Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  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.

  The car stopped suddenly, right next to a leviboard, the largest I had ever seen. The door raised and I got out of the car. Even if I had wanted to escape, there was no way. The leviboard was about ten metres above ground level.

  As the board descended, I saw Uncle Alex and the little figure of ten-year-old Iago, out on the sprawling driveway in front of the vast white nineteenth-century limestone house, striped with state-of-the-art rain funnels. Not an Echo in sight.

  It must have taken about five seconds for the leviboard to reach the ground. And then I was there, with Uncle Alex, whether I liked it or not. Of course, I could have started running right then. But Echos would be sent to chase me, and bring me down. That thought alone would have kept me in place, but I had no energy to carry out such a plan, even if I’d had the inclination.

  As I stepped onto the drive, I felt a sudden weakness, as though my body was too frail a container for all the terror inside it. I closed my eyes but saw nothing except blood.

  My uncle came over, arms outstretched, ready to offer me a hug, but before he got there I had already collapsed on the gravel.

  8

  When I woke up I was lying on a leather sofa, by a fire, with a warm blanket over me. I saw Uncle Alex’s face staring down at me. Again, for a moment it was Dad. They looked very similar, though Uncle Alex was four years younger and more tanned. The same black hair (hair I had inherited) and distinctive features – the long classical nose (another inheritance), the angular face, the eyes shining with intelligence; but Uncle Alex was smarter looking than Dad, wore more expensive clothes, took more gene supplements, and that dark hair was slicked back rather than dishevelled like Dad’s. Plus, Uncle Alex smiled and Dad rarely smiled. And Dad never wore jewellery, while Uncle had a lot of expensive rings. You could tell they were expensive because they had continually shifting engravings.

  Iago was standing behind him. His dark curls formed a heavy fringe which his face hid behind like a spy in the bushes.

  ‘Don’t worry. You’re OK,’ Uncle Alex said.

  I watched as he glanced at someone behind him, someone older than Iago. A tall, too-perfect boy of about my age, blond and pale, with smooth unblemished skin, staring at me intensely.

  ‘Go!’ barked Uncle, his sudden change of tone a jolt through me. And then I realized what should have been obvious. It was confirmed by the E on the back of the left hand.

  The boy wasn’t a boy at all.

  He was an Echo.

  And with that knowledge I began to panic, and saw those eyes staring at me as the eyes of a killer; and I thought of my dad’s upturned hand and my mum’s lifeless face, and I felt my heart pound as if there was no other part of me, as if my head and arms and stomach were part of one terrified heart. And although that Echo must have only stood there for a second or two, it was enough to cause the air to thin and for me to scream out for my parents. And then at the Echo. ‘You killed them! You killed them!’

  My uncle looked furious now, and shouted even louder at the Echo. ‘Get out of here, Daniel, you’re agitating her! Get out this instant!’

  The Echo left, and to try and calm my mind I focused on Iago’s ten-year-old face, a face that I hadn’t seen up close since he was a toddler. It was a cute face, with dopey wide-apart eyes and cherub cheeks, but I found no comfort there. In fact, he was smiling at me, and it was a kind of devilish smile, so I looked at the fire, but when you are in that kind of state you can see all kinds of things in flickering flames.

  ‘You’re dry now. The fire’s on and we put the heating up. It’s going to be OK, Audrey. I’ve called the police, and you probably know from your fa—’ He stopped himself.

  He wiped a tear from his eye. He was sad for himself as well as for me, I believe that. After all, he had lost his brother. A brother he might not have got on well with, but a brother none the less.

  ‘Nothing can hurt you here. We’ve upped our security recently, since some protests against me. Intelligent plants in the back garden. And sensor-activated Echo hounds . . . With police officers on permanent guard outside the front.’

  He composed himself. Looked at the rings on his fingers. ‘I am a powerful man, Audrey. And power is overrated. It brings more problems than it does solutions, but it is advantageous at times like this. Friends in high places . . . As you may know, the dark ages are over. Don’t listen to all the rumours. The police are the most efficient they have ever been. We fund them, you see. Castle. I fund them. The business funds them. And they will look into this, and examine why there was a malfunction with that Echo . . . Of course, at some point you might have to talk to them, but let us not worry about that at this moment. Right now, our priority is you. You need to rest, and then tomorrow you will need to get checked out. I know a very good specialist. Human, you’ll be pleased to hear . . .’

