Echo Boy (8 page)

Uncle Alex put his hand on my back, his face creased with anguish. ‘Audrey?’

But it was over in a flash. The pain was gone, though it lingered like an echo in the empty cavern of my mind.

‘It might be the neuropads,’ Uncle said. ‘They are a prototype, like I said. There may still be some . . . some teething problems.’ He looked at me with concern. ‘I think you should take them off.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s OK.’ I was willing to risk more physical pain if it meant stopping emotional pain.

‘Well, Audrey, I’m a little worried. They are not designed to be worn all the time. The more you wear them, the more chance there will be of side-effects. Let’s just hope that Mrs Matsumoto can help. She is very good. Oh look, we’re nearly there . . .’

Above us, the famous floating observatories, set up about eighty years ago to monitor changes in the weather, looked grey and battered from countless storms and the almost continual rain. It wasn’t raining now, though. Not right at this minute. But the clouds were gathering, quite fast.

‘4449 Skylodge Villas, Cloudville.’

Cloudville
.

‘She lives in the sky? I thought you said she had lots of money.’

‘She does. But she chooses to live here, in the poorest part of town, 600 metres above the tip of the Shard.’

The Shard was an old skyscraper, shaped like a stretched-out pyramid. It had once been the tallest building in Europe, but now it was derelict and rather sad-looking, jutting out of the dirty floodwater like a strange fin.

As for Cloudville, well, it looks even worse up close than it does from afar. A giant grey disc full of tall, thirty-year-old buildings that looked far older because of the weather damage they suffer up here. And I remember hearing about it on the news; how it was meant to be overrun with gangsters.

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ And then Uncle Alex pulled something out of his jacket. A gun. ‘This is a positron. Do you know about positrons?’

‘I know that they are an irresponsible weapon and should be banned.’

‘You sound like you are echoing someone. Your dad maybe?’

‘They’re responsible for thousands of accidental deaths every year.’

‘Which is about one per cent of the accidental deaths caused by laser blades, which aren’t regulated at all. Or jolt-clubs. But anyway, you’d prefer it if I left it in the car?’

‘Yes,’ I said, without hesitation.

We stepped out onto a platform into raw wind and rain. The gale was so strong it very nearly blew us away, as the platform was narrow and slippery. There was a barrier, a fence, but it didn’t look like it had ever been finished – just metal poles with nothing in between them. We walked towards an alley high in the sky, amid the ten-storey apartment
buildings, which rose on either side of us like vertical wings in a spaceship.

Mrs Matsumoto was very old. She was post-mortal, which meant she had died, technically. She had been dead for two hours, fifteen years ago. She had died of natural causes, but her wealthy clients (Uncle Alex among them) had paid for her to be retrofitted with various death-defying and cell-renewal technologies.

She looked pale and grey, which, given that she was 185 years old when she died, was entirely understandable. She wore long dark clothes, and a few wisps of white hair sprouted out of her chin and cheeks. The room was all metal, a kind of dark steel, I think. In the middle was a strange-looking couch with a helmet attached to it. As soon as we entered, Mrs Matsumoto smiled a thin smile from her chair beside the couch. On the palm of her left hand there was a circular metal disc. Smaller metal discs merged into the skin of her fingertips. She also had a picture of a large open eye tattooed to the middle of her forehead that had probably been there for a century. Her actual eyes, when I got close to them, had milky cataracts over them. She was blind, I realized.

‘They brought five out of six senses back to life,’ she said in her slow voice, after telling me to lie down on the couch.

She turned to Uncle Alex. She seemed to know exactly where he was in the room. ‘How are the nightmares?’ she asked.

Uncle looked at me nervously. He obviously didn’t want me to know he had nightmares. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

Then she pushed the helmet-thing away. ‘I prefer to use my hands,’ she said, and she touched the side of my head with the cold metal fingertips and brushed against the pads.

‘They’re neuropads,’ Uncle explained. ‘They’re a new invention. A kind of tranquillizer. I’m a bit concerned about them, actually. I would prefer her not to need them.’ He explained what had happened in the car. He then asked for a word with Mrs Matsumoto on her own, and they went into a small side room, and spoke for a bit.

