by Mike Bursell
“My parents are back,” Mo whispered, “talk tomorrow.” He put the phone down, and I was left holding a gently buzzing receiver. I replaced it put the phone under my bed, pushing it back into place. We're getting somewhere, I thought to myself, next step is planning what we can do to make a difference out there.
Chapter 5 – And if you ever see me wearing pink
Now that we had a way to communicate, Mo and I chatted most nights. We could be pretty sure that no-one was listening in, of course, and so this was much safer than using the dead letter drops. We started out ignoring each other completely at school, avoiding being paired for tasks in class, for instance, until I realised that going out of our way not to be seen together could be as obvious as spending lots of time with each other. This sneaking business around was more difficult than I'd originally expected. From then on, we tried to interact normally with each other: in other words, not much, but not avoiding each other, either. But in the evening, we got together, and we schemed.
One of the first things that Mo wanted was to find out why I'd given him the name 'Floyd'. “It's a bit random.”
“That's the point. There shouldn't be any obvious connection.” The reason that I'd come up with it was that I'd been sitting on the floor in the hall when he'd first called, thinking about how much more comfortable it would be if I could sit on my bed instead, and remembered what would be directly in front of me if I was on my bed. It was a vintage poster that Mum had bought me a couple of birthdays ago, before the Government had brought in the worst of the changes. It was from a seriously old band and printed on fabric, rather than paper. It showed a set of marching hammers, and a screaming face, and the words “Pink Floyd” above “The Wall”. She'd explained that it was from an album that had come out on vinyl when she was a kid, and that she'd always liked a particular song: “Another Brick in the Wall”.
Of course, I'd had to find out more, and had listened to the song again and again. It was still on a play list I went through from time to time, but the song itself was now officially banned by the Government for “encouraging youthist sentiments”. “Youthist” was a word they'd coined to describe anybody who embraced the idea that young people should have rights: the very ones that they, the Government, were busy taking away from us. It was one of their strongest condemnations. Older "youthists" were among those most likely to get their children taken away from them and put into the Child Internment Camps, but there were sporadic reports of those on National Service engaging in "youthist" anti-Government protests, too.
The other thing I'd had to find out was what the heck the phrase “came out on vinyl” meant. It turns out that in those days, all music was released in physical form on flat black plates of plastic with ridges cut in them. It wasn't even digital. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but look it up: it's for real.
Anyway, I could see why the Government had banned it, along with the whole album: it was pretty much a manifesto against control by adults and a central government. Mum had told me that it was considered subversive even when she was a kid. I wasn't sure how many people would know the song, but it had given me an idea of a tag for Mo: “That's why you should be 'Floyd',” I told him, explaining why. I ended up playing the song down the phone to him, and despite the terrible quality of the line, he wanted to hear the whole thing.
The next day, I put a copy on a mini memory drive, and left it in one of the dead letter drops for him to listen to, and when he called me that night, a little later than usual, he agreed to the name. “Love the song,” he explained, “that's why I was late calling: just kept listening to it. Oh, and if I'm Floyd, shouldn't you be 'Pink'? Then we'd be Pink and Floyd: Pink Floyd,” he suggested, enthusiastically.
“When did you ever see me wear pink?” I asked, levelly.
“Um,” I could almost hear him thinking. “Never?”
“Right. And if you ever see me wearing pink, you have my permission to kill me.” I paused, before continuing in what I hoped was my most menacing voice. “Which is exactly what I'll do to you if you ever try calling me that. Clear?”
He gulped. “Clear.”
“Right then," I said, moving to a more normal tone of voice to clear that air, "now that's sorted, let's get down to business.”
"Business" meant working through the sets of plans that we'd been starting to draw up for things we could do to damage the Government. Mo had, luckily, not started any serious attacks before I'd got to him. He was most interested in finding ways to get at the Government, whereas I was most interested in ensuring that he didn't get caught, which seemed like the basis for a good partnership. He started coming up with ways to damage the Government, and I worked on ways to protect him - and us.
