Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  They pretended they didn’t know what I was talking about, but they also had the good grace to look a bit embarrassed, which I took to mean that I’d got through to them.

  “Some night,” Rabid Dog mumbled. He had his lappie out and he turned it round so that I could see the screen, a slideshow of photos from the graveyard. Some of them were shot with a flash and had that overexposed, animal-in-the-headlamps look; the rest were shot with night filters that made everyone into sharp-edged, black-and-white ghosts whose eyes glowed without pupils. Nevertheless, I could tell even at this distance that it had been every bit as epic as I remembered. The slideshow got to a photo of Twenty and my heart went lub-dub-lub-dub. Even in flashed-out blinding white, she was magisterial, that being the new replacement for illustrious that had gone round at the party.

  Jem snorted. “That one’s trouble, boy-o,” he said. “Too smart for her own good.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I felt an overprotective sear of anger at him, the kind of thing I used to get when boys came sniffing round after Cora.

  He shrugged. “It was a mate of hers that brought me last night. One of those girls up in the trees. She said that your little bit of fluff there runs with a bunch of politicals, the sort who’d rather smash in a bank than go to a party. And Aziz says she’s just nuts, full of gigantic plans.”

  I swallowed my anger. “None of that sounds like a problem to me,” I said. “That all sounds bloody fantastic, actually.” I said it as quietly and evenly as I could.

  He shrugged again. “Your life,” he said. “Just letting you know. And now you know. I’ll say no more about it. So, it’s Cecil now?”

  I refused to be embarrassed about it. “Like Jem was your real name. You just picked it so you and Dodger could be the Jammie Dodgers, yeah? And Rabid Dog’s mum didn’t hold him up, crying and covered in afterbirth, and say, ‘Oo’s Mummy’s lickle Rabid Dog then, hey?’ And Chester from Manchester? Please. Why should I be the only one without a funny name?”

  The boys were all looking at me as if I’d grown another head. I realized I’d got to my feet and started shouting somewhere in there. It must have been the hangover. Or Jem talking rubbish about Twenty.

  In silence, I got some more fruit salad. Outside the locked-down, blacked-out windows of the pub, someone was shouting at someone else. Loud motorbikes roared down the street. Dogs barked. Drugs kids hooted.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Jem bounced an empty juice box (we’d found two pallets of them, the boxes dirty from a spill into a puddle) off my head. “You’re forgiven. Go get your bloody computer and email the mad cow and ask her out. Then take a shower. No, take a shower first.”

  That broke up the tension. Dog and Chester giggled, and I realized that Jem was right: I wanted nothing more badly than to get my lappie and see if I could find Twenty on Cynical April and try to come up with something not totally stupid to say to her.

  And I did need a shower.

  * * *

  It took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that I should be looking for “26” and not “twentysix” or “twenty six” in the Cynical April user directory, but once I had that down, I found myself in a deep and enduring clicktrance as I went through all of Twenty’s old message-board posts, videos, and all the photos she’d appeared in. She liked to do interesting things with her hair. She had a properly fat cat. Her bedroom—in which she had photographed herself trying out many hair colors and cuts—was messy and tiny, and it had a window that looked out onto a yellow-black brick wall, the kind of thing you got all over London. Her room was full of books, mountains and teetering piles of them, and she reviewed them like crazy, mostly political books that I went cross-eyed with boredom just thinking about.

  Aha! There it was: she had a part-time job at an anarchist bookstore off Brick Lane, in the middle of Banglatown, a neighborhood that was posh and run-down at the same time. It was riddled with markets, half of them tinsy and weird, selling handmade art and clothes or even rubbish that semihomeless people had rescued and set out on blankets. The other half of the markets were swank as anything, filled with expensive designer clothes and clever T-shirts for babies and that.

  I’d wandered into the shop she worked at: it had wicked stickers, but it smelled a bit, and the books all had a slightly handmade feel, like they had come off a printer in someone’s basement. It felt a bit like visiting the tinsy school library at my primary school, a sad closet full of tattered books that someone was always trying to get you to read instead of looking at the net. But my school library didn’t have a beautiful, clever, incredibly cool girl working in it. If it had, I probably would have gone in more often.

