Good friends and lifted spirits/Magnum opus (“It's Not Fair!”)/Parliament Cinema

I thought about calling Annika or one of the organizers or politicos I'd met along the way, but in my head, the conversation got as far as “We've lost, there's no point, we might as well chuck it in,” and then trailed off.

So I went home, sulking the whole way, the now-familiar long journey across London to the Zeroday. It was Friday, and the TIP-Ex vote was due on Monday. On Tuesday, I was scheduled to go on trial for £78 million worth of copyright infringement.

For all that, London seemed unaware that it had only days to go before all hope would be lost. The streets were full of people who clearly didn't give a toss about copyright, about TIP, or about anything apart from getting rat-arsed and howling through the night, vomming up their fried chicken into the gutter or having sloppy knee-tremblers with interesting strangers in the doorways of shuttered shops.

26 was right. These people would wake up on Tuesday morning and see some hard-to- understand headline about the defeat of some bill they'd never heard of and they'd ignore it and go back to talking about who had the West Nile virus, who had been rubbish and who had been brilliant on Celebrity Gymnastics, and which clubs they'd get blotto at next weekend. And if some of their mates went to jail, if their parents lost their livelihoods, if their kids couldn't make art or get an education, well, what could you really do about it? Just a fact of life, innit, like earthquakes or tsunamis.

Rabid Dog and Chester had scored some truly amazing food down at Borough Market and Jem had decided it was time for a feast. He'd been in the kitchen all day with Dodger, who had invited Rob over. Chester had brought along Hester, 26's old mate from Confusing Peach, and Aziz had come by with three kids about our age who'd been staying at his and helping him with a massive haul he'd brought in, turning it into saleable merchandise and moving it out through a small network of car-boot sale retailers he'd put together. They were your basic gutterpunks, but clever and moderately sober.

I'd invited 26 and she'd agreed to come and naturally we'd both forgot about this, so I came home just as Dodger was serving up a massive humble pie, stuffed with livers and heart and tripes in a simmering, rich brown gravy that was as thick as custard. The crust was yellow-gold and crackled like parchment when he sliced into it, releasing first a waft of butter smell, and then the meaty smells from within.

“Sit down, Cecil,” he said. “And shut your gob, you're letting the flies in and the dribble out.”

Something about coming through my familiar door and into a candle-lit room dominated by a huge table (okay, it was a bunch of little wobbly pub tables pushed together) ringed by friends and friends-of-friends, drinking wine, laughing, and this big, beautiful, ridiculous pie in the middle of it all -- it made me think that maybe, just maybe, my problems might be solved. Why not? We were the Jammie Dodgers, and we could do anything!

I took off my jacket, went into the kitchen and maneuvered around Jem -- resplendent in an apron, working madly at five bubbling pots on the massive cooker -- and washed my hands in the sink. Back at the table, someone had poured me a glass of wine, and Dodger had dished me up an enormous slice of pie. Jem burst out of the kitchen carrying platters of roast parsnips, duck-fat potatoes, tureens of white sauce, and a massive loaf of thick- crusted brown bread studded with olives and capers. It steamed when he tore off hunks and chucked them at us, and the air was filled with baked-bread perfume. There were saucers of coarse salt and saucers of dark green olive oil, and we dipped the bread in the oil and then the salt and chewed it like gum, hot and fatty and salty and so fresh it almost burned your mouth.

Then we attacked the pie and the veg and there was wine-guzzling and arms reaching across the table to top up everyone's glasses whenever they ventured even a little below the full line. We didn't talk about copyright or film remixing or finding £78 million with which to pay off the nutters at the film studios. Instead, we gossiped about friends; Dodger told near-death electrocution stories; Hester regaled us with stories of drug-fueled excess from a party we'd all missed; Rabid Dog had a new joke he'd made up about three children who go wandering in a woods filled with serial killers (it went on and on, getting funnier and funnier, until it came to the punchline: “I thought you were going to chop the firewood!” and we fell about laughing); Aziz and his minions explained a gnarly driver problem they were having with a load of de-authorized sound-cards and solved it for themselves as they described it and cheered and slapped one another on the back; Chester had just read a mountain of downloaded ancient comics called Transmetropolitan that he couldn't shut up about... In other words, it was a brilliant table full of amazing, uproarious conversation, piled high with delicious food.

It was just the tonic I needed, and two hours later, as we mopped up the last of the custard- drowned sweet suet pudding with our fingers and piled the plates up and shuttled them into the kitchen, I once again felt like, just maybe, the world wasn't an irredeemable shit- heap.

