Page - 156 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

156 | www.limina-graz.eu Frank G. Bosman | The turning of Turing’s tables allowing the player – through TOM – to choose one of two endings: either to kill Sarah and Ava or to let them “kill” TOM by destroying his servers. In both instances, the player is “rewarded” with the on-screen text: “Con- gratulations. You have passed the Turing Test.” This message, as we will see later on, is more than just an indication that the player has beaten the game of this name. Hex codes and a captcha as reversed Turing tests By now, a whole web of (reversed) Turing tests has been deployed in the game. The base is the first one, as indicated above: it has been re-arranged by the crew to serve as a giant Turing test in itself, about which TOM him- self indicates that he needs Ava’s divergent way of thinking in order to penetrate it. But the first ones are already found on-board the Fortuna. On a big screen, outside the hallway of the cryostasis-pods, an encrypted file “ID: 404 not found” can be observed. When the hex codes are translated, the screen reads “I am a real boy” over and over again. While this reference to the wooden boy, who wanted to become a real boy, from Carlo Collodi’s The adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is apparent and an indication of TOM’s growing self-awareness, it can also be identified as a kind of novel (“secondary”) reversed Turing test, in which the goal is to identify and separate the artificial intelligence from the human, shielding the information from the second. The same applies to the hex-coded mes- sages from the ISA received by TOM, also readable on the Fortuna, which set TOM’s new directives as: “Research organism”, “If Ava reaches Europa, she is not permitted to return to the Fortuna”, and “Stop crew leaving Eu- ropa; stop organism leaving Europa; kill crew if necessary”. Also, this mes- sage is hidden behind a secondary reversed Turing test to prevent human interference. The opposite is also found on the Fortuna. When the ISA permits Daniel to grant TOM to use lethal force, he is given approval by means of a reversed Turing test, a captcha test in this case, showing human-readable letters between other nonsensical characters, reading: “You have been given full permissions. You’re doing what is right for the future of humanity. You will When the hex codes are translated, the screen reads “I am a real boy” over and over again.