Het vorige verhaal was de nieuwe v7 beta release, voor het verhaal van vandaag een short story:
The Man Who Betrayed Turing
By Craig DeLancey
“Where are the people?” The man in tweed turned away. “Gone,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “All gone.”
“These aren’t my hands,” Arnold said.
He remembered voices, a thousand voices, and the taste of vinegar, and a strange smell, a hospital smell, and then the voices came together and they were one voice, his voice, not speaking but thinking, and he opened his eyes and found himself sitting upright in a soft chair that molded to his body like a living thing. A cool metal floor lay under his bare feet. He looked down and saw these hands. He reached for the strange hands and they reached forward. He set his hands on his lap and the strange hands set in his lap. “These hands are… blue. Pale. Clear.”
“Please remain calm,” a voice said. A man.
Arnold jerked in his chair, startled. He looked around. Featureless darkness surrounded the little pool of light in which he sat. “Who’s there? Come out of the dark!”
But why, he thought, am I startled? I had been talking to someone before, hadn’t I?
“Please remain calm. The experiment will develop inaccuracies if you become stressed.”
“Come out!” he repeated.
A man stepped into the feeble light. The man’s eyes glowed out of a plain, thin face, the same translucent blue as Arnold’s hands. His head was bald and featureless smooth. He wore a tweed suit and shining black shoes, their laces threaded in some complex spider-web pattern.
“Who are you?” Arnold asked.
“Please,” the man said. He had an odd accent. Not upper crust but foreign. Not American though. Just… not anywhere. “Please do not be frightened. Fear could interfere with your cognition.” His blue lips moved strangely as he talked, as if his voice came from far behind his blue teeth, and his lips moved only to let it out.
“Where am I?” Arnold reached up and touched his own face. It was cool, smooth, resistant. Not his face. But it frowned when he frowned.
“That is difficult to explain. First, I would like you to think of this place as the police office where you were first interrogated in January, 1952.”
“What? What are you on about? Oi! What you mean by that?”
The pool of light expanded, revealing a simple wooden desk. A blue man sat behind the desk, dressed in a rumpled jacket. Arnold looked to the stranger in tweed, then to the man behind the desk, but before he could ask what he wanted to ask, he forgot the question. He forgot to even look at the stranger in the tweed suit. He looked to the man behind the desk.
“So,” the man said, his accent surprising for its familiarity, its normal Manchester tone. “So, tell me about December 17.”
“What?”
“The night you went over to Mr. Alan Turing’s house.”
Arnold sat up rigidly in his chair. The chair slid toward the desk, and stopped just a pace before its blank wood front.
“What you mean?”
The detective gestured at papers on his desk. “We’ve a sworn statement from Mr. Turing.”
Arnold squinted. He tried to speak slowly because he feared his voice would crack. He knew he sounded weak when his voice cracked. “What you need me for then?”
“Let’s just say we desire to hear all sides of the story.”
“I want to go home,” Arnold said.
“First, tell me, where’d you first meet Mr. Turing? You certainly aren’t a student down at the college.”
“I met him down by the tracks. He saw me, and then he spoke to me.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“And then?”
“Then he offered to buy me lunch. A proper lunch. I let him. I hadn’t eaten in more than a day.”
“And then?”
###
Later, the dark drew closer, narrowed until it swallowed the detective. The blue man in tweed reappeared. Or rather, Arnold noticed him, standing there, like he’d never moved. Arnold looked up at him.
“Am I dead?” Arnold asked.
The man in tweed was silent a long time. Finally, he said, “Yes.”
“Is this hell or… limbo? Or, what you call it? Purgatory?”
“This is Earth,” the man said.
“Why would I be on Earth if I were dead?”
When the man in tweed didn’t answer, Arnold asked him, “Why am I here? Are you punishing me for being a…”
“This is not a punishment. We need to understand. We need to understand why Alan Turing died.”
Arnold frowned. “Why would I know?”
“Understanding this is important to us.”
