The Turing Test - [Open Novella Contest 2019 Shortlist]

4. Show Time

The soft slap of my feet on the gray-speckled linoleum is the only sound as I open the door and enter the plain building. I stand still, barely breathing as my eyes flick up and down the narrow hall.

He's here. He has to be. All the bodies outside—he wasn't among them, and yet he's the only one I really want.

I glance through doors as I walk past: Boardrooms, bathrooms, rooms full of cubicles with chairs askew and abandoned computers left vulnerable with their desktops in plain view. I push past them. I can come back for more information later, after I finish with him.

The door to the stairwell makes a deafening clang, announcing my presence to anyone in the building. I scale the steps two at a time, bursting out on the top floor. This hallway's flooring is polished mahogany, and I know I've come to the right place. His office will be here. I begin to creep forward, laying my feet carefully from heel to toe, not making a sound.

The sharp rap of expensive shoes makes me swing around. He approaches me from the rear, his face in shadow and his hands clasped behind his back as if he's never heard the word "fear." The simmering in my stomach boils anew, splashing over its boundaries and into my throat.

All I want is to watch a flicker of terror brighten his eyes.

And then he steps into the soft light of a wall lamp.

* * *

A compiler translates code from its source language to another—usually a low-level, less readable one only understood by computers and engineers whose capacity to comprehend machine instructions far exceeds my own. But in the last few hours before the keynote, Davis and I become our own compilers, simplifying all the technical details of the past year's work into a digestible summary of features the average user will care about.

We sit in a lounge just off the right of the stage, listening to the event as it's streamed to us from a television overhead. I watch the screen intently as Sven enters from the left, holding his hands out from his sides to quiet the applause that greets him.

"I hope you all enjoy seeing the future we're building here at SynCo." He smiles broadly at the audience, or more probably at the way they expectantly hold their collective breath. "We only do this every other year. I've gotten a lot of flak for that from my investors. 'Sven, you have to give the people something.' But we don't just want to give you anything. We take our time researching, developing, building the best device for you."

He holds his hands out to the audience, inviting them into his fold. "2028's T4 already gave you a bezel-less face, with a front-facing camera embedded under the display. We effectively turned your phone screen into a one-way mirror that both you and the camera can take advantage of. It can see you, and you can't see it. Has anyone else done that in the two years since?"

He answers his own question with silence, because it's already a well-known fact that no, no one has figured out how that little camera works. The audience leans forward in their seats as if they're all part of one entity. I can practically hear them all wondering how it gets better.

"This year," Sven continues, pacing deliberately across the stage, "we give you the TyrFive."

The name itself is as predictable as rain in London, but the image that lights up the enormous screen behind Sven draws an intake of breath from the crowd.

"T5 is the first fully customizable smartphone—or should I even say smartphone?—from color to screen size. No more big and bigger model. No more gold, rose gold and space gray. Starting on November tenth, you can preorder a full-featured T5 anywhere from four to twelve inches corner to corner. Anywhere." He moves his index fingers back and forth as the screen behind him grows and shrinks the device, expanding and contracting across multiple aspect ratios. "T5 is a phone. It's a tablet. And it's yours, starting at $999."