Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  Rosella was trying to compose herself. ‘Alex Castle said that if I didn’t do it, then I would be imprisoned and Granddad would die.’

  I stared at her; after hearing this, I wanted to hate her; but somehow I couldn’t. Somehow I knew that it wasn’t her fault any more than it was Alissa’s fault. It was no one’s fault but my uncle’s, and for a moment I resented the fact that he was still alive while my parents were dead.

  It was such a strong feeling that it nearly caused me to pass out again.

  ‘I want to kill him,’ I told her, remembering Daniel’s screams. And those of my parents. ‘My uncle. I want you to do what you did. I mean, I want you to turn an Echo into something that will kill him.’

  She looked at me for a long time. ‘Killing him will not bring your parents back. I want to help you, but revenge is never the answer. All that would happen is that Echos might be banned, and all existing ones terminated.’

  I had no idea if this was the truth or not. But I was troubled by this information. I thought of Daniel. The idea of his destruction was now a horrific one, yet it might have already happened. It was strange. Only days ago I had wanted to live in a world completely free of Echos. And here I was thinking that the loss of just one – this particular one – would be a catastrophe.

  Rosella had stopped crying but her hands were trembling. ‘Also, I nearly tried it once before. He had someone access my computers and saw I was up to something – he didn’t know what – but he made threats. He knew how much I loved him. And he hinted that, well . . . I just couldn’t risk it.’

  She told me that my uncle’s promises had been false. She told me that it wasn’t safe here. She thought she was next on Uncle’s list. ‘He is acting strange. Quiet. Too quiet.’

  ‘Why don’t you move?’

  ‘There is nowhere for me to go.’

  Then she started asking questions about Daniel.

  I told her everything I knew.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘He said you would look after me.’

  She smiled, but it was not a sign of happiness.

  3

  Two hours later, he came.

  Daniel.

  He arrived after having escaped from the Resurrection Zone.

  I heard him downstairs with Rosella. ‘Where is she?’ he said.

  ‘Where is the girl? Where is Audrey? Has she come here?’

  I got up. I had to see him.

  ‘Don’t worry. She is safe. She is all right.’

  The moment I heard his voice, relief flooded through me.

  ‘Can I see her? I want to see her.’

  He saw me. He rose up on the leviboard just as I was about to go down. And the moment I saw him, I realized that he was back. He had an alertness to him again. Whatever Uncle Alex had tried to take out of him wasn’t something that could be removed.

  He looked as though he was about to cry. The point at which a machine wants to cry is the point at which it is no longer to be considered a machine. I’d heard that somewhere. Anyway. I wanted Dad to be alive so I could say that to him. I’d also have added this: If you have things inside you that cannot be taken away or destroyed, you are not a machine, either. And I looked at him and did not see an Echo at all. I just saw someone called Daniel. Someone I cared for more than anyone. And someone who was far more than the sum of his parts.

  I went over and hugged him. ‘You made it.’

  ‘Yes. So did you.’ I felt his body become heavy and sink into me. He was weak.

  It was undeniable. I loved him. It might not have been the sort of love the Neo Maxis sang about, but it was love all the same. Love was just that part of your feelings for someone you couldn’t explain. The bit that doesn’t make sense. The bit that was left inside you if you took everything else away. Like the bit inside an Echo that might be able to make it human.

  He was in desperate need of some sugar and water, which Rosella gave him.

  ‘I was working in the Resurrection Zone. I was never going to get out. It was horrible there, but I had given up hoping. Then I saw that you had escaped. I saw it in the news. And so I—’

  ‘News?’ Rosella looked worried.

  Daniel nodded. ‘There is a newsletter called Castle Watch. I was given it by a woman called Leonie.’

  ‘Leonie Jenson,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. The newsletter said witnesses had seen you at Hampstead Station. And I knew that if you got a train, it was likely that you would try and come here.’

  Rosella seemed to be in a panic now. ‘Witnesses?’ She stared straight at me. ‘Was it a direct train here?’

