by Matt Haig
Daniel did all the talking, as he was fluent in Spanish. The man who was serving us looked me up and down. He had long blue dreadlocks and a moving tattoo of a silently roaring tiger on his arm. He wasn’t wearing a top, and I could see a dull glow in his chest. Everglow addict. He said something to me.
‘What did he say?’ I asked Daniel.
‘He said he needs an Echo girl to look after him.’
I shuddered.
The man smiled as he looked at me, but his eyes weren’t looking at me.
‘I am just an object now,’ I said as we headed for the exit.
‘No you’re not. You aren’t an Echo. I’m not even an Echo.’
‘But you were made to be one.’
‘Yes. Kind of.’
He told me about Rosella’s dead child. He told me the full story of the hair and the locket. ‘I am 0.01 per cent human,’ he said.
0.01 per cent didn’t sound a lot, but right then it sounded like everything. Maybe to be the slightest bit human was to be totally human. Maybe it was like love. You couldn’t be a little bit human in the same way you couldn’t be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn’t even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was just about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah. Maybe being human was to make no sense.
‘Then neither of us belong,’ I replied. Except to each other, I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud, because it would have made my head explode from embarrassment.
‘My uncle probably thinks we’re dead by now,’ I said as we left the heavy humid air of the store for the brighter heat outside.
‘I hope so.’ I could see from the way Daniel said it that he didn’t really believe it.
I drank a bit of the juice. It was disgusting. It had gone off in the heat. I had to leave it. My stomach rumbled.
We travelled the last short distance to Barcelona 2. The city, from the road anyway, seemed the exact opposite of Valencia: modern (nothing there was more than fifty years old, obviously), and everything was bright and the buildings were in the sky and glowed turquoise and green and blue against the increasing night. The blue was a giant Castle logo, a giant hologram floating in the sky. I stared up at it and felt like Uncle Alex was watching me. I shuddered. I had no doubt that if he ever saw me again, or even found out that I was alive, then I would be dead, and so would Daniel. The spaceport was a little to the north, so we kept driving.
I looked at Daniel as he drove. He would never age. He would look like this for ever. That was frightening. After all, I would not look like me for ever. I would age. That’s what humans did. And no amount of keratin could stop me from being human. If I ever got to turn forty or eighty or 150, I would look and feel my age.
And what did Echos do? They stayed the same. Sure, after ten years they were meant to be replaced by newer models, but it was perfectly possible – with the right care – for an Echo to go on indefinitely. So, if my future was with this Echo boy, then one day I would be a hundred years old, and he would still be looking sixteen. Once an Echo boy, always an Echo boy.
Yes, it was frightening. But I was fed up with being frightened. I had been frightened of Daniel himself not so long ago. Maybe you could only live life by heading towards the things that frightened you.
See, most of my life I had spent looking forward, thinking of going to Oxford and pleasing my parents. Wondering how I would go on pleasing them as an adult, when Mum wanted me to be successful and to have money and Dad wanted me to live like him – on principles alone.
Then, these last days, I had been consumed by the past. It had kept trying to to suffocate me. I’d either been as good as dead with neuropads or wanting to be dead without them.
But right then, I wasn’t thinking of either past or future. I was living in the present, and it felt as intense and real as the sky ahead, and the giant illuminated shuttle we could just about see on the horizon.
Daniel. Mind-log 4.
1
We were halfway to the moon. We had been travelling for four hours, forty-eight minutes and fifteen seconds.
It was far from perfect.
We were cramped, as Echos should expect to be. There were 308 other Echos in the shuttle.
The ratio of nitrogen and oxygen in the air was slightly wrong. The air was closer to eighty per cent than seventy-nine per cent nitrogen. It was making me feel tired, and I knew Audrey felt even tireder, but she knew she had to stay awake for most of the journey in order not to arouse suspicion.
She probably needed a bit more than the sugar solution that was the only available nourishment.
‘It’s a small price,’ she had whispered. ‘I’ll be OK.’
It must have been weird for her, knowing that she was the only human there. But it was weird for me too. I didn’t belong with those others. They could just sit on the communal long seats facing each other and stare blankly ahead at the inside walls of the aeroshell. They had no interest in looking out of the small windows at the planet we had just left. The blue cloud-swirled sphere full of 13,428,602,881 humans and 6,290,000,000 (precise number unknown) Echos, all living side by side but at an infinite distance from each other.
‘Why was he so evil?’ she said quietly. ‘Uncle Alex, I mean. I don’t think my dad had any idea.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe you will find out one day. Humans seem very complicated.’
‘Part of me thinks it’s best not to know. I just hope Dad never knew, either . . . I worry that something happened when they were kids . . . Something I’ll never know about.’
‘Please, Audrey, stop worrying. That’s the past. We have no control over that. But the future is ours . . .’
‘Yeah,’ she said sleepily. ‘The future is ours . . .’
