Echo Boy (7 page)

‘Thought I’d bring it to you myself,’ he said. ‘I made it myself too. It’s an Echo-free breakfast. Porridge, corn bread, gene-support orange and kale juice, chocolate. The works. I can make you a red tea if you want something hot. I know you couldn’t manage food yesterday, but I really think you should eat something now, Audrey. If you can.’

I looked down at the porridge and realized I hadn’t eaten since the plantain shake I’d had the previous day. I was faint with hunger, yet I still didn’t want to eat.

‘Your dad used to love corn bread,’ Uncle Alex said as he looked sombrely down at the tray. ‘We had it as kids. He used to put butter on it. This was before they banned butter, obviously.’

I took the tray and realized that, even with the neuropads on, my hands and arms were shaking. Noticing this, Uncle Alex took the tray back off me and set it down on a small table in the centre of the room. It was the first time I had seen it.

In fact, it was only then that I took in other details of the room. There was a sofa by the wall, an antique television which must have been from around 2020 or something, a large mirror, a plush nano-fibre carpet with subtle continuous colour shifts between blue and purple (‘Sleep colours,’ explained Uncle Alex), a small immersion pod in the corner (‘If there’s anyone you want to talk to, or if you just need to escape for a while’), and a door leading to an ensuite bathroom. It was more like a small apartment than a bedroom. There was a painting on the wall. Red figures on a blue background. One of the figures was playing a violin, another the flute. Three more sat clutching their knees, listening.

‘Bought that painting from the Hermitage in Leningrad. Russia. Before the civil war there. You like it?’ he asked me.

‘It’s by Matisse,’ I said, which wasn’t a real answer. The truth is, with the neuropads on I didn’t know if it was a good painting or a bad one. Maybe you needed to be able to feel pain and sadness in order to appreciate art.

Uncle Alex nodded, impressed. ‘You have a lot of knowledge for a fifteen-year-old.’

‘Mum loved art. She used to take me to galleries. Sometimes real ones. Sometimes we’d go in a pod together and visit virtual ones.’

‘Your mum was a very intelligent woman. She must have been a very good teacher. Did your dad ever teach you?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. He was too busy writing.’

Uncle Alex chuckled sadly. ‘About Castle Industries mainly!’

I didn’t reply to this. I just said: ‘But, you know, he’d sometimes teach me about writing. He reckoned words were weapons. Get the right words, and they could have a power beyond anything. They could
help people. Or hurt them. He mainly taught just by being himself, though. To have principles. To do the right thing even if it’s hard. He also taught me how to cook.’

Uncle Alex nodded, and looked at me uneasily. He had thin lips, I noticed. Thinner than Dad’s. Tola had once said,
Never trust someone with thin lips
, but Tola was a bit superficial and vicious about such things.

‘The trouble with the truth is that it is like morality. It changes from person to person. One person’s truth is another person’s lie. One person’s good is another’s bad. He probably said terrible things about me.’

I sat down at the table, picked up the spoon and started on the porridge. I could only eat a mouthful, even with the neuropads on. ‘Not terrible things, no. He liked you and he always told me you were a good man. He said that being civilized meant having differences of opinion but getting on.’ This was true, but Uncle Alex didn’t seem to believe it. ‘He did,’ I added.

‘Audrey, listen, you’re my blood. You’re family. And family is important. And I’m going to try my very hardest to make you as comfortable here as it is possible for you to be . . . I have told everyone I need to tell at Castle that I will be staying at home for the next week or so. I’m not leaving the house, I promise. Our European headquarters are based in Cambridge, only a few minutes away by magcar, but to be honest I can do everything from here anyway. And I know you have a problem with Echos. I will stay here.’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the way the blond one had tried to reach my room last night. ‘I do. One of them tried to reach my room last night. Outside. He climbed up and tried to get in my room. It was the one I saw last night. Daniel.’

A flash of worry; but a moment later Uncle was looking calm again, or at least trying to. ‘Don’t worry about that. Echos only need two hours’ recharge a night. You know that. So they do night work. Maintenance work. To the outside of the house. The rain funnel gets blocked sometimes. He will have been climbing up to clear that.’