  It took me a minute to figure out what day of the week it was—I’d gone to bed at sunrise, and slept, and the room was shuttered in, but after looking at the clock and then making it expand to show the calendar, I worked out that this was Saturday, just before four in the afternoon. And hey, what do you know, Twenty worked afternoon shifts on Saturday at the shop: said so right there in a message board for party-planners who were trying to schedule a meeting. Another quick search and I found out that the shop closed at 5:30 P.M. on Saturdays. Which meant that I could just make it, if I managed to get out of the house in less than fifteen minutes, and the bus came quick. It occurred to me to try calling the shop to see if she was working and if she’d wait for me to get there, but somehow that seemed creepier than just “accidentally” wandering in a few moments before closing to “discover” that she happened to be working.

  Yes, I will freely admit that this was not objectively any less creepy. That I was getting into deep stalker territory with this. That I’d only met her briefly, and that for all I knew she was seeing someone else, or was a lesbian, or just didn’t fancy me.

  But it was summer. I was sixteen. Girls, food, and parties. And films. That was all I cared about. And most of the time, it was either girls or food. Okay, films and food. But girls: girls most of all. It was weird. Intellectually, I knew that it wasn’t such a big deal. Girls were girls, boys were boys, and I would probably start seeing a girl eventually. Everyone seemed to manage it, even the absolute losers and weirdos. But the fact was that I was desperate, filled with a longing for something my bones and skin seemed absolutely certain would be the best thing that ever happened to me, even if I couldn’t say so for sure. I’d seen innumerable sex scenes on my screen—even edited one or two—and objectively, I could see that they weren’t such a big deal. But there was a little man sat in the back of my skull with his fingers buried deep in my brains, and every time my thoughts strayed too far from girls, he grabbed hold of the neurons and yanked them back to the main subject.

  So: fastest shower ever, brush teeth quickly, then again as I realized all the terrible things that might be festering in my gob. Dress, and then dress again as I realized how stupid I looked the first time. Speaking of first times, for the first time I wished I had some cologne, though I had no idea what good cologne smelled like. I had an idea that something like a pine tree would be good, but maybe I was thinking of the little trees you could hang up in your car to hide the stink of body odor and old McDonald’s bags.

  I didn’t have any cologne.

  “Anyone got any cologne?” I shouted down the stairs as I struggled into my shoes. The howls of laughter that rose from the pub were chased by catcalls, abuse, and filthy, lewd remarks, which I ignored. I pelted down the stairs and stood in the pub, looking at my mates.

  “Where are you going?” Jem said.

  “I’m going to go try and meet Twenty,” I said.

  “Twenty whats?” Rabid Dog said, puzzled enough that he forgot to mumble.

  “The girl’s name is 26,” I said. “But it’s ‘Twenty’ to her friends.”

  Jem started to say something sarcastic and I jabbed my finger at him. “Don’t start, ‘Jem’!”

  “Is that what you were talking about last night?” Chester said. “Bloody 26! You wouldn’t shut up
about it. I thought you were having visions of a winning lottery number or some’at. Shoulda known.”

  I didn’t remember any of that. Wait. No, I did. It was after the driver threw us off his bus. Which was after I threw up in it. And we were walking through somewhere—Camden? King’s Cross? And I was counting to twenty-six, counting backward from twenty-six. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six. Stupid beer. If I hadn’t got so drunk, I could have been talking to 26 all night, instead of making an ass out of myself in the streets of London. Stupid beer. Stupid me.

  “Do I look okay?” I said.

  Jem cocked his head. I thought he was going to say something else sarcastic, but he came over to me and smoothed down my collar, untucked my shirt from my trousers, did something with his fingers to my hair. “You’ll do,” he said. Rabid Dog and Chester were both nodding. “Proper gentleman of leisure now,” Jem went on. “Don’t forget that. They can smell fear. Go in there, be confident, be unafraid, be of good cheer. Listen to her, that’s very important. Don’t try to kiss her until you’re sure she wants you to. Remember that you are both a gentleman and a gentleman of leisure. Got your whole life ahead of you, no commitments and not a worry in the world. Once she knows that, fwoar, you’ll be sorted. Deffo.” Jem always turned on the chirpy cheerful cockney sparrow talk when he was on a roll.

