by Matt Haig
I got close. I only had to think about the blinds opening and, because they were fitted with neuro-receptors, they opened. The whole of London hummed and glowed in the night. The slogan of Castle Industries kept on appearing and disappearing, glowing indigo in the clouds.
Relax! It’s Castle.
I went up to the glass, so close it almost touched my nose. Something was there, to my right, outside, scaling the wall. There were two floors below me. But this was a house with high ceilings. Two storeys was quite a way. Yet it was climbing, fast.
He.
The Echo boy. Daniel.
He was looking straight up at me. He was gesturing for me to open the window. But I didn’t. Even with the neuropads on I knew that would not be a wise thing to do.
He mouthed words that I couldn’t understand, then began to climb a steel rain funnel that ran right by the window. He was strong, and climbing faster than any human could, but I wasn’t frightened. My brain was artificially forced into calm. I was observing everything as if it was something happening in a book, something I was detached from, that wasn’t really happening to me.
Then another Echo was there.
She had long plaited red hair (the colour hardly visible) and she was holding a gun. But this wasn’t just a gun.
No.
This was a weapon I had only seen in holo-movies. A sleek-looking silver and aerogel positron. The kind that use antimatter technology, so they don’t just kill you; they cause you to disintegrate and disappear. There is no stain to clear away. No trace that you existed at all. Yeah. Scary weapon. And one my dad hoped would never become popular. They hadn’t – yet. They were probably the rarest guns out there. Owned by only a handful of uber-rich or uber-powerful people. Yet this one had been taken (I would later realize) from Uncle Alex’s weapons cupboard on the ground floor of the house – and she was aiming it at the other Echo, Daniel, and telling him to get down.
He stared at me, and even in the dark, and even with the neuropads on, I felt as if there was something not quite right about him. His eyes seemed different; more dangerous and intense than those of any other Echo I had seen. Even Alissa’s. He stayed still for a moment as he held onto the funnel, but then he realized that the red-haired Echo was not to be messed with.
He climbed down, keeping his eyes on me all the way.
11
I went back to bed, no more disconcerted than if it had been a dream.
The neuropads were designed to not only stabilize mood but also aid sleep, apparently. And I fell asleep again quickly, only this time I had dreams. I dreamed about my parents, and then I dreamed about Daniel. I dreamed he had smashed his way through the window and now had his hand clasped around my mouth.
But still, it was sleep.
And when I woke up again, it was nine in the morning and I realized they had done their job well enough for me to resist taking them off.
‘Light,’ I said wearily, and sure enough, it came on.
There was a noise outside my window. Distant voices, chanting. A protest, probably. London was a city of protests these days. I knew this because Dad had often joined them, even though Mum never wanted him to.
I was in a vast bed in a large plush spare bedroom. The sheets smelled not of lavender and lime flower, as they did at home, but of primrose and patchouli. I realized this because the sheets were complete with nanotechnology, and faint white lettering flickered across the green cotton when I lifted it away from me. This morning’s scent is restorative primrose and calming patchouli.
I had left my info-lenses at home, but I noticed Uncle Alex had left a pair by my bed, in a case branded with the simple Castle logo, that blue silhouette of a castle with three turrets that you saw on everything from immersion pods to the neuropads’ aerogel container. I could even see it out of my window. I hadn’t noticed it last night, I had only noticed the slogan; but then, I hadn’t really noticed anything except Daniel climbing up towards me.
The logo was blazoned on the side of a giant rotating sphere that floated above the London skyline and a crisscrossed spaghetti mess of magrails and fast traffic.
I knew where the sphere was located, of course. It was directly above the Castle Industries-funded Resurrection Zone. This had once, before I was born, been a beautiful and tranquil part of the city known as Regent’s Park, but was now home to what was possibly Castle’s most controversial venture – a vast zoo for formerly extinct species that had been brought back to life by sequencing genes. Of course, not everything had been brought back to life. Humans now know that they will never be able to bring back dinosaurs, as no dinosaur DNA has been preserved successfully enough. But others – polar bears, pandas, dodos, mountain gorillas, woolly mammoths, tigers and (most controversially of all) Neanderthals – were all housed there.
