Echo Boy (30 page)

‘The Neanderthal couple?’

‘The star attraction. They don’t even need to be violent to bring the visitors in. People come from all over the world to see them.’

He stopped spreading hay for a moment and stood up straight. It was probably then that he took his eyes off Alice. And probably then that I first heard the noise from outside. At first I thought it might be coming from the visitors looking down at us from behind the transparent upper south wall of the enclosure. But I quickly realized that this was impossible. That wall was made of aerogel, a material I knew was not only transparent, but stronger than steel, heat-resistant and soundproof. They could hear the sounds from within the enclosure, via tiny unseen speakers on the outside, but there was no way we or Alice could hear
them
. Which meant – as this enclosure was on the periphery of the whole Resurrection Zone – that the noise was coming from outside the zoo itself, on the street, beyond the high titanium fence. I glanced up and saw magrails above the street. There were no cars or buses floating over it, which seemed odd as all the other rails
elsewhere in the sky were crammed with morning traffic.

The voices formed a chant, getting louder. ‘Free the Neanderthals! Now! Now! Now! Free the Neanderthals! Now! Now! Now!’

‘They’ve started early,’ said 15, looking back at Alice. I had a memory. The protestors storming through Mr Castle’s lobby, running through the unicorn.

And then a klaxon sounded. A loud sonic blast that startled Alice, who was suddenly moving in a frenzied fashion, forwards and backwards, tossing her head and her giant tusks as if in battle with an invisible enemy. We were in trouble. I looked up and saw humans looking down at us. They smiled and nudged each other, pleased to see that something was about to happen.

‘Right, there’s the drama,’ 15 said. ‘We can get out of here.’

I ran – and 15 hobbled – to the exit door.

‘Open door,’ 15 said.

Nothing.

I saw Audrey in my mind, heard her telling me it was going to be OK.

He pressed the central button on the panel (
DOOR OPEN
) but it didn’t open. We tried again and again. Still nothing. 15 turned and looked up at the glass.

‘Louis, are you there? Louis, are you watching this? We’ve got to get out of here. The door’s locked and Alice is seriously distressed. It’s the noise. The protest. Louis? Louis? Are you there? It’s not safe in here.’

15 was speaking quickly, but I can’t say I saw anything in his face to show he was feeling the fear that was slowly being reborn inside me.

I am nothing
, I tried to tell myself.
I am just like any other Echo. Just a glorified robot. I cannot be feeling fear, because machines do not feel fear. I am 99.99 per cent machine. And the 0.01 per cent has
been more than undone. I do not feel, I do not fear, I do not care
 . . .

Another klaxon blast.

I turned and saw Alice.

She roared, or wailed – a high-pitched sound that drowned out the klaxon. As she reared up on her hind legs, I caught sight of dull red hairless patches around her rib-cage and legs where she had been burned by the jolt-club. She charged forward into the wall and turned, in a kind of heavy and clumsy dance, towards us. I got out of the way, but 15 stayed by the door because Louis was now responding.

‘Oh, 15, you know it would be very irresponsible for me to open the door when Alice is having one of her turns.’

I heard this as I ran for shelter behind a rock. Beyond the exit door there was another door: Louis could easily have opened one and kept the other closed. And besides, the exit was only a fifth of the size of a woolly mammoth. There was no way she would have fitted through.

And all the time Alice kept going crazy. She slammed her head into the trunk of the only tree in the enclosure; its trunk fractured, then broke completely. As the tree fell, it caught my leg and I tipped sideways, my legs beneath it. 15 came over and tried to pull the tree off me, but he wasn’t very strong. Behind him I could see Alice; she looked ready to charge.

‘You’d better get out of the way,’ I told 15.

He turned, saw the danger, then looked back at me.

‘No.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘She could terminate you if she charges.’

But still 15 kept trying to pull, as I kept pushing. It made no sense. There was no logical reason for him to be helping me. Yes, two Echos were better than one, but he was in immediate danger if he stayed doing this. I caught sight of the visitors up in the viewing area staring at
me, at Alice, at 15. Over a hundred of them now. All looking down at us with laughter or open mouths, probably recording it with their info-lenses. One, a man in a spray-on skin-clinger and wearing a mind-wire, was pointing straight at me, laughing uncontrollably.

