Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

There was only a fraction of a second between seeing him and feeling the pain as the jolt-club pressed hard into my chest. It must have been on its highest setting because the electromagnetic force stopped my heart for four seconds after it sent me flying back to the ground.

  It was dark now.

  On entering the enclosure with Zeta-One, Louis had switched the glass to dark mode so no visitors could see inside. Not that there were many visitors – yesterday’s protests had put people off coming. And not that they cared about what happened to an Echo.

  These weren’t the thoughts I was having then. I was hardly thinking anything because the pain was so intense. But it wasn’t just pain. The charge of the jolt-club had weakened my entire nervous system. It had messed up my circuitry. When my heart restarted, it was beating fast, 306 beats per minute, and my mind was moving at hyperspeed. Image after image flashed through my brain. Rosella’s face as she stared at her dead iguanas, then Alice rearing up on her hind legs, then Audrey – and that look of horror as she realized what I was that first night.

  The pain I was feeling was the pain of a world where I would never belong.

  Louis stood over me. He kicked me in the stomach, hard. He wasn’t stronger than me, but he had a weapon. And Zeta-One.

  ‘Oh, this is perfect,’ said Louis, smoothing his fingers over his damaged skin. ‘I couldn’t have arranged it better myself. Shall I tell you what is going to happen here? Shall I?’

  My punishment for not answering was another hard kick in the stomach.

  ‘You are going to be terminated, right here. But not by me, oh no. And not by Zeta-One or the tigers. No, no, no. By someone else.’

  He turned to the Neanderthals; they were standing upright, Oregon’s arm around Pitu, Pitu bending into him, frightened and confused. ‘By them.’

  Louis scanned the ground, and picked up a loose rock that was about the size of a hand.

  ‘Go on,’ he told Oregon. ‘You want your freedom, don’t you? Well, you can have it. The only payment I ask for is for you to smash this rock into the skull of that Echo. Do you understand, caveman?’ And then he spoke in a crude and bullying imitation of Oregon’s own voice. ‘Kill Echo, you free! Uh-huh? Uh-huh? You got that, you Ice Age numbskull?’

  Oregon studied Louis for a while. He scratched his thin wispy black beard, then his high, pronounced cheekbones, deep in thought.

  ‘You lie. Human lie.’

  Louis smiled. ‘No. No, I do not lie, Oregon, I do not. You see, I will tell you it straight. You are a nightmare for me. For us. For the Resurrection Zone. For the whole place. A PR catastrophe. Look. Look at this . . .’ He pulled out one of the interactive leaflets Leonie had handed over earlier. He held up the front, which was full of information about Neanderthals. ‘You two are bad news. You should have stayed extinct. Even Mr Castle knows you were a mistake now. He’s nearly been killed because of you two being here. But don’t worry, there is a way out of this mistake. You see, what you do is, you kill this Echo, and then you escape, and people will start to worry. Maybe you could smash a rock over a human’s head too. So suddenly they won’t sympathize any more. And the zone won’t be the bad guy. So, I’m serious. Kill, and then escape. Free. We want no more of you.’

  So there I was.

  On that dusty floor. Staring up at Audrey’s face on the back of the leaflet that was in Louis’ hand, making her a silent promise.

  I had Louis’ boot pressed into my stomach, and the jolt-club inches away from my face. And, further away, there was Zeta-One pointing an antimatter positron towards me. If he fired it, I would be nothing. Not even a stain on the stone floor.

  Louis turned away from Oregon for a second. He studied me; his eye-cam made a noise, zooming in to capture my misery.

  ‘An Echo that feels fear. An Echo that feels pain. I wonder what else you can feel?’

  I stared at him, as defiantly as I could. ‘Hatred,’ I told him.

  Louis took a deep breath. He seemed triumphant, like he’d got something he had wanted. ‘Good. Good. Now, Oregon. Drop that little stone. Take this rock.’

  Oregon dropped the blood-stained flint and took the rock. My mind was filled with information it didn’t need right then. I didn’t need to know that the rock was granite, composed of quartz, feldspar and biotite materials or that granite rock formed most of the tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust. This information was not going to help me.