I volunteered to be Jem's coffee-slave as he hand-brewed us cups of gritty Turkish coffee, and once we were all fed, we loosed our belts and took off our shoes and lay on cushions on the floor or on the sofa and Hester got out her mandolin and played a few old Irish folk songs that Chester knew the words to, and one of Aziz's helpers had a tin whistle and she played along with Hester and they got us to sing along on a gaggingly hilarious version of “The Rattlin' Bog,” which went on and on, until we stumbled through the final chorous: “And the grin was on the flea and the flea was on the wing and the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was on the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was on the tree and the tree was in the hole and the hole was in the dirt and the dirt was in the ground and the ground was in the bog -- the bog down in the valley-o!”

And then it got quiet.

“So, Cecil,” said Jem, “are you going to tell us what's got you looking so miserable, or are we going to have to beat it out of you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing's wrong, mate, it's all fine.”

“You're not fooling anyone. You came in here looking like your whole family had just been killed in a traffic accident. So spill. What is it? 26 angry at you?”

I shook my head. “So much for my career as a cool, collected man of mystery.”

Aziz patted my shoulder. “Cecil, you have many virtues, but you're as easy to read as a book. Never take up a career as a poker player, that's my advice.”

I told them. It's not like Letitia had asked me to keep it a secret, but still, I didn't exactly mention how I knew that the fix was in. Chester and Rabid Dog knew that I had a personal connection with Letitia, so they'd probably guess at the connection, but I had some feeling that putting up Letitia's name would just be getting her in trouble.

Hester shook her head. “What a right pissing mess,” she said. “No wonder you're so miserable.”

“The worst part is that it makes me want to give up. I mean, I knew it was going to be hard when we started, but for so long as I thought it was possible that we could win, I wanted to keep at it. Now I can't even release my new video or I could end up in actual jail for violating the judge's order.”

Jem fingered his scar. “Not worth it, chum. You want to stay out of His Majesty's clutches, trust me.”

“Well, let's see it, then,” said Dodger. He'd been spinning up a Dodger-style spliff, big as a cigar, stuffed with skunk so pungent I could smell it through my ears. “World premiere an' that.”

“Go on, then,” Aziz said. The rest nodded.

Funny, I felt embarrassed. I'd shown my films to audiences of hundreds, uploaded them for millions to see. But my new video, made with the Scot footage that no one else had ever worked with, felt like a piece of me. I overcame my shyness and got out a laptop and found a beamer among the box of electronic junk. We had cleared a wall and whitewashed it, and we used it whenever we had film nights. The beamer focused itself and I started the video.

Three minutes and eighteen seconds later, I switched off the beamer. No one said a word. I felt a sick, falling feeling, and I felt like I might toss up the incredible meal, bread and tripes and suet and custard and all. Then Jem said, “'Ken hell, mate.”

“Fwoar,” agreed Chester. Then it was nods all round. Finally, Rob began to applaud: Clap. Clap. Clap. In a second, everyone had joined in, and they whistled and cheered and stamped their feet. Aziz thudded me between the shoulder-blades and Hester gave me a hug and yeah, that was about as good as it got. Some people are great artists -- I think all my mates were, of one kind or another -- but it takes a special kind of person to be a great audience.

And they were.

You've seen the video, I suppose. What happened next guaranteed that practically every- body had seen it; what's more, there's whole libraries' worth of remixes of it, and if you ask me, plenty of them are better than anything I could have come up with. Still, I made that first mix, and I'm going to be proud of it for my whole life. Even if I never do anything else anyone gives a wet slap for, I made Pirate.

And since I'm writing all these adventures down and trying to tell them as best and truthful as I can, I figure I should set down a few words about Pirate, too.

It opens with Scot at his prime, thirty-some years old. He's not a teen heartthrob anymore, nor a twentysomething actor being cast for increasingly improbable teen roles. Now he's done four summers of Shakespeare at the Globe and had his directorial debut with Wicked. Cool., a brutal film about a British foreign service bureaucrat who cynically funnels money and weapons to the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, despite their horrible atrocities and use of child soldiers, because they promise access to a rich deposit of coltan mud for a firm listed on the London Stock Exchange in return. He's put on some wrinkles and a few pounds, but he's better-loved than ever. Girls -- grown, married women -- fling themselves at him. The tabloids are obsessed with who he's shagging. He is a stunner, and he knows it.

Oh, he clearly knows it, The opening shot is him, sitting behind his desk, a humble little table, much-loved and clearly a working tool, not a status symbol. He's grinning at his screen with supreme confidence. Cut to his screen, where I matted in a little VLC window showing another clip of Scot, much younger, teenaged, horsing around with half a dozen nameless starlets on the set of some film. I'd done a little jiggery-pokery so that you could see his face reflected in the monitor, an expression that wasn't quite a smirk and wasn't quite a smile on his face. It was one of those unguarded, unself-conscious expressions that Scot was so famous for, the face of someone who you would swear had no idea that a camera was pointed at him. Another trick shot, zooming back so that now we're looking over his shoulder.

