The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  “The sticker is just flagging the freebie you get when you buy the laptop. Personally, I keep my Kevin in a cupboard under the stairs.”

  “You didn’t buy that laptop. And stop being a dick. That sticker says that you can’t be too careful. It says you can’t trust anyone, that if you don’t take things seriously, you’ll get caught.”

  “You need glasses, mate. They’re not going to get us. We’re good. Some of the stuff I’ve got on here, some of the things you haven’t seen, they’re going to blow your mind. SQL injection, you see that in Phrack? I’m ahead of the game.”

  Azi nodded, trying not to choke on a sudden burst of conscience. He already knew what was on Ad’s laptop. He knew because he had hacked it, last week, while Ad was doing a beer run to the nearest corner shop.

  Azi had committed this ultimate betrayal via a program called Back Orifice, developed by the fine hackers at Cult of the Dead Cow, which granted total control of any Windows system. He had also more or less managed to convince himself that he was doing this for Ad’s own protection. The very fact that Ad was running Windows was a sign he wasn’t taking things seriously. Not every sysadmin was an idiot. Not every hacker was an ally. You couldn’t trust anyone, that was the rule.

  “Are you all right there, mate? Is there something you want to tell me?” Ad sounded horribly solicitous.

  “No! I mean, yeah. Kind of. Look, mate, I’d just like you to be more careful. And I’d like to see the new stuff you’ve got. SQL injection sounds pretty cool.”

  “Yeah. But you’ve seen it already.”

  “What?”

  There was a hardness in Ad’s face that Azi had never seen before.

  “I said, you’ve seen it already. Unless you think my own mum is spying on me? I mean, I basically have to help her find spellcheck but, you know what, maybe she’s undercover? Maybe she’s an even bigger two-faced fucking liar than you. Otherwise, the number of people who could install Back Orifice on my computer is basically one.”

  “Jesus. Look.” A sickening heat spread across Azi’s body. “Look. Mate. I was worried, that was all. You’ve got to believe me, all this Mitnick stuff, the whole world is going crazy about hackers…I just wanted to keep you safe.”

  “Ask me how I knew.”

  Azi looked around his shed wildly. Nothing in it suggested any escape from this conversation. “How did you know?”

  “I have remote access to your PC. From my desktop box. Your PC used to be mine. Remember? I thought I’d keep an eye on you, mate. Added a little something to your Linux OS when you weren’t looking. Now who’s running a lame box? How does it feel, you smug prick?”

  Azi, usually the reserved one, usually the one to keep his temper, lunged ineffectually towards Ad with something between a slap and a blow—a move that, thanks to the lack of any space between their folding chairs, saw him collapse across his friend’s lap, banging his head on the desk in the process. Ad contemplated him in disgust.

  “I’ve watched you, getting cocky. Taking my stuff, thinking you know it all. Appointing yourself boss. And yeah, I saw you downloading my porn too. How was that for you, by the way?”

  Humiliated and glowing with shame, Azi scrabbled back into his seat.

  “Ad! I was worried about you. About us getting caught. What you did was…cheating.” Azi sounded pathetic even to his own ears.

  “I did it because it’s what needs to be done. Listen to yourself. Cheating? There’s no such thing as cheating. Anything goes, everything goes. I was doing you a favor. Think about it. I’m your best mate. I’m the only one who would take this kind of shit from you, who would do it back, who would tell you everything. We’re not kids anymore. The end of the summer, one month away—what’s happening? I’ll tell you what’s happening. You’re making a mistake if you do anything other than come with me to America.”

  So that was what this was about. An old argument in new clothes.

  “Jesus.” Azi tried a mollifying laugh. “Dream on. You might have the money, but all I’ve got is a couple of uni offers and a lot of application forms for financial aid and a fucking shed. I can barely afford a travelcard to Zone One.”

  Ad was implacable.

