6
Identity: Patricia Killiam
It was Bonfire Night, and excited squeals rose up between bursts of rockets and bangers. Walking down the lane, I caught glimpses of children playing in the alleyways, scrambling atop piles of rubbish stacked high in the abandoned bombsites behind the row houses.
Fireworks whizzed and popped overhead, and, coming around a corner, we almost smacked into a little girl running the other way, her eyes fixed on a lit sparkler that she waved back and forth in her tiny outstretched hand.
“Careful now,” I laughed, stooping to catch and stop her before she tripped herself up. She never took her eyes off the sparkler, completely mesmerized. It sputtered out, and the girl looked up at me with eyes wide in wonder. Small, ruddy cheeks glowed warmly above a tightly wrapped scarf. Alan, my walking partner, knelt down on the wet pavement beside us, rummaging around in his pockets.
“Sorry, mum! Little rascal got away from me!” called out a large man huffing and puffing up behind her, waving at us, obviously the girl’s father. The foggy night was thick with the acrid smoke of gunpowder, and my watering eyes strained to see the man approaching.
I called out to him. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all.” The man stopped running and walked the last few paces. He was obviously coming from the Lion’s Head, the pub where we were headed.
“Ahh,” said Alan, having found the prize he’d been searching for. He produced another sparkler from the pocket of his wool overcoat. He looked at the little girl. “Would you like this?”
The girl’s eyes grew and she nodded. Just then the man arrived.
“Oah, that’s very kind of you,” he started to say cheerily, but then his face darkened. “You’re that perfessor, ain’t ya?” He reached down to grab his daughter’s hand.
Alan sighed but said nothing, bowing his head and putting the sparkler back in his pocket.
“And what of it?” I growled at the man, releasing the girl.
“You stay away from my Olivia!” He roughly jerked the little girl away from us. “You stay away, you hear me? Disgusting.” Turning sharply, he walked away, dragging the girl behind him. She continued to watch us intently, craning her neck as she disappeared into the gloom.
I sighed, reaching down to pull Alan back up. He’d visibly crumpled during the exchange. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” I said softly, pulling him in the opposite direction, away from the Lion’s Head. “What do you say we have a drink at the Green Man instead?”
“Yes, I suppose,” he replied distantly.
It was the spring of 1953, although in Manchester, spring was much the same as the rest of the year—cold and raining. While even the Blitz hadn’t been able to displace my mother and father from London during the War, the Great Smog of ’52 had been the last straw to encourage them to take the family north that year.
The smog hadn’t been the only reason, however. My parents used the Big Smoke as their own smoke screen to accompany me to my new school. I’d just been accepted as the first female faculty member of the new Computer Laboratory of Manchester University, and there’d been a terrible row when my father had refused to allow me to leave and live on my own. When Gran’s asthma had practically killed her in the intense smog just before Christmas, it gave Father the perfect opportunity to make everyone happy.
My sisters had all been married off by then, and despite an endless procession of suitors provided by Mother, I’d remained steadfastly alone. I just wasn’t interested. Only one passion burned in my soul.
“Snap out of it, Alan. Don’t listen to that small-minded lout.” I laughed, pulling him into me and giving him a little kiss. He smiled, and we began walking off toward the Green Man. “Tell me again why it’s different.”
“We’re just speaking about two completely different things,” he replied after a pause, his mind coming back to our discussion. “My idea is that if you speak to something inside a black box, and everyone agrees that it responds to them just as a human would, then the only conclusion is that something intelligent and aware, human or otherwise, is inside.”
“Then why not an equivalent test for reality?”
“So you’re suggesting that if, somehow, we could present a simulated reality to humans—”
“To a conscious observer,” I interjected.
“To a conscious observer,” he continued with a nod. “If that conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference between the simulated and the real world, then the simulated reality becomes an actual reality in some way?”
“Exactly! That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
He shook his head.
“Why not? Doesn’t it make a certain sense when all of modern physics requires a conscious observer to make it work for some reason?”
“You can’t just create something from nothing,” he said after some contemplation.
“Why not?”
“And just responding ‘why not’ does not constitute a defense, my dear,” he laughed.
We’d arrived at the pub and stopped outside. With one hand, he combed back his hair, parting it neatly to one side, and smiled at me. Even at forty years of age, he still had a boyish charm, perhaps aided by ears that stuck out just a little too far.
I laughed, looking at him.
“What about the Big Bang then? That’s a whole universe from nothing!” I had a steady stream of correspondence going on with some colleagues at Cambridge who’d just minted the idea.
“Ah yes, my bright little flower, you are clever aren’t you?”
“I am,” I giggled. “Come on, let’s get that drink.”
We wandered inside under the bowing doorframe, across worn granite flagstone floors, and were enveloped by the warm bustle of the dimly lit pub.
“The usual, Mr. Turing?” asked the bartender as we arrived at the bar. He nodded at her.
“Two, please,” I added.
For one luminous yet terribly short year, I had the great privilege of having Mr. Alan Turing, the father of all computer science and artificial intelligence, as my PhD professor. His own hardship had been my gain.
After convictions for homosexual acts, still a criminal offense in 1950s England, his faculty and the academic world had ostracized him, and most of his graduate students had abandoned him. It was the only reason someone of his stature and position would have accepted a female student at the time.
In the end, I had almost an entire year of Alan to myself, an incredible experience that would inspire and shape my thinking for the rest of my life. Sadly, Alan took his own life less than a year later, and the world has been a lesser place without him.
“All right then,” said Alan after a pause. “I’ll allow that. Explain to me exactly what you’re thinking.”
The bartender returned with our pints of cider. Digging into his pockets again, Alan came up with a handful of change that he left on the counter, mumbling his thanks while we collected our drinks. We made our way to a quiet part of the pub near the fireplace, which glowed warmly with coals of coke.
“All realities are not created equal,” I explained as we decided on a small wooden table tucked into the corner. The benches around it had obviously been recycled, or stolen, from a local parish church somewhere. Mismatched and threadbare carpets covered floorboards that creaked as we sat down in the pews. “If there is only one observer of a universe, then that reality is weak.”
“And the more observers that share a reality, the stronger it becomes?” he continued for me.
“Exactly!”