by Matt Haig
So at Barcelona 2 I decided to risk everything, heading onto a hot train with an armed securidroid with GUARDIA CIVIL (famously the toughest police force in Europe) marked on its chest, and travelled to Valencia, staring at a determined-looking cockroach that was scuttling around the carriage floor.
Daniel. Mind-log 3.
1
I woke up and my head was already open.
The extraction of 97% of my neocortex, and the igniter that it now contained, was already underway. The igniter was only essential to switch a prototype Echo into being, and it had done that too effectively. Without it I would still function. I would obey commands. I would be a creature of pure rationality. All those things that single piece of human hair had helped to give me would be undone. I would never question, because to ask a question required imagination and imagination was the problem. Imagination made you care for strangers, humans, her, and it was not my job to care. It was my job to serve. And that was a very big difference.
The removal of imagination requires pain, and the pain was intense, so agonizing it seemed to last for ever. Time was just a myth created by the absence of hurt. But then it was over because my imagination had gone, and without imagination you couldn’t feel anything at all.
I waited there. With no desire to leave or escape.
And then Mr Castle came and saw me. He commanded the surgery pod to open and leaned in towards me. His mouth spread into a smile and he said, ‘There. Did that hurt? I hope so. Not because I am on the side of evil but because I am on the side of good. Because you deserved that pain. I would inflict that pain on every single one of those terrorists as well, if I could. Because do you know what pain is? It is a warning. Pain is always a warning. It tells you that what you are doing is wrong; it tells you where the boundaries are. And that is my one regret, you know, for humans. There is not enough pain any more. There is too much freedom. And I know you are not human, but you were starting to think you could act like one, weren’t you? You thought you could jeopardize your master’s safety to save Audrey. And that was crossing a boundary that you won’t be crossing again. That is what justice is all about. And that blood stuck in your hair, that is beautiful to me. Because I love the restoration of the natural order of things. And that has happened, don’t you think?’ He began to laugh. ‘Sorry. Bad choice of words. Of course you don’t think. You obey. Is that right?’
‘Yes, Master, that is right,’ I said.
‘Very good. But I am not your master for much longer. You are a reject. A failed prototype. You are among the unwanted, the cast-offs, the flawed, the failures. You have no market value. You are a disaster. A bad fit. You are out of my hands, thrown out into a world that does not care about your fate.’
I was not scared.
You could only be scared if you could feel.
‘Anyway, it is a shame in a way that I cannot hurt you any more. Yet I have a consolation – it is pleasure enough to know that I have taken away from you the myth that you are alive. That you are anything other than a machine with no rights, no feeling, for ever unworthy of human emotion. Of love.’ He stood up straight. ‘I will be back in a moment. I’m sure someone would love to see you . . .’
He closed me back in the pod. Eleven minutes later, Audrey was there with Mr Castle. Then he left and it was just me lying there and her looking at me, and the blood. She spoke to me. Her words meant nothing to me any more.
‘Daniel, it is me, Audrey. You saved my life. I want to say thank you.’
It was like a dark ocean with nothing in it but the tiniest pearl. Lost. Somewhere. And she was holding her breath and trying to dive down and find that pearl, the last remaining piece of who I was, and bring it to the surface.
I saw her face and those hazel eyes and heard her voice, a voice that sounded older than a fifteen-year-old’s voice, but the pearl stayed lost.
‘This shouldn’t have happened to you,’ she said. ‘I am sorry. What happened? Why did you stay awake? Why didn’t they switch you off? It’s torture. That’s what happened. You felt pain. You aren’t meant to feel pain, but anyone who heard your screams knew you were in pain. I’m sorry.’
For a second there was something. The faintest of faint desires. To tell her that I was taken into the pod unconscious and I had woken up. But the truth was, I honestly didn’t know this girl.
‘Please. Say something. Anything. Just speak. I know you can hear me. You told me you had met Alissa. You told me you were designed by someone called Rosella Márquez. You had more to tell me. About Alissa. About Uncle Alex.’
And that is when I spoke.
‘Who are you?’ I asked her. Her face crumpled for a moment. I had upset her. But looking back now, I realize that I had asked her a question. And I was not meant to have asked her a question because questions stem from imagination, and that had supposedly been taken out of me.
‘I’m Audrey. Audrey Castle. I am Mr Castle’s niece. My parents were killed by an Echo called Alissa. She was a Sempura Echo, not a Castle one.’ Then she leaned in towards me and whispered into my ear. I could feel the warm breath that carried her words. ‘I’m starting to think that I am only alive right now because I’m useful. I can help him score points against Sempura.’
There was worry in her voice, and that worry did something to me, stirred something inside my mind. I turned my head towards her. This caused me pain. I was not meant to feel pain. And that was when her hand tenderly touched my face – the skin that had been scarred by the protestors’ rock.
I felt another kind of pain. But this kind wasn’t physical.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m troubling you. I don’t want to trouble you. You saved my life.’
I had saved her life. I tried to remember this, and then she read me a line of a poem, and the words were like a torch in that dark ocean.
‘I am: yet what I am none cares or knows.’