  “Uni? Waste of time and money. We should be telling them what to do! America, it’s the land of opportunity, mate, and you’ve got everything you need to make it. Fuck your offer from, what is it, the University of Outdated Bollocks. The internet, all of this, it’s going to take over the world. We are the future. We own the future. I’m your best mate, and I want you to come with me. You know I’m right. You owe me.”

  Azi sighed.

  “Look. I’m sorry I hacked your machine. I’m sorry about everything, Ad, I’m so sorry…but I’m staying here.”

  The next month, Ad was on a flight to San Francisco—and Azi was accepting an offer to study computer science in London.

  They stayed in touch, online, but it wasn’t the same. Ad seemed to expect an apology: for Azi to turn around and admit he was wrong about everything. Azi didn’t know what he expected, but he was pretty sure that Ad was a shitty friend.

  Azi followed his friend’s exploits online, as best he could, aware that their worlds were overlapping less and less. Ad had talent, dedication and imagination. But he also had an unlovely contempt for anyone and anything he considered beneath him—a category that seemed to include the senior management of every start-up he worked for.

  Ad worked brilliantly but erratically. He won a scholarship to Stanford, then dropped out. He sent Azi angry, pleading, unapologetic messages in the middle of the night. Why the fuck was Azi wasting his time in Olde England when San Francisco beckoned? Why did nobody have a sense of humor about the mysterious replacement of every image on their Friendster profile with anthropomorphic genitals?

  Now, at a distance of sixteen years, sitting inside a pitch-black box beside a bucket of his own urine, the whole thing seems ridiculous to Azi: that the most important friendship in his life fell away so fast. Then again, it turns out most things are like that. They’re there, they’re a part of who you are—and then they’re gone, never to return.

  Azi thinks about Munira, then about his mother, then about the fact that he must stop thinking about Munira and his mother in such close proximity. Not least because he needs, more than anything, to believe that only one of them is dead.

  Finally, without noticing any transition, Azi falls into a dead sleep. Through the day and then the night, the truck rolls along progressively worse roads, rocking his wedged limbs.

  An hour before dawn, the engine stops and the quality of air and light shifts. A series of shudders and blows jolt him awake into a body so stiff he can barely turn his head. There is a sense of movement, a bump and a more distant engine roar. Then silence.

  Twenty-one

  Once Azi is fully awake, his most unpleasant surprise is that the agonizing discomfort of being trapped in a crate for twenty-four hours turns out to be no big deal when compared to the yet-more-agonizing discomfort of departing said crate.

  As he starts to stretch out and return some sensation to his numbed nerve endings, it feels as if his arms and legs have been doused in molten metal. Azi bites his cheeks, chokes back involuntary tears, massages his screaming muscles and tries not to descend into hysteria. Eventually, he’s ready to kick against the sealed side of the crate. After five blows, it yields, collapsing with a thud and shudder.

  He blinks. The pain is receding, but there’s plenty of fear waiting to replace it. Has he been betrayed? Is he anywhere near the destination he specified? It’s night-time and there is little more light outside than in, but there is space—vast, needless space.

  Avoiding the bucket of urine, Azi hunches into a crawl and exits into warm dry air with a smell of pine and exhaust fumes. Car lights sketch sporadic arcs in the distance. He seems to be at the bottom of a wooded slope near a road. He seems to be thirsty, hungry and sobbing, although that comes under control as he consumes the last of his food
and water (crisps, cheese sandwich, soft drink, apple—the kind of lunchbox his mum used to pack for school trips to the Science Museum).

  If this is Athens, Azi has a lot of walking to do, although he’s not sure in which direction. He is carrying a small heap of stolen government electronics and one worse-for-wear change of clothes, and doesn’t speak or read a word of Greek. On the plus side, he has his freedom, five thousand euros cash and a destination in mind.

  With a shrug, he stumbles towards the night sky’s brightest edge.