  This sounded like good advice and possibly a little insulting, but I’d already had a turn at defending 26’s honor and reckoned that she could probably stick up for herself anyway. And besides, I was frankly hoping to get “sorted,” whatever that meant in Jem’s twisted imagination. I was frankly grateful for the advice.

  * * *

  It took me three tries to go into the shop, and in between the tries, I stopped and breathed deeply and told myself, “Gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure.” Then I squared my shoulders, rescruffed my hair the way Jem had done, and wandered casually into the little shop.

  She was bent over the desk, mohican floppy and in her eyes, staring at some kind of printed invoice or packing list, a pile of books before her on the counter. Even her profile was beautiful: dark liquid brown eyes, skin the color of light coffee, round nose, rosebud lips.

  She looked up when I came in, started to say, “We’re about to close—” and then raised her eyebrows, and said, “Oh!” She was clearly surprised, and I held my breath while I waited to discover if she was pleasantly surprised.

  “You!” I said, trying hard to seem sincerely shocked, as though I’d just coincidentally wandered in. “Wow!”

  “I’m surprised you’re able to walk,” she said.

  God, I was such an idiot. She hated me. She’d seen me stupidly drunk and had decided I was a complete cock and now I’d followed her to work and she was going to think I was a stalker, too, oh God, oh God, oh God, say something Trent. Gentleman of leisure. “Erm.” I had had over an hour on the bus and that was all I’d come up with. Erm. “Well. Yeah. Felt rank when I got up. Better now, though. Good party, huh?”

  “You looked up where I worked, didn’t you?”

  Uulp. Idiot, idiot, idiot. “Rumbled,” I said. “I, well.” Gentleman of leisure. Unafraid. Full of cheer. I pasted on a smile. “I did. Cos, you know, I drank too much last night and got stupid and that, and I wanted to come here and see you again and give it another try.”

  She looked at her paper. “All right, that’s a little bit creepy, but also somewhat charming and flattering. But I’m afraid your timing is awful. Got a meeting to go to right after work, which is in—” She looked at the screen on the counter. “Ten minutes.”

  I felt like a balloon that’s had the air let out of it. She didn’t hate me, but she also didn’t have time for me just then. Course she didn’t. I tried not to let the crushing disappointment show, but I must have failed.

  “Unless,” she said, “you want to come along? It’s just round the corner.”

  “Yes!” I said, far too quickly for a cool man of leisure, but who gave a toss? “What kind of meeting is it?”

  “I think you’ll enjoy it,” she said. She made another mark on her paper, shoved it into the stack of books, and hopped off the stool. “Come on.”

  * * *

  The meeting was being held just down the road, in the basement room of a Turkish restaurant, the kind of place where they had hookah pipes and apple tobacco and low cushions. 26 said, “They’re a good bunch—some of ’em are from the bookstore, others are from protest groups and free software groups and that. The sort of people who’re worried that they’ll get done over by the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill.” She said this as though I should know what it was, and I was too cool to admit that I had no idea, so I nodded my head sagely and made enthusiastic noises.

  Almost everyone there was older than us by at least ten years, and some were really old, fifty or sixty. Lots of the blokes were older and kind of fat with beards and black T-shirts with slogans about Linux and stuff. These beardie-weirdies were the free software lot; you could spot ’em a mile off. Then there were ancient punks with old piercings and tattoos and creaky leather jackets. And there were serious, clean-cut straights in suits and that, and then a bunch of the sort you’d expect to find round Brick Lane—in their twenties, dressed in strange and fashionable stuff. Mostly white and Asian, and a couple of black people. It looked a little like someone had emptied out a couple night buses full of random people into the low-ceilinged basement.

  Especially with all the DJ/dance party types, showing off their dance moves and tap-transferring their latest illegal remixes to each others’ headphones. I’d always thought of music as something nice to have in a film, so I’d not paid much attention to their scene since landing up in London, but I had to admit that the things these kids could do with pop songs and computers made for some brilliant parties.

