Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  Open your eyes.

  He laughed some more. It was a fake laugh, made unnaturally loud just so I could hear it. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. But if it makes you feel better, believe it was. Believe anything you want! Believe Dad actually cares about you!’

  ‘He lets me stay here,’ I said.

  And I didn’t need Iago’s laughter on the other side of that door to realize how pathetic I was sounding. He lets me stay here. I was an idiot. I was like one of the tigers at the Resurrection Zone, thankful to be trapped in an enclosure.

  I remembered a line from the Neo Maxis song ‘Love in a Cage’ from three years ago: This is what I remember best / When I was a prisoner but thought I was a guest . . .

  I remembered three days ago. The day it happened. When I had terminated – or thought I’d terminated – Alissa.

  I had been in the car, driving away. I had been traumatized, hardly able to think, hardly knowing my own name, and the holophone had rung and I had spoken to Uncle Alex.

  He had been trying to get hold of my parents. He had been wanting to ask them to come to his birthday party. He had obviously tried the house and got no answer so he had tried the car.

  But why had he phoned then?

  I tried to remember when Uncle Alex had last called to speak to my parents. Christmas Day? Maybe. But I didn’t think so. There had been a long period of mutual non-calling. And so what were the chances that he would have been trying to call so soon after their death? Mathematics wasn’t my forte, but it did seem like a very big coincidence.

  Perhaps Uncle Alex was psychic. Perhaps, perhaps . . . Then I thought of Daniel. He had wanted to tell me more, before the Echo hounds had attacked him and he had fallen to the ground. ‘Remember,’ he had said. But what?

  I didn’t know.

  I tried to focus my thoughts. I was frightened, and I knew that I could stop that fear simply by replacing the neuropads – the ones that sat on the chest beside my bed. I could feel calm within seconds. But the thought of feeling calm was the most terrifying thing of all, because fear was always there for a reason.

  And sometimes it was there to keep you alive.

  Daniel. Mind-log 2.

  1

  ‘Te pareces mucho a él,’ Rosella said, sighing. You look just like him. ‘How I imagine he would be, anyway.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked. But she didn’t answer.

  And then she walked around the room in circles. She pinched her bottom lip and whispered to herself. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I translated her behaviour as anxious. I looked at her.

  After six minutes and fifteen seconds she took a deep breath and appeared to have reached a decision. She took something out of her pocket. A small cylindrical black container. She walked over and asked me to hold out my left hand, with my palm facing upwards.

  I did as instructed, and then she pressed her hand around my forearm, and clicked the end of the black cylinder. A small copper disc appeared. I knew that copper was a durable, malleable, corrosion-resistant metal that was second only to silver in its ability to conduct heat.

  I had a feeling of uncertainty as the copper disc hovered away from the cylinder, to land on my wrist.

  Uncertainty. Another thing I wasn’t supposed to feel.

  ‘An Echo is given two marks,’ Rosella explained. ‘The origin mark and this ID mark. One private, one public. One given inside the tank, one outside, to check that there is no untoward reaction.’

  It took me a second or two to feel the heat of it searing through my skin. An intense, consuming pain as I stared at that hot blue day out of the window. I let out a small cry. I remembered the pain I had felt in the tank. Pain was the same with knowledge and without it. Pain was completely independent of information. She clicked the cylinder again, and the disc left my skin, returning from where it came. Rosella pulled away from me, almost scared.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘I’ve done it. I’ve actually done it.’

  It had left a scar, or mark. The scar was in the form of a circle, with the letter E inside it. Dark pink, raised skin. Then she inspected my shoulder. There was a name on it. And numbers. Her name and ID number. She showed it me. I saw it reflected in a mirror.

  DESIGNED BY

  ROSELLA MÁRQUEZ (B-4-GH-44597026-D)

  FOR CASTLE INDUSTRIES

  ‘This was automatic,’ she said, explaining the mark. ‘This was the one that happened in the tank. In the laboratory.’ And another realization dawned on her. ‘It must have been the thing that woke you up. You must have felt this and then come to life.’

