The Turing Test

Valour

Here comes Victor, hurtling through the stratosphere on the Lufthansa shuttle: a shy, thin young Englishman, half-listening to the recorded safety instructions.

“Drinks, anyone? Drinks?” says the hostess: blonde, with high heels, makeup and a short, tight dress. Victor reminds himself, with a certain eerie jolt, that she isn’t human. She’s a synthetik – a robot clothed in living tissue. Lufthansa use them on all their flights now. They are cheaper than real women, they do not require time off, and they are uniformly beautiful…

“Disconcerting, isn’t it?” says the passenger next to him, an elderly German with a humorous mouth and extraordinarily mobile eyebrows. “You find yourself admiring them without really thinking about it – and then suddenly you remember they are only machines.”

Victor smiles just enough to avoid impoliteness. He does not enjoy chatting to strangers. Unfortunately his companion does not feel the same.

“My name is Gruber,” says the elderly German, extending a large friendly hand. “Heinrich Gruber, I am a student of philosophy and philology. How about you?”

“I’m a computer scientist.”

“Really? Where?”

“Silicon City – it’s outside Cambridge – but I’m taking a sabbatical in Berlin.”

Gruber chuckles. “Think of that! A Silicon City, a city devoted to the disembodied mind!”

And as if to disassociate himself from any charge of being disembodied, he cranes round to stare at the comely bottom of the robot hostess as she stoops to take a bottle out of her trolley. He turns back to Victor, eyebrows wriggling with amusement:

“And yet if she was a real human hostess and you and I were sitting here quietly eyeing her up the way men do, would the position really be so different? It would not be her soul after all that was on our minds?”

The eyebrows arch up triumphantly: Victor colours slightly.

“Soul? I see you are a dualist,” says Victor, with a little laugh, so as to move the subject onto less personal ground.

Gruber frowns. “Dualist? My dear fellow, I study the philosophy of the Cassiopeians. I am a trialist. I am a trialist through and through!”

Victor smiles politely, looks at his watch and opens his laptop so as to discourage Gruber from carrying on the conversation. Conversation is such hard work. It involves having to be someone.

“Your wife?” asks Gruber, nodding at the picture of a rather tense-looking young woman on Victor’s desktop.

“My girlfriend,” says Victor, for some reason blushing. “She’s a computer scientist too, back in Cambridge.”

Gruber smiles his amiable, knowing smile. He takes out a battered paperback, folds it brutally back on itself and reads, glancing across from time to time at the young Englishman whose hands dart so quickly and neatly over the keyboard.

Darkness starts to fall outside. Stars appear: Orion, Taurus. An evening meal is served by the pretty robots.

“They make their flesh from genetically modified shellfish tissue, I believe,” says Gruber loudly, swivelling stiffly round in his seat to look at the hostess. “Patella Aspera, the common limpet. It’s good at clinging onto things!”

Victor smiles politely, cutting into his pork chop. Synthetiks first emerged from the laboratory a couple of years previously, and they are still banned in the UK, though the ban is currently being challenged in the European Court. As a computer scientist he rather scorns the publicity given to the semi-human, semi-molluscan flesh. Simulated human tissue is yesterday’s technology. The real technical achievement about synthetics, the true master-stroke, is the brilliant programming which allow them to faithfully mimic the movements of the human body and face.

But perhaps you have to be a computer man to understand just how very clever that is.

“You English are wise to ban them of course,” mutters the German philosopher, turning back to attend to his food. “What I said earlier was true but completely beside the point. The attraction between real human beings may well often begin as a physical matter, but that is the mere starting point, the foundation on which the whole magnificent edifice of sexual love is built. But a synthetik is a starting point for nothing, the foundation of nothing.”

Victor doesn’t enjoy conversation with strangers. But, seeing that conversation of some sort seems inevitable, he changes the subject.

“You were saying you have made a study of the Cassiopeians,” he says. “I must admit I don’t know much about them. I rather lost track after the news first broke, and those pictures came out. Tell me about trialism.”

“You don’t know much about them?! How can any educated…” Gruber makes a gesture of exasperation. “Well, I suppose I can’t accuse you of being unusual in that respect! But it never ceases to amaze me that five years after the most astounding event in human history, hardly anyone seems to give it a moment’s thought. Would you believe, the research money for textual analysis is actually drying up now, though the message is still coming through as clear as ever from the sky!”

