‘You don’t understand,’ he said quickly. ‘She did it, yes. But I told you – it wasn’t a malfunction. She wasn’t a normal Echo. Your parents thought she was, but she wasn’t. She was a prototype, being made for Sempura . . . Rosella designed prototypes. One-offs. Tests.’
Something about this rang false. ‘Designers only work for one company. Everyone knows that.’
‘You don’t understand. Rosella, she is the very best in the world. And she is a good human. Or she tried to be. The trouble was—’
One of the Echo dogs suddenly swept in, and bit Daniel’s left leg. I caught sight of the gleaming titanium teeth, complete with two needlesharp fangs, longer than the rest. It was these that penetrated Daniel’s flesh. Then another bit his right leg. A third jumped with a strength far beyond that of any purely biological dog, and pinned him to the ground.
Daniel looked at me with weary eyes. Those dogs had injected something into him via their fangs. ‘You must escape. Find Rosella,’ he said, before that third hound’s fangs pierced his neck.
He managed a final word – ‘Remember . . .’ – and then collapsed on the grass. A sleep beyond sleep. And as those Echo hounds ran towards the house, no doubt being remote-commanded to help the Echos and the police eliminate the last of the protestors, I went over to Daniel and crouched down to inspect him. The most visible wound was the knife cut on the palm of his hand, which was still leaking fresh blood onto the lawn. And he had a mark on his cheek from where the rock had caught him. Where the dogs had bitten him there were only the tiniest dark dots, as if from injections or vampire bites.
I no longer feared him. It was quite impossible to fear someone who was lying unconscious on the grass in front of you. In fact, I wanted him to wake up or come round. He had more information to give. But it wasn’t just that. He had saved my life. And I knew I’d been wrong about him.
‘Wake up! Wake up! Can you hear me? Daniel? Daniel! Wake up!’
There wasn’t the slightest response, even when I slapped his face. I checked his pulse. I had never felt the pulse of an Echo before, but I knew that their hearts beat slightly faster than a human’s, to ensure blood pumped more quickly around their bodies, leading to more efficient muscles and organs. And although Daniel’s pulse wasn’t beating quite that fast – he was unconscious, after all – it was still beating as fast as mine would in a state of absolute panic. To be honest, I wasn’t far from that state.
A thousand questions sped around my mind.
Why had he saved me?
Why had he left my uncle’s side when he knew he would be punished for disobeying an order?
Could any Echo ever feel guilt?
And had that really been Uncle Alex’s order? Wasn’t it more likely that Uncle would have told him to come and help me? After all, there were other Echos to look after Uncle Alex. But why had another Echo chased us?
And what was this stuff about Alissa? He had heard me say Alissa’s name on that first night. He could have been lying. But then, he had mentioned Rosella. Why would he have said that name?
But was he lying? It came back to that.
Was he lying?
Was he lying?
He was an Echo. An Echo that Iago had already told me was weird. And even the least weird Echo in the world couldn’t be trusted. But if he was lying, then why would he be risking everything to tell me that he knew Alissa? Why would he have brought me out here, into the garden, knowing that the Echo hounds were out here? And why had he told me to find Rosella?
I knew I didn’t have long.
As soon as the protestors had been dealt with – maybe even before – someone would be out searching for me. Searching for Daniel. I looked at him lying there on the ground. At the arms that had carried me, at the hand that been cut trying to defend me, at the bruised and grazed cheek that had taken the force of a rock, at the strong pale neck that had been pierced by the fangs of an Echo hound. All those wounds. All for me. I looked at his closed eyelids, shielding those green eyes. I looked at his face, trying to see if there was some clue on it. If there was something that could tell me if he was lying or not.
Of course, it was impossible to tell. All I knew is that I was staring at a perfect face, and the trouble with perfection is that it doesn’t give you any answers. Indeed, all it did was confuse me further. He was an Echo. I couldn’t feel anything for an Echo except fear, and yet there I was, feeling all kinds of things.
