Echo Boy (6 page)

I heard Uncle Alex say something to the Echo boy, outside. He spoke to him in a quiet but harsh voice.

‘You do not speak to her, Daniel, do you understand? You do not get any ideas, do you hear me?’

The Echo didn’t respond.

Uncle Alex returned to the room. He stroked Iago’s hair affectionately. ‘It will be nice for Iago to have someone young around the house,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t go to school. He has tutors. One of the Echos. Madara. And I work a lot of the time. Even if I’m in the house I am working. So it’ll be nice for Iago to have someone to interact with. Someone real.’

Uncle Alex was holding something. A clear aerogel container with the blue Castle Industries logo on it. He opened it up and showed me what was inside. Two discs made of a delicate white material.

‘Neuropads,’ said Uncle Alex. ‘A step up from erasure capsules and everglows. They take away pain without taking away memory or sanity. They monitor brain activity and regulate it through electromagnetism. Right now your brain waves will be oscillating wildly.’ He smiled. ‘This calms the wild sea of the troubled mind and turns it into a tranquil lake.’

He pressed the pads onto my temples. ‘They instantly change colour to match your skin tone. There. You should feel the effects almost immediately. It’s a brand-new product. It’s not going to be on the market until next year.’

He was right. I
did
feel the effects immediately. The emotional pain that had been overwhelming only seconds before was now leaving me, and in its place – well, nothing. An emptiness, a neutrality, a big zero.

‘Is that better?’

‘I think so,’ I said as an incredible tiredness washed over me.

Uncle Alex smiled. My vision blurred until he could have been my dad.

‘And so to bed,’ he said. ‘Iago and I will take you to your room. And tomorrow, like I said, we’ll go and see the specialist. Mrs Matsumoto. Don’t worry, Audrey. You are safe here.’

We walked through a large lobby full of art, past a kitchen and a tall thin door.

‘That’s the weapons room,’ Uncle Alex explained, and I was too blank to even worry.

I woke from a deep, dreamless sleep to hear a noise against my window.

I was on the second floor of the house. What could possibly be tapping against the glass? This strange realization didn’t trouble me as I was still wearing the neuropads, though I got out of bed and went over to the window. I didn’t need to do this.

I got close. I only had to think about the blinds opening and, because they were fitted with neuro-receptors, they opened. The whole of London hummed and glowed in the night. The slogan of Castle Industries kept on appearing and disappearing, glowing indigo in the clouds.

Relax! It’s Castle.

I went up to the glass, so close it almost touched my nose. Something was there, to my right, outside, scaling the wall. There were two floors below me. But this was a house with high ceilings. Two storeys was quite a way. Yet it was climbing, fast.

He.

The Echo boy. Daniel.

He was looking straight up at me. He was gesturing for me to open
the window. But I didn’t. Even with the neuropads on I knew that would not be a wise thing to do.

He mouthed words that I couldn’t understand, then began to climb a steel rain funnel that ran right by the window. He was strong, and climbing faster than any human could, but I wasn’t frightened. My brain was artificially forced into calm. I was observing everything as if it was something happening in a book, something I was detached from, that wasn’t really happening to me.

Then another Echo was there.

She had long plaited red hair (the colour hardly visible) and she was holding a gun. But this wasn’t just a gun.

No.

This was a weapon I had only seen in holo-movies. A sleek-looking silver and aerogel positron. The kind that use antimatter technology, so they don’t just kill you; they cause you to disintegrate and disappear. There is no stain to clear away. No trace that you existed at all. Yeah. Scary weapon. And one my dad hoped would never become popular. They hadn’t – yet. They were probably the rarest guns out there. Owned by only a handful of uber-rich or uber-powerful people. Yet this one had been taken (I would later realize) from Uncle Alex’s weapons cupboard on the ground floor of the house – and she was aiming it at the other Echo, Daniel, and telling him to get down.

He stared at me, and even in the dark, and even with the neuropads on, I felt as if there was something not quite right about him. His eyes seemed different; more dangerous and intense than those of any other Echo I had seen. Even Alissa’s. He stayed still for a moment as he held onto the funnel, but then he realized that the red-haired Echo was not to be messed with.

