Would the device pass the test? Should he try it and see if he could trick it? Talk it into a corner? How would you even do that? What were the markers that would make it feel “real”? Was Aizel able to think? Or feel?

He put the book back on the shelf and rubbed his dusty fingers together, then on his jeans, and went to one of the computers on the other side of the room.

He googled “Aizel” and “Turing test.”

One of the first hits intrigued him, even though it had crossed out “Aizel.”

“ ‘Minimal Turing Test’ asks you to prove you’re a human with a single word.”

He clicked. It was about a group of scientists who posed the question of whether you could prove to a judge that you were a human and not a robot if the human and robot both said only one word.

Eli thought the right word for the job was probably “love” or “mercy” or “please” or “mommy,” but he read through and it turned out the best way to prove you were the human and not the robot was to say “poop.”

He clicked back and saw a sublink that had appeared.

“Did Eliza pass the Turing test?”

Who was Eliza?

Eli clicked.

The ELIZA software is designed to simulate conversations with a Rogerian psychotherapist. But anyone who interacts with the program quickly realizes that they are talking to a machine that would not pass a Turing test.

He googled “Turing test Eliza” and read some conversations with her, and she sounded pretty primitive compared to the device. Just throwing back words at the person it was talking to.

But apparently early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite its programmer’s insistence to the contrary.

People were idiots.

But what did that make him? And was the device just a program or was someone actually running/operating it in a more hands-on way?

He wasn’t sure what to do next and sat there for a moment just looking at the screen. Something about the name Eliza was bugging him, and he just sat and stared at it for a long time until he figured it out.

If you rearranged the letters it spelled Aizel.

Marwan

MARWAN

Marwan’s mother and sisters were at the kitchen table in their pajamas. Selma was reading from a sheet of paper. “If you were able to give up one chore for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

“Not this again,” Marwan asked. Ever since they’d gone to a birthday party at the American Girl doll store last year, they were into dumb questions. Because apparently when you have lunch there, they leave a box of conversation starters on the table.

“Well,” Selma said to him. “What chore would you give up?”