Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  ‘My name is 15,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry about the questions. I am a rare model. I was made for inquisitive work. Office jobs, insurance, things like that. The ability to question was part of my programming.’

  Eventually it came to me. ‘My name is Daniel.’

  15 nodded. He was designed to look like a young man of about twenty. He had smart mid-brown hair with a side-parting, and a face that was designed to be so neutral and inoffensive you could almost forget what it looked like as you were looking at it.

  ‘I worked in an office. Insurance. In Edinburgh. A train crashed into our building. All the Echos that survived were injured. Including me. My leg. Totally smashed.’

  He lifted up his trouser leg to show me the damage. I had never seen anything like it. Scarred flesh from his ankle to his thigh. But it didn’t shock me. I didn’t think anything could shock me again.

  ‘Means I walk with a limp. Which means I am slow. I can’t run. And that’s not good in here. I’m not exactly made for this type of work in the first place. I’m surprised I have lasted this long . . .’ He looked at me for a long time. ‘Thank you for listening to me. None of the others have time for me. I’m designed to be a talker, you see. What was your problem?’ he asked. ‘Why did you end up here?’

  ‘I was meant to protect my master, but I left his side when he was in danger. To save a girl.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  I remembered Audrey’s face. I felt the slightest flicker of something inside me, something strange and unidentifiable. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘What about the others? Do you know if all the other models like you have malfunctioned?’

  It took me a while to understand the question. ‘Other models,’ I said, to myself.

  He leaned in close towards me and then sat back.

  ‘No! You’re a . . . you’re a prototype, aren’t you? There is only one of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed. It was a kind of awe. ‘There are thousands of others like me,’ he said. ‘Tens of thousands. Except they are not like me. They are better than me. They are not rejects. They can still run. They are faster. Faster bodies, faster minds. But I suppose, if nothing else, being broken makes me different . . .’ He sighed. It might have just been exhaustion. ‘We had better recharge. We need to be alert. It is dangerous work here.’

  So I lay back and closed my eyes and switched to recharge mode. An image of Audrey’s frowning face and intense eyes entered my mind, but it quickly left and there was blankness again.

  6

  At five in the morning an alarm went off and I could see all the others leave their beds.

  ‘You need to get up,’ 15 told me.

  I hadn’t rested properly. I seemed to need more recharge time since the operation.

  I tried to sleep through the noise, a distant siren rising and falling in waves, which only reached sixty-one decibels but somehow troubled me. Eventually I must have managed to shut off because the next thing I knew there was a cold shock of water and I awoke, soaked, to see Louis standing over me with a tin bucket in his hand.

  ‘You get up when you hear the alarm,’ he said, kicking my stomach. ‘It’s very simple.’

  It didn’t hurt. And I wasn’t scared of Louis. I was just there to do as he said, because he was my master now.

  So I got up, put on my work outfit (just blue overalls with the letters RZ on the left chest pocket, and no footwear) and followed Louis outside.

  I had information about this place in my head.

  The Resurrection Zone was six square kilometres of carefully landscaped woodland, complete with animal enclosures set in what had once been Regent’s Park. Some species would stay extinct because their DNA had never been preserved well enough to be sequenced, but there were other prehistoric species whose DNA had remained intact for thousands of years, along with dodos and Tasmanian tigers and rhinos and other more recent addictions.

  But there were other things I didn’t know. Things I would soon find out.

  We were all standing in a line in the rain. It was relentless, the rain, but it didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me. Louis told the others that I was the new arrival. He was holding a metal club. The club was 109 centimetres long and made of titanium, with a small illuminated end. A security robot – an outdated but mean-looking steel- and titanium-clad securidroid – stood behind him. He introduced me.

  ‘This, freaks, is your new co-worker. The nature of his malfunction was that he rebelled. So he might not make it through today, let alone the week.’ And then he looked at me. ‘What is your name again?’

  I was getting quicker. ‘My real name is Daniel.’

