Echo Boy Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Audrey. Mind-log 427.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Daniel. Mind-log 1.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Audrey. Mind-log 428.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Daniel. Mind-log 2.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Audrey. Mind-log 429.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Daniel. Mind-log 3.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Audrey. Mind-log 430.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Daniel. Mind-log 4.

  Chapter 1

  Also by Matt Haig

  Copyright

  About the Book

  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

  Audrey. Mind-log 427.

  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.

  2

  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.

  3

  Like most people, I was schooled at home. A mix of Echo tutelage and the immersion pod.

  Today I would be doing Mandarin and climatology with Alissa and then going into the pod, which was a dated indigo floor-to-ceiling Alphatech affair just outside my room, to do twenty-first-century history.

  So I got up. Put on my jeans and smock-shirt. Mum came into my room to tell me that she had a real-world meeting with a time brokerage in Taipei this morning, and then with a client in New New York, but that she would be back around two; maybe that afternoon we could do some yoga, she said.

  Mum tried to get me to do more yoga. After all, the government, and Bernadine Johnson in particular, recommended that people do five hours of yoga a week. Dad always said that it was best not to trust any prime minister, even on the subject of yoga, but I think he sometimes said things like that just to wind Mum up a bit. But Mum was good at it, while I’d inherited my dad’s tight hamstrings and resistance to exercise.

  ‘We need to work on your downward dog.’

  I try and remember every moment of this because it’s the last time I saw her alive. She was dressed in her smart clothes, which I suppose was more to do with the client in NNY than Taipei, as she was always in Taipei.

  She looked harassed. ‘I’m running late,’ she said, speaking at three hundred kilometres an hour. ‘Never a good look for a time broker. Now, make sure you get Alissa to fix you and Dad some lunch. Dad’s going to be in his office all day, I think, trying to finish his damn book.’

  Mum didn’t want Dad to write this book. They’d rowed about it. The book he was creating – a mix of text and holographic content – was going to be about various tech nightmares that were becoming real: the rise in robotic policing, usual Echo stuff – and also about the ethics of bringing Neanderthals back to life. The Neanderthal stuff was the reason why he’d decided to write it, and why he’d given it the title Brave New Nightmare: Their Rights, Our Wrongs. Mum thought it would make him even more enemies – he had quite a few already – and when Mum worried about stuff, it often came out as crossness. That’s the thing I’ve realized about my parents since they’ve been gone. Sometimes what looked like anger was just love in disguise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mum asked me.

  ‘I’m sitting on my bed staring at the rain,’ I said. ‘And at the houses. I wonder who lives in them. Sometimes I see an old lady in that one there. She stands at the window and just stares out. I feel like she’s lonely. I worry about her.’

  ‘You know,’ said Mum, ‘it wasn’t too long ago when people actually knew their neighbours. Only a hundred years or so.’

  ‘I wish I lived a hundred years ago.’

  She stopped for a moment, and broke out of her rush to concentrate on her daughter. ‘Oh, darling, I don’t think you do. Think about it. You wouldn’t have lived very long. Most people in 2015 died before they were a hundred! They got ill all the time. They still thought cardiovascular exercise was good for them. They used to waste their lives in gyms. And do you know how long it would have taken to get to, say, America from here?’

  ‘An hour?’ I guessed, thinking that sounded a suitably long time.

  ‘Five hours. Sometimes more. Can you imagine? We could be halfway to seeing Grandma on the moon in five hours. Mind you, when I was young I wished I lived two hundred years ago, to be around at the same time as great artists.’

  Mum loved art. Names like Picasso and Matisse filled her conversation. On a Sunday she sometimes took me to the art galleries in Barcelona 2 or Beijing or to the Zuckerberg Center in
California. In fact, she sometimes tried to get Dad to visit Uncle Alex just so she could see some of the priceless paintings he had in his house in Hampstead.

  ‘But I still think that right now is the best time to be alive, whatever your father says,’ she added.

  A car shot by on the magrail outside the window. It was going too fast to actually see, but we could hear the faint whooshing sound, like a stranger blowing air in your ear.

  Mum suddenly remembered that she was late. She gave me a hurried kiss. I felt her hair caress my cheek. I smelled coconut on her skin. (She still used moisturizing creams, despite all the evidence.) ‘OK, happy learning.’

  I raised my eyebrows and gave what I would describe as an ironic nod. Mum translated the nod perfectly. ‘Listen, Alissa may not be the most expensive Echo in the world – and I know you and Dad have it in for her—’

  ‘I don’t have it in for her. How can I have it in for her? She’s a robot.’

  ‘She’s an Echo. Travis was a robot.’

  ‘I miss Travis. Travis was fun.’

  ‘Well, Travis wouldn’t have given you much of an education.’

  This was undeniably true. Towards the end of his ‘life’, Travis was pretty much useless and – even after a full recharge – put everything away in the wrong place when he was tidying up, and couldn’t make any food that wasn’t a sandwich. He also spoke nonsense. Just random words. I painting toilet carrot yes, for example. Onion onion fifty grams at your service thank you it is raining don’t have kiss with boys.

  ‘I’ll give you that,’ I said as Mum stroked my head like I was still ten years old and not nearly sixteen.

  And then her last words to me ever, spoken quickly, without any eye contact, though content-wise they couldn’t have been better. ‘Love you. And make sure you take your brain tablets.’ There. Motherhood in a sentence. My mother in a sentence, anyway.

  This is hard.

  ‘I love you,’ I said back. Or maybe I didn’t. I like to think I said it back to her. I could probably check. Every house in the land has watching walls to record everything, and ours was no different. But no. I don’t want to check. I just want to carry on believing that I told her I loved her and that she heard me as she walked out of my bedroom, and passed the pod along the landing, all the way into my memory.