Echo Boy (13 page)

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 turned 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.’

‘But that wasn’t a random copy,’ I said as I saw the crumpled
Castle Watch
newsletter fly past the window, and higher still into the sky. ‘That was her. That was the same Alissa I thought I had terminated.’

He ordered the car to head back to London.

We travelled fast this time. The greenhouses and floodlands and wind farms dissolved into the same blur. ‘Yes it was. Because, as I have said, I want to know exactly what happened. Your dad was also my brother. I owe it to him – and to you, and to your mum – to make sure that nothing like this happens again. So I had people go to the house – to your old house – and drag her out of the water and bring her there.’

‘But what about the police? What about the investigation?’

‘Don’t worry. The police have seen her. And listen, I wanted to get hold of that Echo before Sempura got to her, and started a cover-up. Anyway, don’t worry about that.’ He smiled a caring smile. I had expected him to be cross with me for following him, but he wasn’t. This confused me.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we have a chance here – a chance for your parents’ deaths not to have been in vain. Information is a weapon. And I want to do everything to make sure we know exactly what happened. You understand?’

We were nearly home. I looked at Uncle Alex and didn’t really know who I was looking at. Was he bad or was he good – or was he like most of humanity, hovering somewhere in between?

‘Yes,’ I said as the car stopped. ‘I do.’

Hours later, Uncle Alex went into his pod for a meeting. I decided to take advantage of this and explore the house. I went downstairs. In the hallway I walked past a hologram of a unicorn and into the grand lobby. Iago wasn’t around. But Echos were. There was a female one I hadn’t seen before. She was polishing an antique chest and looked at me with blank eyes.

I walked on through the lobby, past more holo-sculptures and expensive furniture. There were a couple of Echos in the kitchen, preparing food. I walked straight past and turned right into a dark narrow corridor, and began to feel a bit more nervous as I realized I was heading towards the Echo quarters.

There was no one there.

The first door I came to was locked. Like most of the doors in this house, it had an old-fashioned door handle you could turn and push. Which I did. But then I felt a hand grip my arm.

‘Stop,’ said a voice. I turned and saw him. The blond one. Daniel. He stared at me intensely – nothing like the stare of the one who had been polishing the old chest.

It was then that I began to panic, and pulled away from him.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe. Does your uncle know?’

‘No.’