Echo Boy

by Matt Haig

  Eventually, together, we got me free. I struggled back up again, feeling little pain. 15 looked at me, as confused as the people watching us. I knew he was wondering why he had done that. Why he had put his own existence in danger to protect another Echo. The crowd of watchers were wondering it too, and they had stopped laughing.

  ‘He’s going to keep us in here because of the protests,’ 15 said. ‘It’s a distraction until the police move them away, which might take hours. He’s going to keep us here all day. So we’ve just got to try and keep out of Alice’s way.’

  I turned back towards him just as Alice charged in his direction. A ferocious mass of hair and flesh, of which 15 wasn’t completely aware.

  ‘Run!’

  But he could only hobble, so I ran and dived and saved him.

  Then he did something amazing. This Echo, with his lame leg, climbed what remained of the gnarled and twisted tree and jumped high through the air, onto Alice’s back.

  The crowd cheered from behind the aerogel screen.

  ‘Stay behind the rock!’ he ordered me, and pointed to where he meant.

  I did as instructed, and watched as 15 – who knew Alice far better than I did – slowly managed to calm her, leaning forward across her back, holding her, whispering soothing words into her ear.

  Slowly, it worked. Or for a moment it worked. Then another klaxon blast upset Alice again; she reared up and 15 fell off and landed hard on the ground, five metres down.

  And then we thought it at the same time. The rock. It was heavy – 312 kilos. But with 15’s help I managed to pick it up. We hauled the rock towards the door, and threw it with all our weight. It didn’t break it, but it damaged it. Alice began to charge. A second later, the door slid upwards and we ran through it, just in time to avoid being terminated.

  9

  When the second door opened, Louis was already there, waiting for us, out of view of the paying crowds.

  ‘You damaged the door,’ he said. ‘You do realize the security system of the enclosure is worth more than two lousy Echos. If I wasn’t opening the door, you should have stayed behind it.’

  He studied me intensely. Even the ceramic eye seemed to study me. ‘You. You are useless. But you are new. I can give you one more chance to get a return on my meagre investment.’ Then he turned to 15. ‘But you. How many warnings have you had?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Two, exactly, exactly.’ Louis smiled. ‘And this is your third.’

  I had no idea what this meant, but 15 seemed to understand. Anyway, Louis became distracted by the noise outside.

  ‘What are the police doing?’ he wondered aloud, and went out to have a look. ‘In the meantime, go and do the feeding rounds.’

  We did as he instructed, but 15 had gone quiet. We threw fish – lanternfish, hatchetfish, ridgeheads and other surface-dwelling artificially farmed mesopelagic fish – into the saltwater lake in the centre of the park for the sea birds to eat. Crowds wandered around us. 15 dug deep for another slender, blunt-headed lanternfish.

  I threw a large fleshy ridgehead and watched the auks squabble over it, then back away as a baiji dolphin rose up and snatched it.

  ‘Why did you help me?’ I said. ‘Do you have empathy?’

  ‘It was logic,’ 15 said. ‘I was helping you to help me survive.’

  ‘But it hasn’t worked like that.’

  ‘No.’

  I waited a moment. I felt the need to share something, even if sharing it with an emotionless Echo was entirely illogical. But some information just desires to be free, if it has been kept locked up for long enough.

  ‘I . . . I have empathy,’ I admitted. ‘It troubles me. And I feel all kinds of things I am not meant to feel. I have even felt love. Two very different kinds. I am not meant to feel like this. I am an Echo. No Echo is meant to feel like this. No Echo is meant to feel anything. When they find you have feelings, they try and take them away. Humans fear anything they didn’t ask for.’

  ‘Did you have your brain messed about with?’

  ‘Yes. He took stuff away. He took my igniter. And much of the technology and biomatter in my neocortex. Mr Castle did.’

  ‘Alex Castle?’

  I nodded as a group of humans who had been watching us in the enclosure saw us and pointed. ‘I was a prototype for Castle, so I lived with him.’

