Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  Chapter 19 – Nothing if not clever

  So that's what we spent the next few days doing: planning our next attacks. And then spent a few weeks carrying them out, and after that we settled into a rhythm. We were managing between 1 and 2 attacks a week, baiting the Government, undermining them, and although Mo was enjoying coming up with new ways to embarrass them or derail a short-term plan they were rolling out, I was getting rather frustrated. We weren't making that much long-term impact, and I was aware that as we increased the annoyance level that the Government was feeling, they would also be increasing the amount of resource they'd be putting into finding us. Mo had done a very good job, so far, in keeping us hidden, but I didn't feel confident that we could keep it up for ever. And, more to the point, if we weren't actually going to stop the Government and bring down the Prime Minister, then we weren't achieving what we'd first set out to do. I wanted to do something that would make a real difference.

  After about eight months of attacks, though, something took place that would change things: Kareem arrived. Kareem was only just 18, but he was on National Service, and he was absolutely miserable.

  It was also Kareem who ended up tipping the Enforcers off, which led to the raid to take me away to a Child Internment Camp, of course, but I'm not bitter about that. In fact, when they came for Mo, who they ended up thinking was me, and took Mr Jeffreys away instead, I wondered for a while whether they were going to come back for me at all. I had a horrible fear of Kareem feeling that he needed to tap one of the Enforcers on the shoulder and point them back into the class-room to go and fetch me. But luckily, he didn't need to, and when the ones who'd left with the unconscious Mr Jeffreys came back, it took them less than two minutes to stand in front of my desk, and motion for me to stand up.

  But enough of that, and back to National Service. National Service was an old idea that the Government had dusted off, made more extreme, and made its own. The core reason that the Government had been elected in the first place was because of the problems with the economy. Over the previous decades, the governments that had been in power had kept betting on the world making more and more money, rather than less and less. All the people who'd been working over that time had set aside money for pensions, but the number of people needing pensions had grown while the number of people working to put money into the pension fund had shrunk.

  More people taking money out of the piggy bank, fewer people putting it in: not enough money. It was a pretty simple equation, which governments had tried to fix in a number of ways. The first and most obvious was to get people to work longer, so they put more money into the piggy bank. The second was to get people to put more in to the pot early on in their working life. Unluckily, people didn't want to put more of their money away in pensions which they wouldn’t, they hoped, have to touch for decades. And worst of all, as far as the Government was concerned, it also turned out that firms preferred to hire younger people, who were cheaper, rather than the people who were getting towards retirement. So the people who should have had more money to put aside, and more interest in doing so, were exactly the people who didn't have jobs when the economy went bad.

  So they had needed to come up with a new plan, and the party who ended up being elected to the Government hit on a brilliant one. For ages, political parties had tailored their messages to the people who were most likely to vote: older people. “Young people aren't as likely to vote, so why bother with them?” was the thinking. And so, instead of cutting winter fuel allowances, or free bus passes, both of which went to old people, they reduced the money spent on youth clubs, playgrounds and maternity pay. But in order really to appeal to the people most likely to vote – the older people – they decided to give them what they really wanted: security. The thinking was like this:

  Question: How do we make sure that all the jobs go to older people, rather than young people?

  Answer: Don't actually employ any young people.

  But what do you do with the young people? Well, the answer to this was National Service: you force all young people to work for almost nothing, take most of the wages they would have earned and put those into the pension fund: the piggy bank for the older people. Suddenly, you're keeping the older people happy, as they have work, and will be able to retire and have enough pension to keep them comfortable when they do. Now that you're in power, you're also careful to remove the vote from everybody on National Service, so that you're more and more likely to stay in power.

  The problem, of course, is that youth – youth, as defined by the Government, being anyone under the age of 28 – has a reputation for “unrest”. This was another of those Government propaganda words meaning that young people kick off against authority, particularly when that authority is telling you that you won't have any money, and can't do what you want. In fact, I did some research, and it turns out that most rioters, protesters, active members of resistance groups and volunteer army recruits are under 30 or so. Older people either have more sense, or have settled down and have a family that they want to look after. There was something about how “younger people have no sense of mortality”, which seems to mean that young people don't worry about dying, which seems unlikely to me, because I for one am quite happy being alive, thank you very much.

  Now, our beloved Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Mr David Condie, is nothing if not clever. Love him or hate him – well, hate him, to be honest – he had an answer to the problem that youth wouldn't like the idea of having to work for a pittance, and that answer was simple. Make them work for a pittance a long way away from anyone else they knew, and then restrict their travel, so that they couldn't get together with friends, and then move them around frequently to different jobs in different places, so that they couldn't form into groups and organise resistance against him and his Government.

