Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  We heard something. A kind of thudding sound. But this wasn’t coming from outside.

  Daniel looked at me, as curious as I was.

  It was coming from one of the tanks.

  6

  ‘There was a noise from one of the tanks,’ I told Rosella.

  The words were like a slap across her face. ‘A noise. But that’s . . . that’s impossible. They haven’t been ignited.’

  Daniel was confused. ‘Why? I was a noise in a tank once.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘Are there Echo prototypes in the tank?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, for Castle. But I haven’t even started to develop them. I haven’t inputted any data. They don’t even have igniters. I’m not going to develop them.’

  Daniel considered. ‘Why not? He won’t be happy if you don’t give him them.’

  Rosella’s eyes were filled with bleak defiance, even as the colour drained from her face. ‘I no longer care if he is happy or not happy.’

  ‘When are they meant to be ready by?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow. This is another reason why you must be gone as soon as possible.’

  I saw genuine concern in Daniel’s face. ‘What are you going to tell him?’

  ‘I will tell him nothing. It is over.’

  ‘You should come with us,’ I said, buttoning my top.

  Rosella ignored this and went over to a table covered in equipment. She chose a cylindrical object with a copper end, and the indentation of a reverse E on it. I knew instantly what it was.

  Another noise from the tanks. Rosella looked worried. She whispered something in Spanish and then said: ‘We have no time . . . I should really have got something to block the pain . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, sensing her urgency. ‘I can take the pain.’

  And so I did. She pressed it onto my skin, turned the end, and I stared straight into Daniel’s eyes and he stared straight into mine, and the pain was there, a scorching pain that seared into me, but I could take it because I knew what the pain meant. It meant freedom.

  Rosella looked at me as if I was a sweet little child who had just recovered from an operation. ‘There. It is O—’

  The noise came again. We walked over towards the tank which, like all the others, was thirty centimetres above its electromagnetic stand.

  ‘Wait there,’ Rosella told us. ‘I am going to check something downstairs. On the computers.’

  So she left me and Daniel. Daniel walked towards the tank and I followed him.

  I felt that I should say something, so I said: ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘I’m sorry for everything. For being horrid when I first met you. I was wrong to think all Echos were the same.’

  He smiled. ‘Most are,’ he said. ‘Most will do whatever they are programmed to do. They don’t think about what they are doing. They will do anything they are told to, and only that. They won’t know the pleasure of a book – or a kiss – but then, they won’t know pain either. They have no morals. To have morals, they need to experience pleasure and pain. If it is what is expected of them and if they are told by someone who has power over them, they will do anything – even kill.’

  ‘There are humans like that too.’ I studied him for a moment. ‘So it didn’t change you. The operation. The reprogramming . . . what Uncle Alex did to your head . . .’

  ‘I thought it had for a while. But then I realized that I was just the same. The core things that made me who I am weren’t to do with programming. There was something else. Something permanent.’

  ‘I feel so guilty. You shouldn’t have saved me.’

  ‘Everything has worked out OK. We are—’

  There was a fourth noise from inside the tank. Stronger, harder. Daniel looked disconcerted. ‘That didn’t sound right. That sounded too strong, even for an Echo. Stand back.’

  Just as he said that, there was another noise, from a different tank further away. And then a third. ‘This is not right,’ he repeated.

  Right then, Rosella rose back onto our floor on the leviboard, distraught. ‘I’ve been hacked. The computers – he’s got into them. Or rather, his hackers have. He’s programmed all the Echos. To maximum levels of strength and aggression. Illegal levels. You’ve got to get out of here. Now. They’re strong enough to break out of the tanks, and it’s due to happen, and when they do they’re programmed to kill all three of us. I’ve just seen the code. You have to run. Get out of here. Get on a ship to the moon.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  ‘I must stay here,’ she said. Her voice sounded calm, but a kind of forced calm. Something was going on that she wasn’t telling us; that she wanted to protect us from. Her Spanish accent became stronger but her words stayed quite calm. ‘This is my responsibility. I have to be reprogramming the computers. You must go now before it is too late.’ But then she said, much louder, ‘Go! You must leave! Vete!’

