Echo Boy (23 page)

‘Something’s coming!’

We got out just in time. There was an explosion. A ball of fire and a black channel of smoke rising up against the night. We felt the heat of it, but we weren’t hurt. Ernesto struggled to breathe for a while, but I think that was more to do with shock than smoke.

‘The bloody damn government!’ Rosella was saying as she stared at the heat and the smoke. ‘They wanted to kill us! They didn’t just want to destroy the house – they wanted to kill us!’ And she swore, furiously, in Spanish. Then she thought of something and started running round to the other side of the house, and was even more furious to find that the iguanas were dead.

We drove that night. We had to. We had to get to the warehouse before daylight came – the heat would have killed Ernesto if he was left out in it. We heard and saw other explosions near by. Every home in the whole area was being destroyed.

It was dangerous, especially taking me, and I told Rosella that she didn’t have to do it.

‘There is no risk. Mr Castle never comes unannounced. There would always be time to hide you away. A few minutes maybe, if he comes from London . . .’

So this was our new home. The laboratory. A vast three-storey warehouse made of translucent concrete on a hill on the edge of the city. The ground floor was 148 metres by 120 metres and contained twenty-five cuboid tanks, including the one where I had been made. The top floor was Rosella’s office. Down below was a basement full of the technology that brought me into being, along with an incinerator.

‘I don’t want you to go down there,’ she told me.

‘Why?’

‘I think it would be bad for you. To see how you were made.’

‘OK,’ I said.

Then she looked at me for a while. ‘But I do want you to remember a number. OK. Can you record this number for me? Eight . . . four . . . two . . . nine . . . zero. Have you got that?’

‘Yes. But what is it for?’

She inhaled, her face as solemn as only a human face could look. ‘You will know if you have to know.’

There were a lot of things Rosella didn’t tell me, or at least didn’t fully explain. She kept on talking to herself. And she also went very quiet, and made me leave the room whenever she had a work call. One day I overheard her.

‘Yes, I have started work on her, but you know how dangerous this is for me. If Mr Castle finds out, I will be in serious trouble.’

She would tell Ernesto that in a few weeks everything would be fine. Ernesto was confused, and hardly spoke, but Rosella tried to comfort him, saying, ‘We’ll have a new place to live. Money is coming.’

‘From Castle?’ Ernesto asked, with a worry I couldn’t quite understand.

‘Just don’t worry,’ Rosella said. ‘I’m working on something.’

We all slept near each other on the top floor, in the office. We slept on futons. It was OK for me as I only needed two hours a night, but Ernesto struggled. He kept on waking up coughing blood. And Rosella got tireder and tireder from listening to all the coughing. On those rare occasions when she and Ernesto managed to get some sleep, I would stand at the window, staring out.

I could see the lights of a city sprawling out all around me. Haulage vehicles speeding by on rails. Illuminated words and holograms flickering in the sky. Spanish words, along with brand names, one more dominant than the others:
CASTLE, CASTLE, CASTLE
. Lots of blue
castles with three turrets. In the distance I could see the sea, reflecting moonlight.

Then one day there was a call.

Rosella’s desk started flashing.

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Hide.’

But it was too late. It was a forced call. A hologram of a man appeared where the light had been flashing. The man had dark hair and wore a black suit.

‘Rosella? The next prototype is overdue.’

‘I know, Mr Castle,’ Rosella said. ‘He is still not ready. I have done something wrong. I need to do more work.’

‘Rosella, do not lie to me. You are the best designer we have. You never do anything wrong. Please. You said he would be ready three weeks ago. And I am looking at him right now and he looks ready. He looks as ready as can be. Another magnificent prototype. A worthy investment. You are too filled with doubt. Too much the tortured artist. He’ll be fine. He’ll come and live with me for two months, and if everything works, then we’ll use him as a prototype and make a lot of him.’

‘That would be a bad idea, Mr Castle.’

‘Why?’

‘He feels emotion. He feels pain.’

At this point Mr Castle looked at me in wonder, or maybe just greed. ‘Well, isn’t that something. Rosella, you have excelled yourself.’

