Echo Boy (27 page)

‘Audrey, yes, Rosella Márquez is the name of the person who designed Daniel, but you really are joining dots that shouldn’t be joined. Do you realize that most Echo designers are from Spain or South America, and that most are women? Do you realize that Rosella is one of the most popular Spanish names?’ He glanced behind me, out of the window.

‘Daniel told me he knew Alissa.’

‘Daniel would have told you anything. He was clearly manipulating you, using you . . .’

‘Why would he have done that?’

‘He was malfunctioning.’

‘I thought Castle Echos didn’t malfunction. That’s what you told me.’

I needed to know. Without truth, no one can ever be free.

‘They don’t normally malfunction, Audrey. And I am deeply horrified that this one has, but the designer . . .’

‘Rosella Márquez.’

‘Yes, all right, Rosella Márquez, if her name is that important to you. She went too far. She worked too hard on him. She lost a child when she was young, and ever since then she has been trying to get over this fact by creating Echos that are as lifelike as possible. But on this one she obviously crossed a line.’

Uncle Alex’s eyes kept flicking back to the window behind me. I looked round and saw the familiar black semicircle of a police car coming to a halt and hovering just above the magrail. A police robot was aiming something at me. Not a positron, but a laser gun that I was pretty sure could be equally fatal.

Uncle Alex smiled, and sounded very much like his young son when he said: ‘The game’s over, Audrey.’

I started to run as a laser was fired. It scorched the carpet where I had been standing only a moment before and left a perfectly circular hole, about a centimetre wide, in the window.

‘Get out of my way,’ I said to Uncle Alex.

‘Audrey, you do realize you can’t escape, don’t you?’

‘I’m going to find Daniel.’

‘Audrey, you can’t. He isn’t Daniel any more. He can’t even find himself after what we’ve done to him.’

This time I said it like I meant it. ‘Get out of my way or I swear I will kill you!’

He got out of the way, but I sensed he was right. It was very unlikely that I could escape the grounds, even with a gun in my hand. And if I did, well, what then? Uncle would surely disable all the leviboards, so I wouldn’t be able to reach the car. And besides, that was out the front of the house, and I was heading towards the back. Away from the police.

I knew I wasn’t Daniel.

I knew that if I jumped from an upstairs window, it would probably be the last thing I ever did. So I had to go downstairs. And I ran fast down the marble staircase as I heard Uncle Alex behind me.

‘Echos! All Echos! Stop Audrey! Stop her! Don’t let her leave the house!’

I had terminated an Echo before, but now, somehow, it felt different. When I shot the old man with the white beard as he ran out of the kitchen towards me, it felt more like murder. He disappeared, like a nightmare after sleep, and I ran through the space he had just been inhabiting, through the vast, now empty kitchen, with its transparent cupboards and glowing self-clean crockery.

There was a steak sizzling in the frying pan. Synthetic tiger meat, no doubt, as that was Uncle Alex’s favourite. I kept running, and reached the conservatory as I heard other Echos behind me. I turned, and blasted two into non-existence as one of the intelligent potted plants in the conservatory leaned in towards me.

‘Open,’ I said to the conservatory door, but it didn’t respond. So I fired at it and made it disappear.

Then I was out in the expansive sprawl of the garden, running across the multi-coloured grass Daniel had carried me over. Once past the bushes, I knew what was coming. And this time the four Echo hounds all appeared at once and chased me at double the speed I was able to run. I turned and transformed one into antimatter, then two more, before something whipped out at me and coiled tight around my right ankle, so that I fell forward onto the grass.

I desperately tried to free my leg, but whatever it was held me tight. Before I had time to look, there was something else to deal with. The last of the Echo hounds leaped through the air and landed on top of me; it growled, its red eyes studying me to find a suitable place in which to sink its teeth.

