2312

“No thanks,” Swan said. “I want to try a Turing test. Or why don’t you test me?”

“How would we do that?”

“How about twenty questions?”

“That means questions that can be answered by yes or no?”

“That’s right.”

“But one could just ask us if the other is a simulacrum or not, and the other answers, and that would take only one question.”

“True. What if we only allow indirect questions?”

“Even so it would be very simple. What if you had to do it without questions at all?”

“But real people ask each other questions all the time.”

“But one of us or more are not real people. And it’s you who suggested a test.”

“That’s true. All right, let me look at you. Tell me about Inner Mongolia.”

“Dear Inner Mongolia, hollowed in the year…”

“Hollowed be thy name,” one of the indeterminates interjected, and they laughed.

“Population approximately twenty-five thousand people,” said the more feminine one.

“You must be a qube,” Swan said. “No human ever knows that kind of thing.”

“None?”

“Maybe some people, but it’s odd. But I must say, you look fabulous.”

“Thank you, I decided to wear green today, do you like it?” Showing off the sleeve of the dress.

“It’s very nice. Can I look closer?”

“At my dress or at my skin?”

“At your skin, of course.”

And they all laughed.

Laughter, Swan thought as she examined the person’s skin. Could robots laugh? She wasn’t sure. The person’s skin was lightly pocked by hair follicles, slightly lined by creases at the bend points; there was a scattering of nearly transparent hair on the back of the person’s wrists and forearms, and a little patch of longer darker hairs on the inside of the wrist, which had four permanent creases just inside the hand, where the skin was thinner but darker, revealing a pair of veins, with bumps and bends in them. The skin on the underside of the hand had faint whorls, like big fingerprints, on the ball of the thumb and the meat of the hand. The lifeline was a deep long curve. It looked very much like anyone’s hand, anyone’s skin. If it was artificial skin, it was very impressive; this was said to be the hardest thing to make look natural. If it was a biological skin, as in the labs, but grown over a frame, that would be impressive in a different way. It didn’t look possible that these people’s skin could be artificial, but of course materials science was very sophisticated, and many things were possible to it. Set goals and parameters, and what wasn’t possible?

It remained a question who would want to do such a thing, but on the other hand, people did odd things all the time. And making an artificial human was a very old dream. Maybe it was pointless, but it had a tradition. And here they were, after all, and she wasn’t sure yet what she was facing. That in itself was interesting.

If you had sex with a machine, was that interesting, or just a complicated form of self-satisfaction? Would a qube register your responses to it one way or another? Would it too be having sex?

She would have to try it if she wanted to find out. It would be just another approach to the more general problem of qube consciousness. What one had to remember with qubes was that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there was no one home: no consciousness, no Other, just a mechanism programmed to respond to stimuli in a certain fashion by its programmers. No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness. Swan fully believed this, but even Pauline fairly often surprised her, so it could be hard not to fall for the illusion.

“Your skin is beautiful. You feel like flesh of my flesh.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think, do you think?”

“I most definitely think,” the feminine one replied.

“So you have a sequence of thoughts that wander from one thought to the next in a more or less continuous flow, free associating from one topic to the next, across all the possible thoughts you could have?”

“I’m not sure it’s quite like that. I think it’s more a matter of stimulus and response, with my thoughts responding to the stimuli of my incoming information. Now, for instance, I think about you and your questions, about the green of my dress as compared to the green of this grass, about what I will eat for dinner, as I am a bit hungry-”

“So you eat food?”

“Yes, we eat food. In fact I have a hard time not eating too much!”

“Me too,” Swan said. “So, do you ever think about having sex with me?”

The three of them stared at her.

“Well, but we have just met,” one said.

“That’s often when people think of it.”

“Really? I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Believe me, it’s true.”

“I don’t have any good reason to believe you,” the second one said. “I don’t know you well enough for that.”

“Does one ever know one well enough for that?” the third one asked.

They laughed.

“ Believe someone else?” the feminine one said. “I don’t think so!”

They laughed again. Maybe they were laughing too much.

“Are you people on drugs?” Swan asked.

“Is caffeine a drug?”

Now they were giggling.

“You three are silly girls,” Swan said.