  Oregon came over to me, raised it high in the air.

  I’m just a machine. An automaton. An advanced robot.

  I closed my eyes.

  I cannot be killed because I am not alive.

  I am a nothing.

  The world will not change without me.

  Pain is just an illusion.

  There is no such thing as pain . . .

  You have to tell yourself such comforting lies when you are about to confront non-existence. I wondered, in that half-second, if Audrey was alive or dead.

  And I waited for the blow.

  The end.

  The peace that only being nothing could bring.

  But that’s not what happened.

  What happened was this:

  A thud. A tiny sound of cracking bone.

  Opening my eyes, I instantly realized what was going on. Oregon had smashed the rock into Louis’ face, sending blood spraying everywhere. I looked at Oregon and told him and Pitu to run.

  ‘Now! Come on! You’ve got to get out of here!’

  But Oregon stood there, staring at the blood-drenched rock as Louis writhed on the ground.

  ‘Zeta-One! Zeta-One!’ Louis was bellowing as he clutched his face. ‘Kill them!’

  17

  That titanium-and-steel hulk of a robot raised the pistol and fired, and there was a thin, quivering pulse of air and a noise like a sharp inhale, as if the enclosure itself was gasping for breath.

  Oregon went first. He was there, and then he was swallowed up into nothing. Gone. Not a trace.

  ‘No!’ Pitu cried in an anguished howl as she ran at the robot. It was no match. She too was gone in a second.

  And in another second it would have been me. But I knew Zeta-One would not kill me unless instructed by Louis. The instruction had been ‘Kill them’, but from Zeta-One’s perspective, I wasn’t alive any more than Zeta-One itself was alive. I was an Echo. I could only be terminated, not killed. So I kicked the jolt-club out of Louis’ hand, and covered his mouth. His blood ran over my skin, and then he bit into my palm. He knew I could feel the pain.

  I dragged him forward, under the illuminated gaze of Zeta-One, who kept the gun aimed at me all the time. And I pulled Louis across the enclosure, past the cave and the landscaped grass and ferns towards the exit.

  ‘Command me, Master,’ Zeta-One was saying. ‘What is my command? What is my command?’

  Louis screamed through my hand, but his muffled cry was not understood.

  ‘I am sorry, Master, but I could not process that command. Please try again . . . I am sorry, Master, but I could not process that command. Please try again . . . I am sorry, Master, but I could not process that command. Please try again . . .’

  And I took Louis right out of there.

  Out onto the path.

  There was a group of visitors – Chinese day-trippers, all wearing identical mind-wires, wondering why they couldn’t see the Neanderthals. When they saw us, they screamed, but I kept moving with Louis. He struggled and squirmed like a fish, but he was light and weak and so I could keep up a reasonable pace as we went past Alice, and the thin crowd of people outside her enclosure. More people started screaming. They liked violence, but only from behind an aerogel viewing screen.

  ‘How do I get out of here?’ I asked Louis, realizing I would have to let him speak. ‘And if you scream a command, I will . . . I will kill you. Do you understand?’

  He nodded behind my hand. There was absolutely no going back now. It was freedom or death.

  So I let him speak.

  ‘You�
�ll need me. To authorize it. Out of the staff exit.’

  The staff exit was between Alice and the aviary. A semicircle cut into the steel that would rise on the right instruction. Ninety-three metres away. And there were two Echos running towards us. The identical ones me and 15 had passed near the auk lake yesterday.

  ‘Wait!’ they were telling me. ‘Stop!’

  But I kept going until we made it. All that determination and defiance that had been given to me by a single human hair.

  And Louis said ‘Open’ into the graphine speech-recognition screen and his command was understood, even though his voice was weak and scared. That changed, though, the moment I flung him to the ground and ran out of there. He roared behind me, in a voice full of sheer rage:

  ‘Terminate that Echo!’

  18

  There was a strong wind, textured with light drizzle. The road was full of grand red-brick houses that were 300 years old. I knew where I was, even though I had never been there before. Information sprang automatically from vision, even without seeing a street sign.