  At that time, this contradicted my knowledge. ‘Echos don’t come to life. They are switched on. Am I alive?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  She was frightened, I realized, seeing her pupils dilate. It was fear coupled with excitement.

  ‘I’ve had a dream,’ she said. ‘I’ve had this dream for years. A dream of creating something so close to being alive it would be impossible to know the difference. And my dream has just come true. And sometimes there is nothing more terrifying in this life than having a dream come true.’ She stood up, and backed away from me, colliding with the desk. She stayed there and began to breathe really fast and deep. ‘You felt pain,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. So am I not an Echo?’

  ‘No. You are. You are. But a prototype Echo would not have come alive in the tank. You should not have felt anything at all before you were ignited. You should not have felt fear. You should not have seen despair in an abstract pattern. And most certainly you should not have been able to feel pain!’

  ‘So why did I?’

  ‘And questions!’ Her hands were in her hair. ‘You should not be asking questions. You are not meant to be curious. You are not meant to question your situation. You are just meant to be. To exist. You are knowledge without thought. You are action without emotion. You are service without question. Those are the Echo principles. And I have broken them. I tried to break them, but . . . but . . . but . . . I never expected to break them.’

  She began to cry, even as she smiled. After speaking for a while, she poured forty-three millilitres of a copper-coloured liquid into a glass. I detected the scent of malted barley and alcohol, and consequently knew that the drink was whisky. She said this:

  ‘Hay algo que quiero contarte . . . I want to tell you something. I owe you an explanation. You see, you are a one-off. There is no Echo in the world like you. There has never been one. Never. Nunca. I didn’t even know you were possible, but I always imagined you might be. I lost a baby. A baby boy. He died in his sleep when he was ten months old. He was called Daniel. It is a family name. My grandfather’s middle name. Always the middle name. But I broke that tradition. He was blond, like his father. It made me depressed. Triste. And then things went sour between me and the man I was with. He was called Alfredo, and he was a bastard. That is all you need to know about him. Anyway, after that, I hurt myself, a lot. I used to cut my skin to block out the pain, because physical pain is never as bad as the mental kind. Look . . .’ I could see thin white scars on her arms. ‘I had to see a doctor, but I never really got over it. The only thing that gave me any comfort was working on you. Well, that and whisky. See, I wanted to create an Echo that has emotions and feelings. So I worked hard on you. You started as a commission for Alex Castle. He wanted someone strong and agile, with a precise mathematical mind and high computational power. Yet I realized that you were the best shot. I’d been given a lot of money to play with, for you. And so I went full-on with the code. I played God. I raised my game. I didn’t sleep. Fine tuning and fine tuning and fine tuning. Si.’ Her forehead creased, between her eyebrows. ‘Living on nothing but energy pills and whisky and this stupid dream. Me pasé.’

  ‘There are no others like me?’

  ‘No. There can’t be. You were made different. The code wasn’t just Echo code. I mean, that was 99.9 per cent of it. Of the programming. But there was something else.’

  ‘Some
thing else?’

  She hesitated. Her lips pursed, and she exhaled slowly and deliberately, the way humans do when they are trying to calm themselves, or gain courage. She toyed with her locket, pulling it gently along its chain. ‘You have the same knowledge, the same fast ability to learn, the same speed and strength and reflexes, but I made you different. Mira esto.’

  Look at this.

  She detached the gold locket from its chain and opened it, showing me its contents. Inside, there was a curl of blond hair. I calculated thirty-one strands. ‘This is his hair,’ she explained. ‘This is Daniel’s hair. My boy’s hair.’

  I stared at it and began to understand. I knew that hair – even hair like this that had no perfectly intact follicles – contained mitochondrial DNA, and that although that kind of DNA had less information than nuclear DNA, there was prediction software that could do the rest, and fill in most of the jigsaw.

