After Mind by Spencer Wolf

Robin said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing when you were at the counter. I’m not in such a rush. She’s just here for the spray, too. If you need to, you can go first, or maybe the nurse can do them together?”
    “That would be great,” Daniel said.
    Meg grabbed Robin’s small suede case from her purse and crossed back over the square to Daniel. She handed the tan case up to him.
    “No, thank you,” Daniel said. “Do you like what he’s playing with on the floor?”
    Meg didn’t answer with words but climbed on the empty chair beside Daniel. She pulled and uncurled Robin’s ScrollFlex from its case.
    “Do I have a choice?” Daniel looked up, asking Robin.
    “No, it’s okay. Go ahead. She misses that.”
    “Misses what?”
    “Reading with someone other than me.”
    “I hear you,” Daniel said. He took the ScrollFlex from Meg.
    Robin got up with her palm pressing her forehead. “I’m sorry, I was just—I’ll go see what’s holding them up, and if they can take us together.”
    “Sure,” Daniel said. Meg scooted in closer at the arm of his chair. He tapped through letters on her fancier, semitransparent ScrollFlex screen. Images appeared. He touched a portrait of Giovanni Cassini, a man regaled in semi-profile glance and pre-Newtonian powdered locks.
    Daniel held up the screen for Meg to see, but Cessini could see straight through it. Daniel framed the man’s picture so that Cessini was superimposed with it on the floor. Meg giggled. “Giovanni Cassini,” Daniel said. Cessini looked funny with overlaid waves of white hair. “This man here is Cassini, with a ‘Ka’, not ‘C’ like my Cessini there on the floor. ‘Cee’—Cessini.” Daniel winked and Meg ate it up.
    “Ceeme,” she said and pointed at him past the screen.
    “Okay. Ceeme. Close enough.”
    “Keep reading,” she said, grinning. Her short bangs were just falling in.
    “The astronomer Cassini discovered the rings of Saturn and calculated the size of the solar system. It was his collected data that led to the calculation of the speed of light.”
    “I like his hair,” she said.
    Cessini listened from the floor.
    “That is true. I guess he does have nice powdered hair. How about something more age appropriate, what do you say?”
    “Okay.” She scooted back in the chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. She smiled.
    “That’s what I thought.” Daniel touched through more letters, grinning and wiggling his eyebrows. He enlarged an image with a sepia timeline and read one of its points aloud. “The original Turing test consisted of two simple text conversations with a human judge. If the judge couldn’t tell the difference between a human’s text conversation and a computer’s, then the computer passed.”
    Daniel looked at Meg. She kicked out her feet and sat back up straight. She giggled. Cessini looked up.
    “The enhanced test added images and sound so it would be harder to pass.” Daniel lowered the screen. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked and Meg nodded. “I’m creating the Enhanced Inversion Test to go even further.” He winked.
    She pulled her knees back up to her chest. She giggled.
    “In my inversion test, the computer is the test-taker and judge and it has to determine for itself if it’s a computer or a human. An epistemology coding turned in on itself. Descartes’: ‘I think, therefore I am.’”
    “Why?” She smiled and kicked out her legs to sit up straight when he looked.
    “You want to know the trick? I designed the Inversion test so the taker would fail the first time. But if that very same taker comes back with a passion, a hope, a genuine force of feeling, then it won’t simply be an emotionless computer. It will have passed the test. And in my book, it’ll be a human computer.”
    “Why?” she asked again, about to draw in her legs once more with her giggle.
    Daniel held up a finger in front of her big eyes. She paused. “Because . . .” he said and Cessini