Eventually, together, we got me free. I struggled back up again, feeling little pain. 15 looked at me, as confused as the people watching us. I knew he was wondering why he had done that. Why he had put his own existence in danger to protect another Echo. The crowd of watchers were wondering it too, and they had stopped laughing.

‘He’s going to keep us in here because of the protests,’ 15 said. ‘It’s a distraction until the police move them away, which might take hours. He’s going to keep us here all day. So we’ve just got to try and keep out of Alice’s way.’

I turned back towards him just as Alice charged in his direction. A ferocious mass of hair and flesh, of which 15 wasn’t completely aware.

‘Run!’

But he could only hobble, so I ran and dived and saved him.

Then he did something amazing. This Echo, with his lame leg, climbed what remained of the gnarled and twisted tree and jumped high through the air, onto Alice’s back.

The crowd cheered from behind the aerogel screen.

‘Stay behind the rock!’ he ordered me, and pointed to where he meant.

I did as instructed, and watched as 15 – who knew Alice far better than I did – slowly managed to calm her, leaning forward across her back, holding her, whispering soothing words into her ear.

Slowly, it worked. Or for a moment it worked. Then another klaxon blast upset Alice again; she reared up and 15 fell off and landed hard on the ground, five metres down.

And then we thought it at the same time. The
rock
. It was heavy – 312 kilos. But with 15’s help I managed to pick it up. We hauled the rock towards the door, and threw it with all our weight. It didn’t break it, but it damaged it. Alice began to charge. A second later, the door slid upwards and we ran through it, just in time to avoid being terminated.

When the second door opened, Louis was already there, waiting for us, out of view of the paying crowds.

‘You damaged the door,’ he said. ‘You do realize the security system of the enclosure is worth more than two lousy Echos. If I wasn’t opening the door, you should have stayed behind it.’

He studied me intensely. Even the ceramic eye seemed to study me. ‘You. You are useless. But you are new. I can give you one more chance to get a return on my meagre investment.’ Then he turned to 15. ‘But you. How many warnings have you had?’

‘Two.’

‘Two, exactly, exactly.’ Louis smiled. ‘And this is your third.’

I had no idea what this meant, but 15 seemed to understand. Anyway, Louis became distracted by the noise outside.

‘What are the police doing?’ he wondered aloud, and went out to have a look. ‘In the meantime, go and do the feeding rounds.’

We did as he instructed, but 15 had gone quiet. We threw fish – lanternfish, hatchetfish, ridgeheads and other surface-dwelling artificially farmed mesopelagic fish – into the saltwater lake in the
centre of the park for the sea birds to eat. Crowds wandered around us. 15 dug deep for another slender, blunt-headed lanternfish.

I threw a large fleshy ridgehead and watched the auks squabble over it, then back away as a baiji dolphin rose up and snatched it.

‘Why did you help me?’ I said. ‘Do you have empathy?’

‘It was logic,’ 15 said. ‘I was helping you to help me survive.’

‘But it hasn’t worked like that.’

‘No.’

I waited a moment. I felt the need to share something, even if sharing it with an emotionless Echo was entirely illogical. But some information just desires to be free, if it has been kept locked up for long enough.

‘I . . . I have empathy,’ I admitted. ‘It troubles me. And I feel all kinds of things I am not meant to feel. I have even felt love. Two very different kinds. I am not meant to feel like this. I am an Echo. No Echo is meant to feel like this. No Echo is meant to feel anything. When they find you have feelings, they try and take them away. Humans fear anything they didn’t ask for.’

‘Did you have your brain messed about with?’

‘Yes. He took stuff away. He took my igniter. And much of the technology and biomatter in my neocortex. Mr Castle did.’

‘
Alex
Castle?’

I nodded as a group of humans who had been watching us in the enclosure saw us and pointed. ‘I was a prototype for Castle, so I lived with him.’

15 nodded too, processing this information. ‘A lot of people think he is dangerous. But Lina Sempura is equally unpopular. I was replicated from a Sempura prototype. There are people who think we should never have existed. That Echos are getting too close to being
human, and that one day we will surpass them and stop obeying them.’

‘Maybe that day is coming soon,’ I said.

