Echo Boy (35 page)

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ Daniel was saying. ‘I just thought there might be a way we could get on the shuttle together.’

‘What? Like by putting my hands in my pockets?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

Rosella was pacing the room. ‘It’s not just the marks. It’s your skin. It’s human. Any expert on Echos would be able to see the difference. It’s the indentations, the pores, the other imperfections. Look, the flaws.’

I felt my skin, suddenly feeling self-conscious in front of Daniel.

Rosella studied me, making assessments. ‘
Los ojos
,’ she said. ‘
Your eyes
. Your eyes are hazel. Castles’ are green. Sempuras’ are brown. Darker than yours. My eyes are naturally hazel too. Wait, wait . . .’ She took a moment to remove her lenses. ‘UVA-defence info-lenses. Kind of needed in the Spanish desert. They’re not transparent.
Look, brown irises. Same as a Sempura Echo. I have them to protect me from the sun. I can get some more.’

I put the lenses in. Rosella looked at my face and my arms.

‘For your skin, you’d need to go in the tank. There are three unoccupied tanks here. And you would need to go in one. If I made sure there was enough keratin in the restoration fluid, then it might just be possible to make the outer layer of your skin – the epidermis – look like an Echo’s.’

‘Can I do it?’

‘It’s unlikely. You see, the liquid rises slowly. There is no way of speeding up the process. You would need to be able to hold your breath underwater for three minutes.’

‘I can do it,’ I said, without having a clue if that was true or not.

‘Are you sure?’ Daniel asked me. ‘You don’t have to do this. There might be another way.’

‘The moon is our best option,’ I said. ‘He won’t think of looking for me there because he knows I can’t leave the planet. As a human, I mean.’

‘And he’s probably the last person in the world to imagine that a human would ever volunteer to become an Echo,’ said Rosella, who knew that my uncle saw Echos as commodities and nothing more. I could tell she had come round to the idea.

So I did it.

We went downstairs to the tanks. Strange giant eggs hovering just above the ground. We passed quite a few occupied ones, works in progress for my uncle, I supposed, and then we reached one with the door open.

‘You will need to take off your clothes,’ Rosella said.

I looked at Daniel. ‘Turn round,’ I said.

I don’t think he understood shyness, or body anxiety, but he turned round.

I got undressed.

‘You can do it,’ Daniel said, still staring at a distant work table.

‘If you are in trouble, knock very hard on the door . . . You can do it – you will be all right,’ were Rosella’s last words before I stepped inside.

The door shut automatically. I was sealed in, and as the cool liquid rose, I began to panic. They couldn’t see me. What if I wasn’t able to make myself heard? They seemed pretty soundproof, those things.

It rose up. Higher, higher, higher. Feet, waist, neck. Making my skin tingle. I tried to slow my breathing, remembering Mum’s yoga lessons.
A slow breath needs a slow mind
, she’d once said.
You need to slow your thoughts. Your mind is always too busy, your attention flits too much. Like a butterfly, you must learn to settle
.

I took my last inhale, feeling the fluid on my chin, at the base of my lips. And then I closed my eyes and held my breath.

I saw Mum and Dad in my mind. I remembered them taking me swimming in Paris on Saturday mornings. Dad used to swim whole lengths underwater.
I think I was a fish in a former life
, he had said.

A former life.

And then I remembered him trying to teach me. Knowing I was scared of being under the water and wanting to combat that.

The way to do it is to try not to think about anything . . . The way to do it is not to try too hard. Just imagine you are nothing. Just be another natural element in the pool.

How long had it been?

It was very difficult to tell. It felt like ten minutes, but it had probably only been one. But then, just as I thought my lungs were about to explode and the panic was setting in, another thing happened. A sharp, searing pain caused by something hard pressing into my shoulder. It was the origin mark. Why hadn’t Rosella told me the origin mark was given here, in the tank?

The burning pain was so intense that I opened my mouth to scream. I swallowed a mouthful of that fluid. That sharp, mineral fluid. I banged my arm as hard as I could against the tank, realizing I had about a second.

And then I died.

Or I thought I did.

But sometimes what we think is the end is really just a beginning in disguise.

So I awoke. And I was naked, though Rosella had preserved my modesty and body heat by laying my clothes over me like a blanket.

