Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  The other two were … less ideal.

  The first was up on the roof of the London Film Museum. The scouting party had discovered an emergency stairwell during a daylight hours visit, and they’d fiddled the lock with a lump of polymer clay wrapped in aluminum foil so that it remained opened, but still closed the circuit that told the system it was locked. The idea was to go up all the stairs to the rooftop, get the shot sorted, and head back out—but the door opened out on the touristy strip in front of the London Eye and the London Aquarium. Hard to say what would be worse: trying to sneak out of the door with heaps of witnesses around in daylight, or sneaking out at night when it was utterly deserted. Okay, not hard to say: it would definitely be worse at night.

  For a shot at the east side of Parliament, the best they could do was a temporary sewer-works site with its own temporary toilet; the green Porta-Loo box had removable panels below the roofline where someone standing inside the toilets might pull off a bank-shot with the projector’s light, but it would be an insanely tight shot, and the person inside would have no idea whether or how many coppers were looking on as the gig unfolded. Plus the scouts were uncertain as to whether there were any handy poles, shelves, or brackets that might be used to anchor the reflector once it was in place, allowing the conspirators to get away while the show played on.

  Of course, 26 volunteered us for this one. “Wouldn’t want anyone else stuck in such an awful spot,” she said. “Not for my idea.”

  “Excuse me, loads of us came up with the idea,” I said. “All together.”

  “The reflectors were my idea,” she said. “Case closed.”

  Aziz and the White Whale rolled up to the Zeroday around 7:00 P.M., just as the summer sun was starting to drift down toward the horizon, sending fierce light stabbing into the eyes of anyone foolish enough to look west. We piled into the back of the van and sorted through the piles of kit. We’d dressed in our dustiest, dirtiest builders’ trousers from the Pirate Cinema heydays, proper builders’ clothes caked in plaster dust and all sorts of muck and grunge. Aziz’s gang had other plans, though: “Strip off,” ordered Brenda with an evil grin.

  Before we could ask what she was about, she’d torn open a huge black bin liner and spilled out a small mountain of awful Souvenir of London clothing: T-shirts that said “Bladdy Lahndin,” and “I LOVE LONDON” and “Norf London,” and pictures of Routemaster buses, Union Jacks, Lord Nelson on his column, and various jug-eared Royals. The shorts had “London” emblazoned across their bums, and sported enormous cargo-pockets for all your tourist dross.

  Jem said, “Eugh, did you lot rob a tour bus?”

  Brenda shook her head, and her mate, Lenny, said, “Found ’em in the skip behind the Day’s Inn near Stansted, the day after some huge publishing conference pulled out. They were still in the conference bags. Such utter rubbish the cleaners didn’t even nick ’em. You won’t find anything less memorable to wear in the whole of London. Put ’em on under what you’re wearing now, and when you get a chance, change into ’em. Put the outer layer into one of these conference bags.” He nudged a slithery pile of cheap carrier bags emblazoned with THE FUTURE OF BOOKS/EARL’S COURT/LONDON and the logos of a load of publishers. “You’ll look like a bunch of out-of-towners finishing one last night’s revelry before going back to Des Moines or Athens or whatever.”

  “Or like we mugged a bunch of that lot,” Jem said. “I don’t really think we’ll pass as out-of-towners. We’re too sophisticated, mate.”

  Brenda and Lenny fell about laughing at this, and for a minute Jem looked so affronted I thought, My god, he was actually serious, and then he couldn’t keep a straight face, either. We were all so nervous that we laughed much harder at all this than it deserved, and when we did strip off, and Aziz hit a pothole that sent us into a half-naked squirming pile, there was so much hilarity and shouting that it was a miracle that the van wasn’t reported to the law by someone who mistook us for kidnap victims being spirited out of London.

  The safety helmets were like old friends, and I managed to find the one that had been my favorite when we were doing the heaviest Pirate Cinema activity. There was a modified mosquito hat for each of us, with spare battery packs. It was impossible to tell that they’d been modded. “Firmware-only hack,” Brenda explained. “Once you’ve got the bootloader cracked, all you need to do is flash the bastard with your own code and away you go.”