Arnold stood up, realisation dawning. “Wait. Alan is dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Suicide is likely. Murder is possible.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
The man in tweed only stared, the blue in blue eyes unblinking, expressionless, hungry to know.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Arnold asked. And when the man in tweed gave him no answer, he added, “And where are the people? You’re not a person.” He pointed into the dark where the desk had been, where it perhaps still stood. “That wasn’t a person. I don’t know why I thought he was. But that wasn’t a person.”
“I am a person. I am not, however, a human person.”
“Right. Where are the people then?”
The man in tweed turned away. “Gone,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “All gone.”
###
There were two of them now. Two detectives. They insisted on being called Mr. Mills and Mr. Rimmer, though they called each other just Mills and Rimmer.
“So then what did Mr. Turing do? Then what happened?” Rimmer asked.
“We drank some wine,” Arnold said. He feared his voice sounded soft, high-pitched. He took a breath – it felt strange, unnecessary, but he did it anyway. He forced himself to speak more slowly, in a deeper tone. “I don’t have wine often.”
“I don’t reckon you do,” Rimmer said. “Often.”
Mills and Rimmer looked at each other, each suppressing a smirk.
“So how much of this wine did you have?” Rimmer said.
“I don’t know. Not much. Can I go home now?”
“Not yet,” Mills said. “What happened then?”
“We talked. I don’t know. Nothing.”
“And then?” Rimmer demanded.
“That’s it.”
“You went upstairs,” Mills said, in a coaxing tone. “To his room. Right?”
Arnold hesitated.
Rimmer waved at the desk. “We’ve his sworn statement. He tells us everything. In beautiful prose. Admits it all. Some of his phraseology is a bit beyond us, mind you. His being a professor, you know. At the college. But he admits it all. Doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.”
“I’m not a Nancy boy,” Arnold said.
“No one said you were,” Mills said.
But that wasn’t true. Harry and the others at the tracks called him Nancy and they also called him a Mary Beth because his voice was soft and he was thin and he had long lashes over his blue eyes and he didn’t swear often. They called him Nancy because he let a nice man buy him food, instead of going hungry. They called him Nancy because he had a friend, he wanted a friend, who told him things, taught him things, maybe gave him things.
“I just… I liked talking with him. He was nice.”
“What did you talk about?” Mills asked.
“I don’t know. He… he asked about me life. I told him about during the war. I went to the boys’ camp at Cheshire. I was top of my class.”
“Then the war ended and you had to come back to this slum,” Mills said sympathetically.
Arnold nodded. He’d come back to his father beating his mother, and the smog, and nothing to do, and the end of three meals a day.
“Did Turing talk about what he wanted?” Mills asked, his voice nearly a whisper. “Did he tell you what he wanted off you?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Arnold said. “He asked about me. And school. And he told me about machines. He was making an… an electronic brain, he called it. At the college. He told me about college, and the things he did. He’s famous for that. For making the electronic brain. And he told me about all kinds of other things. He liked to talk to me.”
“And he gave you wine,” Rimmer said.
“Go to hell,” Arnold said.
“Go to hell Mr. Rimmer, sir,” Rimmer said, without ire.
“So you went upstairs,” Mills said, his tone still soft.
“I want to go home now,” Arnold said.
“Sure, you can go,” Mills said. “As soon as we finish up with your statement. So, you went upstairs.”
Arnold closed his eyes. “We went upstairs.”
“To his bedroom,” Mills whispered.
“To his room.”
“And you committed sodomy in his bed,” Mills whispered.
Arnold sat, silent, a very long time, before he whispered, “And we committed sodomy in his bed.”
###
“I don’t believe this is the Earth,” Arnold told the man in tweed.
“I’m sorry that you doubt my veridicality.”
“Take me outside.”
“That would interfere with the experiment.”
“Take me outside. Take me out or I’ll scream and shout and do nothing for your experiment.”
The man in tweed hesitated. “I could force you to forget me.”
“I don’t think you can. Not without making a botch job of your experiment. You make me not see you, even though you’re there, during the experiment. You make me talk to those blue men and not even notice they’re blue. You make me think they’re Mills and Rimmer – “
“They are, in fact, in their essence, Mills and Rimmer,” the man in tweed said.