  15 nodded too, processing this information. ‘A lot of people think he is dangerous. But Lina Sempura is equally unpopular. I was replicated from a Sempura prototype. There are people who think we should never have existed. That Echos are getting too close to being human, and that one day we will surpass them and stop obeying them.’

  ‘Maybe that day is coming soon,’ I said.

  15 smiled a small sad smile. ‘Maybe you are the start of a revolution. What some see as a malfunction might really be progress, but you are right – when people see progress they often fear it. Especially if it was progress they hadn’t planned for. But often progress cannot be stopped. If it is meant to happen, it happens. Like a lizard whose tail keeps growing back.’

  I looked at his face. It did not look so forgettable now. I knew 15 couldn’t feel fear, but I sensed that he was close to feeling it. Maybe one day I wouldn’t be such a freak. Anyway, he might not have been feeling fear, but I was feeling it for him.

  ‘What is Louis going to do to you, now you have done three things wrong?’

  He looked down at the dead lanternfish in his hand. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes Echos go missing in the night.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Securidroids come in and take them away.’

  I asked it outright. ‘Does this frighten you?’

  He looked at me. Part of me wanted him to say yes. This was selfish, I know, but I didn’t want to feel as lonely as I felt. ‘I do not feel pain. You can only feel fear if you feel pain.’

  I nodded. I understood. He wasn’t like me. For his sake, I was glad.

  10

  We had fed the auks, and the baiji dolphins.

  Our buckets were empty.

  15 knew today’s itinerary: he headed for the meat-bank in the staff quarters to get some meat for the tiger.

  We passed two tall males with no hair and brown eyes, identical Echos, who were just coming out of the aviary. I said ‘Hello’ but they didn’t respond.

  ‘Give up on being polite,’ 15 told me. ‘Most of the Echos are pre-2100. Those two are old Sempuras, both called Solomon. They can solve any mathematical problem in the world – they could see a fifty-eight digit number and know in a second if it was a prime or not – but they’re not friendly.’

  We fed the tigers. We stood at the side, throwing in the raw ostrich steak. There were five of them. Four females and one male. Ferocious beasts. They were hungry, and devoured the meat within five seconds, and one of the females got hardly any.

  ‘Louis likes to keep them hungry,’ 15 explained.

  ‘Why?’

  But 15 knew he didn’t have to answer that. He hardly spoke for the rest of the day. We sat together in the canteen and had our sugar solution, watched always by distant securidroids.

  ‘Has any Echo ever escaped?’ I asked.

  ‘From here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave the smallest shake of his head.

  ‘I sometimes look at the moon,’ he said. ‘At Hope City. It is an easy life for Echos up there. There is no Resurrection Zone. 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 one ever suspects an Echo of running away. And I never would. It would be against our programming.’

  ‘And what was smashing that door with a rock? What was pulling that tree off me?
Was that part of our programming?’

  ‘We are programmed to resist our own termination.’

  ‘But what if escape meant resisting termination?’

  15 stared out at nowhere in particular. ‘No. You have it the wrong way round. Escape would mean termination.’

  11

  At a minute and eleven seconds after midnight, during the quiet time, and three hours after the last visitor had left the zone, Louis came into the lodge with his securidroid.

  The robots grabbed 15.

  Louis stood in the doorway, with the rain beating hard behind him and resurrected birds squawking away in the aviary beyond.

  ‘It is your time,’ said Louis, his ceramic eye shining in the dark. And then, to all of us, in a suddenly lively and fake-friendly voice: ‘Come on, you must get bored sometimes. I know boredom isn’t possible for you freaks, but let’s pretend it is. Come, come, come . . . Let’s have a show.’

  We were taken out in the rain, past the Neanderthal couple in their enclosure, staring out at us from their cave. Past the aviary, past Alice, past the lake, all the way to the edge of the zone. To the tigers in their vast pit. We were asked to stand in a line and then 15 was told to come forward.

