Echo Boy (22 page)

Look at this.

She detached the gold locket from its chain and opened it, showing me its contents. Inside, there was a curl of blond hair. I calculated thirty-one strands. ‘This is his hair,’ she explained. ‘This is Daniel’s hair. My boy’s hair.’

I stared at it and began to understand. I knew that hair – even hair like this that had no perfectly intact follicles – contained mitochondrial DNA, and that although that kind of DNA had less information than nuclear DNA, there was prediction software that could do the rest, and fill in most of the jigsaw.

‘You are not him,’ she said. ‘You are an Echo. But I dissolved the hair into the solution. The solution from which you were made. The liquid born from code. It is like you contain a piece of him. The way this locket contains a piece of him. You are a locket made flesh. A memory brought back to life. You are an Echo, and an echo. But you are
you
. Someone totally new. You have a physical and mental power humans lack, and emotions and dreams that Echos lack. That 0.1 per cent makes all the difference.
Es todo
. It’s everything. It is like . . . like . . . like . . .’ She searched for a simile. ‘It is like the crack in the door that lets the light in and illuminates the whole room. You are the best of both worlds. You are the end of evolution.’

These words did not comfort me. Instead, I felt small. I felt an intense emotion characterized by a hollow, exposed sensation. I identified it as loneliness. And then fear. I started to be worried. I thought of the mark on my shoulder.
For Castle Industries
.

‘What is going to happen to me?’

She looked at the cross on the wall and the small pewter sculpture
of a dying man. And then she looked into my eyes and must have seen the fear because she said, ‘Nothing, Daniel. Nothing is going to happen to you. I have lost a Daniel before. I will not lose you. You will not be sold. You can stay here. You can live with me. I will tell Mr Castle that you need more work, that something went wrong. I will tell him that I will try to fix you, but then I will tell him it didn’t work. It will be all right – yes, I am sure.’

She sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince me. But I wanted to believe her. Or that piece of me that had been human did.

‘I hope so,’ I said. I may have been the first Echo in history to use the word
hope
. But I knew it was a delicate thing, hope, and could be broken as easily as a single strand of human hair.

For a short while it worked like that. One day she went to her office and holo-called Mr Castle. I wasn’t there for the conversation, and it was a good deal later that I first saw him, but the result was that Rosella was given time to ‘work’ on me. Of course, she had no plan to do so. And I have to be so grateful for that.

I lived with Rosella and her ill grandfather. I was not expensive to look after, as I was an Echo. My survival depended only on a solution of sugar and water. Five hundred millilitres a day. That and a hundred and twenty-two minutes of recharge or ‘sleep’ a night.

While Rosella went to work at her warehouse in Valencia, I filled my days by looking after Ernesto and observing the iguanas that were kept outside as pets. When I was outside, I saw a long plume of smoke stretching to the sky. There was also a smell of sulphur. The smoke was from the town of Catadau. I would later realize that Catadau had been destroyed two months before by the Spanish government. But the fires hadn’t gone out. It was a town permanently on fire.

You could hardly see the fire itself. Just a dull glow. But in a way, everything felt like it was on fire because of the sun. I felt the heat.
It didn’t burn my skin as it would a human’s, especially a human of my colouring. It couldn’t cause cancer. (Another fact I knew: the only cancer humans still got, since the medical advances involving T-cell regeneration made during the twenty-first century, was skin cancer. It was especially prevalent in those European countries that had massively increased in temperature over the last hundred years, like Spain. Other countries – Britain, New Germany, all of Scandinavia, Northern France, Canada, much of the US – had become wetter, stormier, greyer, and so skin cancer wasn’t so much of a problem in those places; but if you were quite fair skinned and lived somewhere like Spain or Italy or anywhere below Austria, then you had to be careful.) Anyway, the heat still could cause an Echo like me problems. It made me lose liquid, and so sometimes I needed more than five hundred millilitres of water. The water wasn’t from taps. Rosella had bottles of it stored in her refrigerator.

