Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  It was a good place to gather. By day, Trafalgar Square was a favorite with the tourists, and there were always people coming and going. Human spammers were common, and you often saw them taking their lunch breaks on the steps or benches or in the shadow of the National Portrait Gallery at the top of the square.

  We huddled up tight and went over the plan together, 26 leading the lesson, making each person recite his or her part of the plan, along with three escape routes. It was simple enough: “I pull down my shirt and put on the hat and turn on the lights and make my way to Leicester Square. I pick a spot in the Odeon queue and work my way down it, saying ‘Free films, free films,’ handing out the thumb-drives as fast as I can. Don’t argue with anyone. Don’t stop to talk. Keep my face down. After seven minutes or when I run out—whichever comes first—I walk quickly away. My first escape route is down through Trafalgar Square. My second is up to Chinatown. My third is east to Covent Garden. I step into the second doorway I pass and take off the hat and shirt and put them in my bag, then head back the way I came, toward Leicester Square, and go around it to my next escape route. We regroup in Soho on Greek Street at 7:25. Any trouble, call 0587534525 and enter my serial number, which is 4.”

  The phone number was one of those free voice-boxes. It came with a touch-tone or voice-menu, and I could access it using my prepaid mobile if someone didn’t turn up within ten minutes of the appointed time.

  “If I think I’m being followed, I go to the nearest tube station and board the first train, ride five stops, get out, and check to see if I can still see my tails. If they’re there, I sit down on a bench and read a book for half an hour and see what they do. If not, I get back on the tube and go home, after leaving my serial number, which is 4, at 0587534526.” We’d got another voice mail drop for this eventuality.

  Once we’d each said it, quickly and perfectly, we put on our shirts and hats, openly, just as we would if we were any other gang of human spammers who’d just been given the night’s briefing by our manager. Then we trooped in a loose line up to Leicester Square, the purple shirts hanging down to our knees, the hatbrims obscuring our faces. Other peoples’ attention slid away from us as they avoided eye contact with a potential handbill-shover. I wished I’d thought to get some handbills from some real human spammer for us to carry into battle. Nothing made Londoners get out of the way faster than the sight of someone trying to give them an advertisement for some takeaway curry house or discount fitness club.

  The mission went perfectly. We hit the queue in an orderly mass, half of us on its left, half on its right. It was drizzling out, which was normal for autumn in London, and the early September twilight mixed with the water made the whole square dark and gloomy. The forest of unfurled umbrellas provided excellent cover from the CCTVs and PCSOs and coppers with their hat-brim cameras. We efficiently went up and down the line, barking “Free films!” and handing out our little footballs. I could hear little surprised noises rippling through the queue as some people read the ribbon’s message and worked out what they’d just been given, but by then I’d given out my lot of sixty-seven footballs. I checked my phone: less than seven minutes had elapsed.

  I wadded up the nylon carrier bag I’d brought the boodle in and shoved it into my pocket, then turned on my heel and struck out back to Trafalgar Square. Again, I wished I had some fliers I could hold to make the crowd part—it was getting thick. I kept checking my reflection in the drizzle-fogged windows of the restaurants and office buildings on the way out of the square, looking for a tail, but I didn’t see any. I concluded, tentatively, that I’d made it out of the square without being followed.

  Back to the rendezvous, Greek Street, with its pretheater Soho throng and the office people who’d gone home and changed into their woo-party! outfits trickling back in, and we were just a bunch of teenagers, giggly and bouncy. Everyone made it. We got on the tube and headed back to the Zeroday, absolutely drunk on delight.

  Chapter 5

  FLOP!/A TOOLSMITH/FAMILY REUNION/LATE REVIEWS

  We all had theories about what would happen next. I thought that the cinema people would go totally mental and announce a fatwa on all of us, releasing weird, blurry CCTV footage of our costumed army with our fuzzed-out heads; cut to apoplectic industry spokesdroid who’d call us terrorists and declare us to be the greatest-ever threat to the film industry, while solemnly intoning the millions we’d cost them with our stunt.

