I am in control because I know things you do not know. But if you choose to stay, remember, you chose to be here. Pay attention.

The Voight-Kampff machine is a fictional biometric measuring device used in tandem with a test bank of psychological profiling questions “designed to evoke an emotional response.” In Blade Runner, this test is given to those who are believed to be replicants, the artificially intelligent entities created to work under dangerous or unpleasant conditions in early 21st-Century off-Earth colonies who are, to any but the most well-trained observers, indistinguishable from humans.

In 1951 in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), is interrogated by a detective, Nock, about his blank military service record and alleged homosexuality, discovered as a result of investigating a burglary at Turing’s home. (Turing’s arrest actually came in 1952, a needless historical inaccuracy.) The interrogation room is colored in a blue hue similar to the lighting in the room where Leon is questioned about flipped-over turtles and his mother at the beginning of Blade Runner. Nock, learning of Turing’s work, specifically a recent paper describing the “imitation game” (a modification of which is known as the Turing test) that would attempt to tell a human from a machine intelligence, asks him, “Do machines think?” He is nonplussed with his own query; this has nothing to do with military records, spying, or sexual orientation, does it?

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