by Matt Haig
Dad was starting to look worried, but nowhere near as worried as he should have been.
‘What is that you are holding, Alissa?’
And then he saw it, and – Dad being Dad – his first instinct wasn’t to save himself but to save us. He called for my mum. ‘Lorna! Lorna! Audrey! Lorna . . . get Audrey . . . Both of you, get out of here . . . Alissa is malfunctioning.’
He was backed into a corner.
He tried to push past her, but she pressed the blade into his stomach.
‘Dad,’ I wept, helpless, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you . . .’
And then she cut his throat, and blood flowed out of him like a river and the colour drained from him and he went weak and I screamed.
‘Stop this! Stop showing me this! Stop playing the recording! Let me out of the pod!’
But nothing happened. I was still there, in our old house, looking at my dad as blood and life leaked out of him and he kind of stagger-collapsed towards the floor.
I left the room to see my mum running along the landing, looking frantic. Instinctively I raised my hands. ‘No, Mum, don’t go in there! You’ll die if you go in there!’
She didn’t hear me, of course. She just passed right through me.
‘Mum! Mum!’
I closed my eyes but I couldn’t close my ears. She screamed first from the sight of Dad, then from her own pain.
‘Get me out of here! Get me out! Get me out!’
But it didn’t happen.
I stayed there on that landing.
I could feel its cold floor beneath my feet. Five minutes later I heard someone else.
The ultimate stranger.
Myself.
‘Mum? Dad?’
My voice from downstairs. My old voice. The one that didn’t sound like the end of the world had just happened.
Of course. I had just finished my class in the pod.
There was no answer from my parents. I remembered what I had been thinking. That Dad would be in his pod, writing his book. But I’d wondered why Mum hadn’t answered. I counted the seconds, wondering how long it had been from the time of doubt to the time of terror.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
I had gone into the kitchen. I remembered that. And then I had stepped onto the old creaking leviboard, through the hole in the ceiling to the next floor. I watched myself in my low-tech cotton smock and jeans. I hated the sight of me. I felt like I was looking at an arrogant traitor.
‘You stupid idiot,’ I told my other self. ‘Ten minutes! Your lesson was over ten minutes ago. Why did you stay around and chat? You should have just got out and gone to Mum like you wanted, instead of listening to Tola go on about gladiators and boyfriends.’
But of course, three days ago I hadn’t heard this voice of my future self.
‘Mum?’ I had said. Innocent. ‘Are you there?’
And then that noise that I hadn’t been able to recognize three days ago. The one I’d thought might have been a magcar flying by on the rails outside, but was actually my mum’s last dying breath.
I watched myself head towards Dad’s office.
. . . eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . .
As my recorded self reached the doorway, I noticed something I hadn’t seen three days ago. Blood was actually leaking out onto the landing. It must have been my dad’s, as he was closest to the door.
‘Dad?’
I watched the pain slowly set in my face as it looked inside the office, seeing my dad first.
‘Dad? What’s the matter? Why aren’t you—’
Then seeing everything.
Dad, Mum, Alissa, the knife, the blood that wasn’t able to be absorbed into the self-clean carpet. (The only carpeted room in the house – ‘I like softness under my feet, it’s my only indulgence.’)
My face rigid with shock as it too struggled to absorb.
And, of course, her voice.
Alissa’s, as she stood there with the bloodstained knife.
‘I was waiting for you to come. I was waiting for you to come, I was waiting for you to come . . .’
Only now it seemed less like a malfunction and more like single-minded determination. And myself, my three-day-ago self, just standing there, until she moved. And then I moved, and as I watched, I realized how fast I’d been, far faster than I knew I could be, as I ran that short distance along the landing towards the window.
Then my voice, loud and hard and clear as I commanded that window to ‘Open!’