Then a kiss. As her mouth approached mine, I had no idea what she was doing. Echos aren’t made for kissing. Her lips stayed on mine for a second or two, no more than that, but it was enough to make me feel something powerful. Friendship, love. And love is a kind of force. You shine it at someone, and it can’t help but reflect back, however dimly.
The torch’s beam had caught a glimpse of the pearl in that murky ocean.
‘You aren’t like the others. You are different. You care. You feel pain. But one day you will feel other things. Nicer things, I promise you.’
I felt a strong need to tell her something.
I said her name in a whisper. I knew her name now. The kiss had brought me back to life, just a little. It was like in one of those fairy tales I had read while living in the villa in the desert.
‘He changed Alissa,’ I managed to say. But then the door opened and Mr Castle was back in the room.
Audrey and I were separated.
A man came to the house.
He was tall and blond and called Seymour.
He had come to take me away.
2
I did not fear or welcome Seymour’s presence. Now that Audrey was no longer near me, I was unquestioning – though with a strange kind of sadness deep inside me; a feeling of having lost something.
Or someone.
My memory was weak now.
I could remember Rosella, I could remember the desert and Ernesto and Valencia, but it was through a fog. The only thing that had any clarity in my mind was Audrey. I remembered her face looking up at me as we ran across the grass outside. I remembered her at the window as I cleaned her car. I remembered her that night when she first arrived. I remembered first seeing her, when she was petrified, staring with wide frightened eyes, first at the painting on the wall and then at me.
But I did not really feel that much, despite the clarity of these particular memories. I had no idea, for instance, why I had felt the need to save her life, as she just told me I had. But nor did I really care. So I was back to being a machine. I was as good as dead, standi
ng there.
The man – this Seymour – was 193 centimetres tall, and he had blond hair (345,092 strands – my ability to calculate was still there, even though my curiosity had gone), but darker than mine, and greasy. As well as being tall he had a significant circumference, and weighed between 220 and 230 kilos. He had tanned but tired skin, and wore a turquoise suit made of cheap electro-cotton, with lapels that glowed. He lived in Silverlake, Los Angeles (‘Got a new condo in the sky’), a full hour away from London. His job was to collect and sell unwanted proto types from the leading international manufacturers – such as Castle.
These Echos were unwanted because they had malfunctioned in some way, had been tampered with, or were otherwise flawed. Echos like me, in other words.
He spoke a little with Mr Castle, but I wasn’t paying that much attention to what he said. I just remember his voice – deep and loud and slow. The words themselves were unimportant to me, as was my fate.
He was eating a shark burger. And Mr Castle seemed disgusted by him, and clearly didn’t want him to hang around.
At one point Seymour asked about the amount of damage the protestors had done to the house and if any art had been destroyed. He had pointed to the hologram of the unicorn and made a joke about that being the only kind of safe art investment Mr Castle could make now. Anyway, he took me away in a small magbus with five other Echos inside. I didn’t speak to them and they didn’t speak to me. I noticed that the female opposite with long black hair had no hands, and that one of the males was gigantic and muscular but kept humming a continuous note (B flat).
You are among the unwanted, the cast-offs, the flawed, the failures . . .
The journey lasted less than a minute. And then we were at another place in London, the King William V Exhibition Centre. A vast dome-shaped building made of electrochromic glass and self-heating concrete. We got out, as Seymour instructed, and there was a big crowd – 326 humans, 260 Echos – being ushered along by two armed, metallic securidroids. Both of them had the words ECHOMARKET SECURITY OFFICER blazoned on their chests. We were led into the large building.
Although my head was full of 9,218 facts about London, not a single one related to EchoMarket.
But I learned soon enough.
3
EchoMarket was a place where the unwanted Echos like me were bought and sold. It was immediately clear why certain Echos were unwanted. Some were physically damaged or weakened. One had suffered a neck injury that rendered him incapable of speech. Others were suffering malfunctions: one female Echo seemed only capable of walking in circles, for instance. Another – a male – kept talking in calculations. One Echo had his own securidroid: he needed to be constantly restrained because he attacked anything that moved.
There was another section, further along, that wasn’t full of Echos at all. It was just robots, all looking in pretty bad condition; there were a few of the Travis model, which I knew was over sixty years old.
Some of the Echos, though, were a bit more like me. It was hard to see what was wrong with them. We – all the Echos – had to stand inside individual transparent and illuminated booths with information written in fluorescent letters. I remember all this because it is recorded inside me, but at the time it was just a fog. Everything was a fog. The information on my booth was this:
ECHO 113. MALFUNCTION CLASS 5
ORIGINAL MANUFACTURER: CASTLE INDUSTRIES
DESIGNER: ROSELLA MÁRQUEZ
NATURE OF MALFUNCTION: REBEL
Like the other vendors, Seymour stood in front of the booths that contained the Echos he was trying to sell – five of them. I was ‘113’. I was no longer Daniel.
I looked at the black-haired handless Echo in the box next to me. She gave the smallest shake of her head, to tell me that I shouldn’t be doing that.
Humans kept coming up to the box, asking Seymour questions about one or other of us. The first to be sold was the strong one.
