Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “Fine,” he said. “But what about one or two films?”

  Durr. There it was, staring me in the face. If you wanted to distribute just a couple of films, at very high resolution, with four or five audio-tracks and some additional material, thirty-two gigs was plenty. They’d rattle around with all the space left over. And that’s when the plan came together.

  * * *

  Aziz not only had a thousand thumb-drives; he also had a shelf full of bulk-writers for them, ones that would take fifty at a time and let you write a disk-image to all of them at once. We packaged up the leaked copy of Part 18 along with a couple hundred of the best piss-takes from Cynical April, along with a little video that we all worked on together, piecing it together using the dialog from the actual film and its earlier parts, cutting in one word at a time to have a blur of actors explain:

  “When you go to see terrible shows like this one, you just give money to the people who are destroying our country with corrupt, evil laws. Your children are being sent to jail by laws bought with the money from your purchase. Don’t give them your gold. If you must see this stupid film, do it at home and keep your money for better things. Make your own art. Originality is just combining things that no one ever thought to combine before.” Some of the word choices were a bit odd—all eighteen parts combined had the vocabulary of a reader for a toddler—but it worked brilliantly.

  Some of 26’s anarchist pals were deep pros at making T-shirts; they lent us their silk-screening kit and showed us how to make a little grid of skull-crossbones logos with PLAYME written beneath. We lined up the loaded thumbs on the pub floor in a grid that matched the skulls on the screen and sprayed sloppy red and black identifiers on the footballs, straight over the naff old Major League Soccer marks.

  Finally, we used one of Aziz’s specialist printers to run off thousands of feet of scarlet nylon ribbon printed with the same manifesto that we’d loaded into the thumbs, and signed it THE JAMMIE DODGERS. I thought that Jem might mind—it was his and Dodger’s thing, after all—but he just grinned and shrugged and said, “I’d have a lot of nerve to complain about you pirating from me, wouldn’t I? I positively insist, mate.”

  So we threaded lengths of ribbon through all of the footballs and tied them off. We filled urethane shopping bags with them, and admired our handiwork.

  “Now,” said Chester, “how do you plan on getting them to people before they buy their tickets? Hand them out at some tube station or something?” If there was one thing that Jem’s begging signs had taught us all, it was how to efficiently distribute small free items to commuters going into and coming out of the underground.

  I shook my head and swilled some of the mulled wine that we’d made to warm up the night, spat a clove back into my cup. “Naw. Too inefficient. We want to get these to people who are actually planning on seeing the film, right before they stump up their money. Maximum impact.” That was the whole idea: maximum impact. A film makes most of its gross on the all-important opening weekend. Attack the box-office take from that weekend and you attacked the studio at its weakest, most vulnerable point.

  “I’m going to give them out in Leicester Square,” I said. “On opening night.”

  They all gaped at me. 26 looked worried, then delighted, then worried again.

  Jem put a thumb up. “All right,” he said. “Why not? Go big or go home, right?”

  * * *

  Like any red-blooded English lad, I have seen approximately one million commando raids conducted with stopwatch precision, thanks to the all-popular military/terrorism thriller genre. I knew how to assemble the pieces: we needed cover, we needed countermeasures, we needed escape routes.

  Cover: The enemy had given this one to us. Ever since the cinemas had introduced mandatory metal-detectors and coat-checks for phones and computers, every film opening looks more like an airport security queue, with a long snake of bored, angry people shuffling slowly toward a couple of shaved-head thugs who’ll grope them, run them through a metal detector, and take their phone and laptop and that off them, just in case they’re one of the mythological screen-cappers.

  This is London. Where you have a queue of people with money, you have a small ecosystem of tramps, hawkers, and human spam–delivery systems passing out brochures, cards, and loot-bags advertising cheap curry, dodgy minicabs, Chinese Tun-La massage (whatever that is), American pizza, Minneapolis Fried Chicken, strip clubs, and discount fashion outlets.