The villa was very basic. Inside, it smelled of clay and sour milk. It was cut off from the outside world. Apparently it had been abandoned for thirty years when Rosella had moved in and she hadn’t put any additional technology inside.

‘The government want to destroy it,’ she told me. ‘Every day I worry they will send a locater missile to blow us up. They don’t even bother with antimatter technology. We are not worth the price of an expensive bomb! They want rid of not only the properties around here, but the residents too.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they say there are dangerous people living in them. Ex-convicts. People like that. People who don’t need ID, or money. But it’s exaggerated. Basically a government always fears the poor, because they have nothing to lose.’

I found it incredible that Rosella was poor. I had been programmed to believe that humans were rewarded for their talents, and Rosella was surely among the most talented humans.

Most of the time I sat outside and stared at flat arid land, and the salt bushes and a leafless tree and the iguanas and the faraway rising smoke. Sometimes in the evening I would sit with Ernesto, if he was feeling strong enough. We would speak together in Spanish.

He talked about the iguanas.

He told me that if you picked them up by the tail, the tail can break off so they can free themselves, then a new tail grows in its place. ‘To survive in life, sometimes you need to cut a bit of you away, leave something behind . . .’

He talked about the land too.

‘All this used to be rice fields,’ he said, struggling with his breath in the heat. He winced each time he inhaled, as if it scorched his lungs. ‘The largest in Europe. This was years ago. When I was still a young man. Before the sun turned evil.’

That was about all the conversation I could get out of him before he started coughing and wheezing and needed to escape the hot, sulphurous evening air.

We were quite isolated. There were no magrails because no one was meant to be here. Rosella went to work on land roads. Few people used land roads any more, and the last land car had left the production line on 15 March 2076, exactly thirty-one years after the first magrail came into being, enabling people to get to places a hundred times quicker than they had before.

The car Rosella drove was nearly sixty years old. A rickety old electric auto-drive with four wheels and a top speed of a mere 360 kilometres an hour. Land roads were dangerous. They hadn’t been
maintained for years and were in a state of disrepair. In many places the sun had literally melted the tarmac away. Also, Ernesto told me something that troubled me.

He said that murderers and bandits occasionally travelled these old worn unpoliced land roads, looking not only for derelict villas to live in but also for people to hurt or steal from.

It made me worry about Rosella.

I told Rosella this, and she said that she was worried about a terrible bandit but that he didn’t drive on land roads. Back then I didn’t know who she meant. I do now, of course.

There were old books in the house and I read them. Most of them were in Spanish. I read a book called
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes. I read the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the stories of Jorge Luis Borges.

I read a love story and felt sad to think that I would never fall in love.

I read fairy tales. I loved fairy tales more than anything. My favourite was
Sleeping Beauty
by the Brothers Grimm. I found something comforting in the story of a princess who pricks her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and then, because of a wicked fairy’s curse, falls into a sleep for a hundred years. The curse could only be lifted by the kiss from a prince. The comforting part came from the lengths the prince went to in order to reach her and bring her back to waking life, fighting his way through a magical forest full of brambles and thorns designed to keep everyone away. He was determined to reach her, and he did. It was the kind of story that could make a machine like me feel human.

I talked to Ernesto about being a human.

Ernesto believed that if you were a good human in life you went to heaven, and if you were bad you went to hell.

I made sure Ernesto had his medication. I also made food for
Rosella when she came home from work. Simple dishes, made from cheap food that she bought in the food markets in Valencia (rice, synthetic ham and fish). I never tasted this food myself but I enjoyed making it. Mainly I would sit in the sun and play Rosella’s guitar. I found it very easy to learn. I liked what music did to me. It made me feel emotions I wasn’t programmed to understand.

