Echo Boy (26 page)

But then it came to me.

Protestor
.

So long as I was in the pod I was safe, so I stayed in there and tried
to communicate with the pod in Iago’s room, knowing that he would be there. But all I got was an automated voice saying, ‘
Game mode
,’ and then asking, ‘
Do you want to join the game?
’

I had no choice but to mind-respond
Yes
.

I was on a battlefield in 1917. Passchendaele, Belgium. Part of the Western Front.

The wind was harsh and cold and there was mud everywhere, along with the continuous and deafening noise of gunfire. I had a gun in my hand; it had a sharp blade attached to the end. A bayonet.

My avatar was a nineteen-year-old man called Siegfried. I had chosen him hastily seconds after entering the game.

As I stood there, in the black mud, feeling the tight weight of my boots, I saw the man next to me get shot in the throat. Blood spilled through his hands as he held onto his neck.

A moment later, two medics appeared; they lifted the man onto a stretcher and jogged away with him.

‘This is not real,’ I reminded myself. ‘None of this is real. The only thing that is real is that Madara is outside the pod waiting to kill me.’

I looked around at all the simulations of German and English soldiers killing each other in the mist. Somewhere among them was my cousin.

‘Iago,’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Iago! Where are you?’

If he had heard me above the gunfire, he didn’t show it. I was left with no choice.

‘Player two meta-command,’ I said (this didn’t need to be shouted – the software understood). ‘Pause the game. Repeat, pause the game.’

Suddenly everything stopped. Running soldiers froze mid-stride, bullets stood static in the air, the artillery fire fell silent.

Then a voice somewhere behind me: ‘No! What’s going on? Game continue, game continue . . .’

I turned and saw a suave, bearded army officer in knee-high boots and a murky green uniform walking around shouting up at the sky and shaking his rifle. I could not imagine anyone less like my ten-year-old cousin, except for his behaviour.

‘What’s going on? Game
continue
.’

A voice came from the clouds. ‘Player two has paused the game.’

‘Player two? Player
two
? There
is
no player two.’

And then he stopped looking at the sky and started looking at me.

‘Who are you?’

‘It’s me, Audrey.’

‘Why are you here? Get out of here. I don’t want you here. You’re putting me off. The Germans have slaughtered half my men. I don’t need any distractions.’

He threw his rifle down on the muddy ground, pulled an ancient-looking pistol out of his holster and pointed it at me as he walked closer, stepping over freeze-framed dying or dead soldiers.

‘Because I can kill you. I can take you out.’

He was up close now. He pressed the pistol against my forehead. I felt the sensation of cold steel. He had chosen a taller player than me. One with the most realistic of beards and a pistol that looked as solid and physical as anything in the real world.

He couldn’t kill me, of course, not on this imaginary battlefield, but if he pulled the trigger, I’d be out of the game and I couldn’t afford for that to happen.

Iago was a psychopath, I realized. A ten-year-old psychopath. But that suited me right now. ‘Iago, listen to me. Listen. There is someone in my room. A . . . a’ – this was where the lie was needed – ‘a protestor. She got into the house. You must get a gun from downstairs – a positron, to be on the safe side – and then come into the room and kill her. She’s here now. She’s tall, with red hair.’ I was going to say,
She looks a bit like Madara
, but he might have got suspicious. ‘But you can’t hesitate. Not for a second. If you hesitate, she’ll kill you. So . . . you’ve got to be fast. Just kill her. Kill her without looking.’

Iago’s avatar scratched his beard. He took the pistol away from my forehead.

‘I’ll have a look at her now,’ he said. ‘On “House View” in the pod.’

‘No,’ I said, panicking. ‘No, don’t do that. There’s no time. You’ve got less than a minute. Now remember. It needs someone tough, someone good with a positron. You’re the only person for the job. Remember. Tall red-haired woman . . . and she’s holding a kitchen knife.’

A look of menacing delight slowly spread across the officer’s features, which for a second made him look entirely like my cousin.

He looked up at the thick grey clouds of that imaginary sky. ‘Game over.’

Iago wasn’t in major danger.

