Кевин Брукс - iBoy

"No," I said. "Whoever threw it, they called out my name. They knew I was there. I don't suppose they expected it to actually hit me, but I'm pretty sure they threw it at me."

"You'll have to tell the police, Tommy. Tell them that it wasn't an accident."

I shrugged. "What's the point? They're not going to find out who it was, are they?"

"Well, you never know ..."

We looked at each other, both of us knowing that I was right. There wasn't a chance in hell of anyone ever being charged with cracking open my skull. And even if there was, even if someone was arrested, charged, and convicted ... what good would it do? It wouldn't change anything, would it? I'd still have bits of iPhone stuck in my brain. Ben would still have been beaten up. And Lucy ...

Nothing was ever going to make Lucy feel better.

After Gram had asked me at least a dozen times if I minded if she went into her room to carry on working on her new book, and after I'd assured her that I didn't mind at all, and that I was fine, and that she didn't have to keep worrying about me all the time ... after all that, I finally went into my room, lay down on my bed, and tried to get to grips with the growing realization that I knew what was happening inside my head ... and that although it had to be impossible, it wasn't.

Imagine you're trying to remember something... anything — the last time you cried, someone's telephone number, the names of the seven dwarves — it doesn't matter what it is. Just search your memory, try to remember something ... and when you've done it, try to imagine how you did it. How did you find what you were looking for? What did you search with? Where exactly in your brain did you search? How did you know where to look, and how did you recognize what you were looking for?

If someone asked me those questions, I couldn't answer them. All I could say was — well, I just did it. The things inside my head, inside my brain ... they just did what they do. I told myself to remember something, and the stuff in my brain did the rest.

It's my head, my brain, and it makes me what I am — but I don't have a clue how it works.

And as I lay on my bed that day, listening to the distant babble of soundless sounds in my head, that was the only way I could think of it: it was my head, my brain, it made me what I was ... but now there was something else in there, something that had somehow become part of me, and it was doing what it did — reaching out, finding things, an infinite number of things — and I didn't have a clue how it worked ...

But it did.

It was working right now.

It was showing me bits of websites, random pages from random sites — words, sounds, images, data. It was scanning a world of emails, a world of texts, a world full of phone calls ... it was connecting, calculating, photo­graphing, filming, downloading, searching, storing, locating ... it was doing everything that an iPhone could do. And that's what it had to be — the iPhone. The frag­ments of iPhone that were lodged in my brain ... somehow they must have fused with bits of my brain, bits of my mind ... bits of me. And somehow, in the process of that fusion, the powers and capabilities of the iPhone must have mutated, they must have evolved ... because as well as doing everything that an iPhone could do, I could also do a whole lot more. I could hear phone calls, I could read emails and texts, I could hack into databases ... I could access everything.

All from inside my head.

I was connected.

I knew it now. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it... but I still didn't know anything about it. I didn't know how it was happening. I had no control over it. It just happened ... and, like I said, it had to be impossible.

But it wasn't.

It was happening.

Other things were happening too. As I lay there, trying to digest this impossible truth, I could feel a glow of heat in my head, a warm tingle around my scar. It felt really weird, kind of shimmery, and I didn't like it.

I got up off the bed and went over to the mirror on my wall.

I didn't believe what I saw at first. It had to be some­thing else, a trick of the light, a distorted reflection ... but when I leaned in closer and stared intently at my face in the mirror, I knew that it was real. The skin around the wound was shimmering, vibrating almost, as if it was alive. It was radiating, glowing with countless colours, shapes, words, symbols ... all of them constantly changing, mer­ging into each other, floating and drifting, sinking and rising, pulsating like minute shoals of multicoloured fish.

I lifted my hand and moved a finger towards the shim­mering wound ... then stopped, remembering the last time I'd touched it. The electric shock. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and then somehow, unknowingly, I closed something down in my head. The shimmering faded.

"It's OK," I heard myself mutter. "It's all right now. Trust yourself."

I gently moved my finger towards the wound, hesitated for a moment, then touched it.

Nothing happened.

No shock.

Just a very faint tingle.

I softly ran my finger along the length of the wound, feeling the raised skin, the newly grown flesh ... and underneath it all, or maybe within it, I could feel a sensa­tion of power. It wasn't a physical sensation, it was more like a feeling of potential ... the kind of feeling you get when you touch the surface of a laptop or an iPod or something. Do you know what I mean? You can't actually feel anything, but something tells you that there's power under your fingertip, the power to do wonderful things.

That's how my head felt.

I took my finger away.

I looked at myself.

I shook my head.

Impossible.

I closed my eyes for a moment, opened them again, and — click — took a picture of myself in the mirror. I viewed it, emailed it to myself, geocoded it, saved it, then deleted it.

Impossible.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

Robert A. Heinlein The Rolling Stones (1952)

http://www.quotationspage.com/search http://www.quotationspage.com/search.

php3?homesearch=impossible

Goodbye normality. It was nice knowing you.

It was around seven thirty in the evening when I knocked on Gram's door and went in to see her. Her curtains were still open, and through her window I could see the orangey-red glow of a distant sunset fading over the horizon. Gram was sitting at her writing desk, surrounded by papers and books and ashtrays and empty coffee cups.

"How are you feeling?" she asked me.

"All right, thanks."

"Did you get any sleep?"

"Yeah, a bit."

"Are you hungry?"

"No ... no, I'm fine, thanks."

She smiled at me. "What's on your mind?"

"Well ..." I said, "I was thinking of going up to see Lucy, you know ... just to say hello, see how she's doing. What do you think? Do you think that'd be all right?"

"I don't know," Gram said hesitantly. "I suppose so ... as long as Michelle thinks it's all right... and Lucy feels up to it. She might not, you know. I mean, I don't think she's been out of the flat since it happened ..." Gram looked at me. "She might not want to see anyone, espe­cially a boy ..."