Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  ‘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.

  13

  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.

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

  But it was over in a flash. T
he 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 pres
sed 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.