But then I remembered. Echos have origin marks, singed onto the skin. It was roughly the same size as the mark on the back of an Echo’s left hand. The E.
I had never seen Alissa’s origin mark up close. Had never had any inclination to do so. But my parents would have done, I supposed, when they first purchased her. Yeah. Probably. Maybe.
There was the sound of footsteps, heading closer. I looked through the bushes and saw Uncle Alex, flanked by Madara and the other Echo who had been guarding him – the tall, muscular dreadlocked one – walking across the lawn towards me. Within twenty seconds they would be here.
Wasting no time, I tugged at Daniel’s clothes until I saw his naked shoulder, and that origin mark. A band of text, neat bold capitals forming words almost too small to read:
DESIGNED BY
ROSELLA MÁRQUEZ (B-4-GH-44597026-D)
FOR CASTLE INDUSTRIES
‘Activate info-lenses,’ I said. And within a second the familiar green dot was hovering in front of me, to signify that the lenses were on. ‘Camera,’ I commanded. ‘Take image.’ I blinked. Rosella Márquez’s ID number was now recorded. Just in time, as it turned out.
‘Oh, Audrey, thank God.’ Uncle Alex was standing there, looking worried. ‘He didn’t have time to hurt you.’
‘I don’t think he was going—’
He wasn’t listening. ‘Chester,’ he said to the large Echo with the dreadlocks as he pointed at Daniel. ‘Take that into the house.’
That. Why did it hurt me to hear him talking about Daniel like that? Echos don’t warrant sympathy. They’re just machines.
But still, when Chester scooped him off the ground and carried him into the house, I felt worried.
‘What are you going to do to him? Is he going to die?’
My question seemed to puzzle Uncle Alex. Maybe not the words, but the way I said them.
‘Audrey,’ he said gently, ‘this is my fault. An Echo never wins at chess if they are told not to win at chess.’ Yes. Uncle’s voice was gentle. But there was something new about the way he was looking at me. His eyes were harsh. ‘We are going to make sure he never puts your life in danger again.’
‘He didn’t put me in danger. He . . . he saved my life.’
Uncle Alex came close to me. ‘What did he say to you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Madara must have done an instant voice-reading because she said: ‘It is a lie, Master.’
Uncle Alex looked at Madara with an affection he couldn’t hide from me. She was his favourite Echo, I could see that. But even so, he managed to say to her: ‘Hush, Madara. She is young and she is human. She is allowed to lie. Indeed, it is expected.’
‘He said some stuff, but it didn’t make sense,’ I explained. ‘That is what I meant.’
Uncle Alex gave a small nod. ‘Some stuff.’
The Echo hounds skulked back across the grass and returned to their underground homes, the grass-covered doors closing and restoring the lawn to normal. I looked over towards the house.
‘You are in shock. We all are, obviously, after what has just happened. Those protestors tried to kill me. They are animals. Monsters. Too scared to come out from behind their masks. They tried to kill Iago too. He is fine, though. In fact, he dealt with a lot of them himself. He is a sharp shooter. Whoever said that war games were bad for kids, eh? They might have just saved his life!’ Uncle laughed a little. The laugh quickly died. ‘Candressa wasn’t so lucky, though.’
‘What happened?’
‘One of them shot her. In h
er arm. It won’t be fatal. She’s in surgery.’
‘In hospital?’
‘No. There’s a medical room in the basement. Two Echos are fixing her right now.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘There’s been a lot of damage. I’ve lost a lot of money just in terms of the art they’ve destroyed. Picassos! They’ve destroyed Picassos! Clocks and furniture can repair themselves, but a painting can’t. And all because of those terrorists. Terrorists fuelled by all that ridiculous anti-progress propaganda.’
‘You mean, like Dad used to write?’
He sighed and looked at me for a while, maybe wondering if he should be polite. But eventually he came out and said it: ‘Yes, exactly like that. Listen, I know you think I must have hated your dad. But I didn’t. He was a stubborn man. I offered him money once. A lot of money. He turned it down. He didn’t start off radical; he became it. The more successful I became, the more principles he developed. It was classic sibling rivalry. Nothing more, nothing less. Now come on, I can’t stand around out here all day. I’ve got to talk to the police. And assess the damage.’