He climbed down, keeping his eyes on me all the way.

I went back to bed, no more disconcerted than if it had been a dream.

The neuropads were designed to not only stabilize mood but also aid sleep, apparently. And I fell asleep again quickly, only this time I had dreams. I dreamed about my parents, and then I dreamed about Daniel. I dreamed he had smashed his way through the window and now had his hand clasped around my mouth.

But still, it was sleep.

And when I woke up again, it was nine in the morning and I realized they had done their job well enough for me to resist taking them off.

‘Light,’ I said wearily, and sure enough, it came on.

There was a noise outside my window. Distant voices, chanting. A protest, probably. London was a city of protests these days. I knew this because Dad had often joined them, even though Mum never wanted him to.

I was in a vast bed in a large plush spare bedroom. The sheets smelled not of lavender and lime flower, as they did at home, but of primrose and patchouli. I realized this because the sheets were complete with nanotechnology, and faint white lettering flickered across the
green cotton when I lifted it away from me.
This morning’s scent is restorative primrose and calming patchouli.

I had left my info-lenses at home, but I noticed Uncle Alex had left a pair by my bed, in a case branded with the simple Castle logo, that blue silhouette of a castle with three turrets that you saw on everything from immersion pods to the neuropads’ aerogel container. I could even see it out of my window. I hadn’t noticed it last night, I had only noticed the slogan; but then, I hadn’t really noticed anything except Daniel climbing up towards me.

The logo was blazoned on the side of a giant rotating sphere that floated above the London skyline and a crisscrossed spaghetti mess of magrails and fast traffic.

I knew where the sphere was located, of course. It was directly above the Castle Industries-funded Resurrection Zone. This had once, before I was born, been a beautiful and tranquil part of the city known as Regent’s Park, but was now home to what was possibly Castle’s most controversial venture – a vast zoo for formerly extinct species that had been brought back to life by sequencing genes. Of course, not everything had been brought back to life. Humans now know that they will never be able to bring back dinosaurs, as no dinosaur DNA has been preserved successfully enough. But others – polar bears, pandas, dodos, mountain gorillas, woolly mammoths, tigers and (most controversially of all) Neanderthals – were all housed there.

From my position, propped up on pillows in this strange bed, I couldn’t see inside the zone itself, just the tops of trees. But I could tell this was roughly where the noise was coming from.

The chanting.

A protest against the Resurrection Zone. Dad would have known about it; maybe he would have even been planning to go. But then, I
suppose the book he was writing was itself a kind of protest against it, as the big selling point of the Resurrection Zone was the fact that Neanderthals – real living cave humans – were there. And Mum had banned Dad from going to protests. Or she had tried to.

‘Leo,’ she used to say. ‘Leo, you’re selfish.’

‘Selfish? Trying to preserve the future for us all is selfish?’

‘One more person at a protest will not make a difference.’

‘When differences are made, it is always down to one more person.’

‘OK, well, what about having more time with us? We used to value our Saturdays. What happened to our Saturday mornings at the Centre Aquatique in Paris? Why do you prefer marching with a load of violent anarchists to spending time with your family?’

‘You’ve changed. You used to believe in this stuff. What do you believe in now? Yoga?’

‘I grew up, Leo. OK? I entered the real world. Of real jobs. And having to earn money. Of looking after our family. Do you not understand that?’

At which point Dad used to mutter something and skulk off to his office. And Mum would look at me as she stood there in the kitchen and say, ‘I only worry about him.’ And she would then frown and bark at Travis and tell him to stop yammering on about sea cucumbers, and turn to me again. ‘Your father exhausts me,’ she’d say, popping a brain pill and blinking through her mind-wire messages. ‘I love him, Audrey. But he’s a nightmare. Whatever you do, don’t end up like him. Don’t end up barred from life by your principles. Now, come on, it’s Saturday. I have some time. Let’s go to America and see some art and do something fun.’

