Echo Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

I said. It was an instinctive thing. ‘No. It’s OK. Thank you, but I’ll go somewhere else.’
    But where else could I go?
    Grandma’s. Mum’s mum. She lived on the moon, but I could have gone to the spaceport at Heathrow and caught a flight. Mum had flown to see her two months ago. She’d planned to spend the week there but had only managed a night. Grandma had Echos. The whole moon was full of Echos. But so was Uncle Alex’s. And, I don’t know, I just felt closer to Grandma.
    ‘Heathrow Spaceport,’ I said. ‘Fast.’
    But the car didn’t speed up. The car slowed down to under five hundred kilometres an hour. I was looking out of windows, at real actual things. I saw distant fires. It might have been one of the riot towns.
    I passed over large greenhouses full of farm crops. Perfect fields of barley, gently swaying in the artificial breeze.
    It is weird, when you love someone and they die. How the worldhas a strange negative power. A short while later we were over Oxford. I slid past the college buildings. The famous titanium wheel that was New Somerville College, rotating on its axis. I was staring at my future. That was where I was meant to be attending university. I had been there, with my mum. I thought of her. But there was nothing. I could only think of blood. And then, between Oxford and London, continuing suburbs. Floating homes, stilt houses, and those giant rectangular rain absorbers that shade miles of land and water.
    This was not the way to Heathrow.
    ‘Car,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’
    Trees.
    A rotating sphere.
    Houses. A dense mesh of crisscrossing magrails. An h-ad for Sempura mind-wires.
    ‘Car, stop. Car, I want to go to Heathrow Spaceport. Car, car,
car
?’
    ‘The designated address is One, Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, London,’ said the car.
    ‘But I’ve told you to drive to Heathrow Spaceport. I want to go to the spaceport. I want to go to the moon. I want to see my grandma.’
    ‘I am fitted with Castle maxiresponse navigational software. It cannot disobey its creator.’
    Had my parents known this? That although the car wasn’t made by Castle, the software inside it was?
    I saw a hologram of our destination appear where Uncle Alex had been.
    One of the most expensive houses in London, a vast mansion that looked like a Roman temple, with acres of land that was also built in one of the highest parts of the city and so unlikely to flood. Apparentlymy uncle had paid 110 million unidollars for it, way back in 2098, but that kind of money was nothing to him.
    Not that he needed the space.
    There was only him and my ten-year-old cousin, Iago. Uncle Alex had been married once, for two years, but his wife – Iago’s mum – had gone a bit crazy after the birth of her son, and a divorce had followed.
    Right then, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this. I was just trying to get the car to do what I wanted. As it didn’t obey any voice command, I tried to disable it by kicking the dashboard. I kicked and I kicked. There was no way I wanted to go to Uncle Alex’s. Not necessarily because of Uncle Alex himself, but because I could not stand the idea of being surrounded by his Echos.
    ‘Car, stop! Reverse. Go back home. Go back to Yorkshire.’
    ‘If you continue to harm this vehicle, you will be forcibly restrained,’ said the car.
    I continued to harm the vehicle.
    And I was forcibly restrained. A sudden field of invisible magnetic force slammed me back against the rear window, nearly a metre above the seat.
    London, speeding by. Water, dripping from my forehead onto the car seat.
    I looked out of the window, at the blur of landscape and buildings, a grey-green melted world that somehow echoed my desolate thoughts.
    ‘ . . . we will look after you.’
    It was Uncle Alex. He was back in the car. Or at least, his hologram was.
    ‘But Echos are there,’ I said, my whole jaw stiff from the pressure. ‘Please, tell the car to go—’
    ‘Don’t worry about them,