Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “Are you asking me ‘what if’ as in ‘imagine that there was such a thing,’ or as in ‘I have such a thing?’” I asked, and my excitement was creeping back now, because I thought I knew what was coming next. For one thing, Aziz’s helpers looked like they were about to bust and Aziz was nodding thoughtfully.

  Jem waved his hands. “That’s the wrong question. Just imagine it for a moment. Where would you screen your little tour de force if you could show it anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. Erm. Buckingham Palace?”

  Jem snorted. “It’d only be seen by a load of tourists, mate.”

  “The Tate? From across the river? It’s got nice, big blank walls.”

  Jem nodded. “Oh, that’s good. Hadn’t thought of that. But think bigger, son. What else is on the river? Some place were MPs are bound to see it?”

  I could see other people in the room getting it, which was frustrating as anything. Hester laughed. Chester and Rabid Dog laughed harder. Rob and Dodger roared with laughter. Aziz and his gang pounded their fists on their thighs. Then, the light dawned for me.

  “Bloody Christ, Jem—Parliament?”

  “Now you’ve got it!”

  * * *

  The Jammie Dodgers pulled off some insane stunts over the years, but nothing half so grand as the night we took over the House of Commons.

  It wouldn’t have been possible without The Monster, which is what Aziz and Co called this fantastic, forty-thousand-lumen beamer they’d rescued from a skip behind a cinema that was being pulled down in Battersea. None of them could believe that this astounding piece of kit could possibly work—not until they googled it and discovered that it had been decertified from use ten years before, thanks to a firmware crack that let bent projectionists harvest pristine, lossless copies of new-release films. Of course, I could have told them all about it: the NEC DCI Mark III was notorious for being thoroughly compromised within days of each of its patch-cycles, twenty-eight times in all over two years, before it was finally decertified, and thereafter no self-respecting digital film would play through its powerful lens.

  Though I’d hardly been a tadpole when all this had happened, the zeroday film-release scene I’d grown up with was still wistful about that golden age, when new films would turn up online an hour before the worldwide premiere, smuggled out of the projection booth by someone who knew someone who knew someone. Of course, there were always screeners before the cinematic leak—advanced copies that had been sent to reviewers or awards juries—not to mention all those prerelease versions that leaked out of the edit-suites. But those tended to have big, ugly NOT FOR EXHIBITION watermarks on them, or were rough and unfinished. The Mark III was piracy’s best friend in those long-ago days, and I’d assumed that all those beasts had been busted up for parts or melted down or beheaded and stuck up on the wall of the MPAA’s chief pirate hunter’s study.

  And yet here it was, a huge box with a lens as big as a pie plate and a massive, 240V safety plug.

  “It draws more power than a roomful of Gro-Lites,” Aziz said ruefully, watching the power meter on his mains outlet whir around.

  “But look at that picture!” I said. I couldn’t restrain myself from hopping from foot to foot. We’d brought it up on the roof of Aziz’s warehouse and we’d focused the picture on a low tower-block over the road and across a field, a good kilometer away. At that distance, the picture was three stories tall, and even at this distance, it looked bleeding amazing. I zoomed in on it with my phone’s camera, and with magnification at max, I could barely make out the tiniest amount of fuzz. The Mark III had been overbuilt, overengineered, and overpowered, and as Aziz swung the projector around on the dolly we’d lugged up to the roof, the huge image slid vertiginously over various walls and windows. I held my hand in front of it and made a shadow doggy. Over the road, a giant’s hand loomed up on the wall: Woof! Woof! But more like WOOF! WOOF!

  “Of course, this only works if we don’t care about getting nicked,” Dodger said. He’d sobered up quite a lot on the ride over in the back of Aziz’s White Whale, and he’d made appreciative, electrician-type noises as we muscled it onto the roof, using a winch and crane that seemed to be made of rust and bird poop at first, but didn’t even rock an inch as we hauled away like sailors at its ropes.

  From the ground below, we heard 26 shouting: “Hey, you kids, stop splashing your pirate photons all over the shop!”

  “How’s it look from down there?” I called.

  “Like the Bat-Signal,” she said. “But in a good way. Hang on, I’m coming up!”