From my position, propped up on pillows in this strange bed, I couldn’t see inside the zone itself, just the tops of trees. But I could tell this was roughly where the noise was coming from.
The chanting.
A protest against the Resurrection Zone. Dad would have known about it; maybe he would have even been planning to go. But then, I suppose the book he was writing was itself a kind of protest against it, as the big selling point of the Resurrection Zone was the fact that Neanderthals – real living cave humans – were there. And Mum had banned Dad from going to protests. Or she had tried to.
‘Leo,’ she used to say. ‘Leo, you’re selfish.’
‘Selfish? Trying to preserve the future for us all is selfish?’
‘One more person at a protest will not make a difference.’
‘When differences are made, it is always down to one more person.’
‘OK, well, what about having more time with us? We used to value our Saturdays. What happened to our Saturday mornings at the Centre Aquatique in Paris? Why do you prefer marching with a load of violent anarchists to spending time with your family?’
‘You’ve changed. You used to believe in this stuff. What do you believe in now? Yoga?’
‘I grew up, Leo. OK? I entered the real world. Of real jobs. And having to earn money. Of looking after our family. Do you not understand that?’
At which point Dad used to mutter something and skulk off to his office. And Mum would look at me as she stood there in the kitchen and say, ‘I only worry about him.’ And she would then frown and bark at Travis and tell him to stop yammering on about sea cucumbers, and turn to me again. ‘Your father exhausts me,’ she’d say, popping a brain pill and blinking through her mind-wire messages. ‘I love him, Audrey. But he’s a nightmare. Whatever you do, don’t end up like him. Don’t end up barred from life by your principles. Now, come on, it’s Saturday. I have some time. Let’s go to America and see some art and do something fun.’
There were lots of places around the world like the Resurrection Zone, and most of them had nothing to do with Castle Industries. And as Dad told me, Uncle Alex was just one of many people who made money out of such things. But still, being here made me feel uncomfortable.
After all, I had never been to Uncle Alex’s house before. He had invited my parents to stay two Christmases ago, but they had declined the offer.
‘I love my brother,’ my dad told me then. ‘I love him because he is my little brother and I have to love him, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend a lot of time listening to him. Or visiting his expensive house. You see, Audrey, my brother is a very wise and charming man who, I truly believe, thinks he is helping the world progress by making new technology widely available. But it is my view that he is doing a lot of bad things for society.’
Which was why, when it came to buying Alissa, for instance, she was not a Castle product. She was from Sempura, whose products were more expensive but were considered better quality. And Sempura hadn’t helped bring Neanderthals back to life. The company was just about Echos and robots and cars.
‘Uncle Alex swims with the current and I swim against it.’ My dad’s words again, that Christmas
Eve. ‘No wonder I sometimes feel like I am drowning.’
Even though we never went to Hampstead, we did see Uncle Alex. He had been to Yorkshire a few times, though never with Iago, and he had always been very kind and loving to me. On my ninth birthday he had arrived on our doorstep with a brand-new state-of-the-art immersion pod; I realize now that it didn’t please my parents very much. There was sometimes tension, but it was normally caused by Dad. To be fair to Uncle Alex, he had never seemed to want to start an argument.
Hearing footsteps outside on the gravel, I got up and went to the window. Far in the distance, higher and further south than the Resurrection Zone, the mile-high slums of Cloudville glowed and flickered, like a dark electric thunder cloud. I leaned close to the glass and looked down.
I suppose I half expected to see someone climbing up to the window. But no.
