by Кевин Брукс
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 cancelled 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.
I slept for a while after that (morality and algorithms are really tiring), and when I woke up, Gram was back, and she'd got some food, and we had some toasted sandwiches together.
While Gram went back to her writing, I spent some more time in my room, scanning the airwaves, listening out for any mobile calls that might tell me what the Crows were up to, but I didn't hear anything particularly interesting. It was all mostly — where are you? what you doing? you hear about Trick and Jace?
Trick was Carl Patrick, and Jace, I assumed, was Jayden Carroll. I found out from the hospital's computer records that Carroll had suffered three stab wounds to the stomach, none of them life threatening, and that he'd undergone surgery and was now expected to make a full recovery.
Carl Patrick had been arrested.
It was 19:15:59 when I left the flat and went up to the thirtieth floor to see Lucy. I don't remember how I was feeling or what I was thinking about at the time, but whatever it was, when the lift doors opened, and I saw a group of kids along the corridor outside Lucy's flat, my head and my heart suddenly emptied.
There were about six or seven of them. They were all hooded up in the usual Crow gear, but I recognized some of them: Eugene O'Neil, DeWayne Firman, Nathan Craig. One of the ones I didn't recognize had a can of spray paint in his hand and was spraying something on the wall, and DeWayne Firman was bending down and calling out something through Lucy's letter box. Eugene O'Neil was just standing there, obviously in charge, looking mean and bad and hard as hell... and when the lift doors opened, he looked down the corridor at me, and an ugly grin cracked his face.
As I shut the lift doors and hit the button for the twenty-ninth floor, I saw him shaking his head and smiling at me, mocking what he thought was my cowardice, my weakness.
But I didn't care. He wouldn't be smiling for long. As I got out at the twenty-ninth floor and headed back up the stairs, pulling up the hood of my jacket, my iSkin was already shimmering.
1011
"I could be a soldier/falling in love/I could be a soldier/ I could be happy"
Shame
"Come Closer to Me"
I'd never felt the kind of rage I felt as I pushed open the stairwell door and strode down the corridor towards O'Neil and the others. It was all-consuming, brutal, merciless ... it felt like a volcano inside me, a force of nature, straining to erupt. But at the same time, I felt weirdly calm and controlled.
I was in control of being out of control ...
As the stairwell door slammed shut behind me, all the Crows stopped what they were doing and turned in my direction. I was moving quickly, but not running — marching along the corridor towards them, my senses alert, my eyes taking in everything. I saw the shocked looks on their faces when they saw me — a shimmering, glowing, hooded figure — and I saw two of them immediately start to run, not even bothering to look back ... they just turned and sped down the corridor towards the lift.
I let them go.
I saw O'Neil and Firman and Craig shuffling back a few steps, keeping the kid with the spray can in front of them. And I saw him staring at me with wide-open eyes as I read the words he'd sprayed on the wall of Lucy's flat — bitch, whore — and then, before I knew what I was doing, I'd grabbed the aerosol out of his hand and was spraying it into his eyes. He screamed and tried to cover his eyes, but I kneed him in the balls and pushed him to the ground, and as his hands left his eyes to protect his groin, I emptied more red paint into his face.
The other three were making a move for me now, coming up behind me and trying to pull me away from the aerosol kid, but even as they reached out for me, before their hands so much as touched me, a jolt of energy surged through my body, and I heard a sharp crackling sound and shocked yells of pain as the three Crow kids were electrocuted. As I turned round to face them, I saw them staggering away from me, trying to shake the pain from their hands ... and I could see them all staring at me with abject fear in their eyes.
Behind me, I heard the aerosol kid getting to his feet. I raised my foot and kicked back at him, catching him square in the face, and then — just to make sure he didn't give me any more trouble — I quickly turned round and touched my finger to his paint-smeared head. The shock I gave him was hard enough to jerk his head back, and as he crawled away down the corridor, whimpering and moaning, I could see that I'd given him a fingertip-sized burn mark on his head.
I turned back to the other three. Firman and Craig looked as if they'd had enough now, and they were already starting to edge backwards towards the lift. Neither of them wanted to be the first to run, but as I moved towards O'Neil, who was still standing his ground, Firman shook his head and muttered, "Fuck this," and he turned and legged it towards the lift. Craig didn't waste any time following him.
So now it was just me and O'Neil.
He stared at me for a second, torn between running and fighting, and then — with a tough-guy crick of his neck — he made his decision. He reached into his track pants and pulled out a knife. It wasn't much of a thing — just a stubby little kitchen knife, with a blade of no more than ten centimetres — but it looked nasty enough, and just for a moment I felt a brief pang of fear.
But it didn't last long.
I had faith in my iPowers.
I smiled at O'Neil and moved towards him, holding my hands up, offering him an unguarded stab at my torso. The knife was shaking in his hand.
"Go ahead," I told him. "Use it."
He hesitated, swallowing hard, and looked at me.
I moved closer. "What's the matter?" I said to him. "You look as if you're going to shit yourself."
