iBoy

by Kevin Brooks

  “And that’s it?” I said. “You kill and rape and brutalize people just to show the world what you are? That’s your reason?”

  He shrugged. “It’s as good a reason as any.”

  I stared at him. “But you must know it’s wrong —”

  “Wrong?” He laughed. “What the fuck’s wrong got to do with anything?” He looked at me. “D’you think it’s wrong for a dog to kill a cat?”

  “That’s totally different.”

  “Why?”

  “Dogs are animals — they don’t know any better.”

  “What, and you think I do? You think any of us do? Fuck, man . . . we’re all fucking animals — none of us know any better.”

  As we sat there staring at each other — a wimp and a devil, iBoy and Hell-Man, together in the backseat of a black Range Rover — I wondered for a moment if perhaps, in a twisted kind of way, he was right. Maybe neither of us did know any better. Maybe we were just animals. And maybe . . .

  I stopped thinking about it then. The car was beginning to slow down. I looked out the window and saw that the Range Rover in front of us had turned right and was heading slowly up an unlit lane. We followed it. The lane was uneven, pitted with cracks and potholes, and as the car lumped and rolled its way upward, the twin beams of the headlights illuminated the ghosted remains of the old industrial park: rusted dumpsters, vacant factories, empty industrial units, abandoned warehouses . . .

  The car in front was turning right again, this time into a square of wasteground that had probably once been a parking lot . . . a parking lot for the employees who’d probably once worked in the dilapidated warehouse on the far side of the wasteground.

  “Follow them round the back,” Ellman told Gunner.

  We followed the car in front as it rumbled across the wasteground, over to the warehouse, round the back . . . and that’s where we stopped.

  I looked over at the other car, trying to catch a glimpse of Lucy, but it was too dark to see anything.

  “Don’t worry,” Ellman said to me. “You’ll see her in a minute.”

  I looked at him. “What are you going to do with her?”

  “The same thing I did to your mother.”

  “What?”

  He smiled coldly. “You should have seen the look on her face when I ran that bitch over.”

  “But you said —”

  “Yeah, I know. I said I was only joking about Georgie . . . but I wasn’t.” He grinned at me. “Or maybe I was . . . but I guess you’ll never know now, will you?”

  He moved so incredibly quickly then, hammering his head into mine with such stunning speed and power, that I didn’t have time to feel confused. I didn’t have time to feel anything. The only thing I was vaguely aware of was a sudden shuddering impact, a momentary flash of blinding pain . . .

  And then nothing.

  The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

  Richard Dawkins

  River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995)

  The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and staring across the interior of the warehouse at Lucy. My head was throbbing, my vision was blurred, my mouth was soured with the taste of blood . . . and, after I’d struggled uselessly for a few moments, I realized that I could barely move. I was securely bound to an iron girder by tightly wound lengths of wire. My hands, my feet, even my neck . . . everything was so firmly tied that the only thing I could move was my head.

  But none of that mattered.

  All that mattered was Lucy.

  She was about fifty feet away from me, on the other side of the warehouse. She was on her knees, and Ellman was standing in front of her with a long silver knife in his hand. Her mouth was still taped up, but the gun had been removed from her head, and Hashim wasn’t with her anymore. Instead, he was standing right beside me. And now that he’d realized I was conscious again, he raised the pistol and leveled it at my head.

  As Ellman sensed Hashim’s movement and glanced over at me, the blade of his knife caught the pale yellow light of an electric lantern hanging from the wall, and just for a moment the reflected flash of light seemed to illuminate the whole warehouse. It was a fairly big place, with rust-ridden sheet-metal walls, a crumbling concrete floor, and dozens of frayed electric cables dangling from the ceiling. There wasn’t much else to see: the blackened remains of old machinery, some cracked wooden crates, empty gas canisters, a couple of dilapidated chairs . . .

  “What do you think?” Ellman called out to me. “Do you like it?”

  I didn’t answer him, I was too busy checking out where the others were. Hashim, as I said, was right beside me; O’Neil was behind Ellman and Lucy, leaning on a windowsill; Tweet was sitting in one of the old chairs, calmly smoking a joint; and the two drivers, Gunner and Marek, were standing over to my left by a pair of wooden doors.

  Six of them.

  One of me.

  And I didn’t even have any iPowers.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” Ellman said. “You not talking to me anymore?”

  I looked up to see him crossing the warehouse toward me.

  He grinned at me. “How’s your head? I haven’t broken anything in there, have I? You know, smashed a few circuits or something?” He stopped ten feet or so away from me. “Or can’t you tell without a signal?” He reached into his pocket, brought out his BlackBerry, and studied the screen. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Still no bars.” He looked at me, smiling. “How about you? You got any?”

  I said nothing.

  He put his phone back in his pocket. “I’m guessing,” he said, “that without a signal, you’re fucked.” He looked at me. “Am I right?”

  Again, I said nothing.

  He carried on smiling at me. “No signal. No WiFi. No phone, no power.” He nodded his head, miming the head-butt he’d given me. “No force field either.” He glanced at Hashim. “What d’you say, Hash?”

  Hashim grinned. “Yeah, I’d say he’s completely fucked.”