  But it was already too late, because at that moment a hand burst out of the tank we were standing in front of and grabbed Daniel by the throat. Bursting right out, and leaking restoration fluid.

  Daniel couldn’t breathe. I turned to the table and grabbed the Echo brander, and pressed the copper end onto the anonymous Echo’s wrist as I switched it on. But this Echo was not Daniel. This Echo knew no pain.

  I turned back to the table. There were about a hundred instruments I didn’t recognize. I saw one that I did. A laser blade. I picked it up, switched it on, and turned to slice through the Echo’s wrist. It worked. Dark Echo blood sprayed everywhere. The detached hand stayed clasped around Daniel’s throat until he pulled it off. The part of the arm that stayed attached to the otherwise unseen Echo thrashed around violently. Noise started to come from other tanks. From one of them, another hand burst out.

  ‘Go!’ Rosella shouted.

  There was no way we were going to do that. ‘I can’t leave you here,’ said Daniel. ‘You made me. You looked after me.’

  ‘I abandoned you.’

  ‘You had no choice.’

  ‘Go now. You’ve got someone to look after now. Both of you. You’ve got each other to look after. Sometimes, to save something, you have to lose something. I have nothing to lose. You have each other. If you stayed and died and I survived, I could not live with myself.’

  ‘Rosella,’ I said, ‘nothing has been your fault.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, leaning forward and pleading with us. ‘It is very easy for me to change the program. It is two commands, and I can stop this, but I am not going down there until I know for certain that you are out of here. And once you are, I want you to get in my car and drive to the main hospital in Valencia, the Clínica Quirón de Valencia, and I want you to find my granddad and stay with him and make sure he is safe. Please do that. And get him out of the hospital. I think he is a target too.’

  This changed things. Daniel was quick to understand the decision that faced us. The only one he could make with the information we had. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll go and look after him.’

  Rosella disappeared down to the basement.

  All the occupied tanks were now making noises as the Echos tried to break out. ‘Let’s go,’ I told Daniel.

  I held his hand, and we ran past the hands reaching for us as we splashed our way across the increasingly wet floor. We reached the door and voice-commanded it to open, but because of the increasingly thunderous background noise, it took a few fast and frenzied attempts; then we were outside in a baking bright blue-skied world, and we sprinted round the other side of the warehouse to a car. Not a magcar, but a land car. An ancient battered electric one from the 2070s or something.

  Daniel broke into it; he knew how to drive it. We had set off down the old dust road no longer made for cars to travel on, when suddenly the outdated-looking holophone on the dashboard started ringing.

  ‘Hello?’ said Daniel.

  And then we saw Rosella’s face in front of us, fl
ickering like a ghost.

  7

  The hologram of Rosella was looking so calm that at first I thought she’d managed to reprogram the Echos and make them safe. But there was something behind the calmness; something I couldn’t quite detect because of the flickering image – an image made faint by the brightness of the sun.

  ‘My granddad is not at the hospital,’ she said. ‘I had to say that to get you both out of here. He – Ernesto Daniel Márquez – died two weeks ago . . .’

  What was she talking about? I looked at Daniel.

  All those in the world who still doubt that it is possible for an Echo to feel emotion should have seen Daniel’s face at that moment. It would have convinced them in a heartbeat.

  ‘No . . . No . . . You said—’

  ‘Lo siento mucho de verdad.’ She closed her eyes. She looked a little less calm now. I don’t think she even realized she had said that in Spanish. ‘I lied, Daniel. I am human. Humans lie. Listen, you don’t need to go to Heathrow. London might be too dangerous. There is a spaceport in Barcelona 2. It will be easier. There are fewer checks there. They have Echo shuttles to the moon leaving every night. They will be basic, but that is what life as an Echo is . . .’

