Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “MAC addresses—those are the hardwired serial numbers on every card. They identify the manufacturer, model number, and so on. Get sent along with your requests. So if they seize your computer, they can pull the MAC address and look at all the logged traffic to a pirate site and put two and two together. You don’t want that.

  “But with the right drivers, this card can generate a new, random MAC address every couple of minutes, meaning that the logs are going to see a series of new connections from exotic strangers who’ve never been there before. This is what you want. That’s all you need to know for now. Just follow the recipes to get the drivers configured, and look up more detail as it becomes necessary. It’s not like it’s hard to learn new facts about networking—just use a search engine. In the meantime, just do it.”

  I snorted a little laugh. Between the sleep deprivation and his enthusiasm, I was getting proper excited about it all.

  From there, it went much faster. I learned not to worry about the parts I didn’t understand, but at Aziz’s urging I started a big note-file where I made a record of all the steps I was taking. This turned out to be a lifesaver: any time I got stuck or something went utterly pear-shaped, I could go back through those notes and find the place where I went wrong. All my life, my teachers had been on me to take notes, but this was the first time I ever saw the point. I decided to do this more often. Who knew that teachers were so clever?

  * * *

  That was when life really took off at the squat. The next week, we scouted the council estate’s wireless network and got an antenna aimed at one of their access points. It was encrypted of course, and locked to registered devices so that they could keep out miscreants who’d had their network access pulled for being naughty naughty copyright pirates.

  But once we had the antenna set up, it was piss-easy to get the password for the network. It was written on a sheet of paper stuck to the notice board inside the estate’s leisure centre: REMEMBER: EFFECTIVE THIS MONTH, THE NETWORK PASSWORD IS CHANGING TO ‘RUMPLE34PETER12ALBERT.’ After all, when you need a couple thousand people to know a secret, it’s hard to keep it a secret.

  Once we could decrypt the network traffic we were able to use Ethereal to dump and analyze all the traffic, and we quickly built up a list of all the MAC addresses in use on the system. There were thousands of them, of course: every phone had one, every computer, every game box, every set-top box for recording telly. Armed with these, we were able to use our forbidden network cards to impersonate dozens of devices at once, hopping from one MAC address to the next.

  It was all brilliant, sitting in our cozy, candlelit pub room, using our laptops, playing the latest dub-step revival music we’d pulled down from a pirate radio site, watching videos on darknet video sites, showing our screens to one another. Aziz had given me a little pocket beamer with a wireless card and we took turns grabbing it and splashing our screens on the blank wall behind the bar (we’d cleared away the broken mirror) with the projector.

  Even the housemates became easier to deal with. Ryan and Sally hooked up, which was revolting, but it didn’t last long, ending with a spectacular row that sent Sally home to Glasgow (finally!) and convinced Ryan that he needed some “alone time” to get over his heartbreak. With both of them gone the Zeroday’s energy changed, and it became a place where there was always someone cooking something, making something, writing a story or a song. We had all the food we could eat, and we were getting along well with our neighbors, too—even the drug dealers and their lookouts dropped by to see what we were up to, and seemed to find the whole thing hilarious, mystifying, and altogether positive.

  Dodger turned out to be an incredible chef, able to cook anything with anything. He prepared epic meals that I can still taste today: caramelized leeks with roasted stuffed peppers, potatoes roasted in duck fat and dripping with gravy. Then there was the day he made his own jellied eels. It turned my stomach at first, just the thought of it, but that didn’t stop me from eating sixteen of them once I’d tasted them!

  I never did work out what happened between Jem and Dodger and the squat they’d shared before. It was clear that they were the best of mates, though Dodger was a good five years older than us. From what I could tell though, the old squat—Dodger still lived there—had gone through some kind of purge after a blazing row over chores or something stupid like that. Dodger spent so much time at ours, I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just move in. We had it pretty comfortable, with fifteen good bedrooms that we’d scrounged furniture for, a lovely front room, all the Internet we could eat.

