Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  It was worse than being slapped. “Twenty—” I said.

  But she was already stalking off. I turned back to where Letitia had been sitting, but she was gone now, too. I found my hands were shaking. I wanted to run after 26 and tell her she was wrong.

  The problem was, I really felt like she might be right.

  Chapter 14

  GOOD FRIENDS AND LIFTED SPIRITS/MAGNUM OPUS (“IT’S NOT FAIR!”)/PARLIAMENT CINEMA

  I thought about calling Annika or one of the organizers or politicos I’d met along the way, but in my head, the conversation got as far as “We’ve lost, there’s no point, we might as well chuck it in,” and then trailed off.

  So I went home, sulking the whole way, the now-familiar long journey across London to the Zeroday. It was Friday, and the TIP-Ex vote was due on Monday. On Tuesday, I was scheduled to go on trial for £78 million worth of copyright infringement.

  For all that, London seemed unaware that it had only days to go before all hope would be lost. The streets were full of people who clearly didn’t give a toss about copyright, about TIP, or about anything apart from getting rat-arsed and howling through the night, vomming up their fried chicken into the gutter or having sloppy knee-tremblers with interesting strangers in the doorways of shuttered shops.

  26 was right. These people would wake up on Tuesday morning and see some hard-to-understand headline about the defeat of some bill they’d never heard of and they’d ignore it and go back to talking about who had the West Nile virus, who had been rubbish and who had been brilliant on Celebrity Gymnastics, and which clubs they’d get blotto at next weekend. And if some of their mates went to jail, if their parents lost their livelihoods, if their kids couldn’t make art or get an education, well, what could you really do about it? Just a fact of life, innit, like earthquakes or tsunamis.

  Rabid Dog and Chester had scored some truly amazing food down at Borough Market and Jem had decided it was time for a feast. He’d been in the kitchen all day with Dodger, who had invited Rob over. Chester had brought along Hester, 26’s old mate from Confusing Peach, and Aziz had come by with three kids about our age who’d been staying at his and helping him with a massive haul he’d brought in, turning it into saleable merchandise and moving it out through a small network of car-boot sale retailers he’d put together. They were your basic gutterpunks, but clever and moderately sober.

  I’d invited 26 and she’d agreed to come and naturally we’d both forgot about this, so I came home just as Dodger was serving up a massive humble pie, stuffed with livers and heart and tripes in a simmering, rich brown gravy that was as thick as custard. The crust was yellow-gold and crackled like parchment when he sliced into it, releasing first a waft of butter smell, and then the meaty smells from within.

  “Sit down, Cecil,” he said. “And shut your gob, you’re letting the flies in and the dribble out.”

  Something about coming through my familiar door and into a candlelit room dominated by a huge table (okay, it was a bunch of little wobbly pub tables pushed together), ringed by friends and friends of friends, drinking wine, laughing, and this big, beautiful, ridiculous pie in the middle of it all—it made me think that maybe, just maybe, my problems might be solved. Why not? We were the Jammie Dodgers, and we could do anything!

  I took off my jacket, went into the kitchen and maneuvered around Jem—resplendent in an apron, working madly at five bubbling pots on the massive cooker—and washed my hands in the sink. Back at the table, someone had poured me a glass of wine, and Dodger had dished me up an enormous slice of pie. Jem burst out of the kitchen carrying platters of roast parsnips, duck-fat potatoes, tureens of white sauce, and a massive loaf of thick-crusted brown bread studded with olives and capers. It steamed when he tore off hunks and chucked them at us, and the air was filled with baked-bread perfume. There were saucers of coarse salt and saucers of dark green olive oil, and we dipped the bread in the oil and then the salt and chewed it like gum, hot and fatty and salty and so fresh it almost burned your mouth.

