Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  Then:

  Outside a door, made of a metal that blurred my reflection. My avatar’s reflection which, as it looked pretty much exactly like me, was almost the same thing. An automated voice came from a primitive-looking voice reader beside the door. ‘Who is calling please?’

  I felt an overwhelming sense of dread, remembering why I was here. ‘My name is Audrey . . . Audrey Castle.’

  There was a gap of a few seconds.

  The last time I had spoken to Grandma, we had talked about books. Grandma is a novelist. She is quite well known. She wrote detective stories set in Frankfurt in the 2060s, just before the introduction of robotic police officers. She had told me she was thinking of writing a new series set on the moon.

  ‘A crime series about New Hope,’ she had said. ‘My publisher thinks it is an unromantic thing to write about. Echos and mining companies and old hermits like me. But there’s a lot more than that going on up here on the moon . . . You see, everyone here – I mean, every human here – is escaping from something. The rich adventurers who flock here because they want to live dangerously, and even the workers who signed up for the construction jobs building apartments in the suburb in the north of the city, Aldrin, knowing all the risks. It can feel primitive, sure, like the pioneer country of the ancient Wild West, but it’s exciting. I do wish you would come here. If your parents don’t want to, fine, fine, I know they’re Earth-loving traditionalists. Your mum couldn’t leave quickly enough when she came. She said it was “culturally suffocating”, whatever that meant. I know they worry about the crime rate and claim that artificial air is unhealthy. I know they hate too many Echos, blah blah blah, but you’re a growing woman. You’re fifteen. You can drive, you can vote, you can live on your own at fifteen . . .’

  I loved Grandma.

  I had always thought it was fun to have a wild relative, and I always looked forward to her summer visits.

  But of course, she didn’t answer the door.

  An Echo did.

  A large muscular male – over two metres tall – designed to look about twenty years old. I took a deep breath.

  He beckoned me in, and I walked along a nondescript white corridor and entered a large but basically furnished apartment with three Echos standing in three of the corners of the room, one more at my grandma’s feet, giving her a foot massage, and another standing behind, rubbing his hands through her wild turquoise hair to massage her scalp.

  I’m not here, I told myself. The Echos can’t hurt me.

  I walked over, dreading the moment when she noticed the hologram coming towards her. And I wished I was still wearing the neuropads.

  The Echo who had beckoned me inside spoke, his voice making me jump. ‘There is a visitor for you, Imogen. It is Audrey Castle. Your granddaughter.’

  She looked up at me and instantly smiled broadly. ‘Audrey! Wow, it’s you.’

  ‘Hello, Grandma.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She fluttered her hands, gesturing for the two Echos who were currently massaging her to leave her alone. It took her a moment to stand up, and I remembered Dad saying that fake gravity has a negative impact on bone strength. I tried to speak but I couldn’t. Outside, I heard distant screaming.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, sweetheart. There’s always something happening here. That’s what makes it interesting.’ Grandma was wearing a large woollen kaftan and had a transparent jar full of small glowing golden capsules around her neck. Her eyes were wide, which – coupled with her turquoise hair – made her look quite crazy.

  ‘Right, well,’ I said eventually. A hologram with a racing heart. ‘Grandma, I’ve got something to tell you. It’s about—’

  Grandma didn’t seem to be listening. She seemed happily mesmerized by the sight of me. Just as I was quite mesmerized by the sight of her. I hadn’t seen her since last year, when she had come to help us after the car accident. Grandma was a hundred years old, but looked younger because of the everglows. Dad said she looked like a fortune teller from the nineteenth century. To my dad’s disgust she had taken everglows for a long time – as long as Dad had known her (twenty-six years), and maybe even before.

  Everglows were controversial. They were an anti-ageing drug that you could buy across the counter if you were over seventy. But lots of people younger than that bought them and just took them for fun, as a drug, and got addicted. I don’t know if Grandma was addicted. Obviously Dad had thought she was. Dad had also told me that Mum thought she was irresponsible, and that she’d had affairs during her marriage to every one of her seven husbands (including husband number three, my granddad, who had died when the tsunami hit the west coast of Ireland in 2080). He told me this when I was seven. My dad really didn’t hold back when it came to Grandma.