  ‘You are not him,’ she said. ‘You are an Echo. But I dissolved the hair into the solution. The solution from which you were made. The liquid born from code. It is like you contain a piece of him. The way this locket contains a piece of him. You are a locket made flesh. A memory brought back to life. You are an Echo, and an echo. But you are you. Someone totally new. You have a physical and mental power humans lack, and emotions and dreams that Echos lack. That 0.1 per cent makes all the difference. Es todo. It’s everything. It is like . . . like . . . like . . .’ She searched for a simile. ‘It is like the crack in the door that lets the light in and illuminates the whole room. You are the best of both worlds. You are the end of evolution.’

  These words did not comfort me. Instead, I felt small. I felt an intense emotion characterized by a hollow, exposed sensation. I identified it as loneliness. And then fear. I started to be worried. I thought of the mark on my shoulder. For Castle Industries.

  ‘What is going to happen to me?’

  She looked at the cross on the wall and the small pewter sculpture of a dying man. And then she looked into my eyes and must have seen the fear because she said, ‘Nothing, Daniel. Nothing is going to happen to you. I have lost a Daniel before. I will not lose you. You will not be sold. You can stay here. You can live with me. I will tell Mr Castle that you need more work, that something went wrong. I will tell him that I will try to fix you, but then I will tell him it didn’t work. It will be all right – yes, I am sure.’

  She sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince me. But I wanted to believe her. Or that piece of me that had been human did.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. I may have been the first Echo in history to use the word hope. But I knew it was a delicate thing, hope, and could be broken as easily as a single strand of human hair.

  2

  For a short while it worked like that. One day she went to her office and holo-called Mr Castle. I wasn’t there for the conversation, and it was a good deal later that I first saw him, but the result was that Rosella was given time to ‘work’ on me. Of course, she had no plan to do so. And I have to be so grateful for that.

  I lived with Rosella and her ill grandfather. I was not expensive to look after, as I was an Echo. My survival depended only on a solution of sugar and water. Five hundred millilitres a day. That and a hundred and twenty-two minutes of recharge or ‘sleep’ a night.

  While Rosella went to work at her warehouse in Valencia, I filled my days by looking after Ernesto and observing the iguanas that were kept outside as pets. When I was outside, I saw a long plume of smoke stretching to the sky. There was also a smell of sulphur. The smoke was from the town of Catadau. I would later realize that Catadau had been destroyed two months before by the Spanish government. But the fires hadn’t gone out. It was a town permanently on fire.

  You could hardly see the fire itself. Just a dull glow. But in a way, everything felt like it was on fire because of the sun. I felt the heat. It didn’t burn my skin as it would a human’s, especially a human of my colouring. It couldn’t cause cancer. (Another fact I knew: the only cancer humans still got, since the medical advances involving T-cell regeneration made during the twenty-first century, was skin cancer. It was especially prevalent in those European countries that had massively increased in temperature over the last hundred years, like Spain. Other countries – Britain, New Germany, all of Scandinavia, Northern France, Canada, much of the US – had become wetter, stormier, greyer, and so skin cancer wasn’t so much of a problem in those places; but if you were quite fair skinned and lived somewhere like Spain or Italy or anywhere below Austria, then you had to be careful.) Anyway, the heat still could cause an Echo like me problems. It made me lose liquid, and so sometimes I needed more than five hundred millilitres of water. The water wasn’t from taps. Rosella had bottles of it stored in her refrigerator.

  The villa was very basic. Inside, it smelled of clay and sour milk. It was cut off from the outside world. Apparently it had been abandoned for thirty years when Rosella had moved in and she hadn’t put any additional technology inside.