  Then we attacked the pie and the veg and there was wine-guzzling and arms reaching across the table to top up everyone’s glasses whenever they ventured even a little below the full line. We didn’t talk about copyright or film remixing or finding £78 million with which to pay off the nutters at the film studios. Instead, we gossiped about friends; Dodger told near-death electrocution stories; Hester regaled us with stories of drug-fueled excess from a party we’d all missed; Rabid Dog had a new joke he’d made up about three children who go wandering in a woods filled with serial killers (it went on and on, getting funnier and funnier, until it came to the punchline: “I thought you were going to chop the firewood!” and we fell about laughing); Aziz and his minions explained a gnarly driver problem they were having with a load of deauthorized sound-cards and solved it for themselves as they described it and cheered and slapped one another on the back; Chester had just read a mountain of downloaded ancient comics called Transmetropolitan that he couldn’t shut up about.… In other words, it was a brilliant table full of amazing, uproarious conversation, piled high with delicious food.

  It was just the tonic I needed, and two hours later, as we mopped up the last of the custard-drowned sweet suet pudding with our fingers and piled the plates up and shuttled them into the kitchen, I once again felt like, just maybe, the world wasn’t an irredeemable shit-heap.

  I volunteered to be Jem’s coffee-slave as he hand-brewed us cups of gritty Turkish coffee, and once we were all fed, we loosed our belts and took off our shoes and lay on cushions on the floor or on the sofa and Hester got out her mandolin and played a few old Irish folk songs that Chester knew the words to, and one of Aziz’s helpers had a tin whistle and she played along with Hester and they got us to sing along on a gaggingly hilarious version of “The Rattlin’ Bog,” which went on and on, until we stumbled through the final chorus: “And the grin was on the flea and the flea was on the wing and the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was on the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was on the tree and the tree was in the hole and the hole was in the dirt and the dirt was in the ground and the ground was in the bog—the bog down in the valley-o!”

  And then it got quiet.

  “So, Cecil,” said Jem, “are you going to tell us what’s got you looking so miserable, or are we going to have to beat it out of you?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing’s wrong, mate, it’s all fine.”

  “You’re not fooling anyone. You came in here looking like your whole family had just been killed in a traffic accident. So spill. What is it? 26 angry at you?”

  I shook my head. “So much for my career as a cool, collected man of mystery.”

  Aziz patted my shoulder. “Cecil, you have many virtues, but you’re as easy to read as a book. Never take up a career as a poker player, that’s my advice.”

  I told them. It’s not like Letitia had asked me to keep it a secret, but still, I didn’t exactly mention how I knew that the fix was in. Chester and Rabid Dog knew that I had a personal connection with Letitia, so they’d probably guess at the connection, but I had some feeling that putting up Letitia’s name would just be getting her in trouble.

  Hester shook her head. “What a right bloody mess,” she said. “No wonder you’re so miserable.”

  “The worst part is that it makes me want to give up. I mean, I knew it was going to be hard when we started, but for so long as I thought it was possible that we could win, I wanted to keep at it. Now I can’t even release my new video or I could end up in actual jail for violating the judge’s order.”

  Jem fingered his scar. “Not worth it, chum. You want to stay out of His Majesty’s clutches, trust me.”

  “Well, let’s see it, then,” said Dodger. He’d been spinning up a Dodger-style spliff, big as a cigar, stuffed with skunk so pungent I could smell it through my ears. “World premiere an�
�� that.”

  “Go on, then,” Aziz said. The rest nodded.

  Funny, I felt embarrassed. I’d shown my films to audiences of hundreds, uploaded them for millions to see. But my new video, made with the Scot footage that no one else had ever worked with, felt like a piece of me. I overcame my shyness and got out a laptop and found a beamer among the box of electronic junk. We had cleared a wall and whitewashed it, and we used it whenever we had film nights. The beamer focused itself and I started the video.

  Three minutes and eighteen seconds later, I switched off the beamer. No one said a word. I felt a sick, falling feeling, and I felt like I might toss up the incredible meal, bread and tripes and suet and custard and all. Then Jem said, “‘Ken hell, mate.”