  Louis smiled, and spoke in a soft voice that could hardly be heard above the rain. ‘No. You’ll find it is better not to romanticize yourself, Echo. Your name is 113.’ He adjusted the dark sphere in his eye socket and pointed the club towards me.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued to the rest of the group, ‘I was going to ease him in gently. 113 was going to be feeding dodos and auks today, but maybe he would like something more challenging . . .’

  He waited. I said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you going to speak?’

  ‘I can feed the dodos.’

  ‘Shut up.’ He walked over to me, stared at my face. ‘You are not right. Just what do you think you are?’

  ‘An Echo. An Enhanced Computerized Humanoid Organism. I was a prototype designed by Rosella Márquez in Valencia.’

  ‘Prototypes are always arrogant. Are you arrogant?’

  ‘No. Arrogance is an emotion. I do not feel emotion because I am an Echo.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Louis, so close I could smell his breath. The sour pang of bacterial infection. ‘An Echo. A blend of biology and technology. Part flesh, part silicon. You are just an echo. Echo, echo, echo, echo. I say something, and you do it. That is the echo. You do not think about it, you do not question. I am a human – that is my privilege. To think. You are nothing. No, you are less than nothing. An Echo is nothing, but you are less than an Echo. Because you are a prototype but they didn’t want any more of you. And while you are here, you have no more privilege than an alarm clock or an info-lens or a tattered old piece of furniture. You are mine. You obey me. Whatever happens, you won’t last long. No one does. But while you are here, I am a God to you, OK? You call me Master because, well, I am your new master. I am your new everything. You echo my commands through your actions, OK?’

  By this point he was pressing his hand around my face. Most of the other Echos weren’t watching. They were staring straight ahead. All except 15, who was sneaking a glance at me, looking worried.

  ‘Do you know what happened to my face?’ Louis asked.

  I shook my head.

  Then he raised the tip of the club and pressed it against my stomach. The sudden shock of electricity was so strong that it sent me flying onto the ground.

  ‘I wish you could have felt that,’ he said. ‘I normally use it on the animals, but occasionally I like to use it on you freaks. Just to imagine it does actually hurt.’

  And as I lay holding my stomach, I realized something. I had felt it. A sudden blast of pain. It hadn’t felt as strong as it would have done once, but it was there.

  Louis spat saliva onto the rain-soaked ground. An unseen animal wailed. ‘I said: do you know what happened to my face?’

  ‘No, Master.’

  ‘Tiger,’ he said. ‘Back in ’eighty-nine, twenty-six years ago, when I first worked here. I went in to see them, armed with this jolt-club, but one of them – a female – took offence when she saw I was standing a bit too near the meat I’d brought. So she swiped at me. Claws and all. You should have seen me. Whole face needed surgery. They could have given me a new eye too. But I quite like this old Sempura eye-cam. Sees everything. I can see the past and present at the same time with this thing. Course, you shouldn’t ha
ve Sempura anything in here, this being part of the Castle portfolio and all, but no one says anything. Sympathy vote. And I’m part of the scenery now. Anyway, that tusked monster would have damn well eaten me alive if I hadn’t had that club with me. Haven’t slept properly since, which is why I’m out here with you now, in the dark and the rain. Yeah, tigers are the second most dangerous animal we have in this zoo. Anyway, after that, the powers that be realized that some of these creatures are too dangerous. Too volatile. So, once they heard about Echos, they got a load of them in. And you know what we learned early on?’

  I stood up. ‘No, Master.’

  He smiled. ‘The crowds like seeing things go wrong. They like incident. But they don’t want to feel guilty about it. They want to see violence, but only if it doesn’t interfere with their morals. And as it is only Echos getting attacked, then they don’t care. And Mr Castle himself saw the figures. He saw that every time an Echo got attacked by a tiger, or got injured by a mammoth, visitor numbers spiked. And the extra revenues far outweighed any damage to Echos. Especially when we decided to buy them cheap, get the lowest of the low. The damaged and the rejected. Echos like you.’

  At that point my mind couldn’t quite appreciate the irony that I had ended up here. That after being discarded by Mr Castle I was back on his property. I had started at his mansion in Hampstead and had ended up at the Resurrection Zone. That was as big a fall as an Echo could make.