  ‘The government want to destroy it,’ she told me. ‘Every day I worry they will send a locater missile to blow us up. They don’t even bother with antimatter technology. We are not worth the price of an expensive bomb! They want rid of not only the properties around here, but the residents too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they say there are dangerous people living in them. Ex-convicts. People like that. People who don’t need ID, or money. But it’s exaggerated. Basically a government always fears the poor, because they have nothing to lose.’

  I found it incredible that Rosella was poor. I had been programmed to believe that humans were rewarded for their talents, and Rosella was surely among the most talented humans.

  Most of the time I sat outside and stared at flat arid land, and the salt bushes and a leafless tree and the iguanas and the faraway rising smoke. Sometimes in the evening I would sit with Ernesto, if he was feeling strong enough. We would speak together in Spanish.

  He talked about the iguanas.

  He told me that if you picked them up by the tail, the tail can break off so they can free themselves, then a new tail grows in its place. ‘To survive in life, sometimes you need to cut a bit of you away, leave something behind . . .’

  He talked about the land too.

  ‘All this used to be rice fields,’ he said, struggling with his breath in the heat. He winced each time he inhaled, as if it scorched his lungs. ‘The largest in Europe. This was years ago. When I was still a young man. Before the sun turned evil.’

  That was about all the conversation I could get out of him before he started coughing and wheezing and needed to escape the hot, sulphurous evening air.

  We were quite isolated. There were no magrails because no one was meant to be here. Rosella went to work on land roads. Few people used land roads any more, and the last land car had left the production line on 15 March 2076, exactly thirty-one years after the first magrail came into being, enabling people to get to places a hundred times quicker than they had before.

  The car Rosella drove was nearly sixty years old. A rickety old electric auto-drive with four wheels and a top speed of a mere 360 kilometres an hour. Land roads were dangerous. They hadn’t been maintained for years and were in a state of disrepair. In many places the sun had literally melted the tarmac away. Also, Ernesto told me something that troubled me.

  He said that murderers and bandits occasionally travelled these old worn unpoliced land roads, looking not only for derelict villas to live in but also for people to hurt or steal from.

  It made me worry about Rosella.

  I told Rosella this, and she said that she was worried about a terrible bandit but that he didn’t drive on land roads. Back then I didn’t know who she meant. I do now, of course.

  There were old books in the house and I read them. Most of them were in Spanish. I read a book called Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I read the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the st
ories of Jorge Luis Borges.

  I read a love story and felt sad to think that I would never fall in love.

  I read fairy tales. I loved fairy tales more than anything. My favourite was Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm. I found something comforting in the story of a princess who pricks her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and then, because of a wicked fairy’s curse, falls into a sleep for a hundred years. The curse could only be lifted by the kiss from a prince. The comforting part came from the lengths the prince went to in order to reach her and bring her back to waking life, fighting his way through a magical forest full of brambles and thorns designed to keep everyone away. He was determined to reach her, and he did. It was the kind of story that could make a machine like me feel human.

  I talked to Ernesto about being a human.

  Ernesto believed that if you were a good human in life you went to heaven, and if you were bad you went to hell.

  I made sure Ernesto had his medication. I also made food for Rosella when she came home from work. Simple dishes, made from cheap food that she bought in the food markets in Valencia (rice, synthetic ham and fish). I never tasted this food myself but I enjoyed making it. Mainly I would sit in the sun and play Rosella’s guitar. I found it very easy to learn. I liked what music did to me. It made me feel emotions I wasn’t programmed to understand.

  ‘Mr Castle chooses which prototypes he likes,’ she explained one night at around midnight as we sat on the old wooden bench and stared out across the desert, towards the dull glow in the sky from Valencia. ‘Then he takes them to live in his big house in London. If they are successful, he gets his company to replicate them; make millions of them for homes and businesses around the world. Some are designed to be all-rounders. Others are for a specific purpose. Some I make to be exceptionally strong. Some to be good at intricate tasks. Some are wanted just for security purposes, others for gardening or babysitting or cooking.’