I knew that Uncle Alex would have ordered Madara to kill me and me only. But I was still worried something could go wrong. Ten-year-olds weren’t meant to use antimatter pistols like the positron, even if he had proven more than capable of using one. There were other worries too. That he wouldn’t actually do it. That he’d see it was Madara before he fired. This was quite likely. I just had to hope that, in this case, Madara would be distracted for long enough. It was doubtful. Madara was Uncle Alex’s favourite Echo, and one reason for this is that she did exactly as she was told, and did it well. And fast.

One other concern was that Uncle Alex might find out what was going on. He might check up on the house while at work and come home. He could be here in less than a minute, if that was the case.

So I stayed in the pod, observing the room outside. Madara, statue-still, waiting. I tried to slow my breathing, but my body was alive with fear. And then it happened – almost too quick and easy. The bedroom door opened, Madara turned, and before Iago had time to be aware of who he was aiming at, she was gone. He’d killed her. It was
only a second later that he understood. And once he had done it he looked devastated.

After all, he had destroyed Uncle Alex’s most treasured Echo.

And he was standing there. A little ten-year-old with his dark fringe looking down at the gun. The same gun he had used against the protestors. But he seemed far more upset about killing Madara than he had about killing humans.

I stepped out of the pod. The bedroom door was still open. This was my chance to escape, finally. But Iago was now pointing the gun at me, with tears streaming down his blotchy cheeks.

‘You tricked me.’

‘She was going to kill me.’

‘No she wasn’t.’

‘She had a knife. Your dad wants me dead.’

He looked at the knife that had fallen onto the carpet. ‘No he doesn’t. He hates you, that’s all.’

‘He killed my parents.’

‘No. No he didn’t.’ He held his arm out straighter. More determined to shoot.

‘I’m not lying. Your dad wants to kill me because I know too much. He has broken the law.’

‘My dad doesn’t care about laws. He has money. Money beats laws.’

‘Listen – you could hurt yourself, Iago. It is a very dangerous weapon you are holding. I wouldn’t have asked you to bring it here unless I needed you to. I was going to be killed.’

‘Hurt myself? Hurt
you
. Not that you’d be hurt. You’d just disappear. “Oh, where did Audrey go?” Ha!’

Something changed inside me. A very clear thought came to me, in the intensity of the moment.

Just disappear.

Those words should have sounded scary, but they didn’t. In fact, dissolving into thin air seemed about the best idea imaginable. Daniel was gone now, to wherever he had been sold. I would never see him again. The one person left on this planet who cared about me, and technically he wasn’t even a person. So I was only really half calling Iago’s bluff when I walked towards him and said:

‘Go on then, do it. Pull the trigger.’

‘It’s not a trigger.’

‘Button, whatever, you pathetic little gun-geek. Pull it. Pull it, push it, turn it, twist it, whatever you have to do. Play soldiers. I’m the enemy in one of your sad little games. We’re on that muddy field in the First World War – do you even know that was a real war? Do it. Kill me. I am nothing already. I am here. A big empty nothing. Now, make a dream come true. What’s the matter with you?’

He was angry. His lips thinned; he looked like a miniature version of his dad, and pressure seemed to build inside him. Like an apple exposed to intense heat, he looked ready to burst. ‘Shut up, Audrey!’

I stepped closer. ‘Why don’t you make me?’

‘Shut up or I will . . . I
will
make you, you stupid dumb hippy freak.’

‘Stupid dumb hippy freak? Is that the best you can do? Wow, you’re really hardcore.’

‘I’ve killed people before!’

‘So what’s stopping you this time? Is it because I’m a girl? I’m a feminist. I demand an equal right to have my electrons turned into positrons. Come on, Iago, don’t wimp out.’

His face was red with either despair or rage or a bit of both. ‘I’m not wimping out – I’m going to do it . . . I’m going to do it . . .’

‘Good. But know this: your dad is a murd—’

Then someone else:

‘Enough!’

Iago jumped at the sound of the voice, and turned to see his dad, standing solemn-faced in his black suit in the doorway.

‘Dad!’ cried Iago.

I only had a split-second, I knew that. And it was very risky. But while Iago’s face was turned towards Uncle Alex, I went for it. I went to grab the weapon from Iago’s hand, knowing that it could go off and kill me at any second.

‘Watch her!’ boomed Uncle Alex. ‘She’s going for the posi—’

Too late. I had it. And I pointed it not at Iago, but straight at his father. The source of everything. But still, as I looked at the face that was so like my dad’s, it was hard to know anything for sure.

