4
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 cli
matology, 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.’
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.
5
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.
6
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 fam
ily. 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.