by Kevin Brooks
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 anymore. 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 gray. Actually, come to think of it, it’s more of a browny-gray kind of color — the sort of shitty brown color you get when you mix all the colors 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 canceled 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 elevator 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 the door’s mail slot. Eugene O’Neil was just standing there, obviously in charge, looking mean and bad and hard as hell . . . and when the elevator doors opened, he looked down the corridor at me, and an ugly grin cracked his face.
As I shut the elevator 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.
I could be a soldier/falling in love/I could be a soldier/I could be happy
Shame
“Come Close to Me”
I’d never felt the kind of rage I felt as I pushed open the stairwell door and str
ode down the corridor toward O’Neil and the others. It was all-consuming, brutal, merciless . . . it felt like a volcano inside me, a force of nature, straining to erupt. But at the same time, I felt weirdly calm and controlled.
I was in control of being out of control . . .
As the stairwell door slammed shut behind me, all the Crows stopped what they were doing and turned in my direction. I was moving quickly, but not running — marching along the corridor toward them, my senses alert, my eyes taking in everything. I saw the shocked looks on their faces when they saw me — a shimmering, glowing, hooded figure — and I saw two of them immediately start to run, not even bothering to look back . . . they just turned and sped down the corridor toward the lift.
I let them go.
I saw O’Neil and Firman and Craig shuffling back a few steps, keeping the kid with the spray can in front of them. And I saw him staring at me with wide-open eyes as I read the words he’d sprayed on the wall of Lucy’s flat — bitch, whore — and then, before I knew what I was doing, I’d grabbed the aerosol out of his hand and was spraying it into his eyes. He screamed and tried to cover his eyes, but I kneed him in the balls and pushed him to the ground, and as his hands left his eyes to protect his groin, I emptied more red paint into his face.
The other three were making a move for me now, coming up behind me and trying to pull me away from the aerosol kid, but even as they reached out for me, before their hands so much as touched me, a jolt of energy surged through my body, and I heard a sharp crackling sound and shocked yells of pain as the three Crow kids were electrocuted. As I turned round to face them, I saw them staggering away from me, trying to shake the pain from their hands . . . and I could see them all staring at me with abject fear in their eyes.
Behind me, I heard the aerosol kid getting to his feet. I raised my foot and kicked back at him, catching him square in the face, and then — just to make sure he didn’t give me any more trouble — I quickly turned round and touched my finger to his paint-smeared head. The shock I gave him was hard enough to jerk his head back, and as he crawled away down the corridor, whimpering and moaning, I could see that I’d given him a fingertip-sized burn mark on his head.
I turned back to the other three. Firman and Craig looked as if they’d had enough now, and they were already starting to edge backward toward the lift. Neither of them wanted to be the first to run, but as I moved toward O’Neil, who was still standing his ground, Firman shook his head and muttered, “Fuck this,” and he turned and legged it toward the lift. Craig didn’t waste any time following him.
So now it was just me and O’Neil.
He stared at me for a second, torn between running and fighting, and then — with a tough-guy crick of his neck — he made his decision. He reached into his track pants and pulled out a knife. It wasn’t much of a thing — just a stubby little kitchen knife, with a blade of no more than four inches — but it looked nasty enough, and just for a moment I felt a brief pang of fear.
But it didn’t last long.
I had faith in my iPowers.
I smiled at O’Neil and moved toward him, holding my hands up, offering him an unguarded stab at my torso. The knife was shaking in his hand.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Use it.”
He hesitated, swallowing hard, and looked at me.
I moved closer. “What’s the matter?” I said to him. “You look as if you’re going to shit yourself.”
His eyes went cold, and he lunged at me, aiming the knife at my stomach. I flinched a little, but I knew that I was safe. My force field was on, and as the knife blade struck it, and sparks flew, O’Neil shrieked and dropped the knife to the floor. I looked down at it. It was smoldering, the plastic handle melted out of shape. I looked up at O’Neil. He was shaking his hand, blowing on his fingers, his face twisted in a grimace of pain.
I moved round him, positioning myself between him and the lift, so now the only way he could move was back along the corridor toward the stairwell. I edged toward him, making him step back.
“What the fuck?” he said. “Who the fucking hell —?”
“Shut up,” I told him. “Get down the corridor.”
“What?”
I reached out toward him. He drew back.
“Move,” I said. “Down the corridor.”
He backed all the way down, never taking his eyes off me, and stopped at the end of the corridor.
“Open the window,” I told him.