  Again, Louis’ words came flavoured with his sour breath. ‘I cannot say when you will terminate, exactly, but it will be here. In the Resurrection Zone. Make no mistake about that.’

  I saw that 15 was still looking at me. Louis saw it too, and went over to him.

  ‘What are you doing, 15?’ he asked, with cold interest.

  ‘I was just looking, Master,’ 15 said, sheepish.

  ‘But why? You should be looking straight ahead. You should always be looking straight ahead. Curiosity? Is that it? Do you have curiosity?’

  ‘I don’t know, Master. I was made to be more—’

  Louis stroked 15’s hair, almost tenderly. ‘Because you know what we humans say . . . “Curiosity killed the cat.” Or maybe this time the cat will kill curiosity. It’s an ongoing mystery.’ He studied 15 some more, then looked at me.

  ‘Looks like it’s an Alice day for you two.’

  7

  Alice was a twelve-year-old woolly mammoth fifty-two times our body weight, who was kept in an enclosure.

  ‘Alice used to be gentle,’ 15 said, before the door opened. ‘But gentle isn’t entertaining for the visitors, so Louis started tormenting her.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. This was a question. The first I had asked since being here.

  ‘The jolt-club. Course, he never does that during visitor hours. He sends one of the Echos to do it, obviously. They’ll be in there right now.’

  It was now one minute to seven. Visitors arrived at seven.

  ‘Listen,’ 15 said.

  We were standing behind a large metal door. Beyond that was another. But we could still hear a strange shrieking noise.

  ‘That’s Alice.’

  Then the door immediately in front of us opened and an Echo walked out, a tall butch-looking Echo with no hair. He ignored us. And then it was our turn in there.

  The moment I stepped inside I felt the cold. It was minus thirteen degrees in the enclosure, to simulate an Ice Age environment. It didn’t bother 15 and it shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. I thought of that curl of blond hair in Rosella’s locket. Alice was over in the far corner, among the grass and sedges. She was still distressed but was eating, for comfort possibly. She pulled out tufts with her long trunk and chewed it while looking at us with alert eyes.

  Louis had told us that we had to clear the dung, and feed her.

  ‘She has to eat 180 kilos a day,’ 15 explained as he limped along with his bucket. ‘She eats during every waking moment. Well, every moment she’s not being tormented.’

  At first it looked like we were going to be OK. Alice seemed to be calming down as she ate.

  So we spread the hay around the middle of the enclosure, near the saltwater lake. The longer we stayed in there, the more I felt the cold. The cold was sharpening my mind, making me think about things. I thought about Mr Castle, the first time I had met him, at Rosella’s warehouse in Spain. I thought of carrying Alissa, naked, out of the tank. I thought of Audrey, and her parents’ murder. My body shook.

  ‘You can take my coat,’ said 15 in a whisper, looking confused. ‘I don’t feel the cold.’

  And he gave it to me.

  Alice saw me shovelling her dung into a bucket. She watched through the hair that fell over her eye.

  15 threw the last bit of hay down on the ground. I looked up and saw the first visitors of the day looking through the screen at Alice, and at us. There were already seventeen of them. And Louis too. He was there, watching the crowd, and me.

  ‘He won’t let us leave until Alice puts on a bit of a show,’ 15 told me. ‘So just pick up the dung, and try to stay away from the walls. You need freedom to move.’

  He pointed up to the glass. There were now forty-two visitors and the number was growing.

  ‘They want something to happen,’ said 15. ‘They love it. If we were human it would be different, but we are not human. They know we cannot feel pain, or fear. We are just like robots to them.’

  ‘But the mammoth – Alice – she must feel pain. And fear. And the humans know that.’

  ‘A lot of humans don’t care. Some do. The protesters who march around the zoo every day – they care. But that’s mainly about the Neanderthal couple.’

  I remembered the protestors who had stormed into Mr Castle’s home, to kill and do as much damage as possible.

  ‘The Neanderthal couple?’

  ‘The star attraction. They don’t even need to be violent to bring the visitors in. People come from all over the world to see them.’

