Echo Boy

Pull yourself together, Audrey. Focus. Say what you have to say. It will help to face it. You must face it.

  So, here I go.

  After twenty-first-century history, there was a conversation with Tola.

  ‘Why was that a double?’ she’d asked, changing her virtual hair colour from red to black and back again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, I know Mr Bream is not the sharpest VT in the world and, sure, the Google Riots are a good subject, but that was a double lesson.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ I agreed.

  ‘It’s never that long. Maybe there’s a virus in the software. Maybe it was hacked!’

  Tola liked the idea of school being hacked, because whenever schools are hacked you have a week off, while they re-run all the software.

  ‘Why would anyone want to hack that? I mean, Google isn’t even going any more.’

  Tola shrugged, staying with the red hair option. ‘Hey, guess where I’m going this afternoon?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ancient Rome. To the Coliseum.’

  ‘It’s meant to be a good simulation.’

  ‘The gladiators are so hot. It’s fun, watching them die and stuff.’

  ‘Right. Well, I’d like to come but—’

  ‘Don’t worry! I wasn’t inviting you. It’s with JP.’

  She went on to talk about this new boyfriend she had and then I made my excuses to leave.

  After I left the pod and went back into my bedroom. I noticed something quite incredible. Something that very rarely happened. The sun was out. The grey clouds had parted just enough to let it emerge, shining golden light into my room.

  This prompted me to go to the window, and I noticed the car hovering just above the magrail. I remembered that Mum’s meeting in NNY had been cancelled. So she was in the house. Which made me realize that the house was awfully quiet. Course, Dad was probably working in his pod, but Mum – what about her? She would normally have heard me leave the pod and asked how my lessons went. Or I’d have heard her come home.

  My mother was always someone you heard. I don’t mean she was deliberately noisy, but she often sang to herself. The thing with Mum is that even though she was crazy-stressed a lot of the time, she always had fun in her. Or maybe she used to like to show she had fun in her to Dad who, well, had maybe missed out on the fun rations. She sometimes even sang a Neo Maxis song. She used to like ‘Song for Eleanor’. But mainly she’d sing some old song from the dark ages. (‘Mind-wire Heartbreak’ by The Avatars and ‘Robotic Tendencies’ by If This Was Life, and sickly stuff like that.) Even if she hadn’t been singing, I’d have heard her making a cup of tea or something. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe she was deliberately noisy. I think she wanted me to know she was back so she could have a moan about her nightmare of a day.

  But anyway – point is, it was not a big house.

  I left my room.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. I stood still, momentarily distracted by the bookcase that lined the space beyond the pod. My parents had an extensive collection of old books – as in, the kind made from dead trees; the kind that gave the air a strange tangy smell.

  I found the book I was looking for, opened it, and started to read right there. But I realized I was hungry. It felt like a long time since breakfast. So I put the book back on the shelf and walked towards the leviboard and down to the kitchen.

  ‘Mum? Dad?’

  There was no answer.

  They weren’t in the kitchen, so I stepped onto the rickety old internal leviboard and went up through the hole in the ceiling to the next floor, where I had just been.

  ‘Mum? Are you there?’

  She sometimes took a while to answer. Especially if Dad had put her in a bad mood. And I was really starting to think that Dad had put her in a bad mood. I mean, there’d been that argument this morning. Dad had sounded quite aggro. And what had Mum been worried about? Why did she want to speak to him? I thought of something else. I thought of what Tola said, and Mr Bream’s double lesson. Why had it been a double? I hadn’t really minded, as I preferred being in the pod to being taught by Alissa. It was a bit odd, now that I thought about it, that Mr Bream hadn’t said anything.

  Maybe there had been a hacker.

  It was also odd that Alissa had known in advance that it was a double lesson.

  ‘Mum?’ I walked along the landing.

  It was then that I heard something.

  I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it was coming from the south end of the house. A kind of whooshing or gasping.