‘But there was another Echo too. She had a gun and was threatening to kill him. Or at least, I think that’s what she was doing.’

‘Which one?’

I told him.

‘Oh, Madara. She is a prototype for the military. I’m working out whether to produce a lot of her. I think I will. I think I’m going to go ahead with the commission. She is very good. She’s my security at night. She patrols the grounds. She is programmed to assert her authority among other Echos. Trust me, it was nothing untoward. There was no malfunction.’

‘OK,’ I said, my worry dulled by the pads on my temples.

Uncle Alex sat on my bed, and pressed his hands together as if in prayer, then took a deep inhale, thinking of the right words. ‘It is understandable, your anxiety about Echos, given what has happened, but I want to tell you something. The Echos here are not like the one that killed your parents. I’ve spoken with the police. They have seen the security footage and have confirmed that this one was definitely a Sempura product, not one of ours. You can tell because she had brown eyes and ours all have green eyes. Did you know that?’

I told him I did. Besides, I’d already known Alissa was Sempura. I thought of Dad’s face the day she arrived. The disdain.

‘It’s an Echo,’ Mum had told him. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

‘I don’t see the difference,’ he’d said, limping over to inspect Alissa.

I contemplated another spoon of porridge.

‘This couldn’t have happened with one of our products. You see, we make sure our designers put blocks in place. It limits the Echo, but it keeps their owners safe. Now, after breakfast we are going to have you checked over by Mrs Matsumoto, the specialist I told you about.’

‘Is she a program?’ I asked.

‘No. There are times when even I believe that nothing beats an actual human, face to face. And there is no one better than Mrs Matsumoto. Mrs Matsumoto is the best. She costs a lot of money and is very much in demand. But sometimes it is useful to have a rich and powerful uncle.’ He winked. The wink prompted me to smile, or as good as. And he smiled at that near-smile. Maybe he thought it was progress.

Uncle Alex studied me. He seemed worried about saying the next few words. He squinted, as if he was scared how I’d react. ‘She is a mind doctor. She helped me after my wife left me. I know mind doctors are a bit 2090, but like I said, she is the best in the world. I think she can help you.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Here. In London. I’ll take you.’

I didn’t particularly want to go. The outside world was suddenly a terrifying concept. ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I think I just want to stay here.’

‘Well, there’s no rush,’ he said. ‘No rush.’ And he said it in such a way that it instantly defused any pressure on it. And with that release of pressure I found myself saying, ‘No, actually, I will see her now.’

‘She doesn’t do home visits. I could offer her a million unidollars and she’d still say no.’

‘That’s OK.’

And Uncle Alex tucked my hair back behind my ear, like Dad used to, and I saw tears glaze his eyes.

There was a knock on the door. The sound of it shocked me, even with the pads. Uncle Alex went to get it and I saw the female Echo, the one with freckles. Madara. The one made to be a warrior. She was holding a trowel. I took the pads off again, trying to work out what to make of her; to understand what had happened last night.

‘We have weeded the flowerbeds, Master,’ she said, her voice blank in that Echo way. ‘Now, do you want me to buy the girl some clothes, like you said you might?’

‘Yes, Madara. She will need some.’ For a moment I saw nothing but Alissa holding the kitchen knife, and my hands must have reached my face, because the next thing I knew, the pads were on the floor and I was flooded with panic.

And I backed away from them to the other side of the room, until I hit the window. Then I turned and saw the blond Echo boy looking in at me, and this time the scream wasn’t silent. It came out of me now, like it had last night. Uncle Alex shut the door and came over; he held me firm, then tried to put the pads back, but they didn’t stick.

‘They need work. Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK . . .’

I heard Mum’s words echo in my mind:

That’s OK, Alissa. Don’t worry. I like spending time with my daughter.

And Uncle Alex kept on, trying to comfort me:

‘It’ll be OK.’

But of course, nothing was ever going to be OK again.

Only the most expensive cars – Silver Bullets and Prosperos (like the one we were travelling in) – are allowed on hightrack magrails. The night before, I hadn’t noticed, but there was a hightrack directly above Uncle’s house. It was about a hundred metres up, so it was quite hard to see even when you stood in the drive. It was just a thin white line drawn in the sky, like a piece of string connecting clouds.