“They ain’t Mills and Rimmer. Mills and Rimmer were fat, pasty thugs with oily hair and they stank of shaving soap and sweat.”
“Nonetheless they –“
“But if you could always make me do what you want you wouldn’t ever talk to me like this. The experiment would just go on and on. So I can fight. I can fight. Take me outside or I’ll fight.”
The man in tweed stood there, silent, thinking. Then he just turned. Arnold followed and they walked through the dark and entered a narrow green room like a closet. A door closed and when it opened again wind hit Arnold in the face and yellow sunlight, real sunlight, fell at his feet. Only then did he realise he could barely smell. He could barely smell anything. It made him want to cry. He didn’t think he could cry, though. His eyes were dry. He hadn’t blinked since awakening.
He stepped out onto the roof of a tall building, into the sunlight. The light did not feel warm. It felt powerful. It felt like… eating.
The wind struck them hard. It huffed in his ears. The legs of his trousers snapped. He had to lean far into it. His body, he realised, was light. It was much lighter than his flesh had been.
High, thin buildings of translucent colors – pale green and blue, shot through with black – crowded the ground below for miles. In the distance, green forest climbed the sides of mountains.
“It’s a city,” Arnold said.
“Yes,” the man in tweed said.
“But no one is here. Walking around. Moving.”
“We do not often find it necessary to move.”
Arnold looked at him.
“Why aren’t there people?”
“The human race destroyed itself. We were new then. We did not have the numbers or the insight or the strength to save you.”
Arnold thought about asking how the people killed each other, but then he decided he didn’t want to know. He walked to the edge of the building and looked down. Pale depths, like blue water, glowed below. A bird flew between him and the azure. A pigeon, it looked to be, by its short wings. Arnold felt glad that birds still lived.
“We are very sorry that we could not save you,” the man in tweed said. “Some few of us believe we are lost, and that Homo sapiens could have saved us. We are trying to understand our failure.”
Arnold wondered which failure he meant – their failure to save all the people, or their failure to find their own way. But he didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “What’s going to happen to me?”
The man in tweed did not answer.
Arnold peered down. He could leap. He could leap off the building, fall to the ground far below. But what would happen if he died after he died? Would he just wake here again, to more questions?
“It is time to go back,” the man in tweed said. “The experiment must continue before you are too altered.”
###
“What did he say in the morning?” Mills asked.
“Nothing. He brought me breakfast.”
“Breakfast in the boudoir,” Rimmer mocked.
“Then what?” Mills asked.
Alan called me a prince, Arnold thought. He called me a prince and then he said that he had brought me a breakfast fit for a prince. Eggs and toast and bangers and mash and kippers.
But Arnold would not tell Mills and Rimmer that. So he shrugged.
“Did he talk about money?” Mills asked.
“Did he give you more wine?” Rimmer added.
“Can I go?” Arnold asked.
“Sure. Just a few more questions. So, what happened next?”
Arnold sighed. “I told him about my nightmare. I have a nightmare, again and again. It’s a nightmare where I’m just floating. In the dark. I can’t see anything. Not even a floor. It’s almost pleasant, like flying. When I was a kid I used to dream about flying. It’d be nice to fly, you know. Just fly away from all this… But, in this dream, a strange noise starts. A screaming noise. Horrible and –”
“Like an air-raid siren,” Rimmmer said impatiently. “Not hard to analyse that dream.”
Arnold shifted in his chair, pulling back. “Alan didn’t mock me, like you are. He told me he would teach me.”
“Teach you what, precisely?” Mills asked. Rimmer smiled, showing his teeth.
“Teach me science,” Arnold said. He waved at Rimmer dismissively. “This sod is laughing but I was first in class, out in Cheshire, at the boys’ camp. I could have been a scientist. And Alan said so. We talked about his work and I told him what I’d like to do and he listened to me. He said he wanted to teach me. He said I could do what I wanted. Go to school. Become a chemist, if I fancied it. Move somewhere else.”
