Echo Boy

  ‘Focus,’ I said silently.

  That was then. This is now.

  There was no Castle logo on the warehouse. It was an ancient brick building – maybe two hundred years old – surrounded by derelict apartment blocks. Some were black and burned-out, as sad and gone as childhood memories.

  I remembered something my info-lenses had told me about riots in Paris. Maybe it was around here but the warehouse itself seemed undamaged. There was hardly anyone around now. I guessed people who didn’t work in the warehouse had little reason to come here.

  Uncle Alex left the car and headed through the gale-force wind towards it. I should have felt relieved. I should have just got the hell out of there and found a taxi home. But no, I wasn’t going to do that. I needed to know more. I was about to enter a place full of Echos. A place where they were made. My heart raced. My mouth was dry. My chest was tight with anxiety. I was becoming too used to the neuropads.

  ‘Open the door,’ I told the car.

  ‘You are not an authorized user of this vehicle. Declare your identity.’

  ‘I am Audrey Castle,’ I said. ‘I am Alex Castle’s niece. I live with him.’

  The car obviously had lie-detect software and knew that this was the truth. No further instructions were needed.

  ‘Door opening.’

  It was windy. There was no leviboard there, so I pressed the button on the dashboard that Uncle Alex had used to radio the nearest one. A moment later a rickety-looking old steel leviboard came sliding along towards me. It had a flimsy handrail, and it was blowing a gale out there.

  I could see that this wasn’t the safest part of town. It kind of looked like the apocalypse. A hacked advertising board, showing images of a man shooting himself in the head with an old matter-messer flickered and throbbed above me, disrupting what was meant to be an advert for the iWire 42. I heard Mum’s voice in my mind: Why don’t we go to the Louvre for a couple of hours? Ever since the Mona Lisa was stolen the crowds aren’t so bad there.

  After I descended I walked across a large dilapidated patch of tarmac. The air smelled of fresh rain and dead dreams.

  I stood there and stared at the vast, blank brick building, which was as large as a cathedral. I needed to breathe properly, so I pulled down my hood. I saw a leaflet on the ground, blowing towards me. A crumpled piece of illuminated electronic paper, full of flickering text and moving images.

  It was a damp French edition of Castle Watch, the newsletter that was against everything Castle did. I looked around to see who it could have belonged to, but it really was like a ghost town. There was a language option at the bottom of the page, so I clicked ‘English’. Quickly, an article appeared, complete with a photograph of the pink-haired young woman who had submitted the piece.

  HERO CAMPAIGNER DIES

  – ARTICLE FILED BY LEONIE JENSON 17.5.2115

  Leading journalist and tech-sceptic Leo Castle was murdered alongside his wife at his home in Yorkshire (Zone 3) on Wednesday. Although the full details of what happened are yet to emerge, they are thought to have been killed by an Echo. There is no word yet as to how the Echo entered their home . . .

  Before I could read on, something happened. The still image of the journalist beside the article suddenly jerked into life. It was a live connection. Location-tracked. The connected world.

  ‘Hello?’ said the pink-haired woman, Leonie. She looked out of the picture like someone looking for something in fog. ‘Bonjour. Salut. Qui est là?’

  ‘Audrey Castle,’ I said.

  ‘It says on the location tracker that you are near an Echo warehouse in Paris, which is why I am interested. I’d set up an alert, you see, for that area, as soon as someone picked it up – because the only people around there are going to be— Wait! Audrey Castle? As in, Leo Castle’s daughter? As in, Alex Castle’s niece?’

  I nodded. She could see me.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I told her.

  She asked me if she could ask questions about how my parents had died. I said no. I didn’t trust Castle Watch. They were linked to the hardest fringe of anti-Castle protestors. Borderline terrorists.

  ‘I would just like to know how the Echo came to get in the house?’

  ‘It was our Echo,’ I said. I knew that I was crushing an idea of my dad in her mind – one which all these hippies had: the idea that my dad was some kind of saint who never went near technology and lived in a bubble totally separate from the modern world. To be fair, it was an image my dad had been happy to encourage. ‘Mum and Dad bought her. From Sempura.’

  She looked like I had slapped her. I didn’t care. I didn’t want my dad to be remembered as an angel, because he wasn’t an angel. He was my dad.

  ‘Sempura?’ she said eventually. ‘Why would a Sempura Echo want to kill your parents?’

  ‘Why would any Echo want to kill my parents? Echos don’t want anything. They are machines.’

  She nodded furiously. ‘Yes, exactly. They are machines. They are programmed. They are given instructions. Are you sure they bought the Echo from Sempura?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I am trying to say that your uncle is the most immoral man in the business world. And your dad was about to publish a book that could have damaged the prospects of your uncle’s pet project, the Resurrection Zone.’

  ‘You didn’t know my dad,’ I said. ‘And you don’t know my uncle.’

  I ended the conversation by screwing up the sheet of e-paper and throwing it – along with Leonie Jenson’s moving image – back down onto the tarmac, where it skittered away, carried along by the strong wind.

  This was it. I was going into the Echo factory. My plan was simple: I would put my hood back up and I would wait here, invisibly, and follow someone into the building. I waited twenty seconds, counting them out in my head, before someone appeared. A man in blue overalls, with an animated tattoo on the back of his neck. Just a rolling word – MINOTAUR – probably after the hardcore Brazilian magneto band.

  ‘Blackjack,’ he said, clear and loud, into the voicebox, and the metal door quickly slid open, after recognizing the voice. The door made a scratching sound you could hear above the wind.

  I followed him inside, trying to ignore the sign that said SECURIDROID PROTECTED and matching his footsteps with mine. I was inside the factory now. The air was still, but even cooler than outside. It smelled strange. I couldn’t really work out what it was, because it wasn’t strong. It was kind of a clean but unnatural smell – as faint as fresh air, but in the opposite direction. The ceiling was high. The light was a kind of spooky dim grey.

  I felt like I had really done the wrong thing. I was now in a vast hangar-sized room filled with hundreds of Echos. A whole assembly line of them. And they were all the same. Exactly the same.

  I stepped forward. Had a good look. They were all exactly like the prototype Madara, back at the house in Hampstead, except that these were all totally motionless, and standing in giant transparent eggs that were about three times my size. The eggs hung down from the ceiling on long, equally transparent wires, which I suppose must have been made out of aerogel or something to hold the eggs and the Echos they contained.

  I couldn’t see my uncle anywhere. At first I couldn’t see anyone other than the man I had followed in, who walked over to one of the eggs in the middle of the room. He held his hand against the side of the egg, and some kind of work panel glowed into life. He began inputting stuff, pressing the illuminated gold and green light-buttons that had appeared.

  Pretty soon, I realized that he was not the only one. There were at least five people – Echo technicians, I suppose – all in the same blue overalls and all attending to different eggs in different parts of the room.

  I looked around for the securidroid, but there was no metal robot anywhere to be seen. Maybe the sign had been a lie.

  Doubtful.

  Uncle Alex would have wanted to keep his factories safe.

  I tur
ned and walked back and tried – as quietly as I could manage – to open the door, just to know I could if I needed to. There was a small red light-button beside it, which I put my hand over, but the light didn’t turn green, and the door wouldn’t open. I was trapped, until someone came and I could follow them.

  This was a mistake, but I was here now. I had to stay calm. I walked into the room, amid the egg-shaped incubation things. It was like being in some sinister art exhibit at the Zuckerberg Center or something. A strange maze of hovering eggs. I stared up at the ceiling and saw, far above me, between the aerogel wires that held the eggs, silver nozzles like shower heads. I wondered what they released.

  What was I doing? What was I doing? What was I doing?

  As I walked, I grappled under my invisiwear to press the neuropads further into my skin. I pulled the face-piece down, became partially visible. Just my head floating in space. I quickly tried to make amends and cover it back up. I passed one of the technicians. A tall skinny woman with a shaven head. She heard me. Turned round. Cold and curious eyes. I stood dead still, aware that a tiny piece of my forehead – and full left eyebrow – was visible. I stayed still and held my breath. She stared. I hoped her info-lenses didn’t have a zoom function.

  She shook her head, thinking it was nothing, then pressed some green command on the side of her egg.

  I am not made to be a spy.

  The far wall had lots of doors in it. Uncle Alex was probably behind one of them. He could have been watching me right then. ‘Help me,’ I said, in a quiet – I thought, almost silent – voice, to no one in particular.

  My voice triggered the Madara that was nearest to come to life inside her egg. ‘Hello, did you need me for anything?’ This sound, in turn, triggered other Madaras to speak, each one offering the same strained smile. ‘Hello, did you need me for anything? Hello, did you need me for anything? Hello, did you need me for anything?’

  ‘No, I—’ I tried to re-cover my face, realizing that the technicians working in the room would now be aware of the commotion.

  ‘Hello, did you need me for anything? Hello, did you need me for anything? . . . Are you getting hungry? Are you getting hungry? Are you getting hungry? Are you getting hungry? . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you . . .’

  They were obviously not quite finished yet, and some rows didn’t even have eyes fitted in their sockets. I began walking quickly across the light grey concrete floor, back towards the door.

  And that is when I saw it.

  That is when I saw the blood.

  Just a few drops, a near-black constellation of them. And then a few more drops further along. And a few more. I followed them to where they led. Towards the far wall, the furthest from the exit. The last row of eggs. They were empty; in fact, both of the last two rows were empty eggs. But the blood was leading to the egg in the far corner, at the end of the last row of empties. Only this one wasn’t empty. There was an Echo inside, her body strangely contorted. The egg had an illuminated notice on it. The notice said:

  ASSESSMENT MODE (62): DO NOT TOUCH

  At first I thought it was another Madara. After all, the whole place was full of them. It was only when I got right up close that I realized that the hair colour was too light.

  There, right in front of me, in this Castle-run Echo factory, was my parents’ killer.

  Alissa.

  I don’t think I screamed. It was more of a gasp. But a gasp loud enough to be heard by her, because she turned towards me.

  She looked at me with absolutely no recognition; then her eyes closed. Her body was broken and bloodied. Her face was caved in. Her head fell back against the transparent three-metre-high egg she was in, causing it to wobble a little. It wasn’t a replica Alissa. This wasn’t another version. This was the one that I had driven into, fast. The one I thought I had destroyed. I nearly fainted. Everything that was in me, that kept me upright and together and in one piece, kind of left for a second or two, and I tilted forward onto the egg, just where the notice was glowing blue.

  This set off an alarm. A loud siren that woke me up again and made me alert. And a loud robotic voice: ‘Intruder alert. Row One. Assessment Pod under threat. Intruder alert. Row One. Assessment Pod under threat . . .’

  Then, inevitably, I heard the technicians running through that vast room, past all those other large eggs.

  ‘Intruder Alert. Intruder unseen, but thermo-detected.’ Straight after that announcement was made I heard a noise above me. A kind of whooshing. I looked up, only to get soaked by a bright turquoise liquid.

  ‘Invisiwear antidote released,’ said the robotic voice.

  The invisiwear evaporated away, dissolving on impact with the turquoise liquid. And within a second it was just me, visible in my cling-top and jeans, although those clothes now had turquoise stains all over them.

  During this moment, the Madaras had stopped talking, and one of the doors on the far wall had opened.

  I needed to get out of there. I looked around the room, at the neat rows of hanging clear eggs and the bodies inside them. And the walls, which were watching, the way walls always did.

  I started running, but a securidroid had appeared out of nowhere in front of me. It was quite small, and was really just metal legs and a face, but the face had guns for ears pointing at me, so when it said, ‘Stay right there,’ I obeyed.

