Love in San Francisco

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing committed suicide after years of government persecution for his sexuality. Forty-one years later, Dr. Neill Bassett commits suicide, and in 2012, Neill Bassett Jr., a 36-year-old Arkansas transplant working for a Silicon Valley computer company called Amiante Systems, uploads his father’s diaries into a computer in Menlo Park in an attempt to replicate an existing human personality. This attempt is part of a grandiose project to create an artificial intelligence capable of passing the Turing Test — that is, of convincing a human tester that the machine is human. Neill Bassett Jr. lives in San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the — for lack of a better word — most popular sites in the world for public suicide.