Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  “But we've got to assume that not all of them will be accepted,” I countered.

  “So what? They want to be Y.T.s: they deserve to be given up.”

  “No. I don't think that's fair. Just because they were thinking of working with the Government didn't mean that they did. And if we publish their names, then they'll never have a chance to do the right thing. They'll be branded traitors, and people will never give them a second chance.”

  “I'm really not convinced,” said Mo, sounding not only unconvinced, but quite unhappy, as well. “Look, these are people we're out to get, aren't they? The people who see themselves as the 'leaders', trying to squash us 'germs'.” His voice was rising.

  “No. The people we're out to get are the ones who are doing the damage. The Government. And the ones who are trying to turn people against each other.” I was getting angry, too, my voice rising in response to his. “Making them distrust each other and splitting up families and friendships. Which I'd like to point out they're doing a great job of, right now.” As the last few words came out of my mouth, I realised what I'd said.

  There was silence down the other end of the line.

  “Look, ...” I started, “... I didn't mean...” But there was a click from the phone and the line went dead.

  Idiot, I berated myself, idiot.

  I hadn't meant us, obviously: I'd meant, well, I'd meant people in the rest of the school. Not us. The Government was doing a great job of breaking up friendships in the school and in the rest of society. It looks like I've just managed to split us up all on my own. No help from the Government needed. Idiot.

  I felt terrible for Mo. Just hours after he'd admitted that he had no friends, I'd manage to break up the only friendship that he did have: ours. He was going to be really upset, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. But a bigger problem, in the short term, at least, was that he might decide to publish the names despite me. Or possibly to spite me.

  I put the phone down in its cradle and got up from the bed. And then sat back down on the bed and picked the receiver back up. I'd not known that it was even called a receiver until Mo had told me, a couple of weeks ago. I shook myself out of my reverie and pressed “1”. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. He wasn't going to answer.

  Chapter 8 – Do you trust your parents?

  I did my homework, distractedly, making more mistakes than I should have done, angry at myself, the Government, the Enforcers, and reasons I couldn't quite work out, with Mo as well. I had supper on my own in the kitchen, as Mum was out, and tried to decide whether I should try calling Mo again before going to bed. For all I knew, he might have been trying to call me while I was downstairs, eating. I was pretty sure that he hadn't been calling me while I was doing my homework, because I'd kept half an eye on the receiver light, glancing over from time to time. But maybe I'd missed him when I'd been out of my room.

  After a little thought, I decided that I should give it a go. I wanted to explain that it wasn't our friendship I'd been talking about when I'd explained about the Enforcers – just, well, others. I'd noticed other people around school looking suspiciously at their friends. But … I'd been angry, I admitted to myself. Maybe I did mean us, a little bit. But he'd got even more upset, and it was my fault. And there was the danger that he might have published the names. If he's done that, I'm going to be really, really angry.

  I could feel myself getting upset, even at the thought of it, and quickly did a search online for news on our school: nothing. I then did a different search on Young Enforcers: again, nothing new beyond the boasts about the numbers of new recruits. I forced myself to breathe slowly and not to get cross about something which it didn't seem he had even done. That way lies madness, and I'm basically accusing him of doing something because he can, not because he did. It's pretty much the same as what he was saying about the pupils from our school who went to see the Enforcers, but hadn't actually joined up. Aaargh! Why does it take a boy to wind me up so much?

  I picked up the phone. Dialled “1”. And waited, listening to the ring tone, hoping Mo would pick up. Nothing. I left the phone at the side of my bed, not even bothering to put it away before heading to bed and turning the light off.

  Sleep took a long time coming that night, and I had some seriously weird dreams. When I woke up, Mum had come back, but was late in and had left a note to let her sleep, so I was effectively on my own. I grabbed a cup of tea, brought it back upstairs to my room, checked to see if there was anything to suggest that Mo had published the names, and was about to head back downstairs to get some breakfast when I noticed the light on the phone receiver blinking to itself.

  Lunging across my room and landing on my bed, I bounced, hit my head on the wall, and knocked the receiver from its cradle. I swore – both because of the pain of the body-wall collision and from the frustration of having missed the phone. I recovered myself, lay on the bed and scooped the receiver from the floor.

  “Hello?” I managed, trying to be quiet in case I'd already woken Mum.

  “You OK there?” asked Mo, hesitantly.

  “Um, yeah. OK. Just hit my head,” I explained.