  In fact, she looked younger than she had done even last year. It was weird.

  Breathe in for five, breathe out for five . . .

  ‘Oh, Audrey . . . This is all very state-of-the-art for you, I must say! Look at you – it’s almost like you’re here. It feels like you are actually in the room walking about. It must be one of those new pods I’ve heard about. The ones your uncle is going to make billions selling. I can’t believe your dad actually agreed to get one. It’s very un-him, I must say. I tried contacting your mum earlier but there was no response. I was a bit worried . . . I don’t know . . . I had this weird feeling . . .’

  This was not going well.

  ‘Dad didn’t get a new pod.’ Say it, say it, say it . . . ‘I’m not at home, Grandma.’

  ‘What do you mean you’re not at home?’

  ‘I’m at Uncle Alex’s.’

  This really shocked her. It was like she knew something was very, very wrong.

  Say it . . .

  ‘Grandma, they’ve been mur—’ I was about to say murdered. But was it murder? Alissa was sub-human. A robot made flesh. If someone gets killed by a lion or a robot, the word is killed. I did not want to raise Alissa up. So I corrected myself. ‘They’ve been . . . killed.’ And saying it made me cry. The tears felt real. I was crying real tears and ghost tears all at once.

  It felt good in a strange kind of way, a release. I wanted to cry for ever, but I had to try and keep myself together for Grandma, who was staring at me as if I wasn’t really there at all – which of course I wasn’t; as though she couldn’t see anything, as if the horror of what I had said had made everything disappear. She didn’t cry. She just kind of sank in on herself.

  ‘No. No. What are you saying?’

  I told her again. And then a third time.

  ‘Killed? I don’t understand. What do you mean? What by? Who by?’

  I looked around. There were six Echos in this room. They were all looking at me with neutral faces. I was terrified of saying it, but Grandma needed the truth.

  ‘By the Echo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After you stayed with us we got an Echo.’

  ‘Yes. Your mother said. Alissa?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you are saying she killed your mum?’

  ‘And Dad,’ I said.

  ‘This is wrong. You are wrong. You are wrong. Audrey, you are wrong.’ She said this for quite a while. ‘Echos don’t malfunction.’

  ‘This one did.’

  It took her a while. Maybe half an hour. But eventually she absorbed it.

  ‘Lorna, Lorna, Lorna,’ she said, her voice fading. ‘My . . . poor . . . Lorna . . .’ Her eyes suddenly seemed distant. Like she was staring all the way to death itself. But she kept switching. From manic to over-calm to manic again. She kept trying to hug me. I felt the simulation of a hug, but she felt nothing. She kept slipping straight through.

  She took some of those glowing capsules from their container and swallowed them. I got a close-up view of the label.

  They weren’t just average everglows, they were 4-glows.

  They were four times as strong. This version of everglows had been banned on Earth because of stran
ge side-effects. No one took these for anti-ageing any more. They took them to feel high.

  ‘My happy pills aren’t working,’ she said after a few of them. She sounded desperate. And kept on repeating it. ‘They’re not working, they’re not working, they’re not working . . .’

  The Echo who had been massaging her foot – a woman with a short dark bob and pronounced cheekbones – spoke up. ‘You have had six capsules. That is your daily limit, Mistress. You told me to tell you that.’

  ‘Oh, Chonticha, damn my daily limit,’ said Grandma, and she kept on taking them. Her hands were trembling wildly. Her whole body seemed to be trembling. At first I thought it might be something wrong with the immersion footage, but it wasn’t. Everything else was perfectly still except poor Grandma.

  ‘My daughter’s just died,’ she wailed to the Echos. ‘Do any of you have any idea what it is like to lose someone you love? Of course you don’t. Because you can’t love. Because you have no feelings, do you? You have no’ – she paused, right there, took a breath and spat out that word again, louder and longer this time – ‘feelings!’