  We could hear other noises near Rosella. Although we couldn’t see it clearly, we were left in no doubt that the Echos had broken free and were heading towards her. To kill her . . .

  Daniel stopped the car. ‘Get out here,’ he told me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted. The first time I’d heard him shout.

  I shook my head. I had lost everything once. I wasn’t prepared to risk that again. ‘You’re not going back alone. No way. No way. We stay together now. And if you do this, I go with you.’

  He saw that there was no point arguing; he turned the car round and started speeding back along the dusty yellow road towards the warehouse.

  ‘Don’t come back here,’ Rosella was saying. She sounded desperate. She was looking all over the place. ‘It is too late, it is too late, it is too late . . . It is over. Don’t feel bad for me. Todo saldrá bien. I love you, Daniel. You’ll look after him, won’t you, Audrey? He is your responsibility now. Will you protect him?’

  ‘I will,’ I told her. ‘I promise.’

  We saw a hand grab her shoulder. Rosella closed her eyes as if saying a prayer, and then she said a series of numbers. Some kind of code.

  ‘Ocho . . . cuatro . . . dos . . . nueve . . . cero . . .’

  As she said those numbers, Daniel whispered them too, with a kind of dread, realizing what was happening. ‘Eight-four-two . . .’

  ‘Activate . . . Activar! Activar!’

  Before I had time to ask Daniel what she was doing, he was screaming, ‘No! Rosella! Stop!’

  But it was too late. He could have screamed loud enough to reach Mars and it wouldn’t have made any difference. In the space of less than a second, the whole warehouse seemed to implode inwardly in a sudden shrinking rush of motion, and then disappeared completely, as if it had never existed. In its place was a vast and perfectly rectangular hole cut into the dry and dusty landscape, the exact same shape as the warehouse, and Daniel only just stopped the car in time to stop us falling down into the pit, which was exactly as low as the basement had been.

  The front of the car must have been only centimetres away from the edge of the hole. There was nothing left of the warehouse or its contents. Well, except for a little black cube sitting on that orange earth in the middle of the hole.

  ‘The Nothing Machine,’ Daniel muttered.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time after that. He just stared out of the front window at the hot shimmering landscape. We could see the dark skeletons of dead trees on the other side of the hole. To the left, past scraggy shrubs and cacti, was Valencia. Its low dull buildings – which all seemed to be run-down warehouses and food markets and apartment blocks – still seemed to wobble in the heat. The city centre magrails were busy. Three of them stretched out across the sea, in different directions.

  I stared at the sea. It was so still. That is the weird thing about the sea. The way it seems as still and solid and calm as anything from a distance, but moving and turbulent and dangerous when you’re close to it. Yeah. The sea was an illusion. Maybe, if you could get close enough to everything, you’d see that’s what the world was full of. Illusions. If you judged things on first appearances, you’d be blind for ever. The way I had been blind to everyone. To Daniel. To Uncle Alex. Maybe even to my parents a little bit.

  I still grieved for them. I still felt like there was a hole inside my heart as big as the one in the ground. Grief was the worst thing. And now Daniel was feeling it too.

  ‘She knew,’ he spoke eventually.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘She knew what was going to happen. She knew it was more than two commands. She knew it was too late. She just lied to save us. A human, dying to save an Echo? Has that ever happened before.’

  ‘You are not a normal Echo, Daniel, and she loved you.’

  I saw tears emerge in his eyes. He tried to battle those tears, but they couldn’t be stopped. So I just sat there with him, and waited. Trouble would eventually be coming, but I allowed everything to remain still. I sensed he needed to sit there and absorb the pain. To let it all in. If you try and block it – or neuropad it away – that can be unhealthy. You end up becoming empty, your own personal Nothing Machine. He needed to feel what he needed to feel. And I had no choice but to let him.

