Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  “What does this mean, Mum?” I asked, but she waved me quiet with her hand, at the same time leaning closer to the screen on the opposite wall. The video changed from the pictures of kids being taken away to showing them lining up to go through a set of metal gates. They all looked confused, and many of them were crying, the younger ones even clutching a few possessions like teddy bears and dolls: not the sort of reporting that the government generally liked to see. But if this was bad, then what was to come was even worse. I felt Mum tense next to me as the camera zoomed out, and we could see that the children were being processed by some bored but still scary-looking people in Enforcers' uniforms. (“Why aren't those police officers...?” whispered Mum to herself.) The camera zoomed out again, and we saw where they were headed: a camp, surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire, with dogs patrolling the borders. A clip of the Prime Minister came on, looking serious and determined.

  “Oh, God,” breathed Mum, who never swore or used language like that. “He hasn’t. He couldn’t do this.” She reached across to me, and clasped me tight, just as her phone went off. She let me go, leant over to the table on the side, and grabbed it, looking to check who it was. I couldn't see, but from her reaction, it wasn't someone she wanted calling her right then.

  “Oh, God,” she said again, and then answered it. She listened for a few seconds, then said, “yes, sir” twice, and hung up. I was looking at her, half watching the pictures on the screen, but she turned my face towards her and looked me straight in the eye.

  “I have to go out. You mustn't call anyone. You mustn't call anyone. You mustn't discuss what you've just seen. You mustn't send any emails, message anyone, do any web searches. Nothing. Do you understand? We'll talk this over in the morning, I promise, OK?” I nodded, and she ran upstairs and changed back into her uniform. I thought she was going to head off without saying goodbye, but before she left, she came and squatted by the sofa where I was still sitting, watching the news.

  “Lena?” she said, looking into my eyes as I turned to face her.

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “You know I love you, don't you?”

  This wasn't one of those times to joke. “Yes. I do, Mum. And I love you, too.”

  “If you need me, really need me, call me. Tell me: any time. OK, just tell me. I'll come, I promise.”

  “I know, Mum. I love you.”

  She gave me a kiss on the forehead, got up, and headed off into the night.

  I didn't see her for 3 whole days.

  The first and second of those days had been a weekend, so I'd kept myself to myself and ate whatever happened to be in the house. I didn't do any web searches, but I watched the news feeds, and did a lot of thinking. On the Sunday evening I had a message from Mum: “Hope to be home tomorrow: so sorry. Love you. Remember instructions: very important. Mum.” I got the impression that there was more that she would have liked to have said. Normally, she'd have been more explicit about what she wanted me to do, and she wasn't one for short messages, generally, having been brought up when email was still a big thing. I wondered what she'd been called into work to do, and whether she'd been involved in the children's camps: I hoped not, for her sake. The feeds since had nothing new, really: just the government trying to explain that this was actually in everybody's best interests: the parents could be sure that their children were being properly looked after (with the implicit suggestion that they hadn't been doing a particularly good job of it on their own); the children would be safe, and receive an education which was “in line with official thinking”; and that society could be assured that they wouldn't be in danger from a “new generation of disruptive elements”.

  In short, it was propaganda. Before David Condie, the Prime Minister, and his Government did a big “clean-up” of the school syllabus, our history teacher had taught us about propaganda in Soviet Russia and Hitler's Germany. But since the Government's changes, there had been less and less discussion of propaganda, and more description of “targeted communications”. I'd done some searches on the Net a while ago, before things got really bad, and had found out quite a lot, but had recently decided that those were the sorts of searches that could get you noticed, and I really didn't want any attention like that. So I went old-school, and tried books.

  You'd be amazed what you can find in libraries. Our school library was OK, but not great, but when I went to the local town library, it was full – and I mean full – of books. I'd never seen so many in my life. I'd assumed that they'd all been got rid of – I mean, who reads books any more when you've got the Net? The books in the library had taught me about real history – not what the government made sure we got taught at school. I'd heard a few people mention at school that if you did certain searches on the school library system, or just on the Net at school, it just didn't come up with any sensible answers. Take “trade union”, for example. A trade union, we'd been taught before the Government came in, was a group of people who worked with companies to make sure that the workers – their employees – were treated fairly. But one of the first things that the Government had done was to ban them: they wanted the companies to have control, and to be able to fire workers when they wanted, and only pay them as much as they thought was right, not what was necessarily fair. So now, if you searched for “trade unions” on a school system, it returned the answer:

  Nothing found: did you mean tread onions?

