Echo Boy (2 page)

Like most people, I was schooled at home. A mix of Echo tutelage and the immersion pod.

Today I would be doing Mandarin and climatology with Alissa and then going into the pod, which was a dated indigo floor-to-ceiling Alphatech affair just outside my room, to do twenty-first-century history.

So I got up. Put on my jeans and smock-shirt. Mum came into my room to tell me that she had a real-world meeting with a time brokerage in Taipei this morning, and then with a client in New New York, but that she would be back around two; maybe that afternoon we could do some yoga, she said.

Mum tried to get me to do more yoga. After all, the government, and Bernadine Johnson in particular, recommended that people do five hours of yoga a week. Dad always said that it was best not to trust any prime minister, even on the subject of yoga, but I think he sometimes said things like that just to wind Mum up a bit. But Mum was good at it, while I’d inherited my dad’s tight hamstrings and resistance to exercise.

‘We need to work on your downward dog.’

I try and remember every moment of this because it’s the last time I saw her alive. She was dressed in her smart clothes, which I suppose was more to do with the client in NNY than Taipei, as she was always in Taipei.

She looked harassed. ‘I’m running late,’ she said, speaking at three hundred kilometres an hour. ‘Never a good look for a time broker. Now, make sure you get Alissa to fix you and Dad some lunch. Dad’s going to be in his office all day, I think, trying to finish his damn book.’

Mum didn’t want Dad to write this book. They’d rowed about it. The book he was creating – a mix of text and holographic content – was going to be about various tech nightmares that were becoming real: the rise in robotic policing, usual Echo stuff – and also about the ethics of bringing Neanderthals back to life. The Neanderthal stuff was the reason why he’d decided to write it, and why he’d given it the title
Brave New Nightmare: Their Rights, Our Wrongs
. Mum thought it would make him even more enemies – he had quite a few already – and when Mum worried about stuff, it often came out as crossness. That’s the thing I’ve realized about my parents since they’ve been gone. Sometimes what looked like anger was just love in disguise.

‘What are you doing?’ Mum asked me.

‘I’m sitting on my bed staring at the rain,’ I said. ‘And at the houses. I wonder who lives in them. Sometimes I see an old lady in that one there. She stands at the window and just stares out. I feel like she’s lonely. I worry about her.’

‘You know,’ said Mum, ‘it wasn’t too long ago when people actually knew their neighbours. Only a hundred years or so.’

‘I wish I lived a hundred years ago.’

She stopped for a moment, and broke out of her rush to concentrate on her daughter. ‘Oh, darling, I don’t think you do. Think
about it. You wouldn’t have lived very long. Most people in 2015 died before they were a hundred! They got ill all the time. They still thought cardiovascular exercise was good for them. They used to waste their lives in gyms. And do you know how long it would have taken to get to, say, America from here?’

‘An hour?’ I guessed, thinking that sounded a suitably long time.

‘
Five
hours. Sometimes more. Can you imagine? We could be halfway to seeing Grandma on the moon in five hours. Mind you, when I was young I wished I lived two hundred years ago, to be around at the same time as great artists.’

Mum loved art. Names like Picasso and Matisse filled her conversation. On a Sunday she sometimes took me to the art galleries in Barcelona 2 or Beijing or to the Zuckerberg Center in California. In fact, she sometimes tried to get Dad to visit Uncle Alex just so she could see some of the priceless paintings he had in his house in Hampstead.

‘But I still think that right now is the best time to be alive, whatever your father says,’ she added.

A car shot by on the magrail outside the window. It was going too fast to actually see, but we could hear the faint whooshing sound, like a stranger blowing air in your ear.

Mum suddenly remembered that she was late. She gave me a hurried kiss. I felt her hair caress my cheek. I smelled coconut on her skin. (She still used moisturizing creams, despite all the evidence.) ‘OK, happy learning.’

I raised my eyebrows and gave what I would describe as an ironic nod. Mum translated the nod perfectly. ‘Listen, Alissa may not be the most expensive Echo in the world – and I know you and Dad have it in for her—’

‘I don’t have it in for her. How can I have it in for her? She’s a robot.’

‘She’s an Echo. Travis was a robot.’

‘I miss Travis. Travis was fun.’

‘Well, Travis wouldn’t have given you much of an education.’