  “All right. You just don't tend to swear like that. Anyway...”

  “Wait,” I interrupted him.

  He stopped, waiting for me to continue.

  “Look, I'm really sorry about last night. What I meant was – well I didn't mean us. I wasn't talking about us, OK?” I paused. He was silent. “I was talking about the school, and, well...”

  “Forget that.” It was his turn to interrupt me. “That's not important.”

  Really? I thought. You hung up on me last night, I kept trying to contact you, and I hardly slept last night, and it's not important? No, calm down, Lena, I told myself. You don't know what he's been thinking. Let him carry on.

  “OK,” I managed, with some effort. “What is important, then?”

  “You were right. We mustn't publish the names,” he said, urgently.

  “We shouldn't? You kept saying last night that we should!”

  “I know. That was then. I was wrong: you were right. But not for your reasons,” he insisted.

  “Not for my reasons?”

  “Well, maybe. I don't know. The point is that your reason wasn't the important one,” he explained. Well, explained in his head, anyway. I had no idea what he was on about.

  I decided to go with it. If he was over the upset last night, then I supposed that I could be, as well. “So, what was the important reason, then?”

  “It's obvious.” (Yeah, right.) “If we publish details of everybody who went to see the Enforcer recruiters in our school, what will be missing?”

  “I don't know. What?” He clearly had some idea, though, and I was beginning to understand how he liked to share ideas he'd come up with.

  “Details of everybody who's gone to see the recruiters in all the other schools they've visited.”

  I got it. And I was embarrassed that he'd spotted it, and I hadn't, because it really was obvious. “So, if anybody spots that we've published the names...” I started.

  “Even if they can't work out who got the information, or who published it,” he continued.

  “...Then it's going to draw attention to us,” I completed the thought. “Well, I'm not sure that's a more important reason than my one,” (I wasn't going to give in that easily) “but it's right up there. It's a different kind of reason,” I conceded. “So, what do we do?”

  “I need to see if I can get into the Enforcers' database of the people they've recruited, but I'm not sure it's going to be easy. I've been nosing around already, and it seems to be on one of the most secure systems out there,” explained Mo.

  “If it's extra secure, that means that they think it's important, right?” I asked.

  “Yup. But it also means that they may have some monitoring systems around it, too. Which is bad, obviously.”

  Obviously. Not. This time, really not. I had no idea what he was talking about. “I hav
e no idea what you're talking about, honestly.”

  I thought that he might get upset about that, and that I might have gone too far again, but luckily he just slowed down and talked to me as if I were a bit stupid. Given that we'd only just apologised – well, sort of – I decided to let it go. This time. “It's simple. If you've got important information, you don't just protect it with layers of defensive security: you put some systems around it to watch it. Passive systems to see if it gets attacked and record what goes on. Or active systems to try to backtrack the attacks in real time.”

  “Or both?” I hazarded.

  “Or both,” he agreed. “And although there are things I can do to try to avoid being traced, I can't always tell, particularly if the systems are defensive, if there’s a trace in place. So I try to avoid going after really well-defended systems.”

  “Good. That's sensible.” More sensible than I would have expected, to be honest, but I don't need to say that.

  “So, I'm not sure there is much we can really do,” he concluded.

  So we decided that the best we could realistically do was wait until it the Enforcers decided who they were actually going to recruit. It might be nobody, or it might be several people, and there was always the worrying possibility that they might recruit somebody to work for them undercover, someone who we wouldn't spot. Or, more accurately, who we wouldn't be sure about. Given that we knew all of the people who'd been into the hall, I knew that neither Mo nor I would ever fully trust them or be sure that they hadn't been recruited.

  “C?” came Mo's voice.

  “Um, yes?”

  “What if people go to see them outside school time?” he asked. “What if they've already gone, and there are already Y.T.s in the school?”

  “Good question. I'm not sure that they would have bothered to send a recruitment squad if they already had someone in the school, do you?”

  “I don't know. Why should I know how they think?” he was getting a little bit defensive again.

  “It was more of a rhetorical question. But even if they didn't have someone before, there isn't much we can do to know if somebody goes to visit them afterwards. I think we're going to have to live with that. We're just going to need to keep being careful,” I suggested.

  “OK.”

  We were both quiet for a while, becoming aware of the fact that any of our classmates could betray us at any point. Or even our teachers. Or even...

  “Do you trust your Mum, C?” Mo asked, hesitantly.