  All the rest of the night, and then the rest of the weekend, we reloaded as many news sources as we could find, searched on every search term. All we found were a few bemused tweets and that from people who’d been in the queue; almost everyone, it seemed, had discarded the booty we’d distributed or not bothered to plug it in.

  In hindsight, I could see that this made perfect sense. No one cared about what a human spammer shoved into your hands, it was assumed that anything you got that way was junk. That’s why they had to hand out so many brochures to get a single person to sign up for a gym membership or whatnot. Add to that the antique media—you couldn’t even do a rub-transfer, you had to fit it to a USB connector, and half the PCs I saw these days didn’t even have one—and the risks of sticking dodgy files on your computer and it was perfectly reasonable that nearly all of our little footballs went in the bin.

  What a misery.

  “I’m a flop,” I said, lying awake and rigid on Sunday night, while Twenty sat up and worked on her chem homework for the next morning. “I might as well go back to Bradford. What a child I was to think that I could beat them. They’re bloody huge. They practically run the government. They’re going to shut down every channel for showing around video except the ones they control, and no one will be able to be a filmmaker except through them. It’s just like music—the way they went after every music download site they couldn’t control.”

  26 gave no sign of even hearing me, just working through her problem-set, tapping on the screen and at the keyboard.

  “The worst part is that I got all those people out there, used up all their time, put them all at risk, and it was for nothing. They must think I’m an absolute tosser. I want to stick my head in the ground for a million years. Maybe then, everyone will have forgot my stupidity and shame.”

  Twenty set down her laptop and blew at the fringe of her mohican that fell across her forehead. She’d died it candy-apple red that week. “Cecil, you’re wallowing. It is a deeply unattractive sight. What’s more: it is a piece of enormous ego for you to decide that we all were led into this by you, like lambs led by a shepherd. We went into Leicester Square on Friday because we all thought it would work. You didn’t make the plan, you got it started. We all made the plan. We all cocked up. But do you see RD or Chester or Jem moping? Look at the bloody Germans! They’re out in Hackney tonight, trying to sneak into all-hours clubs and planning on drinking their faces off no matter what! So leave it out, all right?”

  She was right, of course. Not that I felt any better about it. “All right, you’re right. It’s not just about me. But it’s still awful and rotten and miserable. What do we do? They buy the laws, attack our families, put us in prison—”

  26 picked up her laptop again. “Cecil, I don’t want to talk to you when you’re like this. You know the answer as well as I do: you’re doing something that they want you to stop. They fear what you do. They fear what we all do. So long as you keep doing it, you’re winning. You don’t need to go on a commando raid to beat them: you just need to keep on making your own films.”

  I don’t think anyone ever said anything more important to me than those ten words: “you just need to keep on making your own films.”

  * * *

  I threw myself into the project, stopping work only long enough to eat and snatch a few hours sleep, or to go out for a little fishing in the skips to find some food. I hardly left my room apart from that. My skin grew pale from the hours indoors, and I noticed that when I went up and down the stairs, I felt all sorts of awkward pulling and pinchi
ng sensations from deep in my muscles, especially around my bum and back and neck. 26 said I was sitting too much and made me download some yoga videos, which we did together in my room when she could force me off the box.

  But she wasn’t pissed at me. No one was, that was the amazing thing. I was editing furiously, putting together films in ways that just seemed to appear behind my eyes and in my fingers—first a scene with Scot fighting vampires that pulled together all kinds of vampires from more than a century’s worth of filmmaking, including the magnificently creepy Max Schreck, upsampled for some retrospective festival that the BFI had done. Rabid Dog spent an afternoon watching over my shoulder as I worked, and he was amazing—I’d never dreamt that anyone could know that much about vampire films. By the time the scene was done, I had a new appreciation for vampire films, and I decided that I would expand my scene into an entire short film, in which Scot is a distressed older gentleman, alone in the world, who befriends a young boy (also Scot, which worked surprisingly well), and discovers that vampires are on the loose in his town. Unlike the other videos I’d done, I didn’t really play this one for laughs: it was straight up action-horror, and it took the combined might of my encyclopedic knowledge of Scot’s thousands of hours’ of footage and Dog’s insane horror obsession to pull it off.