  She popped two more capsules into her mouth.

  I could see the glow through her cheeks, and then – fainter – down her neck as she swallowed them.

  She went over to the Echo with the bob. Chonticha. ‘You killed my daughter,’ she said, and slapped her.

  ‘Grandma,’ I said. ‘Please. Come on. Try some deep breathing.’

  ‘Deep breathing! Don’t give me that yoga craperola! She killed my daughter!’

  ‘I did not kill your daughter,’ Chonticha said matter of factly. And then Grandma slapped her again. I told her she needed neuropads, but she didn’t know what they were. She was hardly listening. She was looking at me with the wildest wide eyes I have ever seen.

  ‘Audrey, listen to me – you have to come here, darling. You have to live here. Here in New Hope. You can come here.’

  Dad’s voice: Audrey, promise me, when you are older don’t give up on Earth unless you have to.

  Grandma came right up to me and spoke in a voice that made me wonder if she was insane. ‘Worker shuttles leave every night. You don’t even need any money . . . You just need to go through an ID check . . . Listen, sweetheart, wait there, wait right there . . .’ She left the room. She seemed quicker on her feet now. Maybe it was the pills. Maybe they stopped the pain.

  I had a bit of a panic attack, suddenly left alone with all those Echos.

  ‘Would you like a drink, houseguest Audrey?’ one of them asked me, in a typically blank Echo voice. The muscle man. The one who had brought me into the room.

  ‘No, no . . . I’m OK.’

  ‘Then maybe a little conversation? My name is Herman. What are your favourite hobbies?’

  ‘Seriously, I’m fine. Fine. Just, like, please—’

  ‘You sound agitated, houseguest,’ said another, a female, from the corner. She was standing next to one of the only objects in the room, a replica of a cactus plant. She had a high beehive hairstyle.

  ‘I’m fine. Please.’

  ‘Your voice indicates a tightness of the vocal cords within the larynx,’ said a third, the one who’d been kneading Grandma’s scalp. ‘You need to think relaxing thoughts, houseguest.’

  I closed my eyes. ‘Grandma,’ I shouted. ‘Grandma! Where are you?’

  She came back into the room. She was smiling now. She seemed completely off her head on everglows. She was holding a cat. A large fluffy Persian cat. ‘She’s called Lucy Brooks. You know, after the American president. I think it’s a good name for a cat. I wish you could stay here. I wish you could stroke her – properly, I mean.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ I explained, in a whisper. ‘I’m scared of Echos.’

  ‘Echos are nothing to be scared of, sweetheart. They are just machines. Machines can go wrong. If someone had a car crash, they’d still get in a car again. And Uncle Alex has Echos.’

  ‘But you just hit one of your Echos . . .’

  She seemed confused. ‘Did I, darling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Uncle Alex has Echos,’ she said. I don’t think she realized she was repeating herself.

  I thought of Daniel. I thought of the checkmate incident. ‘I don’t see them. Not really. He says he is going to keep them on a different floor.’

  ‘That’s nice of him,’ she said. She didn’t seem to mean it. I noticed that her hands weren’t shaking any more. ‘Poor Lorna,’ she said. ‘Darling, darling, darling little Lorna . . . in that little red smock she wore to kindergarten . . .’

  I was worried about her. It would have been better if she had been crying – even howling – on the floor. But the way she was acting was beyond that. Maybe if you were sad enough, you pushed right through to the other side and found yourself at the opposite end. Or maybe she had simply taken too many everglows. Through her smock I could see the glow spreading across her chest, all the way to her shoulders.

  ‘You could come and stay with Uncle Alex.’

  It was as though I had slapped her face. ‘No. No, I would never do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  There was more screaming outside. The fast whisper of gunfire. Grandma didn’t seem bothered. Neither was I, right then. I just wanted to know what Grandma had to say.

  ‘Alex and . . . and . . . and your dad. It is something your mum told me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  But she wasn’t able to answer. She was looking glazed behind the eyes. ‘What, darling?’