  He seemed worried that I might be offended, but I realised that it was an entirely fair question. She's a police officer, after all, and if you didn't know her, you might expect her to be at least sympathetic to the Government and the Enforcers. “I trust her. I mean, I really do trust her – completely. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to tell her what I'm doing. I don't think it would be sensible, and I don't think it would be fair on her. And she might try to stop us. Do you think that’s fair?”

  He thought for a while. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  There was an obvious question for me to ask, so I did. “What about you? Do you trust your parents?”

  Again, silence, and then, in a quiet voice, I heard him say, “No. No, I don't. I honestly don't think they care much what I do, most of the time. But if they found out about this – well, I can't be sure that they wouldn't give me up.”

  “To the Enforcers?” Silence. “Oh, Mo.” I couldn't help myself: I had to use his name.

  “And that's why I need a friend.” He almost whispered the words.

  I waited, but he didn't say any more. “I'll be your friend. I will.” I said. This time, when he put the phone down, I knew he wasn't angry with me. And this time, I cried.

  Chapter 9 – Looking around somewhat furtively

  Luckily Mum hadn't woken up, so I didn't need to explain the tears, or the fact that I took ages over breakfast. After clearing up the table – and my face – I did make it into school, but late. That wasn't like me, though – I'm usually embarrassingly well-behaved – so I didn't expect to be called to Ms Martin's office. Which meant, I realised, that I was probably being summoned for some other reason. Given her attitude to the Enforcers in assembly the day before, I wasn't too worried that she was about to turn me in – even if she'd found anything out – but as I sat on the chairs waiting for all the other pupils to be processed through her office, I began to doubt myself and my own logic. What if someone has said something, or what if the Enforcers have told her to pull me in? But there didn't seem to be any sign of any Enforcers, so I forced myself to relax a bit.

  I was last in, and wished that I'd brought along a book to read or something to do, as I was waiting for nearly twenty minutes. A boy from year seven, who had looked a little cocky going in, exited looking rather crestfallen. He looked around, saw me, and told me to go in. I got up, walked over to the door and pushed it open.

  Ms Martin looked up, and seemed a little surprised to see me. “Everybody else gone?”

  “Yes, Ms Martin. I'm the last,” I replied.

  “All right, then. Take a seat.” She motioned to a chair to the side of her desk, rather than the one directly in front of it, which suggested to me that she wasn't going to be telling me off. Or at least that she doesn't want me to think that I was being told off, which wasn't quite the same thing. I'd read something in one of the books about tricks that people play on each other with body language, positions of furniture and that sort of thing, but I'd not been paying that much attention. I wished I had, now, and could remember more of it. She swivelled her chair round to face me, and wheeled across a bit so the desk didn't sit between us at all. Putting us on a similar footing. Though her chair's still higher than mine, I noticed. Still a power imbalance.

  She didn't seem to be in a hurry to say anything, though. In fact, she seemed to be trying to work out what she should say: it was almost as if she were a bit nervous. Really weird. I thought I'd better start things off. “I'm really sorry for being late to school, Ms Martin.”

  She almost jumped. “What?”

  “I was late to school this morning,” I explained. “I'm really sorry. It shouldn't happen again. I mean, I'm hardly ever late. I can't think of the last time I was late. I mean, I had a doctor's appointment last term, but that was planned. I'm sure my Mum told Mr Rudge about it.”

  I was babbling: her nervousness seemed to have rubbed off on me. But the mention of Mum seemed to bring her out of her reverie. “Ah, yes, your mother. That’s what – who – I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “My mother?” I replied, in surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “Not being late to school?”

  “No, no. Don't worry about that. I'll deal with that if your teachers get stressed about it,” she insisted.

  “Um – OK. Thanks. But what about my Mum?”

  “She goes to church, doesn't she?” Ms Martin asked.

  “Err. Yes. We both do.”

  “Right. And she knows Reverend Denise? Quite well? I seem to remember she mentioned something about that, once.”

  This conversation was getting really weird. I had literally no idea what she wanted, but, whatever it was, it didn't seem to be about me, which was just fine as far as I was concerned. Staying out of trouble was high on my list of priorities. Anyway, I nodded in response to her questions: not only did Mum and Denise, our local vicar, get on rather well, but she was my godmother, and we'd sometimes go round for supper at her and her husband’s house.

  "That's good," said Ms Martin, before lapsing into silence.