  This would be our cover. Chester had found us an enormous bag filled with lurid purple T-shirts in a skip, advertising a defunct Internet café (most of them had gone bust since the Theft of Intellectual Property Act raids began). They were gigantic, designed to hang to your knees, turning the wearer into a walking billboard. To these, we added baseball caps from a stall in Petticoat Lane Market that was happy to part with them as they were worn and a bit scuffed.

  Countermeasures: These caps were our countermeasures. Between the baggy shirts and the hats, it would be hard for the CCTVs to pick us up or track us (Chester had read a thriller novel that said that a handful of gravel in one shoe each, would add enough randomness to make our gaits unrecognizable to the automated systems working the cameras).

  But just to be sure, Aziz hooked us up with strings of miniature infrared LEDs, little pinhead things that we painstakingly stitched around the brims with electrical thread that ran into a fingernail-sized power-pack that took a watch battery. These would strobe ultrabright infrared light that was invisible to the human eye, but was blinding to the CCTVs.

  Or so Aziz said. He told us that the cameras were all sensitive into the infrared range so that they could take pictures in poor light, and that they automatically dialed up the sensitivity to max when the sun went down. As they strained to capture the glimmers of IR emitted by our faces, we would overwhelm them with the bright, invisible light. (Not that we told Aziz exactly what we were planning; as Jem said, the less he knew, the less he could be done for not reporting. Aziz didn’t seem to mind.)

  Aziz had a pile of CCTVs (Aziz had a pile of everything), and he had me put on the hat and walk around in front of it for a time, walking close and far, even looking straight at it, with the hat on. Then he showed us the video: there I was, but where my head was supposed to be, there was just a white indistinct blob, like my noggin had been replaced by a poltergeist that manifested itself as ball lightning.

  Escape routes: Piss easy. Leicester Square is a rat-run of alleyways, roads, and pass-throughs that run through the lobbies of clubs, restaurants, and cinemas, leading down to the heaving crowds of Trafalgar Square, up into the mazed alleys of Chinatown, toward the throngs of Piccadilly to the west and the street performers and hawkers of Covent Garden to the east. In other words, getting from Leicester Square to the anonymous depths of central London was only a matter of going a few steps, finding a doorway to shuck your purple shirt and baseball hat in, and then you’d be whistling on your way to safety.

  It was a mad rush to get it all sorted in time for the big night. We worked around the clock silk-screening, wiring, writing disk-images, planning routes. I saw Aziz’s thumb-drives exactly ten days before opening night. I had the idea the next morning, leaving us with nine days.

  By day eight, it was clear we weren’t going to make it. I reckoned that to give out one thousand thumb-drives, we’d need at least fifteen people on distribution, which meant wiring up fifteen hats, and the hats were turning out to be a right beast. Aziz had shown me how to do it ten times, but soldering the flexible wire was harder than it looked, and I ruined two hats completely before I did even one.

  26 promised me that she would be able to dig up ten more helpers through Cynical April. They had to be absolutely trustworthy, with nerves of steel. She knew which helpers had been the best when we were getting the word out on TIP, and which of them had been the nerviest when it came to sorting secret parties. We agreed that we’d bring them in at the last minute, to minimize the chance that one would blab our plan.<
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  With forty-eight hours to go, I was a wreck. We only had three hats done, half the drives hadn’t been flashed, and I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours a day. I’d drunk so much coffee that my eyes wouldn’t focus and my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t hold the soldering iron. Rabid Dog was trying to take over from me, but he didn’t have a clue how to do it.

  “No, shit, not like that!” I said as he burned the hat with the hot iron, filling the table with the stink of burnt plastic. “Shit man, you’ve ruined it. You retard—”

  26 crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed my flailing arms and pinned them to my sides. “Enough. That is quite enough of that. You. Are. Going. To. Bed.” I started to object and she shook her head furiously, her mohican’s ponytail flopping from side to side. “I don’t want to hear it. You’re going to make a complete balls-up of this adventure if you don’t get some sleep—get us all arrested, if I don’t kill you first. Now, apologize to Dog.”

  She was right. I hung my head. “Sorry, Dog. I was out of order.”