Victor feels a little ashamed. “Well, I suppose it is rather appalling when you put it like that! I guess it was when we all realised that the source was 200 light-years away and there was no possibility at all of a dialogue or physical contact. And then it came out that it was all rather obscure philosophical ramblings and nothing that we could really use…I suppose it just became another one of those amazing things that we get used to: like cities on the moon or… or robot air hostesses with human flesh!”

The German snorts. “No doubt. But really is there any comparison between these little technological tricks that you mention and the discovery of other thinking minds among the stars?”

He rolls his eyes upward. “But then, no one is interested in thinking any more. You are quite right: when governments and corporations discovered that it was philosophy the Cassiopeians were sending out, that really was the last straw. They’d hoped for new technologies, new sciences, new powers over the physical world… But philosophy!”

He sighs extravagantly. “In answer to your question about trialism. The Cassiopeians organize the world in threes. They have three sexes, three states of matter, three dimensions of space, three modes of being… and above all, three great forces, struggling for dominance in the world: Valour, Gentleness and Evil.”

“Not Good and Evil?”

“No, no, no. They have no concept of ‘Good.’ It would seem quite incomprehensible to them that we could compound two such obviously unmixable essences as Valour and Gentleness into a single word. To the Cassiopeians, all three forces are equally incompatible. Gentleness tells us to do one thing, Evil tells us to do another, and Valour – it tells us to do another thing again.”

Victor smiles, with dry, polite scepticism. “I hadn’t realised that the translation had got to this stage. I thought I read somewhere there was still a lot of controversy about the text.”

The German growls darkly: “ Ja, ja, ja, a lot of controversy…”

As they separate in the airport, Gruber presses a card into Victor’s hand. “Come and see me if you have the time. It is not every day after all that you will meet a naturalised Cassiopeian!”

His eyebrows bristle as he glares around at silvery robot security guards, robot porters, male and female synthetiks with bright smiles manning the airline check-in desks. “In fact, even a genuine human being is becoming something of a rarity!”

Victor says something insincere, but he is no longer paying attention to the peculiar old man. He has spotted his German friends, Franz and Renate.

“Victor, how nice to see you! How are you? How is Lizzie? How is Cambridge?”

They are bright, polite, smartly dressed young people, who Victor and Lizzie met when they spent a year in Cambridge. After the eccentric Gruber, who might at any time say something embarrassing, they seem very normal and unthreatening and easy to get along with. Victor shakes their hands and exchanges minor news. They take him out to their little electric car (fossil fuels are verboten in the new Green Berlin) and head off in the direction of their Schoneberg apartment where he is to stay till he has found accommodation of his own.

“But I’ve forgotten if you’ve ever been here before?” says Franz.

“Strangely enough no. Very provincial of me, I know, not to have visited the capital of Europa!”

The two Germans laugh, pleased.

“Come now Victor,” says Renate, “surely even an Englishman knows that the capital of Europa is Brussels!”

“Well you know what they say: the President of the Commission sits in Brussels but when he puts in a claim for expenses it’s Chancellor Kommler who signs the form.”

The Germans smile. These bantering exchanges, with their little hidden barbs of jealousy, are the bread-and-butter of contacts between young Euro-professionals all over the continent, as they shake down into a single, transnational class.

“Well,” says Franz, “how about a little tour of this city of ours before we head for home?”

They drive through bright modern streets: tidy parks, tastefully restored old buildings. They drive past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. They go down the Kurfurstendamm. Franz points out the Volkskammer and the TV Tower from the gloomy days of the DDR. They drive along the boundary fence of Lichtenberg II, reputedly the largest Underclass estate in Europa, looking across with a small frisson (rather as an earlier generation might have looked across the famous Wall) at the monolithic apartment blocks within, where live the gastarbeiters, the unemployed, the outcasts of Europa’s prosperous new order.

“Of this we are not proud,” says Renate.

Then all three of them, almost simultaneously, sigh and say: “But it seems this is the price of stability.”

“Ja, and we shouldn’t forget that the Lichtenbergers have a guaranteed income, healthcare, roofs over their heads,” says Franz as he turns the car away from the gloomy perimeter, back into the bright prosperity of the real Berlin. “It’s more than you can say for the poor in most of the world.”

