Echo Boy (21 page)

‘Please. Say something. Anything. Just speak. I know you can hear me.’

I couldn’t help but feel he was my responsibility. When somebody saves your life, you owe them a whole world. I touched his skin.

‘You told me you had met Alissa. You told me you were designed by someone called Rosella Márquez.’

Another blink.

‘You had more to tell me. About Alissa. About Uncle Alex.’

His eyes stared into mine, but it was hard to say what he was really seeing. I suddenly felt self-conscious, aware that I was just a mass of human imperfections.

His mouth moved.

He was about to speak.

‘Who are you?’ he said, in a voice that sounded empty and flat and neutral.

It was a weird feeling. Relief to hear him speak, but disappointment at the words.

‘I’m Audrey. Audrey Castle. I am Mr Castle’s niece. My parents were killed by an Echo called Alissa. She was a Sempura Echo, not a Castle one.’ Then I whispered, ‘I’m starting to think that I am only alive right now because I’m useful. I can help him score points against Sempura.’ It was only as I said this that I realized, with a sudden jolt of fear, that it was true.

He frowned again. It was like someone trying to learn a language.
He turned his head a little towards me. This movement appeared to cause him great pain. He winced. Instinctively I placed my hand gently on his face.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m troubling you. I don’t want to trouble you. You saved my life.’

I remembered a poem. It was one of Mum’s favourites. As I looked down at him, I tried to imagine what he was feeling, and the first line of that poem came out of my mouth: ‘
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows.
’

His eyes weren’t so blank now. There was a sadness inside them. I didn’t know if it was better that he was sad than nothing at all. I remembered that day in his room. I remembered him holding me. I remembered his warm breath. I remembered feeling things I wasn’t meant to feel.

And then I kissed him.

I leaned down and kissed him softly on the lips.

The kiss wasn’t a silly romantic h-movie kiss. It was just the kind of kiss you give someone you care about. And I knew that I had once been wrong about him, and I knew that he was confused and in pain. I knew that he had risked a lot for me. He’d been trying to protect me all along. And I knew that, right at this moment, he was the only real ally I had in the world, so I wanted to bring him back and show that someone cared about him.

I had changed. I was feeling emotion towards something that was technically a machine. If a machine could develop enough to become almost human, maybe a human could develop enough to understand that. Maybe that is what growing up was all about. It was about changing your mind. Opening it right up. Admitting to yourself that you were wrong about stuff.

‘You aren’t like the others,’ I said. ‘You are different. You care. You feel pain. But one day you will feel other things. Nicer things, I promise you.’

He whispered something.

‘
Audrey
.’

He knew my name. My heart felt like it would burst now that I knew I was helping to bring him back.

He looked like he might speak again. And he did.

‘He changed Alissa.’ That is what it sounded like, but I couldn’t be sure.

‘What?
What?
’

But then I stopped talking because the door opened and my uncle re-entered the room and said, ‘All right, lovebirds,’ he said. ‘Time to say your goodbyes. Because I don’t think you’ll be seeing each other again, do you?’

Uncle Alex escorted me to my room, and then he was gone. He shut the door. And I stayed sitting there. I closed my eyes. I hated myself. I had been full of prejudice. I had judged Daniel on the basis of Alissa, and according to the ideas that had been forced upon me by my dad.

Dad
. I thought of something he’d said, the very last time I saw him alive:
Monsters aren’t any different to you and me. No one wakes up thinking they are a monster, even when they have become one, because the changes have been so gradual
. He had been talking about Uncle Alex, I understand that now. But then I realized I couldn’t just sit there. So I stood up and went to the door.

‘Open,’ I said.

Nothing.

‘Open.’

The door stayed closed.

‘I command the door to open. Door open, door open, door open, open, open . . .’ I remembered Lina Sempura’s words to me:
Open your eyes, girl. Open your eyes
.

There was a handle. An old ornate one, from the days when doors
weren’t mind- or voice-commanded. I tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t turn. I tried to pull it too, but the door, though it looked old, had a secure electromagnetic lock, and no amount of pulling would open it.

