Echo Boy (12 page)

The wardrobe was voice-activated, so I leaned into the panel and whispered, as quietly as possible: ‘Open.’

Nothing.

A little louder: ‘Open.’

Nothing.

Then in something close to normal volume: ‘Open.’

Iago didn’t wake up. Just gave a little snore.

The door rose open silently. And I was faced with Iago’s wardrobe. Given that every item was self-clean, he did seem to have a lot of clothes. Smocks, interactive T-shirts, air-suits, all hovering on their hangers, a row of nano-weave cans (he had a lot of spray-on skin-clingers), and tons of slippers and snuggos.

I pulled out one can at a time.

Winter Warmer.

Sport Skin.

Battle-gear Fight Garb
(again, this made me smile, thinking of the thumb-sucking mini warrior lying on the bed).

24/7 Clingsuit.

And then I came to it. The can with the plainest, most unassuming writing, which was probably black though I saw it as green. Writing which said:

All-purpose Full Cover Projection-based Invisiwear (for every height
and width) ×100 uses. Nano-weave: 15nm diameter. Cotton fibre
equipped with nano-cameras and screens. For safety: Do not use in public settings.

‘Gotcha,’ I said, but not out loud. I thought about spraying it on right then, as that had been my initial plan, but the noise of the spray might have woken Iago. Plus, I was already wearing my night clothes. So I risked it. I turned and saw an alien with six arms and a giant head and a mouth with three sets of teeth. Another holo-sculpture. I didn’t gasp. And I made it out, and back to my room, placing the can under my bed.

‘Cruise rail,’ said Uncle Alex. ‘I’m early. And I’ve got thought-work to do.’

Nightmare. The car switched to a slow rail at the next possible turnoff. It was so slow and quiet he could dictate the speed even further.

‘Slower,’ Uncle Alex said. He sounded tetchy. He put on his mind-wire and closed his eyes. Thought deeply. Made silent commands. The blur outside the windows sharpened into visible things. Water. Stilt houses. Other magcars on other rails. Clouds. A sky market.

This was
not good
. The longer the journey, the greater the chance of Uncle Alex realizing I was there, right there, right behind him, trying to breathe in slow and soft and soundless breaths. At one point my nose did a little tickle-itch, like I was going to sneeze, but the moment passed.

‘No,’ he said out loud at one point. ‘Clean her up. I don’t want to see all that mess.’

I couldn’t believe that I was mentally urging us to be closer to a warehouse full of Echos.

There were Echo warehouses all over Europe, Uncle had explained
that morning, when I had maybe asked him too much. Some were small specialist ones for prototypes, and some were for creating the copies that were to be rolled out on the general market. The Paris one was the latter kind.

His eyes sprang open. He turned and stared at the space I was occupying. I could see him – the hood was transparent from the inside. My heart was beating so hard I thought he must have been able to hear it. It wouldn’t have taken much. Just his hand, reaching back, and then he would have found me there.

And what would he have done? Tell me off? Be confused? Share my embarrassment? Surely nothing too severe. But my fear was there and it felt real.

The projection must have been good. The optical illusion of nothing but a back seat and a rear window must have been seamless, because he turned round again.

‘Holophone active,’ he commanded. Then he gave the code. ‘Valencia four seven asterisk triple three dash seven dash hashtag AAX.’

And then a woman appeared, flickering into life. She looked pretty cool and arty and boho, I suppose, but tired and worried. She had long hair that was a total mess, a pierced eyebrow and some kind of necklace or locket around her neck.

She said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand.

‘Shut up and speak in bloody English,’ said Uncle Alex, in a voice so cold and harsh I hardly recognized it.

She seemed to be in a state. She took a swig of a brown drink. ‘How is he? How is the prototype I gave for you?’

‘
To
you. You are drunk. Your English isn’t normally this sloppy. You gave it
to
me. And oh, my God, you were right. There’s something
wrong with him. He’s not right. This is why he meant so much to you, isn’t it? What did you do? What?’

‘Where is he? How is he?’

‘I’ve half a mind to come to you right now. I’d beat it out of you if I had to.’

‘
Si, si, si.
Yeah. You? Or one of your Echo slaves?’

‘No. It’s really not worth it. I’ll leave you to your whisky. I have important things to do.
Hasta luego . . .
’ Then, to the car: ‘Call over.’

And the Spanish woman vanished, leaving me wondering about what had happened, and what Uncle Alex thought she was hiding.

For the rest of the journey he spoke in business jargon and mumbled into his mind-wire. I looked out of the window, trying to imagine I wasn’t there. I stared at the floating wind farms in the English Channel. And then at the vast wetlands of Northern France, which of course had been hit as badly as Yorkshire, Scotland and Cornwall from continual flooding. Thousands of stilt houses, not dissimilar to the one I’d lived in until two days ago, but smaller and packed together. There were swamps and marshes and cholera clinics, which had been set up a couple of years ago to deal with the latest strain. But then, towards Paris, the land got drier and the houses were bigger and more widely spaced, though the weather was just as grey and stormy and rain-whipped here.

I saw a large holo-ad for the Neo Maxis’ new audio capsule. It was called ‘Love and the Machine: Live from Neptune’. The ad was the four band members dressed in black moonsuits playing a concert to the small community of terraformers on Neptune. The capsule was going to be released tomorrow. I remembered looking forward to that so much. I had absolutely no feelings about it now, except that the idea of a concert on Neptune seemed like a bit of
a gimmick. This made me sad, as I realized how much of the old me had died.

I silently urged the car to speed up, but Uncle Alex kept it on the slow rail.

The magrail passed right up close to a vast enclosed greenhouse. It must have been about eight kilometres long. Inside I saw an ocean of wheat, perfect in every way, shifting to and fro in the artificially induced breeze. There was another greenhouse of a similar size immediately after it. This one farmed livestock. About four hundred cows, all identical – literally indistinguishable from one another – completely oblivious to the pounding weather outside. I felt sad for them. They were born to die the most pointless of deaths, especially as synthetic meat was now probably better than the real thing. But some people always wanted the real thing, I supposed.

Finally my wish was granted.

‘Full speed,’ Uncle Alex said. ‘Fast rail.’ And we were there in seconds.

The warehouse was on dry land, deep in the eighteenth arrondissement. Far in the distance I saw the large glowing white hologram of the Eiffel Tower, which had been put there after French anti-Echo protestors had destroyed the first one back when I was a child.

I remembered the original metal one, which had seemed more beautiful, even though it had only been half the size of the hologram. As I did so, a thousand Parisian memories came back. All those Saturdays. From the car I could see the gigantic Centre Aquatique far away: two cubes, one fixed to the ground and one floating above. The top one had a picture of a dolphin inside a rubber ring. The children’s pool, where Mum and Dad always used to take me, was in there. I closed my eyes.

‘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.

– 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.