  We worked on it for three weeks straight, editing and editing, subjecting our housemates to rough cuts. The idea was to polish out all the seams, all the places where it became clear that these were footage from different films. I dropped them all into black and white to correct for the different color balances in the different sources, then I punched up the shadows on a frame-by-frame basis, giving it the dramatic contrast of some of the older, scarier horror films that Dog made me sit through. Some days I spent hours just shaving out individual pixels, rubbing out the edges, until one day, I watched all twenty-two minutes of it and realized it was perfect.

  “This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen at the cinema,” 26 said from her perch on the sofa arm. “Honestly.”

  “But no one’d show this at any cinema,” Jem said. “Not in a million years. Too weird. Wrong length. Black and white. Sorry, mate, but I think the best you’ll do is a couple bazillion hits on ZeroKTube or similar.”

  I didn’t say anything. Some old ideas I’d had were knocking together in a new way. I restarted the video and we all watched it through again. It was bloody scary. The kind of thing that made the hairs on your neck stand up—partly that was the way the organ music worked. That was another Dog find—it had come from a fifth-rate monster film, but the director had scored it in a huge old cathedral with the original organ, and you could really hear the reverberations of the low notes in a way that was flat-out spooky.

  “Imagine seeing this somewhere really spooky,” I said. “Someplace that actually feels haunted. Not on some tetchy laptop screen—somewhere dangerous.”

  “Like the graveyard,” Chester said. “That night we all met up. That was brilliant. But it’s too cold and wet for that sort of nonsense right now, mate. It’d have to wait for next summer.”

  “Someplace like the graveyard, but someplace indoors. Underground.” I snatched up my laptop and went back to my favorite infiltration site. There was a whole subculture of mentalists who spent their nights breaking into boarded-up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren’t meant to be. They lovingly documented their infiltrations with video uploads and maps, carefully masking their faces and voices. It was fantastic watching, all this brilliant mountaineer’s ropework, expert lockpicking, and the thrill of discovery as these modern explorers invaded modern ruins that human eyes hadn’t seen for generations.

  The video I called up was one I’d watched several times: it showed an infiltration gang making its way into an abandoned sewer under the Embankment, built as a spillover sewer when the river Thames was locked in the nineteenth century. They accessed it by means of an anonymous doorway that guarded a narrow stairway that led down into a maintenance room.

  The door was locked, but not very well. The Greater London Authority standard for this kind of door was an old Yale lock, vulnerable to a “bump” attack, which even I could do: you just slid a filed-down key-blank into the lock, then rapped it smartly with a little hammer. The energy from the hammer-blow traveled along the key’s shaft and was transmitted into the lock’s pins, which flew up into the lock-mechanism for a brief moment, during which you could simply turn the doorknob and open the door. All told, bumping a Yale took less time than opening it with the actual key.

  A series of locked (but bumpable) doors leading off the maintenance room took them deeper and deeper into the underground works, including a revolting stretch of catwalk that ran over an active sewer. The explorers wrapped cloth around their faces for this part, but even so, they made audible retching noises as they passed over the river of crap.

  Two more locked doors and they were in: a huge, vaulted chamber, like the inside of a cathedral, all Victorian red brickwork with elaborate archways and close-fitted tiles on the floor and running up the walls. As the explorers’ torches played over the magnificent room, we all breathed in together.

  “There’s my cinema,” I said.

  “Oh yes, I think so,” Jem said. “That’s the place all right.”

