Echo Boy (4 page)

My dad’s hand.

Then his arm.

What was he doing lying on the floor? I looked at his desk. Steam was rising from his mug.

‘Dad? What’s the matter? Why aren’t you—’

As I drew level with the doorway, I saw everything. All at once. A whole shock-load of images I have no way of forgetting.

My parents, dead, killed in the most brutal and old-fashioned way imaginable.

With a knife.

A knife she must have taken from the kitchen.

Dad’s blood leaking into Mum’s self-clean suit, the blood disappearing into the fabric, but not being fully absorbed. It was too much even for the carpet to absorb and clean away like it usually did when Dad spilled a coffee or red tea.

My parents’ blood.

It seemed impossible – and I suppose, when I think about it now, it was the idea that my parents were just physical. When someone is
alive, the last thing you think is that they are just a biological organism made of blood and bone and other matter. They are people – wise, quiet, serious, humorous, sometimes annoying, sometimes grumpy, tired, loving people. And death – especially this horrible kind of death – took all that away, and said it was a lie, and that my parents were nothing more than the sum of their parts.

And, of course,
she
was there.

Alissa. With her blonde hair and too-perfect smile.

Standing there, with the blood-soaked knife.

‘I was waiting for you to come,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you to come, I was waiting for you to come . . .’

She kept saying it, like a broken machine, which I suppose she was.

And I just stood there, until she moved.

How long was that? How long?

I don’t really know. Time had disintegrated, along with reality itself. But I must have had something inside me – some determined will to survive, and for that man-made monster to not take me, my life, a life which was the product of those two bodies on the floor – and there must also have been just enough distance, and just enough of an obstacle in terms of those bodies, for me to run that short stretch along the landing towards the window.

I also found enough of a voice to command that window to ‘Open!’

Though there was a tiny delay, from the command to the action of it opening. A delay no doubt caused by the fact that my dad had been determined not to spend more money on technology than he needed to by having them replaced.

So she – that thing I really don’t want to dignify with the human name Alissa – she grabbed me, the sleeve of my cotton top, and
she would have finished me off too. But I wasn’t like my parents must have been.

No.

There was no fear inside me at that second in time. Fear belongs to people with stuff to lose. It was just pure anger, pure hate, and the hate was so strong that just for a second I had the power to match an Echo, even though an Echo was designed to be three times as strong as a fully-grown human man. In that second this didn’t matter because I had them inside me – I had my parents inside my heart – and when I pulled away from her and slammed my elbow hard into her face, it was as though all of us, the whole family, were doing it.

She staggered backwards.

Being an Echo, she obviously hadn’t felt any pain, but she had to obey the same laws of physics as anyone else, so it was a moment before she could come at me again. But by that time the window was open and I was jumping out of it, leaping into the water. As soon as my head was out in the air, I screamed up towards the rails and the leviboard. (External leviboards were one piece of technology my parents had always been forced to upgrade because of rain damage.) It descended to just above water level, and I climbed out just as Alissa was jumping in (if she had been a first-generation Echo, that would have been enough to finish her off, but she was as waterproof as I was).

Once in the car, my brain almost combusted as the fear finally arrived, and so I forgot the right command combination. By this time she was trying to get inside. Failing, she stood on the rail itself, right in front of the car.

‘Reverse,’ I said.

But there were only five metres of rail behind us. There was only one thing I could do.

‘Forward,’ I said. ‘Fast. Full speed. To . . . to fast rail.’

And the car sped ahead with such momentum that we smashed right into Alissa, and headed away to anywhere, the windscreen streaked with blood, my face streaked with flood water and unstoppable tears.

She was dead. No question.

But then again, as Dad always said, in life you can never ask too many questions.

Something else Dad once said: ‘I am not having an Echo in this house.’

He had said something similar quite a few times. But Mum was insistent. ‘They are by far the best tutors. If we want Audrey to go to a good university, I think we should get one. It could help her.’

‘Echos are the end of civilization,’ he said. ‘They are the end of humanity. People who sell Echos are selling the end of the human race.’

‘People like your brother, you mean?’

