As I stood by the lift doors, waiting for Jayden Carroll to come up, I could feel the throbbing/tingling/shimmering in my head beginning to spread. My face, my neck, my arms, my chest ... everywhere was starting to feel weird — kind of glowy, warm, buzzy.
Without thinking, I pulled up the hood of my jacket.
The lift was coming up now. I didn't know what I was going to do when it got here, but I knew I was going to do something.
As the floor numbers above the lift doors lit up — 20, 21,22 — I gazed at my reflection in the shiny steel of the doors. The steel was scratched, graffitied, dirty, so my reflection wasn't all that clear, but it was clear enough to see that the hooded figure I was looking at didn't look anything like me. It didn't look anything like anything. The face — my face — was pulsating, floating, radiating with colours, shapes, words, symbols ... my skin was alive. My face was a million different things all at once. It was still me — my face, my features, my skin — but everything was unrecognizable in the shimmering blur.
Before I had a chance to look any closer, the lift went ting, the doors opened, and Jayden started to come out. When he saw me standing there — a hooded figure with a nightmare face — he froze, shocked, scared to death. I reached out to push him back into the lift. I only intended to give him a shove, but when my hand touched his chest, my fingers flashed and I felt something jolt through my arm, and Jayden was suddenly flying backwards into the lift as if he'd been hit with a sledgehammer. As he slammed back against the lift wall and slumped to the floor with a weird kind of grunting sound, I stepped in after him and closed the doors.
There was a faint smell of electricity in the lift as I hit the button for the ground floor — a hot, crackly kind of smell — and for the first time I realized that the skin of my hands was shimmering too, just like my face. And the ends of my fingertips were glowing red.
The lift started to descend.
I looked down at Jayden. He was very pale, his face white and rigid, his hands shaking.
"You all right?" I asked him.
"Uh?"
"Are you all right?" I repeated.
He stared at me for a moment, then wiped his mouth and spat on the floor. "What the fuck are you?"
I guessed that meant that he wasn't too badly hurt.
"I'm your worst nightmare," I told him, moving closer.
"You what?"
I stood over him. "If you go anywhere near Lucy or Ben Walker again, I'm going to make you wish you'd never been born."
He tried to grin at me, to let me know that he wasn't scared, but his lips were too shaky for grinning. He spat again. "I don't know who the fuck you are," he said, "or what the fuck you think you're doing —"
I wasn't in the mood for all this tough-guy talk, so I just reached down and touched him on the forehead with my finger. I felt the jolt in my arm again, only this time it was a little bit stronger, and Jayden let out a screech as his head jerked back and slammed against the wall.
"Fuck, man!" he screamed. "What the —?"
"Do you want me to do it again?" I said, leaning down, reaching out for his head.
"No!" he yelled, cowering away from me. "No ... don't ..."
The lift was approaching the ground floor now.
I leaned down again and whispered in Jayden's ear. "This is nothing, all right? Compared to what I could do to you, this is nothing. Do you understand?"
He nodded. "Yeah, yeah ... I understand."
"You're going to stay away from Lucy and Ben, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Because if you don't, the next time I see you, you won't be getting up off the floor. All right?"
"Yeah, yeah ..."
The lift tinged for the ground floor. The doors opened, I gave Jayden a final look, then stepped out. There was no one around. I quickly crossed over to the stairwell and started heading up the stairs.
I didn't want to think about what I'd just done. Was it right? Was it wrong? How the hell had I done it? No ... I couldn't let myself think about it. Not yet, anyway. I just had to concentrate on climbing the stairs, getting my skin back to normal, and getting back home.
I didn't consciously know how to get my skin back to normal, but by the time I'd reached the third floor, I could already feel it cooling down, and although there were no mirrors around to check my face, I could see that my hands looked like my hands again.
I thought about taking the lift the rest of the way, but I didn't know if Jayden would still be in there or not, and I didn't really want to see him again, so I just carried on up the stairs.
In the stairwell on the twentieth floor, three guys were slumped against the wall, puffing away on crack pipes. They were all about nineteen or twenty, and they were all totally wasted.
I had to step over them to get past. "Excuse me," I said. "I just need to —"
"Hey, fuck," one of them slurred at me, reaching out a grimy hand. "Gimme your —"
I flicked at his hand, my head turning on the electric, and I gave him just enough of a shock to surprise him, maybe just sting him a little. He jerked his hand away, cursing sharply, and at the same time he dropped his pipe from the other hand. While he scrabbled around on the ground, desperately looking for his pipe — and simultaneously waggling his shocked fingers in the air — I stepped past him and climbed the last three flights to the twenty-third floor.
No matter how weird and scary this iPhone-in-the-brain stuff was — and, believe me, it was incredibly weird and scary — there was no doubt that it had its advantages. I just had to hope that the more I thought about it, the more I tried to rationalize it, the less weird and scary it would become.
Fat chance.
1000
The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory; storing numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires ... Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But... all this would do is speed up the processing, and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already ... the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me.
I spent the rest of that night lying on my bed in my room, with my eyes closed, looking inside my head. It was a relatively quiet night (Crow Town is never completely silent), and I was so used to the distant sounds of the estate down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tyres of (probably stolen) cars — it was all just a nothing-noise to me. The flat was fairly peaceful too — just the soft tap-tapping of Gram in her room, and the occasional whispered curse. I could smell the faint drift of cigar smoke from her room, and it was easy to imagine her hunched over her laptop, tapping away like crazy, with a small cigar smoking away in her mouth, the ash occasionally dropping on to her clothes, burning little holes in her shirt, her trousers ... that's what she'd be cursing about.
Anyway, it was quiet enough for me to just lie there in the darkness and try to make sense of the weird and scary cyberworld that was growing inside my head.
It was all too much for me at first. What I knew, what I sensed, what I had access to ... it was simply too vast, too alien, too unbelievably colossal to comprehend. It was like suddenly realizing that you know everything there is to know. I could see it, hear it, find it, know it ... I could reach out to anywhere in the world and know whatever I wanted to know. It was all there: information, pictures, letters, numbers, words, symbols, faces, voices, bodies, hearts, thoughts, places ... everything. But it was far too much all at once. Too much to know. So I tried to concentrate, to focus ... I tried to make some order out of the chaos. And the best way to do that, it seemed to me, was to go back to the beginning. And the beginning of all this was the iPhone.