  I never got to know Dodger that well, but Jem seemed to include me when he talked about the Jammie Dodgers, which was the imaginary youth gang that we all belonged to. It was also the name of his favorite biscuit: the old classic round cookie filled with raspberry jam. I didn’t like the cookies much, but I was proud to be a JD, really. It was nice to belong.

  We hadn’t seen Dodger for a few days. It had come on full summer, and the pub was sweltering. We still didn’t dare take the shutters down off the bottom windows, but we’d pried them off the upper stories and had pointed a few fans out the windows upstairs, blowing the rising hot air out the building, sucking in fresh air from below. It made the Zeroday a little cooler, just barely livable. Like hanging about in a pizza oven an hour after the restaurant had shut.

  It was three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. I was sitting in cutoff shorts and no T-shirt, staring at my laptop and trying not to think about the mountain of messages that Mum and Dad and my sister had piled up in my inbox and IM. I couldn’t face opening any of them, and, of course, the longer I waited, the more angry and sad and awful it would be when I did.

  Jem cocked his head. “Did you hear that?” he said. My computer’s fan was working triple-time in the heat, trying to force cool air over the huge graphics card I’d wrestled into the chassis at Aziz’s before it melted the whole thing to molten slag. It was proper loud, and emitted a plume of hot air that shimmered in the dim.

  “Hear what?” I said. I covered the fan exhaust with a finger—it was scalding—and listened. There it was, the sound of a hundred tropical birds going mad with fear. It was the drugs lookouts, and they were in a state about something. “Maybe the coppers are raiding that sugar-shack on the eighth floor,” I said. “Want to go upstairs and have a peek out the window?”

  Jem didn’t say anything. He’d gone pale. “Get some trousers, shoes on, let’s go,” he said.

  I gawped at him. “Jem?” I said. “What—”

  “Do it,” he snapped, and pelted up the stairs, rattling doorknobs and thumping doors, shouting, “Get moving, get moving, coppers!”

  It felt like I was in a dream. For the first month after we’d claimed the Zeroday for our own, I’d lived in constant fear of a knock at the door: the coppers or the landlords come to muscle us out. Jem assured me that we couldn’t be arrested for squatting—it’d take a long court proceeding to get us out. But that didn’t stop me worrying. According to Dodger, sometimes landlords would take the easy way out and send over some hard men with sticks or little coshes filled with pound coins that could shatter all the delicate bones in your face, your hands, your feet.

  But you can’t stay scared forever. I’d forgot that the Zeroday was anything except a utopian palace in Bow, our own little clubhouse. Now all the fear I’d left behind rushed back. I was so scared, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, like a nightmare of being chased. I ran up the stairs behind Jem, headed for my room. All the clothes I owned had come from charity shops or out of skips. I yanked on a pair of jeans. I had a good pair of trainers I’d bought at a charity shop, and I jammed my feet into them, and stuffed my socks into a pocket. I still had my laptop under my arm, and I turned around and legged it for the front door.

  As I entered the room, I heard a thunderous knocking at the door and the baritone shout, “POLICE!” I froze to the spot. Upstairs, I could hear the sound of Jem hustling the rest of the house out the top-floor
window and down the fire-stairs out back, telling them to go. The hammering grew louder.

  I went back upstairs, saw Jem standing by the window, his face still pale, but composed and calm.

  “Jem!” I said. “What’s all the panic? You said the cops wouldn’t do anything to us, just order us to appear at a hearing—”

  He shook his head. “That was until this week. They’ve got new powers to bust us for ‘abstraction of electricity.’ Immediate arrest and detention. Dodger told me about it—he’s gone underground. Figures that they’d like to hang him up by the thumbs.”

  Abstraction of electricity? “What’s abstraction of—”

  “Stealing power,” he said. “As in, what we’ve been doing here for months. Go!”

  I went out the window. Downstairs, I heard the door splinter and bang open. Jem was right behind me on the fire escape. Outside, it was a sunny summery day, hot and muggy, and the birdcalls from the drugs kids made it feel like a jungle. The fire-stairs were ancient and rusted, crusted with bird shite. I ran down them on tiptoe, noticing the patter of dry crap and dust on the ground beneath me, sure that at any moment, I’d hear a cop-voice shout, “There they are!” and the tromp of boots. But I touched down to the broken ground and looked up to check on Jem, who was vaulting down the steps five at a time, holding onto the shaking railing and swinging his body like a gymnast on a hobbyhorse. The rest of the Zeroday’s crew had already gone, disappearing into the estate, keeping behind the pub and out of sight of the men at the door.