  Hester’s ears grew points. “Where’s the I/O?” she said, closely examining her hat for a USB port.

  Brenda said, “You’ll love this. It’s optical. You literally flash it—with pulsed light, right there on this sensor in the back.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “It makes a twisted kind of sense. This thing has so many optical sensors already, why not use them for input? After all, how many times are you going to flash them? The ROMs only hold a couple megs; you can reflash one in a minute or two under ideal conditions.”

  Hester said, “What about nonideal conditions? Say, when someone’s walking down the street and you’re following at a discreet distance?”

  Brenda rubbed her hands together. “I really like the way you think. I don’t think it’d work, though. You want to be really close, and in shadow.… It’d stand out like a sore thumb. Still, it’d be something, wouldn’t it? Surreptitiously reprogram every one of these things in London to kill CCTVs?”

  26 held up a finger. “Could you use the lasers in the hats to zap other hats, and rewrite their firmware? Like, a virus for mosquito-hats?”

  Brenda got a thoughtful, faraway look. “Tell you what: if we’re not all in jail next week, let’s figure it out,” she said.

  Jem covered his face with his hands. “You people are insane,” he said. “Not in a bad way, you understand, but insane nevertheless. I thought squatting and perfecting scientific begging were odd hobbies, but little did I know that I would be the least weird one in this little group.”

  Rob cleared his throat. “I suspect that I might have that honor,” he said.

  Dodger put a huge hand on his shoulder. “We don’t hold it against you, mate.”

  That ride in the back of the windowless van, swaying and making jokes, stands out as one of the most memorable moments of my life. We were balanced on the knife-edge of risk and success, a box full of possibility hurtling toward destiny. In the back of the White Whale, time seemed to stretch into infinity, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of real love for each and every one of my mates. Whatever happened after this, we’d already done something amazing, the minute we got into that van.

  And then the van was pulling over at the first stop: the building site where the projector was to be mounted. First we stopped around the corner so that Brenda could hop out with a doctored mosquito hat on and wander around the site, killing any CCTVs. Then we donned our hardhats and hi-viz and set out hazard sawhorses and muscled the projector behind the hoardings. The scouts had already cut through the chain earlier in the day, working quickly and efficiently with the ease of long practice. In a moment, we were all back in the van except for Dodger and Jem, and barreling toward the bridge.

  At each stop, we shed more passengers, until it was just 26 and me in the back. As we slowed to a stop, she grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a ferocious snog that practically ripped my lips off. It was precisely the thing I needed at that moment. 26 is a clever, clever woman.

  We opened the doors and ducked into the Porta-Loo box and pulled the door shut behind us. No one had been around to zap the CCTVs for us, but Aziz had pulled over right beside the toilet and we’d blocked ourselves off with the van doors, and we had our safety helmets pulled way down low. It would have to do.

  Aziz’s helpers had sorted out mobile phones from the enormous stash of semibroken old handsets in the pile: one for each pair and one more for the projector crew, with cash-only prepaid SIMs in each. Each one had been programmed with the others’ numbers, listed in their address books as PROJECTOR, BRIDGE, CAR PARK
, MUSEUM and TOILET. As soon as we got the door shut behind us and the ventilation grill unscrewed, we texted “1” to each of the phones. If we’d been nicked or run into some other problem, it would have been “0.” The only other permissible code was “9,” which meant “abort mission”—chuck away your gear, change clothes, get out.

  No one sent out a 9 that night, but there were plenty of 0s.