He shrugs resignedly, defensively, and changes the subject to more cheerful things. “Now Victor, I seem to recall you have a weakness for VR, I must show you the phantasium. It is the Mecca for all the VR aficionados in the city.”

“Sounds good!” Victor laughs. He loves VR arcades. They make him feel seventeen again. They give him a sense of wildness and dangerousness which is otherwise almost entirely lacking from his tidy and air-conditioned life.

He and Franz plunge into the glowing electronic cave of the Phantasium, with the agreeable, conspiratorial feeling that men have when they get together without their women. (Renate has declined to come in, and headed off on another errand.)

Of course, they have VR in Cambridge too (they also have Underclass estates), but the Phantasium is on a wholly different scale. Victor gives a small, impressed whistle. In an enormous dark chamber, long rows of cages made of plastic tubing stretch into the distance.

And in nearly every cage, a youth squirms and writhes alone inside a suspended control suit that encloses his arms, legs and face, while he battles in imaginary landscapes against cybernetic phantoms that he alone can see and touch…

Other youths wander up and down the rows, sometimes peering into small monitoring screens that give a taste of the electronic dreams and nightmares on offer: “The South Invades,” “Berserkers of Islam,” “Gene-Lab Catastrophe,” “Pump-Action Killer,” “UC Break-out!”…

“Now that last one is good,” says Franz. “The subject matter is in poor taste I admit, but the graphics and tactiles are brilliant.”

Victor smiles, runs his credit card over the reader and straps himself into the control suit. Soon he is cheerfully battling against a murderous gang of immigrants and benefit-claimants who have broken out of their concrete estate and are terrorising the good citizens in the neighbouring suburbs. (All educated Europeans know that the Social Compromise is necessary to contain inflation but how they are haunted by those outcasts behind their concrete walls!)

“Yeah,” he agrees, climbing out. “Pretty sophisticated stuff.”

At the end of this row of games an archway labelled Liebespielen marks the beginning of an inner sanctum where the games are discreetly boxed in with plywood and have names like ‘Oral Heaven’ and ‘Lust Unlimited.’ The two young men, Franz and Victor, glance surreptitiously through the gateway: Franz gives a hearty German laugh.

Later, back in Franz and Renate’s apartment, Vince retires to his room and plugs in his lap-top so it can replenish itself with nourishing streams of information. Presently he calls up Lizzie.

“Oh it’s you, Boo Boo dear,” she says. (How did they start these awful names?) “Did you have a good flight?”

“Not bad at all.”

“What’s their flat like?”

“Oh, like ours really, only bigger.”

“I’ve got nearly got everything sorted for me to come over. Should be with you by the end of next week.”

“Great.”

“You don’t sound very pleased, Boo Boo!”

For a moment, Victor looks at the face of his beloved and sees this is so, sees that the connection between them is an anxious one, one that exists at the surface only. Deep down neither has touched the other at all. Not even once. Terrified, he blots the insight from his mind.

“Of course I’m pleased, Liz-Liz. It’s going to seem really strange just being on my own.”

“Hmmm,” says Lizzie, “I think perhaps I should let you stew on your own for a week on two longer, Boo Boo, and then perhaps you will learn to appreciate me a bit more!”

Afterwards, Victor can’t sleep. He switches on his laptop again and goes to a news channel.

Every playground in Europa, it seems, is to be resurfaced in a new rubberised substance called Childsafe, following a tragic accident in Prague when a child fell from a swing… New standards for food hygiene are to be announced by the Commissioner for Health… The sprawling and impoverished Federation of Central Asia is preparing once again for war with its neighbours. A vast crowd swirls round a giant statue of a soldier in heroic pose. The crowd chants. “Death! Death! Death!” “Death to the blasphemers!” “Death for the Motherland is sweeter than a lover’s kiss!” Thousands of fists are thrust up in unison into the air. And the statue gouts real blood from a dozen gaping wounds…

Victor leans forward closer to the screen. All over Europa, with its safe children’s playgrounds and its pure and hygienic food, healthy and well-fed people are leaning forward like him to watch this reckless energy, this crazy camaraderie with death…

Every day, according to the news report, citizens of Central Asia queue in their thousands to donate blood for the statue. They are poor and underfed, very often, and can ill afford to give away their lifeblood, but they keep on coming anyway: Never mind that Central Asia’s hospitals have no blood for transfusions, never mind that the needles used for the donations are reused again and again and that AIDS is rampant. The statue’s wounds must flow.