  He hit the ground a moment later and hissed “Run!” He took off and streaked for the nearest estate tower. I took off after him. Behind us, I finally heard the shout: “There!” and then “Stop!”

  Jem planted one foot, spun, changed directions and ran off at right angles, toward the distant road, across the open ground. I’d never seen him run before, barely saw him now out of the corner of my eye, but even so, I could see that he could run, powering up like a cartoon character.

  He was leading the chase away from me. What a friend. What an idiot. Feeling like the world’s biggest coward, I kept going, heading for the estate, for the door where the lock was broken, for the maze of corridors and buildings that I could disappear into.

  Chapter 2

  ADRIFT/A NEW HOME/A SCREENING IN THE GRAVEYARD/THE ANARCHISTS!

  Jem didn’t answer my e-mails, didn’t show up again at Old Street Station, didn’t turn up at the skips we’d haunted. Dodger’s phone was out of service—he’d either been caught or had really and properly gone underground. The rest of my housemates had melted into the afternoon and vanished as though they’d never existed.

  Back to the shelter I went, feeling a proper failure, and I slept in a room with seven other boys, and I got free clothes and a rucksack from the pile, ate the stodgy meals and remembered the taste of eels and caramelized leeks, and found myself, once again, alone in the streets of London. It had been nearly six months since I’d left Bradford, and I started to ache for home, for my parents and my sister and my old mates. I made a sign like Jem’s, with Kleenex and sanitizer and gum and little shoe-polish wipes, and made enough money for a bus ticket home in less than a day.

  But I didn’t buy a bus ticket home. I gave all the money to other tramps in the station, the really broken ones that Jem and I had always looked out for, and then I went back to the shelter.

  It’s not that life was easy in the shelter, but it was, you know, automatic. I hardly had to think at all. I’d get breakfast and dinner there, and in between, I just needed to avoid the boredom and the self-doubt that crept in around the edges, pretend that I wasn’t the loneliest boy in London, that I was living the Trent McCauley story, the second act where it all got slow and sad, just before the hero found his way again.

  But if there was a new way, I didn’t know where it was. One day, as I sat in Bunhill Cemetery, watching the pigeons swoop around the ancient tombs—their favorite was Mary Page: IN 67 MONTHS, SHE WAS TAPD 66 TIMES - HAD TAKEN AWAY 240 GALLONS OF WATER - WITHOUT EVER REPINING AT HER CASE - OR EVER FEARING THE OPERATION (I wasn’t sure what this meant, but it sounded painful)—and I couldn’t take it anymore. Call me a child, call me an infant, but I had to talk to me mam.

  I watched my hands move as though they belonged to someone else. They withdrew my phone, unlocked it, dialed Mum’s number from memory, and pressed the phone to my ear. It was ringing.

  “Hello?” The last time I’d heard that voice, it had been cold and angry and fearful. Now it sounded beaten and sad. But even so, it made my heart thump so hard that my pulse was like a drumbeat in my ears.

  “Mum?” I said in a whisper so small it sounded like the voice of a toddler. First my hands, now my voice—it was like my entire body was declaring independence from me.

  “Trent?” She sucked in air. “Trent?”

  “Hi, Mum,” I said as casually as I could. “How’re you?”

  “Trent, God, Trent! Are you alive? Are you okay? Are you in trouble? Jesus, Trent, where the bloody hell are you? Where have you been? Trent, damn it—” She called out, Anthony! It’s Trent! I heard my father’s startled noises getting louder.

  “Look, Mum,” I said. “Hang on, okay? I’m fine. I’m just fine. Missing you all like fire. But I’m fine. Healthy, doing well. Mum, I’ll call again later.” Calling now seemed like such a stupid idea. I hadn’t even been smart enough to block my number. Now I’d have to get a new prepaid card. What an idiot I was.

