His Honor was kind, though: he reduced the damages to £152.32: one penny per charge. The entire courtroom laughed when that was announced, and I had to hide my grin. Roshan looked furious and patted me on the shoulder, but the dinosaurs’ lawyer was even angrier as the giggles turned into roars of laughter. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t have cared if it was ten million quid.
We’d won the real fight.
That’s why the crowd was laughing. Everyone—the judge, the claimants, and their expensive barristers—knew that the real fight had been settled two weeks before, in Parliament, not during the long, drawn-out, stupendously dull copyright trial. I’m sure that some clever lobbyist had decided, back when, that it would be incredibly effective: first, they’d defeat TIP-Ex; then they’d get a judgment against me for millions, then they’d bring criminal charges against me and put me in jail, and every horrible pirate in the land would tremble in terror at the awful fate awaiting anyone who crossed the almighty Content Barons.
But TIP-Ex was law, there would be no criminal prosecution, and the election was on in three weeks and not one single “rogue MP” had been chucked out of her or his party. Letitia had already promised another Private Member’s Bill, if reelected, that would legalize remix videos. She told me that half the party power-brokers wanted to sack her and the other half wanted her to be the next Prime Minister. In any event, her constituents had turned up to her surgeries in hordes to tell her how happy they were with her.
I reckon I’ll work on the election. Here in Bow, our MP was one of the ones who took the day off work, which is better than having voted against us. Maybe I’ll campaign for her. Or maybe I’ll go to Bradford and help Cora campaign for the poor bastard whose office she’d been haunting ever since I went to London.
“Are you coming out to Hester’s cinema night?” I asked 26. I’d been texting her all day without a reply, so I finally broke down and called her. I knew she was working at the bookstore, but I needed to know so I could make plans with Chester and Dog, who each had a film in at the screens Hester had got permission to stick up in a community center in Brixton, where she lived.
“No,” 26 said tensely.
“You okay?”
She covered the mouthpiece and I heard her have a muffled conversation with someone. “Just a sec,” she said, and I heard her go into the back room of the store and up the little stairs that led to the tiny storeroom and loo.
“Cecil,” she said.
I could tell from her tone of voice that this was going to be bad. I got that tingly feeling again, but this time there was nothing at all pleasant about it. “26?”
“I’ve decided on where I’m going to go for uni,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Oh,” I said.
“The thing is, I had this talk with my dad—my biological dad—and he told me loads of stuff he’d never said before, about how terrible he felt about letting me down, and how not getting to know me was the biggest regret in his life, and—”
I could hear that she was crying. I wished I could be there to hold her.
She snuffled. “Sorry. Sorry. Okay, well, the thing is, I don’t think I ever got over his going away, never got over feeling rejected. I mean, like, I thought I had, but when I spoke to him—”
“So you’re going to go to Glasgow?”
“No,” she said. “That would be a little too close. But Edinburgh has a brilliant law school. And I’d sent them an application, just as a kind of Plan B, and, well, they accepted me, and—”
“Scotland’s not that far away,” I said.
She made a choked sound. “It’s far, Cec. I know loads of girls who graduated last year and went away to places that are close, Reading or Oxford, and none of them stayed with their boyfriends. It was a disaster for all of them.”
“We’re different—”
“Everyone thinks they’re different.”
“But you and I, all the things we did, they are different—did any of your mates get a bloody law passed before moving away to bollocky Reading?”
I was marshalling my arguments, laying them out in my head, getting ready to deliver them like it was a debate, and I was going to use logic to convince her.
She made the tiniest of laughs. “I know, I know. But Cecil, I have to do this, do you understand that? Dad called me when he heard the news about TIP-Ex, told me how proud he was of me, told me all these things I’d waited so long to hear, and—”
And I realized this wasn’t a debate. It wasn’t a discussion. It was an announcement. The world dropped away from me and my whole body started to shake.
She didn’t say anything else. Inside, I wanted to shout, “He abandoned you! He’s a copper! It’s cold in Scotland!” I also wanted to whimper: Don’t leave me all alone. But I said neither.
“’Course I understand,” I said. “’Course I do.” I swallowed hard a couple times. “You coming to Hester’s, then?”
“You go without me,” she said. “I’ve got to break it to my parents.”
“See you soon then?”
“Sure,” she said.
But we didn’t. Something happened—growing up, winning, her dad—whatever, and for me, it was the summer of heartbreak. There was plenty of work to do, plenty to keep busy with, but I didn’t make another film until the winter finally set in and the sun started to set at four in the afternoon and the rain shitted down your neck every time you left the house.
And then, I did make a film. And another. And another.
And now, I’ve got to go and make another.
ALSO BY CORY DOCTOROW
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction
(with Karl Schroeder)
Essential Blogging
(with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott, and Mena G. Trott)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
A Place So Foreign and Eight More
Eastern Standard Tribe
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
Little Brother
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
The Rapture of the Nerds
(with Charles Stross)
About the Author
Cory Doctorow is a coeditor of Boing Boing and a columnist for multiple publications, including The Guardian, Locus, and Publishers Weekly. He was named one of the Web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His award-winning YA novel Little Brother was a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Canada, he currently lives in London.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PIRATE CINEMA
Copyright © 2012 by Cory Doctorow
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Andy and Michelle Kerry/Trevillion Images
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor Teen Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-2908-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781429943185 (e-book)
First Edition: October 2012
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chap
ter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Also by Cory Doctorow
About the Author
Copyright
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Also by Cory Doctorow
About the Author
Copyright
Pirate Cinema Page 40