This was undeniably true. Towards the end of his ‘life’, Travis was pretty much useless and – even after a full recharge – put everything away in the wrong place when he was tidying up, and couldn’t make any food that wasn’t a sandwich. He also spoke nonsense. Just random words.
I painting toilet carrot yes
, for example.
Onion onion fifty grams at your service thank you it is raining don’t have kiss with boys
.

‘I’ll give you that,’ I said as Mum stroked my head like I was still ten years old and not nearly sixteen.

And then her last words to me ever, spoken quickly, without any eye contact, though content-wise they couldn’t have been better. ‘Love you. And make sure you take your brain tablets.’ There. Motherhood in a sentence.
My mother
in a sentence, anyway.

This is hard.

‘I love you,’ I said back. Or maybe I didn’t. I like to think I said it back to her. I could probably check. Every house in the land has watching walls to record everything, and ours was no different. But no. I don’t want to check. I just want to carry on believing that I told her I loved her and that she heard me as she walked out of my bedroom, and passed the pod along the landing, all the way into my memory.

I went to the kitchen to drink breakfast. I made it myself. Alissa offered, but I insisted. If you have everything in life done for you, then you get depressed. Dad had shown me the statistics. The suicide rate rises in direct proportion to the number of Echos a person has.

Alissa kept me updated on the time situation. ‘It is now seven thirty a.m. Your first lesson begins in ten minutes.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But thanks for the reminder.’

‘It is now seven thirty-one a.m. Your first lesson begins in nine minutes.’

After my plantain high-fat shake (I was on a health kick) I did exactly as Mum had instructed. I had my brain pills.

‘It is now seven thirty-two a.m. Your first lesson begins in eight minutes.’

‘OK. I get it.’

At this point Dad came in. The first and only time I would see him alive that day. Yeah. The last time I’d ever see him alive. He made himself a red tea. He hadn’t showered. His beard seemed to have grown bigger and darker overnight. He was in nearly-finished-book
mode and so he was somewhere between being very happy and very miserable. In fact, my dad might have been the first human in history who could manage to be both those things at once. Intense. That was the word for my dad. He was intensely passionate and intensely difficult and intensely kind and intensely annoying and intensely human.

He talked about the news. I don’t know what news exactly. Something about the Spanish clearances in Andalucía. ‘Monsters aren’t any different to you and me. No one wakes up thinking they are a monster, even when they have become one, because the changes have been so gradual.’ This was my dad. He could just come out with stuff like that at any time of day.

‘It is now seven thirty-three a.m. Your first lesson begins in seven minutes.’

Dad looked at me, and didn’t look at Alissa, but gestured to her with his thumb. ‘What’s her problem this morning?’ he said. Dad would never have spoken like this about an actual human, but with an un feeling bit of technology it was quite normal.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, swigging the last of my shake. ‘She came into my bedroom as well. To tell me I had to get up.’

‘Has she ever done that before?’ he said, wincing a little as he rested his stick against the unit.

‘Dad, sit down – I’ll get your tea.’

‘No,’ he said, a little tersely. He clenched his eyes shut. Half pain, half anger. Then he looked at me. ‘I can get my own bloody tea. OK? I can get my own bloody tea.’ He stopped, as if shocked by his own words. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap. I’m just a bit stressed out at the moment. Audrey, I’m sorry.’

Dad was always stressed out, but it was rare for him to snap at
me
like that. He must have been
really
stressed out.

‘It’s OK,’ I said.

‘Now let me think.’ Dad made his tea.

Then Alissa stepped forward, towards us. She took a glass from the cupboard, then some sugar. She was wearing her usual self-clean white vest and white trousers. I noticed that her smooth arms looked somehow smoother and even more unnatural today. I smelled her. She smelled too clean. She smelled like hospitals. She put five spoons of sugar in the glass, then some water, got a spoon and stirred it around. The she drank it in what seemed to be one gulp. ‘It is now seven thirty-four a.m. Your first lesson begins in six minutes. I think you should be getting prepared.’

Dad frowned. He looked at me. ‘Hold on a minute – did you see that?’

‘See what?’

‘Five spoons of sugar.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning she normally only has one. An Echo only needs fifty mils of water and one spoon of sugar every twenty-four hours.
One
, not
five
.’

I thought of something. ‘And last night . . . she had water and sugar last night. I went to get a drink and I noticed she wasn’t in the spare room, and then I saw her, finishing a drink in the kitchen. The sugar was out.’ (I still thought of the spare bedroom as spare even though Alissa recharged there every night.)

