by Matt Haig
I needed to see her again. Once you had known something as warm as love, or even the distant possibility of love, it was impossible to let go. That seemed to be what love was. The impossibility of saying goodbye.
And yet I had to.
I went to the window while the other Echos had their recharge time.
I looked up at the moon, and New Hope gleaming down towards Earth. I remembered what 15 had said about dreaming of getting away, but it being impossible. I thought of those tigers killing him. At least he hadn’t felt pain. One thing I did know was that if I ended up being prehistoric tiger food, I would feel it. And I hated pain. I thought of being in the surgery pod. Of the pain as my neocortex had been removed.
Mr Castle had thought he was taking away every emotional part of me and turning me into any other machine. And for a little while, I’d believed it had worked. But now I was sure it hadn’t. Maybe once you had known fear and love and beauty you could never unknow them.
I thought of the iguanas. Rosella’s pets. I thought of their ability to grow new tails after their old ones broke off.
Ernesto had once told me, in a conversation about the government, that tyrants could weaken minds but they couldn’t crush souls.
Maybe that was the problem.
Maybe I had a soul. And a soul might be like an iguana’s tail. It might always come back.
At that moment I wished that the operation had worked.
I wished I was unable to feel a thing. No sadness and no happiness. Pain and loss seemed a steep price to pay for life and love.
I remembered 15’s last warning to me. Don’t get yourself killed . . .
They were the wisest of words. Like 15, I was dreaming of getting out of here. And like his, my dreams would stay where dreams were meant to live: inside my mind.
I was never going to get out of here, so I had to forget about escape, and I had to forget about Audrey Castle. She had caused me enough trouble already. My only aim was to survive, and to stay away from pain.
13
The next day I was partnered with another Echo.
The one with no arm who hadn’t flinched when zapped with the jolt-club. 406. His name had once been Victor. That was all the information I got out of him. All I wanted.
We were given a lot of tasks to do. Trim plants in the aviary. Throw meat for the tigers, who weren’t that hungry this morning. I stared at them and tried to channel my hate towards them, rather than at Louis or Mr Castle, but I couldn’t. They were just animals who weren’t meant to be here, and who probably didn’t want to be here, either.
I didn’t want to stay near them, so I took my ten minutes. (Echos at the Resurrection Zone were given ten minutes’ rest time out of a working day in which they were allowed to recharge and take some sugar solution.) I walked away, out of view, and sat on a bench watching the rhinos graze on grass and leaves. I could not stop computing things. There were 35,451 leaves on the bush. I could see 46,329 blades of grass. The rhinos weighed between 1,340 and 1,350 kilos.
As I sat there, a woman came up to me and handed me a leaflet. I looked up at her but I didn’t take the leaflet. She had a pile of them. Eighty-seven.
I didn’t want anyone to talk to me – I didn’t want any attention. She had pink hair. She was young, about nineteen, but looked exceptionally serious, and studied me intently.
I glanced at the leaflet, which was made of outdated interactive electronic paper. It was called Castle Watch and flashed various pieces of continually updated pieces of news, along with information on the ethics of resurrecting extinct species – particularly Neanderthals – to then house them in a zoo.
I declined to take the leaflet.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Go away.’
‘I want you to read this leaflet’ – she gestured to my clothes – ‘because you work here. You should know the ethical implications involved.’
‘You are not allowed to hand out those leaflets. You’d better leave. I just want to be alone,’ I said. ‘Please.’
But she wasn’t going.
‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s unnatural. Animals shouldn’t be kept in zoos anyway, and certainly not if they’re brought back from extinction. But Neanderthals are only animals in the sense that we are animals. They are like us.’
Like us.
She thought I was a human.
And for some reason I found myself hiding my left hand under my leg so she would go on thinking I was human. To be a human was so much better than being me. A human had been thousands of years in the making. Every human on Earth was only there because the genetic material that had made them had been passed down, over and over again, in a direct and unstoppable line – through earthquakes and floods and wars – all the way through history. Like a piece of treasure, protected and handed on for ever. All I’d had to do was be made. Once.
‘How do you justify it?’ she asked me, and for a moment I was taken aback by her face and the passion it displayed.
‘Please just—’
‘Humans killed Neanderthals through tribal warfare 30,000 years ago. And now we bring them back just to keep them in captivity? I think it is depraved.’
I looked around. No Echos. No Louis.
‘It is. But you can’t change anything. No one can. Go away.’
She looked at me for a long time. ‘You look a bit young to work here. How old are you?’
Humans looked at each other in a different way to how they looked at an Echo. A better way. Even if they were arguing. I was sixteen weeks old, but I didn’t tell her that.
She nodded at my non-response. ‘Bet you’re old enough to question things. And if I were you, I’d walk right out of here.’
But what if you didn’t have a choice? I wanted to say, but didn’t. From now on, questions would be locked away, out of view, kept in the same hidden place as my dreams and those mental pictures of Audrey. Questions were dangerous.
She frowned. ‘If you are a strong person, you would do something about it. It’s not like they are Echos. They are living, feeling creatures.’
