Echo Boy Read Online Free Page A

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.
    Pull yourself together, Audrey. Focus. Say what you have to say. It will help to face it. You must face it.
    So, here I go.
    After twenty-first-century history, there was a conversation with Tola.
    ‘Why was that a double?’ she’d asked, changing her virtual hair colour from red to black and back again.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I mean, I know Mr Bream is not the sharpest VT in the world and, sure, the Google Riots are a good subject, but that was a double lesson.’
    ‘That’s weird,’ I agreed.
    ‘It’s never that long. Maybe there’s a virus in the software. Maybe it was hacked!’
    Tola liked the idea of school being hacked, because whenever schools are hacked you have a week off, while they re-run all the software.
    ‘Why would anyone want to hack that? I mean, Google isn’t even going any more.’
    Tola shrugged, staying with the red hair option. ‘Hey, guess where I’m going this afternoon?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Ancient Rome. To the Coliseum.’
    ‘It’s meant to be a good simulation.’
    ‘The gladiators are so hot. It’s fun, watching them die and stuff.’
    ‘Right. Well, I’d like to come but—’
    ‘Don’t worry! I wasn’t inviting you. It’s with JP.’
    She went on to talk about this new boyfriend she had and then I made my excuses to leave.
    After I left the pod and went back into my bedroom. I noticedsomething quite incredible. Something that very rarely happened. The sun was out. The grey clouds had parted just enough to let it emerge, shining golden light into my room.
    This prompted me to go to the window, and I noticed the car hovering just above the magrail. I remembered that Mum’s meeting in NNY had been cancelled. So she was in the house. Which made me realize that the house was awfully quiet. Course, Dad was probably working in his pod, but Mum – what about her? She would normally have heard me leave the pod and asked how my lessons went. Or I’d have heard her come home.
    My mother was always someone you heard. I don’t mean she was deliberately noisy, but she often sang to herself. The thing with Mum is that even though she was crazy-stressed a lot of the time, she always had fun in her. Or maybe she used to like to show she had fun in her to Dad who, well, had maybe missed out on the fun rations. She sometimes even sang a Neo Maxis song. She used to like ‘Song for Eleanor’. But mainly she’d sing some old song from the dark ages. (‘Mind-wire Heartbreak’ by The Avatars and ‘Robotic Tendencies’ by If This Was Life, and sickly stuff like that.) Even if she hadn’t been