“What for?”
“Just do it.”
He turned to the window at the end of the corridor, unlatched it, and opened it as far as it would go, which wasn’t all that far because all the windows in the tower blocks have safety restraints on them. They’re there to stop the windows opening all the way so people can’t jump out of them . . . or throw other people out of them.
“Step away,” I told O’Neil.
As he moved back, I reached over, took hold of both restraints, and shot a bolt of electricity through them. The rivets popped out, and I yanked the restraints off. Now, as I lifted the frame of the window, it opened all the way.
“Shit, man,” I heard O’Neil whisper. “What are you doing?”
I grabbed hold of him before he could run, grasping his throat with one hand, giving him enough of a shock to stop him from struggling. It was enough to stop him from talking, too. As I forced his head, and then his upper body, through the open window, all he could say was “Nunh . . . nuhguh . . . nunh . . .”
I don’t know how far I would have gone if Lucy hadn’t suddenly appeared in her doorway, yelling at me to stop. I don’t think I would have pushed O’Neil out the window . . . I don’t think I had it in me. I think I was just trying to scare him. But I’ll never know for sure. Because when I heard Lucy’s voice — “No! Don’t do it!” — all the coldness, the brutality of my rage . . . it all just suddenly faded away, and for a moment I really didn’t know who or what I was.
I gazed down the corridor at Lucy. She was standing outside her door, with Ben in the doorway behind her, and I could see the genuine concern in her eyes — she really didn’t want me to push O’Neil out the window . . . and I couldn’t understand it. O’Neil had raped her. He’d done the absolutely worst thing imaginable to her. How could she possibly not want me to kill him?
“But you said . . .” I heard myself say.
She frowned at me. “What?”
“You said you wanted to hurt them, to kill them . . . you wanted them to suffer . . .”
She shook her head, still frowning, and I wasn’t sure if that meant that she hadn’t heard me, or that she had, but she didn’t understand what I was saying.
While all this was going on, I must have loosened my grip on O’Neil, because I suddenly realized that I no longer had hold of him and he was staggering away from me, holding his throat, heading for the stairwell door.
I didn’t go after him.
My rage was over now. I felt drained, exhausted, almost lifeless, and I wondered if I’d overdone it, used up too much power. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a few deep breaths. I could hear O’Neil running down the stairs. When I opened my eyes again and looked over at Lucy, she was still just standing there, staring at me . . . and as I met her gaze, and we looked at each other across the corridor, I saw a flash of sudden realization in her eyes. She’d remembered where my words had come from — You said you wanted to hurt them, to kill them . . . you wanted them to suffer. She’d realized that the words were from her Facebook page. And who was the only person who’d read her comments?
I saw her eyes widen, and her mouth open, and I saw her lips move as she whispered to herself, “iBoy.”
I chose that moment to leave.
As I went through the stairwell door and started heading down the stairs, I could hear O’Neil’s distant footsteps echoing on the steps below. He wasn’t running anymore, but he was still moving fairly quickly. I went inside my head and selected the video of the last few minutes, then I le
aned over the railing, looking down at the dizzying drop of the stairwell, and zeroed in on O’Neil’s mobile. As I sent the video to his number, I called out his name.
“Hey, Eugene!”
As his footsteps stopped, I heard the sound of my voice echoing dully around the concrete and metal of the stairwell, and then the distant sound of a ringtone (Fiddy’s “In Da Club”).
“Answer it!” I called out.
There was a pause, then the ringtone stopped. I gave O’Neil a few moments to open the video and realize what it showed — i.e., him trying to stab me and failing, and me getting hold of him by the throat and nearly pushing him out the window — and then I called out to him again.
“You got it?”
Another pause, then, “Yeah . . .”
His voice was a mixture of confusion and concern.
“If you go anywhere near Lucy again,” I shouted down to him, “that video’s going on YouTube. Do you hear me?”
Nothing. Silence.
“Do you HEAR me?” I yelled.
“Yeah . . . yeah, I hear you. How the fuck —?”
“I’ll post it on YouTube and send it to everyone you know. All the Crows, the FGH . . . everyone. Do you understand?”
“Yeah . . . but —”
“No questions. You’ve got three seconds to get moving, and then I’m coming after you.” I started counting. “One . . . two . . .”
He started running.
I waited until he’d clattered down another few flights of stairs, then I turned off my iSkin and walked back down to the twenty-third floor.
You don’t have to be crazy to put on a shiny costume and battle evil — but it doesn’t hurt.