She was stirring an anger inside me. A question broke free. ‘Did you have anything to do with the raid on Mr Castle’s house?’
‘You mean the massacre? Where they killed almost everyone who entered his grounds?’
‘People who were there to kill in the first place.’
She was the type of human who couldn’t say anything without moving her arms. ‘We feel we are at war,’ she said. ‘We feel Alex Castle is potentially going to kill thousands, maybe millions, if Echos get any more advanced.’
‘Why do humans always assume that anyone more intelligent or stronger than them is going to want to kill them?’
‘Because humans are dangerous.’
‘Correct. But it wasn’t just Mr Castle they were after. There was a girl there too. An innocent girl.’
The woman stared at the leaflet she was holding, and pointed. ‘You mean her? I’ve spoken to her before . . .’
I looked at where she was pointing. And there was her face. Audrey. Right there in front of me, frowning up at me from the e-paper, and staring at me with those intense and troubled and beautiful eyes.
14
I read the headline: CASTLE NIECE TALKS OF ECHO DANGER AFTER PARENTS’ MURDER.
I quickly (two seconds) processed the article:
The niece of Alex Castle has described the horrific way her parents were killed by a malfunctioning Echo, at their stilt house in the floodlands of West Yorkshire. However, growing intrigue surrounds the case, which the mainstream media continually fails to cover. For instance, a distraught-looking Audrey appeared alongside her uncle at the media conference. He says publicly that he has concerns for her well-being and has agreed that it is best for her to stay at his house. Yet here at Castle Watch we cannot help but notice how convenient it is for him that his brother, who was after all his most outspoken critic, disappeared a week prior to the expected completion of his new book, which speak
s out against Neanderthal resurrection and treatment.
I was tempted to tell her what I knew. But really, what good would it do? What was the point? Mr Castle was the third richest and most powerful man in Europe. Telling her, and angering the protestors, would endanger them more than it would Mr Castle. And besides, it was probably one of her friends who tried to kill Audrey.
‘Just go,’ I said. ‘Please go. Just leave the zoo. It is not safe for you.’
‘Really, I think you should use your own brain.’
‘OK,’ I said, just wanting the conversation to be over.
At that moment Louis appeared round a corner in the distance. My sight was better than a human’s, even one with an eye-cam, so I knew he hadn’t seen us yet. And so I hastily took one of her leaflets and put it in my pocket.
‘Now go,’ I said. ‘And get out of here. I’ll read it, I promise.’
‘You’re peculiar. What’s your name? You can at least be polite enough to tell me that. Mine’s Leonie.’
I very nearly told her ‘Daniel’, but I now realized how I could get rid of her. So I raised my hand and showed her the E. ‘My name is 113. Now please, go away – my boss is coming. If he finds you, you will be in big trouble. We both will be . . .’
Louis came closer. I looked round. I could have grabbed Leonie; I could have pulled her out of view, behind the hologram of a diplodocus (the closest thing to an actual dinosaur they had here) and the info centre, amid the ferns and other prehistoric plants. But my plan was now to stay out of trouble, and if I had done that, and got caught doing that, then I would have risked being fed to the tigers.
So when Louis came over and asked what was going on, I told the truth. Foolishly, Leonie was relieved by the sight of Louis and his blank letterless hands. Hesitantly she held up the leaflets. Louis nodded. ‘Ah, the usual propaganda.’
‘It is not propaganda. It is a moral fact.’
‘There are no moral facts, only moral opinions,’ said Louis. ‘Well, I must confiscate this literature and take your name and ID code.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, don’t play the innocent with me. What you are doing here is against the law. You are on private property. Property owned by Castle Industries. Also, a few days ago protestors stormed into Alex Castle’s house and attempted to kill him. So now the police have put their teeth back in, you get me? I could say that this filthy leaflet is inciting violence or what have you, and have you incarcerated in a sky cell before you could cry for your mummy and daddy.’
He grabbed the leaflets. She tried to take them back. He called for the security robot which had restrained me yesterday. It stood in front of me, its white illuminated eyes staring down at me.
‘Zeta-One, take this woman and escort her out of here please.’
The robot grabbed her arm tightly and I saw her face go pale. ‘Get off me!’ she screamed.
‘You come with me,’ said Zeta-One. ‘You come with me, you come with me, you come with me . . .’
‘That hurts,’ she said as she was dragged away.
I felt guilt – another emotion I wish had been removed from me. Maybe the worst one of all. But defiance shone in her eyes. And she kept shouting, ‘Alex Castle is still alive! Fifty people are dead. Castle is the most unethical organization. If you want my opinion, they should never have let private companies have shares in the police in the first place, but there is no worse organization to run it than Castle. Every unethical thing that has happened in the last three decades has been the result of that company. The work of this zoo, for one thing. And the development of robotic security guards and police officers. And neuro . . .’ Her voice faded, out of hearing of even my ears. I tried to think how foolish the woman was, to hold onto principles in the face of fear.
‘So,’ Louis said to me, ‘I think it is time you got back to work, don’t you?’
