by Matt Haig
‘But that wasn’t a random copy,’ I said as I saw the crumpled Castle Watch newsletter fly past the window, and higher still into the sky. ‘That was her. That was the same Alissa I thought I had terminated.’
He ordered the car to head back to London.
We travelled fast this time. The greenhouses and floodlands and wind farms dissolved into the same blur. ‘Yes it was. Because, as I have said, I want to know exactly what happened. Your dad was also my brother. I owe it to him – and to you, and to your mum – to make sure that nothing like this happens again. So I had people go to the house – to your old house – and drag her out of the water and bring her there.’
‘But what about the police? What about the investigation?’
‘Don’t worry. The police have seen her. And listen, I wanted to get hold of that Echo before Sempura got to her, and started a cover-up. Anyway, don’t worry about that.’ He smiled a caring smile. I had expected him to be cross with me for following him, but he wasn’t. This confused me.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we have a chance here – a chance for your parents’ deaths not to have been in vain. Information is a weapon. And I want to do everything to make sure we know exactly what happened. You understand?’
We were nearly home. I looked at Uncle Alex and didn’t really know who I was looking at. Was he bad or was he good – or was he like most of humanity, hovering somewhere in between?
‘Yes,’ I said as the car stopped. ‘I do.’
21
Hours later, Uncle Alex went into his pod for a meeting. I decided to take advantage of this and explore the house. I went downstairs. In the hallway I walked past a hologram of a unicorn and into the grand lobby. Iago wasn’t around. But Echos were. There was a female one I hadn’t seen before. She was polishing an antique chest and looked at me with blank eyes.
I walked on through the lobby, past more holo-sculptures and expensive furniture. There were a couple of Echos in the kitchen, preparing food. I walked straight past and turned right into a dark narrow corridor, and began to feel a bit more nervous as I realized I was heading towards the Echo quarters.
There was no one there.
The first door I came to was locked. Like most of the doors in this house, it had an old-fashioned door handle you could turn and push. Which I did. But then I felt a hand grip my arm.
‘Stop,’ said a voice. I turned and saw him. The blond one. Daniel. He stared at me intensely – nothing like the stare of the one who had been polishing the old chest.
It was then that I began to panic, and pulled away from him.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe. Does your uncle know?’
‘No.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I . . . I don’t know.’ But as I said it, I realized exactly what I was doing here and what I was looking for. I was looking for him. He was the one who had tried to break into my room in the middle of the night. And I wanted to know why. But then he grabbed my arm again, tighter this time. It hurt. And he pulled me further along the dark corridor. Now I was scared. He seemed stronger than Alissa. If that hand was around my neck, it could have killed me in a second.
‘Help!’ I screamed. Even though the moment you scream help, you sound and feel more like a victim.
His hand was over my mouth. ‘Shut up,’ he said.
I ignored him and tried to scream again, but it was muffled now. Just a blunt noise. We reached the last door in the corridor, and he turned the handle and opened it. Pushed me inside. Shut the door. It was a bare room. Nothing but a wooden bed without a mattress, and a sink, and a small square window.
‘Don’t scream,’ he said. ‘I am not going to hurt you. I promise.’
I had no idea if I should believe him.
‘Why did you climb up to my window, that first night I was here? Why?’
‘I wanted to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘I wanted to tell you about how I was made. And who made me.’
‘Why did you want to tell me that?’
‘Because it would explain things. It would explain why I am not like the others. It would also explain about . . .’ He hesitated mid-sentence. This was odd. I mean, Echos never hesitated mid-sentence. ‘About why I feel guilty.’
‘You can’t feel guilty. You’re a machine.’
His eyes did a good imitation of looking hurt. He started to talk quietly. ‘Do you think I am an automaton?’
‘An automaton? What, like an android? Yes! You’re an Echo. Enhanced Computerized Humanoid Organism. You can’t feel guilt. You’re tricking me. I want to go.’
‘A machine without feelings? And can I bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?’
He looked at me with anger in his eyes. It felt real, that anger. And then I realized that his words sounded familiar.
‘That’s from a book.’
He nodded. ‘It’s from one of yours. Jane Eyre. Your books were brought down here before they were taken up to your room. Your uncle wanted to have all your stuff checked.’
‘Checked? He never told me that.’
I had never had a conversation with an Echo before. Sure, Alissa had given me lessons and spoken to me a lot, but that had been different. That had been like interacting with a living computer. Everything had felt logical. But there was nothing logical about talking to Daniel.
He frowned deeply, as if in pain. I had a strange urge to comfort him. I wanted to touch his arm and tell him it was OK. I didn’t, of course, but the urge was there.
‘And why were you reading my books? Who told you to do that?’
‘No one told me to do that.’
‘But why would an Echo read a book unless someone had told them to?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I like reading. I enjoy it. It helps me escape. In my head, I mean.’