And as I walked back with him, I wondered if Uncle Alex was the reason Daniel had told me to escape.
We were back inside the house. I was in my bedroom. Uncle Alex had told me to stay there until all the mess could be cleared away. I think he also wanted me in my room so I wouldn’t ask any questions. Or see whatever they were going to do to Daniel.
I sat there staring out of the window. At the crisscrossing rails carrying traffic. At the distant floating bone that was the New Parliament building, directly above the old one, which had flooded and evacuated many years ago, though Big Ben had been left relatively intact. The bone contained what Dad always used to call ‘a joke of a government’, as most of the politicians who worked there were also getting money from one of the main technology giants, and significantly more money from Castle than from Sempura. Knowing this, and seeing that giant sphere going round and round with the blue castle on it, it was very easy for me to feel like Uncle owned the whole city. That he was a kind of king. And a king with far more power and wealth than King Henry IX.
King of the Castle.
The trouble was, if he was like a king, he was an unpopular one. One that many clearly wanted dead. So it wasn’t safe here. Today had proved that. But it wasn’t just the protestors – or ‘terrorists’, as Uncle Alex had been quick to call them – that bothered me. No. And it wasn’t just the Echos, either. It was Uncle Alex himself. He had been kind to me, as Candressa had pointed out. And it was true. And I desperately tried to convince myself that my growing doubts were unfounded. Daniel had malfunctioned. How could I have taken his word for anything?
‘Is Daniel going to be OK?’ I asked when Uncle Alex came in with a cup of red tea for me.
‘Audrey, I don’t understand it. I thought you hated Echos.’
‘I do . . . I do . . . I just want to know what will happen to him. I’d like to be able to speak to him again.’
Uncle Alex sat on a chair and leaned back, taking a deep breath. I’d felt like this before. When I’d had the interview for Oxford. It was the feeling of being assessed. ‘Well, that’s not going to happen, I’m afraid.’
‘Why? What are you going to do to him?’
‘Don’t worry about that, Audrey. We’re not going to terminate him. We’re going to make a few little changes and then send him somewhere else.’
A few little changes.
‘You see,’ Uncle Alex said, ‘there are things you don’t know about Daniel.’
‘Things?’
‘He’s not like the other prototypes. A lot more money was spent on him. Made by the best designer. By a genius, in fact. But there is very often a problem with genius. Sometimes the genius pushes things a little too far. It can create something that we’re not quite ready for. It can create something that acts in unpredictable ways. And that might be what has happened here.’
‘Like Alissa?’
‘What?’
‘Alissa acted in unpredictable ways.’
‘Alissa wasn’t a Castle product. If she was a Castle product, she would never have been on the market. None of the Echos I have here have been released yet.’
‘But you said they were all safe. You said there was nothing to worry about.’
‘They are all safe. Most of them. In fact, without them we’d be dead right now. Killed in cold blood by those terrorist monsters.’
He looked angry, but he was hiding something. I was becoming a bit scared. He reverted to his original topic. ‘No Castle prototype has ever caused problems before. It’s just Daniel. The most advanced. And therefore the most problematic.’
‘So what are you going to do to him?’
‘I don’t know if you know about Echos. Their brains look like ours but they are not like ours. They run on code. There is a chip inside them. This chip sends different instructions and triggers to different parts of the brain. The rear part of the brain deals with free thought. In his particular case – for some reason we can’t identify – it seems to trigger imagination.’
I was confused. ‘Imagination? Is that bad?’
‘Imagination is dangerous, Audrey. Imagination makes them have a degree of unknowability. It makes them more advanced, but it increases the risk. But luckily, in an Echo, it is located right here.’ He patted the back of his head. ‘And it is very simple to remove, while still ensuring he maintains a degree of functionality.’
Degree of functionality.