His eyes went cold, and he lunged at me, aiming the knife at my belly. I flinched a little, but I knew that I was safe. My force field was on, and as the knife blade struck it, and sparks flew, O'Neil shrieked and dropped the knife to the floor. I looked down at it. It was smouldering, the plastic handle melted out of shape. I looked up at O'Neil. He was shaking his hand, blowing on his fingers, his face twisted in a grimace of pain.
I moved round him, positioning myself between him and the lift, so now the only way he could move was back along the corridor towards the stairwell. I edged towards him, making him step back.
"What the fuck?" he said. "Who the fucking hell —?"
"Shut up," I told him. "Get down the corridor."
"What?"
I reached out towards him. He drew back.
"Move," I said. "Down the corridor."
He backed all the way down, never taking his eyes off me, and stopped at the end of the corridor.
"Open the window," I told him.
"What for?"
"Just do it."
He turned to the window at the end of the corridor, unlatched it and opened it as far as it would go, which wasn't all that far because all the windows in the tower blocks have safety restraints on them. They're there to stop the windows opening all the way so people can't jump out of them ... or throw other people out of them.
"Step away," I told O'Neil.
As he moved back, I reached over, took hold of both restraints and shot a bolt of electricity through them. The rivets popped out, and I yanked the restraints off. Now, as I lifted the frame of the window, it opened all the way.
"Shit, man," I heard O'Neil whisper.
"What are you doing?"
I grabbed hold of him before he could run, grasping his throat with one hand, giving him enough of a shock to stop him from struggling. It was enough to stop him from talking too. As I forced his head, and then his upper body, through the open window, all he could say was, "Nunh ... nuhguh ... nunh ..."
I don't know how far I would have gone if Lucy hadn't suddenly appeared in her doorway, yelling at me to stop. I don't think I would have pushed O'Neil out of the window ... I don't think I had it in me. I think I was just trying to scare him. But I'll never know for sure. Because when I heard Lucy's voice — "No! Don't do it!" — all the coldness, the brutality of my rage ... it all just suddenly faded away, and for a moment I really didn't know who or what I was.
I gazed down the corridor at Lucy. She was standing outside her door, with Ben in the doorway behind her, and I could see the genuine concern in her eyes — she really didn't want me to push O'Neil out of the window ... and I couldn't understand it. O'Neil had raped her. He'd done the absolutely worst thing imaginable to her. How could she possibly not want me to kill him?
"But you said ..." I heard myself say.
She frowned at me. "What?"
"You said you wanted to hurt them, to kill them ... you wanted them to suffer ..."
She shook her head, still frowning, and I wasn't sure if that meant that she hadn't heard me, or that she had, but she didn't understand what I was saying.
While all this was going on, I must have loosened my grip on O'Neil, because I suddenly realized that I no longer had hold of him and he was staggering away from me, holding his throat, heading for the stairwell door.
I didn't go after him.
My rage was over now. I felt drained, exhausted, almost lifeless, and I wondered if I'd overdone it, used up too much power. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a few deep breaths. I could hear O'Neil running down the stairs. When I opened my eyes again and looked over at Lucy, she was still just standing there, staring at me ... and as I met her gaze, and we looked at each other across the corridor, I saw a flash of sudden realization in her eyes. She'd remembered where my words had come from — You said you wanted to hurt them, to kill them ... you wanted them to suffer. She'd realized that the words were from her MySpace blog. And who was the only person who'd read her blog?
I saw her eyes widen, and her mouth open, and I saw her lips move as she whispered to herself, "iBoy"
I chose that moment to leave.
As I went through the stairwell door and started heading down the stairs, I could hear O'Neil's distant footsteps echoing on the steps below. He wasn't running any more, but he was still moving fairly quickly. I went inside my head and selected the video of the last few minutes, then I leaned over the railings, looking down at the dizzying drop of the stairwell, and zeroed in on O'Neil's mobile. As I sent the video to his number, I called out his name.
"Hey, Eugene!"
As his footsteps stopped, I heard the sound of my voice echoing dully around the concrete and metal of the stairwell, and then the distant sound of a ringtone (Fiddy's "In Da Club").
"Answer it!" I called out.
There was a pause, then the ringtone stopped. I gave O'Neil a few moments to open the video and realize what it showed — i.e. him trying to stab me and failing, and me getting hold of him by the throat and nearly pushing him out of the window — and then I called out to him again.
"You got it?"
Another pause, then, "Yeah ..."
His voice was a mixture of confusion and concern.
"If you go anywhere near Lucy again," I shouted down to him, "that video's going on YouTube. Do you hear me?"
Nothing. Silence.
"Do you HEAR me?" I yelled.
"Yeah ... yeah, I hear you. How the fuck —?"
"I'll post it on YouTube and send it to everyone you know. All the Crows, the FGH ... everyone. Do you understand?"
"Yeah ... but —"
"No questions. You've got three seconds to get moving, and then I'm coming after you." I started counting. "One ... two ..."
He started running.
