Echo Boy (20 page)

‘He said some stuff, but it didn’t make sense,’ I explained. ‘That is what I meant.’

Uncle Alex gave a small nod. ‘
Some stuff
.’

The Echo hounds skulked back across the grass and returned to their underground homes, the grass-covered doors closing and restoring the lawn to normal. I looked over towards the house.

‘You are in shock. We all are, obviously, after what has just happened. Those protestors tried to kill me. They are animals. Monsters. Too scared to come out from behind their masks. They tried to kill Iago too. He is fine, though. In fact, he dealt with a lot of them himself. He is a sharp shooter. Whoever said that war games were bad for kids, eh? They might have just saved his life!’ Uncle laughed a little. The laugh quickly died. ‘Candressa wasn’t so lucky, though.’

‘What happened?’

‘One of them shot her. In her arm. It won’t be fatal. She’s in surgery.’

‘In hospital?’

‘No. There’s a medical room in the basement. Two Echos are fixing her right now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘There’s been a lot of damage. I’ve lost a lot of money just in terms of the art they’ve destroyed. Picassos! They’ve destroyed Picassos! Clocks and furniture can repair themselves, but a painting can’t. And all because of those terrorists. Terrorists fuelled by all that ridiculous anti-progress propaganda.’

‘You mean, like Dad used to write?’

He sighed and looked at me for a while, maybe wondering if he should be polite. But eventually he came out and said it: ‘Yes, exactly like that. Listen, I know you think I must have hated your dad. But I didn’t. He was a stubborn man. I offered him money once. A lot of money. He turned it down. He didn’t start off radical; he became it. The more successful I became, the more principles he developed. It was classic sibling rivalry. Nothing more, nothing less. Now come on, I can’t stand around out here all day. I’ve got to talk to the police. And assess the damage.’

And as I walked back with him, I wondered if Uncle Alex was the reason Daniel had told me to escape.

We were back inside the house. I was in my bedroom. Uncle Alex had told me to stay there until all the mess could be cleared away. I think he also wanted me in my room so I wouldn’t ask any questions. Or see whatever they were going to do to Daniel.

I sat there staring out of the window. At the crisscrossing rails carrying traffic. At the distant floating bone that was the New Parliament building, directly above the old one, which had flooded and evacuated many years ago, though Big Ben had been left relatively intact. The bone contained what Dad always used to call ‘a joke of a government’, as most of the politicians who worked there were also getting money from one of the main technology giants, and significantly more money from Castle than from Sempura. Knowing this, and seeing that giant sphere going round and round with the blue castle on it, it was very easy for me to feel like Uncle owned the whole city. That he was a kind of king. And a king with far more power and wealth than King Henry IX.

King of the Castle.

The trouble was, if he was like a king, he was an unpopular one. One that many clearly wanted dead. So it wasn’t safe here. Today had
proved that. But it wasn’t just the protestors – or ‘terrorists’, as Uncle Alex had been quick to call them – that bothered me. No. And it wasn’t just the Echos, either. It was Uncle Alex himself. He had been kind to me, as Candressa had pointed out. And it was true. And I desperately tried to convince myself that my growing doubts were unfounded. Daniel had malfunctioned. How could I have taken his word for anything?

‘Is Daniel going to be OK?’ I asked when Uncle Alex came in with a cup of red tea for me.

‘Audrey, I don’t understand it. I thought you hated Echos.’

‘I do . . . I do . . . I just want to know what will happen to him. I’d like to be able to speak to him again.’

Uncle Alex sat on a chair and leaned back, taking a deep breath. I’d felt like this before. When I’d had the interview for Oxford. It was the feeling of being assessed. ‘Well, that’s not going to happen, I’m afraid.’

‘Why? What are you going to do to him?’

‘Don’t worry about that, Audrey. We’re not going to terminate him. We’re going to make a few little changes and then send him somewhere else.’

A few little changes.

‘You see,’ Uncle Alex said, ‘there are things you don’t know about Daniel.’

‘
Things?
’

‘He’s not like the other prototypes. A lot more money was spent on him. Made by the best designer. By a genius, in fact. But there is very often a problem with genius. Sometimes the genius pushes things a little too far. It can create something that we’re not quite ready for. It can create something that acts in unpredictable ways. And that might be what has happened here.’