‘Now, don’t be a silly girl,’ he said, his smooth voice returning to its normal volume.

‘You killed my parents.’

‘You know that isn’t true, Audrey. You were there in the house on the day it happened. You have seen the footage. You know it was an Echo. Josephine, or whatever she was called.’

‘Alissa. You know she was called Alissa. Why did you just pretend to forget her name?’

‘I loved my brother. Why would I want to kill him?’

‘The book. All his work. The journalism. You hated him. You thought he was trying to attack you.’

‘He
was
trying to attack me!’ he blurted. ‘He was jealous of me.’

‘No. It’s the other way round. You were jealous of him.’

Uncle Alex laughed then. ‘Jealous?’

‘Because he had principles. He had a life. He had a loving family. I don’t know – was it because he went to Oxford and you got kicked out of school?’

He couldn’t contain his anger then. ‘You don’t know
anything
.’

‘Well, tell me, tell me, tell me . . .’

He tried to calm the mood, and smiled the fakest of all his fake smiles. ‘Audrey, whatever paranoia you are experiencing right now, I want you to know that it is a symptom and nothing else.’

‘You sent an Echo into this room to kill me.’

He raised his eyebrows as if I was a strange new product he wasn’t sure of. ‘You obviously have post-traumatic shock disorder – depression is a part of that, and so is paranoia and delusion. You really shouldn’t have taken the neuropads off. You were not ready . . . Now please, you know you won’t use that gun.’

‘I was delusional all right. I was delusional that day in Cloudville thinking you were my hero, my great protector. You only wanted me alive for the press conference. That’s all.’

‘That’s not true, Audrey. I promise you. I wouldn’t have risked my life for a bit of PR. What do you think I am?’

‘I’m getting a clearer idea every second.’

Tears glazed his eyes. ‘Audrey, I am not a bad man. I am just someone who wants to make the world a better place.’

‘
A better place
.’

I shifted my arm and aimed straight at the immersion pod in the
corner of the room. I pressed my finger down hard on the aerogel button and the pod was instantly gone. Then I did the same thing with the bed and the chair I had been sitting on a short while before. A second later I was aiming the positron directly towards the Matisse painting. The one that had cost Uncle Alex billions of dollars. That was the first time he actually started to panic. He scratched his smooth stubbleless cheek.

‘Audrey, don’t be stupid. You would be destroying a timeless work of art loved by millions of people. I’ve already lost a Picasso. You wouldn’t do that.’

‘It should be in a public gallery,’ I said, ‘where those millions of people can see it.’

‘Just calm down, Audrey . . . Think . . .’

Of course, I was never going to actually destroy a brilliant work of art. I was my mum’s daughter, after all. But I kept the gun aiming at it for a little while longer because it was a good way of getting Uncle to talk.

‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘If you do that, you will destroy the whole wall as well, and this house is old. It needs that wall for the ceiling not to fall on our heads.’

At one point Iago stepped forward (what did he think he was going to do?), but he was quickly reprimanded by his father: ‘Stay back, Iago! You fool! Against the wall! And what were you doing with the gun? I’ve told you a million times . . .’

‘Sorry, Dad,’ he said sulkily. ‘Audrey said there was a protestor in the room.’

I felt a sudden twist of guilt in my gut. Yes, Iago was a violent little runt, but he was also a ten-year-old boy. Being a violent little runt kind of went with the territory.

But Uncle Alex’s attention was already turned back towards me.

‘Calm down.’

‘You locked me in here.’

‘For your safety . . . since those terrorists stormed the house.’

‘I don’t believe you. You killed my parents. And you would have killed me sooner if you hadn’t wanted to use me as your little wounded show-pony to score points against Sempura.’

‘Alissa wasn’t even a Castle product. She was made by Sempura, from a Sempura prototype designed by a Sempura-funded designer . . .’

‘Rosella Márquez?’

‘I really don’t know why you keep going on about this Rosella.’

So I told him. Given what has happened since, I realize this was a mistake, but at the time I just wanted answers. I needed the truth. ‘I know she made Daniel. And Alissa mentioned her too, at the media conference. And the moment I said her name, the conference stopped.
You
stopped it.’