Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  Anyway, the Chinese had been fighting West Nile mosquitoes for years apparently, and they did it all with these powerful green lasers that were as cheap as chips. They’d hook ’em up to a couple of microphones that used sonar to locate the little bastards, then they targeted the lasers by bouncing them off curved mirrors, and zip-zap, no more little flying vampires. They worked a treat in houses, where you could mount ’em with brackets in the corners of the rooms, but when you were out in the world, you needed another layer of protection. Bug spray was nice, but laser hats were scorchingly bad-arse because they put lasers on your head and you went pew-pew-pew when you walked down the street. I couldn’t argue with that reasoning, even if I hadn’t had a single mosquito bite that I’d noticed since coming to London. Though, naturally, by the time I’d finished googling, I was imagining mosquito whines in the barely audible edge of the bus motors, and feeling phantom itches from nonexistent bites. I resisted the temptation to google “West Nile Disease” for as long as I could, but after the fifth nonexistent mosquito bite, I gave in.

  Oh, lovely, comas. Twitching, horrible, usually terminal comas. That was just fantastic. I’d have to get a hat.

  * * *

  I got home and no one was there. I was about to ring Jem when he rang me. “Hullo, chicken,” he said in his bravest voice, but I could hear the edge in it. Jem was tired, and hurting.

  “Jem! Where are you? Do you need me to come and get you?”

  “They just sprung us. Sounds like your girlfriend’s old man impressed the magistrate. After her hearing, the old darling started to ask the law some tough questions about just why we were being held. There was a fixer from the film industry there, some smart city boy lawyer, kept trying to say something, but the magistrate told him to sit down or he’d have him chucked out of the court. So we’re sprung. Only one problem, son, Rabid Dog—” He breathed a deep breath, and I heard a ragged edge in it. “He’s not in such good shape. I don’t have money for a taxi, and I don’t reckon Chester and me can get him home on our own on the bus.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could and counted under my breath. At ten, I said, “What happened to Dog?”

  “Some of his cellies started calling him things, ‘nancy boy’ and that. He was separated from us, in with two tough lads who’d been done for brawling outside a pub. Couldn’t see ’em, but I could hear it. Dog told them that he thought they were unintelligent fellows of questionable breeding with a proclivity for sticking their johnsons in things that shouldn’t be stuck, in so many words, and there was a lot of thumping and shouting and that. I was proud of the little bastard, but scared, too. Screws took their time breaking it up. Saw them bring out the brawlers. Big sods. Size of houses. One of ’em looked like he wouldn’t be seeing out of one of his eyes for a long time, the other one was bleeding from the nose and one ear. Thought that Dog had, like, finally got in touch with his inner horror film, maybe he’d done okay. But then they brought him out. On a stretcher. Wanted to take him to a secure infirmary, but I talked them out of it. Think they were glad to see him go, cos otherwise it’d have to be paperwork and maybe complaints and that. But—” He heaved another one of those fluttery breaths. “Well, he ain’t so good, Cecil.”

  I had thirty-five pounds left from my begging, which was enough to get a minicab there and back, just barely. It seemed to me that all I’d done that day was run around, back and forth. The minicab driver drove the whole way without a word, and when we pulled up to the station, I jumped out and held the door open so he couldn’t drive off. I reckoned that if Dog looked as bad as I thought he might, the driver wouldn’t want to stay.

  But he was a good egg. He found a blanket in his boot and spread it over the backseat and helped Chester and Jem get Dog into the backseat, and Jem went round to the other side of the car and got in and put Dog’s head in his lap. Chester got in on the other side and put Dog’s feet on his lap, and then I got into the passenger seat in the front and the driver took his car back to the Zeroday so gentle, I swear he didn’t hit a single sleeping policeman or pothole.

  We got Dog inside and I fetched a big bowl of water and a pile of clean black T-shirts we could use as rags—black because the blood wouldn’t show. There was a lot of blood. Both of his eyes were swollen shut, and his nose was a big puffy ball, and his knuckles were all skinned like he’d dragged bricks over them. We couldn’t get his T-shirt over his head because his arms hurt too much—he made these horrible squeaks that were worse than screams when we tried—so Jem got a scissors from the kitchen and cut all Dog’s clothes off, down to his underpants. Now we could all see the bruises on his ribs and arms and thighs. Looking at him, I couldn’t imagine ever suffering through a beating like that.

  But Dog managed something recognizable as a grin and said, “Will I ever play the piano again, doc?” around his swollen lips. And that was when I knew that I would never be as mean and tough and hard as Rabid Dog, and no matter that he looked like a harmless puffball and no matter that he was queer. He was the most macho sod I’d ever known.

  No one wanted to try to carry him upstairs, so Jem brought down blankets and a pillow and set up his lappie and queued up all his favorite slasher films, and made him a Lemsip and had him take three sketchy-looking pain tablets he got from some secret place in his room. He took them with sips of water, and pulled the blanket up around his chin, and watched the films with one eye until he fell asleep. We moved around him with murmurs and tiptoes, and eventually the three of us found ourselves up in my room, me on my bed, Jem at my editing chair, Chester on the floor with his back to the wall.

