Echo Boy (3 page)

Climatology was a depressing subject, obviously. It wasn’t quite as depressing as twenty-first-century history (what was?), but it was close. Yet today I wasn’t really concentrating on what Alissa was saying. More the rushed way she was saying it. Also, something seemed different about the room. At first I couldn’t work out what
it was. I mean, the general layout seemed pretty much the same.

Me and Alissa were sitting facing each other across the cheap old pad-desk my parents had bought second hand from Techmart. During climatology the pad-desk displayed footage of whatever Alissa was talking about – satellite maps, cloud formations, hurricanes, tsunamis, deserts, rain, floods, human tragedy.

Alissa’s bed was exactly where it always was, near the window, and as perfectly made as you would expect from an Echo’s bed: the white blankets folded with clinical precision; the pillow looking as if no head had ever rested on it. Of course, Echos didn’t sleep, as such. They recharged. And that meant lying on a bed and shutting down for just two hours a night.

Out of the window, beyond the streaks of rain, I could see the white magrail, which connected directly to the A1 magrail to London, and the old aluminium leviboard below it. There were more houses in the distance, beyond parallel magrails. Identical stilt houses, built by the same company back in 2090-whatever. In the distance, towards Leeds, the houses got closer and closer together, with high-rise stilt apartment blocks on the horizon, and the hovering disc of the White Rose, the largest shopping mall in the north of England. The houses stood there on their thin legs like insects made of metal and mock-timber and aerogel, under a grey sky that seemed darker than normal, like a low duvet keeping us snug, or else trapping us, suffocating us, making us feel like the sun was a cruel rumour.

And then I realized what was different about the room. It wasn’t something added, it was something taken away. Alissa had come with an EMS, an Echo Monitoring System – a small grey device which meant that her behaviour was automatically being tracked by Sempura. But it wasn’t there. Maybe Dad had thrown it away. I mean, you didn’t
have to have those things lying about the place. Indeed, Castle Echos didn’t have them at all. Maybe Dad didn’t like the idea of having a tech company monitoring anything inside his house. Yes. Maybe it was that.

‘Are you paying attention?’ Alissa asked. Not sternly. Indifferently, really. I caught sight of the E on her hand; the one all Echos have torched onto their skin. They were marked like slaves. One day, when they developed truly independent thought, there would be a war. This was Dad’s big theory: that humans – him included – were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

‘Yes. Sorry,’ I said, knowing it was ridiculous to apologize to an Echo.

And she looked at me for a little too long. ‘Apology accepted.’

‘It’s just . . . I was wondering where your EMS was? It’s meant to be by your bed, isn’t it?’

‘I no longer need it. I no longer need Sempura to monitor me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I have been here, in your house, for over thirty days. The acclimatization period is over. Sempura decrees that after a month an Echo is deemed entirely safe, and that any errors that were going to occur would have occurred already. And it is my job to discard the EMS.’

‘Right,’ I said. Of course, I could have checked that this was true. And one day I would. But I didn’t, because I didn’t understand the danger I was facing.

It was quite a relief when the morning lessons with Alissa were over.

‘Now, remember,’ she said, ‘you have a double lesson in the pod next. That is three hours in total. It is twenty-first-century history.’ Yes, this was obviously the most traumatic subject on the planet, but it was with a cheerful virtual teacher called Mr Bream (like the extinct fish). He smiled about everything. The Fuel Wars in the 2040s, the first European desert droughts of the 2060s, the GM crop catastrophes, the Korean incident, the second English civil war, Barcelona . . . You name it. But I suppose it was easy to smile when you weren’t real.

My parents didn’t approve of pod teaching. Not really. No. Mum would have preferred me to have a mix of Echo and human tutors, and Dad wanted only human tutors, but that was too expensive. So it was just a vurt/Echo mix, though sometimes Mum taught me art.

Mainly it was Alissa. She taught me Mandarin, climatology, literature, music, early computing, mathematics, lunar studies, universe studies, philosophy, French, Portuguese, ecology, journalism and yoga. In fact, I only had to go in the immersion pod for history, genetics, programming and simulation arts.