  Four hours and eleven miles later, Azi is starting to doubt the wisdom of embarking on post-incarceration hikes through dustily huge cities on summer mornings.

  To put it mildly, he does not feel perky. Through a combination of luck and monoglot direction-begging, he has managed to trudge his way almost to his desired destination. But he is out of food and water, and hasn’t yet felt brave enough to restock.

  The result is almost hallucinogenic: a light-headedness that makes his aching body feel far away and the increasingly bright streetscape jerk like a stop-motion animation. Then again, the area he has recently entered is itself hallucinatory.

  Every exposed surface and accessible inch of plaster is a psychodrama of slogans and graffiti; a stew of ferocious public utterance and private grievance. There are images of protest, demon-headed men wielding fire, Nazis crushed by booted anti-fascists, politicians as cartoon animals and ancient philosophers in gasmasks. Welcome to Athens reads a small, flaming scrawl, next to a cursively rendered Fuck the Police. Beside these, blood-red stencils in Greek and English spell out the name of the district. ΕΞΑΡΧΕΙΑ. EXARCHIA. The last resort of those who give a fuck. Azi’s target zone.

  According to most tourist guides, Exarchia is a crime-infested hellhole packed with more or less interchangeable anarchists and addicts. According to locals, it’s an international beacon of free-thinking resistance to the debaucheries of capitalism and the rising threat of fascism. According to Vice magazine, you should check out a new place called Warehouse, which is the sort of place you’ll enjoy if you hate the word “mixologist” but enjoy getting pissed and talking shit about Marx with some guys in leather jackets.

  Most importantly, Exarchia is a place of refuge from almost everything that makes technological modernity quite so good at keeping people under control: surveillance, consumerism, social media analytics. Numbed by heat and exhaustion, Azi contemplates the streets, the nearby smell of cooking, and with famished eagerness steps towards the aroma.

  Unfortunately, Azi manages to misjudge the height difference between the curb and the road in front of him and, after attempting to balance upon several inches of empty air, crashes forehead-first into the tarmac.

  Everything goes very bright, then very dark, then somewhere in between. At some point there are friendly—or, at least, not overtly hostile—hands around his shoulders and waist. Then there is a smell he associates with hospitals and doctors’ waiting rooms. Gradually, it becomes clear to Azi that he is indeed seated in a waiting room. He is offered water, after which he feels a great deal better.

  The room he’s sitting in is small and crowded, but also cool and clean, with a tiled pale floor and animal pictures on the walls, presumably for the benefit of children. He likes it. He is being looked after. Following a considerable wait, during which the tiles and animals intermittently swim out of focus, he is ushered into a tiny back room in which a dark-haired woman sits behind a desk.

  Her fierce competence reminds him of Anna, although, once she speaks, there’s several degrees more warmth in her tone. The sounds coming out of her mouth are incomprehensible. Azi stares at her blankly, then mutters one word.

  “English?”

  She nods, shifting languages effortlessly.

  “You are lucky I studied in London. I am Dr. Eleni. Welcome. And your name and your nationality are—”

  Azi vaguely prepared for this during his wait. “Er, Ad. Adam. British.”

  “Mr. Adam British?”

  He gets the feeling that this doctor finds him amusing. “No, sorry. My name is Adam, and I am British. I’m Mr. Adam Walker.”

  “And do you have any identification?”

  To Azi’s relief, his unopened rucksack was still attached to his back when he returned to consciousness, but he has no intention of producing anything from it. So he shakes his head, after which the room takes a while to stop moving.

  “Okay. No problem, Adam, I will still examine you. Please, follow the light. With your eyes, not your head! Better. You don’t speak any Greek? Do not worry, nobody speaks Greek. I believe that you have a concussion, as well as that nasty gash. You fell over?”

  Azi tries to make his response as dignified as possible. “Off a pavement, yes. Onto a road.”

  Dr. Eleni nods in energetic sympathy, her latex-gloved fingers pursuing each other across his skull as she completes her examination. “It happens. Please try to stay still while I clean you up and ask a few questions.”