  And that, in a nutshell, was why I loved my girlfriend to tiny, adorable pieces: she’d gone home that afternoon in a miserable sulk, but when I’d called her and told her to drop everything, right now, and get her fabulous arse over to Aziz’s place, she’d dried her tears, worked out the night-bus routes, and trekked halfway across England (well, all right, London), without a second thought.

  Aziz killed the projector, leaving sudden blackness in its wake. We all blinked and waited for our eyes to adjust. I heard 26 downstairs, then on the steep aluminum ladder that went up through the skylight. She nodded hello to all of us, then came and slipped her arm around my waist and nuzzled my neck. “Sorry,” she whispered into my ear.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered back.

  Dodger shook his head. “Look, you lot, this is pretty amazing and all, but I’m not up for going to jail. Maybe I can get you your power and then scarper before you turn it on, yeah?”

  “What’s the problem?” 26 said.

  Dodger thumped the Mark III. “Only that this thing is an absolute beacon,” he said. “These lunatics think they can shine it on Parliament tomorrow night, screen your man’s home film on the House of Effing Commons, but we’ll have the law on us in seconds. You said it yourself. That thing is like the Bat-Signal.”

  “Hrm,” 26 said. It was the “hrm” she used when she was really thinking about something. “Any of you lot know much about pirate radio?”

  We mumbled words to the effect of, Yeah, kinda. Heard of it, anyway.

  “It used to be giant,” she said. “That was mostly before the net, of course. There were all these people, complete nutters really, and they’d climb up onto the roof of buildings and hide an all-weather broadcasting station up there. But then they’d add a second antenna, one that was meant to receive signals from anywhere that had line-of-sight to their rooftop.”

  I could see where this was going. “They bounced the signal off another building! It was a relay, right?”

  She patted me on the head. “That way, when Ofcom’s enforcers went all-out to trace their signal back to the transmitter, they’d just find a box on a roof that could be fed from any of thousands and thousands of flats. They’d take the antenna down, and the broadcasters would just aim their little transmitter at another antenna they’d already prepared.”

  “Oh,” we all said at once.

  “Listen to that penny dropping,” she said, “it’s a lovely, luvverly sight. Now, I’m no expert on optics, but I did just write my A level on physics, and I don’t imagine it’d be insanely hard to make this work, especially if you’re not particular about the image quality and just want to make a big spectacle without getting banged in jail, yeah? What we want is some big mirrors, and a good monocle or better yet, a telescope.”

  Aziz was nodding so hard it looked like his head would come off. “I’ve got just the thing.”

  Jem drummed his hands on the top of the projector. “I’ll get started on the coffee,” he said. “Who wants some?”

  As one, we each shot an arm into the air, and said, “I do,” and Jem said, “Right,” and scampered down the ladder.

  * * *

  Despite it being a short summer night, the time seemed to stretch out. Over the years, Aziz had accumulated all manner of monocles, SLR camera zoom lenses, telescopes, and other optics. There was also plenty of shiny stuff to be had, from outsized, clip-on rearview mirrors to satellite dishe
s lined with aluminum foil. The best results came from the smooth, bowl-shaped pot off the headlamp of a rusting old Range Rover Aziz had in back of his place. It had come out of the Rover a little dusty, but once we wiped it down with a lint-free cloth and then lined up the shot right, we could funnel the beam off the Mark III through a bugger-off huge Canon telephoto lens with a busted thread, then through a Minox tactical monocle, turning it into a pencil-beam of high-resolution light; thereafter, we could send it a good 100-200m into the headlamp pot, and bank it 90 degrees and into a building-side half a kilometer away. Sure, the final image was a lot more distorted, but—

  “We could get four of these and spread ourselves out in hiding spots all along the south bank, set the projector up on the north side of the river, and hit Parliament over and over again, switching over every time we heard the sirens start,” I said.

  “There’s only two pots on the Range Rover,” Aziz said. “But there’s a wrecker up the road we should be able to scout for more.”

  “Lining up the shots at that distance will be tricky,” Chester said.

  In answer, Rabid Dog pulled a laser-pointer out of his shirt pocket. “What about a laser-sight?” he said. He turned it on and aimed it at the pot we’d set up halfway down the road from Aziz’s place. It neatly cornered and showed up on the building side where we’d been testing out the video.