  He muttered something. I felt miserable. Dog was better about talking these days, sure, but when you were cruel to him, he went right back into his own head and pulled the door shut behind him. Jem glared at me. It seemed they were all furious with me. I recognized the paranoid, angry feeling for what it was: massive sleep deprivation and caffeine overdose. Time to go to bed.

  * * *

  I woke fourteen hours later, feeling like weights had been tied to my arms and legs by a merry prankster who finished the job by gluing my eyes shut with wheatpaste and then taking a foul, runny shit in my mouth. Yes, I know that this is a gratuitously disgusting way of describing it. Take comfort, dear reader, in the knowledge that it is not one half so disgusting as the taste in my mouth.

  I staggered to the second-floor toilet and turned the tap on all the way. As always, there was a groaning and a sputtering and a coughing, and then it began to trickle cold water. The pressure up here was almost nil, and there were fittings for an old pump that was long gone that might have corrected it. As it was, it took forty-five minutes for the toilet cistern to fill up between flushes. Every now and then we’d joke about complaining to the landlord.

  I slurped up as much of the water as I could get out of the tap, then changed into a brown corduroy bathrobe that 26 had surprised me with when the weather turned. I added a pair of rubber shower-sandals and made my way back down into the pub room, moving like I was underwater as the residual sleep and fatigue tugged at my flesh.

  It was a hive of brightly lit, bustling activity, filled with happy chatter and speedy, efficient motion. Memory sticks were loaded, silk-screened and tied up with ribbon. Hats were stitched, soldered, powered, and tested. It looked like a proper assembly line. Only one problem: I didn’t recognize any of the people doing the work.

  They all stopped and looked at me when I walked into the room. Someone’s phone was playing jangly dance music, DJ mixes that I’d heard on Cynical April. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, about my age or a bit older, with strange, pudding-bowl haircuts and multicolored dye-jobs that matched their multicolored, chipped nail-varnish (even the blokes). They had ragged tennis shoes that were held together with tape and safety pins, black cargo trousers with loads of little pockets, and cut-down business shirts with all the collars, sleeves, and pockets torn away.

  “You’d be Cecil, then,” said one of the girls. She had a funny accent. Not English or Scottish. Foreign.

  “Y-e-s,” I said slowly.

  “Right,” she said, and beamed at me, showing me the little skulls laser-etched into the enamel of her front teeth. “I’m Kooka, and these are Gertie, Tomas, and Hans the Viking.” Hans didn’t look anything like a viking. He looked like a stiff breeze might knock him down. What was it about wimpy blokes and big, macho nicknames? But he was smiling in a friendly way, as were the others, and waving, and I waved back, still not sure what to make of these strangers.

  “Are you friends of—”

  “We’re friends of the Jammie Dodgers!” Tomas declared. He pronounced it “ze Chammie Dodtchers!”

  “We’re your reinforcements,” Kooka said. “We’ve come from Berlin to help!”

  “Berlin?”

  “We’d have been here sooner, but the hitchhiking was awful,” she said. “Not least coming up from bloody Dover after we got off the ferry. It’s like English drivers have never seen someone hitching a ride before!”

  I shook my head and sat down. “I see. Erm. Who the hell are you?”

  “We’re from Cynical April!” Kooka said. “It’s not so complicated. We’ve been on the boards forever, from way back. We’re the German wing.” Hans cleared his throat. “German and Swedish,” Kooka said. “We’ve been fighting off the same bastards at home for years and it seemed like a holiday was in order.”

  I felt my mouth open and shut of its own accord. Part of me was made up that we had this help, and so exotic and energetic, with their hitchhiking and that. Part of me was furious that 26 had brought in outsiders without asking me. But the enraged part couldn’t work up much fury—I seemed to have burned out all my capacity to be furious, spending it on the weeklong binge of coffee and work.

  26 appeared from the kitchen, teetering under a tray carrying our teapot, a stack of our chipped, mismatched cups, the sugar bowl, the cream jug, and a small mountain of posh little health-food seed-cakes that had turned up in the skip of a fancy delicatessen in Mayfair.

