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 alclass="underline" 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.
Walking away from Eden House, I call the police. "Flat 3, fourteenth floor, Eden House," I tell them. "Yusef Hashim. He's got a gun. It's in a rucksack in the kitchen."
... and other flats, other nights, other sounds of sleeping. The pale ghost plants a bag of heroin here, a bag of cocaine there ...
... timeless iHours spent working on the computer in my head: sending false texts and photoshopped pictures, posting videos on YouTube, spreading malicious lies in chat rooms and blogs. Lies become rumours, rumours become facts: Nathan Craig's a grass; Big and Little Jones are terrorists; DeWayne Firman has posted a Facebook message calling Howard Ellman a queer ...
... Sunday 11 April, 19:47:51. Tom Harvey is sitting on a bench at the kids' playground, thinking about Lucy. He hasn't been to see her for nearly a week ... and he knows that it's iBoy's fault. iBoy and Lucy have got into a routine of sending each other at least a couple of MySpace messages every day, and Tom keeps forgetting that he's not iBoy, that he's not talking to Lucy all the time, but that she doesn't know that. So she'll be wondering why Tom hasn't been round to see her.
Or maybe she won't...?
It's really confusing for Tom, flipping from iBoy to himself all the time, trying to remember who he is and what he's supposed to be. And when he thinks about Lucy, it almost feels as if he's cheating on her with himself ... or maybe it's the other way round? As if she's cheating on him, but she doesn't know that the other boy she's seeing (or at least talking to on MySpace) isn't actually another boy at all, it's Tom.
He closes his eyes.
There's a new MySpace message from Lucy. hey iBoy, have you heard about all this stuff going on round the estate?
what stuff?
you know, all the gang kids getting arrested and beating each other up and everything. it's been in the local papers. all the dealers are getting busted and there's rumours about some kind of superman going round kicking the shit out of the crows and fgh. do you know anything about that?
me? why would i know anything?
yeah, ha ha! why would you? btw ben told me nathan craig got beaten up yesterday, it was pretty bad, apparently. some of the older kids found out he grassed up a deal and they beat the crap out of him.
yeah?
yeah, and the cops caught yusef hashim with a gun. and dewayne's disappeared, no one's seen him for days, funny, it seems like everyone who had anything to do with what happened to me is running into a lot of bad luck.
really? must be some kind of karma.
yeah, well... just be careful, OK?
aGirl xxx
i'm always careful, see you later.
iBoy xxx
It's just then, after iBoy has logged out of MySpace, that Tom looks up and sees a bunch of FGH kids walking along Crow Lane. He knows they're FGH because most of them are wearing Adidas gear, which is an FGH thing. There's about eight or nine of them, and they're heading south, away from the playground and down towards Fitzroy House. Most of them are around sixteen or seventeen, but there's a few younger kids too, and there's also a couple of girls.
It's the girls that draw Tom's attention. They're both about thirteen or fourteen, both dressed in short skirts and skinny little tops, and they're both trying very hard to look as if they're enjoying themselves — shouting and laughing, messing around with the boys — but there's something about them that doesn't seem right to Tom. He isn't sure what it is, but he can sense something wrong about the whole situation. The way the boys are looking at the girls, their eyes cold and empty, even when they're smiling at them. The way the girls keep looking at each other, looking for reassurance, as if to say — this is just a bit of fun, isn't it? And the way some of the boys keep looking back down the road, while the others are keeping the girls surrounded, blocking them in as they walk along ...
It just isn't right.
Tom gets up off the bench and starts following them.
He doesn't recognize any of them, and he's pretty sure that none of them know him — they're FGH, and the FGH don't usually mix with the kids from his end of the estate — so he doesn't bother turning on his iSkin for the moment, he just follows them as Tom.