iBoy

1010

It was still raining when I left the old sports hall, so there weren't many people around, but as I headed back round the rear of the main building towards the workmen's gate, I saw something going on over by the science block. Two boys and two girls were arguing about something, shouting and swearing, pushing each other around. I recognized three of them — Jayden Carroll, Carl Patrick, and Nadia Moore — and I guessed the other girl was Leona, Jayden's girlfriend. From the way Nadia kept waving her mobile around, shoving it into Leona's face, I assumed the argument was about the text I'd sent last night — the one that had made Nadia think that Carl had been seeing Leona.

I hung back behind a pillar and watched as the argu­ment intensified. The shouting and swearing got louder, the pushing and shoving got nastier, and then I saw Nadia grab Leona by the shoulder and smack her across the face with her mobile. After that, everything really kicked off. Jayden grabbed hold of Nadia and shoved her into a wall, Nadia retaliated, scratching her nails down Jayden's face ... and then, as Jayden yelled out in pain and swung his fist at Nadia, I suddenly realized that Carl Patrick had a knife in his hand. I saw him lunge at Jayden and grab his shoulder with one hand, and then he just kind of pumped his other arm a few times, and Jayden staggered backwards, clutching at his stomach, before falling to his knees in a puddle and slumping slowly to the ground ...

And that was it.

Everything stopped then.

Carl Patrick and the two girls didn't really do anything, they just kind of stood around Jayden, looking down at him, looking at each other ... I even saw Patrick shrug, as if to say — don't blame me, it was his fault...

Which, of course, it wasn't.

It was my fault.

I dialled 999 in my head, anonymously called for an ambulance, then I walked back round the other side of the main building and went out through the workmen's gate.

I knew that it wasn't really my fault. I might have unwit­tingly caused it by sending the text to Nadia, but that's all I'd done. I hadn't stuck the knife in Jayden's belly, had I? I couldn't blame myself for that...

Could I?

I played it all back in my head, then anonymously sent the video to DS Johnson's mobile phone, with a text message identifying Carl Patrick as the one with the knife. And then, as I started walking back towards Crow Town, I tried to forget it all. I tried telling myself that it was no big deal, that people get stabbed around here all the time ... that you can't do anything about it, it's just how it is ...

But the words in my head sounded pretty empty. They were the kinds of words that Davey would use — it's just the way it is, it's just what they do — words that mean nothing. And maybe, in a funny kind of way, that's why he used them. Meaningless words for meaningless actions.

I stopped thinking about it then.

Lucy was logging on to her MySpace page.

While I waited for her to read my message (iBoy's message), I dialled Gram's number in my head. As it rang, I suddenly realized that it'd look a bit strange if I was walking along talking to Gram without either a mobile or one of those stupid hands-free/Bluetoothy things stuck in my ear, so I quickly pulled out my mobile and held it to my ear.

"Tommy?" Gram answered. "Where are you? You're late."

"Yeah, sorry, Gram," I said. "I bumped into Mr Smith, you know, my English teacher ...? He just started talk­ing to me about stuff, and I couldn't get away. I'm on my way back now."

"You'd better be. Where are you?"

"Just passing the garage. I'll be five minutes."

"Right... well, don't hang around."

"I'll see you in five, Gram."

Lucy had replied to my MySpace message. iBoy, she'd written, i can't talk to you. please don't write again.

And I guessed that was fair enough.

Just before I got to Crow Town, I took a quick detour down Mill Lane, a little back street that leads down to an old part of the industrial estate that isn't used any more. There's not a lot down there — abandoned ware­houses and factories, vast stretches of wasteground — but it's the only place I know around here where you can't get a signal on your mobile, and I wanted to check what happened to the iStuff in my head when there wasn't any mobile reception.

It's not a very nice place, the old industrial estate. It's sort of grey and flat and lifeless, and it always has this weird kind of dull silence to it... in fact, even when it's not actually silent, the whole place seems to be muffled with a cold and empty hush. Although it's not used any more, there's always a lot of stuff going on down there, especially at night. A lot of the local kids hang around in the old warehouses and factory buildings, just doing what they do — taking drugs, having sex, partying, fight­ing — and sometimes you hear about more serious stuff going on — gang stuff, shootings, stabbings, dead bodies.

So, no, it's not the nicest place in the world, and I didn't like being there, but I carried on walking — with my iBrain turned on — until I reached a point where the signal receptor in my head faded to zero, and then I stopped.

No signal.

No reception.

No iBoy.

