iBoy by Kevin Brooks Page B

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