iBoy

1000

I spent the rest of that night lying on my bed in my room, with my eyes closed, looking inside my head. It was a relatively quiet night (Crow Town is never completely silent), and I was so used to the distant sounds of the estate down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tyres of (probably stolen) cars — it was all just a nothing-noise to me. The flat was fairly peaceful too — just the soft tap-tapping of Gram in her room, and the occasional whispered curse. I could smell the faint drift of cigar smoke from her room, and it was easy to imagine her hunched over her laptop, tapping away like crazy, with a small cigar smoking away in her mouth, the ash occa­sionally dropping on to her clothes, burning little holes in her shirt, her trousers ... that's what she'd be cursing about.

Anyway, it was quiet enough for me to just lie there in the darkness and try to make sense of the weird and scary cyberworld that was growing inside my head.

It was all too much for me at first. What I knew, what I sensed, what I had access to ... it was simply too vast, too alien, too unbelievably colossal to compre­hend. It was like suddenly realizing that you know everything there is to know. I could see it, hear it, find it, know it ... I could reach out to anywhere in the world and know whatever I wanted to know. It was all there: information, pictures, letters, numbers, words, symbols, faces, voices, bodies, hearts, thoughts, places ... everything. But it was far too much all at once. Too much to know. So I tried to concentrate, to focus ... I tried to make some order out of the chaos. And the best way to do that, it seemed to me, was to go back to the beginning. And the beginning of all this was the iPhone.

Everything I needed to know about iPhones — or every­thing I already knew — came to me in an instant:

The iPhone is an Internet and multimedia enabled smart-phone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail). a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with email, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity) using the phone's multi- touch screen to render a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard. The first-generation phone (known as the Original) was quad-band GSM with EDGE: the second generation phone (known as 3G) added UMTS with 3.6Mbps HSDPA; the third generation adds support for 7,2Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384Kbps uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSPA protocol. The iPhone 3GS was announced on June 8, 2009, and has improved performance, a camera with more megapixels and video capability, and voice control.

Manufacturer

Apple Inc.

Type

Candybar smartphone

Release date

Original: June 29, 2007

3G: July 11, 2008

3GS: June 19, 2009

Units sold

21.17 million (as of Q2 2009)

Operating system iPhone OS 3.1.2 (build 7D11),

released October 8, 2009

Power

Original: 3.7V 1400mAh

3GS: 3.7V 1219mAh

Internal rechargeable non-removable lithium-ion polymer battery

CPU

Original & 3G: Samsung 32-bit

RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.o

3G: 3.7V 115omAh

620MHz underclocked to 412MHz PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU

3GS: Samsung S5PC100 ARM

Cortex-A 8

833MHz underclocked to 600MHz PowerVR SGX GPU

Storage capacity

Flash memory

Original: 4, 8, & 16GB

3G: 8 & 16GB

3GS: 16 & 32GB

Memory

Original & 3G: 128MB eDRAM

3GS: 256MB eDRAM

Display

320 x 48opx, 3.5m (89mm), 2:3 aspect ratio, 18-bit (262,144-colour)

LCD at 163 pixels per inch (ppi)

Input

Multi-touch touchscreen display,

headset controls, proximity and ambient light sensors,

3-axis accelerometer

3GS also includes: digital compass

Camera

Original & 3G: 2.0 megapixels with geotagging

3GS: 3.0 megapixels with video

(VGA at 3ofps), geotagging,

and automatic focus, white balance, &; exposure

Connectivity

WiFi (8o2.nb/g), Bluetooth

2.0+EDR (3GS: 2.1), USB 2.o/Dock connector

Quad band GSM 850 900 1800 1900

MHz GPRS/EDGE

3G also includes: A-GPS; Tri band

UMTS/HSDPA 850, 1900, 2100MHz

3GS also supports: 7.2Mbps HSDPA

Online services iTunes Store, App Store. MobileMe

Dimensions

Original:

115mm (4.5m) (h)

61 mm (2.4m) (w)

11.6mm (0.46m) (d)

3G & 3GS:

115.5mm (4.55m) (h)

62.1mm (2.44m) (w)

12.3mm (0.48m) (d)

Weight

Original & 3GS: 135g (4.80Z)

3G: 133g (4.70Z)

Actually, that was far more information than I needed, and most of it didn't make much sense to me anyway. But it confirmed what I'd already assumed: I had WiFi capability, I could connect to the web. I had access to every single website in the world, which is a lot of websites:

Web pages in the world, August 2005:19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo as of August 2005.

Websites in the world, August 2005: 70,392,567 websites were indexed by Netcraft as of August 2005.

Web pages per website: 273 (rounding to the nearest whole number).

Web pages in the world, February 2007: multiplying our estimate of the number of web pages per website by Netcraft's February 2007 count of websites, we arrive at 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007.

And there was even more. There were databanks, secure sites, programs and websites that were supposed to be inaccessible to unauthorized users, but my iBrain knew how to get into them.

