Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  I recognized her instantly. The whole room did.

  It was Lina Sempura. She stared at Uncle Alex, who was temporarily too surprised to speak.

  ‘Surprise!’ said Lina, with her strange accent (she had an Argentinian mother and a Japanese father, and been raised by Echos in Moscow).

  Uncle Alex knew he couldn’t switch off the conference now. It would have been very bad PR.

  ‘Lina, I see you are up to your old tricks. Deceiving people comes naturally to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I am here, in person, to tell this room that I – me in person – supervised the development of the Alissa prototype. And the models based on that prototype were – and remain – the safest that Sempura have ever created. We are determined to get to the bottom of this, and have nothing to hide.’

  Uncle Alex laughed nervously. ‘You came as a man called Idris and you have nothing to hide!’

  I felt scared as Lina – or the simulation of Lina – stood up and walked towards me. She looked at me directly. Her simulation was more lifelike than life. I had never seen anyone who looked more real. I could see fine hairs on her upper lip. ‘I lost my parents,’ she said, ‘when I was a bit younger than you. They died on a cheap shuttle flight to the moon. I know as well as anyone the dangers of badly made technology.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Uncle Alex. ‘Faulty warbots that kill allied troops? Info-lenses that blind people? Malfunctioning securidroids? Please! You only know the dangers of badly designed technology because you make it.’

  Lina Sempura ignored this, and carried on talking to me. ‘Don’t be a foolish girl. Don’t be his little PR monkey. Don’t belittle your parents’ memory by doing this sort of stuff . . . Especially when your father was so against everything your uncle stands for.’

  This made me angry. ‘And what you stand for!’ I said.

  ‘But he chose a product from our company, didn’t he? What does that tell you, Anna?’

  ‘Her name is Audrey,’ said Uncle Alex.

  ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Candressa, ‘I’m sorry about this disturbance. We would have loved to answer more of your questions, but as this event has been undermined by this intrusion from our chief competitor, I’m afraid we must end it here, unless Lina Sempura volunteers to leave.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Lina as everyone else in the room kept on soaking up the drama. ‘I’m out of here.’ But before she dissolved away into nothing she said to me: ‘Open your eyes, girl. Open your eyes.’ And then she was gone.

  ‘OK,’ said Candressa. ‘Let’s get this back on track.’

  Uncle Alex looked at me. ‘Audrey, are you OK?’

  ‘Jelani Oburumo,’ said a man sitting on the front row. ‘House and Droid. Forgive the direct nature of this question, but did you see Alissa kill your parents?’

  It took a real effort to speak now. ‘I was in the pod when it happened, but I have seen the footage. I have seen everything.’

  ‘Why do you think this happened?’ the man went on. ‘Why do you think Alissa malfunctioned?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know . . .’ And then I remembered what I had heard her say, and I blurted it out. I blurted it out loud. ‘She said a name. She said Rosella.’

  ‘Rosella?’ about five people asked at once.

  ‘After she killed them she said, “Rosella.” I don’t know who Rosella—’

  Another freeze-frame.

  Then my uncle staring at me with anxious eyes. ‘I think this is too much for you. I’m sorry. You are clearly finding this distressing. I think we should call it a day. I think it’s time for you to leave the conference . . . Candressa and I can take it from here.’

  ‘But—’

  And suddenly I was speaking to no one. I was in the dark of the pod, with the mind-reader on. And with the knowledge that whoever or whatever this ‘Rosella’ was, it was something my uncle knew about. And something he wanted to hide.

  6

  I left the pod and stayed in my room. I was shaking and crying. I sat listening to the distant chants of another protest, coming again from near the Resurrection Zone. I stared out of the window at the revolving sphere and the logo of the blue three-turreted castle.

  Downstairs there was a weapons room. I could have taken a positron and turned it on myself and turned into nothing.

  A bleak thought. I tried to shake it away.

  I tried to read some philosophy. Philosophy had always helped me in the past, but today it didn’t. Maybe it was because I was reading Sophocles. One of the ancient philosophers I’d been planning to study at Oxford. There is a point where even justice does injury.

  Was I at that point?

  Was there any reason at all to bother trying to get justice for my parents’ deaths when they were dead and could never be brought back to life? And also, what was justice? The only thing I really wanted was to live in a world with no Echos. I would never feel comfortable living like I was living at Uncle Alex’s, knowing that I was always only a short distance away from those machines. Machines that could kill.

  I went to the window. Looked out at the rain funnel. It looked perfectly fine. The night I had seen him climbing up to my room he had been trying to reach me. I very much doubted there was any work that had needed doing.

  I went out of the room.

  I stood on the landing for a moment, listening for Echos.

  I noticed there was another painting.

  This one I recognized instantly.

  It was a painting of an old-fashioned street at night, complete with the kind of streetlamp that existed two hundred years ago. But instead of darkness above it, there was a sunny blue sky and white candyfloss clouds. In other words, it was a painting of day and night all at once. This wasn’t a Matisse or a Picasso. This was by someone called René Magritte. It was my mum’s favourite painting. I wondered if Uncle Alex knew that. Maybe he did. Maybe it gave him some sick pleasure buying things my parents – or, indeed, almost anyone – couldn’t afford.