‘But that makes no sense.’
‘Not everything does.’
His head turned sharply, like an animal. I followed his eyes towards the door. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said.
I couldn’t hear anything, but I vaguely knew that Echo hearing was a lot more powerful than the human kind.
‘Listen,’ he said, coming close to me and speaking in a hushed voice. ‘Alissa was meant to kill you too. She was meant to kill your whole family. To make it clean. But it didn’t happen like that. You survived . . .’ He stopped a moment. Listened. ‘They’re sixteen metres away, getting closer.’
I heard it now too. Footsteps.
‘You are in danger here,’ he said.
‘But how can I trust you? For all I know, you could be about to malfunction and kill me too.’
He shook his head, impatient, but there was a softness in his eyes that was almost human. ‘If I wanted you dead, you would be dead, wouldn’t you? And trust me, there was never any malfunction. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan was you. You were tougher than he thought.’
‘Alissa was female.’
I could feel his breath on me. It was warm. Of course it was. Echos may have been artificial, but they were biological. They were given bones and blood and hearts and breath. Their brains may have had hardware in them, their blood may have had different minerals in it, their muscles may have been ten times more efficient, but they were still breathing bodies.
‘You have to go.’ I thought he meant I had to get out of the room, but it was too late for that.
The door opened. An Echo male stood there, staring at me with cold eyes. It was one of the ones that had been working in the kitchen. He was completely hairless, like most kitchen Echos.
‘What is occurring?’ he asked.
‘I – er – I—’
But Daniel was quick with the right excuse, and even adopted a cool and even Echo voice, quite different to the one he had used with me. ‘Hello, Thomas. The human girl had lost one of her books and wondered if it was down here.’
‘She knew Madara had collected her books. And she knew Madara was an Echo, so she headed to the Echo quarters.’
Thomas stood there, looking at me with wide eyes. He didn’t blink. ‘So why is she in your room and not Madara’s?’
‘I don’t know my way around,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve never been in this bit of the house before.’
‘What level of risk would you give this situation?’ Thomas asked Daniel.
‘I would give it a zero. There is no risk. The human girl is Mr Castle’s niece.’
Thomas nodded. Then to me he said, ‘I will escort you back to the human area.’
I looked up and Daniel gave me the smallest of nods, indicating that I should go with Thomas.
‘I hope you find your book,’ Daniel said to me, in role, as I left the room. ‘I hear page 206 is particularly good.’
Thomas didn’t hold my arm as we headed back to ‘the human area’, as he’d called it, but even so I didn’t feel any safer.
‘Enjoy your evening,’ he said, with all the passion of a refrigerator.
I walked back through the lobby, alone, passing the Echo polishing the chest and seeing a couple more guarding the front door. For the first time I felt like I was being kept not in a friendly house but in a kind of prison.
Page 206? I wondered. What does that mean?
I had no idea. But as I climbed that old staircase, I began to realize that Daniel, the most mysterious Echo I had ever seen, held the key to everything.
Daniel. Mind-log 1.
Remember
1
The thing burning into my shoulder caused me a significant amount of pain.
My arms were strapped tight. I was in some kind of a container. My body was in thick clear liquid, right up to my neck.
The liquid was rising slowly. It was now touching my chin.
At first this was a passive observation, and one made without knowing such words as ‘liquid’ and ‘chin’.
But slowly there came an instinct.
(This is what I have discovered. Before thought, before knowledge, there is instinct. It is the root of everything.)
And the instinct I had was:
Panic.
Without understanding why, I felt I had to get out of there. I pulled desperately on the straps. I screamed. The scream was not a word. I did not scream ‘Help!’ – I would have, if I’d known to do so, but I didn’t. The scream was just noise. A desperate roar that gave me enough strength for my arms, then legs, to break free of their constraints.
That is when I started banging on the side of the tank.
I kept banging and screaming until I heard something that wasn’t a bang or a scream.
The sound was coming from outside. I think there was a sense of relief that there was an outside, and that the whole world wasn’t confined to a tank full of ever-rising liquid.
Something was opening the tank. Something, someone – whatever. Maybe the tank was opening itself, but the key fact – the only important fact – was that the tank opened and I fell a short distance onto hard ground.
I was in a vast space. It was still an enclosed space, but it was many, many times larger than the tank. There was no liquid here, either. Only what had arrived with me, which was now being absorbed into the floor.
I looked back from where I had come.
The tank.
A white oval attached to the ceiling and floor via a transparent cylinder.
There were other tanks in the room. How many, I couldn’t tell. All sealed.
I got to my feet. Looked down at my body. It looked neither strange nor familiar. It just was.
A noise.
Something getting nearer.
Someone.
It was a woman. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. She had long hair and wore white clothes. She was on her own. She came close to me. She knelt beside me. Her face was frowning. She said things, but I think she knew I couldn’t understand them.