  The sun was rising now, and there was more traffic, and the projector light was harder to see. But it didn’t matter. This would work.

  “What about the CCTVs?” Dodger said.

  “Hats,” Jem said. “Pull ’em down low. Wear anonymous stuff—jeans and tees, that sort of thing.”

  Dodger made a face. “Forget it,” he said. “They’ll put your piccie on the evening news, call you a terrorist, someone’ll shop you by breakfast. Count me out,” he said.

  “When did you get to be such a scared little kitten? I thought you were meant to be all hard and fearless, Dodge.” Jem and Dodger rarely fought anymore, but when they did, it was like watching brothers go at it, that same total abandon, that same fast and scary escalation.

  Aziz raised his hands. “Calmness,” he said. “Calmness, please. Jem, Dodger, there’s something we’d like to show you.” He nodded at one of his acolytes, Brenda, who went to a shelf and took down one of the familiar mosquito-zapping hats.

  Dodger made a rude noise. “That thing barely has a brim! It wouldn’t do you any good.”

  Aziz rolled his eyes. “It’s not a disguise. Brenda?”

  Brenda took off the flat-cap she wore. Her kinky black hair sprung out into a halo. She stuffed it back under the mosquito hat and smiled.

  “Observe,” Aziz said, and held up his phone so that the camera lens shone at her.

  Zap.

  An instantaneous line of green light snapped out of the hat and drilled directly into the lens. There was a light crackling sound from Aziz’s phone, and then the screen went dark. He chucked it onto a workbench that I now noticed was covered in lightly charred, semiobsolete phones.

  “I got the idea from those posh antipaparazzi handbags,” he said. “The ones that detect a camera-focus and detonate a flash before it can shoot? Scourge of the tabloid photog, they are. I thought that I could probably use the optics in one of these things to find CCTVs, anything with a camera. You wear one of these going down the street and anything close enough to get a decent look at you will be fried before you come into range. What’s more, you’ll blend right in wearing these things—everyone’s got ’em. Don’t suppose they’ll last long, once the law figures out what we’re about, but I figure we might as well use them for something fabulous while we can. I’ve got eight ready—should be plenty for a projector crew and four runners to take on the reflectors. At this rate, we should be able to light up the House of Commons for a good two or three hours and still get away clean.”

  Dodger’s mouth was slack, his eyes wide. Jem slapped him lightly across one cheek.

  “Right,” Jem said. “How’s that suit you, Dodger my boy?”

  * * *

  When I’d first cut the “It’s Not Fair,” short, I’d automatically inserted my usual credit-reel, with my little Cecil B. DeVil pitchfork-and-horns logo and URLs. I excised this, then went over the file with a hexadecimal editor, looking for any serial numbers, user keys, or other metadata that might lead back to me. Just to be on the safe side, I ran the video through an online transcoder, upsampling the video and audio by a tiny amount, then downsampling it again. The resulting file was minutely fuzzier (which hardly mattered, given the projection method we were planning on using), but I felt better about the possibility that there might be some sort of sneaky serial numbers or other scary snitchware lurking in the file.

  We built several quick-and-dirty pages to host it, embedding the video from five different sources, including ZeroKTube, but also using several YouTubes that punters would be able to access without having to install any software. But the really tricky thing was, we also embedded the TheyWorkForYou page that tracked the vote-record for each MP on the upcoming TIP-Ex vote. Because the vote hadn’t happened yet, all this showed was N/A in each MP’s voting column; but once they’d cast their vote, it would be there, searchable by post-code. A single link would place a phone call or send an email to the MP’s office, and a second link went to a page with the platforms of all the MPs’ competitors in the upcoming election.

  The message wasn’t subtle: “We’re watching you. We will let every voter in the country know about how you voted in this one. You may think it’ll be hard to get reelected if your party chucks you out for going against the whip, but it’ll be just as hard to get your seat back if thousands of your constituents go door-to-door explaining to their neighbors how you sold them down the river.”

  Granted, it wasn’t much different from the message that we’d been sending them all along, all the way back to the first TIP vote, but the numbers had been steadily growing, and with the media splash from our creative projector-graffiti, we were hoping they might take this a little more seriously.

