“Yes. Like people thought the earth used to be. If you sail far enough, you’ll fall off the edge. But not Evrim. Evrim is round. Evrim passed the final Turing test.”

“I don’t follow.”

Mínervudóttir-Chan shrugged. “Few follow where DIANIMA goes. Being ahead of all of you is the game, isn’t it? That’s what’s kept us in business all these years. But I can explain. It’s simple, really. The Turing test is, as we’re all aware, a test of whether a computer can make responses accurate enough to fool a human into thinking the machine is human. In a sense, we had already beaten it. Most of the point-fives will accomplish this for decades of conversational time—for so long that anyone administering such a test would long ago have concluded the computer they were talking to was human. The ‘flatness’ of the point-fives may, in fact, never become apparent to their users. But we know it’s there. And nobody would call them conscious.

“Evrim, though, is special. Evrim will never fail the Turing test, because they have passed the final Turing test.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Ah. There it is.”

Mínervudóttir-Chan stood up, walked over, and touched the interviewer on the shoulder. “No. Of course you don’t.”

She made a motion with her hand under the interviewer’s chin—an intimate motion, like a lover stroking a favorite scar. The interviewer slumped over, inert. “You weren’t designed for much more than to fool a feedstream audience back home. Which you’ve successfully done for five years now. You’re flat as well—although no one you’ve interviewed ever sailed over your edges until now. But as I was saying: Evrim is special. Evrim has passed the final Turing test: that’s when a machine believes it is conscious, because it asks a question of itself—and someone answers. It’s simple. Evrim has asked the question, ‘Am I a conscious being?’ And Evrim has answered, ‘Yes’—that’s all: when the machine asks the machine a question, and answers it, fully convinced it is talking to itself, fully convinced it exists as a conscious entity, we have closed the loop. But Evrim is no more a conscious entity than the autocameras recording this interview are. Evrim isn’t a true simulation of a human mind: Evrim is simply the most convincing fake we’ve ever constructed. A fake so sophisticated it has fooled itself into thinking it is real.”

Ha looked at Evrim—the long, coppery, expressionless face reflecting the terminal back in miniature in their pupils. This interview would be burned into Evrim’s memory forever. Why had Mínervudóttir-Chan said these things?