‘Like Alissa?’

‘What?’

‘Alissa acted in unpredictable ways.’

‘Alissa wasn’t a Castle product. If she was a Castle product, she would never have been on the market. None of the Echos I have here have been released yet.’

‘But you said they were all safe. You said there was nothing to worry about.’

‘They
are
all safe. Most of them. In fact, without them we’d be dead right now. Killed in cold blood by those terrorist monsters.’

He looked angry, but he was hiding something. I was becoming a bit scared. He reverted to his original topic. ‘No Castle prototype has ever caused problems before. It’s just Daniel. The most advanced. And therefore the most problematic.’

‘So what are you going to do to him?’

‘I don’t know if you know about Echos. Their brains look like ours but they are not like ours. They run on code. There is a chip inside them. This chip sends different instructions and triggers to different parts of the brain. The rear part of the brain deals with free thought. In his particular case – for some reason we can’t identify – it seems to trigger imagination.’

I was confused. ‘Imagination? Is that bad?’

‘Imagination is dangerous, Audrey. Imagination makes them have a degree of unknowability. It makes them more advanced, but it increases the risk. But luckily, in an Echo, it is located right here.’ He patted the back of his head. ‘And it is very simple to remove, while still ensuring he maintains a degree of functionality.’

Degree of functionality.

‘He’s not a machine!’

‘Oh, but that is exactly what he is. He is an Echo. He wasn’t born, he was made. There are no blurred lines. And this machine has malfunctioned, so he is getting downgraded. And then I’ll be putting him out there on the open market. There is a big market, you see, for rejects. Some go to the moon. Some end up in London, doing dirty or dangerous work. They are cheap. That place over there is full of them.’

‘Where?’

He pointed out of the window, at the rotating sphere in the distance.

‘The Resurrection Zone?’ I remembered Dad’s stories about that place. About violent encounters between the animals and the Echos that looked after them. Dad compared it to the Coliseum in ancient Rome, where Christians were fed to the lions for entertainment. But instead of Christians it was Echos, and instead of lions it was tigers. And though Dad wasn’t a fan of Echos, I agreed that it was cruel – to the animals, if no one else. And yet, weirdly, I wasn’t thinking about the animals. I was thinking about Daniel.

‘Most Echos don’t last more than a month there,’ I said.

‘Some do, some don’t. That’s hardly our problem.’

‘But you own it. Castle owns it.’

He looked at me, and there was a sense that we both knew we were playing some kind of game. We were saying some things and not saying others. ‘The Resurrection Zone is a fun place. It angers those terrorists, but everything angers them. I’ll take you one day. I think you’ll see that your dad was wrong about it. It makes a lot of people happy. It does a lot of good work.’

It was then that we heard a noise. A faint but alarming sound. A scream.

‘Was that him? Was that Daniel?’

‘It might have been.’

I realized they must have been operating on him right then. ‘He sounded like he was in pain. Don’t you do it painlessly?’

‘Echos don’t feel pain.’

‘But he’s advanced.
He
can. He can imagine and he can feel pain.’

Uncle Alex looked at the painting. Those huddled, cold, traumatized nudes listening to music. ‘Interesting. I am sure artists like Matisse would have agreed. The price of imagination is pain. That may be true.’ He laughed. ‘Well, better he feels it than he inflicts it.’

And then he stood up to leave. The screams kept on. They triggered questions inside me. Questions I was no longer too scared to ask.

‘Who was Rosella?’

Uncle Alex sighed. His nose whistled slightly as he did so. ‘Whatever he said to you, you shouldn’t trust it. He was playing with your mind.’

‘How do you know he said anything about Rosella?’ I said, my heart speeding as a revelation pumped adrenaline into me. ‘Alissa did. I told you that at the media conference. But you are right – so did Daniel. Was she the genius? Did she make Alissa?’

Uncle Alex stopped just before he reached the door. ‘You can tell you are your dad’s daughter. Questions, questions, questions.’

‘My dad was a good person.’

He nodded. And he looked at me with eyes that showed no sign of warmth. ‘Yes, but look what happens to good people.’