Victor switches off and goes to a window: Faint smudges of stars are visible in the city sky. He tries to remember which one of those constellations is Cassiopeia.

Franz and Renate are conscientious hosts. They take Victor to the museums and the historic sites. They take him to concerts and parties. They take him one frosty night to the famous annual parade on the Unter den Linden.

The starry flag of Europa flies high over the crowds alongside the black and red and gold of the German Bund. Statues and buildings loom eerily in the icy floodlights. Laser beams dance in the sky. There are drum majorettes, and decorated floats, and brass bands in lederhosen. And then, one after another, come the parade’s most famous marchers…

So many parades have been this way before: Prussian cavalrymen, Nazi brownshirts, goose-stepping soldiers of the DDR… But these are something of quite another kind. They are creatures from prehistory; denizens of the Pleistocene steppes, ancient giants shambling patiently between the Doric columns of the Brandenburg Gate.

Mammoths!

Franz and Renate lean on the railings while the animals go by. They have seen the parade before and watch the scene with a proprietorial air, from time to time looking round to check that their guest is suitably impressed.

They are immense beasts! And they walk with such calm, muscular gravity, such a sense of assurance of their place in the world, that it seems to Victor that perhaps their resurrection was not the incredible and improbable feat of science that it was claimed to be, but rather the result of some basic and inescapable law of nature: if you wait long enough, everything returns.

“Those huge tusks!”

“Berlin has 140 mammoths now,” says Franz.

“New York has twelve,” says Renate. “Even Tokyo only has sixty, even though the Japanese have much freer access to the frozen carcasses in Siberia than we do because of the Eastern Pact.”

Another huge male lumbers by; and Franz nods in its direction. “They have a few in Russia itself of course, but they are really rather a cheat. Less than 20 percent of the genes are actually authentic mammoth. They are really just glorified Indian elephants with big tusks and added hair. The Berlin mammoths are 80 or 90 percent pure.”

“Even the New York mammoths are only 70-percent genuine,” says Renate, “and the Americans are having considerable difficulty in successfully breeding from them for that reason…”

“Something to do with incompatible chromosomes I believe. And most of them have defective kidneys…”

But Victor the quiet Englishman suddenly gives a strangled cry: “For God’s sake! Can’t you two shut up even for one moment and just look at the things!”

Franz and Renate gape at him in astonishment, along with a whole segment of the crowd. Just as astonished as they are, Victor turns his back and walks away.

He has no idea where he is going, but a little later a thought occurs to him. He takes the battered visiting card out of his pocket and heads for the Kreuzberg apartment of Dr Heinrich Gruber.

“Come in, my friend, come in!”

It is musty and dark, like a brown cave, full of wood and the smell of pipe smoke, and Victor has the feeling that he is the first visitor for quite some time.

“Come on through!”

The old man’s eyebrows bristle with pleasure and animation as he ushers Victor into his small sitting room and dives off into a grubby little kitchen to fetch beer. Victor looks around, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed and wondering why he came.

The sitting room clearly doubles as Gruber’s study. Half the floor-space is covered in books, journals and papers. On the desk under the window is roughly piled up a long print-out, covered with an unreadable gobbledegook of letters, numbers and punctuation marks.

…XXQpeNU’B VFF6VV G’NNLPP P*JJVNKL’L JGDSF’E^X MX9*M MMLXV XVOG? KK’B KQQZ…

“This is Cassiopeian?” Victor asks as Gruber returns with the beer.

“Ja, ja, that is the standard notation of Cassiopeian.”

The elderly man rummages through a stack of manila files on a small side table. “You probably remember that the message contains a repetitive element? Every 422 days it repeats the same five-day-long passage known as the Lexicon, which turns out to be a ‘Teach Yourself’ guide to the language. The key to understanding it was when we discovered that part of the Lexicon consisted of co-ordinates for a spatial grid. When these were mapped out, they produced pictures. The Cassiopeians taught us the basics of their language by sending us pictures and accompanying each picture with the appropriate word or words…”

He goes to a computer and taps on keys.