The window’s slow response, giving Alissa time to grab the sleeve of my cotton top. And then I witnessed my fury as my other self pulled away from her and slammed an elbow hard into her face. The window opened, I jumped out and Alissa followed, but before she did so, I noticed something else I obviously hadn’t seen before. She looked inside the office, as if wondering whether to stay with the corpses of my parents.
She spoke into the air. ‘Rosella.’ Anyway, I was pretty sure that was what she said.
‘Rosella? Who the hell is Rosella?’ I asked, screaming it. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’
But then she jumped out and I heard that splash, and I – the actual real, present me – ran across the landing to see my head burst out of the water and scream up towards the leviboard that was just outside the car.
‘Down! Down!’
The leviboard descended; I watched myself climb onto it.
‘Who is Rosella?’ I wailed.
The window closed again.
I watched the car reverse five metres, to the end of the rail. And I watched as Alissa stood dripping wet in front of the car. She knew what was going to happen.
She knew she was going to be terminated.
She didn’t care.
Why didn’t she care? Echos were programmed to preserve their own existence.
But then, Echos were also programmed never to harm their masters.
She was breaking all the rules.
The window was level with the rail, which meant that I could watch it all quite easily. The car moving forward with me inside, a blur of speed, so fast that Alissa just disappeared. She was there, and then there was the fastest flowering of blood, some drops even making it to the window. Her crumpled body fell into the water below. And the car was away; I was away, heading south fast.
I – the actual present me who knew she was still inside this footage – turned to look at my parents, and then I walked towards them. Towards these bodies that had once hugged me. And held my hand. And rocked me to sleep as a baby (they would never have let an Echo do that). And taught me to swim in a swimming pool in Paris. And to hold my breath underwater.
The way to do it is to try not to think about anything . . . The way to do it is not to try too hard. Just imagine you are nothing. Just another natural element in the pool.
My dad’s eyes were open, as if staring up at me. Eyes that were his but not really his, all at once. The way a house stops belonging to someone after they stop living there.
‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop this.’
And I cried helplessly, and collapsed on top of him and my mum, and hugged them and felt their blood on me. I wailed and I wailed until their bodies dissolved from under me, along with the floor, and I screamed and found myself falling and falling through blackness, a blackness only punctured by occasional bright objects that passed before me.
The Darwin’s Nightmare book.
The kitchen knife.
The ancient computer.
But then there was nothing at all except the dark and the fast sensation of descent, until eventually I landed in a chair, in a bright wooden room.
5
A crowd of strange beings sitting on large leather chairs were staring at me. Most looked human, but some didn’t. Some had blank avatars – just blue humanoids with those scary featureless faces, all identical. Even more surreal was the fact that a few of the avatars were the kind idiots from school use on social media. I saw a strange albino alien with
three red eyes, glistening in the artificial light. I saw an old robot from the 2060s. I saw a minotaur.
‘Where am I?’ I asked, sobbing.
Someone touched my arm.
I turned and saw Uncle Alex.
‘It’s OK, Audrey. You are still in the pod. I’m in my pod in the office. This is the virtual media conference. There are journalists here who want to ask you a few questions.’
‘Journalists?’
Uncle Alex poured a sigh into the silence. ‘Yes. Don’t be fooled by their avis. They often have eccentric avatars. The media circus really is a circus these days. I suppose they think you’re more likely to be yourself around them. Who knows?’
‘My parents died and they are pretending to be aliens?’
‘It’s nothing personal. They’re just overgrown schoolkids.’
‘We’re not allowed fictional avatars at school. Only on social media.’
‘Well, your dad used to have one.’
‘Did he?’
Uncle Alex smiled. Maybe he was pleased that I didn’t know this about Dad.
‘Oh yeah. He sometimes used to come to conferences like this. To ask his brother some questions. But never as himself. He’d always be a gorilla.’
‘A gorilla?’
‘Yep. A big silverback gorilla.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a long story.’ I could swear a trace of bitterness crept into his voice. ‘You might get to hear it one day. But anyway, the main thing is that you shouldn’t worry about what these journalists are trying to be. Just be you.’