‘I need to know.’

He smiled. Looking back, I realize it was the first time I had seen open cruelty on his face.

‘Well, then, come with me. You can ask Daniel everything you want to know.’

At the time I wasn’t really sure why Uncle Alex wanted this to happen.

I mean, why he wanted me to see Daniel after the operation.

Why he took me down two flights of stairs to a part of the house I had never been in – to the surgery room, and that horizontal pod where Daniel was lying awake but lifeless beneath the aerogel casing.

Now, though, I realize it was about power. Everything in Uncle Alex’s life was about power. The aggressive business strategies, the big house in Hampstead, the Matisse and Picasso paintings, the holo-sculptures. It was all to show how powerful and important he was. I wish Dad had told me more about what Uncle Alex had been like as a child. Maybe that would have explained a few things. Maybe one day I would discover the truth.

But anyway, this was about power. About showing the power he had over his products, of which Daniel was one; and also about showing the power he had over me. Because, really, this was the moment when everything changed between me and my uncle. It was the point at which the pretence was over. When I could no longer try and convince myself that he had my best interests at heart. Maybe it was
the shock of the activists breaking into the house, but whatever it was, the mask had slipped.

We walked into the bare, perfectly clean white room.

‘Open pod,’ said Uncle. And the pod opened and Daniel was lying there looking up at us. Though his eyes were different now. They seemed blank and empty, the way Echo eyes were supposed to look.

‘Right,’ said Uncle, smoothing back his own hair. ‘I’ll leave you to ask your questions. Now, I am going to see how the house repairs are going.’

So he left us there. Alone.

But obviously we weren’t really alone.

You couldn’t really be alone anywhere in this house. You were always being watched, recorded, monitored. Uncle Alex could have been in his pod or in the security room, watching us in real time.

I tried not to think about this.

I tried to concentrate on Daniel.

It was weird. This whole thing was weird. Was he asleep with his eyes open? As I got closer I saw the blood. I was reminded that Echo blood and human blood is almost identical, except that Echos have fewer white blood cells, so theirs is darker. It was already drying, beneath the back of his head on the harsh-looking surgi-pillow and matted into his light hair.

‘Hello,’ I said.

Nothing. Not so much as a blink.

‘Daniel, it’s me, Audrey. You saved my life. I want to say thank you.’

There might have been something then. The smallest twitch between his eyebrows. A sign that he might be hearing my words.

And here’s the thing . . .

He was not terrifying.

I had always been troubled by the way Echos looked; their perfect faces and bodies. It was a perfection that I had found ugly. Beauty was about imperfection because that was what made people special. Or maybe that’s what I told myself because I had large shoulders and walked like a boy. Whatever. But if everyone was made to look perfect, then no one would be special because being special meant being different, by offering something that wasn’t on offer elsewhere, and Echos were all the same. The models changed, but they were equals in perfection.

Echo skin wasn’t quite like human skin. There were no pores or marks or blemishes. Everything was made to be symmetrical and visually appealing. Some people liked that sort of thing, obviously. (Which, I suppose, was the thinking behind Universal Affection and Echo Echo and 3.14 and Love Circuits, and all those other manufactured Echo ‘boy’ bands, which I had always seen as the absolute opposite of something real and messy and human like the Neo Maxis.)

But beauty was something else. Something hidden slightly away, something that existed inside every living thing, which could only be seen by certain people. And once they saw it, they couldn’t unsee it, because like all those old dead poets said, beauty was truth and eternity and it connected you to the infinite.

Beauty did not belong to machines. It did not belong to Echos. And yet it was there, as difficult to spot as the little crease that had momentarily appeared on Daniel’s forehead.

‘This shouldn’t have happened to you,’ I told him. ‘I am sorry. What happened? Why did you stay awake? Why didn’t they switch you off? It’s torture. That’s what happened. You felt pain. You aren’t meant to
feel pain, but anyone who heard your screams knew you were in pain. I’m sorry.’

His eyes closed for the slowest of blinks, and when they opened again they were looking at me. But this was not the Echo boy who had saved my life. That boy seemed lost. Totally. He didn’t seem to be there.