  ‘No!’ I shouted, from the line.

  Louis had invited some other human workers. Some were from the Resurrection Zone and some, those in green overalls made of self-clean reinforced nano-weave nylon, were from the zoo next door. There were twelve workers in total. They were all sitting at the edge of the pit, high above the tigers, and they were all laughing and cheering and clapping their hands as the security guards pulled 15 forward.

  The other Echos in the line just stood there.

  ‘We’ve got to do something,’ I said to the one next to me. He was missing an arm. He was tall and strong – 250 centimetres, which made him nearly double the size of Louis. He was stronger than me. And definitely stronger than 15. From the looks of things, he had an energy capacity of 10.5 exa-joules.

  ‘Come on. All of us.’ I said this quietly, forty-eight decibels in my ears, so only the Echos would be able to hear.

  Together, all of us, I knew we could have overpowered Louis and the other workers. It was simple physics. We might even have had a chance against the robots. It was true that Louis had his jolt-club, and also true that one of the security robots had an antimatter positron that could have turned us into nothing with a single shot. But there were twenty of us. Our chances would have been good. And certainly better than 15’s right at that moment.

  But the Echos just looked at me with empty confusion. No uprising was going to happen tonight.

  I was on my own.

  So I ran forward towards 15. I reached him and started pulling him away. But 15 told me to ‘Stay back! Get back! It is too late for me! Just save yourself! I am not scared. I have no feelings.’

  This was probably true. He had no feelings. But to me he felt like a friend.

  Something tight gripped my arm and I saw the titanium face of a security robot. His white illuminated eyes shone bright in the night, stark and unforgiving.

  ‘Get back in line,’ came his crudely textured, monotone voice. And he dragged me away, and Louis came up to me, not laughing now.

  ‘That is your second fault. If you have a third, you are a midnight snack. Do you understand?’

  ‘You are a murderer.’

  ‘No. No, I am not. A murderer is someone who takes a life. And an Echo is a machine. It is not alive. It is not human. It does not feel pain, does it?’

  To illustrate his point he held up his weapon, the jolt-club that had scarred the woolly mammoth, and pressed it into the neck of the Echo I had just spoken to, who didn’t even flinch as the club released its charge, causing a nasty circular scar to appear instantly on his neck.

  ‘See – you didn’t feel that, did you, 406?’

  406 shook his head. ‘No, Master.’

  I looked over at 15. The other security robot had gripped him firmly, but he wasn’t even struggling. I realized I was being foolish. 15 was not really about to die, because he hadn’t really lived.

  As I looked, Louis pulled up my top and I felt a sudden shock of hot, intense pain that scorched my skin and threw me back and made my whole body tremble with weakness. The jolt wasn’t through my clothes this time. It was directly on skin. I could hardly think. There was nothing but that pain, and yet I knew I had to hide my suffering from Louis. And so I found myself thinking of that human girl with dark hair and hazel eyes. Alex Castle’s niece. I said her name in my mind. Audrey, Audrey, Audrey.

  ‘No pain, 113?’

  ‘No pain,’ I told him. ‘I am an Echo.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you are. But one day, one day Echos will feel pain, and I want to be there on that day. I so want to be there. Maybe it is today. There is something in your eyes. Something . . .’

  Another jolt, in the same spot. ‘No pain, 113?’ he asked again, studying me as an animal studies prey. I remembered her lips on mine. I remembered the way she had woken feelings inside me. Intense feelings. Human feelings. I imagined touching her. I imagined my skin next to hers. I would see her again. I just knew it.

  I was in agony, but I imagined a pleasure as deep as this pain. ‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘No pain, Master.’

  Louis pulled away and beckoned one of the robots to pick me up and bring me forward. He looked disappointed, and maybe a little angry at my defiance. He was on to me. He knew I was different. But I was determined to give him no more proof. He nodded to himself as he beckoned.