When they came back, Mrs Matsumoto told me that the therapy would only work if I took the pads off, so I did.

My heart began to race straight away. I suddenly wondered what I had agreed to. I wanted to get off the couch.

‘Grief and terror are twins,’ she told me. ‘They arrive together. Now . . . I want you to hear nothing except my voice.’

‘I don’t think I’m ready for this,’ I said. ‘I think I should go.’

‘It will help you,’ Uncle told me as I wondered what he had just been saying to Mrs Matsumoto. ‘She is the best in the world.’

Mrs Matsumoto was now whispering something in Japanese. Uncle Alex handed me some info-lenses.

‘You’ll need these,’ he said.

I put them in. The translation soon arrived. ‘Now, listen to me,’ she said. ‘I am picking up all kinds of intensity from inside your mind. You cannot go on like this. You will need to come to terms with what has happened. The only way to get over horror is to face it. The only way you can do this is to think about what happened. To visualize it in your mind. Your body is going to become paralysed, rigid, to intensify the mental activity. I am going to channel all these thought-waves, all this negative neural activity, and you are going to experience all that emotion, all that grief, all at once. But after that you will be able to move on with your life. Now, think about what happened to your parents . . . Think about what you saw . . . Picture your house. Picture her. Picture Alissa—’

How did she know Alissa’s name? I suppose Uncle Alex must have told her. But it unsettled me. And I don’t know what was inside those metal fingertips, but I was rigid, and memories and emotions rose like lava in a volcano. I was suddenly seeing my dad’s office, and Alissa, and my parents. I was feeling it all at once. All that undiluted terror and grief. It felt hot. It felt like I was burning with memory from the inside. It was singeing my parents away from me, like I was losing a limb. And it was too much. I started screaming. Or I tried to scream, but my jaw was locked. I was in total paralysis.

‘Stop it!’ Uncle said to Mrs Matsumoto. ‘It’s not working. You’ve got to stop it. It’s too much for her.’

She took her fingers away. My body was released. I could scream properly, and I did. I screamed too loud, because a moment later there was a knock on the door. I calmed down a little, breathed deep.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Matsumoto,’ Uncle Alex said. ‘We’d better go.’

So we left – me trembling like a pathetic leaf behind Uncle Alex as he opened the door. There were two men standing there. Both wearing long coats. Cloudville gangsters. Twitchy and skinny and wind-blown.

‘We heard some screams,’ said the tallest one. They looked out of their heads on everglows. Suddenly one of them recognized Uncle Alex.

‘If it isn’t the Devil himself! Lord of the Universe. So, how goes the work, King Satan?’

‘Audrey,’ said Uncle Alex. ‘Get in the car. Now. Run.’

But I didn’t. I felt responsible. My scream had alerted them, after all. ‘Please, leave us alone.’

A second later and I was being grabbed around the neck. ‘OK, rich girl, don’t do anything stupid. We don’t want to kill you. We just want a good price for you. You understand? It’s just twenty-second-century capitalism. Anything goes, right? We’re all products, yeah?’

I had a stun-stick pressed against my neck, ready to be triggered if I resisted. But Uncle Alex was quick.

And he had lied.

He hadn’t left the positron in the car. He was holding it in front of him, and within a second the other man had vanished into nonexistence, his matter converted into antimatter. And I was quick too. I elbowed the man who was holding me hard in the gut, and stepped away, leaving Uncle Alex clear to shoot him too, which he did.

So. Two deaths in two seconds.

‘Quick!’ Uncle Alex said, looking down the alleyway for anyone else who might have been watching. ‘The car!’

Someone else
was
watching. Only this wasn’t a human. It wasn’t even an Echo. It was a hulk of old rusted metal, more than three metres tall, with one functional eye – the left one – glowing a dull red in the dark. It had faded identification on its chest: CAL-300. It must have been an old second-hand securidroid – once used by the police or a private security firm but now programmed to protect the two men whose lives had just ended, but I could only see it as a big evil robot thing.

‘
Stop there! You have committed a crime.
’

‘No,’ said Uncle Alex. ‘We haven’t. We acted in self-defence.’