  His voice trailed away.

  I could no longer hear what he was saying. I could just hear the word ‘Echo’ over and over.

  ‘I can’t stay here. I shouldn’t be here. I need to get out. I have to get out.’

  If I had been a little more aware, I would have appreciated the irony of Uncle Alex, the man who – more than anyone else – had been responsible for the widespread adoption of Echos among the fifth of the population who could afford them, and within every business in Europe, comforting me and telling me that everything was going to be all right.

  No.

  I wasn’t thinking about irony.

  I was too busy staring at a painting on the wall.

  A vast canvas, depicting a row of naked women, some of whose faces were covered with masks – the kind that would once have been worn by tribal chieftains in Africa.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’ Uncle Alex’s question somehow made it through my panic.

  Not that I was able to answer him, and on a normal day I would have known that I was looking at Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted nearly two hundred years ago, in 1909, one of the most artistically ground-breaking pieces of art ever. Though I’d had no idea that my uncle owned it.

  ‘That is the third most expensive painting in the entire world,’ he said.

  My dad was right. Uncle Alex really did care a lot about money. But that wasn’t what was bothering me. It was those naked bodies with the tribal masks that were coming out of the painting and into the room towards me.

  I closed my eyes, but there was no escape.

  Just my dead parents lying th
ere, and Alissa holding the knife.

  It was the most horrific joke in the universe – my dad, who loved old-fashioned things, being murdered alongside Mum in the most brutal and old-fashioned way possible. And when a joke is powerful enough, you don’t laugh, you scream. Yes, when the mask slips, you scream out loud for all the terror in the world, and I screamed then. I screamed as Iago stood silently watching; as my uncle touched my arm, offering useless comfort.

  Then Uncle Alex stood up. ‘Wait there a moment.’

  He left the room.

  It was just me and Iago.

  He was wearing spray-on nano-weave overalls. A skin-clinger. He saw me looking at the clothes, and then he put his hood up and pulled a flap down over his face. A second later he, and his outfit, had disappeared completely.

  Of course, if I had been a bit more with it I’d have realized it was invisiwear, and that all that had happened was that Iago had switched his clothes to projection mode, so that the nano-cameras within the fabric were recording images of the room and projecting them onto the clothes so perfectly that you couldn’t tell which was room and which was projection. I had never seen invisiwear that was so effective. So in my delirium I was wondering where he had gone, and then, suddenly:

  ‘Boo!’ His face appeared out of nowhere, right in front of me. So close I could smell the strawberry chews on his breath. He laughed. I thought he might not have known what had happened. He was only ten. Maybe he didn’t understand.

  Yeah, maybe.

  In a cold voice, he told me that he had a full supply of the best can-based spray-on invisiwear in the world; it sprayed cotton fibres full of tiny nanoscreens and cameras to make himself invisible. He said I would never be able to tell if I was alone or not.

  He moved back, away from me.

  You couldn’t hate a ten-year-old. Or at least, that is what I used to think.

  9

  Last summer we’d been involved in a car accident. Me, Mum, Dad. At the time that had been my scariest life moment.

  My main memory is of my mother screaming. We were on our way back from a holiday in Fiji – the last of the Pacific islands (apart from Hawaii) not to be submerged under the ocean.

  Dad didn’t do simulated holidays. He always wanted to go to real places. Mum did too, to be fair. And it had been a good holiday. Mum and Dad hadn’t rowed. The weather was good. We scuba-dived and saw the coral reefs. The locals were friendly. Getting back, the plan was to take the magrail to Australia, then one of the new super-fast routes from Sydney to London. After about one minute our cranky old Alpha Glide started to grumble.

  ‘We are going too fast,’ it told us. ‘We are going over 20,000 miles an hour.’

  That did seem pretty fast.

  ‘Advise you to force manual slow-down.’