  “Fwoar,” agreed Chester. Then it was nods all round. Finally, Rob began to applaud: Clap. Clap. Clap. In a second, everyone had joined in, and they whistled and cheered and stamped their feet. Aziz thudded me between the shoulderblades and Hester gave me a hug and yeah, that was about as good as it got. Some people are great artists—I think all my mates were, of one kind or another—but it takes a special kind of person to be a great audience.

  And they were.

  * * *

  You’ve seen the video, I suppose. What happened next guaranteed that practically everybody had seen it; what’s more, there’s whole libraries’ worth of remixes of it, and if you ask me, plenty of them are better than anything I could have come up with. Still, I made that first mix, and I’m going to be proud of it for my whole life. Even if I never do anything else anyone gives a wet slap for, I made Pirate.

  And since I’m writing all these adventures down and trying to tell them as best and truthful as I can, I figure I should set down a few words about Pirate, too.

  It opens with Scot at his prime, thirtysome years old. He’s not a teen heartthrob anymore, nor a twentysomething actor being cast for increasingly improbable teen roles. Now he’s done four summers of Shakespeare at the Globe and had his directorial debut with Wicked. Cool., a brutal film about a British foreign service bureaucrat who cynically funnels money and weapons to the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, despite their horrible atrocities and use of child soldiers, because they promise access to a rich deposit of coltan mud for a firm listed on the London Stock Exchange in return. He’s put on some wrinkles and a few pounds, but he’s better-loved than ever. Girls—grown, married women—fling themselves at him. The tabloids are obsessed with who he’s shagging. He is a stunner, and he knows it.

  Oh, he clearly knows it, The opening shot is him, sitting behind his desk, a humble little table, much loved and clearly a working tool, not a status symbol. He’s grinning at his screen with supreme confidence. Cut to his screen, where I matted in a little VLC window showing another clip of Scot, much younger, teenaged, horsing around with half a dozen nameless starlets on the set of some film. I’d done a little jiggery-pokery so that you could see his face reflected in the monitor, an expression that wasn’t quite a smirk and wasn’t quite a smile on his face. It was one of those unguarded, unself-conscious expressions that Scot was so famous for, the face of someone who you would swear had no idea that a camera was pointed at him. Another trick shot, zooming back so that now we’re looking over his shoulder.

  As the video on his screen runs out, he leans forward and takes the mouse, and I’d matted in the distinctive anonabrowser that The Pirate Bay had introduced, with its pew-pew laser effects as it zapped every tracking bug and cookie; the groovy animations of it hopping through all its proxies before plundering the world’s treasure-house of films, music, and games. Reflected in the screen, his expression changed to one of fierce concentration. In the search-box, the words “Scot Colford.” The mouse glided to the SEARCH button. More clicking.

  Scot’s door interior—the door of the house in Soho he’d lived in for thirty years, a fixture there, now celebrated with a blue disc. Scot crosses to the door, looking fearful (footage from a spooky Halloween short he’d made), opens it. Someone outside. We don’t see who. We just see Scot’s reaction shot, the fear turning into horror, the horror to terror, the terror to abject, weeping pleading. He’d played it for laughs, but with the right music and a v-e-r-y subtle slowdown of the framerate, it looked like he was shattering inside. I knew how that felt. I’d been there. I knew exactly how I wanted Scot to look, and that’s how he looked. Just like I’d felt.

  Now we see a young Scot, not even a proper teenager, and he’s alone, staring abjectly at the blank eyes of a brick school, a massive place that might as well be a fortress or a prison.

  An old Scot next, carrying a box of office things out of a glass tower somewhere in the financial district, suit rumpled, shirt untucked.

  Another Scot, lying in a hospital bed, emaciated, tube up his nose. In the seat next to him, the young Scot again. Fingers on a keyboard. A screen. NETWORK ACCESS SUSPENDED.

  Now the original Scot, and a zoom out to reveal him sitting on the floor of a grim cell, tiny. He is sunken and sallow, and he slowly, slowly raises his hand to cover his face.

