Кевин Брукс - iBoy

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."