She didn’t appreciate the compliment. ‘I’ve made a mistake with the processing. There is an element of unpredictability, which makes him potentially dangerous. Even without the ethical considerations . . .’

The hologram of Mr Castle laughed at this point. ‘Ethical considerations! I find that rather interesting, coming from you.’

I could tell that Rosella was agitated, maybe frightened too. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, lying isn’t always very ethical.’

‘Lying?’

‘I hear that you are working for Sempura, on a commission.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘That is not the important bit, Rosella. How much are they paying you to break your contract?’

Rosella went pale. This explained her secrecy, her need to have me out of the way whenever she had a call or a meeting. I sensed her terror, even though it was a terror she was desperately trying not to show. ‘Mr Castle, please. This is not true.’

‘I have reliable sources. And don’t worry, I understand. I understand. You work very hard for me and I pay you very little. Is that it? You have a granddad who is very sick. And your home has been destroyed. It must be hard.’

‘No. Mr Castle, please—’

‘Fifteen years ago, Rosella, you were nothing. You were nowhere. You were a young designer who wanted the freedom to create what you wanted to create. I gave you that freedom. And you signed a loyalty contract. To me. For life.’

‘I know, I know. And I would never betray that loyalty.’

‘But you have made me
billions
 . . . That must make you bitter. I can see why you might be tempted to bite the hand that has fed you. Especially as you don’t have a home any more. I don’t know how you do it, living there, at the warehouse.’

Rosella hardly had any blood left in her face. I noticed that her fingertips were pale too, and her palms were shining with sweat. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘it is true that I was approached by someone from
Sempura, but I promise you I have not done any work for them.’

‘Listen, Rosella. If you have broken your contract, you are in very serious trouble. Do you understand that? I could get you in some very big trouble. I could get you sent to prison. And you know what prison guards are like, because you designed the prototype. And your granddad would be homeless.’

Rosella looked at Mr Castle with deadly serious eyes as her granddad groaned in his sleep. ‘I know. Exactly. I would never take that risk.’

Mr Castle smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you wouldn’t be that stupid. But you know what, just for my peace of mind I am going to come and pay you a visit in your warehouse. Right now. London to Valencia is only minutes by car with the new rail improvements. You and the Echo – you stay right there. I’ll be with you shortly.’

Rosella was speaking faster now – seventy-two words in one minute. She told me that Mr Castle was Alex Castle, the head of Castle Industries. She said that Alex Castle was a powerful and cruel man and that she was in trouble. She told me to go with her, down to the next level, to the tanks.

She said she needed me for something.

What she needed me for was to take an Echo out of tank eleven.

‘Empty preservation gel,’ she said. Then the egg-shaped tank glowed green to indicate that this had been done. ‘Now open.’

The tank opened. And a female Echo was there. She was naked. She had been designed to look like a thirty-year-old human.

Her eyes were closed. She was standing there. Standing, but unconscious.

‘This is how you should have been,’ Rosella told me. ‘Asleep. Unaware. Beyond fear.’

I nodded. ‘Who is she?’

‘She is a prototype for another company. Sempura, Castle’s rival.
She is a new domestic Echo model I would have been paid a million unidollars for. Her name is Alissa.’

I carried her out. Rosella got out a new prototype igniter, ready to slip it into Alissa’s ear. She was talking to herself, quietly, in Spanish. And then she made a decision.

‘
No . . . no puedo . . .’
She turned to me. ‘There is an incinerator downstairs in the basement. I want you to take her down there and put her in. She needs to be destroyed.’ The basement. The place she hadn’t wanted me to go. And she was about to put the igniter back in its little aerogel box, but her hands were shaking so much that she dropped it onto the floor. And straight away the igniter was crawling towards my foot and over my clothes, and then over Alissa.

‘Oh no,’ said Rosella. ‘Stop it.’

But there wasn’t time. It travelled a metre in 0.23 seconds. It was already crawling inside her ear. Igniters, I now knew, were not only micro-robots that looked like centipedes; they were made to locate the neocortex within the nearest dormant Echo brains and ignite them, giving them life. Or something that looked very much like life.

‘Go to the basement,’ Rosella said, agitated now. ‘Throw her into the incinerator. Before she wakes up.’