Before we left, Uncle Alex showed me round the other side of the house. The leviboard we needed descended on the rear lawn, he told me. It was spectacular, but my senses weren’t able to appreciate the genetically perfect sycamore trees, the distant bushes and the multi-coloured grass – violet and yellow and turquoise, the stripes of colour merging into each other.

‘It isn’t just a garden,’ he said. ‘It’s a defence system.’ He pointed to the turquoise lawn beyond the first row of bushes. ‘Never run over that piece of ground there.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s above a kennel.’

‘You keep dogs underground?’

‘Not
dog
dogs. Echo hounds. The ground has sensors in it. If the house is under threat – if there are intruders, for instance – the sensors are activated and, well, the threat is eliminated, let’s put it like that.’

As I stood there, next to Uncle, waiting for the leviboard to descend, I felt totally empty. If someone had asked me what my name was, it would have probably taken me a good ten seconds to say, ‘Audrey Castle’. I felt so blank that I was only really half aware that Uncle Alex had left my side for a moment and gone back into the house.

When I realized, I turned and saw him in the conservatory with the blond Echo boy. He was talking to him, and gesturing away from the plants that the Echo was watering, into the house. The Echo boy looked at me. He was a weirdo. Machines could be killers, so they could definitely be weirdos.

Uncle Alex’s Prospero was the most luxurious magcar I had ever been inside. It was spacious and sleek and had body-sensitive air seats. It played classical music – Vivaldi, as Uncle Alex had instructed – and was meant to be the safest vehicle in existence.

He set the Prospero to view-speed, which was slow enough for us to be able to see outside the windows. Slow enough to actually see faces of people on the streets below. We passed right over the Resurrection Zone. Uncle Alex had taken me this way deliberately, to show me a glimpse of extinct species like tigers, though there were too many trees to see anything clearly (however, I did notice the swarms of tourists).

‘One thing your dad didn’t realize is that the zone gives people a lot of pleasure. It’s something that’s not appreciated. All those
Castle Watch
journalists and protestors who like to hang around the place . . .’ He sighed. ‘And if I was the monster they thought I was, then why
wouldn’t I force the police to stop the protestors? They could do so. The prime minister herself said to me . . . she said,
If it’s affecting your business in any way, you can stop them.
But I don’t. I’m not an ogre.’ He paused. ‘And besides, that’s what they want. They want me to look like a monster so they can demonize me even more.’

We passed the New Parliament building. It hung in the sky, like a shining titanium bone. Dad had told me that Uncle Alex was good friends with the prime minister, Bernadine Johnson, and I asked if that was true.

‘Oh, we’ve had lunch a few times . . .’

I felt a brief flash of pain inside my head. It was over as quickly as it arrived.

‘I tell you,’ Uncle Alex went on, with raw sincerity, ‘Sempura is bad news. Well, you know that. And you know it because of Ali— I don’t need to spell it out. But anyway, my belief, the belief I have always held, is that technology must always be a force for good. If people are in it solely for money, then things are going to go wrong, risks that shouldn’t be taken are going to be taken, and before we know it we’ll be at the singularity.’

The singularity.

I knew exactly what the singularity was. The singularity was the point at which the machines take over. When they become so advanced that they decide it is in their best interests to stop serving humans, and either kill us or make us their servants. The singularity was something my dad talked about all the time. I remembered my parents rowing about it. According to my dad, the very fact that we had an Echo in our home meant we were encouraging the singularity to happen.

Maybe Alissa hadn’t been a one-off. Maybe the singularity was already starting to happen.

Further south we saw water. It looked blue and solid and frozen and harmless. Of course, everything looked still and harmless from a distance. I thought of how cities can flood and yet survive. I wondered if I would be like that. Grief feels like a flood. Some slip under it and never come up. But most do, I supposed.

And as I did so, another intense pain shot through my head, pushing away all thoughts. It was as though a thin metal spear had been thrust right through my skull and out the other side.

‘
Aaargh!
’ I screamed and fell forward out of the air-chair onto my knees, clutching my head.