‘Shoot it!’ I told Uncle Alex.

But he fired and missed, and the giant creaking robot let off a laser shot that burned the positron right out of Uncle Alex’s hand; then another, though it was slowing.

‘
Stop . . . you have . . . violated . . .
’

‘Come on! It’s malfunctioning,’ said Uncle Alex, running again. CAL-300 followed us, metal limbs and joints moaning through the wind and rain.

And so I ran, I ran fast, but then the platform shook as CAL-300 fell down with its inhuman weight. The trembling, and that temporary distraction, caused me to slip on the wet platform, sliding until my legs were over the side. Then further. Until there was nothing between me and death except a thousand-metre drop. I grabbed one of the metal posts of the unfinished fence.

Below me, all around, the city glowed in the rain like firefly larvae. Skyscrapers and boats and illuminated magrails and hovering office blocks. Holo-ads flickered like the ghost I could very soon become.

I could have let go. It would have been the simplest way. Just letting go. Whatever I landed on from that height would have killed me in less than a second. Easy. No more pain. No more grief. No more memories of Mum and Dad. (Memories were overrated. Memories were just future sadness stored away.)

But life is a stubborn thing.

‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘Help!’

The post was wet. It was tricky to grip, my palms kept shifting, but I kept my fingers locked. My wrists hurt so much that I thought my hands would tear off.

It would be so easy, so easy, so easy
 . . .

The wind got angrier.

How long was this? A second? Two? Three? It might as well have been hours.

A song came into my head. A song! On the verge of death and there came a song. The Neo Maxis, of course. The one they did with Harlo 57:
Life, she said, is not a breeze / It’s seventy-seven storms at seas / But if you can keep the boat from sinking / It is always worth the pain of thinking
 . . .

If you can keep the boat from sinking
 . . .

‘Help! Uncle Alex! Help!’

The wind was a gale. I swayed in it. The wind wanted me to die. But I was not going to die.

He was there. Uncle Alex. Standing there. Just a black rain-streaked shape. He came close, helped me.

‘It’s OK, Audrey. I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you . . .’

His words pulled me up almost as much as his arms.

It was a struggle – he wasn’t quite as big or strong as my dad – but he did it. And we got into the car and drove away fast, before any more Cloudville gangsters or second-hand securidroids could bother us.

I now knew three things. I was nowhere near coming to terms with my parents’ death. I was unable to solve that problem by killing myself. And the third thing? That I should really give Uncle Alex the benefit of any doubt.

‘I shouldn’t have taken you there,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. I felt a deep emptiness inside me. It was hard to describe. It was almost like guilt, a guilt caused by things happening to me while my parents were dead. But for a moment, back there on the platform, amid all that horrifying adventure, I hadn’t felt depressed at all. Maybe that was the only way to handle grief: to be in a constant state of peril. Maybe the only way to return to life was to be next to death.

I put the neuropads back on.

Instantly, the raging swirl of my mind settled. Uncle Alex said something about how I really should try not to wear them.

‘I’m not a saint,’ he said as we parked high above his house. ‘But I am determined to look after you. Listen, something untoward has come up. Tomorrow I have to go somewhere on business, just to visit a warehouse, but it will only be for the day. Other than that I’ll be here. You won’t be in the house on your own.’

I remembered what he had told me.
I will be staying at home for the next week or so. I’m not leaving the house, I promise.

I felt worried. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Paris.’

Paris.

I remembered my mother taking me swimming in the best pool in Europe. Saturday mornings that would never return.

The leviboard lowered us towards the lawn. The Echos were still out gardening. Uncle Alex looked at me and said: ‘You honestly don’t have to worry about them. My vision – the Castle vision – is to make humans achieve all we can achieve, while making the world
safer
. I know you can’t imagine that Echos could make anything safer, but potentially they can . . . Sempura, well, they are run by mad people. Totally crazy. The bosses . . . all they care about is their vision. They want to create Echos that are more advanced than humans, basically, and in doing so they take all kinds of risks. All kinds. Lina Sempura herself, well, she’s crazy. Do you know what her first job was?’

‘No.’