  ‘No. Paris, then Barcelona 2. Then Valencia.’

  Rosella was nodding fast, working things out in her mind. ‘Good, good . . . three trains. Three trains. And did Castle know that you knew about this place. About me?’

  ‘He had talked about an Echo designer in Valencia, but I don’t think he had ever told me that Daniel was made here.’

  ‘Vale, vale . . . OK, OK . . . But if it is known that you went to the train station, they will be able to work out the rest. They will eventually find out that you tried to evade them, and ask to see footage in Paris and Barcelona 2. Mr Castle will have his people – and his Echos – try and track you down. Both of you. But I should imagine he’ll start with you.’ She said that looking at me.

  She tried to think. ‘I would look after you for ever if I could – you know I would – but I am not able to. Every single time I try to help somebody I end up losing them.’ Her eyes gleamed with despair. ‘I think you need to go. I’d say there is half an hour before he works out you are here. You do not have long. He will track you both down. Is there anywhere you can go?’

  I looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at me. We both belonged nowhere in this world except, maybe, with each other.

  ‘You are not safe here. You might not be safe anywhere on Earth,’ Rosella said to me. ‘There must be somewhere . . .’

  ‘I have a grandma who lives in New Hope,’ I told her. I thought of Grandma, remembered how crazy she had seemed when I had last spoke to her, when she was high on everglows. I thought of my mum and dad telling me never to visit New Hope, let alone live there. I heard Dad’s voice, as clear as ever: Audrey, promise me, when you are older, don’t give up on Earth unless you have to. Maybe now I had to. I thought of all the Echos there – though now that wasn’t such a fear.

  ‘The moon!’ said Rosella. ‘Yes. The moon! He has no powers there. The police force are independent.’ She looked at Daniel. ‘And Echos are well protected. They have rights that they don’t have on Earth.’

  Daniel looked relieved. I dreaded to think what he had been through at the Resurrection Zone. Whatever had happened had made him look vulnerable. His skin was still perfect and he was still strong, but there was something about him now that made me want to hug him, to wrap him up in a blanket for ever more and keep him safe. Maybe that is what love is. A need to keep someone safe.

  ‘Does Mr Castle know about your grandma?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Yes. She is my mum’s mum.’

  ‘But it is the moon,’ said Rosella. ‘You would be safer there than anywhere on Earth. People are harder to find. There’s less information stored on them. Less surveillance. That’s why criminals always end up there.’

  ‘Plus,’ said Daniel, who was programmed to know all sorts of things, ‘there are 3,000 unoccupied apartments in Aldrin, the most northern suburb of New Hope. They overdeveloped in 2113, the year it was built, and there are still some without tenants or squatters. We could live in one of them. For a while, at least.’

  It was the most ridiculous idea. A teenage human and an Echo living together in an apartment on the moon. Runaways. Never knowing if today was the day when trouble would come and find us. I thought of my old boyfriend, Ben. The one whose Simulationist parents had decided to move to New Hope. Maybe we could stay with him. But I didn’t say this out loud. It was an option, though, there if we should need it.
>
  Rosella was pinching her bottom lip. Her eyes closed. She had thought of something. Something bad. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No what?’ I asked.

  When Rosella’s eyes opened, it was only me they were looking at. ‘There’s no way you can get to the moon. No way. You won’t be able to leave Earth. The first thing Mr Castle and the police will have done when you ran away is spread your ID around. There is no way you’ll pass through the eye-scan and thumb-reader at the spaceport. You’ll be caught and sent back to him.’

  My heart sank. Disappointment mixed up with fear. I felt trapped. You could feel claustrophobic trapped in a bedroom, but you could feel equally claustrophobic trapped on a planet. Claustrophobia wasn’t a matter of space, but of restriction.

  And of being unable to escape dangers.

  My heart raced. My skin prickled. Fight or flight, but unable to do either.