  This was quite funny, at first, and people started seeing what other searches they could come up with, and what ridiculous answers they got, but it made me think. If they were blocking searches from school, what about from home? Rather than try it myself, I just happened to wonder about it in front of a Tom and Lucy, a pair of twins from another class, who almost immediately thought that they had come up with a really clever idea all on their own. They had headed straight home after school, telling anyone who would listen what they were going to do: try some searches from home which they knew were blocked from school, and see what happened. I kept quiet, rather wishing it hadn't been that easy and hoping that they didn't actually get into any real trouble.

  They came in the next morning looking worried, and properly scared. The story spread round the school in no time. When they'd got home, they'd tried searching on a whole set of words and phrases that the Government didn't approve of, like “human rights”, “justice system”, “equal opportunities” and “fair pay”. A few results had come up, but they'd been links to dull pages on Government websites, and after a few minutes, they'd given up. Around an hour later, while they were having supper, there was knock on the door, and there were two Enforcers standing outside. Not normal police officers, but Enforcers.

  I should stop for a minute and explain about Enforcers. They're like the police, but a lot worse, and most of them are armed. Even the police are scared of them: I know, because I've seen my Mum look at them out of the corner of her eye if we pass them in the street. They wear a different uniform from the proper police – it's got red stripes down the sleeves and flashes on the collar – and people say, quietly, that when the Enforcers come to visit, sometimes they take people away, and you don't see them again. I'd never met anybody who knew if this was true, but everyone was scared of them, so when they turned up at the house, the twins were terrified, and they could tell that their parents were, too.

  “May we come in, please?” asked the first Enforcer, very politely. You don't refuse a request like that from an Enforcer, so of course their parents let them the two of them in, and offered them chairs. The Enforcers sat down, and declined the offer of a drink.

  They both sat quietly, not saying anything, for a couple of minutes, with the family sitting opposite them, until the twins' Dad couldn't bear it any longer. “How can we help you?” he asked.

  “Well,” said one Enforcer, looking at the other and then back at the twins' Dad, “it's more a question of how we can help you.”

  The family looked confused, so the other Enforcer took up the conversation, as r
easonable as anything. “We're worried, you see.” He stopped.

  “About what?” blurted the twins' Mum.

  “Well, here's the thing,” said the first Enforcer. “We're worried that someone may be using your Net connection without your permission.”

  “I, I'm sure they're not, we're very careful...” started the Mum, but her husband stopped her.

  He gulped: “What makes you think that?”

  “Well,” the second Enforcer took up the thread, “it seems, from our records, that somebody has been using the Net to research material which is ...” he stopped for a moment, “how can I say this? Not...”

  “Healthy?” the first Enforcer suggested.

  “You know, that's a very good word. Not healthy. The sort of searches which aren't healthy for the people of this country, and which could do harm to the sort of people who were doing the searching. Or could cause harm to come to them.” For this last sentence, he looked very coolly, very sharply at the twins. Their parents looked at the twins, too, and then at the Enforcers.

  Their Dad was about to speak when the first Enforcer started again: “You see why we're concerned, don't you?” The parents nodded, vigorously, and then they looked at the twins. After a moment, Lucy and Tom nodded, too. “Good. So, you'll ensure that appropriate action is taken, and that this won't happen again?” He wasn't looking at the parents, but at the twins again. They all nodded.

  “Ex-cellent,” said the second Enforcer, standing up. “We'll be on our way, then.” And with that, they opened the door, and let themselves out, leaving the family sitting, shaking, on the sofa.

  I felt rather guilty, then, for planting the seed of the idea in the twins' mind, but also very, very glad that I hadn't tried it myself. As I'd suspected, the government were watching what we did online, and doing the wrong sort of things on the Net could get you some very scary attention indeed.

  Chapter 4 – The bit you talk into

  Everyone screamed, of course, when the black figures came through the windows. Nobody expects their maths lesson to be interrupted in that way – though quite a few people might hope for it – so the whole thing was quite a surprise. The crash as the glass went was mirrored by a bang as the class-room door exploded inwards, followed by another four members of the security forces.

  I'd assumed, when Mo and I had been planning this, that we'd have to pretend to be shocked, but we were screaming with the rest of the class. And, of course, Mr Jeffreys. Ah, Mr Jeffreys. Brave Mr Jeffreys. Brave, foolish Mr Jeffreys. We really hadn't planned for him or what he might do: it hadn't occurred to us to think beyond the likely reactions of the pupils in the class. But as the room filled with black figures, scanning the room from behind their googles and gas masks, panning their stubby little machine-guns around the pupils, Mr Jeffreys took control. After an initial scream, like the rest of us, he shouted: “Children, hands on your head, hands on your head.”

  After my initial surprise at his saying anything – and at the men with guns, of course – I decided that Mr Jeffreys seemed to be following quite a sensible course of action, but it seemed that not everybody agreed. Five of the gun-men immediately turned to face him, while the others focused on the class. The ones around him then squirted something in his face, two of them pulled out telescopic batons, and hit the back of his legs until he collapsed to the ground, paused for a breath and then started hitting him repeatedly round the head until he stopped moving.

