Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  Now he hosted it, along with his other creations, on ZeroKTube, which wasn’t even on the Web. It was on this complicated underground system that used something called “zero knowledge.” I couldn’t follow it exactly, but from what Chester—as the lad from Manchester insisted on calling himself, with a grin—said, it worked something like this: you gave up some of your hard drive and network connection to ZeroKTube. Other 0KT members who had video to share encrypted their video and broke it into many pieces and stashed them on random 0KT nodes. When you wanted to watch the video, you fed a 0KT node the key for unscrambling the video, and it went around and found enough pieces to reassemble the video and there you had it. The people running individual nodes had no way of knowing what they were hosting—that was the “zero knowledge” part—and they also randomly exchanged pieces with one another, so a copyright bot could never figure out where all the pieces were. Chester showed it to me, and even though it seemed a bit slow, it was also pretty cool—the 0KT client had all the gubbins that YouTube had: comments, ratings, related videos, all done with some fiendish magick that I couldn’t hope to understand.

  Chester had a street-buddy, Rabid Dog (or “Dog” or “RD”), which was a joke of a nickname, because RD was about five foot tall, podgy, with glasses and spots, and he was so shy that he couldn’t really talk properly, just mumble down his shirtfront. Rabid Dog was an actual, born-and-bred Londoner, and he was only about fifteen, but had been living on the streets off and on since he was twelve and had never really gone to school. Even so, he was a complete monster for the horror films, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of them stretching back to Nosferatu and forward to Spilt Entrails XVII, which was the only subject that’d get him talking above a mutter.

  Rabid Dog had got his family kicked off the net with his compulsion to rework horror films to turn them into wacky comedies, romantic comedies, torture comedies, and just plain comedies. He’d add hilarious voice-overs, manic music, and cut them just so, and you’d swear that Freddy Kruger was a great twentieth-century comedian. He liked to use 0KT as well, but he wasn’t content merely to make films: he made the whole package—lobby cards, posters, trailers, even fictional reviews of his imaginary films. There was an entire parallel dimension in Rabid Dog’s head, one in which all the great horror schlockmeisters of history had decided instead to make extremely bloody, extremely funny comedies.

  I figured that Rabid Dog and Chester were ready to learn some of the stuff that I’d got from Jem. So one day, I showed them how my sign worked and introduced them round to the oldsters at Old Street Station. The next day, we rummaged for posh nosh in the skip behind the Waitrose (always Waitrose with Jem, he said they had the best, and who was I to change his rules?), and ate it in Bunhill Cemetery, near poor old Mary Page. (Rabid Dog, a right scholar of human deformity, injury, and disease opined that she had had some kind of horrible internal cyst that had been drained of gallons of pus before she expired. What’s more, he pointed this out as we were scoffing back jars of custard over slightly overripe strawberries. And he didn’t mumble.)

  The day after, I took the lads to the Zeroday. I’d scrounged a couple of battery-powered torches and some thick rubber gloves and safety shoes, a lucky find at a construction site that no one had been watching very closely. I put them on once we got inside, first putting on the gloves and then using my gloved hands to steady myself on the disgusting, spongy-soft sofa while I balanced on one foot and then the other, changing into the boots. I had no idea whether they’d be enough to keep me from getting turned into burnt toast by the electrical rubbish if I touched the wrong wire, but they made me feel slightly less terrified about what I was going to do.

  “Hold these,” I said to the lads, handing them the torches and scampering down the ladder into the cellar. It smelled dreadful. Someone—maybe several someones—had used it as a toilet, and my safety shoes squelched in a foul mixture of piss and shite and God knew what else. “Shine ’em here,” I said, pointing down at the switchplate on the wall. Dodger had shown me his work after he got done with it: all the wires he’d put in neat bundles with plastic zip-straps, all running in and out of the ancient junction box with its rubber-grip handle. There were ridiculous old fuses, the kind that were a block of ceramic with two screws in the top, that you had to carefully stretch a thin piece of wire between and screw down. When the circuit overloaded, the wire literally burned up, leaving a charred stump at each screw. Dodger had kept threatening to put in a proper breaker panel, but he never got round to it, and we all got good at doing the wire thing, because the Zeroday’s ancient electricals rebelled any time we tried to plug in, say, a hair dryer, a microwave, a fan, and a couple of laptops.