Dad turned to Alissa, with his sharp journalist’s gaze. ‘Alissa, may I ask you something?’

‘You may ask me something.’

‘How much sugar do you need every twenty-four hours?’

‘An Echo only needs one tablespoon of sugar every twenty-four hours.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s what a standard Echo needs. So why did
you just put five tablespoons of sugar into your glass and drink it?’

‘I only put one spoonful of sugar in the water.’

My dad laughed, incredulous. ‘No you didn’t! We just saw you, Audrey and I, with our human eyes!’

‘Echos do not lie,’ said Alissa, her face as impassive as only an emotion-free Echo’s could be.

‘They’re certainly not meant to,’ Dad said, putting his cup down.

‘Would you like me to wash that for you?’ Alissa asked, with a perfectly artificial smile.

‘Yes,’ Dad muttered. And then, to me, he said, ‘We need to keep an eye on her. There’s something
not right
.’

To be honest, at the time I thought Dad was being a bit over the top. I mean, a lot of the time he
was
over the top. Like the time he said that mind-wires would enable corporations to literally brainwash the human population. That didn’t happen, as far as we knew.

Alissa looked at me. She was still smiling. ‘It is now five minutes until your Mandarin lesson. I will go to the classroom now. I expect to see you there shortly.’

The classroom wasn’t really a classroom. It was the spare bedroom. Alissa’s room.

Alissa left the kitchen. Dad released a long sigh as he looked at me. Then the holophone rang.

‘Yes?’ he said, into the air.

A thirty-centimetre hologram of Mum appeared on the unit. She was standing outside an office building in Taipei. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Just to let you know, the NNY meeting’s been cancelled and so I’ll be back early, and I just wanted to tell you something. Just a worry I had when I left.’

‘What?’ asked Dad. ‘Lorna?’

And then she flickered out. The line was gone. The space where she had been seemed sad and empty. Dad tried to call her back but she didn’t reappear.

‘What do you think that was about?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Then, more quietly, sadly: ‘I don’t know. We had a row this morning. Just a little one. It was silly. Probably about that. We love each other, you know that . . .’

‘Yes. Of course, Dad. I know that.’
Did I actually say that, or is that just what I thought I said? I hope I said that.

‘Listen, I know I’ve been working hard lately, Auds. But I am literally days away from finishing this book. Days. And it has taken a long time, I know that, but it’s an important thing. Hopefully it will make a difference. Anyway, I’m nearing the end. And then, I say, we go on holiday. We haven’t been away properly since the accident and I think we should go somewhere nice.’

Somewhere nice.

He switched on the radio, probably wanting the news. There was an ad for Castle Industries playing. He switched it off again. A little after that he disappeared back up to his office.

I went and sat through my lessons. Alissa did seem slightly different to normal. Slightly more animated, possibly from all the sugar she had just consumed. She rushed through the Mandarin class, speaking fast and hardly giving me any time to answer her questions.

‘
Hen piao liang
,’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘This is good,’ I said.

‘
Hen hao
,’ she said.
Very good
. But then I realized that it didn’t mean ‘this is good’ but ‘this is
beautiful
’, and not everything that was beautiful was good. My mind wasn’t that sharp today, despite having taken my brain pills, and I kept making the odd mistake, yet Alissa
didn’t correct me, even though she was programmed to know the entire Mandarin language (along with two hundred others).

‘
Hen hao . . . hen hao . . . hen hao
 . . .’

Then it was straight into climatology, without a break. Again, Alissa seemed to be speaking very quickly.

‘In the last one hundred years,’ she said, her voice sounding higher-pitched than normal, ‘the temperature fluctuations in surface waters of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean have increased rapidly. This is significant to climatologists as these fluctuations, known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, have for over one hundred years been the ocean-atmosphere phenomenon most closely observed by climate scientists. These changes in temperature, usually noticed around Christmas time in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, have long been early indicators of dramatic shifts in weather, such as hurricanes and tropical storms. But whereas previously these wild changes in water temperature occurred once every few years, now they happen almost continually – one of the reasons why the whole coast of Brazil, among many other places, is now almost entirely uninhabitable. Indeed, even the massive changes in weather that have occurred in Europe over the last fifty or so years – the heavy rains that have dogged northern Europe, the rising temperatures that have turned southern Spain and southern Italy into desert lands, forcing mass emigration northwards – have been predicted and mirrored by these changes in water temperature in the Pacific.’