  I was on Prince Albert Road, two kilometres south of Hampstead and Mr Castle’s house. And roughly the same distance from Hampstead Station. It was empty, but the traffic was busy above my head. I ran as fast as I could – faster than a human, though with the troubling knowledge that it wasn’t humans who were chasing me.

  There were leviboards at hundred-metre intervals, as there were on most major streets in metropolitan areas. But the first two I passed were at rail, not ground level, so it was a 300-metre run to the first one I would be able to step on. The pavement was full of traders selling cheap gifts to the tourists – holo-cards of the New Parliament building, miniature lifelike robots that looked like the King, shark burgers, tour-guide mind-wires, toy mammoths, tigers – so I weaved my way through, cutting left and right and left, thoughts of Audrey fuelling my momentum.

  I knew I was near a leviboard, so I jumped onto it just as Zeta-One and the two Echos were heading out of the zone. I dived down onto the metal as it rose towards the magrail and stayed out of sight. Once there, I waited till I saw a black taxi speeding towards me at 300 kilo-metres an hour. It slowed, stopped, its door rose like a wing, and I stepped inside.

  The robotic driver turned round. She was an old model, stiff and steel, maybe as old as the 2080s. This meant I’d have to make polite conversation.

  ‘Where would you like to go today, sir?’ she asked, in an American accent.

  Through the window I could see that one of the bald twin Echos had spotted me stepping into the taxi and was now pointing up at me. Louis was there too. He saw me. He took the gun from Zeta-One and aimed it at me. I tried to think. There was no way Audrey would still be at Hampstead Station now. She had either been killed or she had got away. And where would she have gone? The moon? No. Too difficult. There was only one possible place I could think of. The place I had – perhaps foolishly – told her to go.

  ‘Valencia,’ I said. ‘And fast.’

  Louis ran towards the leviboard, which had returned to ground level. He and Zeta-One stood on it, and started to rise at two metres a second towards us.

  The driver nodded her steel head. ‘Valencia, Spain,’ she said. ‘Understood. A lovely choice. Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Please. Just go.’

  ‘Thank you, passenger.’

  And just as Louis was there, at the window, his long face taut with hatred, the car shot away.

  Audrey. Mind-log 430.

  1

  The warehouse was high on a hill; it shimmered in the heat.

  It was so hot, the hill felt like it was only inches from the sun. I’d never known heat like this. This is what it must have been like in Africa, before the Great Exodus.

  I’d been this far south before. I had been to Greece once, to visit the crumbling ancient Acropolis with Mum. Yeah. We’d gone first thing in the morning, and it had been January, and we had taken plenty of water in permacool bottles and swallowed our sun factor, but we still hadn’t managed more than about five minutes before getting back into the magcar.

  And this was at least as hot. No. Hotter. This was crazy heat. It seemed to come just as much from the ground as from the sky, so it was like being cooked in an old-fashioned oven or something.

  The warehouse was made of translucent concrete. I knew it was translucent concrete because the swimming-pool building in Paris was made from translucent concrete (Mum had told me that). The big thing about it was that it didn’t need windows. Light could pass through the walls without the interior being visible from the outside. So I couldn’t see in. There was a buzzer next to the steel door. I tried it, but there was no response.

  I thought I might die out there in that heat. It was intense.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a drink. I don’t think I’d had one all day, and with all the running and fear I was extremely dehydrated. My mouth was rough and I couldn’t swallow. The city below blurred and rippled. There was hardly any floating architecture here. It all seemed very low. The sea was a still and dazzling blue mirror. The heat seemed to be melting the solid world into something fluid, and turning the distant salt water into something hard and brutal. Haulage vehicles manned by Echos sped by on the magrail.

  There was no sight of any other human.

  I sat down in the shade, but it was only a bit less hot.

  Seemed funny. After making it this far, it was going to be the sun that killed me.

  I tried to think what I could do. I should have stood up and got on the next train or taxi to anywhere north that wasn’t London.