  The lads played their lights over the switch and I saw that it was in the off position, handle up. Holding my breath, I took hold of the handle and, in one swift movement, slammed it down, jerking my hand away as soon as it was in place, as though my nervous system could outpace the leccy.

  Let there be light.

  The fluorescents above me flickered to life. The fridges started to hum. And above me, Rabid Dog and Chester cheered. I smiled a proper massive grin. I was home.

  * * *

  Putting the Zeroday in order for the second time was easier. We hauled away all the moldering furniture, installed fresh locks, unblocked some of the upper windows, and scrounged some fans to get the scorching summer air out. We scrubbed everything with bleach, found new bedding, and made ourselves at home.

  It was one of those long hot summers that just seemed to get hotter. Since I’d got to London, I’d spent most of my time being gently (or roughly) rained upon, and I’d lost count of the number of times I’d wished the rain would just piss off and the sun would come out. Now it seemed like London’s collective prayer for sunlight had been answered and we were getting a year’s worth of searing blue skies lit with a swollen, malevolent white sun that seemed to take up half the heavens. After months of griping about the rain, we were gasping for it.

  It drove the Zeroday’s residents into a nocturnal existence. But that wasn’t so bad. It was summer. There were all-ages clubs where kids danced all night long, pretty girls and giggles and weed and music so loud it made your ears ring all day long the next day. We’d get up at three or four in the afternoon, have a huge breakfast, shower, smoke some weed—someone always had some, and Chester swore he was going to find us some Gro-Lites and a mister and turn one of the upstairs bedrooms into a farm that would supply us with top-grade weed for the coming dark winter.

  I wasn’t sure about this. Having just three of us in the house, and coming and going mostly after dinnertime, meant that we were keeping a much lower profile than we’d had in the days of the Jammie Dodgers. I thought that the serious electricity that Gro-Lites wanted might tip off the landlords or the law that we were back in residence.

  After breakfast, we’d jump on our lappies and start looking for a party. For this, we used Confusing Peach Of The Forest Green Beethoven, which may just be the best name of a website ever. Confusing Peach was more like an onion, with layers in layers in layers. You started off on the main message boards where they chatted about music and life and everything else. If you were cool enough—interesting, bringing good links to the conversation, making interesting vids and music—you got to play in the inner circle, where they talked about where the best parties were, which offies would sell you beer and cider without asking for ID, where you could go to get your phone unlocked so that it would play pirated music.

  But it turned out that there was an even more inner circle inside the inner circle, a place where they talked about better parties, where they had better download links for music and films, where they spent a lot of time making fun of the lamers in the outer inner circle and the outer outer circle. We got to the inner-inner (for some reason, it was called “Armed Card and the Cynical April”) a couple weeks after finding Confusing Peach. We didn’t have much to do except post on CP, and between Chester’s crazy Bullingham vide
os, Rabid Dog’s insane horror-comedies, and some Scot stuff I awkwardly put together (I hadn’t worked on Scot since the day my laptop had been nicked in Hyde Park, the day I came to London), we were hits. The inner circle opened to us only two days after we got in, and the epic parties followed immediately after. All through the hot nights, in strange warehouses, terraced houses in central London, on abandoned building sites strung with speakers and lights, we went and we danced and we smoked and we swilled booze and tried so very hard to pull the amazing girls who showed up, without a lick of success.