She had something in her hand. It was small and grey and moving. If I’d ever seen a centipede, I might have thought it was one. Though, of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything alive. She placed it between her thumb and finger and mimed putting it in her ear, and then pointed it at me. At my ear.
I understood enough about this instruction to put it to my ear after she had given it me. Within seconds it was moving in my head. I could feel it inside me. It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t even weird, because to find something weird you have to have had experience of normality. But I didn’t have experience of anything.
Then I must have shut down. That thing inside my head had shut me down. Because there was a gap. A time that I can’t remember. A gap during which I was born.
2
When I woke up, everything was different. I understood things. I understood that I was lying on a bed – a futon – on a floor, and I knew that the floor was made from a cloth of ceramic fibres, and I also somehow knew that this particular type of material had been invented in 2067, and was widely used in home environments as a means of insulating against extremes of heat and cold. Seeing the baking sun outside, I realized which one. In this room it was thirty-nine degrees centigrade.
On my skin I felt the keratin from the preservation fluid that had covered me in the tank.
I sat up. I looked around. I was somewhere else. I was in a house. A villa. In the desert. There was a photographic poster on the wall of a skyline and the words NEW NEW YORK. (New New York – human population: 17,345,952; Echo population: 5,492,600.) Also, there was a cross on the wall with a small sculpture of a dying man fastened to it. I had no knowledge about this man, except that he was made of pewter. The room’s size was easy for me to measure. Indeed, it happened auto matically. Six by four metres.
There was the distant sound of a man coughing.
And there was the woman. She was standing above me and looking down. I understood that she was thirty-eight years old and that she was free from unnatural genetic or surgical enhancements. Her face was handsome, which was a word normally used for men, but it fitted her more than beautiful.
She was looking at me with confused eyes, her forehead continually creased.
I calculated that there were 268,245 hairs on her head, most of them long and bleached from the sun, and dishevelled. She was 168 centimetres tall and weighed 61 kilograms. Her skin condition suggested a depletion of collagen and melanin, indicating that, although she currently had no serious illnesses, she was seriously stressed and sleep-deprived. I would have guessed she only had about two hours’ sleep a night. She had a piece of circular jewellery piercing her eyebrow, made of platinum. She was wearing a locket around her neck. This was not platinum, but gold, though the chain itself was steel. A Spanish word was engraved on the locket. The word was SIEMPRE, which meant always, or for ever.
She spoke to me.
She said: ‘Hola. Me llamo Rosella.’
This was Spanish and not my default language. The one I had been programmed to speak before all others was English. But I understood her instantly, just as I had understood the writing on the locket. Hello. My name is Rosella.
Again, I didn’t know how.
Later she would tell me that the bug-like thing that had got inside my head was called an igniter. It basically switched on my knowledge. The knowledge that had been programmed into me. I was programmed to know all kinds of things. I knew that I was on a water planet called Earth that travelled through space at 107,279 kilometres an hour. I knew that the universe we belonged to was a million million million million kilometres across. I knew the composition of the air, and could tell, just by inhaling, how much was nitrogen and how much was oxygen. I could have written Welcome home in Russian (Добро пожаловать домой). I knew that I was an Echo, and that an Echo’s function was to serve humans, without question.
I also knew that I was a prototype. Prototypes were the only Echos that needed igniters,
because they were the first of their kind. Assembly-line Echos were copies of what came before. If a company wanted to replicate an Echo, they could do it a million times without a single igniter.
Rosella was smiling at me now. The smile was harder to translate than the words, especially as she seemed to be on the verge of tears.
‘Y tú te llamas Daniel.’
I heard my name and found it weird that I knew so much, and yet had to be told what my name was. She gave me clothes to wear. She told me I was in Spain. She told me about the government, about how she hated them. I knew that the West European government was based in an ever-moving hydra-bubble hovering high above Madrid, which sometimes travelled to Paris and Barcelona 2. I knew they had been responsible for getting rid of most humans who worked in the civil service and replacing them with Echos. In the police force and army, the replacements had mainly been robots, not Echos. On 14 February of this year, 2115, these robots – securidroids – had suppressed human rights campaigners in Seville, who had been protesting against rising homelessness and deaths as a result of a policy of land clearance.
She gave me some shoes to wear too.
She held a glass mirror in front of me.
I saw myself.
My face.
It was the face of a male human boy. Or almost.
Neat light-blond hair, side-parted. 140,000 strands. Green eyes. My skin, though, was too smooth to belong to a human. It had no blemishes, no pores. I looked faultless, thanks to all that keratin.
Rosella told me that I was the best she had ever designed. But she did not seem happy. When she spoke, I could tell there was tension inside her.
Outside the room there was an open door leading to another room. There was a bed with an old man sleeping in it. He had a transparent mask over his face and he wheezed and coughed in his sleep.
