iBoy

And then nothing.

(Zero.)

The end of normality.

10

The binary number system uses only the two digits o and 1. Numbers are expressed in powers of two instead of powers of ten, as in the decimal system. In binary notation, 2 is written as 10, 3 as 11, 4 as 100, 5 as 101, and so on. Computers calculate in binary notation, the two digits corresponding to two switching positions, e.g. on or off, yes or no. From this on-off, yes-no state, all things flow.

The next thing I knew (or, at least, the next thing I consciously knew), I was opening my eyes and staring up at a dusty fluorescent light-fitting on an unfamiliar white ceiling. My head was throbbing like hell, my throat was bone dry, and I had that not-quite-there feeling you gel when you finally wake up from a really long sleep. I didn't feel tired, though. I wasn't sleepy. I wasn't dazed. In fact, apart from the not- quite-thereness, I felt incred­ibly wide awake.

I didn't move for a while, I didn't make a sound, I just lay there, perfectly still, staring up at the light-fitting on the ceiling, irrationally taking in all the details — it was cracked at one end, the plastic was old and faded, there were two dead flies lying on their backs in the dust... Then I closed my eyes and just listened.

I could hear faint beeps from nearby, something whir­ring, a soft tap-tapping. In the background, I could hear the mutter of quiet voices, a faint swish of cushioned doors, muted phones ringing, the dull clank of trolleys ...

I let the sounds flow over me and turned my attention to myself. My body. My position. My place.

I was lying on my back, lying in a bed. My head was resting on a pillow. I could feel things on my skin, in my skin, under my skin. Something up my nose. Something down my throat. There was a faint smell of disinfectant in the air.

I opened my eyes again and — without moving my head — I looked around.

I was in a small white room. There were machines beside the bed. Instruments, canisters, drips, dials, LED displays. Various parts of my body were connected to some of the machines by an ordered tangle of clear plas­tic tubes — my nose, my mouth, my stomach ... other places — and a number of thin black wires from another machine appeared to be fixed to my head.

Hospital room ...

I was in a hospital room.

It's no big deal, I told myself. No problem. You're in a hospital, that's all. There's nothing to worry about.

As I closed my eyes again, trying to relieve the throb­bing in my head, I heard a sharp intake of breath to my left — a distinctly human sound — and when I opened my eyes and turned my head, I was hugely relieved to see the familiarly dishevelled figure of my gran. She was sitting on a chair against the wall, her laptop on her knees, her fingers poised over the keyboard. She was staring at me, her eyes a mixture of shock, disbelief, and delight.

I smiled at her.

'Tommy,' she whispered. 'Oh, thank God ...'

And then something really strange happened.

How do you describe something indescribable? I mean, how do you describe something that's beyond the limits of human comprehension? How do you even begin to explain it? I suppose it's a bit like trying to describe how a bat senses things. A bat experiences the world through the sense of echolocation: it emits sounds, and it deter­mines the location, size, and manner of objects around it through the echoes they produce. And although as humans we can understand that, and we can try to imag­ine it, we have no way of actually experiencing it, which makes the actual sensual experience impossible for us to describe.

In my case — as I looked at my gran, and she whispered my name — the phenomenon I experienced inside my head was so alien to anything I'd ever experienced before, I simply couldn't digest it. It happened, it was happening, and it was undoubtedly happening to me, in me ... but it couldn't possibly have anything to do with me.

It couldn't be.

But it was.

The best way I think I can describe it is like this. Imagine a billion bees. Imagine the sound of a billion bees, the sight of a billion bees, the sense of a billion bees.

Imagine their movement, their interactions, their connec­tions, their being. And then try to imagine that these bees are not bees, and these sounds, these images, these feel­ings are not actually sounds, images, or feelings at all. They're something else. Information. Facts. Things. They're data. They're words and voices and pictures and numbers, streams and streams of zeroes and ones, but at the same time they're not any of these things ... they're somehow just the things that represent these things. They're representations of constituent parts, building blocks, frameworks, particles, waves ... they're symbols of the stuff that things are. And then, if you can, try to imagine that you can not only experience everything about these billion non-bees all at once — their collective non-sound, non-image, non-sense — but you can also experience everything about every individual one of them ... all at the same time. And both experiences are instan­taneous. Continuous. Inseparable.

Can you imagine it?

You're lying in a hospital bed, smiling at your gran, and just as she looks at you and whispers your name — 'Tommy. Oh, thank God ...' — a billion non-bees explode into life inside your head.

Can you imagine that?

There was no time to it at all. In one sense, it lasted less than a moment, less than an instant... an unknowable and instantaneous explosion of crazy stuff in my head. But in another sense, a more accurate sense, it didn't even last less than a moment. It didn't last at all. It happened without time, beyond time ... as if always-there and never-there were one and the same thing.

It didn't hurt, this unknowable experience, but the shock of it made me squeeze my eyes shut and screw up my face as if I was in some kind of terrible pain, and I heard my gran curse under her breath and scramble up out of her chair, knocking her laptop to the floor, and then she was flinging open the door and calling out at the top of her voice ...

'Nurse! NURSE!'

'It's all right, Gram,' I told her, opening my eyes again. 'I'm OK ... it was just —'

'Lie still, Tommy,' she said, scuttling over to me. 'The nurse is coming ... just take it easy.'

She sat on the edge of the bed and took hold of my hand.

I smiled at her again. 'I'm all right —'

'Shhh...'

And then a nurse came in, followed shortly by a doctor in white coat, and everyone started fussing around me, checking the machines, looking into my eyes, listening to my heart ...

I was OK.

I wasn't OK, but I was OK.

I'd been in a coma for seventeen days. The iPhone had split my head open, fracturing my skull, and — according to Mr Kirby, the neurosurgeon who'd operated on me — a number of significant complications had arisen.