I saw Candressa. She was sitting on my other side, her face white and sharp and angular, as though someone had chipped it out of limestone. But at least she was recognizably herself. Her bright red lips were telling me, in a whisper: ‘Your parents must not have died in vain. Sempura must pay. Answer the questions as honestly as you can.’
I was staring out at all the faces – actual or uber-fictional representations of the real people who were sitting in their pods around the country, or around the world.
‘What happened then?’ I asked Uncle Alex. ‘Why was I back in Yorkshire? Why did I—’
And then the questions started. They came from different people within the room. It felt like the room itself was asking questions as it closed in around me. I went on crying, in the real world and the fake one. Candressa pointed at someone. The minotaur. A man’s body (in a smart twentieth-century suit) with a bull’s head. ‘You. Your question.’
‘Hello,’ said the Minotaur, its bullish mouth doing the talking. It was so surreal that I wanted to laugh and scream with terror at the same time. ‘Yes. I’m Tao Hu, from Echoworld Holozine. I just wondered, how long had your parents owned Alissa?’
‘I don’t . . . I don’t know. Four . . . five weeks.’
Then another journalist, another question. This time the avatar was of an actual human. A woman with dark hair sitting at the front, who kept flickering because of a bad line. ‘Tina Mories, assistant editor, Robotics Week. I was just wondering, why did they decide to buy her? Why did they not get a robot, if your father was so anti Echo technology?’
‘I . . . well . . . my dad was in a car accident, and that slowed him down, and Mum thought it would be better for my education if I was taught not just by virtual teachers but also by Echos . . . She’d seen lots of research . . . and . . . and it was my fault. Dad asked me if we should get an Echo and I said that I thought we should.’
Candressa was very eagerly pointing to someone else, someone whose question she obviously wanted to be heard. A bald man with an animated T-shirt featuring a cartoon rabbit being hit by a wooden mallet. He was sitting next to a man who looked exactly like Albert Einstein (Steve Jobs was also in the room). ‘Yes, yes, Joseph, your question. Your question please.’
‘Joseph Kildare, h-logger for New Horizons. Do you blame Sempura for what happened?’
New Horizons. I remembered an old grumble from my dad: They’re bloody liars! They might as well just be a bloody press release for Castle.
‘I . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
Another hand. Bright white and webbed. The albino alien. ‘Bruno Bergmann, Android Connoisseur Quarterly. Why did they choose a Sempura product? I mean, why didn’t they use the family firm?’
‘Castle isn’t the family firm. It is my uncle’s firm.’
The next person to speak was a large man with a bright red beard.
‘Idris McCarthy,’ said the man. ‘Echo Correspondent with Info-lens Bulletin . . . OK, so it wasn’t your family’s firm, but still, your dad would surely have been inclined to use your uncle’s products?’
Uncle Alex interrupted at this point. ‘What kind of relevance does that have? He was under no obligation to buy products from me. I got on very well with my brother. We may have had different views about technology, as you probably know, but we could separate the personal stuff from the business stuff.’
This jarred with me.
Uncle Alex might have been able to separate the personal and the business side of things, but Dad couldn’t. His work was his life.
Idris McCarthy wasn’t giving up. ‘If Audrey could answer this, please . . . Your dad campaigned for more restraints on technological development. But Sempura is a technology firm too. So why the grudge against Castle?’
I tried to compose myself. ‘It . . . it wasn’t a grudge,’ I said, wondering if I was telling a lie. ‘Dad had his principles.’
‘And those principles led him to buy Sempura products?’
I felt dizzy. But it was a weird kind of dizziness, because the room wasn’t spinning. It was classic pod-sickness. That weird gap between the body in the pod and the mind in the simulation. But it was also panic. I saw Mum’s face in my mind. I saw her eyes and I saw her smile. ‘My parents were killed by a Sempura product. Those products should be banned.’