  “What a mess,” Jem said finally. “Shoulda seen it, they came in with bullhorns and truncheons and that and told us we were all under arrest, read out a charge sheet as long as a very long thing, all the while grabbing people and chucking them into vans. And you know what, your bloke from the films was there, the fellow that was on telly after the Leicester Square caper talking about what a bad, bad boy you were. Smirking and that, standing by the van, practically rubbing his hands together with glee. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve made someone very sad and angry, boy.”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Here was Jem, who’d been stuck in bloody jail, seen his boyfriend beaten to shit and back, and he was cracking jokes. It was why he was the original, all-time, world-beating Jammie Dodger, and there wasn’t anything any of us could do that would top him, ever.

  I was waiting for him or Chester—who was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open—to say something about my departure, but neither of ’em seemed ready to bring it up. So I had to. “Felt like an idiot for running out when I did, but I guess I dodged a bullet, hey?”

  Chester said groggily, “Just figured you were feeling a bit peaky, Cec. Anyway, you gave old 26 a chance to shine, didn’t ya?”

  “What?”

  Jem slapped his leg. “Shoulda seen her! She hopped straight up on the table and gave a speech the like of which I haven’t seen, not never! ‘They say it’s about protecting property, but they invented this idea that creativity is property! How can you own an idea? They say their imaginary property is more important than our privacy, our creativity, and our freedom. I say bugger that. I say we’ve got a moral duty to pirate everything we can, until they’re nothing more than bad memories. Christ, the way they carry on, you’d think that they expect us to come home from work and flop down in front of the telly and anaesthetize our brains for four hours forever, like this is the thing we spent millions of years evolving to do! I say bugger that! I say bugger and bugger who says that’s what we’re on this planet for!’”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Naw, mate, not at all! That little girl of yours is the cleverest agitator I’ve ever had the sincere pleasure of getting rabble-roused by, and I’ve seen some dead good ones in my years. By the time she was done, I wanted to grab a spear and a torch and run down to Knightsbridge and string up some film producers! ’Course, that’s just when the c
oppers made their appearance. Damned good timing. Reckon they had a grass in the crowd.”

  That made me swallow. “26’s dad—her real dad, a copper from Scotland—came down and said he thought I must be a snitch, cos I got out at just the right moment and all.”

  Jem laughed again. I liked the sound of his laugh, made me glad to be alive. “You! Cecil, mate, you’re a lot of things, but a liar, you ain’t. You’ve got the most pathologically honest face of any geezer I know. You’d be the worst grass in the history of Scotland Yard.”

  Chester nodded vigorously. “’Strue,” he said, with a yawn. “You’re rubbish at lying, Cecil. Not one of your talents.”

  “Go to bed, Ches,” Jem said. “You look like chiseled cat shit.” Ches nodded and lumbered away and now it was just me and Jem, staring at each other across the room in the squat.

  “Can’t say I reckoned it would come to this, back when I found you down in the tube that day,” he said. “Look at us, couple of Che Guevaras now, real freedom fighters. You know, most of those freedom fighters get a bullet in the head and an anonymous grave, by and large. I means, all the hipsters will turn your piccie into an icon and put it on their T-shirts and that, but I don’t reckon that’s much comfort when the worms are chewing on your brain stem.”

  I had a plummeting feeling. “Look, Jem, if you don’t want to go on doing this stuff, I can’t fault you,” I said, mind racing. “I mean, we could find a different squat and—”

  And again came that laugh, so epic that it made my heart pound. “Oh, Cecil, don’t be bloody stupid. I’m not tossing you out, I’m telling you how much fun I’m having. That’s the thing, here I am, doing this stuff that I never really had any interest in before I met all you, and it’s become my life. That’s down to you and your mates, and I’m grateful for it. There’s more to life than finding the goods in skips, honing my begging pitch, squatting. Turns out there’s a lot more. I’m glad I found it.”

  I couldn’t help it. I got up and gave him a big, back-thumping hug, and he laughed some more, a sound that seemed to ring through the whole Zeroday, and when he toddled off to bed, it seemed to me that no matter what else happened, no matter how beat up poor Dog was, no matter how much trouble 26 was in with her parents, it was all going to be okay. Better than okay. It was going to be illustrious. It was going to be magesterial.

  * * *

  The next time we all met, we were much more public about it. There’d been some argument about this, of course. Some of Annika’s people thought that we should go deep underground, use secret codes and encrypted mailing lists to hide the location of the next meeting. But 26 overruled them, and I backed her up. First off, we wanted to have as many people as possible come out to one of these things, because the whole point was to get voters to go round to their MPs’ surgeries and tell them to support the private members’ bill. Secondly, because it was clear to anyone who was willing to look that we were thoroughly infiltrated. It just wasn’t that hard to spy on what we were doing, where we were going, and when we’d be there. I liked to imagine that some kid, somewhere, was getting enough money to keep himself in bubblegum and trainers in exchange for showing idiot entertainment execs in suits how to search our message boards, snickering to himself, going to the films, maybe even getting off with some girl who’d be horrified to know she was snogging a supergrass. But it was impossible to say, really: maybe they were a lot cleverer. Maybe looking for our little screenings had turned them into experts.