I saw four Echos tending the flowerbeds. There were two females and two males. They all looked different to each other. An old man with a white beard; a strong-looking, hulking younger male with long dark hair; a female with blonde hair, not dissimilar to Alissa but a little older; and one designed to look like a woman in her twenties who was authentically detailed with freckles and long red hair in a plait.
I realized after a few moments that this was the one I had seen last night. The one who had been aiming the gun at Daniel.
Near them was a robot. A proper steel robot that was basically little more than a self-moving compost heap, which was picking up the weeds and other debris that the Echos were taking out of the flowerbeds.
And then, further across from them, another Echo stood high in the air on the leviboard. Him. The one who looked like a tall sixteen-year-old, his blond hair and pale but perfect features amplified now by daylight. He was scrubbing Alissa’s blood from my parents’ car, which hovered a good few centimetres above the rail. The car – a silver Slipstream shaped like an egg cut in half – had been slightly out of my parents’ price range. Mum had insisted – after the accident – that they get a more expensive model. But it didn’t look expensive in the context of Uncle’s house and grounds. And its self-clean function was as good as useless.
I watched him, the Echo boy, with fascination as he washed away the blood with a bucket and sponge.
The sight of him had made me panic when I first got here. Why wasn’t I panicking now? Why hadn’t I panicked in the night? I tried to think about what had happened to my parents yesterday, but I struggled to feel anything. And then I remembered that I was wearing neuropads. I wanted to remember my parents, and all that had happened, so I removed them, peeling them off my skin one at a time, and almost instantly my brain chemistry changed and I switched back into terror mode.
That is what it feels like when you lose the people you love.
It is not simply a deep sadness, like people always tell you.
No.
It is worse than that.
It is a total terror at being alone.
Panic gripped my chest.
I was fifteen years old but I felt like a tiny baby, abandoned and screaming. I wasn’t literally screaming . . . It was a very quiet type of terror, but terror none the less. A kind of internal falling; a falling of the soul, with nothing to hold onto.
It was hard to breathe.
The blond Echo realized that I was watching him, and stared back at me. And he went on staring, with those eyes that I thought of as cold. I gasped for air, as if I was drowning, and retreated from the window. Quickly I pressed the pads back onto my temples.
12
Shortly after, Uncle Alex knocked on my door. I answered. He was standing there dressed all in black and holding a tray.
‘Thought I’d bring it to you myself,’ he said. ‘I made it myself too. It’s an Echo-free breakfast. Porridge, corn bread, gene-support orange and kale juice, chocolate. The works. I can make you a red tea if you want something hot. I know you couldn’t manage food yesterday, but I really think you should eat something now, Audrey. If you can.’
I looked down at the porridge and realized I hadn’t eaten since the plantain shake I’d had the previous day. I was faint with hunger, yet I still didn’t want to eat.
‘Your dad used to love corn bread,’ Uncle Alex said as he looked sombrely down at the tray. ‘We had it as kids. He used to put butter on it. This was before they banned butter, obviously.’
I took the tray and realized that, even with the neuropads on, my hands and arms were shaking. Noticing this, Uncle Alex took the tray back off me and set it down on a small table in the centre of the room. It was the first time I had seen it.
In fact, it was only then that I took in other details of the room. There was a sofa by the wall, an antique television which must have been from around 2020 or something, a large mirror, a plush nano-fibre carpet with subtle continuous colour shifts between blue and purple (‘Sleep colours,’ explained Uncle Alex), a small immersion pod in the corner (‘If there’s anyone you want to talk to, or if you just need to escape for a while’), and a door leading to an ensuite bathroom. It was more like a small apartment than a bedroom. There was a painting on the wall. Red figures on a blue background. One of the figures was playing a violin, another the flute. Three more sat clutching their knees, listening.
‘Bought that painting from the Hermitage in Leningrad. Russia. Before the civil war there. You like it?’ he asked me.
‘It’s by Matisse,’ I said, which wasn’t a real answer. The truth is, with the neuropads on I didn’t know if it was a good painting or a bad one. Maybe you needed to be able to feel pain and sadness in order to appreciate art.