Eventually she could fight it no longer. She fell asleep on my shoulder. Her breathing slowed to ten breaths per minute. There was a female Echo opposite me who observed this. She had a shaven head and was designed for strength. I smiled at her. ‘She missed her last recharge,’ I explained, on Audrey’s behalf.
Audrey had spoken to me about her doubts before we got on the shuttle, back at the spaceport. She was worried that, even with her new smooth skin, she didn’t look good enough.
‘Even old, wrinkly Echos are old and wrinkly in a perfect way,’ she said. ‘They never quite look human.’
She was worried that she was imperfect, even by human standards. She talked about her shoulders and her nose and the way she walked. I began to realize that humans have a very distorted view of themselves, as nothing she said about her appearance matched the reality.
Most of the other Echos were on their way to manual labour jobs, judging from their size (thirty were in fact exactly the same model – of a large male with a mohawk, and I was pretty sure I was the only prototype among them). When I first got on the vessel, I was startled to find 15 there, taking his seat opposite me but further along. Only of course, it wasn’t 15. Or rather, it was one of probably 5,000 15s in the world.
I had to protect Audrey, and she had to protect me.
Neither of us now belonged with those we were meant to be part of. We were going to have to be a world unto ourselves, a universe of two, and that was good. Well, it was infinitely better than being a universe of one.
She was everything.
She was hope and fear and love and pain.
She was as alive as anyone had ever been alive. And being alive meant possibility and uncertainty. Life was irrational, and irrationality could never be mapped. So in each life – each true life – there were lots of other lives branching out, like the garden of forking paths I had once read about. And loving someone was a process of helping that person find the best of those possible lives, and helping them live it.
She carried on sleeping.
I no longer saw Earth out of the window now. It was just the deep darkness of space, punctured by brilliant white stars. Distant suns, the nearest of which I kne
w was 4.2421 light years away. Yet we could see them. My mind wandered, the way Echo minds weren’t supposed to. Light was like hope, I thought. It took a long time to get there, but it always got there in the end, if you let it keep going.
And then it came into view.
Our destination, New Hope Colony.
A vast dome, next to the dark basalt of the Sea of Tranquillity, covering a surface area of 938 square kilometres. Lights twinkled; streets crisscrossed in neat geometric patterns, and were filled with cheaply made buildings; holo-ads glowed; and the magrails were only half complete.
As we sank down towards the spaceport (2.7 kilometres outside the dome, but connected via a long transparent tunnel full of slow-moving moon traffic), I caught sight of the northern suburb of Aldrin, the place where we were going to live. It was the darkest part, badly lit and with many still-unoccupied homes. Sixty-eight per cent unoccupied. (Implanted information filled my mind every time we came to a new place. And there were few places that were newer than Aldrin, or even New Hope.) It shouldn’t have looked very promising, and it couldn’t have been further away from the leafy green streets and mansions of north London, but that’s the funny thing about freedom, and happiness. It doesn’t always look like you expect it to look. But still, I recognized it when I saw it.
I gently nudged Audrey awake. ‘Audrey, we are here now.’
She woke up slowly. Blinked away the sleep from her eyes. For two seconds, I don’t think she knew where she was, or what she had to pretend to be.
‘Where?’ she asked.
And I said a word I had never said before. A word that felt wonderful to say:
‘Home. We are home.’
And Audrey smiled, though as the craft touched the ground there was a slight fear in her eyes, as there must have been in my own. But it wasn’t like the fears we had experienced before. The fears that had nearly overwhelmed us. No, this was just the fear of not knowing what lay in store for us. The fear that came from realizing that the future couldn’t ever be known, because it contained so many different paths and possibilities. It was the most pleasurable kind of fear, and was coupled with hopeful excitement.
She looked out at that barren grey landscape, towards a smaller dome, in the distance, just inside the dry, dead Sea of Tranquillity. Half a kilometre across. There was what seemed to be grass there, within that dome. Crops. It looked like a farm. They were actually trying to do the impossible: to grow things out of the moon’s lifeless crust.
In a way, that is what we would be trying to do. Not work on a farm exactly – though we wouldn’t rule it out (we wouldn’t rule anything out) – but to create a life out of nothing.
She squeezed my hand. Nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, we were about to step out, into air that felt a lot fresher and purer than the air in the shuttle.
‘This is where we begin,’ I said. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ she said as we stepped onto the leviboard. ‘I am ready.’
About the Author
Matt Haig’s first novel for young readers, Shadow Forest, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award and the Gold Smarties Award. He is also the author of various adult novels, including the bestsellers The Last Family in England, The Radleys and The Humans. Reviewers have called his writing ‘totally engrossing’, ‘touching, quirky and macabre’ and ‘so surprising and strange that it vaults into a realm all of its own’. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He lives in York.
Also by Matt Haig:
Novels for adults
The Dead Fathers Club
The Possession of Mr Cave
The Last Family in England
The Radleys
The Humans
Novels for children
Shadow Forest
The Runaway Troll
To Be a Cat
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ECHO BOY
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17250 4
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
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This ebook edition published 2014
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2014
First Published in Great Britain
Bodley Head 9781782300069 2014
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