‘Mr Castle chooses which prototypes he likes,’ she explained one night at around midnight as we sat on the old wooden bench and stared out across the desert, towards the dull glow in the sky from Valencia. ‘Then he takes them to live in his big house in London. If they are successful, he gets his company to replicate them; make millions of them for homes and businesses around the world. Some are designed to be all-rounders. Others are for a specific purpose. Some I make to be exceptionally strong. Some to be good at intricate tasks. Some are wanted just for security purposes, others for gardening or babysitting or cooking.’

‘What about me?’ I asked her. ‘What was I made for?’

‘I wanted you to be good at everything. More financial investment was put in, and I worked ten times harder on you than on any of the others. You have that mark on your shoulder, but I sort of knew I would never be able to give you away. That’s why I brought you here. Why I had another Echo take you out of the warehouse and put you in my car that night, at three in the morning. I did it because I never wanted him to know about you.’

‘Mr Castle?’

She nodded, looking worried about something.

‘What would happen if he found out?’ I asked her.

‘Well, I suppose he would take you to live in his house in London, like he takes the others. He would make you work for him. If you were
good he’d keep you there, and take the bio-computational code I used to make you in order to produce others exactly like you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, what would happen to
you
?’

She shrugged, but looked scared. ‘
No es problema tuyo
 . . .’ This isn’t your problem. ‘Don’t worry.’

But I
did
worry. I worried a lot, and after Rosella went to bed I sat there and invented comforting tunes on her guitar.

Yes, it was a very simple life. I liked it. I liked my role. It was a role I had formed for myself. Rosella had never asked me to make her food, or to keep Ernesto entertained with music and conversation and by reading him stories (he always wanted to read a Borges story called ‘El Jardín de Senderos que se Bifurcan’ –
The Garden of Forking Paths
; it seemed to give him great comfort). She had asked me to give water and green leaves and papaya to the four iguanas, but I enjoyed doing it, just as I enjoyed cleaning the house.

Sometimes I got lonely.

‘It is understandable,’ Rosella said. ‘Because there is no one like you in the world. You are an Echo, yes. Enhanced Computerized Humanoid Organism. Echo. There are lots of them. But there are none like you.’

It was true.

I was not a human, but I was not a typical Echo, either. If I had been, I wouldn’t have known how to feel lonely.

‘I feel guilty,’ she said. ‘I wonder sometimes if I should have brought you into the world.’

I didn’t want Rosella to feel guilty. ‘I am glad you did,’ I said. ‘Because here I can read great stories and listen to music and look at the stars. I can’t imagine never having known these things.’

Rosella smiled at me. Pride shone in her eyes. And right then we heard coughing from inside the house, and we ran to Ernesto’s bedroom and saw blood on the sheets that had come from his mouth.

‘
Tranquilo
,’ he said, trying to calm Rosella down. He assured us that he was fine.

Later, Rosella cried. I wondered: was it better to live and love, when living and loving could only cause pain? This was a human question, of course. It might well have been the oldest human question of all. And I was not human. In fact, I was not even alive. Not in the technical sense. I was merely
on
. An emotional machine. Yet I loved Rosella and, I suppose, Ernesto too. Because it was impossible to love someone without also loving the people they loved. Love spreads easily. Which made me wonder why the world had been messed up so much, when love was such a contagious thing.

And then, the night after that, something terrible happened.

At 2:46 in the morning I heard a sound; a sound that grew louder as I lay on the futon. I didn’t want to wake Rosella – she was sleep-deprived enough already. So I went to the window and looked up at the sky.

Unlike a human, I didn’t need info-lenses to see in the dark. Rosella had programmed every Echo so that our eyes would have an array of advanced photodetectors, and used seven times the amount of the chemical element rhodopsin (the one responsible for seeing in the dark) than was found naturally in a human eye. And I was no different.

Which meant that I could see something in the sky heading
towards us at 270 metres a second. It was small: I worked out its angle and realized that it was on a direct trajectory for our house and would reach us in fourteen seconds.

‘Rosella!’ I shouted as I ran to Ernesto’s bedroom.

Eventually she opened her eyes. ‘
Si?
’