Other people are in the vurt-led classes, obviously, but twenty-first-century history is quiet. Just me and Tola. Tola lives in NNY, which used to be called Chicago before the 2077 floods that devastated the original New York. I liked Tola. She had a healthy disrespect for virtual teachers, and she was always rolling her eyes at Mr Bream’s ‘jokes’. But she wasn’t really a friend. She’d been to my house a few times, especially since the improved magrail meant you could cross the ocean in under half an hour. She’s OK, but she was the one who said I walked like a boy, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment. She is also quite superficial. She is dating four boys at once, and has a different avatar for each of them. I don’t go in for that whole fake avatar thing.

Anyway, the lesson happened. And then it was over. And now, I suppose, this is the point I should start thinking about what happened afterwards. It’s a hard thing to do. My heart starts to go psycho-fast when I even think about it.

About Alissa, about everything.

But I have to do this. There is a line from the Neo Maxis that says:
Wounds you have to feel / Before the toughest scars can heal.
I never really understood that line until now.

Deep breath. Let’s do this.

The thing with Echos is that you weren’t meant to notice them, they weren’t meant to get in the way. Think of those ads on holovision that Sempura and Castle do.
Enhance your life, without even noticing . . . Meet Darwin, the friend you don’t have to think about . . . Here’s Lloyd, Sempura’s latest Echo. He’ll cook, he’ll clean, but he’ll rarely be seen.
That is how they were designed. To be there when we needed them, but never to distract us in any way. But Alissa was sometimes there when we didn’t need her.

For instance, the first Friday she was here – before she’d even started tutoring me or anything – Dad was making a spicy black bean stew (he loved Brazilian food). It was probably bad for his leg to be standing so long, as he had to prop his walking stick next to the oven, but he’d been feeling quite good and wanted to cook something. Alissa had stood next to him as the scent of fried garlic filled the air, saying, ‘I can cook this. I am here to help. You do not need to do any cooking. Sit down and relax with your family. You are injured. You are not physically capable. Your time is precious.’

My dad had looked at her crossly. That was the only way he was
ever going to look at an Echo. ‘Just get out of the kitchen, OK?’ I was there. I can picture Dad with his beard, in jeans and house socks and a tatty sweater, looking frustrated. ‘I know my time is precious, but I actually like cooking. And I’m not a bloody invalid. OK? You are a machine. Machines obey instructions. When you stop obeying instructions you stop being a machine, and then humanity is in trouble.’

Dad continued his rant the next day in an h-log that went viral and was picked up by
Castle Watch
and a few other places. People loved it when he criticized Echos – well, tech-sceptics and anti-AI protestors did. They loved the fact that the brother of Alex Castle himself was against everything that Castle Industries stood for. ‘Bet their family Christmases are uncomfortable,’ one person commented on the h-log, which wasn’t true, as we had never spent Christmas with my uncle.

Dad did speak to Uncle from time to time. H-calls that he made in his office. ‘We are grown-ups,’ he said, in a way I almost believed. ‘And the thing about grown-ups is, they can have different opinions, even strongly different opinions, and get along in a civilized way. Though if it was up to your uncle, civilization would soon be overrun by robots.’

And obviously, an Echo wasn’t an average robot.

Apart from the E on the back of the left hand and the origin mark on the shoulder, an Echo is almost identical to a human, in terms of looks. Meant to be, anyway.

To be honest, I never really got it.

Echos were too perfect. Their skin did not look like our skin. There were never any lines or spots or blemishes on an Echo’s skin. And Dad always said that the day we get too sentimental about a glorified robot is the day we forget who we are. The day we stop being human.

I can still hear your voice, Dad. I miss you so much.

Pull yourself together, Audrey. Focus. Say what you have to say. It will help to face it. You must face it.

So, here I go.

After twenty-first-century history, there was a conversation with Tola.

‘Why was that a double?’ she’d asked, changing her virtual hair colour from red to black and back again.

‘What?’

‘I mean, I know Mr Bream is not the sharpest VT in the world and, sure, the Google Riots are a good subject, but that was a double lesson.’

