Human Sister

professor concluded that, based on his questions alone, there was less than a ten percent chance that the interrogated system was human; the other nine concluded that, based on their questions alone, there was less than a five percent chance that it was human.”
    “But you remember some of the questions, don’t you?” I persisted.
    Grandma looked at me pleadingly. “Sara, honey—”
    Grandpa raised his palm to quiet Grandma. “One professor read excerpts from literature and poetry. After each excerpt, First Brother was asked what images, thoughts, and feelings the words had engendered in his mind. This professor and his students had performed the same test on hundreds of humans over the past several years. First Brother simply didn’t express sadness, terror, pleasure, attention, or arousal in a normal human way.
    “A second professor read jokes. First Brother was instructed to rate each joke on a scale of 1 to 10 and explain what, if anything, was funny about it. By the way, First Brother was allowed to respond to these and to all other questions only with typed responses. Jokes, as it turns out—I’d never really given it much thought before—tap deep currents of human nature, culture, and knowledge, often utilizing oblique hints at intimacy, absurdity, and offense. First Brother did particularly poorly on this test.”
    That’s for sure, I thought. He never laughs at anything.
    “Another professor asked First Brother to paint in his mind a forest scene that she described: a man walking with a dog, tall pine trees, dark understory, light filtering through treetops, and so on. The professor was reading from the script of another well-researched test. She then asked First Brother to repeat the scene. First Brother did, perhaps too well. Then she asked First Brother to look at the scene in his mind and state what his mind’s eye was focusing on in real-time: man, dog, man, tree trunk, forest floor, man—that kind of stream-of-consciousness response. Humans typically look most often at parts of the scene containing high-contrast and fine detail: up and down trunks of trees, along the visible horizon of the forest floor, the dog, the human. First Brother gave too much attention to the canopy, the moss, the grass.”
    “Just as he stares at strange things around here all the time,” I interjected.
    “Strange for you, perhaps, but interesting for First Brother.”
    “Sorry,” I said, having been corrected more than once after saying something to the effect that First Brother didn’t focus on the right things.

    Eleven years later, it was my turn to be tested. After breakfast, Mom and Dad told me to go to room B9, where my brothers were waiting. First Brother informed me that their goal was to compare my neurologic and other bodily functions with similar functions of other humans whom they had already tested. For the next three days, ten hours each day, I sat, strapped in sensors, and solved, or tried to solve, the problems I was given.
    On the morning of 29 December, only Second Brother was in B9 when I entered. He said he would be giving me what he called the Sentiren test and reminded me of the Turing test that First Brother had been forced to take over a decade before. He stated that he wanted to see whether I was an intelligent, conscious being.
    “But that’s silly,” I said. “Of course I’m intelligent and conscious but in ways different from you. It’s obvious I can’t answer questions within a conversational period of time if their answers require lengthy mathematical or logical computations.”
    Second Brother replied that he wouldn’t ask me to perform lengthy formal computations. He said his goal was to see to what extent I could feel ; he already knew that I, like all humans, had to employ machines whenever I wanted to think about or do anything beyond the merest triviality. I was stunned, especially in light of Dad’s representing that these tests were being conducted to help my brothers understand how I came to solve a problem none of them had been able to solve.
    Despite my inability to do more than speculate as to their answers, I found many of the questions interesting. How does it feel to simultaneously entertain multiple foci of conscious attention, as opposed to a single focus—the serial monophonic consciousness to which humans are limited? How does it feel to be interrupted, while quietly simulating a series of quantum states, by the shock of having someone