Echo Boy (31 page)

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.

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?

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
un
know 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.

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.’