‘He’s not a machine!’
‘Oh, but that is exactly what he is. He is an Echo. He wasn’t born, he was made. There are no blurred lines. And this machine has malfunctioned, so he is getting downgraded. And then I’ll be putting him out there on the open market. There is a big market, you see, for rejects. Some go to the moon. Some end up in London, doing dirty or dangerous work. They are cheap. That place over there is full of them.’
‘Where?’
He pointed out of the window, at the rotating sphere in the distance.
‘The Resurrection Zone?’ I remembered Dad’s stories about that place. About violent encounters between the animals and the Echos that looked after them. Dad compared it to the Coliseum in ancient Rome, where Christians were fed to the lions for entertainment. But instead of Christians it was Echos, and instead of lions it was tigers. And though Dad wasn’t a fan of Echos, I agreed that it was cruel – to the animals, if no one else. And yet, weirdly, I wasn’t thinking about the animals. I was thinking about Daniel.
‘Most Echos don’t last more than a month there,’ I said.
‘Some do, some don’t. That’s hardly our problem.’
‘But you own it. Castle owns it.’
He looked at me, and there was a sense that we both knew we were playing some kind of game. We were saying some things and not saying others. ‘The Resurrection Zone is a fun place. It angers those terrorists, but everything angers them. I’ll take you one day. I think you’ll see that your dad was wrong about it. It makes a lot of people happy. It does a lot of good work.’
It was then that we heard a noise. A faint but alarming sound. A scream.
‘Was that him? Was that Daniel?’
‘It might have been.’
I realized they must have been operating on him right then. ‘He sounded like he was in pain. Don’t you do it painlessly?’
‘Echos don’t feel pain.’
‘But he’s advanced. He can. He can imagine and he can feel pain.’
Uncle Alex looked at the painting. Those huddled, cold, traumatized nudes listening to music. ‘Interesting. I am sure artists like Matisse would have agreed. The price of imagination is pain. That may be true.’ He laughed. ‘Well, better he feels it than he inflicts it.’
And then he stood up to leave. The screams kept on. They triggered questions inside me. Questions I was no longer too scared to ask.
‘Who was Rosella?’
Uncle Alex sig
hed. His nose whistled slightly as he did so.
‘Whatever he said to you, you shouldn’t trust it. He was playing with your mind.’
‘How do you know he said anything about Rosella?’ I said, my heart speeding as a revelation pumped adrenaline into me. ‘Alissa did. I told you that at the media conference. But you are right – so did Daniel. Was she the genius? Did she make Alissa?’
Uncle Alex stopped just before he reached the door. ‘You can tell you are your dad’s daughter. Questions, questions, questions.’
‘My dad was a good person.’
He nodded. And he looked at me with eyes that showed no sign of warmth. ‘Yes, but look what happens to good people.’
‘I need to know.’
He smiled. Looking back, I realize it was the first time I had seen open cruelty on his face.
‘Well, then, come with me. You can ask Daniel everything you want to know.’
At the time I wasn’t really sure why Uncle Alex wanted this to happen.
I mean, why he wanted me to see Daniel after the operation.
Why he took me down two flights of stairs to a part of the house I had never been in – to the surgery room, and that horizontal pod where Daniel was lying awake but lifeless beneath the aerogel casing.
Now, though, I realize it was about power. Everything in Uncle Alex’s life was about power. The aggressive business strategies, the big house in Hampstead, the Matisse and Picasso paintings, the holosculptures. It was all to show how powerful and important he was. I wish Dad had told me more about what Uncle Alex had been like as a child. Maybe that would have explained a few things. Maybe one day I would discover the truth.
But anyway, this was about power. About showing the power he had over his products, of which Daniel was one; and also about showing the power he had over me. Because, really, this was the moment when everything changed between me and my uncle. It was the point at which the pretence was over. When I could no longer try and convince myself that he had my best interests at heart. Maybe it was the shock of the activists breaking into the house, but whatever it was, the mask had slipped.
We walked into the bare, perfectly clean white room.