Then someone else. Someone who didn’t introduce himself. The avatar that was Albert Einstein. ‘What are you saying – Echos should be banned? Or just Sempura ones? Sempura’s track record is cleaner, ethically, than Castle’s.’
‘You must introduce yourself,’ Candressa said, sounding sharp and tense. ‘What is your name and who do you work for? And please don’t tell me you are Albert Einstein.’
There was a pause. Einstein said nothing for a moment or two. Then, quite defiantly, he said, ‘OK, my name is Leonie Jenson. I am from Castle Watch.’
Leonie Jenson. Castle Watch.
Then something happened. She must have used a mind-command to switch her avi from Albert Einstein to her natural self, because suddenly – with the shortest of flickers – she morphed into the woman I had seen staring out of that electronic paper in Paris.
The same deeply inquisitive face and short pink hair.
‘Leonie Jenson,’ said Candressa scornfully. ‘We’ve got to stop this.’
The whole room went still. My uncle or Candressa had freeze-framed it. They were the only people still moving. Well, apart from me.
‘Listen,’ said Uncle Alex. ‘That journalist is from Castle Watch. A propaganda rag. They are setting a trap. She – her – she’ll be setting a trap.’
‘I know who she is . . . How can the truth trap me? I was at my house. I saw them murdered. Why did you put me inside that footage?’
‘Audrey?’
‘I was there. I saw Dad and Mum. Why did you do it? Did you want me like this? I mean, you told me to show my pain. So is that what you were doing? Making me feel more pain? To have me trembling and shaking and crying?’
Then Candressa kind of growled, ‘Oh, listen, little girl, don’t be so melodramatic. It must have been a glitch.’
But Uncle Alex was already sighing. ‘All right, Audrey. All right. Candressa didn’t know about it, but I decided to put you inside that footage beforehand, so you would know exactly what happened and be able to tell the truth. Big claims require big evidence. I wanted the world to see what Sempura had done to you. I wanted people to
see the pain they caused.’
I couldn’t believe it. I looked at the unmoving crowd of avatars, and then turned back to Uncle Alex, who at that moment seemed more fake than any minotaur could. ‘But you didn’t ask me.’
‘I showed you it to help you. I want justice for you, and for Leo. He was a misguided fool with sibling rivalry issues, but he was my brother, and when our parents died he looked after me for two years. I loved him. That is all I want. Justice.’
Before I had time to reply to this, or even absorb it, Candressa said: ‘Don’t tell them you hate all Echos. If you do that, they’ll write you off as some weird crank kid and you won’t get anywhere except with those tin-pot hover-shed freaks over at Castle Watch. If you say you hate Sempura products, then you have a chance of something happening. Think about it.’
But there was no time to think about it. The room came into motion again. And the journalists were waiting for a response.
Idris McCarthy, once again, stroking his red beard: ‘Are you an Echophobe?’
‘No,’ I said, realizing a lie might be the best way of getting something done. ‘I don’t hate all Echos. It’s 2115. I’m not an Echophobe. I hate Alissa, even though she’s gone. And I hate Sempura for producing her. Alissa was an assembly-line product, which means there must be hundreds like her. They are an irresponsible company. They should be punished.’
Idris continued. ‘Do you know that only this morning Sempura have issued a statement saying that though they have recalled all Alissa models, they have not been able to recover the actual model that killed your parents. They are hinting at some kind of conspiracy involving Castle Industries and the British police force.’
‘Well, of course they would say that!’ boomed Uncle Alex. ‘Lina Sempura would blame anyone rather than herself! They are trying to cover up and cloud the facts. They have no evidence of any conspiracy, or they would have provided it. She knows her company pushed things too far.’
Idris suddenly started to change shape. Within a second he had transformed into a short, smart-looking, naturally aged seventy-year-old woman with the same red hair as Idris and a smart white suit. She had a wide, thin-lipped mouth and an upturned nose.