  I looked at my hands. Still trembling. Of course, I could have just gone back into my room and put the neuropads back on. But I didn’t. I wanted to stay scared. I wanted to stay me. And right then I wanted to see Uncle Alex and ask him, face to face, why he had just put me through all that, even though I knew that he would probably just repeat what he had said in the virtual press conference.

  ‘Uncle Alex?’ I called. ‘Uncle Alex, where are you?’

  I heard footsteps leave his office further along the landing and saw Candressa. She was concentrating, sending thought-commands via her mind-wire, and didn’t look happy to see me.

  ‘I’m looking for my uncle.’

  She came close and spoke in a quiet, cold voice. ‘Do you realize how busy your uncle is? Do you understand how much responsibility he has on his shoulders?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said.

  ‘He can’t spend his life babysitting his baby niece.’

  I wiped a tear from my eye before it had time to fully arrive. ‘I’m not asking him to. I don’t need a babysitter. I’m fifteen.’

  Noises.

  Protesters again.

  This time the chants seemed closer. I remembered what Uncle Alex had said about how the protestors had tried to break in. I looked around the hallway. At the expensive furnishings. The nanotech wallpaper, showing trees swaying gently in the wind. At the plush cream carpet. At the expensive artworks. It seemed too dangerously different to the world outside. You know – a world full of angry people with little money, who had lost their jobs because Echos could do them.

  ‘Your uncle is a very kind man. Too kind, really, for someone in his position. He tried with your father. He offered him money. Did you know that? Two years ago. He offered him one million unidollars, but your dad’s ego was such that he rejected it.’

  I didn’t know if she was lying. I started to cry.

  Properly cry. Like a five-year-old.

  In front of the last person in the world I’d have wanted to witne
ss it, although she did pull a tissue out of her trouser pocket. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was just a baby. A great big fifteen-year-old baby. She waved the tissue. ‘Take it. Don’t worry. The paper contains auto-clean nanoparticles. There’s not one single piece of bacteria that can survive on it.’

  I took it. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Your uncle is downstairs. But I would leave him alone if I were you. Just for a while. You see, he’s a little disappointed.’

  ‘Disappointed?’

  ‘In you. For the way you acted in the press conference.’

  I felt anger race through me like a flood. ‘I didn’t do anything except say how I feel. And I had far more to say if I hadn’t been shut out of the conference.’

  Candressa was staring at me harshly as her eyes, shaded by the mind-wire, flickered with tiny illuminated pieces of text from her info-lenses. ‘Don’t you get it? Your story needs to be clear. You can’t go telling journalists something that isn’t part of the story. You must forget what Alissa said. That isn’t relevant. Journalists are idiots. Half of them there are propagandists who hate every single thing your uncle does. And they fuel the protestors. Half of whom are terrorists—’

  ‘They’re not terrorists.’

  ‘Some of them have called for your uncle to be killed.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  She closed her eyes for a second to send an urgent thought-mail. Then she turned her attention back to me. ‘And he might have the police on his side but the press are always attacking him. Fuelling the protestors’ anger. And you might have just added to that anger. They want a simple story, and most of the time that story involves attacking your uncle.’ She hesitated, but then said in a cool voice: ‘And your dad used to be one of them.’

  ‘He never attacked Uncle Alex.’

  ‘Not by name.’

  ‘Not by anything.’

  Her bright mouth tightened. ‘He was hardly trying to make life easy for him. You have only ever heard one side of the story. Your uncle is a good man. He is motivated by the desire to make the world a better place. He gives five billion unidollars to charity every year. I bet you didn’t know that . . .’

  I shook my head. He is motivated by the desire to make the world a better place. Maybe he and Dad weren’t so different after all.

  ‘You are very lucky he is looking after you. If he was less of a great man, then you would be homeless right now. If you were Lina Sempura’s niece, you’d be on the streets, I can tell you.’ She halted, and raised a hand as if to say stop. ‘And listen – listen to that. Outside.’

  I listened. The chanting of the protestors had become a kind of roar.

  Candressa looked worried. Her white skin went whiter still. ‘Oh no. Oh God, no.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She looked at me and then turned. ‘They’ve got over the wall.’

  ‘What?’ I didn’t quite understand.

  She started running towards the stairs. ‘Get Iago. The protestors – they are trying to get into the house. They want to kill Alex. They might want to hurt Iago too.’

  ‘Should I call the police?’

  She disappeared downstairs as I heard more screams.

  ‘They’ll already know. Those protesters would have had to terminate them just to get over the wall.’

  And I had that feeling again.

  That feeling of total alertness that comes from being close to death.

  7

  I ran to Iago’s room.

  But he wasn’t there.

  Downstairs, I heard the smashing of glass. I ran to my room and went into my pod, and in the mind-reader I commanded Menu. There was an option called ‘House View’. I chose that, and then viewed the front garden. The part I couldn’t see from my window. East of the gravel driveway. About ten protestors, all wearing masks, were climbing over a side wall. Where the police were meant to be guarding the house.

