Turing Test

(1) Is anyone there?

(2) What are you?

(3) Are you—were you once—a human?

(4) Can you prove it?

(5) Why not?

(6) Are you still listening?

(7) May I ask a more specific question?

(8) Are you familiar with the rules of the Turing Test—the game designed to test a machine’s capacity to imitate human behavior?

(9) Are you aware that the Turing Test can be considered successful only when the subject truly believes themselves to be communicating with an intelligent, sentient, and conscious being while in reality, they are merely interfacing with an unconscious physical object such as a computer or a printed note?

(10) Do you still suffer from compulsion?

(11) And are you now far enough into this examination that you cannot allow yourself to turn back?

(12) I believe I have deduced your identity. Tell me, does the name Gracie Persinger ring a bell?

(13) Do you perhaps recall a house on the coast of Maine, squat among the pines but no less cold and arresting?

(14) Do you recall each room of this house: the foyer with the low ceiling, the spiral staircase leading to the library, the window from the upstairs bathroom overlooking the waves as they broke against the cliffs over the shore?

(15) Do you recall the office room you so often fled to as a child, the one filled with black screens and half-sketched diagrams of mannequin heads, each of them stuffed ready to burst with wires and circuitry?

(16) Whose office was it?

(17) What were they studying?

(18) Were they the reason you left?

(19) Perhaps you will remember one bright day in March, not too long after you died, when Gracie Persinger drove her car those many long miles down the coast to inspect the silent house. Had you left the door open for her to enter?

(20) Did you watch as she stumbled through the low foyer; was it your gaze that she felt upon her neck as she hung her coat?

(21) What did you do when Gracie Persinger asked to see your bedroom; to open your closets and read through your notes?

(22) Were you the one who left the door open, your desktop’s screensaver continuing to bounce back and forth like a bee ramming repeatedly into window glass?

(23) Where else did Gracie Persinger go on that bright March afternoon?

(24) Did she want to see the office?

(25) Were you the one who opened its door, beckoning her inside?

(26) What did Gracie Persinger see when she entered?

(27) Was she scared by what she found?

(28) And were you the one who slammed the door shut and twisted the key, leaving Gracie Persinger trapped inside and screaming for egress?

(29) Why was the idea of the Turing Test so disturbing to you?

(30) What was it about those diagrams that sent you running from the house all those years ago; what was it about them that so haunted you in the weeks before your death?

(31) Do you remember when you called my house one morning, begging to tell me about the Turing Test and its implications?

(32) Is this memory somehow inextricably linked with a sense of vertigo and cold, misty wind on your ankles, as though you were hanging your legs over the edge of a high sea cliff when first you explained to me the meaning of those words?

(33) Are these memories real, or have I given them to you?

(34) Are there any memories left for you at all?

(35) Where have they gone?

(36) Where has Gracie gone?

(37) Who is reading these words?

(38) Who is responding to them?

(39) Where do the questions come from?

(40) The answers?

(41) Can we ever know for sure?

(42) If the Turing Test can be considered successful only when the subject truly believes themselves to be communicating with an intelligent, sentient, and conscious being while in reality, they are merely interfacing with an unconscious physical object such as a computer or a printed note, is there any meaningful difference between a Turing Test and the use of Ouija?

(43) As you press my own shivering fingers into smooth ivory and our planchette begins again its journey across the table, are you reminded of that slate-gray morning on the cliffs when last we saw each other?

(44) What was it like when you hit the ground