He started sharing his ideas, and it quickly became clear that there were a variety of different ways that we could hurt the Government – and not all of them were direct. My very first task was to ruled out all those which seemed to likely to lead back to him, or which he couldn't promise were safe. Then we started to separate the remaining ones into different types of attacks: damaging, undermining and educating. Damaging was making direct attacks on the Government, doing things which would make their life difficult, disrupt their work, or stop them managing their day-to-day affairs. Undermining was doing things that would make them look stupid, make other people disapprove of what they were doing, or even encourage foreign countries to stop supporting them. Education was a category that I came up with, though Mo was quick to contribute his own ideas. We realised that although we'd been lucky in finding sources of information that helped us realise how misguided the Government were, and to come up with ways to undermine them, we needed to help other people – particularly young people – to come to the same conclusion.
One thing we both agreed on early in our discussions was that we should embrace the principle of “non-violent protest”. We didn't want to hurt people, and felt strongly that if we did ever get into a position where we were harming others, we were stooping to exactly the same level as the Government. What's more, it would be much easier for them to justify violence against us if we were seen to be using it against them or anybody else. I'd read Emmeline Pankhurst's book on Women's Suffrage, and had found out how the British Suffragettes had turned public opinion against the Government by refusing to meet violence with violence, and reckoned that this could be a good tactic for us as well.
First, though, I needed to come up with a way to let Mo prove himself. To be honest, given what he'd done with the telephones, I was pretty impressed already, but I certainly wasn't going to let him know that. And, being a boy, he needed to find a way to show off. This didn't bother me, and if it gave us a chance to hit out at the Government, then fantastic.
“I've got an idea,” said Mo.
“And?” I asked.
“Well, it's a 'damage' attack. I think it's time that someone did something to the Government. They're certainly hurting other people.”
“You saw the news last night?”
“Yes, I saw it.” There had been a report about some “Youthists” rioting somewhere further North: Newcastle, I think it was. Some administrative mess-up by the Government had meant that they hadn't been paid even the pittance that people were entitled to on National Service, and had decided to do something about it by walking on the central Enforcer station in the city. They were met with tear gas, water cannon, dogs, horse charges and rubber bullets. At least, the report on the television had said that the Enforcers were using rubber bullets, not live rounds, but the number of people who shown lying in the street, unmoving, after the riot was over suggested that this may not have been entirely true. I could see why Mo wanted to do something.
“So,” I asked, “what have you got in mind?”
“I thought that shutting down all the numbers for Newcastle Enforcers for 24 hours would be a start,” answered Mo.
“You can do that?”
“Oh, that's easy. The difficult bit will be tracking the numbers of all the
people who phone any Newcastle Enforcers that day, and redirecting their calls to the Australian Centre for Peace Studies at 40 times the normal telephone rate. And any calls that the Enforcers make from their phones, of course.”
“You can do all of that, too?”
“Ooooh, yes.” He sounded smug, and I could understand why: it was a seriously nice plan. Obviously, I was careful not to let him know that I thought that: I do have principles.
“Right, so how do you do it?”
He started launching in on a technical discussion of how he'd break into the central Government telephone directory, and work out from there which mobile numbers to shut down, but I stopped him. First of all, I wasn't that interested in the technical details, which I was pretty sure would get well beyond me in about another minute and a half. Or less. Second, that wasn't what I was interested in. I tried again: “Not what I meant. What system will you use?”
“To launch the attack?”
“Yes.”
“Like I said, I'll break into the central Government telephone directory...”
“I heard that,” I interrupted. “And what system will you do that from?”
“Um, my machine.”
“Your home computer?”
“Yes. My home computer. The one I'm sitting in front of now.”
“The one in your bedroom?”
“Well, it's connected to another one in the attic, which I've hidden so that people can't find it easily, but yes, basically.”
“You've hidden it so that if people come looking for it, they can't find it?”
“Yes.”
“Floyd?”
“Um, ... yes?” He still had to think about answering to Floyd.
“You're an idiot.”
“What?”
“You're an idiot. What happens if someone tracks the attack on the telephone directory to that computer?”
“Difficult.”
“Or the attacks you make on the Enforcers' phones?”
“Also difficult.”
“Or the attacks to divert to the Australian peace thingy?”
“All difficult.”
“Impossible?”
“No. But very difficult.”
“Three 'difficults' make it rather a lot easier, don't they? And if you want to perform other attacks, in the future? Won't it make it easier and easier for them to track you if you keep using the same machine every time?”
He was a little hurt now, because he knew he should have thought of this on his own. I could tell, because he didn't say anything, which really, really wasn't like him.
“Might they be able to catch you? In the long term?”
“They might,” he admitted, sulkily.