  Manual slow-downs were dangerous, obviously. Because cars travelled at the same speed on magrails. Yet even though the car came with the gravitational counter setting to make it feel like we were travelling at one thousandth of our actual speed, it had still felt far too damn fast. And then it happened. The dip, like being on a rollercoaster. The car we were travelling in fell a hundred metres. Magnetism failure. A car too old for the rail it was on.

  So yeah. We fell fast through the air. Me and Mum were safe as we were in the back, on the passenger seats. But this was an old car. Turn of the century. There was no security function if you weren’t in your seat. And Dad had been climbing forward to use the manual brake.

  ‘Leo!’ Mum had screamed. The scream made it clear that Mum loved Dad more than anyone had loved anyone. Loving you proved quite a shock / But under separate buildings there’s one piece of rock (Neo Maxis).

  The car had hit the water hard, and Dad screamed on impact. I had never heard him scream in pain before.

  ‘Dad!’ I shouted as the car carried on sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said, but he wasn’t OK. His legs had been crushed, his torso was twisted. But despite the pain Dad had been aware enough to press his thumb down on the control panel – the red triangle – and send out an emergency signal, and the Australian aqua-ambulance reached the vehicle before we had run out of oxygen.

  For a year I kept remembering things from the accident. Just images. The rush of bubbles outside. The darkness of the ocean. Mum trying to fight the cushion of air that had protected her as she reached for Dad. Me doing the same. Bright blue torches shining through the darkness. Dad’s face, screaming from two kinds of pain at once.

  Dad was sent to the hospital in Sydney. He couldn’t move from the waist down. That was the big thing.

  Course, nine out of ten such cases are fixed with nanosurgery. Dad had hated the idea of that because he hated nano-anything. ‘It’s madness! It’s bad enough trying to keep up with technology you can see, let alone the stuff you can’t.’ But if he didn’t want to be paraplegic he wasn’t left with much choice. The surgery was mostly successful, but his right leg kept on causing him pain, and he had to walk with a stick and take painkillers.

  Grandma stayed with us for a bit, at the start, when Dad had to rest a lot of the time. Dad tried to be friendly to her face, but to me and Mum he grumbled that she should go back to the moon and write her silly books. Dad was getting cross about everything. He grew a beard.

  ‘We need an Echo,’ said Mum. ‘Not just for Audrey’s education, but for us. Look, you are doing too much around the house; I can see you’re in pain. It’s not fair on you. Everyone has Echos these days. I know you write stuff against them, but you write stuff against immersion pods and we have them. And we can’t carry on relying on that stupid robot from the 2050s.’

  The stupid robot from the 2050s was Travis (Tailored Robotic Artificial Vision-enabled Intelligent Servant). He was the size of a man, but looked nothing like one. He was made of various plastics and metals and powered by a lithium-ion battery that needed recharging every night. He’d been used too much recently, and now every time he was switched on he moved in the wrong direction and said the name of vegetables over and over.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, trying to calm her down.

  ‘I’m just worried that when I’m back at work I won’t have much time and we’ll need extra hands. They don’t cost much nowadays. Under a thousand unidollars. Cheaper than the replacement car we’ve just had to buy.’

  For a while Dad said nothing; just sat on the edge of his bed, wincing. Somewhere in the background Travis was saying the word ‘kale’ on repeat.

  Dad’s thumb bounced on his lip. He scratched his black beard. Then he looked at me. However cross he got, he always tended to look at me with soft eyes. ‘Audrey, what do you think? We’re a democracy in this house. So you have the deciding vote. If you say we should have an Echo, we’ll get an Echo.’

  ‘I think . . .’ I said slowly, and almost to my own surprise. ‘I think we should get an Echo.’

  He nodded. Tried to smile. ‘Only if it’s a Sempura! I’m not going to fuel my brother’s megalomania.’

  Mum smiled. ‘We’ll get a Sempura. Don’t worry.’

  And a tiny bit of me sank, like a car in an ocean.

  I was finding it hard to breathe.

  I had never realized it before – the link between love and air. When people you love leave you, they take the air with them. Or some of it. That’s what it feels like, anyway.

  I only had one thought. The wish that I was dead.

  I wish I was dead too, because the dead don’t feel pain. Or guilt. This was all my fault. I said yes to the Echo. I had the casting vote and I said yes.

  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 schoo
l. 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.

  10

  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.