I looked around. There was a block of old factory buildings behind me, towering concrete structures with even taller brick chimneys, and on either side of the road there was nothing but vast stretches of wasteground. About thirty metres up ahead, I could see a disused complex of industrial units and warehouses.

I tried reaching out inside my head, searching for a signal, a network, anything ... but there was nothing there.

My iHead was empty.

My iSkin non-functional.

The electric was off.

I walked back the way I'd come, and after about ten metres or so, everything switched back on again.

I stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. No cars, no bikes, no nothing. I stepped off the pavement and crossed over the wasteground to a black­ened patch of earth — the remains of an old bonfire. I stooped down and picked out some charred tin cans from the ashes, then I went over and placed them on a huge slab of reinforced concrete that was lying nearby.

I looked around again, making sure that I was still alone, and then — for the next ten minutes or so — I exper­imented with my zapping capabilities. I started off by simply touching one of the cans and giving it an electric shock, zapping it right off the slab, and then I tried controlling the power — increasing it, decreasing it, moving away from the cans to see if I could knock them off from a distance ...

By the time I had to stop, when I saw a car cruising slowly down the road towards me, I'd learned that I could control the power, although as yet my degree of control wasn't too great, and that my maximum range for zapping at a distance was no more than a metre at most.

I crossed back over to the pavement just as the approaching car was pulling up at the side of the road. The front window wound down and a seedy-looking guy leaned out and said, "Hey, kid, is this Crow Lane?"

I shook my head and pointed towards the estate. "It's back there."

He glanced at where I was pointing, then turned back to me. "Baldwin House?"

"Second tower along."

He nodded but didn't say anything. He just wound up the window, turned the car round, and drove off.

"You're welcome," I muttered, watching him go.

Gram was working when I got home — tap-tap-tapping away — and after we'd said hello, and she'd pretended to be a bit annoyed with me for staying out longer than I'd promised, I left her to her writing and went into my room.

I didn't know what I was going to do with all the infor­mation I'd got about O'Neil and Adebajo and everything else — the attack on Lucy and Ben, the gang stuff, the Elders, Howard Ellman ... I didn't even know why I'd gone looking for it all in the first place. But as I sat at my window, looking down at the rainy-day dullness of the estate down below, I knew in my heart that I only had two options: I could either do nothing, just forget about everything and try to get on with my life; or I could try my best to do something.

And maybe if I'd still been my old self — the perfectly normal, non-iPhoned Tom Harvey — maybe I might have accepted that there was nothing I could do, because the only thing the normal Tom Harvey could have done was pass on the information he'd collected to the police, and it wouldn't have mattered how carefully or cleverly he did it, the end result would have been the same: not just the Crows, but most of Crow Town, would have turned against Lucy and her family and made their lives even more hellish than they already were.

So the alternative option, of doing nothing at all, would probably have been the only thing the normal Tom Harvey could have done.

But, like it or not, I wasn't the normal Tom Harvey any more. I was iBoy. I had the ability to do things that I couldn't do before, and there was something inside me — a part of me that I wasn't even sure I liked — that made me feel that it was my duty, my obligation, to make the most of those abilities and try to do something useful with them. And whatever this feeling inside me was, I knew that I couldn't say no to it.

I just wished that it would be a bit more helpful. I mean, it was all well and good making me feel that I had to do something ... but how about telling me what that something was?

No, it was no help at all for that. And neither was my iBrain. Deciding what to do was a job for my normal brain.

So I closed my eyes and just sat there — thinking, wondering, listening to the pouring rain ...

It must have been a couple of hours later when Gram knocked on my door, waking me up, and told me that she was just nipping out to the shops. I hadn't got much thinking done, and even the thinking I had managed to do wasn't very useful, or even relevant. In fact, as Gram stood in the doorway, waiting for me to answer her ques­tion — which I hadn't actually heard — I realized that I couldn't even remember what I'd been thinking about before I'd fallen asleep.

"Tommy?" Gram said.

I looked at her. "Yeah, sorry ... what did you say?"

"Did you want anything? From the shops ..."

"No ... no thanks."

"OK," she said. "I won't be long."

"Have you got enough money?" I heard myself say.

"What?"

I shrugged. "Nothing ... I just meant, you know ..." I rubbed my eyes, smiling wearily at her. "Sorry, I'm still half asleep ..."

"Well, maybe you'd better get back to being fully asleep."

"Yeah ..

"In bed, not in your chair."

"OK."

"All right then. I'll see you later."

"Yeah, see you later, Gram."