  Daniel saw my anxiety. ‘I met someone while I worked at the Resurrection Zone. Another Echo – 15. He dreamed of escaping to the moon, but he was never able to. But I have in my mind the full record of what he said. He told me: And if we weren’t here, it would be easy to get to as well. There are Echo shuttles every night. From Heathrow Spaceport. And from others too. Almost every big city in Europe. Pretty basic. Cramped. You know, Echo class. Not like what the humans get to travel in, but it would get you there in the same time. And easy to get on too. You don’t need any ID or proof of employment or purpose. Not even an eye-scan if you are an Echo. No ID.’

  ‘But Daniel, that won’t help Audrey. She is not an Echo. She would need to have ID.’

  And it came to me, the thought, clearing away clouds in my mind. ‘Listen, Rosella. You do everything here, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything. The whole process of making an Echo. That is done here, isn’t it? In this place?’

  Rosella nodded. ‘Yes, why?’

  But Daniel was already realizing what I was going to say. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t become like me. It is no way for a human to be.’

  I ignored him and carried on talking to Rosella. ‘So you could put a mark on my hand. An E. Just like the mark on Daniel’s. And an origin mark on my shoulder. Then I could just pretend to be another Castle product.’

  I took a breath. Scared of what I was suggesting.

  ‘I could be an Echo.’

  4

  Rosella was shaking her head. ‘No, you can’t do that.’

  ‘But you have everything here, don’t you?’

  ‘You are not an Echo. A human can’t just become an Echo.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is it my shoulders? Are they too broad and ugly? Is it the way I walk? Is it my nose? Am I too big?’

  Rosella looked at me for a moment in deep sympathy. ‘I’m glad I’m not young enough to have all those delusional body worries.’

  ‘But I’m not perfect. Echos are perfect.’

  Daniel’s eyes studied me harshly. ‘You are better than perfect. You are beautiful. And perfection is overrated. Perfection is the blandest thing imaginable. Please, Audrey, stay human. Humans are properly alive.’

  Rosella shrugged. ‘Yes and no. I mean, if you could pick us apart, one atom at a time, we’d just be a pile of dust. We’re just a collection of lifeless molecules that together form life. But really, humans are only cleverly made machines, just like an Echo. And it is possible to fuse the two. I mean, look at you, Daniel.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t really be becoming an Echo,’ I said. ‘I’d be pretending to be one. That’s the difference.’ I knew it wasn’t really a difference. I knew that if I looked like one, I would be treated like one. But I couldn’t think of a better plan. ‘Come on, please. They’re looking for a human girl. Not an Echo.’

  ‘You’d be destroying your life,’ said Daniel. ‘Echos are second-class citizens. Pets have more rights. Mice have more rights! Even rats. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  I felt a bit bad. A strange kind of guilt, as though I was betraying my parents. This was not the dream they’d had for me. I was meant to be going to Oxford University. That would not be happening now. Even being a remote student was too dangerous. No. I was a runaway. I was going to be anonymous, and an anonymous Echo at that. Living on the moon, the one place my parents always told me I must never end up. But still, I didn’t have a million choices any more. I had one choice. Life, or death.

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ Daniel was saying. ‘I just thought there might be a way we could get on the shuttle together.’

  ‘What? Like by putting my hands in my pockets?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  Rosella was pacing the room. ‘It’s not just the marks. It’s your skin. It’s human. Any expert on Echos would be able to see the difference. It’s the indentations, the pores, the other imperfections. Look, the flaws.’

  I felt my skin, suddenly feeling self-conscious in front of Daniel.

  Rosella studied me, making assessments. ‘Los ojos,’ she said. ‘Your eyes. Your eyes are hazel. Castles’ are green. Sempuras’ are brown. Darker than yours. My eyes are naturally hazel too. Wait, wait . . .’ She took a moment to remove her lenses. ‘UVA-defence info-lenses. Kind of needed in the Spanish desert. They’re not transparent. Look, brown irises. Same as a Sempura Echo. I have them to protect me from the sun. I can get some more.’