  I headed towards the sound, which had now vanished completely. I walked all the way along, all the way to Dad’s office, not expecting to see anything except his bookcases, antique desktop computer (a classic early-twenty-first-century model which he had just for show, and which Mum said he should sell as we needed the money), the view of the rain and the magrail outside the window and a sealed-up pod beside the desk with him inside. The window slightly open so he could smell the cool muddy water from outside, a smell Dad actually liked. He would be in there working away at his book, as he had been for weeks now.

  How I wish that is all I had seen.

  ‘Dad?’

  The sight didn’t make sense.

  A hand, upturned. A silver wedding ring.

  My dad’s hand.

  Then his arm.

  What was he doing lying on the floor? I looked at his desk. Steam was rising from his mug.

  ‘Dad? What’s the matter? Why aren’t you—’

  As I drew level with the doorway, I saw everything. All at once. A whole shock-load of images I have no way of forgetting.

  My parents, dead, killed in the most brutal and old-fashioned way imaginable.

  With a knife.

  A knife she must have taken from the kitchen.

  Dad’s blood leaking into Mum’s self-clean suit, the blood disappearing into the fabric, but not being fully absorbed. It was too much even for the carpet to absorb and clean away like it usually did when Dad spilled a coffee or red tea.

  My parents’ blood.

  It seemed impossible – and I suppose, when I think about it now, it was the idea that my parents were just physical. When someone is alive, the last thing you think is that they are just a biological organism made of blood and bone and other matter. They are people – wise, quiet, serious, humorous, sometimes annoying, sometimes grumpy, tired, loving people. And death – especially this horrible kind of death – took all that away, and said it was a lie, and that my parents were nothing more than the sum of their parts.

  And, of course, she was there.

  Alissa. With her blonde hair and too-perfect smile.

  Standing there, with the blood-soaked knife.

  ‘I was waiting for you to come,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you to come, I was waiting for you to come . . .’

  She kept saying it, like a broken machine, which I suppose she was.

  And I just stood there, until she moved.

  How long was that? How long?

  I don’t really know. Time had disintegrated, along with reality itself. But I must have had something inside me – some determined will to survive, and for that man-made monster to not take me, my life, a life which was the product of those two bodies on the floor – and there must also have been just enough distance, and just enough of an obstacle in terms of those bodies, for me to run that short stretch along the landing towards the window.

  I also found enough of a voice to command that window to ‘Open!’

  Though there was a tiny delay, from the command to the action of it opening. A delay no doubt caused by the fact that my dad had been determined not to spend more money on technology than he needed to by having them replaced.

  So she – that thing I really don’t want to dignify with the human name Alissa – she grabbed me, the sleeve of my cotton top, and she would have finished me off too. But I wasn’t like my parents must have been.

  No.

>   There was no fear inside me at that second in time. Fear belongs to people with stuff to lose. It was just pure anger, pure hate, and the hate was so strong that just for a second I had the power to match an Echo, even though an Echo was designed to be three times as strong as a fully-grown human man. In that second this didn’t matter because I had them inside me – I had my parents inside my heart – and when I pulled away from her and slammed my elbow hard into her face, it was as though all of us, the whole family, were doing it.

  She staggered backwards.

  Being an Echo, she obviously hadn’t felt any pain, but she had to obey the same laws of physics as anyone else, so it was a moment before she could come at me again. But by that time the window was open and I was jumping out of it, leaping into the water. As soon as my head was out in the air, I screamed up towards the rails and the leviboard. (External leviboards were one piece of technology my parents had always been forced to upgrade because of rain damage.) It descended to just above water level, and I climbed out just as Alissa was jumping in (if she had been a first-generation Echo, that would have been enough to finish her off, but she was as waterproof as I was).

  Once in the car, my brain almost combusted as the fear finally arrived, and so I forgot the right command combination. By this time she was trying to get inside. Failing, she stood on the rail itself, right in front of the car.