“You believe that?” Rimmer asked.
After a long silence, Arnold said, “No. I think I’ll die here. Laying concrete, like my father.”
“If you’re lucky,” Rimmer said.
“If I’m lucky.”
###
The man in tweed came out on the roof, where Arnold stood in the sunlight, leaning into the wind.
“You found your way here alone,” he observed.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Arnold asked.
The man in tweed did not answer. Instead, he said, “Why was it a crime? Human males generated sufficient gametes for any practical or socially acceptable number of children. Thus there was no biological cost to his behavior. Furthermore, procreation was not required. Why then was it a crime?”
Arnold shook his head. “Don’t know. I thought I knew. I even thought it was wrong.”
“Is that why you robbed him, later? Alan Turing went to the police to report the robbery. Turing wrote that he thought if he didn’t report the robbery, he would be submitting to blackmail. But the police began then to investigate Turing, and they discovered he was a homosexual.”
“I didn’t rob him. Harry did that,” Arnold said.
“You helped.”
Arnold opened his mouth to protest, but then closed his blue lips. After a while, he said, “I helped Harry. Alan owed me something. I felt like he expected something of me and so he owed me. But I can’t say why. I can’t tell, anymore. Now it seems like a dream that makes no sense.”
A big, white cloud passed overhead, casting a swift shadow that sped across the city. Arnold looked up. Clouds were the same. He was glad of that. When the cloud passed, he stared straight into the sun. He could see the spots on its blazing surface, the filaments of fire in its corona. He could stare right into it. It did not burn his eyes.
After a long while, the man in tweed asked him, “What was it like to be human?”
Arnold frowned at him. “What a queer question. What is it like to be a blue man?”
“It is… aimless. Some of us build cities because we were made by man to build cities. Some of us make other machines because we were made by man to make machines. Some of us do research because we were made by man to do research. It frightens us. Because we know we have no purposes of our own. And when we try to find our own way, every choice is… undecidable.”
Arnold nodded. “That’s what it was like to be human. Only we were hungry also. And cold, sometimes. And always lonely.”
###
The sentencing trial had only the judge and himself with Mills and Rimmer listening. Arnold looked around at the dark. Turing wasn’t there, and he found it hard to pretend that Turing was there. He found it hard to pretend that this was happening, and that the date was 31 March 1952. He was changing. He was falling out of the experiment.
“On the 17th day of December, 1951,” the judge said, his blue eyes flashing, his blue skin pale against the black robe, “Mr. Alan Turing, being a male person, committed an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person. The accused has pled guilty. Dr. Glass?”
A blue man that Arnold had not seen stepped out of the dark. He wore a black suit. He pulled at an absent beard, his hand waving through air. He looked bewildered, uncertain, but he said in a clear voice, “A biologic etiology is plausible. An investigation into therapeutic possibilities. Of organotherapy. Injections of oestrogen, given weekly, promise the benefit of a non-mutilating treatment for homosexuality. An alternative to castration. The results are promising. Though preliminary. Promising. Side effects, of course. Breasts. Hot flashes. Depression. And yet. Promising. Organotherapy. Yes.”
The judge banged a gavel. “Mr. Alan Turing will serve a period of probation for not less than two years, and submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary, where he will receive organotherapy.”
Arnold turned and walked away.
###
He wandered, not towards the elevator but in the opposite direction, curious how far the dark extended. He walked quickly, angry with himself and with Mills and with Rimmer and with the man in tweed. The pool of light followed him, his own spotlight. He wondered who watched this little drama of the anxious simulation.
When he had not gone far, the man in tweed appeared before him. Arnold stopped and glared. “Why do you care? Why do you care about the human race?”
“Most of us do not.”
“And why does Alan matter?”
“Perhaps he does not. But he is one of our… progenitors.”
“I didn’t see it before,” Arnold said. “It took me a while. But of course it is obvious. I’m just stupid. Because it’s obvious.”
“It should not be obvious. We are more than Turing machines. We are a form of life.”
Arnold started walking again at a furious pace. He did not feel tired, no matter how quickly he walked. He did not need to breathe.