“So, let's find a way to make sure they don't, shall we? Let's hide your tracks. I tell you what, I'll give you 10 minutes, and then I'm going to call you back. Bet I can think of a better way than you can to stop them working out where you're coming from.”
I put down the phone. There was no way that I was going to have a better idea than he would, of course, and I obviously didn't have a clue how he might do it, but the plan was two-fold: first, to get him thinking for himself, which he seemed pretty bad at remembering to do, and second, to give him a chance to prove that he was better than a girl, thereby forgetting that I'd called him stupid. See, I'm quite nice really.
It took a little under 8 minutes for him to phone me back.
“C? I've got it.”
“OK – you tell me your idea, and if mine's better, then I'll let you tell you what I've come up with.”
“Well, we need to make sure that we're going through a bunch of different machines, and we need to make sure that those machines change each time.”
I made "agreeing" little noises as he set out and explained his plans to make sure that there would be always at least 3 computers between his home machine and the machine that he was going to be attacking. He'd forgotten the embarrassment that he'd felt before as he got excited and engrossed in a new plan which he'd come up with on the spur of the moment. It was a good plan, too, and I was pleased that he'd focussed on it, but I needed to remind myself that he needed prodding in the right direction from time to time. After a while, I couldn't interrupt him if I'd wanted to: he was in a world of his own. But it seemed to help him to be able to say it out loud, so I kept quiet and just listened, understanding less and less of what he said as he went more and more technical.
After about five minutes, though, I heard something which I realised I could make sense of: “wait, Floyd: say that again, would you?”
He paused. “What I was saying is that I need a base: some sort of organisation that I can infiltrate and use like a springboard. I want to keep a buffer, a set of machines that I can really own, take control of, and use to jump off to others, which will actually make the attacks. If I control them completely, then I'll be able to see if the Government is getting close to me, and will be able to cover my tracks and stop them getting any closer.”
“OK, I get it. Any thoughts?”
“Nah, not really.”
“How about the school?”
He was silent for a moment. “Ooh, I like it. Nice thinking, C.”
Another couple of seconds of silence allowed me to get another few words in. “Think it'll work?”
“It should. Yes, it should. I know a little about the systems already: they're not that secure, but I've never bothered messing with them because they didn't seem like that much of a challenge.”
“Is there anyone at the school who might have a good enough understanding of security that they might notice that you were in there? In there virtually, that is.”
Mo thought for a while. “No. No-one. Mrs Banks” (the ITC teacher) “is rubbish: she hardly knows how to turn the machines on, let alone keep them even vaguely locked down. And given the state they were in last time I had a glance over their systems, whoever it is who comes in to update the software once a year is clueless, too. None of the pupils would be able to get into the areas that I'd be setting up and controlling, either: it's really safe. What's more, they're even close enough that if I need physical access to them, I could do that, too. I can set up alternative routing rules in the switches if I need to...,” and he was off again.
Chapter 6 – Think sewage
And so began our first attack. I'd expected it to be exciting, but it turned out to be exactly the opposite. We'd agreed on the plan on Friday night, which had given Mo most of the weekend to break into the school systems and arrange the other machines that he'd need. Mo and I had agreed that it made most sense to launch it while we were at school, so he'd set it all up on the Sunday night, had explained it to me on the land-line. – I'd caught maybe a quarter of it, and that was only when he was trying hard to make the explanation simple – and had prepared a timer to kick it off about an hour and a half after we got into school on Monday morning. We'd agreed that although this meant it would be difficult for us to track how it was going, there was less likelihood of it being traced to us, as the Government were unlikely to guess that it was being carried out by anyone who was at school at the time.
At the end of the third lesson, he took the chance to brush past me on his way to out to the toilets. “It's a 'go',” is all he said, holding up his phone, which was showing a text message with one word: “Yes.”. That had been sent by his home machine 10 minutes after it managed to start things successfully, and was, we'd decided, an acceptable risk, as it would be difficult for anyone to correlate all the different actions.
We'd planned to chat that evening, but were overtaken by events. At lunch, a rumour started going down the queue that something was up. My blood ran cold: had we been discovered this quickly, on our first attack? Had we messed up that spectacularly? There was a TV up on the wall in the dinner hall, tuned to the BBC news feed – an “innovation” that the Government had forced on all schools – and I noticed people were looking up at it. I was too far away to be able to hear the sound, b
ut I could make out the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. I caught it halfway through: