‘Where are we?’
‘You are in my villa.’
‘Is it a good place?’
‘Fifty years ago, maybe. I hate it here.’
‘Why?’
‘It is in the middle of a desert.’
‘A desert?’
‘On a good day it is fifty degrees centigrade out there. On a bad day you might as well set foot in hell.’
‘Hell? What is hell?’
‘Of course. I haven’t programmed you to understand religion. I left that out. I had to leave something out. Hell is . . . a very hot place, where people are punished for former sins. We are fifty kilometres outside Valencia. But no one lives here who doesn’t have to live here. All the houses, all the villas you can see outside are free. Most are empty. No one officially lives here any more. They haven’t lived in them for decades. It’s too hot. Everyone moved to the coast or the north. The Basque country or Catalonia. Or France or England. It is considered uninhabitable land here. The West European government doesn’t want anyone living here. France has the weather we had decades ago. Sunshine, but not like this. We have these ancient air-conditioning systems from the 2030s that I’ve restored and upgraded, but it’s very unhealthy living here. Especially for my granddad.’
She explained that her granddad was the man in the next room, who was now coughing. His name was Ernesto Márquez. He was very old. He was 132. But I knew that the average male human lives to be 168, in 2115, the current year.
‘His lungs are deteriorating, and the heat and the extra air-conditioning aren’t good for him.’ She paused for a while as she stared out at the scorched ground. ‘I hate this place.’
‘So why do you live here?’
Rosella laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘Because it is free.’
She explained that although she was a celebrated Echo designer and AI expert, she had little money. She had been stuck in a contract with Castle Industries for over ten years, and they paid her very little money.
‘But that is going to change,’ she whispered, to herself as much as me.
The place where she worked was Valencia, which she could only reach by old neglected land roads across the desert. I had been made there.
And then I had another question. It was a simple question. The simplest in the world. ‘What am I?’
I knew so much, but I didn’t know that basic thing.
‘You are an Echo,’ she said, in her heavily accented English. ‘Why did you have to ask that? You know you are an Echo. You have that knowledge.’
‘I know about Echos. But I know they don’t feel fear. And I felt fear, in the tank.’
Rosella’s mouth became thinner and tighter. I knew that this was a sign of lying, or concealing truth.
‘There is something you are not telling me,’ I said. ‘I should not feel fear.’
‘You are right. An Echo doesn’t feel fear. Not usually.’
She studied me for a while (one minute, forty-eight seconds) in silence. Then she went out of the room. When she returned she had a book.
Images appeared on blank electronic paper.
‘What do you see?’ she asked, each time a new silhouette formed. And so I told her.
‘A butterfly . . . a tree . . . a hand . . . a bridge . . .’
She flicked to another blank page. This time it was a pattern. ‘What does this make you think of?’
I looked at the black spiral in front of me. I answered honestly. ‘Despair.’
She nodded, as if something had just been confirmed.
Audrey. Mind-log 428.
1
The day after my encounter with Daniel I put in my info-lenses and decided to watch some of my dad’s old h-logs. They weren’t about anything personal, or to do with his life. They were just his thoughts on various technological developments.
I hadn’t bothered to watch many of them while he was alive, but now that he was dead I wanted to see his face and hear his voice. I also wanted information. Uncle Alex was certainly right about that. Information was a weapon. So I went through lots of them, his holographic image appearing before me on the virtual retinal display, as if he was in the room with me.
I sat there, before breakfast, listening to him talk about the perils of magnetic levitation, of terraforming Mars and Neptune, of Echos. It was the kind of stuff that would once have bored me to tears.
He spoke of immersion-pod addiction, of nanostarships, of shape-shifting technology, of self-clean upholstery, and – in his very last entry – of neuropads. Inevitably, I watched this one with the most interest of all.
‘By placating our minds,’ he said, wincing quite a bit from pain (this must have been soon after the accident), ‘and by keeping us on a permanent even keel, these long-proposed neuropads may keep sadness at bay, at least in the short term. But at what price? Unpublished research, conducted by the firms involved in developing this technology, confirms the risks. Neuropads, by slowing down and suppressing vital neuro-adaptive processes, actually stop us feeling anything at all. We lose all fear, but also all curiosity. And a human who doesn’t feel curiosity about the world stops being fully human, because curiosity about the world is what defines us. But of course, over the next few years the last thing the big firms want us to do is be curious, or worry about stuff, because that would lead to questions about the technology they are marketing to us. They want submissive minds. Of course they do. And do you know why?’
He raised his eyebrows, the way he always used to.
‘Why, Dad?’ I said, trying to imagine that this was an actual conversation.
‘Money. That’s why. Not just the money they’ll make from selling neuropads, but also the money they’ll keep making if they ever manage to stop us asking questions, and thinking for ourselves. So please, if you have bought some of the first ones that have just appeared on the market, if you are wearing them right now . . . take them off. Even if it means feeling sadness and anxiety, take them off. It is better to be alive than in a waking sleep. It is better to remember than to forget. It is better to feel than to be numb. It is better to be a sad poem than a blank page. We are humans. I want us to stay that way.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I said. And he smiled, and I pretended the smile was for me, and then I switched the program to ‘adaptive mode’ and asked him to hug me, and he did so, but I knew that I was hugging a ghost.