And Daniel’s lips were on mine. And then I choked the fluid out; it burned my throat as it came up. He had exhaled life back into me. I felt weak, physically, but strong in unseen ways. I had been in there just long enough for the fluid to smooth my skin.

‘It worked,’ said Daniel.

‘I am sorry,’ Rosella was saying. ‘How is your shoulder?’

‘It’s OK,’ I lied. It was burning like hell.

She looked worried. At first I thought it was about my shoulder. But it wasn’t. ‘Oh my God, the time. He’ll be here. Or his Echos will.’ Then she looked even more concerned. ‘Why aren’t they here yet?’

We heard something. A kind of thudding sound. But this wasn’t coming from outside.

Daniel looked at me, as curious as I was.

It was coming from one of the tanks.

‘There was a noise from one of the tanks,’ I told Rosella.

The words were like a slap across her face. ‘A noise. But that’s . . . that’s impossible. They haven’t been ignited.’

Daniel was confused. ‘Why? I was a noise in a tank once.’

‘That was different.’

‘Are there Echo prototypes in the tank?’ he asked.

‘Yes, for Castle. But I haven’t even started to develop them. I haven’t inputted any data. They don’t even have igniters. I’m not going to develop them.’

Daniel considered. ‘Why not? He won’t be happy if you don’t give him them.’

Rosella’s eyes were filled with bleak defiance, even as the colour drained from her face. ‘I no longer care if he is happy or not happy.’

‘When are they meant to be ready by?’ I asked.

‘Tomorrow. This is another reason why you must be gone as soon as possible.’

I saw genuine concern in Daniel’s face. ‘What are you going to tell him?’

‘I will tell him nothing. It is over.’

‘You should come with us,’ I said, buttoning my top.

Rosella ignored this and went over to a table covered in equipment. She chose a cylindrical object with a copper end, and the indentation of a reverse E on it. I knew instantly what it was.

Another noise from the tanks. Rosella looked worried. She whispered something in Spanish and then said: ‘We have no time . . . I should really have got something to block the pain . . .’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, sensing her urgency. ‘I can take the pain.’

And so I did. She pressed it onto my skin, turned the end, and I stared straight into Daniel’s eyes and he stared straight into mine, and the pain was there, a scorching pain that seared into me, but I could take it because I knew what the pain meant. It meant freedom.

Rosella looked at me as if I was a sweet little child who had just recovered from an operation. ‘There. It is O—’

The noise came again. We walked over towards the tank which, like all the others, was thirty centimetres above its electromagnetic stand.

‘Wait there,’ Rosella told us. ‘I am going to check something downstairs. On the computers.’

So she left me and Daniel. Daniel walked towards the tank and I followed him.

I felt that I should say something, so I said: ‘Sorry.’

‘What are you sorry for?’

‘I’m sorry for everything. For being horrid when I first met you. I was wrong to think all Echos were the same.’

He smiled. ‘Most are,’ he said. ‘Most will do whatever they are programmed to do. They don’t think about what they are doing. They will do anything they are told to, and only that. They won’t know the pleasure of a book – or a kiss – but then, they won’t know pain either.
They have no morals. To have morals, they need to experience pleasure and pain. If it is what is expected of them and if they are told by someone who has power over them, they will do anything – even kill.’

‘There are humans like that too.’ I studied him for a moment. ‘So it didn’t change you. The operation. The reprogramming . . . what Uncle Alex did to your head . . .’

‘I thought it had for a while. But then I realized that I was just the same. The core things that made me who I am weren’t to do with programming. There was something else. Something permanent.’

‘I feel so guilty. You shouldn’t have saved me.’

‘Everything has worked out OK. We are—’

There was a fourth noise from inside the tank. Stronger, harder. Daniel looked disconcerted. ‘That didn’t sound right. That sounded too strong, even for an Echo. Stand back.’

Just as he said that, there was another noise, from a different tank further away. And then a third. ‘This is not right,’ he repeated.

Right then, Rosella rose back onto our floor on the leviboard, distraught. ‘I’ve been hacked. The computers – he’s got into them. Or rather, his hackers have. He’s programmed all the Echos. To maximum levels of strength and aggression. Illegal levels. You’ve got to get out of here. Now. They’re strong enough to break out of the tanks, and it’s due to happen, and when they do they’re programmed to kill all three of us. I’ve just seen the code. You have to run. Get out of here. Get on a ship to the moon.’