  The initial announcements about National Service had focused on how this was to create opportunities for “training for the younger workforce”. And then on how the short times that the “volunteers” would be spending on each assignment would allow “multi-skilling”. And then they explained how the low pay would be “an incentive to save”. They kept very quiet about keeping the young people away from each other. And they kept even quieter about how National Service, which was originally supposed to be for three years for school leavers, was now for all people under 28. People over 28 could apply to go to university, but if they didn't, they had to take compulsory training.

  The Government hadn't taken people who were already in work out of their jobs, but they'd increased their taxes and reduced their pay so that, for almost all of them, it was much easier to move to National Service. They also made it very, very easy for companies to fire people under the age of 35, and provided retraining for older people to take over those jobs.

  When Fliss had come into school to do the assembly, and then had discussions with a few of us about “opportunities” within National Service, I had originally wondered if this was just a ruse, put together for her visit. The more I thought about it, though, the less likely it seemed: she had had lots of information at her fingertips. I'd noticed a few adverts on the Net, as well, encouraging young people to “step up” and “grasp the opportunities of National Service Volunteering in both hands”. It was crude propaganda, but it looked like the Government were looking for ways at least to pretend that “volunteering” gave you some choice, and that you could learn something useful while you were doing it. I wasn't convinced about either, to be honest, and I began to wonder if there was anything the Government could say that I would ever believe, now.

  Kareem, then, was on National Service. Originally, National Service, back in the twentieth century, had been about being in the Armed Services: the Navy, Army or Air Force. Maybe a few people would work ambulance drivers or medics, but that was it. The Government had changed it to involve pretty much any job they could think of, and Kareem was appointed to work as a general handyman around the school. He had to fix the gutters, weed t
he flower beds in front of the staff room, clean the toilets, all those sorts of things. Although he was officially a member of staff, he was much closer in age to all of us, and the staff, on the whole, ignored him. He was clearly very lonely, but that wasn't the biggest problem, it soon became clear.

  Mo spotted it before I did, as he went past the small caretaker's room that Kareem had to himself on the way back from the toilet during a lesson. He told me later that he noticed Kareem kneeling on the floor, and stopped to see what was going on. Kareem half rose, and Mo ducked behind the door, but after a few moments, he ventured a glance round. Kareem was kneeling again, rocking slightly, on a small piece of carpet, and he could hear muttering sounds. He realised then that Kareem was praying, and he felt horribly embarrassed to have intruded on a particularly private moment. He crept away quietly, hoping that Kareem hadn't heard him.

  A few seconds later, the bell rang for the final lesson, and pupils appeared, shouting, from their class-rooms. They banged along the corridors, and Mo looked back over his shoulder to see Kareem emerging from his little room, looking sad, and Mo was pretty sure that he'd been interrupted in the middle of his prayers.

  That night, once we'd had supper and settled down in our bedrooms for our usual conversation, Mo and I had a chat about this, and I looked up the week's prayer times for Muslims in Britain. I hadn't known much about what prayers Muslims should be performing on a daily basis, but it turned out there were six sets. Two of them – Dhuhr and Asr – sat right in the middle of school-times, and although Kareem had clearly tried to fit one of them – Asr, it turned out – into his day, he clearly hadn't had much success. Looking at the times, it seemed unlikely that he would have managed to fit Dhuhr into his day, either.

  “You've got to feel for him,” Mo said.

  I agreed. “Assuming he's a devout Muslim...”

  “It certainly seemed that he was taking his prayers very seriously, from what I could see.”

  “Well, life must be pretty hard for him. Do you know if there are any other Muslims in the school?”

  Mo thought for a while. “Can't think of any. To be honest, I don't think there can be many in the town. It's not as if we've got a particularly diverse society round here, is it?”

  He was right. Although there were a few non-white faces around the school and the town, they were few and far between. Oddly, partly because there were so few of them, there seemed to be little ill-will, teasing or prejudice – that I had noticed, anyway. I reflected on it a bit and wondered whether that was really true. Maybe these few children and families did encounter prejudice, and I'd never noticed.

  One of the few good things about the Government, however, was that it hadn't embraced the obvious opportunities for demonising minorities by attacking people because of their race or religion. They'd not gone after gay people either, which was a classic technique by extremist governments through history, according to my library research. They'd needed as many allies together if they were to go after the minority that all races, religions and adults could agree on: the younger generation. It was a bold move, but it had paid off, because however uncomfortable older people might feel about it, they all felt that they'd earned some privilege after years of hard work and responsibility, and that the young hadn't paid their dues yet. “Wholesome”, acceptable activities which were considered proper and British, such as sport, walking or cycling in the country and going to church, were all encouraged. And given that the Government was all for being inclusive towards everybody – except young people, of course – “going to church” had been broadly expanded to mean synagogue, temple or mosque.