I thought of what he had said.
I thought of Grandma going mad on her everglows.
We are humans.
It is better to feel than to be numb.
To be numb was as good as being dead.
I took off the neuropads. And waited as I sat on the end of the bed.
Sure enough, the sadness arrived. It was a terrible, strong sadness, but I wasn’t afraid of it. In fact, in a weird way I cherished it. The tears I cried were a measure of how much I had loved my parents. And it was useful to have that measure. It meant that even though I had lost them, I hadn’t lost the love. So long as I went on feeling, then I would be connected to my parents through that love.
It is better to be alive than in a waking sleep.
Then, as my mind became clearer, I remembered something Daniel had said the day before, and used the info-lenses to find something out.
I double-blinked them to life, then asked out loud: ‘Please could you tell me how long Sempura recommends you should keep an EMS? An, erm, Echo Monitoring System? Is it 250 days?’
Then bright Castle-blue text appeared, floating in the air.
Sempura is the only technology company to produce an Echo Monitoring System. It recommends that their EMS is used for as long as the Echo is in the house. Indeed, the longer the Echo is there, the more useful the EMS becomes.
‘Is an Echo ever commanded by Sempura to throw the EMS away?’
No.
I felt my skin prickle with fear, or anger – it was difficult to tell which.
‘Are Echos capable of lying?’
Only if they are programmed or reprogrammed
to do so.
‘Has any Echo ever felt emotion?’
No.
I stopped asking questions as I heard footsteps outside. Uncle Alex had brought me breakfast. Fruit salad. Cinnamon toast. Lychee water.
‘Why aren’t you wearing the pads?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather be sad than blank.’
He smiled a little.
I felt like he wanted to tell me something. Yeah. Or ask me something. I assumed it was about yesterday, and Alissa. But no.
‘What were you doing in the Echo quarters yesterday?’
‘I – I . . . was just . . . I’d lost a book. How did you know I was there?’
‘The walls have eyes,’ he said, laughing.
And then he left me alone.
2
I had a bath.
It was a thermo-bath so the water never cooled and stayed clean. I put it on saltwater setting to start, then pure.
I must have lain there for ages, thinking that if my parents hadn’t been killed, I’d have been with them right now. It was a Saturday. Maybe in another universe I was having that Saturday.
The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn’t thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied. The stuff Alissa had stolen.
I spent the day in my room.
I had no intention of leaving it. What would be the point, after what Uncle Alex had said?
The walls have eyes.
I cried.
I stared out of the window at London, and that rotating Castle sphere. I thought of those animals that should have been extinct, in their enclosures. I felt like one of them. A marooned seal, out of place and out of time. I went into the immersion pod. I accessed simulations of the most beautiful locations. I walked on hot sand as waves lapped my feet. I stood outside the pyramids. The Grand Canyon. And the Floating Tower of Beijing.
None of it helped.
The only cure for reality was reality itself.
I left the pod and lay on my bed. It was raining heavily. I tried to read, but my vision blurred with tears. There were noises outside, on the driveway.
I went to look. I saw the Echo boy. Daniel. He was outside on the driveway, doing press-ups in the rain, while Iago stood over him, laughing and shouting numbers: ‘ . . . 268 . . . 269 . . . 270 . . . 271 . . . Don’t even think about stopping, computer-brain, or you know what will happen – yes, you know what my dad said to you last night? That’s right . . . 275 . . . 276 . . . 277 . . .’
I watched Iago. I saw a little piece of spit leave his mouth. Suddenly, staring at this puny and rather unpleasant ten-year-old, I realized why Uncle Alex wanted to populate the world with Echos. It was a kind of correction. He’d created a flesh-and-blood child whose behaviour was unpredictable, rebellious and borderline evil, so it was easy to see why he was motivated to create what he hoped would be perfect and obedient beings.
No.
No, Uncle Alex probably didn’t feel that way about his own son. In fact, he had probably told him to be out there. This was probably Daniel’s punishment for having spoken to me. Guilt flooded through me.
It was weird. I was sympathizing with an Echo. I remembered his warm breath on my face the day before. I remembered how I’d wanted to touch his arm, to comfort him.
‘Weird,’ I said aloud. I think I was talking about my own feelings. Feelings that were rising up inside me.
Daniel seemed to be struggling, but I knew that this was just a clever illusion, as Echos couldn’t feel pain. So actually, maybe this wasn’t Uncle Alex’s idea. Maybe.
I must have stood there for half an hour, watching him do over a thousand press-ups while Iago (who probably wouldn’t have been able to do five) shouted at him. Indeed, I think Daniel might have been able to do even more if he hadn’t noticed me watching right at the end. After that, he collapsed onto the gravel, exhausted, staring up at the window.
I stepped back, towards my bed.
It frightened me that these machines – and that is all an Echo was, a machine – were now being made to be so much stronger than humans. And this Daniel must have been one of the strongest yet. But he was submissive too. Uncle Alex had stopped him getting close to me, even though Daniel could have easily overpowered him.