  “The creature lives!” she said, handing me the tray and giving me a hard kiss on the neck. I handed the tray off to two of the Germans—or Swedes, or whatever—and gave her a cuddle.

  “This is a surprise,” I said.

  “Surprise!” she said, and tickled my ribs. I danced back, squirming. She was grinning with pride. What was left of my anger evaporated. “I didn’t want to say anything because I half believed they wouldn’t make it. I mean, hitchhiking!”

  “You must try it!” Kooka said. “It’s the only way to travel. All the best people do it.”

  “But now they’re here, we’re in great shape! Kooka’s done all sorts of stunts and raids, isn’t that right?”

  Kooka curtsied and the other nodded. “We’re superheroes. Legends in our own minds. The scourge of Berlin!” She gestured at the works all around her. “And we’re nearly done with all this rubbish.”

  It was true. What we’d struggled with for a week, they’d made short work of in a few hours. Of course, we’d spent a week getting all the kinks out of the production, making expensive mistakes and learning from them. The Germans had the benefit of all those lessons and, what’s more, weren’t crippled by sleep deprivation, squabbling, and caffeine shakes. So they had kicked quantities of ass and torn through the remaining work in no time.

  “Ya,” Hans said. “Then, the party begins!”

  Which, indeed, it did. The next several hours were a blur. We started off heading down to Leicester Square, ostensibly to familiarize the Germans with the escape routes (the local volunteers wouldn’t need any of that). It was sparkling, of course, even though it was only a Wednesday, buzzing with the chatter of thousands of people going into and out of the cinemas. I loved Leicester Square at night: the lights, the glamour, the grifters and tramps, the tourists and hen nights, the spliff and the brochureware spammers. It was like some other world where entertainment and fantasy ruled.

  No one else seemed to have the same reaction. The Germans laughed at the slow, waddling coppers, climbed up on the wrought iron fence around the garden to get a view and then backtucked off it, landing on springheels like gymnasts. Rabid Dog cheered them in an uncharacteristic display of public enthusiasm. Jem joined in, and then the rest of us. Jem climbed up on the fence and gave it a try, though the rest of us told him he was insane and would split his skull. He surprised us all by doing a very credible backflip, though he landed heavily and staggered into a posh couple who shoved him off. He brushed himself off coolly and accepted
our applause, then whistled the little two-note warning the drugs kids used that meant coppers and we saw the PCSOs heading our way and scarpered, up through Chinatown, up to Soho, threading through the crowds and stealing down alleys so skinny we had to turn sideways to pass.

  26 said, “There’s a big Confusing Peach get-together near here tonight.” She pulled out her phone and made her most adorably cute face at it, poking at the screen until it gave up the address.

  The parties that got listed on Confusing Peach of the Forest Green Beethoven were less exclusive and weird than the inner-circle events on Cynical April, but this one was held in an interlocking set of coal-cellars we reached through an unmarked staircase between two skips behind a posh Chinese restaurant. The cellars were narrow and low-ceilinged and they throbbed with music from cheap speakers that had been glue-gunned to the walls at regular intervals. There were so many people in that claustrophobic space that you were always touching someone, usually two or three people, and the music was so loud you could only be heard by pressing your face into someone’s ear and shouting.

  It was brilliant.

  Twenty and I danced these weird, horny dances that were half-snogging, and I could feel people on all sides of me doing the same. Someone passed me a propelled inhaler full of sugar and I stared at it stupidly. I had never tried it, even though there was plenty for sale around the Zeroday of course. I guess I’d just heard all those scare stories at school and in brochures and on the sides of buses and so on, and I was halfway convinced that one hit would turn me into a raving addict who’d kill his own mother for another gasp of the sweet stuff.

  Of course, I’d heard all the same stuff about spliff—the evil, evil skunk that would melt my mind and make me the perverted love-slave of some dealer who’d peddle my doped-up arse to twisted vicars and City boys until I was spoilt meat. I’d smoked spliff for years and the worst thing it did to me was make me lazy and slow the next day. And for all that they said that weed led to the hard stuff, I’d never found myself led anywhere.