  That didn't mean that it would be easy for Kareem as a Muslim out here in the sticks. Assuming that the staff treated him like most youths they weren't paid to teach – which was likely to be badly – then he'd have few opportunities to pray as he'd need to. I thought back to times I'd seen Kareem eating lunch. He tended to sit alone, and I suspected that he'd only eat the vegetarian option that was always offered: he wouldn't be able to find the halal meat that he'd need to eat in a school like ours, as it just wasn't offered as an option.

  We both felt quite sorry for Kareem, and kept an eye on him. Even after a few weeks at the school, he didn't seem to mix with either the teachers or the pupils, and just went about the tasks set him and kept himself to himself. One night, while we were chatting, Mo brought up the idea of recruiting him to join us to work against the Government. I could see his point of view: here was someone who seemed to be unhappy with his lot, and who didn't seem to be engaged with anyone in particular. There was always the possibility that he was an undercover Young Enforcer to be considered, of course. Before meeting Fliss, I might have thought that I had a pretty good chance of spotting one of them, but now I wasn't so sure. And given the mess that the Enforcers managed to get themselves into with Ryan, you might have thought that they would have left our school well enough alone: but they had tried to recruit me. Maybe they felt they needed someone else, and maybe they thought that Mo would be the right person for the job.

  I didn't think that Kareem was likely to be a Y.E., though. He was just too much of a loner, and didn't mix with pupils or staff: surely that would be something any Y.E. would have to do? He also stood out from the crowd too much, and didn't seem to spend much of his time just watching what was going on, either: it seemed that he just wouldn't have been much use to them.

  And he was sad. More than sad, he seemed actively miserable. However, although Mo seemed keen to recruit him to our cause, based, as far as I could tell, on Kareem's state of unhappiness, I wasn't sure that Kareem's misery was really directed at anyone, let alone the Government. At some level, I was sure, he would be resentful at the Government for sending him on National Service to somewhere he didn't fit in, away from his home, friends and family. But was that enough? I suspected that he wasn't really resentful enough, or just worked up enough, to be dangerous. I turned out to be very wrong, of course, but not in a way I'd expected, and not in a way that would show itself for quite a while.

  Chapter 20 – You know, canaries.

  On Monday, at assembly, Ms Martin stood up and made an announcement. "Master Hussein," (all young people on National Service were called "Master" or "Miss" to make them sound less important than adults) "has agreed to take over administration of the computer room from Mrs Banks. He has an interest in computers and will be running a club for interested pupils on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. If you are interested in computers, please sign up on the board outside the computer room."

  We'd had computer clubs before, usually run by (briefly) enthusiastic younger (read “still old”) members of staff who wanted to make sure the pupils could design basic (very basic) websites and use word processing applications. They usually fizzled out after a couple of weeks once they realised that all the pupils had been doing this since they were 4, and were generally better and faster than the (soon disillusioned) teacher. So I wasn't worried, until Kareem stood up and stepped forward from the line of chairs where, unusually, he'd been sitting next to the teachers, though, admittedly, down at one end.

  Everyone turned to face him, and he looked nervous, but spoke loudly enough so we could hear him: "If you're interested in basic – or advanced – system administration, or you'd like to learn to code up applications, then sign up." He stepped back and sat down.

  I really hoped that Mo hadn't turned to look at me as soon as he heard this, because it had taken an effort of will on my part not to turn and look at him. The question on my mind was: "if Kareem is any good, surely there's a risk that he'll spot what Mo's doing on the school systems?" I carefully kept my eyes facing forward, looking at the Ms Martin - who was telling us to be quiet prepare to watch the Government's weekly "school assembly education clip" - and trusted Mo to do the same.

  That night, we discussed what to do, sitting in our bedrooms, talking down the old-style telephones. Mo reckoned that if Kareem really was any good, then he was ev
en more worth bringing over to our cause. "And, after all, almost all hackers are good guys, aren't they?"

  It was that sort of talk that reminded me that however far I'd brought Mo on, he could still be horribly naive. In fact, I had grown even more wary than I had been before – after all, Kareem was now working with the school, wasn't he? – but what was weighing on my mind even more was the concern that he'd find out what Mo had been up to, and even if he didn't track it directly to Mo, then we'd at least be at some increased risk.

  "There's no way he'll find the stuff I've put on there," he assured me, "and if he did, well, he'd have to be pretty good, and I'm sure he'll be on our side."

  I rolled my eyes to myself. "Make up your mind, Floyd: 'there's no way...', or '...and if he did...'? Will he or won't he? You can't have it both ways."