I stood up. ‘Yes, Master.’
Louis laughed. It was the same laugh I had heard in the dark, carried on the chill night air, as tigers tore at the flesh of an Echo.
‘Oh 113, you really are a very confusing Echo, aren’t you? But I suppose there is hope for you yet.’ He gestured towards Leonie. ‘I am pleased to see you are not trying to act the hero. This is promising.’
I smiled meekly, and realized that Louis being pleased with me felt almost as bad as him being displeased. I wondered what was going to happen to the woman, Leonie.
‘Now,’ Louis said, taking the spherical camera out of his eye-socket and polishing it. ‘Let’s get you back to work. I’ve got something special for you. I think you’re ready.’
15
The work he had in mind was to enter the Neanderthal enclosure.
This was the enclosure next to Alice’s. Unlike Alice’s, the temperature wasn’t artificially generated, though the enclosure was as secure. 15 had told me, on my first night, that the Neanderthals were dangerous; like many of the other animals, made even more so by Louis’ cruel methods. They might not have been tigers, but they had destroyed an Echo a week ago by smashing a rock over its head when its back was turned.
Louis had told me that the Neanderthals had names. Their names were Oregon and Pitu. They hadn’t called themselves these names; they were the names the zoo had given them.
I had to go inside their enclosure and feed them.
‘But do not get friendly with them,’ he said. ‘Comprehend, data-brain?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Louis spat on the ground.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. You are learning. Carry on like this and you’ll get along just fine.’
He pushed me forward. I went through both doors and into the enclosure with a meal for them (two bowls of springbok steak and plain white rice, two glasses of water).
Pitu was asleep. She was lying on some dried grass near the cave. Oregon was squatting down with a stick, scratching marks in the earth. He heard the door close behind me, and looked up and kept on looking at me as I walked over. I walked until I was about five metres away, and placed the bowls and cups on the ground. It was very hard to read Oregon’s face. The eyes stared out of that wide, high-cheekboned skull and stayed on me. I was programmed to read human faces, not Neanderthal ones. But still, it seemed to me that these eyes had the distinct glassy quality of sadness. I was in tune with sadness that day.
As I stood up, he spoke.
‘Please,’ he said, in a strange English. I saw scratches on his arm. And then he looked at the door.
I understood.
Oregon nodded. ‘We want escape. We want free.’
I shook my head. ‘I am sorry,’ I said in the quietest of voices.
He lunged forward. He grabbed my arm, tight. He seemed stronger than a human. I wondered if Louis was watching this on the monitor. To be honest, I didn’t care. I noticed that in his other hand Oregon was holding a flint with a sharp edge.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘No belong here,’ he said, releasing me. There was a definite pride and defiance in his voice.
I had been told not to get friendly with them. But I stayed there; I wanted to explain. ‘I am afraid you do. You were created for this place. You were created for humans. Just as I was. Without them we wouldn’t exist. And we can’t escape.’
Oregon didn’t look thankful. He scratched his face. I was understanding it perfectly now. It was full of sadness, and fear. He nodded, and seemed to understand. Then he asked for help in another way. He pointed at me, then at himself and Pitu, who now sat looking at me with wide, worried eyes.
‘You,’ said Oregon. ‘Make die.’
‘What?’
‘Kill. Us.’
A tear grew in his eye, then fell down his cheek.
‘Then we . . .’ He pressed the sharp flint into his arm, to cut himself. Blood leaked out, rolling down his skin in a thin stream.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, and I looked around for something to mop up the blood.
The Neanderthal stopped. ‘If no make
free. We want die.’
I felt in my pocket and pulled out the leaflet I had been given by Leonie. I pressed the crumpled e-paper onto Oregon’s fresh wound, and as the blood soaked into it, I saw that a new news article had popped up, filed mere seconds ago:
FEARS GROW FOR CASTLE NIECE
The niece of Alex Castle, Audrey Castle, is thought to have run away from her uncle’s house. She was spotted with an antimatter positron running down Hampstead High Street at 11.34 this morning. Audrey is the daughter of the great journalist and activist Leo Castle, who was killed with his wife after an Echo malfunctioned in their home. The police are in pursuit, and have been granted full powers. It’s a shoot-to-kill situation.
Castle Watch urges its readers to help her in any way possible, and thwart the police’s efforts to capture or harm her.
I looked at Oregon.
I turned to leave.
The door opened. And I just stood there. I didn’t move. So the door stayed open. I knew now that I couldn’t stare at the moon dreaming of escape for ever.
So I kept standing still on the dry and dusty ground of that enclosure until I had a plan.
16
‘OK,’ I told them. ‘It is up to you. If you want to go, let’s go.’
Oregon made a grunting sound at Pitu, holding the leaflet over his wound. He gestured to the door, beckoning her quickly. She was reluctant to leave the cave. She seemed frightened. She was right to be, of course. What was out there for them?
‘We make free,’ said Oregon. ‘Now. He help.’
Louis was there, entering the enclosure with Zeta-One.