Uncle Alex nodded, impressed. ‘You have a lot of knowledge for a fifteen-year-old.’
‘Mum loved art. She used to take me to galleries. Sometimes real ones. Sometimes we’d go in a pod together and visit virtual ones.’
‘Your mum was a very intelligent woman. She must have been a very good teacher. Did your dad ever teach you?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really. He was too busy writing.’
Uncle Alex chuckled sadly. ‘About Castle Industries mainly!’
I didn’t reply to this. I just said: ‘But, you know, he’d sometimes teach me about writing. He reckoned words were weapons. Get the right words, and they could have a power beyond anything. They could help people. Or hurt them. He mainly taught just by being himself, though. To have principles. To do the right thing even if it’s hard. He also taught me how to cook.’
Uncle Alex nodded, and looked at me uneasily. He had thin lips, I noticed. Thinner than Dad’s. Tola had once said, Never trust someone with thin lips, but Tola was a bit superficial and vicious about such things.
‘The trouble with the truth is that it is like morality. It changes from person to person. One person’s truth is another person’s lie. One person’s good is another’s bad. He probably said terrible things about me.’
I sat down at the table, picked up the spoon and started on the porridge. I could only eat a mouthful, even with the neuropads on. ‘Not terrible things, no. He liked you and he always told me you were a good man. He said that being civilized meant having differences of opinion but getting on.’ This was true, but Uncle Alex didn’t seem to believe it. ‘He did,’ I added.
‘Audrey, listen, you’re my blood. You’re family. And family is important. And I’m going to try my very hardest to make you as comfortable here as it is possible for you to be . . . I have told everyone I need to tell at Castle that I will be staying at home for the next week or so. I’m not leaving the house, I promise. Our European headquarters are based in Cambridge, only a few minutes away by magcar, but to be honest I can do everything from here anyway. And I know you have a problem with Echos. I will stay here.’
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the way the blond one had tried to reach my room last night. ‘I do. One of them tried to reach my room last night. Outside. He climbed up and tried to get in my room. It was the one I saw last night. Daniel.’
A flash of wor
ry; but a moment later Uncle was looking calm again, or at least trying to. ‘Don’t worry about that. Echos only need two hours’ recharge a night. You know that. So they do night work. Maintenance work. To the outside of the house. The rain funnel gets blocked sometimes. He will have been climbing up to clear that.’
‘But there was another Echo too. She had a gun and was threatening to kill him. Or at least, I think that’s what she was doing.’
‘Which one?’
I told him.
‘Oh, Madara. She is a prototype for the military. I’m working out whether to produce a lot of her. I think I will. I think I’m going to go ahead with the commission. She is very good. She’s my security at night. She patrols the grounds. She is programmed to assert her authority among other Echos. Trust me, it was nothing untoward. There was no malfunction.’
‘OK,’ I said, my worry dulled by the pads on my temples.
Uncle Alex sat on my bed, and pressed his hands together as if in prayer, then took a deep inhale, thinking of the right words. ‘It is understandable, your anxiety about Echos, given what has happened, but I want to tell you something. The Echos here are not like the one that killed your parents. I’ve spoken with the police. They have seen the security footage and have confirmed that this one was definitely a Sempura product, not one of ours. You can tell because she had brown eyes and ours all have green eyes. Did you know that?’
I told him I did. Besides, I’d already known Alissa was Sempura. I thought of Dad’s face the day she arrived. The disdain.
‘It’s an Echo,’ Mum had told him. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’
‘I don’t see the difference,’ he’d said, limping over to inspect Alissa.
I contemplated another spoon of porridge.
‘This couldn’t have happened with one of our products. You see, we make sure our designers put blocks in place. It limits the Echo, but it keeps their owners safe. Now, after breakfast we are going to have you checked over by Mrs Matsumoto, the specialist I told you about.’