Unless he malfunctions completely.
I thought of that desperate, fast battle I’d had with Alissa, and how I had managed to escape out of the window just in time. If the same thing happened again, I doubted I would be so lucky.
Outside my room, in the hallway, I heard Uncle Alex walking past and shouting to someone, ‘I want the prototypes ready in two weeks. I know that’s tight, but after what you’ve done I think it’s fair, don’t you?’
I had no idea who he was talking to, but he sounded angry. There was a ferocity to him that he hid from me. I wondered what else he was hiding.
3
Later, it happened. Something I think Uncle Alex had been building up to.
He came into my room. He had a woman with him. A human woman, if we’re being generous.
She was short, with dark mid-length hair, and was wearing a flannel trouser suit and a bright red mind-wire. I could see from the tiny illuminations in her eyes that she had her info-lenses not only in but active. Her face had been artificially lightened with perma-cosmetics and her lips were an unnaturally bright red. Her name was Candressa. She was the public relations person for Castle Industries. She told me that there was to be a media conference about my parents’ deaths; she thought that if I wanted justice, then I should attend.
‘Justice?’ I asked. I was confused. How could there be justice? My parents were dead.
‘Yes,’ said Candressa. ‘Sempura can’t get away with this. They have to be made to pay for what they have done. It is a danger to society if they allow such products onto the market. Lina Sempura herself should be held accountable. Do you understand?’
‘Echos? You want to stop Echos?’
Candressa’s mouth became small and tense. ‘We want to stop Sempura and their dangerous strategy of putting untested products out there . . .’
I must have looked hesitant because Uncle Alex sat down next to me and put his hand on my arm. ‘You wouldn’t have to leave the room. You could do it all from the immersion pod.’ He was trying to look calm and soothing, but there was something desperate about the way he was looking at me. ‘If you do this, you could save people’s lives.’
I thought of Dad and Mum’s blood, leaking onto the floor.
‘When?’ I said.
Candressa looked at Uncle Alex, who gave her a small nod. ‘You could do it right now,’ she said.
‘They are waiting to hear from you,’ said Uncle Alex.
‘But you didn’t say it would be so soon . . .’
Uncle Alex gave more of his soothing smile. ‘I didn’t want to cause you any extra distress.’
Something wasn’t right here, but I couldn’t decide what it was. All I knew was that my parents had been killed by an Echo they had bought from Sempura, and a world with fewer Alissas in it was a safer world.
‘You won’t have to face them,’ Uncle Alex explained. ‘We can put the pod on blind mode. All that will happen is that you’ll be asked a few questions and then you tell them what you know, and that will be that.’
Candressa looked at me. ‘It is ready now.’
‘But I’m not prepared.’
‘You just have to act sad about your parents and say how terrible you think Sempura are for letting that product onto the market. That is the only message you need to have.’
I didn’t feel up to it. I looked at Uncle, and in a moment of weakness I said: ‘Maybe I should have a calmer mind, to get me through it . . .’ I looked over at the neuropads.
Uncle shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea.’
Candressa looked at me coldly. ‘We need them to see your pain.’
So I did it right then.
It was all set up. I think they wanted it this way. They left the room, and went to watch from pods elsewhere in the house. I went into my pod. But the moment the helmet lowered, I saw a familiar bookcase.
Blind mode, I thought. But it didn’t happen. So I said it out loud. ‘Blind mode, blind mode, blind mode . . .’
But this was not a media conference.
This was something else entirely.
I realized what I was looking at.
I was at home, staring straight into Dad’s office.
4
It was achingly familiar.
The bookshelves, and the view of the rain and the magrail through the window. The sealed-up pod beside the desk. Not just looking at it, either. I was as good as there. At home. And there was my dad too, at his desk, next to the vintage computer, reading a book called Darwin’s Nightmare. For a moment I didn’t think. I just stood there, mesmerized. There he was. Dad. As real as he had ever been, sipping tea, unshaven, scruffy-shirted, tired.
‘Dad? Can you hear me?’
Of course he couldn’t. But he heard something.
He looked over at the doorway. I did too.
It was Alissa.
She was standing there, with her blonde hair and her smiling face, one hand behind her back.
‘Hello, Alissa,’ Dad said, looking confused.
‘Hello, Master.’
‘Dad, get out of here. Get out!’ I screamed as loud as I could. But the scream couldn’t reach Yorkshire, let alone the past. No matter how hard you screamed, you could never reach the ears of the dead.
‘Why are you here, Alissa? I didn’t ask for you to be here. Please get out of the room, I am working.’
‘I cannot process that command, Master.’
My dad’s confusion quickly became anger. The anger he often felt towards advanced technology. ‘What do you mean?’
Alissa kept smiling as she walked towards Dad’s desk. Dad stood up. ‘Alissa, stay back . . .’
‘I cannot process that command, Master.’
‘Dad,’ I cried as tears streamed down my face. ‘Get away! She’s going to kill you . . . That’s a knife behind her back . . . Get away . . .’