- "We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required."
- —Roland
Turing Registry or Turing Police is a force that regulates the augmentation of Artificial Intelligence and prevents their evolution and independence.
They noticed that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City owned a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. That was because the clinic's owner made a groundbreaking surgery and applied for seven basic patents. This was unlike the usual order of things and attracted attention of Turing. They considered it to be the first mistake of Wintermute.
They traced the operator and his team to the Sprawl, they were lost, then found again leaving for Istanbul. Tracing their actions through the grid of the matrix, and understood they instigated a riot at the Sense/Net Pyramid. They contacted Sense/Net asking to run an inventory; they were eager to cooperate and found that McCoy Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing. It was easy to trace them to Istanbul where the woman of the team alienated Armitage's contact with the turkish secret police.
Concept art by Nathan Anderson
3 French Turing agents, Michele, Roland, and Pierre, traced the team to Freeside and the Intercontinental.
It is not explicitly confirmed, but it is possible that they were posing as the 3 French tourists spotted by Case at several points: they looked like racing machines, with elaborate hairdressing with uneven tan caused by melanin boosting and Case first saw them gliding above a river, wearing triangular nylons in bright primaries. He saw them again the next morning at breakfast on the roof garden, wearing white cotton ducks, leather sandals and jewelry. The next evening he saw them near the Vingtième Siècle taking the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.
One morning they entered Case's room and waiting for him to return, and told him he is under arrest. They wore perfect white sportsclothes contrasted by their stenciled tans. Pierre and Roland wore identical gold chains around their necks. They all had cosmetic surgeries to look young. They spoke Parisian French among themselves, knowing that Case would not understand it, only that they knew about names like Dixie Flatline, Armitage, Sense/Net and Panther Moderns. They searched his bag, clothes and asked about "Rose Kolodny". Case revealed that he was hired to make a run somewhere, but without knowing the nature of their target.
Trivia[]
The Turings are obviously named after Alan Turing, considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, and proposed the "Turing test" that would judge how advanced an AI would be.
Regarding that the 3 agents are French, it is possible that the Turing Registry was modeled on Interpol.