I waited until he'd clattered down another few flights of stairs, then I turned off my iSkin and walked back down to the twenty-third floor.
1100
You don't have to be crazy to put on a shiny costume and battle evil — but it helps.
http://io9.com/5228906/top-10-greatest- mentally-ill-superheroes
Gram was just coming out of the bathroom when I got back home.
"I thought you were going to see Lucy?" she said to me.
"Yeah, I was ... I am. I'm just... I forgot something."
She looked at me, waiting for me to tell her what I'd forgotten.
"My phone," I said. "I left it in my room."
"Right," she said. "What's that on your hands?"
"What?"
"You've got red paint on your hands."
I looked at my hands, quickly trying to think of an explanation. "Oh, yeah ... there was some graffiti on Lucy's door. You know ... really nasty stuff. I tried to clean it off."
Gram sighed, shaking her head. "Why can't they just leave her alone? I mean, God knows she's been through enough already."
I shrugged. "It's what they do, Gram."
"I know", she said, sighing again. "It's just. . . well, you know ..."
"Yeah."
She looked at me. "Is Lucy OK with you going to see her?"
"Yeah, I think so ... I mean, she said it was all right. And she seemed to get something out of me being there ..." I shrugged. "I'm not sure what."
Gram smiled. "She likes you, she always has. Do you remember that time when she asked you to marry her?"
"Marry her?"
Gram nodded. "It was ages ago, you must have been about six or seven ... the two of you were sitting on the floor in the front room, playing with some Lego or something, and she just turned to you and said, "Will you marry me when I'm older?""
"Really? What did I say?"
Gram thought about it for a moment, then smiled again. "I don't think you said anything. I think you just started crying."
I laughed. "Yeah, that sounds like me. I always was pretty slick with the ladies."
While Gram went back to her writing, I went into my room to pretend to look for my phone. I was still feeling drained, and I took the opportunity to sit down on the edge of my bed for a few moments to recharge myself before I went back up to Lucy's.
As I was sitting there, going over in my mind what had happened with O'Neil and the others, trying to work out if I'd made things better or worse, I sensed Lucy logging on to her MySpace page, and a few minutes later there was a message from her in my inbox.
iBoy, it said, was that you just now?
I messaged back: was that who just now?
i know it WAS you, she replied,who ARE you?
i'm whoever you want me to be.
I logged off.
My mind was too buzzy for resting now. I got up off the bed, got my jacket, and went back up to the thirtieth floor.
Slag, bitch, whore ... I knew that they were only words, and that words — so they say — can never hurt you, but as I stood outside Lucy's flat, gazing at those ugly words painted crudely on the wall and the door, I knew that they did hurt.
I held out my hand, palm first, towards the wall ... and then I closed my eyes and concentrated. After a moment or two, I began to feel an energy between the wall and my hand ... a tangible resistance, like a magnetic field. And when I opened my eyes and started moving my hand over the painted words, gently pushing the resistance into the paint, the graffiti began to flake off.
It didn't take long, and when I'd finished, and all traces of the graffiti were gone, I used the same scouring energy to clean the remnants of paint off my hands, and then I knocked on Lucy's door.
Her mum was out — she worked at the local Tesco's — and Ben had gone out too, so Lucy was on her own. Which I didn't think was a good idea, especially a
fter she'd just had a visit from half a dozen Crows. But as far as Lucy was concerned, I didn't know anything about that, so I just kept my mouth shut and made a mental note to have a quiet — and possibly threatening — word with Ben the next time I saw him.
"You'll never guess what just happened, Tom," Lucy said as we sat down together on the settee in the front room.
"You won the lottery?" I said.
"No, no ... this was just now, about half an hour ago ..." She shook her head. "God, it was so weird. I can still hardly believe it."
She started telling me all about O'Neil and the others then — how she'd been really scared when she'd realized they were outside, and they'd started calling out through the letter box ... and then she'd heard another voice outside, followed by the sounds of struggling — shouts and yells, running feet — and she'd peeked through the letter box and seen this really weird-looking kid with multicoloured skin squaring up to O'Neil ...
"... I mean, his skin was really shimmering, Tom. Honestly. It was like he was covered in neon tattoos or something, and the tattoos were moving ... but they weren't tattoos..."
It was incredibly strange, listening to her telling me the story. Partly because I had to pretend that it was all new to me, so I had to keep going — What? No... really? — and partly because Lucy seemed so innervated now, so full of life, just like the old Lucy, and I didn't know how that made me feel. On the one hand, obviously, it made me feel great. I mean, Lucy seemed to be getting back to her old self again — what could possibly be wrong with that? But on the other hand ... well, there wasn't anything wrong with it. Nothing at all. But I suppose, if I'm totally honest, I felt just a tiny bit jealous. She was so excited, so thrilled, so curious about this mysterious stranger who'd come galloping to her rescue ... and I wanted her to know that it was me. I wanted her to be excited about me, not about iBoy. And I know that sounds pathetic — and selfish and childish and whatever else you want to call it — but, like I said, I'm just trying to be honest here. And that's how I felt.