  0: The bridge. Chester and Rabid Dog were just getting this sorted—carrying a hazard barrier down to the stairwell’s bottom—when they ran into a crew of graffiti kids, real hard lads with shaved heads and rucksacks full of multicolored spraypaint and painstakingly made stencils. They assumed (correctly) that Rabid Dog and Chester were as harmless as bunny rabbits and (incorrectly) that they were real building contractors sent to do something with the bridge’s oh-so-convenient stairwell. Dog sent out the 0 while Chester negotiated with the four lads, explaining to them that he wouldn’t be running to the law or nothing, but he couldn’t just piss off, no matter how forcefully they pressed this point. Meanwhile:

  0: The roof. This was an insane plan to begin with. Just because the alarm hadn’t gone off when the scouts diddled the lock with their polymer clay did not mean that the alarm would not go off when Lenny and Hester opened the door. Which it did. They quickly retreated to a safe distance, setting up their barrier and then sitting down beside it and trying to look cool—or rather, look like builders who were standing around guarding a random patch of ground while they waited for someone to turn up with some vital part or instructions or whatnot—there’s a lot of this around London. After twenty minutes of this, no guard had shown up to investigate the alarm. They decided that—incredibly—the alarm was just a bell that rang in that staircase, far from earshot of anyone who could do anything about it, the building equivalent of one of those car-alarms that hoots for twenty minutes solid at 3:00 A.M. without anyone who actually gives a shit whether the car is stolen turning up to investigate. At this point, they steeled themselves and went back in and walked up the stairs, attained the roof, verified their visual on the projector site, and sent a 1.

  0: The car park. Yes, even the bloody car park, the safest, easiest, most secure spot our scouts had found. The spot was so safe that we left Rob there alone, because it was the perfect site, where nothing bad could possibly happen. So Rob only went and dropped the accursed reflector off the fourth-story ledge where he was getting set up, so that it plummeted soundlessly through the warm, black summer night, until it hit the pavement with a crash that was anything but silent. So, yeah. 0.

  Are you keeping track? Zeros all round from the bridge, the roof and the car park, which left … the toilet.

  That would be us.

  Chapter 15

  A LESS-THAN-IDEAL WORLD/NOT-SO-INNOCENT BYSTANDERS/HOW’D WE DO?

  In an ideal world, 26 would have stood out in the road and looked for the green dot of the laser-scope they’d fitted to the top of the Mark III’s jerry-rigged optics, calling the projector team, giving them guidance. But it was still dead busy outside our little portable toilet hideaway; standing outside with a mobile clamped to your head, following a green dot and giving directions into the mouthpiece would have drawn attention. We didn’t want any attention.

  We had all agreed to keep phone calls to a minimum. No one knew exactly how long the old phones’ batteries would hold out, and it just seemed like the more we left a digital record that could be traced back to us—by our voices, say, possibly captured by whatever superspy technology the MI5 or Met were using in London—the riskier it was. So we waited. 26 stood on the toilet, one foot braced on either side of the seat (I didn’t want to think about what it would be like if she slipped and fell down the hole—but the lid was so flimsy neither of us wanted to risk our weight to it). I stood on the floor, craning my neck up to see if the green dot appeared on 26’s face, which was level with the gap. We both hoped it didn’t skewer her eyeball, because, well, that would be bad.

  And there it was, on her nose. “Your nose!” I said. She whipped the reflector up and I clambered up on the seat beside her (nearly knocking her into the filthy stew of muck and wee and mysterious blue liquid sloshing around below us) and peered intently at the wall of the salmony-yellow brickwork of the Commons, now gray with the dim light of early night. I had a little pair of binox, but have you ever tried to spot a reflected, jiggling green dot on a wall a hundred yards away through a pair of tiny opera glasses? It’s thumpingly hard.

  But I caught it. “Right there,” I said. We hadn’t found anything to anchor the reflector to, but we’d figured on being the very last team to go, and from the opposite bank to all the other shots, which we hoped would have made the cops slower to respond. Ten, fifteen minutes, and off we’d go. Now we were first, and we’d have to stay up and running for as long as we could. I didn’t know what was going on with my zeroed-out mates, but I was surely hoping that they got it sorted quickly.

  I texted another “1” to the projector crew and held my breath.