‘But what if there isn’t time?’

‘Still do it,’ she was crying. ‘If you don’t, terrible things will happen. He can’t see her – if he sees that I’ve broken my loyalty contract, I’ll lose everything. I must destroy the program. I need to be in the pod to do this. We don’t have much time. Go. Go!’

But I couldn’t do it.

I was about to drop Alissa down through the circle in the floor, down into the cool deathly darkness of the incinerator, when her eyes opened. She was awake. Ignited.

I expected her to ask me where she was, or who I was, or who
she
was. But she didn’t. She wasn’t like me. She had no fear. She was just full of knowledge and ready for duty, the way Echos were meant to be. I could have dropped her down into the darkness and watch her vaporize into nothing and it wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have felt a thing.

I wish I
had
.

For Audrey. For Rosella. For Ernesto. Yes, I wish I had.

But I didn’t, because I couldn’t know for sure. I couldn’t know anything for sure except what was in my own mind. And even some of that I had to be careful about.

I heard a voice. It was Mr Castle on the intercom. ‘Anyone home?’

I held Alissa and stared down into her eyes. ‘He has come for us,’ I told her.

‘This information has been processed,’ Alissa said, looking up at me with her blank eyes.

I looked around the basement for somewhere to hide. There was a lot down here. Computers, test brains, fluids in giant jars, two robots with their power turned off, a lot of steel, a lot of silicon, surgical tools, synthetic skin laid out on tables like cloth. Also, Rosella’s old flamenco guitar.

Something else too.

A small black box lying on the floor.

I knew what this was. I hadn’t seen one before but I had been programmed to understand. This was a Nothing Machine. A Nothing Machine was a device that was set to turn specific areas into nothing. It was a security device to safeguard the general human population against any disasters that might occur in an Echo laboratory. If Echos overrun the place after suffering a malfunction, the Echo designer – in this case, Rosella – was meant to be prepared to shout out a code; generally this was a number, and once it was shouted out, the warehouse would disappear, along with all the Echos and whatever else
happened to be inside it. They would disintegrate, be compressed into nothing, as if entering a black hole. Only the box itself would remain.

The number wasn’t there on the box. But then I realized – it was in my head – because Rosella had given it to me:
8-4-2-9-0
.

The knowledge of that power – the power to end myself, end Mr Castle, Rosella, and everything else inside this warehouse – was terrifying.

I looked around, but there was nowhere to hide. So I calculated that our only hope was that Rosella would be able to send Mr Castle on his way without him coming down to the basement.

But he didn’t have to come to the basement. All he had to do was call her name.

‘Alissa!’ (How did he know it? I wondered, back when I didn’t know he knew everything.) ‘Alissa! If you are called Alissa, be a dear and shout very loudly the words “I am here!”’

And I stared at her and whispered, ‘Stay quiet, don’t make a sound – he is dangerous.’

But of course, I was just an Echo, and Mr Castle was a human being, so an instruction from me could not overrule an instruction from him.

And I could see it coming. I could see her mouth move, preparing to make the words, and they burst out of her and reached my ears at a volume of eighty-seven decibels.

‘I am here!’

And that was the start of it all. Or rather, the end.

‘Eight . . . four . . . two . . . nine . . .’

There were times later when I wished I had said that final number. The zero. The nothing that would bring nothing. But really, I was never going to say it all then. Why would I? How did I know how much was going to be lost?

Mr Castle had arrived with a police robot. The police robot – 220 centimetres tall and (I could tell from the presence of a thin oxide coating on the surface) made of titanium – came and got us and threatened to kill me if I disobeyed. So we went back up on the leviboard.

‘Aha!’ said Mr Castle, on seeing Alissa. ‘Now, there you are. As naked as God – or should I say, Rosella – intended. Now, what I want you to do is step back inside the tank from which you came.’

She did so, once Rosella had told her which one that was. And then Mr Castle explained what he wanted her to do to Alissa.

‘You will change her. You will make her look exactly the same, but there will be a glitch. A glitch that doesn’t fully emerge for five weeks. I will give you all the details. I know you will do this for me.’