  ‘There are two types of pain in this world,’ he said, and pointed to his ceramic eye-cam. ‘There is the kind you can see. And then there is another kind, 113. A deeper kind. Come, come, come right here, by the railing. I want to make sure you get a good look at this, because this is your future.’ He laughed, and gave a signal to the other security robot. It understood, and lifted a compliant, or resigned, 15 up into the air. Then there was Louis’ voice, talking to me. ‘Now, if you make so much as a move, you will be dessert. And don’t worry, they’ll eat you. Those tigers can’t see the difference between an Echo and a human . . . Flesh is flesh. Don’t worry.’

  15 curled forward as he was held aloft. ‘Do one thing,’ he told me. ‘Don’t get yourself terminated for me.’

  There was something inside him. He was an Echo. Assembly line. But Louis was right. There was a point where machines become something else. 15 might not have been at that point, but it would come, one day, and then humans would be in trouble.

  I saw the rotating sphere high in the distance. The blue castle with three turrets, and the word underneath. Going round and round and round.

  CASTLE, CASTLE, CASTLE . . .

  Louis whispered in my ear. ‘Say goodbye to your new best friend.’

  I tried to resist the robot’s grip but it was no good. There was nothing I could do as 15 was hurled into the tiger pit. To be mauled to death by hungry creatures that had died out sixty years ago.

  ‘Watch!’ Louis ordered. ‘Watch! Watch!’

  And so I watched. I watched a machine’s body get torn to pieces. I saw blood and flesh and bone. Our manufactured biology. 15 felt no pain, I kept telling myself. But I did. So I had to stay there and not care and think of Audrey.

  Even so, I still felt something roll down my cheek. An impossible tear which I wiped away, hoping that Louis hadn’t had the pleasure of witnessing it.

  I had discovered a new emotion.

  It was called hate.

  12

  At that darkest moment I vowed to myself that I would have no sympathy or compassion for any of them. I would only have hate, because hate was the safest emotion to have.

  This was my situation. I was neither human nor machine. I was alone in this world. I wished I had never been made. I didn’t want to exist, and yet I didn’t want to die. Not the way 15 had died, anyway. That is the trouble with hate. It is attached to fear. It grows out of fear. The fear of loss, of pain, of non-being
.

  But it wasn’t just Louis I hated.

  I found Louis pathetic more than anything else. He was a bully. He was a damaged individual who was on a low rung of human society, and the only way he could find any comfort was by beating those that were lower than him, or at least at his mercy – Echos and animals and Neanderthals – and keeping them lower than him.

  That was bad, but to think it was all Louis’ fault was wrong.

  Mr Castle. That was who I blamed. Without him there would have been no Resurrection Zone, and no Louis. Without him, Rosella would not have been forced to alter Alissa. Without him, Audrey’s parents would still be alive. And without him, I would never have existed, however much Rosella had wanted me to. And I didn’t want to have ever existed, because if I hadn’t existed, then I would never have known the pains of life that an Echo wasn’t supposed to feel. Or the pains of guilt, from having let Alissa live when I could so easily have done as I was told, and finished her.

  My mind was agitated. Why had Rosella added the hair of her dead son? If only she hadn’t, I would not be drowning in feeling. In worry. In guilt.

  15 had died. That might not have been my fault, but I felt partly responsible. (Why was I feeling guilty about this? It didn’t matter: 15 was just a machine.) And for all I knew, Audrey might be dead too. If not killed by protestors, then killed by Mr Castle. After all, he had killed her parents and he had been planning to kill Audrey too.

  She had kissed me. I remembered the kiss. Had it been a dream? I don’t know. If it had been a dream, it had been one that had brought me back to life. The kiss had only lasted a second. In logical terms, it was nothing. Just her lips meeting mine for the briefest of moments. Yet it was a scientific fact that there weren’t really small things or small moments. The whole universe had been created in less than a second. There were 78,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in the average grain of sand. And a strand of hair could make an Echo feel human. So who knew how much meaning could be contained in a single kiss?