I'm perfectly aware that knowing about stuff isn't the same thing as understanding it, so I knew that having access to vast amounts of information hadn't suddenly turned me into a philosophical genius or anything, but that afternoon, as I sat in my room with my eyes closed, iSearching through everything I could iSearch through, looking for a way to sort out Gram's financial position, I kept seeing cyber-flashes of stuff about morals — discus­sion forums, philosophy websites, excerpts from books — and I began to understand that the concept of right and wrong isn't as clear cut as I'd thought. When it comes to morality, there aren't any natural rules. There aren't things that are definitely right or definitely wrong. Noth­ing is simply black or white; it's all a murky dull grey. Actually, come to think of it, it's more of a browny-grey kind of colour — the sort of shitty brown colour you get when you mix all the colours in a paint box together.

Of course, I was also beginning to understand that if you want to do something that you think — or even know — is wrong, there are all kinds of things you can do to convince yourself that it's not wrong, and pretending that there's actually no such thing as "wrong" in the first place is probably one of the easiest.

Anyway, to get to the point, I eventually realized that whichever way I chose to solve Gram's money problems — and with the growing capabilities inside my head, the possibilities were almost endless — but whichever way I picked, it inevitably meant taking money from some­where else, money that didn't belong to me. And however much I tried to convince myself that this was OK, I knew in my heart that it wasn't.

For example, I could easily hack into the accounts and databases of all Gram's various publishers, and it would have been no trouble at all to change the sales figures, to invent more sales for Gram's books, to create a load of money for Gram that wasn't actually there. Or, even more crudely, I could simply hack into some super- wealthy person's bank account, someone who wouldn't miss a measly few thousand quid — maybe Bill Gates, or Bono, or J. K. Rowling — and take some of their money.

In short, I had the ability to steal as much as I wanted from anyone I wanted to take it from. Which, at first, was pretty exciting. I mean, I could be a billionaire, a trillionaire, an infinitillionaire ... but I soon realized that it didn't really mean very much. I mean, what was I going to do with a trillion pounds? And, more to the point, how was I going to explain where it came from?

In the end, what I did ... well, first of all I set up an algorithmic program.

In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects, an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing, in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task will, when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state.

And, basically, I programmed this algorithm to scan all the bank accounts in the world, rank them in terms of wealth, and remove £1 from each of the top 15,000. The total of £15,000 was then electronically (and totally anonymously) transferred to Gram's account as a single deposit. I couldn't work out how to explain this deposit — i.e. how to invent a legitimate depositor — but I decided to leave that for later. Meanwhile, I cancelled Gram's summons for non-payment of council tax and, using some of the £15,000, I paid off what she owed and cleared the outstanding rent.

Yes, it was wrong.

It was stealing.

It was fraud.

It was wrong.

But I didn't feel bad about it.

I slept for a while after that (morality and algorithms are really tiring), and when I woke up, Gram was back, and she'd got some food, and we had some toasted sand­wiches together.

While Gram went back to her writing, I spent some more time in my room, scanning the airwaves, listening out for any mobile calls that might tell me what the Crows were up to, but I didn't hear anything particularly interesting. It was all mostly — where are you? what you doing? you hear about Trick and Jace?

Trick was Carl Patrick, and Jace, I assumed, was Jayden Carroll. I found out from the hospital's computer records that Carroll had suffered three stab wounds to the stom­ach, none of them life threatening, and that he'd undergone surgery and was now expected to make a full recovery.

Carl Patrick had been arrested.

It was 19:15:59 when I left the flat and went up to the thirtieth floor to see Lucy. I don't remember how I was feeling or what I was thinking about at the time, but whatever it was, when the lift doors opened, and I saw a group of kids along the corridor outside Lucy's flat, my head and my heart suddenly emptied.

There were about six or seven of them. They were all hooded up in the usual Crow gear, but I recognized some of them: Eugene O'Neil, DeWayne Firman, Nathan Craig. One of the ones I didn't recognize had a can of spray paint in his hand and was spraying something on the wall, and DeWayne Firman was bending down and calling out something through Lucy's letter box. Eugene O'Neil was just standing there, obviously in charge, looking mean and bad and hard as hell... and when the lift doors opened, he looked down the corridor at me, and an ugly grin cracked his face.

As I shut the lift doors and hit the button for the twenty-ninth floor, I saw him shaking his head and smil­ing at me, mocking what he thought was my cowardice, my weakness.

But I didn't care. He wouldn't be smiling for long. As I got out at the twenty-ninth floor and headed back up the stairs, pulling up the hood of my jacket, my iSkin was already shimmering.