Кевин Брукс - iBoy

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:

Every thought, feeling and action in Homo sapiens orig­inates from the electrical signals emitted by our brain cell circuits ... Remember that your brain communicates with each cell of your body through electrical impulses (hormones, enzymes and neuropeptides). Further, we believe Consciousness is electrically producing mental- imagery in the occipital lobe and precuneous of your brain. Our commonality with our computer, TV, video game player, and telephone is in the use of electricity and electromagnetic fields as a source of energy.

Electricity is the movement of a charge down a wire. In our neurons (nerve cells) the electric signal moves in the form of an Action-Potential. Inside the nerve cells is a negative charge produced by nano pumps moving charged Ions out of our cells. We are constantly involved in polarizing and depolarizing Ions through Gates in our nerve membranes causing our muscle contractions for locomotion. Impulses are sent electrically from the Brain to all parts of the body through these Action-Potentials by signaling our Central Nervous System.

Membranes have two types of proteins: Ion channels for Sodium (Na) outside the cell, and Potassium (K) inside the cell. When the nerve cell receives a stimulus, it opens some of its Ion channels. The second protein is called Transporters. ATP transports chemical energy within the cells for Metabolism.

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 playbutton 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.