  I watched through the window as a lizard slowly ventured forward towards the new hole in the ground. It seemed curious. It went right up to the edge, jerked its head a few times, then scurried away across the dusty, sun-beaten earth towards the dry, withered scrubland to our right.

  After a minute – or two or three or four – Daniel turned to me. The tears had all dried up. His eyes weren’t blotchy. Maybe that was an Echo thing. They looked totally clear and green, but there was still the same amount of pain.

  ‘Audrey,’ he said, his voice sounding delicate and somehow new. Like his words were porcelain or something. ‘Audrey . . . the first time I saw you, when you came to your uncle’s house, I looked at you and saw the pain you were feeling, and as I looked at you I felt your pain as if it was my own. And all I wanted to do, all I wanted to do more than anything in the world, was to help you get over that pain.’ He looked at me. His eyes were wide and green and real. ‘I am scared of you.’

  This startled me. ‘Scared of me? Why? Why do I scare you? What are you scared of?’

  ‘I am scared of caring for you, because to care for someone you risk getting hurt. I have wished, sometimes, that I didn’t know how to care or worry. I have wished I was like all the others. But I am not like them. I know that. I could never be like them. And – and – and . . . you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Even now, feeling this pain, I don’t want to not be me. Because we have hope, Audrey, don’t we? And no matter how terrifying the future becomes, it is worth it. Life is always worth it. I feel alive, Audrey. I must be alive to feel this pain. We have known pain. The physical kind and the other kind. And we are still here. It hasn’t finished us off.’

  I looked at the fresh scar on my hand. The red E amid newly glossy and perfect skin. Maybe that was what life was. Beyond all the illusions. Just a series of scars.

  Yeah. That is how you grew up.

  You discovered pain, but far from being crippled by that pain, you were made stronger, because you knew you had survived it. Skin is tougher when it scars. And so the next time pain comes along, you’re ready for it. And it made the rest of life shine with hope, the way the scar just highlights the smoothness of the skin around it.

  We sat there for quite a while. But then, as the light faded, we drove away.

  8

  We drove for an hour on the near-trafficless old motorway, with a thousand hopes in our heads.

  Two of these hopes were immediate ones.r />
  We hoped that, as soon as Uncle Alex found out about the warehouse, he’d think that we had disappeared with it.

  The road was just about driveable, but it obviously hadn’t been resurfaced for about fifty years; in some places the tarmac had totally worn away; in others it lay cracked and oozing like some wounded grey-black serpent in the heat.

  There were no magrails directly above us. They were all to the east, so we could travel pretty much unseen. Anyway, that wasn’t the only danger. Daniel had told me that the motorways were unpoliced; in one way that was good for us, but it also meant that there were bandits around.

  At one point we worried because three men and a woman on hover-bikes came up close behind us. They wore black clothes and no helmets.

  ‘If they think we’re Echos, they will want to steal us,’ Daniel told me. ‘Don’t let them see the E on your hand.’

  The hover-bikes came close, but they couldn’t have been that interested – maybe because the car we were driving was so old – and they soon turned off. But still, it made me feel uneasy. And I understood how much danger I would face now that I was an Echo.

  The road crossed through a part of a city. Tarragona.

  We followed a sign to a supply store. It wasn’t a very promising-looking store. We only needed the simplest of things. I needed food or a high-fat juice. Daniel needed sugar. We both needed water.

  I don’t think I’d ever been to a shop on the ground before. (But then, I had real-world shopped as little as possible, and only really in places like the White Rose back in Yorkshire, and other sky malls.) There were only a couple of aisles.

  One of the aisles sold everglows, which told me the kind of place it was, as everglows weren’t allowed to be sold in shops anywhere in the world. I went along the aisles, past the chocolate sprays and tapas pills and Sempura mind-wire chargers and medicine patches and sun-factor capsules. We found the sugar and a high-fat juice, but the water, like everywhere in Spain, was sold behind the counter.