  I thought of the twenty minutes before I got there, of catching that busy train to Paris, another to Barcelona 2, then a third to Valencia, and finally getting a taxi here.

  Why had I come here? I should’ve got off at Paris and tried to contact Rosella from a pod-café. I’d assumed he would be here. How stupid was I? This is what reading old books and listening to the Neo Maxis did to your brain. It filled it with unrealistic ideas.

  I closed my eyes and instantly felt the sun burning the thin skin of my eyelids, even in the shade.

  I tried to think. Not easy. What could I do? My mind was a blank.

  Heat dissolves everything, even thought. I felt nothing.

  Yeah.

  I needed to sleep, but knew that if I did, I would probably die.

  In the red-tinged darkness, I used every last bit of energy inside me to call her name. Loud as I could.

  ‘Ro-sell-a!’ And then, what could have been either a second or a minute or an hour later, a door opened and someone ran towards me – a woman, melting into the air.

  2

  It was the same again.

  This is what life does, I realized.

  It echoes.

  Yeah. Life is like a Neo Maxis song. The verses are always different but there are bits – choruses – that become familiar. They’re not always exactly identical or anything, but you recognize them instantly.

  Things happen, and they are not the same but they are nearly the same. And when you see that similarity, you realize that what is happening is a second chance; a chance to see something you didn’t quite catch the first time round. And when you are given those chances, you have to take them, as they let you put right mistakes and your own stupid thoughts. Because this could be your last chance.

  I was lying down after being unconscious.

  And above me was someone who may have been my saviour or my enemy or perhaps a bit of both, and she was looking at me worriedly. She had long, tatty, sun-bleached hair and wore a vest. She had a pierced eyebrow and dark eyes or info-lenses. She smelled of alcohol.

  I realized that I had seen this face before. In the magcar on the way to Paris, when I was hiding on the back seat. I remembered how nasty Uncle Alex had been to her. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a strange office that was also a bedroom. The grey walls glowed with dim-light.

  ‘No te preocupes,’ she to
ld me. ‘No te preocupes, todo saldrá bien . . .’ She was pressing a cup against my lips. ‘Agua.’

  I drank. ‘You’re Rosella?’

  ‘Si,’ she said. ‘How did you know? And who are you?’

  ‘My name is Audrey Castle.’

  ‘Castle?’ she said.

  It was not a nice thing, to have a surname that caused such fear in people.

  ‘As in Alex Castle?’

  ‘I’m his niece.’

  It took a few seconds for her to piece the jigsaw together in her mind, and when she did, fear swiftly sank towards sorrow.

  I felt sick from sunstroke.

  She tried to comfort me. ‘Tranquilo, tranquilo . . . Don’t worry. You are OK now. You nearly died out there in the heat, but it will be all right now. You have been asleep. I have taken you inside.’

  She was a strong, tall-looking woman, but she looked tired. She had the kind of face that could be happy and sad all at once.

  She said something quiet, in a whisper, in Spanish.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.

  And then she looked straight into my eyes and said: ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Sorry? What for? For Alissa?’

  I didn’t ask this with anger. I just needed to know the truth. Just seeing her face react to my mention of Alissa’s name told me half of it.

  She hesitated. And took a deep breath. And when her words came, they seemed as fragile as shimmering buildings on the horizon. ‘I don’t know how much you know, but I am sorry for the death of your parents. You see, it is true. I can confirm to you that I was the one who designed Alissa. I was the one who made her malfunction. It was built into her. After five weeks, she was meant to kill everyone she lived with. Including you. I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry . . . You poor girl. I will never forgive myself, I can never—’ She winced.

  Tears were streaming down her face now as she tried to explain. ‘My granddad, Ernesto, was dying. After I lost my home and had to move here, he had weeks if not days to live. He was in a lot of pain . . . Mr Castle told me that if I did it, my granddad would live for another seventy years, until he was 200. He said he would give him the most expensive gene therapy available, and reverse all the damage that had been done to his lungs and all over his body. And stop the pain he was in. Give him life. I had already lost a son, and my granddad was the only real family I had in the world.’