  But we must have made a good impression, even if it wasn’t good enough to convince any of the young ladies to initiate us into the mysteries of romance (I may have taken Scot’s virginity in my edit suite, but sad to say that no one had returned the favor). Before long, we were in the Cynical April message boards, where the videos were funnier, the music was better, and the parties were stellar.

  “Dog,” I shouted, pounding on the bathroom door. “Dog, come on, mate, there’s just not that much of you to get clean, you fat bastard!” He’d been in the bathroom showering for so long that I was starting to think he might be having a sneaky wank in there. He was the horniest little bastard I’d ever met, and I’d learned never to go into his bedroom without knocking unless I wanted to be scarred by the spectacle of his bulging eyes and straining arm and the mountain of crusty Kleenexes all over his floor.

  The shower stopped. Rabid Dog muttered something filthy that I pretended I hadn’t heard, and a second later he came out, with a towel around his waist. He’d shaved his long hair off at the start of the heat wave, and it had grown in like a duck’s fuzz, making him look even younger. Now it was toffee-apple red, and the hair dye had got on his forehead and ears, making him look like he was bleeding from a scalp wound.

  “Whatcha think?” he muttered, pleading silently with his eyes for me to say something nice.

  “It’s pretty illustrious,” I said, “illustrious” being the word-du-jour on Cynical April. He smiled shyly and nodded and ran off to his room.

  I quickly showered and dressed, pulling on cutoff pinstripe suit trousers and a canary-yellow banker’s shirt whose collar and sleeves I’d torn off. It was a weird fashion, but I’d seen a geezer wearing nearly the same thing at a party the week before and he’d been beating off the girls with both hands. By the time I made it down to the front room, Chester was dressed and ready, too, a T-shirt that shimmered a bit like fish-scales and a kilt with a ragged hem, finished out with a pair of stompy boots so old and torn that they were practically open-toed sandals. I squinted at this, trying to understand how it could look cool, but didn’t manage it. “Huh,” I said.

  He held up two fingers at me and jabbed them suggestively. Then he indicated my own clothes and pointedly rolled his eyes. Okay, fine, we all thought that we looked ridiculous. Why not. We were teenagers. We were supposed to look ridiculous.

  “What’s the party, then?” I said. Chester had been in charge of picking it out, and he’d been snickering to himself in anticipation all day, barring us from looking at the party listings in Cynical April.

  “We’re going to the cinema,” he said. “And we’re bringing the films.”

  * * *

  By that time, Bunhill Cemetery was like a second home to me. I knew its tombstones, knew its pigeons and its benches and the tramps who ate dinner there and the man who mowed the huge, brown sward of turf to one side of the tombstones. When I thought about graveyards, I thought of picnic lunches, pretty secretaries eating together, mums and nannies pushing babies around in pushchairs. Not scary at all.

  But then, I’d never been to West Highgate.

  We snuck into the graveyard around 10:00 P.M. Chester led us around the back of its high metal fence to a place where the shrubs were thick. We pushed through the shrubs and we discovered a place where the bars had rusted through, just as the map he’d downloaded to his phone had promised.

  He whispered as we picked our way through the moonlit night, moving in the shadows around crazy-kilter tombs and headstones and creepy trees gone brown and dead in the relentless heat wave. “This place got bombed all to hell in World War Two and never got put right. There’s still bomb craters round here you could break a leg in. And best of all, the charity that looks after it has gone bust, so there’s no security guards at night—just some cameras round the front gate.”

  Five minutes’ worth of walking took us so deep into the graveyard that all we could see in every direction were silhouetted stones and mausoleums and broken angels and statues. The stones glowed mossy gray in the moonlight, their inscriptions worn smooth and indistinct by the years. Strange distant sounds—rustles, sighs, the tramp of feet—crawled past us on the lazy breeze.

  It was as scary as hell.

  Chester got lost almost immediately and began to lead us in circles through the night. Our navigation wasn’t helped by our unwillingness to tread on the graves, though whether this was out of respect for the dead or fear that hands would shoot out of the old soil and grab us by the ankles, I couldn’t say.

