Authors: Matt Haig
Echo Boy
Contents
Audrey has always surrounded herself with books and music, philosophy and dreams. It’s what makes her different to the Echos: eerie, emotionless machines, built to resemble humans and to work for human masters.
Daniel is an Echo – but he’s not like the others. He feels a powerful connection to Audrey; a feeling he was never designed to have, and cannot explain.
But he’s determined to try.
A powerful story about love, loss and what makes us truly human.
From the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling
The Humans
and
The Radleys
.
To Andrea and Pearl and Lucas
It is becoming increasingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein, 1938
Open your mind, this is only a song,
But the way to be happy is to admit you were wrong.
Neo Maxis, ‘Song for Eleanor’, 2112
1
It has been two weeks since my parents were killed.
It has been the longest two weeks of my life.
Everything has changed. Literally everything. The only thing that remains true is that I am still me.
That is, I am still a human called Audrey Castle.
I still look like me. I still have the same dark hair I got from my dad and the same hazel eyes from Mum.
My shoulders are still too wide.
I still walk like a boy.
I still think it would have been cool to live in the past.
I can still quote all the lyrics to ‘The Afterglow’ by the Neo Maxis, from their audio capsule of the same name. As well as most of their other songs too.
I could still cry when I think about what happened to San Francisco and Rio and Jakarta and Tokyo and the first versions of Barcelona and New York.
I still don’t know if I ever loved Ben or if it was just the idea of love that I loved.
Yes. There are enough similarities for me to know that I am still me. But really, I feel quite different. I feel older. Time doesn’t always go at the same speed. Two weeks can sometimes seem like half a lifetime.
Differences:
I am hardly ever hungry now, whereas before I was food crazy. Now I cry if I catch the scent of Mum’s coconut body lotion. Or when I think of the fact that she was a time broker, when she has no time left. When I remember Mum’s voice, or the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, or the stupid things I shouted at her in arguments, I want to bite my hand until I stop thinking.
When I close my eyes, I see Dad’s face. Sleepy-eyed and bearded and wise and warm and serious. I see him cooking. Or hunched over his desk, glowering into the camera as he does an h-log narrowcast. Or talking to me about the importance of reading books by writers rather than software programs. Or smiling through the pain as he lay on a hospital bed after the accident. Or singing terrible old-fashioned songs from the 2090s. Most of all I see him sitting on the edge of the bed scratching his beard, his transparent blue walking stick leaning against his leg, as he asked me the one question I wish he’d never asked.
And yeah, sure, I can watch 4-D footage of them. I could go into a pod and pretend to hug them; I could even feel my dad’s beard on my forehead as he kisses me goodnight, but I would be interacting with ghosts. They have cured ninety-nine per cent of cancers, brain tumours are always gone within a week, and some people – so called ‘post-mortals’ – have managed to extend their life far beyond its natural span, but they haven’t quite cured death.
Or grief.
Or murder.
And it
was
murder.
I don’t doubt that any more.
Until today, I hadn’t done a mind-log since I was thirteen. I like to imagine it will help me if I focus my mind and record my thoughts. I have no idea if that’s true, but I have to try something.
Mrs Matsumoto, when I saw her way up there in Cloudville, said that I should focus on the facts of what happened. The facts of that day. So what follows is the facts. OK, I feel sick. I hate making myself think about it, but I have to.
That morning I woke up and everything was normal.
The rain drumming away. Me lying there, inhaling the too-strong scent of lavender and lime flower generated from the old cheap sheets.
I had some song in my head. Not Neo Maxis for once. A slow song from one of those new wave magneto bands from Beijing. One of the ones about unrequited love. I don’t know why I always liked songs about unrequited love. I had never felt unrequited love. I probably hadn’t felt requited love, either, and I’d never done anything physical with a boy that hadn’t been computer simulated. But I guess some things you can relate to without actually feeling them yourself.
Anyway, it was just another grey wet Wednesday. It had rained every day for the last four months, but I didn’t mind the rain. You couldn’t mind the rain if you lived in the north of England, as three quarters of it was permanently underwater.
