Кевин Брукс - iBoy

"Shit," I muttered as the two patrol cars turned off Crow Lane and started racing down towards the square with their lights and sirens blazing.

I knew that I was probably safe enough staying where I was, that the police were probably just going to check out the Golf, make sure it was nothing more serious than just another burning car ... then they'd probably just wait for the fire service to arrive and leave it to them. The last thing the local police would want to do at four o'clock in the morning was to go round Baldwin House knocking on doors, waking people up.

So, yeah, I was probably safe enough staying where I was ...

In this stinking flat.

Surrounded by drugs and guns ...

And drug dealers ...

Electrocuted drug dealers.

One of whom was tied to a chair.

No, I realized, probably wasn't good enough. If by any chance the police did find me in here, I'd have a lot of explaining to do.

I had to get out.

I moved away from the window and quickly went over to a table in the middle of the room. It was piled high with clear polythene bags filled with what I assumed was heroin and cocaine. I picked up two bags of each and put them in my pockets.

"Hey!" O'Neil called out. "What the fuck are you doing?"

Ignoring him, I reached out and picked up a small black automatic pistol from the table and put it in my pocket with the drugs.

Car doors were slamming outside now.

Police radios were squawking.

It was time to go.

I turned to O'Neil and said, "Tell Ellman I'm coming for him." And before he could answer, I walked out of the room, went down the hallway, opened the flat door and left.

As I headed down the corridor towards the fire exit, I called 999 from my iBrain.

It was answered almost immediately. "Emergency. Which service?"

"There's been a murder," I said, pushing open the fire door. "6 Baldwin House, Crow Lane —"

"Just a moment, sir. I need to know —"

"It's on the ground floor, 6 Baldwin House," I repeated. "The Crow Lane Estate. Someone's been shot."

I ended the call.

The fire door opened out to the rear of Baldwin House — a concreted jungle of weeds and wheelie bins and broken syringes and dog shit — and from there I headed south, away from the tower, scrabbling down a shallow grass slope to a makeshift path that led me along a dip in the fields all the way back to Compton.

By the time I'd crept back into the flat and tiptoed down to my room, the police officers dealing with the burning car had been alerted to a possible fatal shooting at 6 Baldwin House, and they'd sealed off the area and were waiting for additional officers and an armed response team to arrive.

As I got undressed and climbed into bed, tired and drained, I wondered what the police would think when they finally smashed O'Neil's door down and found that there was no dead body, no murder, just three slightly battered drug dealers, all of them tied up, and a flat full of drugs and guns.

Would the cops care that they'd been wrongly tipped off?

Did I care whether they cared or not?

I didn't know.

I didn't care.

I lay down in the darkness and tried to think about myself and what I'd just done — my violence, my rage, my savagery — but I couldn't seem to find anything in me to feel anything about it. I knew that I'd done it, and I knew that there was a reason for doing it, and I knew that — despite the validity of that reason — I still ought to be feeling some degree of shame or remorse or guilt or some­thing ...

But there was nothing there.

No feelings at all.

Just me and the darkness ...

And iBoy.

Us.

Me.

And i.

We lay there in the silence and thought about ourselves. What were we doing? And why? What were we trying to achieve? And how? What was our goal, our plan, our aim, our desire?

What was our reason?

The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

http://www.quotationspage.eom/quote/1893.html

It was 04:48:07.

We closed our eyes and waited for the sun to rise.

I know what happened over the next ten days or so. I know what I did, and at the time I was perfectly aware of what I was doing. I was there. It was me. I was myself. I knew exactly what I was doing and why.

But now, when I try to recall those days (without the aid of my iMemories), all I can remember are bits of things that don't seem to belong to me. Fragments. Snapshots.

Disconnected moments.

... in my room, sitting on the floor beneath the open window. Rays of afternoon sunlight are streaming in over my head, lighting up motes of dust. My eyes are closed and my iBrain is buzzing with a thousand million words. It's listening to phone calls. Reading emails and texts. It's scanning Crow Town's underworld for anything it can use, anything incriminating ... names, places, times ... anything at all.

It's a god, seeing everything, hearing everything.

It's not me.

It's an automatic police informant application: search­ing the airwaves, scanning the words, finding the bad guys — the thieves, the dealers, the muggers, the runners, the soldiers, the shooters, the shotters. It finds them all and automatically grasses them up to the cops.

All of them.

The application in my iBrain doesn't care who they are or what they're doing — it targets them all: eleven- year-old wannabe gangsters, delivering drugs and guns on bikes; gang kids — Crows and FGH — fighting each other just for the hell of it; and the older kids, the ones who used to be wannabe gangsters, the ones who used to be gang kids and muggers, the ones who now spend their lives doing what they've always wanted to do — dealing drugs, making lots of money, living the life ... beating and killing and shooting and raping ...

The application in my iBrain doesn't care why they do it. It doesn't care if they're poor or uneducated or bored or addicted or troubled or lonely or if they simply don't know any better. It doesn't care if they come from dysfunc­tional families, if they have no one to guide them, no one to help them, no one to show them what life can really be like. Nor does it care if they're none of these things, if they're rich and well educated and they do know better. It doesn't give a shit.

But it doesn't dislike them or blame them for anything either. It doesn't make judgements. They're just things to it.

It has no feelings.

It just does what it does.

And I just let it. Because I'm just doing what I feel I have to do: for Lucy, for Gram, for me ...

For all of us.

I'm just doing it.

... iBoy at night, patrolling Crow Town with his iSkin on. He's breaking up drug deals and fights. He's burning cars and melting bikes and scaring the shit out of little Crow kids. He's mugging the muggers, stealing their guns and their knives and machetes ...

... creeping into a flat in Eden. It's 03:15:44. A drunken mother is asleep in her bedroom, her two boys sleeping in the room next door. I move through the darkness, a palely glowing ghost, and I find a rucksack in the kitchen. I take Troy O'Neil's automatic pistol from my pocket, wipe it clean, and slip it into the rucksack.