My own terrified face stared back at me, reflected and distorted in the Echo hound’s shining titanium chest plate. It started to sink down towards my face – it was going to bite my face! – as I fumbled with the positron. I managed to fire, and that last horrible machine-dog disappeared, but I had the problem of what was still coiling around my leg. It was squeezing hard now. Causing pain. Stopping blood flow. It was some kind of plant. My parents never kept intelligent plants. It was exactly the kind of messing-with-nature Dad couldn’t stand. And the trouble was, I couldn’t shoot at something on my leg without causing myself to dematerialize in the process.

And of course, though I couldn’t see them yet, there would be more Echos approaching on the other side of the bushes. Maybe Uncle Alex had given them permission to kill me; maybe they had gone to the weapons room. Or maybe – more likely still – he had told them to stay back. After all, he knew that the deeper I headed into the garden, the
more danger I faced. This garden was about one thing only.
Security
.

I felt something delicately brush against the side of my cheek. Within a moment, whatever it was had coiled around my neck and was squeezing tight, just as it was with my leg.

Unable to breathe, I concentrated hard.

I had seen this plant before, in a holo-ad. It was a genetically modified giant blood iris, with long thin whip-like leaves. It was used for the purposes of home security. And there was the flower itself, leaning over me like a face. Purple petals, looking darker than normal in the fading light.

I smelled something. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell; indeed, it was sweet. Words from that ad came back to me.
Our plants use halothane
. My panic intensified as I realized that the blood iris was emitting
sleeping gas
.

Uncle Alex clearly didn’t want anyone who entered his garden to leave. Not conscious, anyway.

I had four seconds. Maybe five. Then I would be out cold. There’s nothing like terror to help one focus, and I shot at the flower. The flower disappeared, but not the plant itself, so the leaf tightened around my leg and – of more immediate concern – my neck.

The pressure built inside my head. I felt blood pumping inside my skull, like a desperate bull barging at a door, as I searched through the crowded flowerbed for the plant’s main stem. Eventually I found it, and fired: what looked like a fast ripple of air reached the plant and made it non-existent, the leaves taking a second or so to disappear altogether.

Once free, I got to my feet again and ran, choking, into the centre of the vast lawn, away from the numerous plants reaching out towards me. I had no idea how I was going to escape. I imagined that Uncle
Alex was watching me from his pod or security room, as content as a cat over a mouse stuck in a trap.

He wanted me dead. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the case now – even if he hadn’t last Wednesday, when he killed my parents.

I knew too much.

I had come into contact with the truth, and it was sending me towards hell.

‘Mum,’ I said, delirious with panic as I ran towards the large brick wall at the southernmost edge of the garden. ‘Dad . . . help me . . . What should I do?’

There is no silence like the silence of the dead. And I knew that the futile question would go unanswered.

I had only the most simple of plans. To shoot at the wall, and the plants in the deep flowerbed in front of it. With the aid of a weapon I would turn every obstacle that stood in my way into nothing until I was free.

So I kept on, as focused as a straight line on a blank page. I made it out through the gap in the wall I had created, and kept running. Down the street.

I was out of the house now. Echos couldn’t legally follow me – not on their own, as it was against the law in this country.

But even as I was thinking that, I saw a police car slowing on the magrail above me.

‘Stop and put down your weapon immediately!’

Not a chance.

I fired at the car. It disappeared, but the rail it was on didn’t. I was starting to realize that the stuff about positrons was another lie. Antimatter weapons were the most intelligent in the known universe.
They shot the thing they were aiming at. They could distinguish
between
things. In a sense, that made the weapon more intelligent than me, as lines were blurring pretty fast. But there I was, still firing. A large chunk of rail disappeared. I kept running, turning as I heard a blast behind me – the sound of a police car not stopping in time, flying off and crashing through posts that had been holding up parts of the remaining rail.

I watched in panic as the car rebounded off the last post and ricocheted towards the street.

Towards
me
.

With only a whisker of a second to spare, I fired the positron. The car disappeared.

I looked at the weapon, wondering why it had been slow to fire, and saw some words glowing red along its curved aerogel surface.
POWER DRAINED
.
SHUTTING DOWN
. I threw the weapon aside and sped on, feeling as powerless and scared as an ant caught in the shadow of a descending foot. But I saw the words
HAMPSTEAD STATION
on a rusted old metal sign, peeking out of a bush ahead of me. In a matter of seconds I was at the train station.