  “Trent, don’t you dare put the phone down. You come home immediately, do you hear me? No, wait. Stay where you are. We’ll come and get you. Trent—”

  I hung up. The phone rang. I switched it off, took the cover off, took out the SIM, and slipped it in my pocket. I missed Mum and Dad and Cora, but I wasn’t ready to go home. I didn’t know if I’d ever be. The few seconds I’d spent on the phone had made me feel about six years old. It hadn’t been pretty.

  I left the graveyard, and poor Mary Page, who had never repined her case, whatever that meant.

  * * *

  Without realizing it, my subconscious had been scouting for a new squat. I kept catching myself staring at derelict buildings and abandoned construction sites, wondering if there was an open door around the back, wondering if the power was out. There were plenty of empty places. The economy had just fallen into the toilet again, something it had done every few years for my entire life. This one seemed worse than most, and they’d even put the old Chancellor of the Exchequer in jail, along with a couple of swanky bankers. I couldn’t see that it had made any difference. There were more tramps everywhere I looked, and a lot of them had the bewildered look of mental patients who’d been turned out of closed hospitals, or the terrified look of pensioners who couldn’t pay the rent.

  It was strange to think that the city was filled with both homeless people and empty houses. You’d think that you could simply solve the problem by moving the homeless people into the houses. That was my plan, anyway. I wasn’t part of the problem, you see, I was part of the bloody solution.

  I was especially into old pubs. The Zeroday had been a golden find: proper spacious and with all the comforts of home, practically. I found one likely old pub in deepest Tower Hamlets, but when I checked the title registry—where all sales of property were recorded—I saw that it had been bought up the week before, and guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that they were about to start renovating the place.

  After two weeks of this, more or less on a whim, I decided to ride the bus out to Bow and have a look in on the old Zeroday, see what happened to the homestead, check for clues about Jem’s whereabouts. Plus, where there was one abandoned pub, there might be another. Goodness knew that Bow was in even worse economic shape than most places.

  From a distance, the Zeroday looked abandoned, shutters back up on the upper stories. The drugs lookouts took up their birdsong when I got off the bus, but soon stopped as they recognized me. I sauntered over to the pub, filled with a mix of fear and nostalgia. My h
eart sank when I saw the fresh padlock and hasp on the outside of the front door. But then it rose again as I neared it and saw that the lock had been neatly sawn through and replaced. I slipped it off and nudged the door.

  It was déjà vu all over again. The smell of sugar and spliff and of piss and shite told me that the local drugs kids and sex trade had carried on using the place. I called out hello a few times, just in case someone was in the place, and left the door open halfway to let in some light. I found melted candles everywhere, even on “our” comfy parlor sofa, which was quite ruined, stuffing spilling out, cushions wet with something that made me want to find some hand-sanitizer.

  In the kitchen, I nearly broke my neck falling into the open cellar. It was pitch dark down there, but I had an idea that maybe they’d just flipped the big cutout switch that Dodger’d installed and blacked the place out. Which meant that flipping it the other way—

  I needed to come back with a torch. And some friends.

  * * *

  There were other kids in the shelter that I sort of got on with. A tall, lanky kid from Manchester who, it turned out, had also left home because he’d got his family kicked offline. He was another video nutter, obsessed with making dance mixes of Parliamentary debates, looping the footage so that the fat, bloated politicians in the video seemed to be lip-syncing. It was tedious and painstaking work, but I couldn’t argue with the results: he’d done a mix of the Prime Minister, a smarmy, good-looking twit named Bullingham who I’d been brought up to hate on sight (his dear old grandad, Bullingham the Elder, had been a senior cabinet member in the old days when you had to look like a horrible toad to serve in a Tory government), singing a passionate rendition of a song called “Sympathy for the Devil.” It was a thing of beauty, especially when he cut out the PM’s body from the original frames and supered it over all this gory evangelical Christian footage of Hell from a series called The Left Behinds that aired on the American satellite networks at all hours of day and night. He claimed he’d got eighteen million pageviews before it had been obliterated from YouTube and added to the nuke-from-orbit list that the copyright bots kept.