  Ellman stepped closer, staring into my eyes. “Of course, you could be bluffing, couldn’t you? You could be pretending to be powerless, lulling us all into a false sense of security, and then, when we least expect it — zap!” He clapped his hands together. “You fry us all.” He grinned at me again. “But the only problem with that is that you can’t fry us all, can you? I mean, right now, you could probably blast me and Hash, but the others are too far away. So even if you did take out the two of us, there’d still be Tweet over there, and Gunner and Marek, and don’t forget Yoyo . . . you see what I’m saying? You blast me and Hash, you’re still going to be tied to this girder, and Yoyo’s still going to get to play with your girly.”

  I looked over at Lucy. She was still kneeling there, her head bowed down, her eyes empty and still, shocked into nothing . . .

  I couldn’t let anything happen to her.

  Not again.

  I had to do something.

  “What do you reckon, Hash?” I heard Ellman say. “You think he’s bluffing?”

  “Like you said, it don’t make no odds,” Hashim said. “They’re both going to get fucked anyway.” He started laughing then, a curiously childish sound, which for some reason really irritated me. I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, turned my head, and spat a gob of blood into his face.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, jerking away.

  Ellman laughed as Hashim wiped the bloody spit from his face. I glanced over at Lucy again and saw that she hadn’t moved. She was still just kneeling there, dead to the world.

  “Luce!” I called out. “Lucy!”

  She raised her head and slowly looked over at me.

  “It’s going to be all right!” I called out to her. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be —”

  A crack of pain ripped into my face as Hashim hit me with the barrel of the gun. I tried not to cry out, b
ut I couldn’t help it. The pain was so raw, so ugly, it felt like my face had been torn apart. I turned my head toward Hashim, watching through tear-stung eyes as he raised the gun again, his eyes blazing with anger, and I braced myself for another blow . . .

  But then I heard Ellman’s voice, “That’s enough.”

  I saw Hashim hesitate, desperate to hurt me, but not quite desperate enough to disobey Ellman. Still glaring at me, he lowered the gun and stepped back.

  “Not now, OK?” Ellman said to him. “I want him conscious for now . . . I want him to know what’s happening. All right?”

  Hashim nodded.

  “Afterward,” Ellman said, “you can do what you like . . .” He turned to me. “You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? I mean, you know what I’m going to do.”

  I didn’t say anything, I just stared at him. But I wasn’t actually looking at him. My eyes were open, but in my mind they were closed. I was digging deep inside myself now . . . deep into my iBrain, my iSenses, my iPowers . . . looking for something . . . anything . . . searching, searching, searching . . .

  There was still no signal, no reception, but I had to find something . . . I had to. I had to be iBoy to stand any chance of saving Lucy.

  Ellman had started taunting me about my mother again now — “. . . and I’ll tell you something else about me and little Georgie, and this’ll really give you something to think about . . .” — but I wasn’t listening to him. I couldn’t listen. I was iBoy, and we weren’t there. We were deep down inside ourselves, reaching out, stretching . . . stretching . . . stretching up into the sky . . .

  “. . . and I bet she thought about it, too . . . I mean, we did it a lot, me and Georgie, even when she was working the streets, she still wanted me all the time . . . they always do . . .”

  . . . and we knew it was there somewhere, we knew the signal was there . . . maybe half a mile away, maybe less . . . a few hundred yards . . . just round the corner . . . it was there, they were there. The radio waves from the nearest base station, the frequencies . . . the cycles . . . the pathways were there . . . and the stray static electricity all around us, we both knew that that was there, too . . . and if we could somehow focus it back to our signal receptors . . .

  We closed our wide-open eyes and concentrated.

  “. . . so, anyway,” Ellman continued, “the thing is, when Georgie got knocked up back then, there’s a pretty good chance it was me . . . and if it was me . . . well, fucking hell . . .” He laughed. “Do you see what I’m saying?”

  . . . and now we were feeling something . . . a boost, a rise, something in the air, something out there that was lifting us up . . . out of our head . . . taking our reach and pulling it up through the roof, into the night sky, up over the old buildings and factories . . . and then . . .

  “I could be your fucking father.”

  Then we had it.

  “Hey! Are you listening to me?”

  A connection. A solid connection.

  “Say something, fucker! Fucking say something!”

  We had a connection.

  I opened my still-open eyes and saw Ellman’s face, twisted with rage, staring into mine.

  “If you were my father,” I said to him, “I’d kill myself.”

  Without saying a word, he raised the long silver knife in his hand, gently placed the needle-sharp tip against my forehead, and slowly drew the blade down my skin, deliberately not cutting too deeply, still wanting to keep me wide-awake . . .

  And I could feel the pain, I could feel warm blood running down my face.

  But it didn’t change anything.

  We were still connected.

  “Fucking superhero,” Ellman sneered, taking the knife away and examining the bloodied tip. “Looks like you bleed the same as every other fucker I’ve ever cut.” He looked at me. “Now let’s see how you beg.”