  It was getting dire when a shadow detached itself from one of the crypts and ambled over to us. As it got closer, it turned into a girl, about my age, shoulder-length hair clacking softly from the beads strung in it. She was wearing knee-length shorts covered in pockets and a tactical vest with even more pockets over a white T-shirt that glowed in the moonlight.

  She hooted at us like an owl and then planted her fists on her hips. “Well, lads,” she said. “You certainly seem to be lost. Graveyard’s shut, or didn’t you see the padlock on the gate?”

  I had a moment’s confusion. She looked like the kind of person that showed up at Cynical April parties, but she was acting like she was the graveyard’s minder or something. If I told her we were coming to a party and she represented the authorities—

  “We’re here for the party,” Chester said, settling the question. “Where is it?”

  “What party?” Her voice was stern.

  “The Cynical April party,” Chester said, stepping forward, showing her the map on his phone. “You know where this is?”

  She snorted. “You would make a rubbish secret agent. What if I wasn’t in on it, hey?”

  Chester shrugged. “I saw you at the last one, down in Battersea. You were doing something interesting in the corner with a laptop that I couldn’t get close enough to see. Also, you’ve got two tins of lager in that pocket.” He tapped one bulge in her tactical vest. I hadn’t noticed them, but Chester had a finely tuned booze detector.

  She laughed. “Okay, got me. Yes, I can get you there. I’m Hester.”

  Chester stuck out his hand. “Chester. We rhyme!” As chat-up lines went, it wasn’t the best I’d heard, but she laughed again and shook his hand. Me and Rabid Dog said hello and she mentioned that she’d seen some of our Cynical April videos and said nice things about me and I was glad that you couldn’t tell if someone was blushing in the moonlight. Up close, she smelled amazing, like hot summer nights and fresh-crushed leaves and beer and ganja. My heart began to skip in my chest at the thought of the party we were about to find.

  Hester seemed to know her way around the graveyard, even in the dark, and pretty soon we could hear the distant sounds of laughter and low music and excited conversation.

  Finally, we came to a little grove of ancient, thick-trunked trees, wide-spaced, with elaborate hillocky roots. They led up to a crumbling brick wall, the back of a much larger building, some kind of gigantic mausoleum or crypt or vault, a massive depository for ex-humans and their remains.

  Someone had set glow-sticks down in the roots of the trees and in some of the lower branches, filling the grove with a rainbow of chemical light. I heard cursing over my head and looked up and saw more people in the trees’ upper branches, working with headlamps and muttering to themselves. Chester pointed them out and laughed and I grabbed his arm and said I wanted to know what the deal was. He’d been chortling evilly to himself the whole
trip out to the graveyard, and refusing to answer any questions about the party he’d picked for us.

  “Oh, mate, it’s going to be illustrious. They’ve got little beamers up there, projectors, right? And they’re going to show films up against that wall all night long.”

  “Which films?” I said. I hadn’t been to the cinema all summer—between the high cost and the mandatory searches and having your phone taken off you for the whole show in case you tried to record with it, I just hadn’t bothered. But there were a bunch of big, dumb blockbustery films I’d had a yen for, some of which I’d downloaded, but it just wasn’t the same. When some gigantic American studio spends hundreds of millions of dollars on computer-animated robots that throw buildings at one another while telling smart-alecky macho jokes, you want to see it on a gigantic screen with hundreds of people all laughing and that. A little lappie screen won’t cut it.

  “Our films!” he said, and punched the air. “I submitted clips from all of us and the girl who’s running it all chose them to headline the night. Yes!” He punched the air again. “It is going to be illustrious, illustrious, ill-bloody-us-tri-bloody-ous! We’re going to be heroes, mate.” He hung a sweaty arm around my neck and put me in an affectionate headlock.

  I wrestled free and found myself grinning and chortling, too. What an amazing night this was going to be!