  But it was clear that we couldn’t keep a secret to save our lives, and hell with it, it was time to stop trying. We were helping to pass a law. That wasn’t illegal, that was democracy! We should be able to do it all nice and aboveboard, without sneaking about like spies. That’s what 26 and I reckoned, and in the end, the others agreed with it. Not least because it meant that we could invite in shedloads of press—and I’d been meticulously writing down the name of every reporter who’d asked me for a quote or an interview, and I was prepared to ring every single one them and make sure they knew that our meeting was coming.

  So Annika sighed and said, fine, we were all going to end up in prison eventually, why not now? (But she smiled when she said it.) And then she helped us sweet talk the nice people at Shoreditch Town Hall into giving us use of the big room, which freaked me out even more than the thought of an arrest. You see, the big room at Shoreditch Town Hall was big enough for a thousand people, and they had video hookups with three more rooms in the place should the attendees not all fit in the hall. We were told that we’d have to rent chairs if we wanted them and Annika sneered at the phone and said, no, people could stand, cos it’s easier to stamp your feet and shout when you were standing. Everyone seemed to take it for granted that we’d get more than enough people to fill the whole building, thousands of ’em, and have to turn away more at the door. And everyone took it for granted that I would speak to all these people.

  Every time I thought about this, I got a feeling in my stomach that was kind of the opposite of butterflies: more like anvils. Or dynamite. A feeling like I was about to fall face-first off the roof of a tall building into a field of very, very sharp spikes.

  “You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to, you know,” 26 said to me over the breakfast table one morning. It was the hundredth time she’d said it, which was why I knew she was lying, and it was the first time she’d said it in front of her parents.

  “If you’re worrying about an arrest,” her stepdad said, not looking up from his job of meticulously spreading a single-molecule-thick layer of Marmite over every millimeter of the top surface of his toast, “I think you’ll be okay on that score. I’ve got a friend at the magistrate’s office and he’s promised to let me know if anyone issues any sort of warrant for your arrest. There’s plenty of people in the courthouses who think that this business is an abuse of the law, especially now that they’re bringing in busloads of people whose only ‘crime’ is going to a public meeting to reform a bad law. No one likes the idea that he goes to work at the court every morning for the purpose of increasing the profits of a small group of offshore companies. If they wanted to be corporate lackeys, they’d go to work for a big City firm and make a fortune as real corporate lickspittles. But these poor lads aren’t being paid enough to sell out.”

  I swallowed my own toast, which I’d piled high with cheese and fake meat slices and HP sauce and then slathered with a chili sauce from her dad’s private, homemade reserve supply (a little bottle of pure evil that made my eyes water when I cracked the lid, and which tasted so good I kept eating it despite the desperate pain signals it caused my digestive tract to send to my brain). “That’s reassuring,” I said after I’d wiped the tears away from my eyes and blown out my streaming sinuses on a tissue. Her stepdad had basically adopted me as soon as he worked out that I fancied chili as much as he did, and he nodded approvingly. “It’s funny, when you and Letitia talk about it, you’d think that we’ve practically won the fight already. But when the TIP act was up for debate, practically everyone told us not to bother fighting because we were doomed to fail.”

  He shrugged, and 26’s mum said, “Well, that’s politics for you. There’s plenty that the other side can do if they don’t care about being able to repeat the trick. Call in your favors, tell a bunch of whoppers about how the sky will fall if you don’t get your way, smear your opposition, arm-twist the MPs. Problem is, you can only do this so much before you run out of political capital. I mean, you can only declare that art is about to die so many times before people notice that it has conspicuously failed to die.” I loved it when 26’s mum talked like this. She’d been in government for years before quitting to be some kind of consultant—she’d even been a junior minister for a brief time, but she’d resigned over something her party had done, said she was through with being political forever. As if! When she talked politics, it was like she was sketching out the dark secrets of the world’s inner workings. “I think the problem is that this lot doesn’t re
ally have a strategy. I can’t imagine that most of them dream that they’re going to reduce the amount of copying going on in the world, but there are enough people convinced that they should be able to. So they go on making these bizarre laws, then not having any idea how to turn them into money once they’ve got them. How many lawsuits did you say they’d had, dear?” She turned to 26, who was stuffing her mouth with slices of mango drowned in thick homemade yogurt. 26 rolled her eyes and pointed at me while she chewed.

  “Eight hundred thousand in the U.S.; two hundred and fifty thousand in the UK.” I’d been revising on all the facts and figures of the copyright wars, reading the FAQs from all the pressure groups like Open Rights Group and Electronic Frontier Foundation. I could reel them off like my date of birth and the timecode for the juiciest rude words in Scot Colford films.

  She sucked air over her teeth. “Fantastic,” she said. “Insane. This lot are like a dog that finally catches the car it’s chasing. They’ve got the Internet, it’s clear that they can get practically any law or regulation passed that they want. But having won the battle, they have no idea what to do next. They keep on ordering the world to behave itself, and then giving it a thump when it doesn’t mend its ways. What a bunch of utter prats.”