  ‘Reverse,’ I said.

  But there were only five metres of rail behind us. There was only one thing I could do.

  ‘Forward,’ I said. ‘Fast. Full speed. To . . . to fast rail.’

  And the car sped ahead with such momentum that we smashed right into Alissa, and headed away to anywhere, the windscreen streaked with blood, my face streaked with flood water and unstoppable tears.

  She was dead. No question.

  But then again, as Dad always said, in life you can never ask too many questions.

  7

  Something else Dad once said: ‘I am not having an Echo in this house.’

  He had said something similar quite a few times. But Mum was insistent. ‘They are by far the best tutors. If we want Audrey to go to a good university, I think we should get one. It could help her.’

  ‘Echos are the end of civilization,’ he said. ‘They are the end of humanity. People who sell Echos are selling the end of the human race.’

  ‘People like your brother, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. People like Alex.’

  ‘So you’ll let your rivalry with your brother get in the way of your daughter’s education?’

  This made Dad cross. ‘What is the point of educating our daughter if there is no future for mankind?’

  ‘And us buying one Echo, one everyday household assembly-line Echo – that’s going to lead to the end of the world, is it?’

  ‘You either have principles or you don’t.’

  ‘You mean, you either have your principles or you don’t. I can’t believe your arrogance sometimes, Leo.’

  I think I joined in the conversation at this point. ‘It’s OK, Mum, I don’t want an Echo to teach me. I like going to school in the pod. I’ve got friends there.’

  My mother just stared at me, and blew ripples across her red tea. She was as stubborn as Dad, just in a different direction. ‘I want the best for you,’ she said. ‘Even if you don’t want it for yourself.’

  I had no idea where I was going. I should probably have stopped the car and gone back to the house, but I was too shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  But then I heard a noise in the car. The low-pitched purr of the holophone.

  ‘Yes,’ I blurted, answering.

  And then a man appeared on the flat transparent board in front of me, a hologram one tenth of normal human size. It was a man with black hair and a black suit. In my delirium I thought it was Dad, even though I had never seen him wear a suit. I thought it was a message from the dead.

  ‘Hello, Audrey,’ he said warmly. ‘I’ve been trying to contact your parents.’

  And then I realized who this figure was. It was my uncle Alex. Alex Castle. Dad’s brother.

  I couldn’t speak. I was in such a state of shock my tongue felt locked.

  The little hologram figure stepped closer, looking up at me. I suppose he was a kind of comfort. It was a face I recognized, after all.

  ‘Audrey, what’s the matter? You look dreadful. Why are you in the car on your own? What on earth has happened?’

  ‘They’ve . . . they’ve . . .’ It took every ounce of strength and sanity I had left inside me, but eventually I managed to say it. ‘They’ve been killed.’

  My uncle looked confused, then devastated. For a moment he too seem unable to speak. Then he pulled himself into responsible adult mode. ‘Killed? What do you mean? Audrey, sweetheart, what are you talking about?’

  ‘The Echo. The Echo killed them.’

  ‘You mean the robot, Travis?’

  ‘No. No.’ The idea was ridiculous. Travis couldn’t have peeled a potato, let alone killed a human being. ‘They . . . A new one. An actual Echo.’

  He was confused. ‘An Echo?’

  I didn’t want him to feel guilty, so I managed to say: ‘A Sempura Echo. They bought a Sempura Echo.’

  He looked as if he was in pain. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, gaining composure. ‘We’d fallen out. We’d fallen out, Audrey, about this stuff he was doing. Stuff about the Resurrection Zone. Did you know that? You must know that. God, it was so stupid. And I was just about to make amends. Leo! Poor Leo. My brother! Oh my God. I was just about to invite him to my fiftieth birthday. I was going to make it up to him.’ He stopped, his eyes looking at me, mirroring my pain. ‘And are you safe, Audrey? Are you OK? Were you there?’