My iBrain, my iSelf ...

My i.

What else did it allow me to do? Well, I could send and receive texts and calls, of course ... and, what's more, I seemed to be able to phone and text with complete anonymity. So, if I wanted to, I could send texts and make calls without anyone knowing who they were from.

And I could hear other calls too. I could access other mobiles — stored texts, call logs, address books ... what­ever was there. I knew it all. I knew where the phones were. I could either triangulate their signals or, with a lot of the new phones, simply locate them via their GPS chips. I could reach out into the radio-waved air and pick out a single specific telephone conversation from among all the millions of others ...

What else?

I could take pictures — click.

Make videos — click, whirr.

Watch videos, watch TV, play games.

I could see every email on every computer and every phone in the world.

I could download everything downloadable ...

I could do virtually anything.

I could overdose on information.

I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness for a while, emptying my head of everything. I was drained, exhausted. My skull ached. I was excited, confused, bewildered, thrilled ...

This ... whatever and however it was ...

This was awe-inspiring.

A radio-controlled clock inside my head (receiving its time signal over the air from Anthorn in Cumbria [MSF 6okHz]) told me that it was 23:32:43.

I lifted my hands and held them in front of my face. A soft glow was emanating from my skin — a gentle, very pale, almost purplish light. I watched, oddly unsurprised, as the glow started to shimmer, and my skin began pulsat­ing again ... radiating, floating, swirling with the essence of everything. I didn't have to see the rest of my body to know that it was happening all over — I could feel it. And now that I was witnessing it up close for the first time, I knew what it was. It was everything, the same kind of everything that I had in my head: 30 billion web pages, galaxies of words and pictures and sounds and voices ... all of it shimmering in and over and under my flesh.

And now I could control it.

All I had to do was switch something off in my head (I didn't know what it was), and my skin would fade back to normal; switch it on again, and the cyber-galaxies came back.

I was learning.

At 00:49:18 I learned that Lucy hadn't used her mobile since the attack, she hadn't sent any texts or emails, and that she had a MySpace page but there hadn't been any activity on it for months. No messages, no comments, no blog entries, nothing. In fact, her MySpace profile was virtually blank — no friends, no photos, no videos, no favourites, no information at all. Just her screen name — aGirl — and that was it.

At 01:16:08 I learned how to hack into the personal computers of CID detectives at Southwark Borough police station, and I found out that three individuals suspected of carrying out the rape and assault of Lucy Walker were still under investigation, but that the Senior Investigating Officer, Detective Superintendent Robert Hall, was not expecting any imminent arrests.

The three individuals named were: Eugene "Yoyo" O'Neil, Paul 'Cutz' Adebajo, and DeWayne Firman.

Other individuals suspected of being involved, but with no evidence against them, were Yusef Hashim, Nathan "Fly" Craig, and Carl "Trick" Patrick.

Between 01:49:18 and 02:37:08 I learned (by experimenting with both a penknife and an old toy gun that fired plastic pellets) that when my iSkin was turned on, my whole body was shielded with an electric force field.

And at 02:57:44 I learned (from an article called "Electric­ity is Human Thinking", by H. Bernard Wechsler) that:

And although that didn't explain how the shattered fragments of a 3.7V 1219 mAh lithium-ion polymer battery could meld with the organic electrical energy of my brain (or my body) to produce a level of power that was above and beyond the linear sum of the two original powers, a level of power that was sufficient to produce a powerful electric shock and create a protec­tive force field ...

Well, actually, it didn't explain anything. But, to be honest, I'd pretty much given up on explanations by then. I mean, Spider-Man never bothered too much with expla­nations, did he? He just got bitten by a genetically engineered spider, acquired his super-spider-powers, frowned about them for a minute or two, and that was pretty much it. He didn't spend hours and hours trying to understand them, did he?

"Spider-Man?" I heard myself mutter. "Jesus Christ..."

I couldn't believe that I was comparing myself to a fictional superhero. It was ridiculous. Absolutely ridicu­lous.

At 03:04:50, after forcing myself to stop thinking about the reality and non-reality of superheroes, I intercepted a video being sent from a mobile phone to Lucy's mobile. It came from a girl called Nadia Moore who lived in Eden House, and she'd added a text message to the video. The message read: jst 2 rmind u agn wat a fuckin hor ur.

I had a pretty good idea of what the video was going to show, and I didn't want to watch it, but I knew that I had to. So after I'd blocked it from reaching Lucy's phone, I braced myself, pressed the play button inside my head, and set about watching a blurred and shaky video of the attack on Lucy and Ben.

I can't describe the worst of what I saw. There aren't words sick enough.

I cried so much it hurt.