  I put the lenses in. Rosella looked at my face and my arms.

  ‘For your skin, you’d need to go in the tank. There are three unoccupied tanks here. And you would need to go in one. If I made sure there was enough keratin in the restoration fluid, then it might just be possible to make the outer layer of your skin – the epidermis – look like an Echo’s.’

  ‘Can I do it?’

  ‘It’s unlikely. You see, the liquid rises slowly. There is no way of speeding up the process. You would need to be able to hold your breath underwater for three minutes.’

  ‘I can do it,’ I said, without having a clue if that was true or not.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Daniel asked me. ‘You don’t have to do this. There might be another way.’

  ‘The moon is our best option,’ I said. ‘He won’t think of looking for me there because he knows I can’t leave the planet. As a human, I mean.’

  ‘And he’s probably the last person in the world to imagine that a human would ever volunteer to become an Echo,’ said Rosella, who knew that my uncle saw Echos as commodities and nothing more. I could tell she had come round to the idea.

  So I did it.

  We went downstairs to the tanks. Strange giant eggs hovering just above the ground. We passed quite a few occupied ones, works in progress for my uncle, I supposed, and then we reached one with the door open.

  ‘You will need to take off your clothes,’ Rosella said.

  I looked at Daniel. ‘Turn round,’ I said.

  I don’t think he understood shyness, or body anxiety, but he turned round.

  I got undressed.

  ‘You can do it,’ Daniel said, still staring at a distant work table.

  ‘If you are in trouble, knock very hard on the door . . . You can do it – you will be all right,’ were Rosella’s last words before I stepped inside.

  5

  The door shut automatically. I was sealed in, and as the cool liquid rose, I began to panic. They couldn’t see me. What if I wasn’t able to make myself heard? They seemed pretty soundproof, those things.

  It rose up. Higher, higher, higher. Feet, waist, neck. Making my skin tingle. I tried to slow my breathing, remembering Mum’s yoga lessons. A slow breath needs a slow mind, she’d once said. You need to slow your thoughts. Your mind is always too busy, your attention flits too much. Like a butterfly, you must learn to settle.

  I took my last inhale, feeling the fluid on my chin, at the base of my lips. And then I closed my eyes and held my breath.

  I saw Mum and Dad in my mind. I remembered them taking me swimming in Paris on Saturday mornings. Dad use
d to swim whole lengths underwater. I think I was a fish in a former life, he had said.

  A former life.

  And then I remembered him trying to teach me. Knowing I was scared of being under the water and wanting to combat that.

  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 be another natural element in the pool.

  How long had it been?

  It was very difficult to tell. It felt like ten minutes, but it had probably only been one. But then, just as I thought my lungs were about to explode and the panic was setting in, another thing happened. A sharp, searing pain caused by something hard pressing into my shoulder. It was the origin mark. Why hadn’t Rosella told me the origin mark was given here, in the tank?

  The burning pain was so intense that I opened my mouth to scream. I swallowed a mouthful of that fluid. That sharp, mineral fluid. I banged my arm as hard as I could against the tank, realizing I had about a second.

  And then I died.

  Or I thought I did.

  But sometimes what we think is the end is really just a beginning in disguise.

  So I awoke. And I was naked, though Rosella had preserved my modesty and body heat by laying my clothes over me like a blanket.

  And Daniel’s lips were on mine. And then I choked the fluid out; it burned my throat as it came up. He had exhaled life back into me. I felt weak, physically, but strong in unseen ways. I had been in there just long enough for the fluid to smooth my skin.

  ‘It worked,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Rosella was saying. ‘How is your shoulder?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I lied. It was burning like hell.

  She looked worried. At first I thought it was about my shoulder. But it wasn’t. ‘Oh my God, the time. He’ll be here. Or his Echos will.’ Then she looked even more concerned. ‘Why aren’t they here yet?’