iBoy (9 page)

Who? Harvey?

No, fuck’s sake, the brother. Just tell him what we told him before. OK?

Yeah.

Go on, then.

Right.

The call ended.

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 elevator 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 elevator 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
any
thing like me. It didn’t look anything like anything. The face —
my
face — was pulsating, floating, radiating with colors, 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 elevator 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 backward as if he’d been hit with a sledgehammer. As he slammed against the lift wall and slumped to the floor with a weird kind of grunting sound, I stepped in after him. The doors closed behind me.

There was a faint smell of electricity in the elevator — a hot, crackly kind of smell — and as I hit the button for the ground floor I realized for the first time 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
ting
ed 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.

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.

David Chalmers

Foreword to
Supersizing the Mind
(2008) by Andy Clark

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 street down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tires 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 onto 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 cyber-world 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.

Everything I needed to know about iPhones — or everything I
already
knew — came to me in an instant:

The
iPhone
is an Internet and multimedia enabled smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with email, web browsing, and WiFi connectivity) using the phone’s multi-touch screen to render a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard. The first-generation phone (known as the Original) was quad-band GSM with EDGE; the second-generation phone (known as 3G) added UMTS with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA; the third generation adds support for 7.2 Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384 Kbps uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSPA protocol. The
iPhone 3GS
was announced on June 8, 2009, and has improved performance, a camera with more megapixels and video capability, and voice control.

M
anufacturer

Apple Inc.

T
ype

Candybar smartphone

R
elease date

Original: June 29, 2007

3G: July 11, 2008

3GS: June 19, 2009

U
nits sold

21.17 million (as of Q2 2009)

O
perating system

iPhone OS 3.1.2 (build 7D11), released October 8, 2009

P
ower

Original: 3.7 V 1400 mAh

3G: 3.7 V 1150 mAh

3GS: 3.7 V 1219 mAh

Internal rechargeable non-removable lithium-ion polymer battery

CPU

Original & 3G: Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0

620 MHz underclocked to 412 MHz

PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU

3GS: Samsung S5PC100 ARM Cortex-A8

833MHz underclocked to 600 MHz

PowerVR SGX GPU

S
torage capacity

Flash memory

Original: 4, 8 & 16 GB

3G: 8 & 16 GB

3GS: 16 & 32 GB

M
emory

Original & 3G: 128 MB eDRAM

3GS: 256 MB eDRAM

D
isplay

320 × 480 px, 3.5 in (89 mm), 2:3 aspect ratio, 18-bit (262, 144-color) LCD at 163 pixels per inch (ppi)

I
nput

Multi-touch touchscreen display, headset controls, proximity and ambient light sensors, 3-axis accelerometer

3GS also includes: digital compass

C
amera

Original & 3G: 2.0 megapixels with geotagging

3GS: 3.0 megapixels with video (VGA at 30fps), geotagging, and automatic focus, white balance & exposure

C
onnectivity

WiFi (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (3GS: 2.1), USB 2.0/Dock connector

Quad band GSM 850 900 1800 1900 MHz GPRS/EDGE

3G also includes: A-GPS; Tri band UMTS/HSDPA 850, 1900, 2100 MHz

3GS also supports: 7.2 Mbps HSDPA

O
nline services

iTunes Store, App Store, MobileMe

D
imensions

Original:

4.5 in (115 mm) (h)

2.4 in (61 mm) (w)

0.46 in (11.6 mm) (d)

3G & 3GS:

4.55 in (115.5 mm) (h)

2.44 in (62.1 mm) (w)

0.48 in (12.3 mm) (d)

W
eight

Original & 3GS: 4.8 oz (135 g)

3G: 4.7 oz 133 g

Actually, that was far more information than I needed, and most of it didn’t make much sense to me anyway. But it confirmed what I’d already assumed: I had WiFi capability, I could connect to the web. I had access to every single website in the world, which is a lot of websites:

Web pages in the world, August 2005:

19.2 billion pages were indexed

by Yahoo!

as of August 2005.

Websites in the world, August 2005:

70,392,567 websites were indexed

by Netcraft

as of August 2005.

Web pages per website:

273 (rounding to the nearest whole number).

Web pages in the world, February 2007:

multiplying our estimate of the number of web pages per website by Netcraft’s February 2007 count of websites, we arrive at 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007.

And there was even more. There were databanks, secure sites, programs, and websites that were supposed to be inaccessible to unauthorized users, but my iBrain knew how to get into them.

My iBrain, my iSelf . . .

My i.

What else did it allow me to do? Well, I could send and receive texts and calls, of course . . . and, what’s more, I seemed to be able to phone and text with complete anonymity. So, if I wanted to, I could send texts and make calls without anyone knowing who they were from. And I could hear other calls, too. I could access other mobiles — stored texts, call logs, address books . . . whatever was there. I knew it all. I knew where the phones were. I could either triangulate their signals or, with a lot of the new phones, simply locate them via their GPS chips. I could reach out into the radio-waved air and pick out a single specific telephone conversation from among all the millions of others . . .

What else?

I could take pictures —
click
.

Make videos —
click
,
whirr
.

Watch videos, watch TV, play games.

I could see every email on every computer and every phone in the world.

I could download everything downloadable . . .

I could do virtually anything.

I could overdose on information.