  They carried small rocks and large sticks, and a few – more than a few, actually – had old guns. The kind that required bullets but could still kill. I needed a gun. There were guns in the house. Positrons. I needed a positron.

  I switched to inside the house; saw that some of the protestors were in the lobby.

  Three were engaged in a fist fight with an Echo. A tall dreadlocked Echo who was all muscle. I searched in other rooms, sometimes virtual running between them, sometimes by just mind-leaping.

  The kitchen, the downstairs office, three of the living rooms, the therapy room – where Uncle Alex was, being protected by five Echos, including the blond boy – the indoor swimming pool, the gymnasium full of metal robots in boxing gloves, the dining room. I eventually found Iago in a small room hardly bigger than a cupboard. He was there with two Echos, taking a positron from the wall.

  The weapons room.

  He may have been holding an advanced antimatter weapon and he may have had a look of gleeful murder in his eyes, but he was still a ten-year-old boy and he was my cousin; I had stayed in an immersion pod while members of my family were being killed once before, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

  So I got out of the pod and my bedroom and ran downstairs.

  I ran to the small room where the weapons were kept, but of course he had gone.

  ‘Iago!’ I shouted.

  No response. Or none that I could hear above the sound of shouting and fighting and the occasional shot of an old gun. New guns were being fired too. I saw an Echo shoot a protestor into non-existence, his body disappearing before my eyes, but of course it was antimatter technology so it was unheard.

  I ran to the therapy room to tell Uncle Alex that I couldn’t find Iago.

  ‘Oh, Audrey, you are safe. Come in here, come in here, and close the door behind you. Before any of those bastards see you.’

  But I hesitated.

  And the reason I hesitated was because Daniel was staring at me in such a way that hesitation was the only response. His words echoed in my head. You are in danger here.

  I know it sounds irrational, but I was more scared of being shut up in a room with five Echos than I was of being out there with all those humans who had murder on their minds. Another of the Echos, the red-haired female, Madara, told me to come inside quickly. But she – unlike the blond Echo – was holding a gun. I remembered Uncle Alex telling me that she was designed for the army. To be a killer. I closed the door, and stayed on the other side of it.

  It was a big mistake.

  For the second after I had closed it, I felt something cold and hard press against my temple.

  A gun.

  An old twenty-first-century pistol, probably full of bullets.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man with a mask. The mask was the kind you would wear to a fancy dress party. He had come as a tiger. He was tall and smelled of tobacco gum.

  ‘Where is your dad?’ he asked me. His voice was harsh and rough and full of hate.

  ‘My dad is dead.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me. Your dad. Alex Castle. The self-appointed God himself . . . Where is he? Tell me, or I will kill you. I swear to you I will squeeze this trigger and you will be out of here.’ He did a quick mime to indicate my brains being blasted out of my skull.

  ‘He’s not my dad. My dad was killed three days ago. By an Echo.’

  There was a pause. His voice changed. ‘Your dad was Leo Castle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He put the gun down slowly.

  He seemed to be in shock.

  ‘Leo Castle! He was a hero to me. To most of us! I watched all the pieces he did for Tech Watch. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I wasn’t really going to kill you. I just need to find your uncle. He must be stopped. The Resurrection Zone is evil. Everything he has done is evil. Neanderthals should not be kept in captivity. He cares more about Echos than real living things!’

  ‘My dad didn’t agree with violence,’ I said, feeling a kind of defiance inside me. ‘And he loved his brother. He would have been appalled by what you lot
are doing.’

  For a few moments I was just staring at the tiger mask. Maybe my words were getting through. Maybe he wasn’t going to do anything but leave, and tell the others who were rampaging around the house to leave as well. I would never know, for at that very moment he vanished into thin air and I saw Iago standing behind him holding his antimatter positron. A gun that was far too big for him (though seemingly as light as a feather, as it was far more aerogel than metal).

  Unbelievably, he was smiling.

  He had just killed a fellow human being and he was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile from genuine happiness.

  ‘You owe me one, cuz,’ he said, his voice jauntier than I’d known it.

  He wasn’t hanging around. He was heading past me, jogging through the unicorn holo-sculpture on his way to the lobby.

  ‘Iago, come back! It’s not safe!’ I started running after him, but almost instantly someone burst out of an intersecting hallway and flung me to the floor. Another protester in a mask. This one wasn’t a tiger, but the mask of a Neanderthal, with human eyes gleaming through. He was heavy and I was terrified. I screamed.

  This one didn’t have a gun. He had a stone. A stone large enough to be called a rock. He held it up high. He was about to smash it down on my head. Death was two seconds away now, and so my body was exploding with terrified life. But at that moment I saw someone else.

  Daniel.

  He was out of the therapy room and throwing himself towards us.

  8

  Daniel pushed the man with the Neanderthal mask to the floor. The man smashed the rock hard against Daniel’s face and cut him, but Daniel already had his hand around the man’s throat. He picked him up off the floor, holding him under his chin, his feet centimetres off the ground.

  ‘Please,’ the man wheezed, ‘you’ll kill me.’

  ‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘Only if you hurt her again.’ And then he threw the man far across the hallway, right through the holographic unicorn.

  He turned to me and grabbed my arm, hard.