Uncle Alex had locked me in.

I banged on the door. ‘Let me out! Let me out of here!’

But no one came. After a while I heard Iago on the intercom. He was obviously watching me from the pod in his room.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, laughing his evil ten-year-old laugh. ‘Looks like you’re stuck there.’ He laughed some more, thinking he was funny. ‘You’ll have to wait till your hair gets long enough for a knight to come and climb up and save you! Yeah. Like any knight would bother with a weirdo like you.’

‘Iago, please, help me. I need to get out of here. I’m getting claustrophobic. Uncle – your dad – has made a mistake.’ I was playing dumb, obviously, as I seriously doubted it was a mistake that I was trapped in here. But a part of me hoped I was being paranoid.

Open your eyes.

He laughed some more. It was a fake laugh, made unnaturally loud just so I could hear it. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. But if it makes you feel better, believe it was. Believe anything you want! Believe Dad actually cares about you!’

‘He lets me stay here,’ I said.

And I didn’t need Iago’s laughter on the other side of that door to realize how pathetic I was sounding.
He lets me stay here.
I was an idiot. I was like one of the tigers at the Resurrection Zone, thankful to be trapped in an enclosure.

I remembered a line from the Neo Maxis song ‘Love in a Cage’ from three years ago:
This is what I remember best / When I was a prisoner but thought I was a guest . . .

I remembered three days ago. The day it happened. When I had terminated – or thought I’d terminated – Alissa.

I had been in the car, driving away. I had been traumatized, hardly able to think, hardly knowing my own name, and the holophone had rung and I had spoken to Uncle Alex.

He had been trying to get hold of my parents. He had been wanting to ask them to come to his birthday party. He had obviously tried the house and got no answer so he had tried the car.

But why had he phoned
then
?

I tried to remember when Uncle Alex had last called to speak to my parents. Christmas Day? Maybe. But I didn’t think so. There had been a long period of mutual non-calling. And so what were the chances that he would have been trying to call so soon after their death? Mathematics wasn’t my forte, but it did seem like a very big coincidence.

Perhaps Uncle Alex was psychic. Perhaps, perhaps . . . Then I thought of Daniel. He had wanted to tell me more, before the Echo hounds had attacked him and he had fallen to the ground. ‘
Remember
,’ he had said. But what?

I didn’t know.

I tried to focus my thoughts. I was frightened, and I knew that I could stop that fear simply by replacing the neuropads – the ones that sat on the chest beside my bed. I could feel calm within seconds. But the thought of feeling calm was the most terrifying thing of all, because fear was always there for a reason.

And sometimes it was there to keep you alive.

‘
Te pareces mucho a él
,’ Rosella said, sighing.
You look just like him
. ‘How I imagine he would be, anyway.’

‘Who?’ I asked. But she didn’t answer.

And then she walked around the room in circles. She pinched her bottom lip and whispered to herself. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I translated her behaviour as anxious. I looked at her.

After six minutes and fifteen seconds she took a deep breath and appeared to have reached a decision. She took something out of her pocket. A small cylindrical black container. She walked over and asked me to hold out my left hand, with my palm facing upwards.

I did as instructed, and then she pressed her hand around my forearm, and clicked the end of the black cylinder. A small copper disc appeared. I knew that copper was a durable, malleable, corrosion-resistant metal that was second only to silver in its ability to conduct heat.

I had a feeling of uncertainty as the copper disc hovered away from the cylinder, to land on my wrist.

Uncertainty. Another thing I wasn’t supposed to feel.

‘An Echo is given two marks,’ Rosella explained. ‘The origin mark and this ID mark. One private, one public. One given inside the tank, one outside, to check that there is no untoward reaction.’

It took me a second or two to feel the heat of it searing through my skin. An intense, consuming pain as I stared at that hot blue day out of the window. I let out a small cry. I remembered the pain I had felt in the tank. Pain was the same with knowledge and without it. Pain was completely independent of information. She clicked the cylinder again, and the disc left my skin, returning from where it came. Rosella pulled away from me, almost scared.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘I’ve done it. I’ve actually done it.’