‘Yes. People like Alex.’

‘So you’ll let your rivalry with your brother get in the way of your daughter’s education?’

This made Dad cross. ‘What is the point of educating our daughter if there is no future for mankind?’

‘And us buying one Echo, one everyday household assembly-line Echo – that’s going to lead to the end of the world, is it?’

‘You either have principles or you don’t.’

‘You mean, you either have
your
principles or you don’t. I can’t believe your arrogance sometimes, Leo.’

I think I joined in the conversation at this point. ‘It’s OK, Mum, I don’t want an Echo to teach me. I like going to school in the pod. I’ve got friends there.’

My mother just stared at me, and blew ripples across her red tea. She was as stubborn as Dad, just in a different direction. ‘I want the best for you,’ she said. ‘Even if you don’t want it for yourself.’

I had no idea where I was going. I should probably have stopped the car and gone back to the house, but I was too shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing.

But then I heard a noise in the car. The low-pitched purr of the holophone.

‘Yes,’ I blurted, answering.

And then a man appeared on the flat transparent board in front of me, a hologram one tenth of normal human size. It was a man with black hair and a black suit. In my delirium I thought it was Dad, even though I had never seen him wear a suit. I thought it was a message from the dead.

‘Hello, Audrey,’ he said warmly. ‘I’ve been trying to contact your parents.’

And then I realized who this figure was. It was my uncle Alex. Alex Castle. Dad’s brother.

I couldn’t speak. I was in such a state of shock my tongue felt locked.

The little hologram figure stepped closer, looking up at me. I suppose he was a kind of comfort. It was a face I recognized, after all.

‘Audrey, what’s the matter? You look dreadful. Why are you in
the car on your own? What on earth has happened?’

‘They’ve . . . they’ve . . .’ It took every ounce of strength and sanity I had left inside me, but eventually I managed to say it. ‘They’ve been killed.’

My uncle looked confused, then devastated. For a moment he too seem unable to speak. Then he pulled himself into responsible adult mode. ‘
Killed?
What do you mean? Audrey, sweetheart, what are you talking about?’

‘The Echo. The Echo killed them.’

‘You mean the robot, Travis?’

‘No. No.’ The idea was ridiculous. Travis couldn’t have peeled a potato, let alone killed a human being. ‘They . . . A new one. An actual Echo.’

He was confused. ‘An Echo?’

I didn’t want him to feel guilty, so I managed to say: ‘A Sempura Echo. They bought a Sempura Echo.’

He looked as if he was in pain. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, gaining composure. ‘We’d fallen out. We’d fallen out, Audrey, about this stuff he was doing. Stuff about the Resurrection Zone. Did you know that? You must know that. God, it was so stupid. And I was just about to make amends. Leo! Poor Leo. My brother! Oh my God. I was just about to invite him to my fiftieth birthday. I was going to make it up to him.’ He stopped, his eyes looking at me, mirroring my pain. ‘And are you safe, Audrey? Are you OK? Were you there?’

I couldn’t answer these questions. Not then. Before a bruise shows, the skin stays blank. I was blank. The blank white of just-slapped skin. I felt I had nothing in me.

‘Where are you? Where are you now? I mean, where are you going?’

I looked out of the window. It was dark above me. I must have been travelling under one of Birmingham’s many hover-suburbs. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You must come here. You must come and stay here, Audrey. Please, I’m asking you. Do you understand? It’s the only place you can stay.’

I was reluctant. Uncle Alex had a house full of Echos. He had no problem with Echos – after all, Castle Industries was the main European Echo producer. They made even more than Sempura. At least in Europe.

‘Tell the car to take you to One, Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead, north London. Car? Are you listening? I am Audrey’s closest living relative now that her parents have been killed. I am Alex Castle.’

‘No,’ I said. It was an instinctive thing. ‘No. It’s OK. Thank you, but I’ll go somewhere else.’

But where else could I go?

Grandma’s. Mum’s mum. She lived on the moon, but I could have gone to the spaceport at Heathrow and caught a flight. Mum had flown to see her two months ago. She’d planned to spend the week there but had only managed a night. Grandma had Echos. The whole moon was full of Echos. But so was Uncle Alex’s. And, I don’t know, I just felt closer to Grandma.