  She rattles through a list of inquiries about the date, time, identity of the US president, and how exactly Azi botched stepping off a pavement. He gets through it, earning himself some bandaging around his head and a cheerful discourse on remuneration.

  “There we are, that is better. Now, this is my clinic, and it is free for those who cannot afford it. But I would rather see a European health card and charge the government. I don’t suppose you have anything that shows your citizenship? The government cannot afford it either, but I care less about them.”

  She is, Azi reckons, a little older than him—and a great deal more grown up. Her hair is tightly curled, her skin dark under a blue cotton T-shirt. She deserves as much honesty as he can muster, but he’s not about to start unrolling grubby fifty-euro notes.

  “I’m very sorry but I really haven’t got anything.”

  Her attention intensifies. “You are not a tourist, then?”

  “Er. No…Not really. I don’t like sightseeing.”

  “You should see the Acropolis. Everyone should see the Acropolis.”

  “Right. Apart from that. I’d love to see the Acropolis, obviously.”

  With a sympathetic smile, Dr. Eleni opens a slim laptop and starts typing. At the same time, as if the two activities inexorably accompanied one another, she embarks upon a well-rehearsed monologue.

  “Only you can’t see it unless you pay twelve euros. Everyone should see the Acropolis, but this country won’t let them. It’s a crime. The streets near here used to be full of markets, full of people. But they taxed and fined and drove them out of business, to punish them. Because nobody who has real money pays anything in this country! Only the poor. I have no problem taking money from the government, despite the difficulties they are in, for this reason. So, what are you doing here?”

  Azi ventures the near-truth he has been preparing.

  “I work with computers. Web design. Bit of activism. I’m working on something, and now some people are looking for me. I came here because—”

  Dr. Eleni needs no further prompting. “Ah! Because you read about it online. I understand. I know people like you. Computer people, sitting behind your desks, changing the world on email. Until someone comes knocking at the door. Then you wake up in the real world. That is your story, yes? Well, now I will tell you about the real things you need. Food, water, rest. You are dehydrated. I assume you know nobody, that you have no resources?”

  “Yes and no,” Azi mutters with the growing sense that the more clueless he seems, the more likely it is that Dr. Eleni will make things happen.

  “I thought as much! So, I can give you a chance. If you really know computers, you may be useful. If you make yourself useful, you can find a place to stay. That is how it works, around here.” She finishes typing with a flourish. “I will make an introduction, for accommodation. They will feed you in the park if you say that Eleni sent you. You will get soft drinks. If you ask nicely.”

  Azi smiles what he hopes is his best and
most British smile.

  “I always ask nicely. It’s kind of my thing.”

  Twenty-two

  By the next morning, Azi has officially become a squatter.

  At least, he has become the most recent participant in an ongoing attempt to seek collective autonomy from dominant social structures, which—he is told—entails the rejection of all forms of state power and provision. This suits him fine. Since the financial crisis, almost a third of the housing in Athens has stood vacant, and some of the apartments and shops that haven’t turned into hipster hangouts have become a kind of anarchist-operated safety net for those at society’s sharp end. Someone wishing to avoid both official surveillance and unofficial inquisitiveness couldn’t wish for a better base.

  While “organized by anarchists” sounds like a contradiction in terms, Azi has rarely met a more disciplined bunch of people, nor a more devotedly process-driven administration. Everyone has an equal voice, everyone has a vote, and everything gets collectively debated, although woe betide the debater who hasn’t read at least one shockingly dense FAQ outlining the Anarchist Library’s international protocols for Collective Decision Making. The online resources section alone contains a giddy selection of flowcharts, and takes forty thousand words to address knotty questions like “what do anarchists think causes ecological problems?” After the two hours of debate it took yesterday to admit him on probationary terms to the building, Azi has already started thinking of ways to improve their taxonomy.