‘But what about you?’

‘I must stay here,’ she said. Her voice sounded calm, but a kind of forced calm. Something was going on that she wasn’t telling us; that she wanted to protect us from. Her Spanish accent became stronger
but her words stayed quite calm. ‘This is my responsibility. I have to be reprogramming the computers. You must go now before it is too late.’ But then she said, much louder, ‘Go! You must leave!
Vete!
’

But it was already too late, because at that moment a hand burst out of the tank we were standing in front of and grabbed Daniel by the throat. Bursting right out, and leaking restoration fluid.

Daniel couldn’t breathe. I turned to the table and grabbed the Echo brander, and pressed the copper end onto the anonymous Echo’s wrist as I switched it on. But this Echo was not Daniel. This Echo knew no pain.

I turned back to the table. There were about a hundred instruments I didn’t recognize. I saw one that I did. A laser blade. I picked it up, switched it on, and turned to slice through the Echo’s wrist. It worked. Dark Echo blood sprayed everywhere. The detached hand stayed clasped around Daniel’s throat until he pulled it off. The part of the arm that stayed attached to the otherwise unseen Echo thrashed around violently. Noise started to come from other tanks. From one of them, another hand burst out.

‘Go!’ Rosella shouted.

There was no way we were going to do that. ‘I can’t leave you here,’ said Daniel. ‘You made me. You looked after me.’

‘I abandoned you.’

‘You had no choice.’

‘Go
now
. You’ve got someone to look after now. Both of you. You’ve got each other to look after. Sometimes, to save something, you have to lose something. I have nothing to lose. You have each other. If you stayed and died and I survived, I could not live with myself.’

‘Rosella,’ I said, ‘nothing has been your fault.’

‘Listen,’ she said, leaning forward and pleading with us. ‘It is very
easy for me to change the program. It is two commands, and I can stop this, but I am not going down there until I know for certain that you are out of here. And once you are, I want you to get in my car and drive to the main hospital in Valencia, the Clínica Quirón de Valencia, and I want you to find my granddad and stay with him and make sure he is safe. Please do that. And get him out of the hospital. I think he is a target too.’

This changed things. Daniel was quick to understand the decision that faced us. The only one he could make with the information we had. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll go and look after him.’

Rosella disappeared down to the basement.

All the occupied tanks were now making noises as the Echos tried to break out. ‘Let’s go,’ I told Daniel.

I held his hand, and we ran past the hands reaching for us as we splashed our way across the increasingly wet floor. We reached the door and voice-commanded it to open, but because of the increasingly thunderous background noise, it took a few fast and frenzied attempts; then we were outside in a baking bright blue-skied world, and we sprinted round the other side of the warehouse to a car. Not a magcar, but a land car. An ancient battered electric one from the 2070s or something.

Daniel broke into it; he knew how to drive it. We had set off down the old dust road no longer made for cars to travel on, when suddenly the outdated-looking holophone on the dashboard started ringing.

‘Hello?’ said Daniel.

And then we saw Rosella’s face in front of us, flickering like a ghost.

The hologram of Rosella was looking so calm that at first I thought she’d managed to reprogram the Echos and make them safe. But there was something behind the calmness; something I couldn’t quite detect because of the flickering image – an image made faint by the brightness of the sun.

‘My granddad is not at the hospital,’ she said. ‘I had to say that to get you both out of here. He – Ernesto Daniel Márquez – died two weeks ago . . .’

W
hat was she talking about? I looked at Daniel.

All those in the world who still doubt that it is possible for an Echo to feel emotion should have seen Daniel’s face at that moment. It would have convinced them in a heartbeat.

‘No . . . No . . . You said—’

‘
Lo siento mucho de verdad
.’ She closed her eyes. She looked a little less calm now. I don’t think she even realized she had said that in Spanish. ‘I lied, Daniel. I am human. Humans lie. Listen, you don’t need to go to Heathrow. London might be too dangerous. There is a spaceport in Barcelona 2. It will be easier. There are fewer checks there. They
have Echo shuttles to the moon leaving every night. They will be basic, but that is what life as an Echo is . . .’