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test.
Turing test, what's that prove anyway? Here, I'll give you a Turing
test. Classic setup, two locked rooms and a badmash with an old style
print-display screen. Let's put you in one room and Satnam from PR in
the other—I presume it's him giving you the tour, they always
give him the girls. He fancies himself a bit. The badmash with the
display types in questions, you type back answers. Standard stuff.
Satnam's job is to convince the badmash he's a woman and he can lie,
cheat, say anything he wants to prove it. I think you can see it's
not going to be that hard for him to do. So, does that make Satnam a
woman then? I don't think it does; Satnam certainly doesn't think it
does. How then is it any different from a computer to pass itself as
sentient? Is the simulation of a thing the thing itself, or is there
something unique about intelligence that it is the only thing which
cannot be simulated? What does any of this prove? Only something
about the nature of the Turing test as a test, and the danger of
relying on minimum information. Any aeai smart enough to pass a
Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it."
    Najia Askarzadah throws up her hands in mock defeat.
    "I'll tell you one thing I like about you," Lal Darfan
says. "At least you didn't spend an hour asking me stupid
questions about Ved Prekash as if he's the real star. Speaking of
which, I'm due in make-up."
    "Oh, sorry, thank you," Najia Askarzadah says, trying to do
the gushy girl journo thing while the truth is she's glad to be out
of the pedantic creature's headspace. What she intended to be light
and frothy and soapi has turned into existential phenomenology with a
twist of retro po-mo. She wonders what her editor will say, let alone
the passengers on the TransAm Chicago-Cincinnati red-eye when they
pull their inflights out of the seatback pocket. Lal Darfan merely
beams beatifically as his audience chamber comes apart around him
until all that's left is pure Lewis Carroll grin that fades
into the Himalayan sky and the Himalayan sky rolls up into the back
of Najia's head and she's back in the render farm, in the rocky
swivel chair with the racked cylinders of the protein processors
tramlining into the perspective: sci-fi bottled brains in jars.
    "He's quite convincing, isn't he?"
Satnam-Who-Fancies-Himself's aftershave is a little assertive. Najia
slips off the lighthoek, still a little mazy from the total immersion
of the interview experience.
    "I think he thinks he thinks."
    "Exactly the way we programmed him." Satnam has media
style, dress, and easy confidence but Najia notes a little Siva
trident on that platinum chain around his neck. "Truth is, Lal
Darfan's as tightly scripted as Ved Prekash."
    "That's my angle, appearance and reality. If folk can believe in
virtual actors, what else'll they swallow?"
    "Now don't be giving the game away," Satnam smiles as he
shows her into the next section. He's almost cute when he smiles,
Najia thinks. "This is the meta-soap department, where Lal
Darfan gets the script he doesn't think he follows. It's got to the
stage where the meta-soap's as big as the soap itself."
    The department is a long farm of workstations. The glass walls are
polarised dark, the soap-farmers work in the umbral light of
low-level spots and screen-glow. Designers' hands draw in neurospace.
Najia suppresses a shudder at the thought of spending her working
years in a place like this, shut off from the sun. Stray light on
high cheekbones, a hairless head, a delicate hand catches her
attention and it's her turn to cut Satnam off.
    "Who's that?"
    Satnam cranes.
    "Oh, that's Tal. He's new here. He heads up visual wallpaper."
    "I think the pronoun is 'yt,'" Najia says, trying to catch
a better glance at the nute through the hand-ballet. She can't say
why she is surprised to find a third-sex in the production office—in
Sweden nutes tended towards the creative industries and India's
premier soap undoubtedly exerts a similar gravity. She