‘Heathrow Spaceport,’ I said. ‘Fast.’

But the car didn’t speed up. The car slowed down to under five hundred kilometres an hour. I was looking out of windows, at real actual things. I saw distant fires. It might have been one of the riot towns.

I passed over large greenhouses full of farm crops. Perfect fields of barley, gently swaying in the artificial breeze.

It is weird, when you love someone and they die. How the world
has a strange negative power. A short while later we were over Oxford. I slid past the college buildings. The famous titanium wheel that was New Somerville College, rotating on its axis. I was staring at my future. That was where I was meant to be attending university. I had been there, with my mum. I thought of her. But there was nothing. I could only think of blood. And then, between Oxford and London, continuing suburbs. Floating homes, stilt houses, and those giant rectangular rain absorbers that shade miles of land and water.

This was not the way to Heathrow.

‘Car,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

Trees.

A rotating sphere.

Houses. A dense mesh of crisscrossing magrails. An h-ad for Sempura mind-wires.

‘Car, stop. Car, I want to go to Heathrow Spaceport. Car, car,
car
?’

‘The designated address is One, Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, London,’ said the car.

‘But I’ve told you to drive to Heathrow Spaceport. I want to go to the spaceport. I want to go to the moon. I want to see my grandma.’

‘I am fitted with Castle maxiresponse navigational software. It cannot disobey its creator.’

Had my parents known this? That although the car wasn’t made by Castle, the software inside it was?

I saw a hologram of our destination appear where Uncle Alex had been.

One of the most expensive houses in London, a vast mansion that looked like a Roman temple, with acres of land that was also built in one of the highest parts of the city and so unlikely to flood. Apparently
my uncle had paid 110 million unidollars for it, way back in 2098, but that kind of money was nothing to him.

Not that he needed the space.

There was only him and my ten-year-old cousin, Iago. Uncle Alex had been married once, for two years, but his wife – Iago’s mum – had gone a bit crazy after the birth of her son, and a divorce had followed.

Right then, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this. I was just trying to get the car to do what I wanted. As it didn’t obey any voice command, I tried to disable it by kicking the dashboard. I kicked and I kicked. There was no way I wanted to go to Uncle Alex’s. Not necessarily because of Uncle Alex himself, but because I could not stand the idea of being surrounded by his Echos.

‘Car, stop! Reverse. Go back home. Go back to Yorkshire.’

‘If you continue to harm this vehicle, you will be forcibly restrained,’ said the car.

I continued to harm the vehicle.

And I was forcibly restrained. A sudden field of invisible magnetic force slammed me back against the rear window, nearly a metre above the seat.

London, speeding by. Water, dripping from my forehead onto the car seat.

I looked out of the window, at the blur of landscape and buildings, a grey-green melted world that somehow echoed my desolate thoughts.

‘ . . . we will look after you.’

It was Uncle Alex. He was back in the car. Or at least, his hologram was.

‘But Echos are there,’ I said, my whole jaw stiff from the pressure. ‘Please, tell the car to go—’

‘Don’t worry about them, Audrey. I will keep them away from you. I promise. Iago and me, we will look after you. You know the moon isn’t a sensible option. And besides, there are Echos everywhere on the moon. And you can’t go home. The police need to examine the scene and . . . and take the bodies. You can’t go there.’

Yeah. He was right about that. I couldn’t stay at home. I never wanted to see that house again.

And Uncle Alex and Iago were the only real relatives I had. On Earth, anyway.

He noticed that I was pressed against the roof of the car.

‘Release her,’ he commanded.

And I fell onto the car seat.

‘Listen, Audrey, it’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK . . .’

I was closer to my grandma, but she had been living on the moon for the last ten years, in New Hope Colony. I loved Grandma; right at that moment I would have far preferred to see
her
, but it was a long flight, and besides, Grandma had tons of Echos. Indeed, Echos and lower-level robotic life-forms outnumbered humans by five to one on the moon.