  He stopped spreading hay for a moment and stood up straight. It was probably then that he took his eyes off Alice. And probably then that I first heard the noise from outside. At first I thought it might be coming from the visitors looking down at us from behind the transparent upper south wall of the enclosure. But I quickly realized that this was impossible. That wall was made of aerogel, a material I knew was not only transparent, but stronger than steel, heat-resistant and soundproof. They could hear the sounds from within the enclosure, via tiny unseen speakers on the outside, but there was no way we or Alice could hear them. Which meant – as this enclosure was on the periphery of the whole Resurrection Zone – that the noise was coming from outside the zoo itself, on the street, beyond the high titanium fence. I glanced up and saw magrails above the street. There were no cars or buses floating over it, which seemed odd as all the other rails elsewhere in the sky were crammed with morning traffic.

  The voices formed a chant, getting louder. ‘Free the Neanderthals! Now! Now! Now! Free the Neanderthals! Now! Now! Now!’

  ‘They’ve started early,’ said 15, looking back at Alice. I had a memory. The protestors storming through Mr Castle’s lobby, running through the unicorn.

  And then a klaxon sounded. A loud sonic blast that startled Alice, who was suddenly moving in a frenzied fashion, forwards and backwards, tossing her head and her giant tusks as if in battle with an invisible enemy. We were in trouble. I looked up and saw humans looking down at us. They smiled and nudged each other, pleased to see that something was about to happen.

  8

  ‘Right, there’s the drama,’ 15 said. ‘We can get out of here.’

  I ran – and 15 hobbled – to the exit door.

  ‘Open door,’ 15 said.

  Nothing.

  I saw Audrey in my mind, heard her telling me it was going to be OK.

  He pressed the central button on the panel (DOOR OPEN) but it didn’t open. We tried again and again. Still nothing. 15 turned and looked up at the glass.

  ‘Louis,
are you there? Louis, are you watching this? We’ve got to get out of here. The door’s locked and Alice is seriously distressed. It’s the noise. The protest. Louis? Louis? Are you there? It’s not safe in here.’

  15 was speaking quickly, but I can’t say I saw anything in his face to show he was feeling the fear that was slowly being reborn inside me.

  I am nothing, I tried to tell myself. I am just like any other Echo. Just a glorified robot. I cannot be feeling fear, because machines do not feel fear. I am 99.99 per cent machine. And the 0.01 per cent has been more than undone. I do not feel, I do not fear, I do not care . . .

  Another klaxon blast.

  I turned and saw Alice.

  She roared, or wailed – a high-pitched sound that drowned out the klaxon. As she reared up on her hind legs, I caught sight of dull red hairless patches around her rib-cage and legs where she had been burned by the jolt-club. She charged forward into the wall and turned, in a kind of heavy and clumsy dance, towards us. I got out of the way, but 15 stayed by the door because Louis was now responding.

  ‘Oh, 15, you know it would be very irresponsible for me to open the door when Alice is having one of her turns.’

  I heard this as I ran for shelter behind a rock. Beyond the exit door there was another door: Louis could easily have opened one and kept the other closed. And besides, the exit was only a fifth of the size of a woolly mammoth. There was no way she would have fitted through.

  And all the time Alice kept going crazy. She slammed her head into the trunk of the only tree in the enclosure; its trunk fractured, then broke completely. As the tree fell, it caught my leg and I tipped sideways, my legs beneath it. 15 came over and tried to pull the tree off me, but he wasn’t very strong. Behind him I could see Alice; she looked ready to charge.

  ‘You’d better get out of the way,’ I told 15.

  He turned, saw the danger, then looked back at me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘She could terminate you if she charges.’

  But still 15 kept trying to pull, as I kept pushing. It made no sense. There was no logical reason for him to be helping me. Yes, two Echos were better than one, but he was in immediate danger if he stayed doing this. I caught sight of the visitors up in the viewing area staring at me, at Alice, at 15. Over a hundred of them now. All looking down at us with laughter or open mouths, probably recording it with their info-lenses. One, a man in a spray-on skin-clinger and wearing a mind-wire, was pointing straight at me, laughing uncontrollably.