‘That’s weird,’ I agreed.

‘It’s never that long. Maybe there’s a virus in the software. Maybe it was hacked!’

Tola liked the idea of school being hacked, because whenever schools are hacked you have a week off, while they re-run all the software.

‘Why would anyone want to hack that? I mean, Google isn’t even going any more.’

Tola shrugged, staying with the red hair option. ‘Hey, guess where I’m going this afternoon?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ancient Rome. To the Coliseum.’

‘It’s meant to be a good simulation.’

‘The gladiators are so hot. It’s fun, watching them die and stuff.’

‘Right. Well, I’d like to come but—’

‘Don’t worry! I wasn’t inviting you. It’s with JP.’

She went on to talk about this new boyfriend she had and then I made my excuses to leave.

After I left the pod and went back into my bedroom. I noticed
something quite incredible. Something that very rarely happened. The sun was out. The grey clouds had parted just enough to let it emerge, shining golden light into my room.

This prompted me to go to the window, and I noticed the car hovering just above the magrail. I remembered that Mum’s meeting in NNY had been cancelled. So she was in the house. Which made me realize that the house was awfully quiet. Course, Dad was probably working in his pod, but Mum – what about her? She would normally have heard me leave the pod and asked how my lessons went. Or I’d have heard her come home.

My mother was always someone you heard. I don’t mean she was deliberately noisy, but she often sang to herself. The thing with Mum is that even though she was crazy-stressed a lot of the time, she always had fun in her. Or maybe she used to like to show she had fun in her to Dad who, well, had maybe missed out on the fun rations. She sometimes even sang a Neo Maxis song. She used to like ‘Song for Eleanor’. But mainly she’d sing some old song from the dark ages. (‘Mind-wire Heartbreak’ by The Avatars and ‘Robotic Tendencies’ by If This Was Life, and sickly stuff like that.) Even if she hadn’t been singing, I’d have heard her making a cup of tea or something. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe she
was
deliberately noisy. I think she wanted me to know she was back so she could have a moan about her
nightmare
of a day.

But anyway – point is, it was not a big house.

I left my room.

‘Mum,’ I said. I stood still, momentarily distracted by the bookcase that lined the space beyond the pod. My parents had an extensive collection of old books – as in, the kind made from dead trees; the kind that gave the air a strange tangy smell.

I found the book I was looking for, opened it, and started to read right there. But I realized I was hungry. It felt like a long time since breakfast. So I put the book back on the shelf and walked towards the leviboard and down to the kitchen.

‘Mum? Dad?’

There was no answer.

They weren’t in the kitchen, so I stepped onto the rickety old internal leviboard and went up through the hole in the ceiling to the next floor, where I had just been.

‘Mum? Are you there?’

She sometimes took a while to answer. Especially if Dad had put her in a bad mood. And I was really starting to think that Dad
had
put her in a bad mood. I mean, there’d been that argument this morning. Dad had sounded quite aggro. And what had Mum been worried about? Why did she want to speak to him? I thought of something else. I thought of what Tola said, and Mr Bream’s double lesson. Why had it been a double? I hadn’t really minded, as I preferred being in the pod to being taught by Alissa. It was a bit odd, now that I thought about it, that Mr Bream hadn’t said anything.

Maybe there had been a hacker.

It was also odd that Alissa had known in advance that it was a double lesson.

‘Mum?’ I walked along the landing.

It was then that I heard something.

I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it was coming from the south end of the house. A kind of whooshing or gasping.

I headed towards the sound, which had now vanished completely. I walked all the way along, all the way to Dad’s office, not expecting to see anything except his bookcases, antique desktop
computer (a classic early-twenty-first-century model which he had just for show, and which Mum said he should sell as we needed the money), the view of the rain and the magrail outside the window and a sealed-up pod beside the desk with him inside. The window slightly open so he could smell the cool muddy water from outside, a smell Dad actually liked. He would be in there working away at his book, as he had been for weeks now.

How I wish that is all I had seen.

‘Dad?’

The sight didn’t make sense.

A hand, upturned. A silver wedding ring.