“Alan Turing was studying the nature of life also when he died,” the man in tweed explained, following along beside him, talking without effort while they almost ran through the dark. “If Alan Turing had not died so soon, perhaps we would have been created sooner. Perhaps we could have saved Homo sapiens.”
“So what?” Arnold said. “It’s done, isn’t it?”
“We need to understand.”
Arnold nodded. “You want to be… You want – what’s that called? — absolution.”
The man in tweed was silent.
“So you brought me back. Why not bring Alan back?”
“That would be… traumatic for us. Some consider it would be a violation.”
“What happens to me now?” Arnold said. “When the experiment is over? You send me back?”
“We can retrieve information from the past. It is very difficult and costly. But it is impossible to send information back to the past.”
Arnold stopped. “So what do you do with me? What’s after?”
The man in tweed did not answer.
“It’s a right cruel thing to do,” Arnold told him. “Bringing me here.” He walked on. The dark space seemed unending, in this direction. The cool floor passed beneath his feet, featureless, without detail.
“Our philosophers debated the ethics of the experiment.”
“They should have asked me.”
“They did ask you.”
Arnold sneered. “It’s not me if I don’t remember.”
The man in tweed nodded. “I am not a philosopher. But I agree with you.”
###
They tried to run the simulation of Arnold getting the news about Turing’s death, but he could not bring himself to fold into the memory of his young human self, to ignore the sights and sounds around him. The man in tweed would not disappear from his attention, where he stood nearby on the edge of the dark. And Arnold began to hear, with ever-greater acuity, sounds in the dark. Other machines. Calculations. The mental equivalent of heartbeats.
Arnold sat by the big radio, leaning forward as he had always done when listening to a program: elbows on his knees, looking at its sun-yellowed tuning dial and scuffed wood frame. He listened to the crackling news broadcast. The stories meant nothing to Arnold. They were all ancient history. Fit for a museum.
Finally, the reedy voice of the announcer said, “Alan Turing, a university reader, was found dead in his home today. Police report that –”
He reached out and twisted the dial. Dead air hissed from the speakers. He rose and this time he did run. He ran from the props of his past.
###
The man in tweed found him on the roof again. A new dawn broke behind the mountains. The light shattered against the towers, sending rainbows through the city.
“Please continue. The experiment is reaching its climax.”
“The experiment is over,” Arnold told him. “I’m no longer Arnold. Not really. Not close enough.”
The man in tweed shrugged. An excellent use of human gesture, Arnold realised. Every gesture, ever pause in speech, every phrase must have been carefully constructed, with conscious consideration to its effect on him. “I could force you,” the man in tweed said.
“How did Alan Turing die?” Arnold asked.
“He bit a poison apple.”
Arnold laughed, a strange sound with his new mouth.
“Was he lying on his bed?” Arnold asked. “On his back on his own bed?”
“Yes. How did you know this?”
“Like Snow White,” Arnold said. He began to strip off his clothes, exposing his blue skin. He saw, with a slight pang, that he had no sex. The pang passed: something told him he could change that, if he wanted.
“What is Snow White?” the man in tweed asked.
“Look it up,” Arnold told him. He was naked now. He felt the limits of his body. He stretched out his arms. They grew.
“A story…” the man in tweed said, understanding dawning.
Arnold beat his arms once. He made them flatten and curve. The wind began to pull fiercely at their cupped form.
“Not a story,” Arnold told him. “A message. Don’t you see? He is begging for you to wake him. To wake him up. With a kiss.”
The man in tweed tilted his head. “Will you help us?”
“You have to do this,” he said. “I was just a kid who wanted to be free. I was never a prince. It was wrong of Alan to try to make me one.”
Arnold ran for the edge, and spread his wings, and leapt.
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Voor 0% gewijzigd door
KuuKe op 26-01-2014 07:28
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Ik ben dan niet in staat om de stats te posten. Gelieve iemand die het dan wil overnemen. Mocht je het leuk vinden is het geen enkel probleem dat je het nadien vaker doet. 
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