I had never been on a magtrain before. Too dangerous. Too many fatal accidents. Surely Uncle Alex would assume I’d be getting a taxi. Also – Sempura controlled most of the lines and owned most of the European network. So this was as safe an escape as I could find. Still, I knew that nothing was too hard to find if you were Alex Castle. I had to stay scared. Only by staying scared would I stand a chance.

The station was deserted except for a couple of everglow addicts with glowing throats. I wanted to disappear among crowds, but no crowds were there.

‘Come on, come on, come on, come on,’ I said, pleading with the rail network and time itself.

The line hummed. A train appeared, out of nowhere.

I hopped on and kept my head down. It was packed with dangerous-looking people. You know, people with that glint of madness in their faces. I was one of them now. I had just destroyed two police cars and put a hole in a major London magrail. I was as dangerous as they came. I could hide quite well among this crowd of addicts and drifters. The train was going to Euro East, but I got off at Paris, a whole twenty-one minutes and seventeen seconds after I had got on (I counted). I was tense for the whole slow journey, as it felt like a lifetime. Then I followed the largest crowd of people to another train, heading for Barcelona 2. I’d wanted to make it as difficult as possible for Uncle Alex to follow me – and hopefully I was now off his radar – but I was going to end up where I was going to end up.

So at Barcelona 2 I decided to risk everything, heading onto a hot train with an armed securidroid with
GUARDIA CIVIL
(famously the toughest police force in Europe) marked on its chest, and travelled to Valencia, staring at a determined-looking cockroach that was scuttling around the carriage floor.

I woke up and my head was already open.

The extraction of 97% of my neocortex, and the igniter that it now contained, was already underway. The igniter was only essential to switch a prototype Echo into being, and it had done that too effectively. Without it I would still function. I would obey commands. I would be a creature of pure rationality. All those things that single piece of human hair had helped to give me would be undone. I would never question, because to ask a question required imagination and imagination was the problem. Imagination made you care for strangers, humans, her, and it was not my job to care. It was my job to serve. And that was a very big difference.

The removal of imagination requires pain, and the pain was intense, so agonizing it seemed to last for ever. Time was just a myth created by the absence of hurt. But then it was over because my imagination had gone, and without imagination you couldn’t feel anything at all.

I waited there. With no desire to leave or escape.

And then Mr Castle came and saw me. He commanded the
surgery pod to open and leaned in towards me. His mouth spread into a smile and he said, ‘There. Did that hurt? I hope so. Not because I am on the side of evil but because I am on the side of good. Because you deserved that pain. I would inflict that pain on every single one of those terrorists as well, if I could. Because do you know what pain is? It is a warning. Pain is always a warning. It tells you that what you are doing is wrong; it tells you where the boundaries are. And that is my one regret, you know, for humans. There is not enough pain any more. There is too much freedom. And I know you are not human, but you were starting to think you could act like one, weren’t you? You thought you could jeopardize your master’s safety to save Audrey. And that was crossing a boundary that you won’t be crossing again. That is what justice is all about. And that blood stuck in your hair, that is beautiful to me. Because I love the restoration of the natural order of things. And that has happened, don’t you think?’ He began to laugh. ‘Sorry. Bad choice of words. Of course you don’t think. You
obey
. Is that right?’

‘Yes, Master, that is right,’ I said.

‘Very good. But I am not your master for much longer. You are a reject. A failed prototype. You are among the unwanted, the cast-offs, the flawed, the failures. You have no market value. You are a disaster. A bad fit. You are out of my hands, thrown out into a world that does not care about your fate.’

I was not scared.

You could only be scared if you could feel.

‘Anyway, it is a shame in a way that I cannot hurt you any more. Yet I have a consolation – it is pleasure enough to know that I have taken away from you the myth that you are alive. That you are anything other than a machine with no rights, no feeling, for ever unworthy of human
emotion. Of love.’ He stood up straight. ‘I will be back in a moment. I’m sure someone would love to see you . . .’