  A group of people, Uncle Alex among them, came rushing over. Uncle pushed through the others – some of them technicians, two in (now turquoise-stained) suits, who were starting to look angry. One of the suited men wore all-white info-lenses, like posers wear, making him look like an alien. Another had a red mohawk. The neuropads were not doing anywhere near enough.

  ‘What is this?’ Uncle Alex shouted. He looked at me. For a moment his face showed total fury. The turquoise stains on his self-clean suit slowly shrank and disappeared, as they did on the clothes of everyone else in the room. All except mine. Well, my jeans self-cleaned. But my cling-top was old-school non-clean and the stains stayed. ‘What are you doing here?’

  And then he rubbed his hand over his face as if washing his anger away. A streak of turquoise spread across it like faded war paint.

  The turquoise was on his fingers now. He showed it me. ‘It’s nothing high tech, this, you know? Just simple paint blended with titanium oxide. That reacts with invisiwear, disables it completely – that is the criminal’s uniform, of course.’

  Was that what I was to him? A criminal? Was I going to be punished like one?

  He looked first at me, then at Alissa – her broken body splattered in blood – through the aerogel. He softened his tone. ‘Audrey, why are you here?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  Uncle Alex switched mood again and turned to the man with the mohawk, wearing a scruffy but evidently self-clean suit. ‘Guillaume, why the hell is this on the main floor? Tell me.’

  ‘The only w-w-way we could keep her in this kind of c-c-condition was to put her in a reha—’

  ‘Jesus! Je-e-sus! What is with you people?’ He closed his eyes tight, and pressed the bridge of his nose with frustration. The phone call in the car hadn’t been a fluke. There really was another side to Uncle Alex.

  He put his arm around me. ‘Come on, Audrey, tell me. Why are you here? Why did you follow me?’

  ‘You said . . . I couldn’t come, but I wanted to. I wanted to understand. I wanted to know more. About Echos. I thought you didn’t want me to come, so I thought . . . I thought . . .’

  Uncle Alex tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’ll take you home. I am sorry you saw it.’

  I should probably have left it at that. But there was a question that just wouldn’t let go. And I asked it, when we were outside.

  ‘What was it doing there?’ We walked over the damaged ground towards the leviboard. ‘It’s a Sempura . . .’


  We rose up on the leviboard, Uncle Alex shielding me from the weather. He responded when we were back in the car, totally sealed off from the wind. I stared at the warehouse, sitting under nightmarish clouds.

  ‘We’re a business,’ he said. ‘From the very beginning we’ve studied our competitors’ products. We’re a better company than Sempura. We’re a principled company. This isn’t just a financial war. It’s a . . . it’s a moral war. We’re winning, on both counts, but I’m not so arrogant as to think I’ve cornered the market on every innovation.’

  This wasn’t making sense. I was struggling just to keep up.

  ‘And it’s not just about successes. It’s failures too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You can learn just as much from failure as you can from success. We study our competitors’ failures in the hope that we can avoid such tragedies. And in this case I really wanted to find out what had happened, for obvious reasons. I wanted to know the how and the why. I’m not saying we’ll be able to find it, but if there’s an answer, then the best place to look is Alissa’s circuitry.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you that I was doing this, and I told them to hide her well away – just in case someone who shouldn’t have seen her ever saw her. Which has obviously just happened in the most spectacular way. They are useless, the factory managers, the technicians . . . You see, all the brilliant minds work on the prototypes. There is one in particular, in a small warehouse in Valencia, who is an absolute genius.’ I wondered if this was the Spanish woman he had been shouting at, but then I thought it couldn’t have been, as he surely wouldn’t have treated someone he admired like that. I was going to ask, but I didn’t want to remind him that I had witnessed that conversation. ‘But Echo factories like this Paris one . . . they’re just middle links in the chain. They just input data into computers mainly.’