Kevin Brooks

iBoy

For Dave and Steve, my most excellent and beloved brothers

1

The formula for calculating the velocity of a falling object from a given height is: v = V(2ad), where v = velocity, a = acceleration (9.81 m/s2) and d = distance.

The mobile phone that shattered my skull was a 32GB iPhone 3GS. It weighed 135g, measured 115.5mm x 62.1 mm x 12.3mm, and at the time of impact it was travelling at approximately 77mph. Of course, I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew at the time, the only thing I was vaguely aware of, was a small black object hurtling down through the afternoon sky towards me, and then ... CRACK!

A momentary flash of blinding pain ... And then nothing.

Twenty minutes earlier, everything had been perfectly normal. It was Friday 5 March, and the streets were still mushy with the remains of last week's snow. I'd left school at the usual time, just gone three thirty, and I'd started the walk back home feeling pretty much the same as I always felt. Kind of OK, but not great. Alone, but not lonely. A bit down about things, but not really worried about anything in particular. I was just my perfectly normal ordinary self: I was Tom Harvey, a sixteen-year- old kid from South London. I had no major problems, no secrets, no terrors, no vices, no nightmares, no special talents ... I had no story to tell. I was just a kid, that's all. I had my hopes and dreams, of course, just like every­one else. But that's all they were — hopes and dreams.

And I suppose one of those hopes, one of those dreams, was the girl I was thinking about as I made my way along the High Street, then down Crow Lane, towards the familiar grey sprawl of Crow Town, the estate where I lived (its official name is the Crow Lane Estate, but every­one calls it Crow Town).

The girl's name was Lucy Walker.

I'd known Lucy for years, since we were both little kids and we used to live next door to each other. Her mum used to babysit for my gran sometimes, and my gran would babysit for her, and then later on, when we were both a bit older, me and Lucy used to spend a lot of time playing together — in each other's flats, in the corridors, in the lifts, on the swings and stuff at the kids' playground on the estate. Lucy didn't live next door to me any more, hut she was still in the same tower block (Compton House), just a few floors up, and I still knew her quite well. I'd see her at school sometimes, and occa­sionally we'd walk back home together, and every now and then I'd go round to her place and hang around for a while, or she'd come over to mine ...

But we didn't play on the swings together any more.

And I kind of missed that.

I missed a lot about Lucy Walker.

So it'd been kind of nice when she'd come up to me in the school playground earlier that day and asked if I could come round to her place after school.

"I need to talk to you about something," she'd said.

"OK," I'd told her. "No problem ... what time?"

"About four?"

"OK."

"Thanks, Tom."

And I'd been thinking about her ever since.

Right now, as I cut across the stretch of grass between Crow Lane and Compton House, I was wondering what she wanted to talk to me about. I was hoping it was something to do with me and her, but I knew deep down that it probably wasn't. It was probably just something to do with her stupid brother again. Ben was sixteen, a year older than Lucy (but about five years dumber), and he'd recently started going off the rails a bit — missing school, hanging around with the wrong kind of people, pretending to be something he wasn't. I'd never really liked Ben that much, but he wasn't such a bad kid, just a bit of an idiot, and easily led, which isn't the worst thing in the world ... but Crow Town is the kind of place that preys on easily led idiots. It eats them up, spits them out, and turns them into nothing. And I guessed — as I went through the gate in the railings into the square beneath Compton — I guessed that was what Lucy wanted to talk to me about. Did I know what Ben was getting up to? she'd want to know. Had I heard anything? Could I do anything? Could I talk to him? Could I try to make him see sense? And, of course, I'd say Yes, I'll talk to him, I'll see what I can do. Knowing full well that it wouldn't do any good. But hoping that Lucy would really appreci­ate it anyway ...

I looked at my watch.

It was ten to four.

(I had thirty-five seconds of normality left.)

I remember realizing, as I headed across the square towards the front entrance of the tower, that despite the mush of snow on the ground and the icy chill to the air, it was actually a really nice day — crisp and fresh, bright and clear, birds singing in a sunny spring sky. The bird songs were almost drowned out by the usual manic soundtrack of the estate — distant shouts, cars revving up, dogs barking, music booming from a dozen different high-rise windows — and although the sun was high and bright, and the sky was bluer than blue, the square around Compton I louse was as shadowed and gloomy as ever.

But it was still a pretty nice day.

I paused for i moment, looking at my watch again, wondering, if I was too early. Four o'clock, Lucy had said. And it was still only just gone ten to. But then, I reminded myself, she hadn't said exactly four o'clock, had she? She'd said about four.

I took another look at my watch.

It was nine and a half minutes to four.

That was about four, wasn't it?

(I had five seconds left.)

I took a deep breath.

(Four seconds ...)

Told myself not to be so stupid ...

(Three...)

And I was just about to get going again when I heard a distant shout from above. "Hey, HARVEY!

(Two ...)

It was a male voice, and it came from a long way up, somewhere near the top of the tower, and just for a moment I thought it was Ben. There was no reason for it to be Ben, it was just that I'd been thinking about him, and he lived on the thirtieth floor, and he was male ...

I looked up.

(One ...)

And that's when I saw it — that small black object, hurtling down through the bright blue sky towards me, and then ... CRACK!

A momentary flash of blinding pain ...

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.