15 smiled a small sad smile. ‘Maybe you are the start of a revolution. What some see as a malfunction might really be progress, but you are right – when people see progress they often fear it. Especially if it was progress they hadn’t planned for. But often progress cannot be stopped. If it is meant to happen, it happens. Like a lizard whose tail keeps growing back.’

I looked at his face. It did not look so forgettable now. I knew 15 couldn’t feel fear, but I sensed that he was close to feeling it. Maybe one day I wouldn’t be such a freak. Anyway, he might not have been feeling fear, but I was feeling it for him.

‘What is Louis going to do to you, now you have done three things wrong?’

He looked down at the dead lanternfish in his hand. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes Echos go missing in the night.’

‘Missing?’

‘Securidroids come in and take them away.’

I asked it outright. ‘Does this frighten you?’

He looked at me. Part of me wanted him to say yes. This was selfish, I know, but I didn’t want to feel as lonely as I felt. ‘I do not feel pain. You can only feel fear if you feel pain.’

I nodded. I understood. He wasn’t like me. For his sake, I was glad.

We had fed the auks, and the baiji dolphins.

Our buckets were empty.

15 knew today’s itinerary: he headed for the meat-bank in the staff quarters to get some meat for the tiger.

We passed two tall males with no hair and brown eyes, identical Echos, who were just coming out of the aviary. I said ‘Hello’ but they didn’t respond.

‘Give up on being polite,’ 15 told me. ‘Most of the Echos are pre-2100. Those two are old Sempuras, both called Solomon. They can solve any mathematical problem in the world – they could see a fifty-eight digit number and know in a second if it was a prime or not – but they’re not friendly.’

We fed the tigers. We stood at the side, throwing in the raw ostrich steak. There were five of them. Four females and one male. Ferocious beasts. They were hungry, and devoured the meat within five seconds, and one of the females got hardly any.

‘Louis likes to keep them hungry,’ 15 explained.

‘Why?’

But 15 knew he didn’t have to answer that. He hardly spoke for the rest of the day. We sat together in the canteen and had our sugar solution, watched always by distant securidroids.

‘Has any Echo ever escaped?’ I asked.

‘From here?’

‘Yes.’

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

‘I sometimes look at the moon,’ he said. ‘At Hope City. It is an easy life for Echos up there. There is no Resurrection Zone. And if we weren’t here, it would be easy to get to as well. There are Echo shuttles every night. From Heathrow Spaceport. And from others too. Almost every big city in Europe. Pretty basic. Cramped. You know, Echo class. Not like what the humans get to travel in, but it would get you there in the same time. And easy to get on too. You don’t need any ID or proof of employment or purpose. Not even an eye-scan if you are an Echo. No one ever suspects an Echo of running away. And I never would. It would be against our programming.’

‘And what was smashing that door with a rock? What was pulling that tree off me? Was that part of our programming?’

‘We are programmed to resist our own termination.’

‘But what if escape meant resisting termination?’

15 stared out at nowhere in particular. ‘No. You have it the wrong way round. Escape would
mean
termination.’

At a minute and eleven seconds after midnight, during the quiet time, and three hours after the last visitor had left the zone, Louis came into the lodge with his securidroid.

The robots grabbed 15.

Louis stood in the doorway, with the rain beating hard behind him and resurrected birds squawking away in the aviary beyond.

‘It is your time,’ said Louis, his ceramic eye shining in the dark. And then, to all of us, in a suddenly lively and fake-friendly voice: ‘Come on, you must get bored sometimes. I know boredom isn’t possible for you freaks, but let’s pretend it is. Come, come, come . . . Let’s have a show.’

We were taken out in the rain, past the Neanderthal couple in their enclosure, staring out at us from their cave. Past the aviary, past Alice, past the lake, all the way to the edge of the zone. To the tigers in their vast pit. We were asked to stand in a line and then 15 was told to come forward.

‘No!’ I shouted, from the line.

Louis had invited some other human workers. Some were from
the Resurrection Zone and some, those in green overalls made of self-clean reinforced nano-weave nylon, were from the zoo next door. There were twelve workers in total. They were all sitting at the edge of the pit, high above the tigers, and they were all laughing and cheering and clapping their hands as the security guards pulled 15 forward.