‘Oh yeah, yeah,’ Seymour told the man and woman who had bought him. ‘119 will be perfect for providing home security and any other domestic duties you should want doing . . . Don’t worry too much about the humming. You’ll soon get used to it.’
As the afternoon progressed, more and more of the Echos were sold. To homes and businesses and local governments who wanted to buy cheap. People came up to the booth to ask me questions directly.
‘Have you any experience of office work?’ one woman asked me. She seemed friendly. She was wearing a shawl that kept changing colour, from purple to black and back again.
‘No,’ I said. It took me a while to answer questions. The pain I’d been through had not only made me numb, it had also made me slower.
‘But 113 is programmed for various office roles,’ interrupted Seymour enthusiastically. ‘In fact, he was created by Rosella Márquez in Valencia, one of the most respected Echo designers in the world. And don’t worry about his rebelliousness. He has been treated for it.’
The woman studied me closely. Clicked her fingers in front of my face. ‘Maybe a little too treated, by the looks of things.’ And then she walked away.
Seymour closed his eyes in frustration, and rubbed a hand through his greasy blond hair.
A man with a long braided beard came up to me. He was from a construction company specializing in self-evolving architecture. He asked me a lot of questions. I answered them. But still, like the woman before, he walked away.
‘He’s too dull-witted, too slow – there seems to be too much missing.’
Seymour lowered my price every hour. I had started the afternoon at 1,900 unidollars, and now I was down to 650.
Seymour kept on putting food into his mouth. He came over to me. ‘OK,’ he said, making no attempt to hide his mouthful of banana, ‘when the next customer comes over, be quick on the response. Wake up a bit, OK? Because unless they’re looking for a hat stand, you are not going to be sold until after five. And do you know what happens after five? After five, the standard of customers falls quite rapidly and you could end up with any psychotic bargain-hunter who comes along.’
Seymour had a call from someone. ‘I know they were all meant to be sold by now, but there’s only one to go . . . It’s 113, the one direct from Castle’s place . . . There’s something wrong with him . . . I don’t know what they did when they reconditioned him, but he’s not right . . .’
As he spoke, I gazed across the hall at another unsold Echo in his illuminated booth, designed to look like a middle-aged human male. He raised his hand to see if I would do the same, but I didn’t. And then he laughed wildly for six minutes and kept banging his head against the booth, much to his vendor’s dismay.
Five o’clock came and went, and I realized that Seymour had been right. The atmosphere changed. The customers who came in now showed no sign of wanting to talk to the Echos – all fifteen of us (down from 1,800 at the beginning of the afternoon). They clearly knew that we were rejects among rejects. The lowest of the low. All they wanted was a good price.
Seymour sighed as he watched a customer pay another vendor for the Echo across the hall. The one who had been laughing uncontrollably.
‘Even Mia has sold out before me,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief as he gestured to his rival vendor, now on her way out of the hall.
He whistled to a robotic vending machine, which trundled over so that he could help himself to a sweetened red tea.
4
A skinny man with a long face.
He was wearing overalls and his right eye was totally black. A gleaming black ceramic sphere placed inside the socket. As he came closer, I could smell him. He smelled of ammonia. Urine.
He just stood there, his tongue clicking inside his dry mouth as he looked at me. If I’d had more wits about me I wouldn’t have liked the look in his eye. It would have made me feel even cheaper than I was. But I had nothing about me, right then.
‘How much is this one?’ he asked, in a small voice that Seymour didn’t even hear the first time. And
then he screwed up his face in frustration, and repeated louder: ‘I said, how much is this one?’
Seymour turned round, looking perturbed at the sight of the man. ‘Ah, Laurence, it is good to see you again.’
‘Louis. My name is Louis.’
Seymour nodded. ‘Sorry, sorry, sir. My mistake. It’s been a long day.’
Louis carried on looking at me shrewdly. ‘There are only long days.’
‘Yes.’
I noticed that his dirty overalls had a logo on the chest pocket. A blue castle with three turrets. There were two letters underneath: RZ. This should have troubled me, but it didn’t.
‘So,’ said Louis, looking me up and down. ‘How much?’
‘For you, 300. And that’s tearing my arm off.’
Louis shook his head. ‘250. Paid now. Nothing more.’
For a moment Seymour seemed to be in a quiet type of pain. He took a sip of his tea. Eventually he nodded. ‘OK, you kill me. 250.’
And then he opened the booth door, looking at me almost apologetically before handing me over to my new owner.
‘So,’ he said, noting the initials on Louis’ overalls. ‘How’s life at the Resurrection Zone? Made friends with the Neanderthals?’
Louis snarled a little, offended by the question, and said nothing. Except to me: ‘Come. Now.’
I was told to follow this Louis out of the hall, which of course I did.
I was just another damaged unquestioning Echo at the service and mercy of humans.
5
I recharged in a lodge right underneath a rotating sphere, with seven other Echos. All male. Most didn’t talk to me; although one had, before going to bed. He was a bit different to the others. I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to him. All the other Echos were by now in recharge mode, but I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t feeling anything at all.