  There was iced mint tea, which was brilliant, and someone had brought a big basket of tofu-carob biccies, which were revolting, but I was hungry enough to eat three of them.

  “People, people,” said one of the old punks. She was very tall and thin as a skeleton, and had some kind of elaborate tentacle tattoo that wrapped around her throat and coiled round her arms and her bare legs sticking out of a loose cotton sundress, disappearing into her high, scuffed Docs. “Time to start, okay?” She had a Polish accent and the air of a kindly schoolteacher, which was funny, because she looked like a warrior queen out of a post-apocalyptic action film.

  We all sat down and looked over at her. 26 looked at her with something like worship, and I wondered what it would take to get her to look at me that way.

  “I’m Annika,” she said. “Thank you all for coming. We hear that TIP is going to be introduced some time in the next month, and they’re going to try to get it through with practically no debate. Which means we’re going to have to be fast if we want to get people pissed off about it.”

  She took out her phone and turned on its beamer and painted a page on the back of the door to the basement room. It was dense type, but parts of it had been highlighted and blown up to be readable. It was headed THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY BILL and it was clear that it was some kind of boring law, written in crazy lawyer gobbledygook. I looked at the highlighted sentences: “Criminal sanctions,” “commercial-scale infringement,” “sentencing recommendations to be left to Business Secretary’s discretion…” I tried to make sense of it, but I just couldn’t. I felt stupid, especially as 26 seemed to get it right away, shaking her head and clenching her fists.

  Annika gave us a minute to look at it. “This is a leaked draft, so we don’t know how much of it will be in the bill when they introduce it, but if even a tiny amount of this is in the final, it’s very bad. Look at this: Article 1(3) makes it a criminal offense to engage in ‘commercial scale’ infringement, even if you’re not charging or making money. That means that anyone caught with more than five pirated films or twenty pirated songs can be sent to prison. And here, article 2(4), leaves the sentencing guidelines up to the d
iscretion of the Business Secretary: she’s not even elected, and she used to work for Warner Music, and she’s been on record as saying that she wished we still had the death penalty so it could be used on pirates.

  “And here, this is the best part, here down at the bottom in article 10(4)? This says that unless this results in a 70 percent reduction in copyright infringement in eighteen months, there’s a whole new set of police powers that go into effect, including the right to ‘remotely search’ your computer, with ‘limitation of liability for incidental loss of data or access.’” The people around me hissed and looked at one another. I didn’t know what the hell it meant.

  26 noticed my puzzlement. She pinched my cheek. “Thicko,” she said. “It means that they have the right to hack your computer over the net, search your drive, and there’s no penalty if they get it wrong, mess up your data, invade your privacy, whatever.”

  I shook my head. “That’s the daftest thing—”

  Everyone was talking at once. Annika held up her hands for silence. “Please, please. Yes, this is terrible. This stupid clause, this eighteen-months business, it’s been in every new copyright bill for a decade, right? Every time, they say, ‘If these new penalties don’t work, we’re going to bring in even worse ones. We don’t want to, of course, heavens no, who would want to be able to put people who hurt your business in jail? What corporate lobby would ever want to be able to act as police, judge and executioner? Oh no. But if this plan doesn’t work, we’ll just have to do it. Le sigh.’ It’s so much rubbish. But Parliament has been giving EMI and Warner and Sony and Universal so much power for so long, they’ve got so used to going to parties with pop stars and getting their kiddies into the VIP screenings and behind the rope at big concerts that they don’t even think about it. They just get out the rubber-stamp and vote for it.

  “This time, we want to stop it. I think the time is right. People are sick to death of the piracy wars. Everyone knows someone who’s been disconnected because someone in their house was accused of file-sharing. Some families are ruined by this—lose their jobs, kids fail at school—” I jolted like I’d been stuck with a Taser. 26 looked quizzically at me, but I was a million miles away, thinking of my mum and dad and poor Cora, and all the time that’d gone by without my contacting them. I knew that they were still trying to get in touch, I couldn’t help but see and flinch away from the emails they sent me from the library or a neighbor’s house. But every day that went past without my replying made it harder for me to think about replying the next day. She’d said “ruined families,” and I realized that yes, that’s what I’d done: I’d ruined my family.