There were lots of places around the world like the Resurrection Zone, and most of them had nothing to do with Castle Industries. And as Dad told me, Uncle Alex was just one of many people who made money out of such things. But still, being here made me feel uncomfortable.

After all, I had never been to Uncle Alex’s house before. He had invited my parents to stay two Christmases ago, but they had declined the offer.

‘I love my brother,’ my dad told me then. ‘I love him because he is my little brother and I have to love him, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend a lot of time listening to him. Or visiting his expensive house. You see, Audrey, my brother is a very wise and charming man who, I truly believe, thinks he is helping the world progress by making new technology widely available. But it is my view that he is doing a lot of bad things for society.’

Which was why, when it came to buying Alissa, for instance, she was not a Castle product. She was from Sempura, whose products were more expensive but were considered better quality. And Sempura hadn’t helped bring Neanderthals back to life. The company was just about Echos and robots and cars.

‘Uncle Alex swims with the current and I swim against it.’ My dad’s words again, that Christmas Eve. ‘No wonder I sometimes feel like I am drowning.’

Even though we never went to Hampstead, we did see Uncle Alex. He had been to Yorkshire a few times, though never with Iago, and he had always been very kind and loving to me. On my ninth birthday he had arrived on our doorstep with a brand-new state-of-the-art immersion pod; I realize now that it didn’t please my parents very much. There was sometimes tension, but it was normally caused by Dad. To be fair to Uncle Alex, he had never seemed to want to start an argument.

Hearing footsteps outside on the gravel, I got up and went to the window. Far in the distance, higher and further south than the Resurrection Zone, the mile-high slums of Cloudville glowed and flickered, like a dark electric thunder cloud. I leaned close to the glass and looked down.

I suppose I half expected to see someone climbing up to the window. But no.

I saw four Echos tending the flowerbeds. There were two females and two males. They all looked different to each other. An old man with a white beard; a strong-looking, hulking younger male with long dark hair; a female with blonde hair, not dissimilar to Alissa but a little older; and one designed to look like a woman in her twenties who was authentically detailed with freckles and long red hair in a plait.

I realized after a few moments that this was the one I had seen last night. The one who had been aiming the gun at Daniel.

Near them was a robot. A proper steel robot that was basically little more than a self-moving compost heap, which was picking up the weeds and other debris that the Echos were taking out of the flowerbeds.

And then, further across from them, another Echo stood high in the air on the leviboard. Him. The one who looked like a tall sixteen-year-old, his blond hair and pale but perfect features amplified now by daylight. He was scrubbing Alissa’s blood from my parents’ car, which hovered a good few centimetres above the rail. The car – a silver Slipstream shaped like an egg cut in half – had been slightly out of my parents’ price range. Mum had insisted – after the accident – that they get a more expensive model. But it didn’t look expensive in the context of Uncle’s house and grounds. And its self-clean function was as good as useless.

I watched him, the Echo boy, with fascination as he washed away the blood with a bucket and sponge.

The sight of him had made me panic when I first got here. Why wasn’t I panicking now? Why hadn’t I panicked in the night? I tried to think about what had happened to my parents yesterday, but I struggled to feel anything. And then I remembered that I was wearing neuropads. I wanted to remember my parents, and all that had happened, so I removed them, peeling them off my skin one at a time, and almost instantly my brain chemistry changed and I switched back into terror mode.

That is what it feels like when you lose the people you love.

It is not simply a deep sadness, like people always tell you.

No.

It is worse than that.

It is a total terror at being alone.

Panic gripped my chest.

I was fifteen years old but I felt like a tiny baby, abandoned and screaming. I wasn’t literally screaming . . . It was a very quiet type of terror, but terror none the less. A kind of internal falling; a falling of the soul, with nothing to hold onto.

It was hard to breathe.

The blond Echo realized that I was watching him, and stared back at me. And he went on staring, with those eyes that I thought of as cold. I gasped for air, as if I was drowning, and retreated from the window. Quickly I pressed the pads back onto my temples.

Shortly after, Uncle Alex knocked on my door. I answered. He was standing there dressed all in black and holding a tray.