  I couldn’t answer these questions. Not then. Before a bruise shows, the skin stays blank. I was blank. The blank white of just-slapped skin. I felt I had nothing in me.

  ‘Where are you? Where are you now? I mean, where are you going?’

  I looked out of the window. It was dark above me. I must have been travelling under one of Birmingham’s many hover-suburbs. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must come here. You must come and stay here, Audrey. Please, I’m asking you. Do you understand? It’s the only place you can stay.’

  I was reluctant. Uncle Alex had a house full of Echos. He had no problem with Echos – after all, Castle Industries was the main European Echo producer. They made even more than Sempura. At least in Europe.

  ‘Tell the car to take you to One, Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead, north London. Car? Are you listening? I am Audrey’s closest living relative now that her parents have been killed. I am Alex Castle.’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was an instinctive thing. ‘No. It’s OK. Thank you, but I’ll go somewhere else.’

  But where else could I go?

  Grandma’s. Mum’s mum. She lived on the moon, but I could have gone to the spaceport at Heathrow and caught a flight. Mum had flown to see her two months ago. She’d planned to spend the week there but had only managed a night. Grandma had Echos. The whole moon was full of Echos. But so was Uncle Alex’s. And, I don’t know, I just felt closer to Grandma.

  ‘Heathrow Spaceport,’ I said. ‘Fast.’

  But the car didn’t speed up. The car slowed down to under five hundred kilometres an hour. I was looking out of windows, at real actual things. I saw distant fires. It might have been one of the riot towns.

  I passed over large greenhouses full of farm crops. Perfect fields of barley, gently swaying in the artificial breeze.

  It is weird, when you love someone and they die. How the world has a strange negative power. A short while later we were over Oxford. I slid past the college buildings. The famous titanium wheel that was New Somerville College, rotating on its axis. I was staring at my future. That was where I was meant to be attending university. I had been there, with my mum. I thought of her. But there was nothing. I could only think of blood. And then, between Oxford and London, continuing subur
bs. Floating homes, stilt houses, and those giant rectangular rain absorbers that shade miles of land and water.

  This was not the way to Heathrow.

  ‘Car,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

  Trees.

  A rotating sphere.

  Houses. A dense mesh of crisscrossing magrails. An h-ad for Sempura mind-wires.

  ‘Car, stop. Car, I want to go to Heathrow Spaceport. Car, car, car?’

  ‘The designated address is One, Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, London,’ said the car.

  ‘But I’ve told you to drive to Heathrow Spaceport. I want to go to the spaceport. I want to go to the moon. I want to see my grandma.’

  ‘I am fitted with Castle maxiresponse navigational software. It cannot disobey its creator.’

  Had my parents known this? That although the car wasn’t made by Castle, the software inside it was?

  I saw a hologram of our destination appear where Uncle Alex had been.

  One of the most expensive houses in London, a vast mansion that looked like a Roman temple, with acres of land that was also built in one of the highest parts of the city and so unlikely to flood. Apparently my uncle had paid 110 million unidollars for it, way back in 2098, but that kind of money was nothing to him.

  Not that he needed the space.

  There was only him and my ten-year-old cousin, Iago. Uncle Alex had been married once, for two years, but his wife – Iago’s mum – had gone a bit crazy after the birth of her son, and a divorce had followed.

  Right then, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this. I was just trying to get the car to do what I wanted. As it didn’t obey any voice command, I tried to disable it by kicking the dashboard. I kicked and I kicked. There was no way I wanted to go to Uncle Alex’s. Not necessarily because of Uncle Alex himself, but because I could not stand the idea of being surrounded by his Echos.

  ‘Car, stop! Reverse. Go back home. Go back to Yorkshire.’

  ‘If you continue to harm this vehicle, you will be forcibly restrained,’ said the car.

  I continued to harm the vehicle.

  And I was forcibly restrained. A sudden field of invisible magnetic force slammed me back against the rear window, nearly a metre above the seat.