  A long beat, the light changing, and it looks for a moment like it will grow dark, but that’s just a fake-out. The scene lightens, brightness edging in from the edges of the screen until it is a searing white. A perfectly black, crisp-edged silhouette … dances on that white screen. No, it’s not a dance, it’s some kind of boxing training, but so graceful, until the savage kicks and punches. The light changes, and now the silhouette is Scot again, teenaged Scot, shadow-boxing, and the background fill-in with a film set, and Scot is whirling and punching and ducking and weaving.

  Now, the first words spoken in the whole film: “It’s. Not. Fair.” More punching and kicking—there’d been about ten takes of this in the video Katarina gave me, and I’d used them all, playing with the lighting and the speed and cutting back and forth so that Scot became a dervish. There’d been a moment when I was cutting that sequence where it felt like Scot and I were working together, across time and space; I felt like I could see what Scot was trying to say with his body and his facial expressions, and I was bringing that out, teasing it out, bringing his intention to the fore.

  Back to the Scot in the hospital bed. If you watched the whole clip, it was just some footage of him recovering from having a kidney stone out, but he really looked like death, and he’d got his wife to bring in a camera and set it up at the foot of the bed so he could experiment with expressions of grief and dying. It was what made Scot Scot, that constant practice of his craft. There’d been one frame where he’d just nailed it, so much so that when he caught a glimpse of himself in the monitor, he’d startled and made a yeek sound. It was the face of someone who was angry and scared and hopeless and in pain—it was the exact mixture of feelings I’d felt the day they’d come and taken away my family’s Internet. The second I saw it, I knew it was my closer. I let it flicker in a series of short cuts from the rage-dance, flick, flick, flick, faster and faster like a zoetrope starting up, until it was jittering like an old fluorescent tube. Then I held it still for just less than a second, and cut to black.

  That was it.

  * * *

  “Dude,” Chester said. He’d been watching a lot of American animation lately and it was all “dude” all the time. “Duuuuude.”

  Rob giggled. He’d had a little too much of Dodger’s special helper and was lying boneless on the rug in front of the sofa. “I think what’s he’s trying to say is, that video needs to get a wide viewing.”

  I shook my head. “Well, maybe after the trial. But it’ll be too late then, of course. The vote’ll have gone ahead. We’ll have lost. And I daren’t release it before the trial, or I’ll end up in jail; everyone’s been very clear on that subject.” I sipped at my wine. “Christ, I wish I could put this online tonight.”

  “What if we got someone else to put it online?” Jem said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’d work,” I said. “It wouldn’t get the play, and no one would pay attentio
n to it before Monday.”

  Jem looked up and down, thinking so hard I could hear his brain whirring. “What if we got every major news outlet to play it?”

  I made a rude noise. “Well, so long as we’re playing what-if make-believe, what if we could show it to every MP?”

  Jem nodded. “Yeah, that was my plan all right,” he said. “What if we screen this thing somewhere everyone will see it? Somewhere that makes every single newscast the next morning? Something that’ll be on every freesheet and website?”

  “Erm, yeah, that would be great. How do you propose to do this, Jem?” I was skeptical, but I felt a tickle inside. Jem was grinning like mad, and he hadn’t been into the skunk yet, so there was something going on in that twisty mind of his. Something grand and wonderful.

  “You remember that time Hester and your missus put on that brilliant show in Highgate Cemetery? The outdoor beamers and all?”

  I nodded, and felt a little disappointed. Yeah, we could probably get a bunch of the Confusing Peach types out to some park and show this to them, but we knew by now that our message boards were full of supergrasses who’d fink us out to the law, and besides, what did it matter if our crowd saw this? They were already on our side.

  Jem caught my expression and raised his hands. “Hear me out now! What if you had a fantastic beamer, a giant one, one that was powerful enough to, say, paint an image on the side of a building a good five hundred meters or more away?”