  I could feel the power surging inside me as he turned away and began walking over to Lucy . . . but what could I do with it? If I zapped Ellman and Hashim now, it wouldn’t make any difference. I’d still be tied up. And the wire that was binding me to the girder was wound so tightly, and there was simply so much of it, that my chances of blasting it away or melting it with a burst of electricity were pretty slim. And even if I could zap my way out of the wire, taking out Ellman and Hashim at the same time . . . well, O’Neil and the others would still be there. And although there was a chance, just a very slight chance, that once Ellman and Hashim were out of the picture, Gunner and Marek and Tweet might decide to cut their losses and run . . . there was no way that O’Neil was going to back down.

  He’d get to Lucy before I could get to him.

  And I couldn’t let that happen.

  I couldn’t let him get anywhere near her.

  I was, as Hashim had so eloquently put it, completely fucked.

  And so, with a wretched heart, I just stood there and watched as Howard Ellman strode through the dusty light toward Lucy.

  Knowledge is power.

  Francis Bacon

  Meditationes Sacrae. De Haeresibus (1597)

  I’m still not sure if knowledge really is power, but as Ellman stood in front of Lucy with the knife in his hand, looking down at her with absolutely nothing in his eyes — no malevolence, no desire, no emotion at all . . . well, at that moment, knowledge was all I had.

  My iBrain knew things.

  Facts, news, information . . .

  And I knew that I had to do something with it, because Ellman was leaning toward Lucy now, tearing the tape from her mouth, and I could see that she was crying . . .

  And I was, too.

  And crying wasn’t going to help.

  “Tom . . . ?” I heard Lucy sob.

  Her voice was faint, weak with fear, and her face was pale and grayed with shock, but when our eyes met, I could see that she still had that hidden strength in her eyes . . . and that, incredibly, she was trying to smile at me.

  I smiled back.

  And Ellman slapped her across the face.

  “Don’t fucking look at him,” he told her, his voice quite calm. “Look at me. You hear me? You keep your fucking eyes on me.”

  She stared up at him, her eyes cold with hatred.

  Ellman casually raised the knife in his hand, holding it close to her face. “You stay on your knees, you keep your eyes on me . . . and I might not cut you. Understand?”

  Lucy said nothing, just carried on staring at him, and I could tell by the look in her eyes that she had no intention of giving up without a fight . . . and that meant that I had to act now, right now, before she got herself killed. I had to look deep inside myself and use everything I had — my iSenses, my iKnowledge, my iPowers, my self . . . I had to focus it all, all at once, all in a timeless moment, on my one and only hope.

  I closed my eyes.

  The iKnowledge was already there — If a lithium battery is overcharged, lithium metal will plate (adhere) to the anode, and oxygen will be generated at the cathode. This is highly flammable and a fire hazard — and the iNews was already there — A man has died after his mobile phone exploded, severing a major artery in his neck . . . local reports said that this was the ninth recorded cell phone explosion since 2002 — and I’d already scanned the warehouse and checked the location of all six mobile phones. Ellman’s was still in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, Hashim’s was in the back pocket of his jeans, O’Neil’s was in the front pocket of his track pants, Tweet’s was tucked into his belt, Gunner’s was in his T-shirt pocket, and Marek’s was in the front pocket of his jeans.

  I opened my eyes.

  Ellman was standing closer to Lucy now. Lucy was still on her knees, still staring at him, and O’Neil had got out of the chair and was standing nearby, his eyes alight with sick excitement. Smiling coldly, Ellman edged the knife toward the top of Lucy’s nightgown. Lucy made a sudden lunge for the knife, but Ellman was ready, whipping his knife hand away from her and slapping her across the face with his other hand
, all in one rapid movement. As Lucy cried out and fell back to her knees, I yelled across at her.

  “Lucy! Don’t look at me . . . don’t look. Don’t do anything, OK? Don’t fight him. Don’t move. Just wait . . . trust me. Please, just trust —”

  Hashim clubbed the butt of the pistol into my head, shutting me up. The impact dazed me for a moment, but I didn’t seem to feel any pain, and when I looked over at Lucy again, I saw that she wasn’t moving. She was just kneeling there, not looking at anything, as Ellman moved the knife toward her again.

  I closed my eyes.

  We were reaching out now — iBoy and me — we were reaching out into cyberspace, reaching out along the myriad pathways, from base station to base station . . . from cell to cell . . . from mobile to mobile to mobile . . . all around the world . . . we were connecting . . . connecting to a thousand phones, a million phones, a billion phones . . . and somehow we were accessing them all, connecting to them all, instructing them all to ring the six numbers in this warehouse.

  I opened my eyes.

  Half a second had passed. Ellman’s knife had pierced Lucy’s nightgown, and now he was slowly pulling the knife upward, slicing through the thin white cloth . . . and Lucy was staying perfectly still.

  I quickly closed my eyes again and went back inside myself, trying to ignore the pounding beat of my heart. We had all the phone calls ready now — a million . . . a billion incoming calls — and we were holding them all back, keeping them waiting in their hordes, and at the same time we were focusing our electric power, concentrating it, directing it, sending it through the radio waves inside the warehouse into the batteries of the six mobile phones. We were charging them, overcharging them, overloading them with every ounce of power we had . . .