  Then I let it go in a whoosh as the opening frames of my beautiful, wonderful, perfect video started rolling on the crenelated walls of the Commons. We’d superimposed a QR code on the top right corner of the frame, and it rotated every 10 seconds; each 2D barcode translated into the URL of a different mirror of the video with the embedded TheyWorkForYou stats. The little battery-powered video player plugged into the projector was programmed to roll the video, wait a random interval between ten and two-hundred seconds, then roll it again.

  The first time it ran, I craned my neck around 26’s trembling biceps to see if I could see the crowd reacting. I heard some excited voices, and maybe a change in the timbre of the traffic noises, but I couldn’t say for sure. Then the video stopped and we very, very carefully changed places, trying not to let the reflector budge by the tiniest amount. It wasn’t that heavy at first, but after holding it in place while I counted one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus to forty-three, I felt my own arms start to tremble. Now it was my turn to be nearly knocked into the soup by 26 as she stood up on tiptoe to get a look out the grill. This being the second run, we expected a lot more people to notice, and they did; I could hear it from where I stood.

  “They’re stopping traffic,” 26 said. “A whole gang of tourists, looks like, standing in the middle of the road where they get the best view.”

  “Any of them looking this way?”

  “A few, but I’m pretty sure the beam is over their heads, the way you’ve got it aimed; they won’t see the light unless they get up higher. Oh, wait, someone’s moving one of the curtains on the high window. Shit!”

  And that’s when the second run finished.

  We swapped again, both of us trembling. We’d been breathing floral-scented shit-fumes for ten minutes solid now, and between the lightheadedness, the excitement, and the weird, plasticky acoustics in the Porta-Loo, we were nervous as cats. Add to that the prospect of imminent discovery and arrest, and it’s a wonder neither of us had a stroke.

  “How many times are we going to do this?” I said. I hadn’t wanted to be the first one to say it, but it was clear that 26 was a lot tougher than me.

  She made the tiniest of shrugs, keeping the reflector still. “Until someone else is in position, I suppose. Can’t stop until then.”

  Not unless we get caught. I didn’t say it. Didn’t have to. We were both thinking it.

  The video started again. Now I didn’t have to look out the window to know that it was drawing a crowd. I could hear them. Also, the unmistakable voice of authority, coppers telling people to move along, the crackle of police radios. Distant sirens. I was in the middle of switching with 26 when the phone buzzed. She dug it out of my pocket and fumbled it and we both snatched for it as it fell towards the festering crap-stroganoff below us. I managed to bat it so that it fell to the floor instead. 26 went for it as I tried to realign the reflector. It was from the bridge: 1. They were ready. I managed to get the reflector lined up again just as the vi
deo ended, and we changed quickly into our tourist outfits, stuffing the hi-viz and builder’s clothes into the carrier bags and switching on our CCTV-killing laser-hats. We snuck out of the toilet hand in hand, our palms so sweaty that they practically dripped. As we slipped out the door, a beefy copper clapped a hand on each of our shoulders.

  “Just a minute, please,” he said, with that hard filth voice that made my heart stop beating. Four polite words, but they might as well have been, “And now you die.”

  I swallowed, then dredged up my thickest, most northern voice, widened my eyes and said, “Excuse us, officer! We’re just here for the weekend and we told our Mam and Dad we’d meet them at the Parliament to take our coach and well, we were both caught a bit short and this was the only toilet we could find—I know it was wrong, but it was a desperate situation.”

  He got squinty and thoughtful and then, by microscopic increments, the hand on my shoulder loosened up.

  “Mind if I see your arms, lad?” he said.

  I understood then, but pretended I didn’t. He thought we’d been injecting drugs in the toilet. I gladly held my arms out, and so did 26. “Like this?” I said, putting even more northernness in my voice, so I sounded like the comedy Yorkshireman in a pantomime. But the copper didn’t twig. After a short look at my arms he said, “McDonald’s is always a better bet for a public convenience if you really need to go. It’s dangerous to sneak into a construction site, you never know what’s lying around. Not to mention you could get done for trespassing. Don’t let me catch you at it again, all right?”