I couldn't watch all of the video — there were some scenes that were simply too vile ... too heart-breaking to witness — but after watching most of it, I knew that the police were only partly right. The six individuals they suspected of being involved — O'Neil, Adebajo, Firman, Hashim, Craig, and Patrick — they were all definitely there, and it was definitely the first three who'd done all the really bad stuff. But they weren't the only ones who'd been there. There were others. Some of them had been there from the start, and others had come later, in response to texts and calls from both Carl Patrick and Nadia Moore, who apparently were boyfriend and girlfriend (and, unbeliev­ably, it was Nadia who'd actually done the filming). Even while the attack was going on, they were sending out texts and calling their friends, inviting them to come along — homporn 4u!! lovit haha! ... cum c da fun! — as if it was some kind of circus or something. And their friends did come along. By the time O'Neil and the others had finished with Lucy and Ben, there must have been at least six or seven others in the flat.

Some of them had their faces covered, so I couldn't make out all of them from the video, but I recognized most of them. Jayden Carroll was there, and a couple of brothers from Addington called Big and Little Jones. There were a few youngish kids — no more than twelve or thir­teen years old — who I didn't know, but I'd seen them around. And Davey Carr was there too. It was Davey who'd taken the iPhone out of Ben's pocket and thrown it out of the window. He was laughing when he did it.

I wanted to delete the video, to erase it from my head. I didn't want it to be there any more ... I didn't want it to exist.

But I couldn't delete it.

Not yet.

I might need it.

Inside my head, I reached out in anger to Carl Patrick's mobile and instantly sent a text from his phone to his girlfriend's, Nadia Moore. leona, I wrote, gotta cu agin soon. ur SO xxxx hot!! trkxxxxx

It was a pathetic thing to do, I knew that. It was petty and stupid and utterly pointless, and it didn't make me I feel the slightest bit better. But what the hell? It didn't make me feel any worse either.

At 03 :41:29 Lucy logged on to her MySpace profile, opened up her blog, and started writing. As far as I could tell, it was the first time she'd ever written anything in her blog. I knew that I shouldn't be spying on her, and I did feel kind of sneaky and ashamed of myself for doing it, but however much guilt I felt, my desire to know how she felt, to know what she was thinking, was that much stronger.

She didn't write very much. i don't know why i'm writing this, she began, cos i know nobody's ever gonna read it, but i think i just need to write down what i'm feeling. i need to tell someone even if it's only me. i feel dead, i hurt, nothing's ever going to be good again, nothing means anything anymore, all the good things are gone.

T was good and it was really nice to see him, he made me feel not so dead for a while, but tonite in the dark it all comes back and i can't see any light anywhere, there's nothing to feel, i want to hurt them, kill them, i hate them, i want them to die, to suffer, but what good would it do? they'll always have done it and i can't make that go away.

I waited for a while to see if she wrote any more, but after about fifteen minutes or so, she logged off MySpace and shut down her laptop. I waited some more, thinking about what I could do, what I should do, what I wanted to do ... and then, at 03:57:33, I closed my eyes, re-entered my cyber-head, and created a MySpace page for myself. It was almost as blank as Lucy's page — i.e. no pictures, no information, etc. — but I did include two favourite films, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, because me and Lucy had watched them together once, and under the Music section I put Fall Out Boy and Pennywise, because I knew that Lucy really liked them.

When it came to choosing a name for myself, I thought about it for quite a long time, and eventually — bearing in mind the name that Lucy used on her MySpace profile (aGirl), and the fact that I was, whether I liked it or not, part iPhone and part boy — I settled on the name that one of the Crows had called me earlier that day.

I called myself iBoy.

Lucy's page was set to private, which under normal circumstances meant that only her friends could send her messages (if she'd had any friends). And that meant that if I wanted her to add iBoy as a friend, I'd have to send her a request, wait until she logged on again, hope that she wanted to add me ... and I really didn't want to do all that. And, besides, these weren't normal circum­stances ... and I was iBoy, after all. All I had to do was think about adding myself to her friends, think about customizing the message connection between us, making it totally private, totally instant, and totally restricted to aGirl and iBoy, and then think about sending her a message ... and it was done.

hello aGirl, I wrote/thought/sent, i hope you don't mind me sending you this message, but i read your blog and i know that you didn't really mean anyone to read it, but i just wanted to let you know that if you ever feel like talking to someone, you could always talk to me. i know you don't know me, and i could be anyone, but for what its worth i'm not anyone you shouldn't talk to. i'm not anything really, just a 16-year-old boy who doesn't under­stand what's going on.

anyway, if you want to talk to me that'd be great, but if not, just don't reply or tell me to go away, and i prom­ise you'll never hear from me again.

iBoy

At 04:17:011 learned that my video function was on all the time, filming everything that I saw, and that all I had to do to play anything back was remember it, and then play it.

And between 04:48:22 and 06:51:16 I learned that it's really hard to get to sleep when you know everything there is to know, and that superpowers — no matter how powerful they are — are no help at all when you're crying on your own in the darkness.