  26 and I caught a nap together that afternoon in the Zeroday while Chester and Hester and Jem and Dog scouted locations; they’d done fantastic work finding us underground sites for the original Pirate Cinemas, and reckoned that between Google satellite images of the rooftops and a little ground surveying, they’d be able to find plenty of rooftops on the South Bank with a view of the Commons. They were also going to scout out the North Bank for sites that might be able to get a clear shot of the east wall, which would be tricky, but a lot more dramatic. Aziz and his elves were working on gluing heavy fixings to the lampposts so that they could be attached to whatever was handy and then fast-cemented into place once they were correctly lined up. If we got it all right, each crew would show up in hi-viz vests with cones and that, get the reflector into place, make sure it was working, fix it with fiendish adhesive and scarper. The projector crew would hit each reflector until the law showed up and took it down—they could just drape someone’s jacket over the reflector, of course, but it might take them a while to hit on that strategy, and once the pic went dark, we’d wait a random interval and then switch to another one. The law would never know if they’d got all the sites—and we’d save the last, a direct shot, for just before dawn, hours after the first hit, when the first of the morning commuters were coming across the bridges.

  It was a risky strategy, but Jem insisted that it was our best one, the one that would make the biggest splash. And since he was going to work the projector, we couldn’t really talk him out of it. He assured us that as soon as the picture was lined up, he’d do a runner and leave it running unattended until the lackwits and jobsworths at the Met took it down. We’d wear gloves and wipe everything down with bleach-wipes, and the laser-hats would take care of any CCTVs.

  All this whirled through my mind as I tried to sleep in the middle of the hot, sunny afternoon, a wheezing fan blowing over me and 26. I tried to concentrate on my breath and t
he smell of her skin behind her ears and in the crook of her chin, but my stupid brain kept returning to the night’s plan, and all the ways it could go wrong, and just how risky it was, and how much riskier it would be if I didn’t get some sleep—I’d be so logy and stupid with sleep-deprivation, I’d be bound to make some ridiculous cock-up and get us all sent away. Which, of course, made me even more anxious and even less able to sleep, and so on.

  But at a certain point, it just doesn’t matter how tightly you’re wound or how much your mind is racing, sleep comes and takes its toll from you, and so sleep I did, and dream terrible, anxious dreams in which I was looking all over for the Bradford motor-coach station, then looking for my knapsack and lappie in Hyde Park, then looking for Jem in all our haunts, then looking for the Zeroday, which seemed to have moved of its own volition, then looking for 26, then looking for the mirrored pots of the Land Rover lights—while a clashing brass band played on in the background, so loud it drowned out all thought, making it harder and harder to think straight. I was practically weeping with frustration when I realized that the brass band was my alarm, a little salute to Bradford and its brassy history, and it was time to get out of bed and commit some crimes by cover of dark.

  I shook 26 awake, pulled on my clothes, then shook her awake again, for she had crawled back into bed and put a pillow over her head. “Come on, love,” I said, “time to go and save Britain.”

  “Sod Britain,” she said from under the pillow.

  “Time to go and put the screws to Parliament, then,” I said.

  “That’s a little better,” she said.

  “Time to go and pull off the most amazing feat of pirate cinematry that the world has ever seen—does that suit madam’s taste?”

  “Much better,” she said. “Come on, then, enough slacking. Let’s do it!”

  * * *

  Perhaps the simplest thing to do here is catalog all the ways that this plan went wrong. Because, of course, that’s where all the excitement was—but also because the plan mostly went right. The building site that the scouting party found was just perfect for the projector. Dodger was able to tap into the mains without even using any special kit, and the route they found up the scaffolding avoided all the vibration anticlimb sensors. Once up on top, they used one of the many winches to bring the projector up and got it settled in in a matter of minutes. Of the four other sites scouted for the reflector setups, two were ironclad: one was a roped-off section of multistory car park that was invisible from the street and from the parking area, but had a straight shot to Parliament and the building site. The other was a pedestrian stairwell descending from the Embankment Rail bridge—all it took was some safety yellow tape and a NO ENTRY-CONSTRUCTION-WE REGRET THE INCONVENIENCE sign at top and bottom to ensure that no company would be along.