  * * *

  We went that night, straight down to the Embankment with reversible hi-viz vests that we’d hung with realistic-looking laminated badges and passes for various municipal entities. They wouldn’t hold up if we got hauled into a police station, but in the dark, they’d be convincing enough. We bumped the locks and retraced the spelunkers’ route. We’d brought along some paper painter’s facemasks and these did the trick well enough when we crossed the active sewer, and when we reached the big room, we strung up a load of white LED lanterns we used during the frequent breaker-overloads at the Zeroday. They lit it up with a spooky light that turned buttery with all the dust motes floating in the air.

  Twenty paced the chamber’s length, thinking aloud: “We’d get, what, two hundred or three hundred chairs in here. Put a bar over there. We’ll have to clear out the dust; that’ll be a ten-person job at least. Need lanterns strung along the route, too. The screen’ll go, erm, there, I think, and we’ll need to do something about a toilet—”

  “It’s a sewer, love,” Jem said, prodding her in the ribs with a friendly finger as she paced past him.

  “Yes, all right, sure, but we can’t ask people to crap right here by the bar, can we, now?”

  “There’s no bar,” Jem said.

  “Not yet. But there will be. And three hundred people—that’s a lot of wee and poo and that. We need a ladies’ and a gents’.”

  Jem slipped his mask over his face and headed out into the active sewer. He came back a moment later, waving his torch.

  “There’s a little ledge to either side of the walkway there, just beside the door. Wide enough to build a couple of outhouses, they’d just have to have a hole in the floor leading straight down into the sewer, right?”

  We all made faces. “That’s disgusting,” 26 said.

  “What? It’s where it all goes in the end. Not like we’re going to be able to rig up proper plumbing down here, right? The smell’ll stop people from lingering in the toilets, too. We’ll put some hand sanitizer here, by the door.

  “What about a band?” said Chester, finger on his chin.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Well, something to get the crowd worked up, before the films, like?”

  “Who ever heard of a band before a film?”

  “Who ever heard of a film in a sewer?”

  “Touché,” I said.

  “This is going to be brilliant,” 26 said. She gave me an enormous hug, and it was all wonderful.

  * * *

  I’d learned a lot about construction and renovations from the work we’d done on the Zeroday, but that was nothing compared to the size of the job we faced in the Sewer Cin
ema, as we quickly took to calling it. First, of course, was the problem of how to move all the materials in without getting arrested.

  Aziz looked at us like we were mad when we asked him about it, but after we talked about how wonderful it could be, and showed him the videos, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “that could work. But you’re going to need some things.”

  “Some things” turned out to be a portable chain-link fence with opaque plastic mesh, emblazoned TEMPORARY WORKS-J SMITH AND SONS-CONSIDERATE BUILDER SCHEME-RING 08003334343.

  “Just bung that up around your doorway after dark, turn up with a bunch of hi-viz vests and hard hats and keep the brims low—”

  “We could put those infrared LEDs in ’em,” Jem said.

  “Yeah,” Aziz said. “That, too. And you’ll need a vehicle.”

  He took us out behind his warehouse where there were a half dozen cars in various states of disassembly. One of them was a typical white-panel van, gray with city muck, hubcaps rusted, bonnet with the scars of an old, cack-handed conversion to hybrid. You saw one just like it every ten seconds or so on London’s streets, night or day. The number-plate was artfully spattered with mud and filth, so you could only make out a few digits on it.

  “That’s my beauty,” Aziz said. “The White Whale. She’s a workhorse, she is. Go anywhere, carry any load, never complain. And a motor like that commands respect on the streets of London, my boy. Practically screams, ‘I have nothing to lose’—any crash with an estate-banger like this is going to do more harm to the other geezer than you.”

  Jem grinned and smacked his hands together. “She’s perfect, Aziz.”

  Twenty gave him a playful cuff on the back of the head. “It’s a van, Jem, not a girl. Behave.”