Suddenly a face stares out at Victor, thin and long, utterly inscrutable, crowned with spiky horns…

“This one is a female,” says Gruber, tapping another key. “This is a male. This belongs to the third sex, which I call promale. If you remember, the Cassiopeians have a triploid reproductive system, a simple biological fact which permeates the whole of their language, their culture, their metaphysics. They simply do not see the world in terms of black and white, yes or no, positive or negative. Everything is in mutually exclusive threes…”

He taps more keys and new images roll across the screen: plants and strange animals, buildings strung like spiders’ webs between enormous diagonal struts…

“They are incredible pictures,” says Victor. “I’ve seen them before of course, when they were in all the papers, but you’re quite right, it’s amazing how quickly we’ve all just forgotten them.”

Gruber smiles. “The images are fascinating of course, but they are really only the key to the text…”

Victor smiles. “Which is truly nothing but philosophy?”

He is dimly aware that this is where the controversy lies: the extent to which the text has really been translated or just guessed at.

After all, who would think of beaming out philosophy to the stars?

Gruber nods. “Even though they have made a powerful radio transmitter, the Cassiopeians are not especially sophisticated technologically. They simply don’t put such a high store by science and technology as we do: they consider all that to be only one of three distinct and separate fields of knowledge.”

Victor asks what the other two are but Gruber is too preoccupied with his own train of thought to answer.

“The point about the Cassiopeians is that they are not afraid to think,” says Gruber, standing up. “They still trust themselves to do something more imaginative than count! As a result their ideas are beautiful and they know it, so they beam them out for anyone who wants to listen.”

He laughs angrily. “Which on this planet at least, sometimes seems to amount to about eight people among all the seven billion inhabitants!”

He perches on a table, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it. Victor seems to remember that there had been some suggestion too that the pictures had been greatly enhanced: crude matrices of dots had been ‘interpreted’ to a point that was arguably simply wishful invention. Perhaps even deliberately doctored?

Gruber stands up again agitatedly, thrusting the still unlit pipe at the young Englishman.

“My dear friend, what the Cassiopeians offer us is something that we desperately need: wisdom! Our own ideas have grown stale. We are in a blind alley. Christianity was once a brilliant new liberating leap. So once was scientific rationalism. But they have grown old. We have no real ideas any more, not even us Germans, for whom ideas and philosophy were once almost a vice. Especially not us Germans. Human philosophy no longer dares to attempt the big picture. All we have is the pursuit of cleverer and cleverer technologies, all of them quite pointless of course in the absence of any system of values that could tell us what all this cleverness is for.”

He laughs self-deprecatingly and sits down again, wiping a speck of spittle from his lower lip. “But as you can see this is something of an obsession with me. Have some more beer. It comes from my homeland of Swabia. Not bad, do you agree?”

Victor smiles. The beer is indeed good, and very strong. He feels quite at ease. He finds himself liking the odd old man.

Gruber picks up a file and begins to read aloud: “Just as there are three sexes, three states of matter and three Modes of Being – Substance, Life and Soul – so there are three principles in the universe constantly at war: Gentleness, Valour and Evil. There can be no reconciliation between these three, no final resolution of their perpetual conflict, only temporary alliances. Those who hate Evil must surely hope for an alliance of Gentleness and Valour, full of contradictions though such an Alliance will inevitably be. But oftentimes in history it is Valour and Evil that come together against Gentleness and we see cruel, harsh and warlike nations, preoccupied with honour, indifferent to suffering.”

He flips over the page: “At other times it is Gentleness and Evil that form an alliance against Valour. Nations become timid. They fear passion. They try to hide themselves away from encounters with suffering and death…”

“That sounds a bit like Europa!” observes Victor, and the old scholar beams at him delightedly.

“Precisely, my friend, precisely. We are obsessed with the fruitless struggle to eliminate disease and accident and death. We cordon off all that is distressing and unruly in the Underclass Estates. We have our wars in faraway countries, and watch them from the comfort and safety of our living rooms. We confine adventure to the Virtual Reality arcades, where no one ever gets hurt but nothing is ever achieved. We do not trouble one another any more with our untidy sexual passions, but release them (if we must) in the hygienic liebespielen, or in the new synthetik brothels, which everyone says are so ‘civilized,’ because they do not spread disease and do not exploit the vulnerable…”

Later Victor spends some time wandering the busy Kreuzberg streets, reluctant to return to Franz and Renate’s apartment. He feels embarrassed by his earlier outburst and by the fact that he simply walked away and abandoned the two of them, embarrassed, now that it is over, by his evening with the old philosopher in his squalid little bachelor’s lair.