It had left a scar, or mark. The scar was in the form of a circle, with the letter E inside it. Dark pink, raised skin. Then she inspected my shoulder. There was a name on it. And numbers. Her name and ID number. She showed it me. I saw it reflected in a mirror.

DESIGNED BY

ROSELLA MÁRQUEZ
(
B
-4-
GH
-44597026-
D
)

FOR CASTLE INDUSTRIES

‘This was automatic,’ she said, explaining the mark. ‘This was the one that happened in the tank. In the laboratory.’ And another realization dawned on her. ‘It must have been the thing that woke you up. You must have felt this and then come to life.’

At that time, this contradicted my knowledge. ‘Echos don’t come to life. They are switched on. Am I alive?’

‘I . . . I don’t know.’

She was frightened, I realized, seeing her pupils dilate. It was fear coupled with excitement.

‘I’ve had a dream,’ she said. ‘I’ve had this dream for years. A dream of creating something so close to being alive it would be impossible to know the difference. And my dream has just come true. And sometimes there is nothing more terrifying in this life than having a dream come true.’ She stood up, and backed away from me, colliding with the desk. She stayed there and began to breathe really fast and deep. ‘You felt pain,’ she said.

‘Yes. So am I not an Echo?’

‘No. You are. You are. But a prototype Echo would not have come alive in the tank. You should not have felt anything at all before you were ignited. You should not have felt fear. You should not have seen despair in an abstract pattern. And most certainly you should not have been able to feel pain!’

‘So why did I?’

‘And questions!’ Her hands were in her hair. ‘You should not be asking questions. You are not meant to be curious. You are not meant to question your situation. You are just meant to be. To exist. You are knowledge without thought. You are action without emotion. You are service without question. Those are the Echo principles. And I have broken them. I tried to break them, but . . . but . . . but . . . I never
expected
to break them.’

She began to cry, even as she smiled. After speaking for a while, she poured forty-three millilitres of a copper-coloured liquid into a glass. I detected the scent of malted barley and alcohol, and consequently knew that the drink was whisky. She said this:

‘
Hay algo que quiero contarte
 . . . I want to tell you something. I owe you an explanation. You see, you are a one-off. There is no Echo in the world like you. There has never been one. Never.
Nunca
. I didn’t even know you were possible, but I always imagined you might be. I lost a
baby. A baby boy. He died in his sleep when he was ten months old. He was called Daniel. It is a family name. My grandfather’s middle name. Always the middle name. But I broke that tradition. He was blond, like his father. It made me depressed.
Triste
. And then things went sour between me and the man I was with. He was called Alfredo, and he was a bastard. That is all you need to know about him. Anyway, after that, I hurt myself, a lot. I used to cut my skin to block out the pain, because physical pain is never as bad as the mental kind. Look . . .’ I could see thin white scars on her arms. ‘I had to see a doctor, but I never really got over it. The only thing that gave me any comfort was working on you. Well, that and whisky. See, I wanted to create an Echo that has emotions and feelings. So I worked hard on you. You started as a commission for Alex Castle. He wanted someone strong and agile, with a precise mathematical mind and high computational power. Yet I realized that you were the best shot. I’d been given a lot of money to play with, for you. And so I went full-on with the code. I played God. I raised my game. I didn’t sleep. Fine tuning and fine tuning and fine tuning.
Si
.’ Her forehead creased, between her eyebrows. ‘Living on nothing but energy pills and whisky and this stupid dream.
Me pasé
.’

‘There are no others like me?’

‘No. There can’t be. You were made different. The code wasn’t just Echo code. I mean, that was 99.9 per cent of it. Of the programming. But there was something else.’

‘Something else?’

She hesitated. Her lips pursed, and she exhaled slowly and deliberately, the way humans do when they are trying to calm themselves, or gain courage. She toyed with her locket, pulling it gently along its chain. ‘You have the same knowledge, the same fast ability to
learn, the same speed and strength and reflexes, but I made you different.
Mira esto
.’