  ‘You were going to say something, Grandma.’

  ‘Was I? Was it about Oxford?’

  ‘Oxford?’

  ‘Oxford University. You’re nearly sixteen. It’s coming up.’

  ‘Grandma—’

  She remembered. Tragedy flashed across her face.

  ‘You look like your mum did.’ She burst out laughing. ‘You look exactly like her.’

  I had no idea why this was funny.

  But then she started to cry.

  An Echo came up to me. The one with the bob. Chonticha. ‘You are distressing my mistress. Please leave her alone.’

  Then the other Echos started coming towards me. ‘You are distressing our mistress. Please leave her alone.’

  I panicked. This is not real. I am not here.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Grandma said. ‘She’s not going to hurt me.’ And then to me, in a whisper: ‘They’re all second-hand.’

  ‘Grandma, are you going to be OK?’

  She tapped the remaining everglows. ‘Yes, yes . . .’

  ‘Now, think, is there anything you wanted to tell me, Grandma? Anything I should know? About Dad and—’

  Something began to happen to the room.

  A darkness began to leak into the floor. One of the Echos disappeared, then another; the fake cactus was swallowed up too, and the cat, and then it was just Grandma, against nothing at all, and she was still talking.

  ‘Grandma! Grandma! I can’t hear you! I don’t know what’s happening! There must be something wrong with the connection.’

  That was it.

  Grandma’s kaftan and turquoise hair and fearful face melted away, like a dream or a nightmare dissolving into the dark of sleep, until it was just her silent mouth calling my name.

  And then nothing.

  Nothing except the darkness of the mind-reader.

  17

  I thought I could hear something. Outside the pod.

  And then, when the pod door had opened, I realized there was no one in my room. But I still heard footsteps – out on the landing this time.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was no answer. So I ran across to the door, and peered out to see Uncle Alex walking towards the vast elegant staircase.

  ‘Uncle Alex,’ I said.

  He stopped. Turned. He was smiling, but looked confused. ‘Audrey? What’s the matter? How did it go with your grandma?’

  ‘I lost the connection.’

  ‘Oh, tha
t’s weird. But it’s a brand-new pod. The most advanced there is. Let’s try again.’

  Something.

  Something right there.

  The way he said it. I wouldn’t have noticed with the neuropads on, but without them, yes, there was a trace of something in his voice – I don’t know what exactly – but something that sharpened my suspicion.

  We tried again. Just blackness.

  ‘Teething problems,’ he said. I thought: There are a lot of teething problems around here. ‘Don’t worry. It will right itself in a while. Do you want to try a different pod?’

  I thought of the Echos, and of Grandma, acting crazy on her ever-glows. ‘No. No. It’s . . . it’s OK.’

  I felt sorry for Grandma, but I didn’t think it would ever be possible for me to live on the moon. I had hardly been able to cope with it as a hologram.

  It was here or nowhere.

  18

  Later that evening Iago came in to ask if he could use my immersion pod. Apparently mine accessed different hologames or something, and was more up to date.

  But before he went in, he looked at some of my books from home which Madara had placed in neat piles on the table. They sat directly under the Matisse painting. He picked them up, one by one. They were mostly ancient (except for my Neo Maxis holo-book), and this – combined with the fact that they were, well, books – made him treat them as if they were weird objects from some alien planet. ‘Withering . . . Wuthering Heights . . . The Catcher in the Rye . . . Romeo and Juliet . . . Frankenstein . . . Twenty-First-Century Philosophy . . . Jane Ey-re . . .’ He dropped them on the table in a haphazard fashion, making no attempt to put them back in a pile.

  Dad had once written that, The more dependent we get on Echos, the more uncivilized we will become.

  Dad, I love you. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.

  I was calmer. My neuropads were on. So I decided to try and start a proper conversation. I mean, this was the first time I had been properly alone with Iago, so I thought I might as well take advantage of the fact.

  It wasn’t easy. But I felt that if I was to understand a bit more about Uncle Alex, and the Echos in this house, I could do worse than to start with Iago.