He passes VR arcades, video galleries. He passes an establishment which he suddenly realises is a brothel staffed by specially adapted synthetiks. He walks quickly past.

Three police cars whoop by, heading eastwards to put the lid back on some outbreak of mayhem in Lichtenberg.

I’ll stop for a drink and wait until Franz and Renate are in bed, Victor decides. Sort it out in the morning.

He turns into a street called Moritzstrasse. (“Empire of Charlemagne!” exclaims a poster put up by the Carolingian party for the recent senatorial elections. They stand for a smaller unified Europa consisting of France, Germany, Lombardy and the Low Countries – the area of Charlemagne’s long-dead empire. Tired old Europa is rummaging in the attic of her own history for ideas, but the ideas are stale and empty. No one votes for the Carolingians. Those who turn out for elections vote dutifully for Federation, the Market and the Social Compromise.)

He finds a small bar and orders a glass of red wine. There is a TV on in the comer showing an extended news programme about the anticipated bloodbath in Central Asia.

Victor sips his wine and looks around the room. In the far comer a young man is fighting chimeras in a small head-and-hands VR machine. A fat red man at the bar is loudly extolling the virtues of half of one percent reduction in interest rates, currently the hot issue in Europa’s political life.

At the next table, a woman about Victor’s own age is sitting by herself. She is very beautiful, it suddenly seems to him. She has a particular unselfconscious grace that is all her own. As Victor admires her, she unexpectedly turns and sees him, meeting his eyes for a moment and giving him a small wistful smile.

Victor looks away hastily, takes another sip from his glass.

But suddenly he is aware of the three warring principles of the Cassiopeians struggling for control within his mind.

“Go over to her!” says Valour.

“What about Lizzie?” says Gentleness.

“If it’s sex you want,” says Evil, “why not just go back to that synthetik place? It would be a loss less trouble and there’d be a lot less potential for embarrassment.”

But Valour is insistent.

“Go over!” says that unfamiliar voice, “Go over before the moment passes!”

Victor is terrified. Never in his whole life has he ever done anything as audacious as to approach a beautiful stranger in a bar. He and Lizzie only went out together after months of working side by side. Even now, after years together, their sexual life is so crippled by fear and inhibition as to have hardly even begun.

“Go!” says Valour.

Grasping his wineglass firmly, Victor stands up. He clears his throat. He tries to assemble in his mind a coherent opening sentence. (The entire German language seems to be rapidly deleting itself from his brain…)

“Ich… Sie…”

She smiles delightedly and Victor grins back, amazed, only to realise that she isn’t smiling at him at all…

“Clara! I’m sorry to be late!” says a big blond man from behind him, crossing the room and embracing her.

The clenched wineglass shatters in Victor’s hand. He feels an excruciating stab of pain. Blood wells from a deep gash between his fingers.

Clara looks round. Everyone in the bar looks round – some amused, some puzzled, but all a little afraid. There is a crazy man here clutching a broken glass. What will he do next?

What can he do? Staring straight ahead of him, dripping blood, Victor stalks out into the cold street. No one challenges him to pay his bill.

KILL ALL WOPS, says a scrawl on the wall opposite.

EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE, says another.

KEEP BERLIN TIDY, says a municipal sign.

But, just over the rooftops, unnoticed, washed out by the city lights but still just visible, the universe shines down, with the W-shape of Cassiopeia there in the midst of it.

From somewhere up there, fainter than gossamer, fainter than the silvery tenuous voices of the stars, whispers the Cassiopeian signal. It is a ripple from a single tiny pebble dispersing slowly across an enormous ocean, yet even at this distant shore it still bears the unmistakable signature of its origin. It is still a message. It is still purposeful. It is still without question the product of intelligent minds.

“Valour?” says Victor to those unreachable minds, nursing his copiously bleeding hand. “Valour is it? Do you realise you lot have just made me look like a complete idiot with that Valour nonsense of yours!”

He chuckles a bit at this, then laughs out loud.

And then crashes unconscious to the ground.

Clara and her blond brother Hans are the first to come to Victor’s aid where he lies flat on his face on the cold Kreuzberg pavement, under the frosty stars.

“We need to do something about that hand,” says Clara. “He’s lost an awful lot of blood.”