  By the time he was on his knees, most of us had gone quiet, staring at the scene in front of us, but when they started hitting him again, people started screaming again. Two of the boys – not Mo, I noticed, despite everything going on around me – started towards him, but they were waved back by guns. Four of the black suits then picked Mr Jeffreys up and carried him out, the others waiting in the room, covering us with their scary weapons. And I think that's when I realised quite how much trouble we were in, and exactly what I'd started.

  You see, Mo and I had planned this for quite a long time, and this was part of a much larger plan. Once we'd made initial contact, there was lots I wanted to ask him. I wanted to find out how good he really was, and how much damage he could do. I wanted to find out how much he'd actually done already, and whether there was any danger that he might be under suspicion. But the first problem I had, after hooking Mo, was to talk to him safely. I had some ideas about what we could do together, but lots of them would be useless if people knew that we were working together. We needed to find a way to get together – or at least communicate – without anybody else knowing.

  A few months before, this wouldn't have been too difficult, but the problem was the controls that the Government had recently put in place. Now, all people in the UK under the age of 28, and over the age of 2, had to carry a “personal remote identification device”. That meant carrying an electronic device of some type which the Government could use to track you, wherever you were. And that usually meant a phone, though companies quickly brought out special devices for use by younger children. But whoever you were, and wherever you went, you had to have one on you. And if you didn't, your parents or guardians could end up in jail. And, as of the past few weeks, you could end up in one of the new “Children's Internment Camps”. So if the Government could track your phone, they could track you, which meant that there was no easy way to meet up in secret – and if we met where other people were, then we might be recognised together.

  Surely, you might say, we could have phoned each other, or chatted over the Net? I think not. Even the least aware kid in the school knew the Government tracked all of the conversations you had with other people.

  Not to say that the Government listened to every phone call you made, or even recorded all of them – there's no way the would have had enough man-power, or even computer-power, to manage that. But if they could work out who was talking to whom, then they could start recording, and you'd never know that they were tracking you until it was too late: they'd be onto you. Even more, they might not even need to listen in: they could trawl over the phone records and spot when certain people talked together rather more often than might have been expected, or combine that information with details of when their phones had been close to each other, suggesting that those people had been meeting. That would be enough to raise suspicions, and get them watching you. And it was way easier – and cheaper – to get software to do that than employ bored Enforcers to go through millions of phone and Net records to work out who might be plotting against the Government. That's what I'd discovered, during my book reading, was called “traffic analysis”, and was part of a concerted set of activities that the government would be carrying out called “signals intelligence”, which allowed them to track information going around on phones and the Net.

  So we had to think of a way to talk. We started with something very simple, and very old style: we left notes for each other around the school. It was pretty simple, and more secure than you might think. We were careful not to sign the notes, or to address them, but we kept what used to be called “dead letter drops” in a few places where people were unlikely to look, and we'd be unlikely to be spotted checking. I'd check from time to time, and he'd do the same, and if there was a note, we'd take it.

  This was also thanks to my new book-reading habit. The stuff that I found around the town library was astonishing. Books on British and Allied spies in the Second World War – the SOE, or Special Operations Executive – and the French Resistance were some of the best. I learnt about how to avoid being followed (less useful these days, given the rules about keeping your phone with you), how to make secret messages, how to avoid being captured, and basic codes.

  It turned out that I didn't need that last bit. Mo was brilliant at codes. I'd assumed that he was only interested in recent geeky stuff – the latest machines, the latest technologies – but he'd spent years of his life learning about computers and their history from the ground up. As some of the earliest computers had been used for code-breaking, he'd
gone even further to find out more about early codes and ciphers, too, and although we couldn't be certain that people wouldn't be able to decipher our notes, the measures we were taking would give us some protection if someone found them and decided to investigate.

  I was very pleased, when investigating the library, to discover that they had very old computer systems which weren't fully hooked up to the Government's networks. I presumed that the majority of the people who used libraries were old – at least the ones I who saw in them, anyway – and not only unlikely to be of interest to the Government, but also unlikely to need up-to-date systems. The good point, of course, was that without connected systems, there was no way for anyone to track what you were searching for, or what books you'd found. The librarians I met just seemed happy to have someone using their services, and didn’t pay any attention to what I took out. I was pretty certain that the Government wouldn't be happy for me to be finding out about the tactics used in struggles like the American Civil Rights movement, or the battles for independence from the British Empire through the Twentieth Century. I learnt about villains, and there were lots of those, but also about heroes: Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, a World War II spy called “The White Rabbit” and crazy, brave lady called Josephine Baker.