iBoy (14 page)

He glanced at where I was pointing, then turned back to me. “Baldwin House?”

“Second tower along.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything. He just wound up the window, turned the car round, and drove off.

“You’re welcome,” I muttered, watching him go.

Gram was working when I got home — tap-tap-tapping away — and after we’d said hello, and she’d pretended to be a bit annoyed with me for staying out longer than I’d promised, I left her to her writing and went into my room.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with all the information I’d got about O’Neil and Adebajo and everything else — the attack on Lucy and Ben, the gang stuff, the Elders, Howard Ellman . . . I didn’t even know why I’d gone looking for it all in the first place. But as I sat at my window, looking down at the rainy-day dullness of Crow Town below, I knew in my heart that I only had two options: I could either do nothing, just forget about everything and try to get on with my life; or I could try my best to do something.

And maybe if I’d still been my old self — the perfectly normal, non-iPhoned Tom Harvey — maybe I might have accepted that there was nothing I could do, because the only thing the normal Tom Harvey could have done was pass on the information he’d collected to the police, and it wouldn’t have mattered how carefully or cleverly he did it, the end result would have been the same: Not just the Crows, but most of Crow Town, would have turned against Lucy and her family and made their lives even more hellish than they already were.

So the alternative option, of doing nothing at all, would probably have been the only thing the normal Tom Harvey could have done.

But, like it or not, I
wasn’t
the normal Tom Harvey anymore. I was iBoy. I had the ability to do things that I couldn’t do before, and there was something inside me — a part of me that I wasn’t even sure I
liked
— that made me feel that it was my duty, my obligation, to make the most of those abilities and try to do something useful with them. And whatever this feeling inside me was, I knew that I couldn’t say no to it.

I just wished that it would be a bit more helpful. I mean, it was all well and good making me feel that I
had
to do something . . . but how about telling me what that something was?

No, it was no help at all for that. And neither was my iBrain. Deciding
what
to do was a job for my normal brain.

So I closed my eyes and just sat there — thinking, wondering, listening to the pouring rain . . .

It must have been a couple of hours later when Gram knocked on my door, waking me up, and told me that she was just nipping out to the shops. I hadn’t got much thinking done, and even the thinking I
had
managed to do wasn’t very useful, or even relevant. In fact, as Gram stood in the doorway, waiting for me to answer her question — which I hadn’t actually heard — I realized that I couldn’t even remember what I’d been thinking about before I’d fallen asleep.

“Tommy?” Gram said.

I looked at her. “Yeah, sorry . . . what did you say?”

“Did you want anything? From the shops . . .”

“No . . . no, thanks.”

“OK,” she said. “I won’t be long.”

“Have you got enough money?” I heard myself say.

“What?”

I shrugged. “Nothing . . . I just meant, you know . . .” I rubbed my eyes, smiling wearily at her. “Sorry, I’m still half-asleep . . .”

“Well, maybe you’d better get back to being
fully
asleep.”

“Yeah . . .”

“In bed, not in your chair.”

“OK.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, see you later, Gram.”

I’m perfectly aware that knowing about stuff isn’t the same thing as understanding it, so I knew that having access to vast amounts of information hadn’t suddenly turned me into a philosophical genius or anything, but that afternoon, as I sat in my room with my eyes closed, iSearching through everything I could iSearch through, looking for a way to sort out Gram’s financial position, I kept seeing cyber-flashes of stuff about morals — discussion forums, philosophy websites, excerpts from books — and I began to understand that the concept of right and wrong isn’t as clear-cut as I’d thought. When it comes to morality, there
aren’t
any natural rules. There aren’t things that are
definitely
right or
definitely
wrong. Nothing is simply black or white; it’s all a murky dull gray. Actually, come to think of it, it’s more of a browny-gray kind of color — the sort of shitty brown color you get when you mix all the colors in a paint box together.

Of course, I was also beginning to understand that if you want to do something that you think — or even
know
— is wrong, there are all kinds of things you can do to convince yourself that it’s
not
wrong, and pretending that there’s actually no such thing as “wrong” in the first place is probably one of the easiest.

Anyway, to get to the point, I eventually realized that whichever way I chose to solve Gram’s money problems — and with the growing capabilities inside my head, the possibilities were almost endless — but whichever way I picked, it inevitably meant taking money from somewhere else, money that didn’t belong to me. And however much I tried to convince myself that this was OK, I knew in my heart that it wasn’t.

For example, I could easily hack into the accounts and databases of all Gram’s various publishers, and it would have been no trouble at all to change the sales figures, to invent more sales for Gram’s books, to create a load of money for Gram that wasn’t actually there. Or, even more crudely, I could simply hack into some super-wealthy person’s bank account, someone who wouldn’t miss a measly few thousand quid — maybe Bill Gates, or Bono, or J. K. Rowling — and take some of their money.

In short, I had the ability to steal as much as I wanted from anyone I wanted to take it from. Which, at first, was pretty exciting. I mean, I could be a billionaire, a trillionaire, an infinitillionaire . . . but I soon realized that it didn’t really mean very much. I mean, what was I going to do with a trillion pounds? And, more to the point, how was I going to explain where it came from?

In the end, what I did . . . well, first of all I set up an algorithmic program.

In
mathematics
,
computing
,
linguistics
, and related subjects, an
algorithm
is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for
calculation
and
data processing
, in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task will, when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state.

And, basically, I programmed this algorithm to scan all the bank accounts in the world, rank them in terms of wealth, and remove £1 from each of the top 15,000. The total of £15,000 was then electronically (and totally anonymously) transferred to Gram’s account as a single deposit. I couldn’t work out how to explain this deposit — i.e., how to invent a legitimate depositor — but I decided to leave that for later. Meanwhile, I canceled Gram’s summons for non-payment of council tax and, using some of the £15,000, I paid off what she owed and cleared the outstanding rent.

Yes, it was wrong.

It was stealing.

It was fraud.

It was wrong.

But I didn’t feel
bad
about it.