I heard my parents arguing. Not arguing. Niggling. But I couldn’t hear what it was about. Maybe it was about Alissa. Our Echo.
She had only lived with us for a little over a month. My mother thought we should have got her sooner – straight after the accident, in fact – but Dad had been determined to struggle on with nothing more than Travis, our old house robot. Dad had been pretty clear that he didn’t like having Alissa around very much. To be fair, I didn’t either.
She was too human. Too real-looking. It creeped me out.
She came into my room. She looked at me sternly, even though I knew an Echo couldn’t really feel stern. She had been designed to look like a thirty-year-old human woman with blonde hair and features that were pretty, but not threateningly so. She had a perfectly wholesome face, with smooth shining Echo skin. Echo skin is not quite human skin, just as Echo blood is not quite human blood, but the freaky thing for me was how similar she looked to an actual human. She was flesh and blood. I was used to Travis, of course, but robots were different. Alissa was as flesh and blood as I was, except for the small centimetre cube of hardware and circuitry inside her brain.
‘You have your first lesson of the day – Mandarin – in thirty-five minutes. You need to start getting ready.’
She stayed standing there a little too long.
‘OK. I’ll . . . be ready.’
I was a slow waker, so I commanded the curtains to open and just stared at the grey, rain-streaked world. There were other houses, but we didn’t really know our neighbours.
This was even before I put my info-lenses in. Sometimes I didn’t want enhancements, or information. The news had been depressing lately.
The re-emergence of cholera across Europe.
The energy crisis.
The deaths of terraformers on Mars.
Hurricanes. Tsunamis.
Echo stuff.
The government in Spain wiping out homes in the deserts of Andalucía.
Sometimes – like that morning – I just wanted to see the world as it actually was, in all its rain-ravaged glory. So – no mind-wires, no info-lenses.
I was never really a full-on body-tech person. Well, no, that’s kind of a lie. It was hard for me to be a body-tech person, as my dad was very suspicious about most types of technological advancement. For instance, he basically thought that Echos would one day take over, and we’d be wiped out. According to him, none of the big tech companies cared for human life, no matter what they said, and he got quite cross if I ever showed too much interest. Mum had a different attitude. She loved spending hours in the immersion pod, wandering around ancient cities or doing yoga with Buddha himself. She told me to ignore Dad, but he was quite persuasive.
We lived in a stilt house. Not the smallest stilt house in the world, but still, a stilt house. Dad had a high profile, but he worked for free and there wasn’t as much money in time brokering as there used to be, despite Mum’s long hours.
My bedroom was fifty-eight metres above ground level. Or, to put it another way, about forty-nine metres above average water level.
Sometimes the water was higher, sometimes lower. Sometimes there was no water at all. Just muddy ground. Not that my feet ever touched the ground. You could hardly step out and go for a walk.
There was an old steel magrail outside our house, which connected to others, meaning that our car could take us to the centre of London – more than 300 kilometres away – in considerably less than ten minutes. Though travelling by car had been a bit more tense since the accident.
So we were there.
Castles in our castle, with our very own moat
.
Moat.
Dad once said that the only way to stay human in the modern world was to build a moat around yourself. A moat made of thoughts that have nothing to do with technology.
And this was a bit ironic as Dad’s brother was Alex Castle.
The
Alex Castle. The one who was head of Castle Industries, the leading tech empire in Europe, and second only to Sempura worldwide. But then, Dad didn’t like Uncle Alex much, and Uncle Alex didn’t like him, mainly because, as a journalist, Dad spent his life attacking things like artificial intelligence and gene therapy and bringing extinct species back to life (which are pretty much the main things Castle do). Also, Uncle Alex was the third richest man in Europe and Dad was in debt.
Course, we did have some technology. We had info-lenses and mind-wires and holovision and immersion pods and a magcar and the external and internal leviboards and all the normal stuff. We also had an Echo. I suppose my dad was a bit of a hypocrite. But the Echo was my fault more than his, and I’m alive and Dad is dead, so I’m hardly going to judge.