iBoy

'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.

10001

A fugue state is a dissociative memory disorder character­ized by an altered state of consciousness and an interruption of, or dissociation from, fundamental aspects of an individual's everyday life, such as personal identity and personal history. Often triggered by a traumatic life event, the fugue state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.

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 ...