As the video on his screen runs out, he leans forward and takes the mouse, and I'd matted in the distinctive anonabrowser that The Pirate Bay had introduced, with its pew-pew laser effects as it zapped every tracking bug and cookie; the groovy animations of it hopping through all its proxies before plundering the world's treasurehouse of films, music, and games. Reflected in the screen, his expression changed to one of fierce concentration. In the search-box, the words “Scot Colford.” The mouse glided to the SEARCH button. More clicking.

Scot's door interior -- the door of the house in Soho he'd lived in for thirty years, a fixture there, now celebrated with a blue disc. Scot crosses to the door, looking fearful (footage from a spooky Halloween short he'd made), opens it. Someone outside. We don't see who. We just see Scot's reaction shot, the fear turning into horror, the horror to terror, the terror to abject, weeping pleading. He'd played it for laughs, but with the right music and a v-e-r-y subtle slowdown of the framerate, it looked like he was shattering inside. I knew how that felt. I'd been there. I new exactly how I wanted Scot to look, and that's how he looked. Just like I'd felt.

Now we see a young Scot, not even a proper teenager, and he's alone, staring abjectly at the blank eyes of a brick school, a massive place that might as well be a fortress or a prison.

An old Scot next, carrying a box of office things out of a glass tower somewhere in the financial district, suit rumpled, shirt untucked.

Another Scot, lying in a hospital bed, emaciated, tube up his nose. In the seat next to him, the young Scot again. Fingers on a keyboard. A screen. NETWORK ACCESS SUSPENDED.

Now the original Scot, and a zoom out to reveal him sitting on the floor of a grim cell, tiny. He is sunken and sallow, and he slowly, slowly raises his hand to cover his face.

A long beat, the light changing, and it looks for a moment like it will grow dark, but that's just a fake out. The scene lightens, brightness edging in from the edges of the screen until it is a searing white. A perfectly black, crisp-edged silhouette... dances on that white screen. No, it's not a dance, it's some kind of boxing training, but so graceful, until the savage kicks and punches. The light changes, and now the silhouette is Scot again, teenaged Scot, shadow-boxing, and the background fill in with a film set, and Scot is whirling and punching and ducking and weaving.

Now, the first words spoken in the whole film: “It's. Not. Fair.” More punching and kicking -- there'd been about ten takes of this in the video Katarina gave me, and I'd used them all, playing with the lighting and the speed and cutting back and forth so that Scot became a dervish. There'd been a moment when I was cutting that sequence where it felt like Scot and I were working together, across time and space; I felt like I could see what Scot was trying to say with his body and his facial expressions, and I was bringing that out, teasing it out, bringing his intention to the fore.

Back to the Scot in the hospital bed. If you watched the whole clip, it was just some footage of him recovering from having a kidney stone out, but he really looked like death, and he'd got his wife to bring in a camera and set it up at the foot of the bed so he could experiment with expressions of grief and dying. It was what made Scot Scot, that constant practice of his craft. There'd been one frame where he'd just nailed it, so much so that when he caught a glimpse of himself in the monitor, he'd startled and made a yeek sound. It was the face of someone who was angry and scared and hopeless and in pain -- it was the exact mixture of feelings I'd felt the day they'd come and taken away my family's Internet. The second I saw it, I knew it was my closer. I let it flicker in a series of short cuts from the rage-dance, flick, flick, flick, faster and faster like a zoetrope starting up, until it was jittering like an old fluorescent tube. Then I held it still for just less than a second, and cut to black.

That was it.

“Dude,” Chester said. He'd been watching a lot of American animation lately and it was all “dude” all the time. “Duuuuude.”

Rob giggled. He'd had a little too much of Dodger's special helper and was lying boneless on the rug in front of the sofa. “I think what's he's trying to say is, that video needs to get a wide viewing.”

I shook my head. “Well, maybe after the trial. But it'll be too late then, of course. The vote'll have gone ahead. We'll have lost. And I daren't release it before the trial, or I'll end up in jail; everyone's been very clear on that subject.” I sipped at my wine. “Christ, I wish I could put this online tonight.”

“What if we got someone else to put it online?” Jem said.
I shook my head. “I don't think it'd work,” I said. “It wouldn't get the play, and no one would

pay attention to it before Monday.”

Jem looked up and down, thinking so hard I could hear his brain whirring. “What if we got every major news outlet to play it?”

I made a rude noise. “Well, so long as we're playing what-if make believe, what if we could show it to every MP?”

Jem nodded. “Yeah, that was my plan all right,” he said. “What if we screen this thing somewhere everyone will see it? Somewhere that makes every single newscast the next morning? Something that'll be on every freesheet and website?”

“Erm, yeah, that would be great. How do you propose to do this, Jem?” I was skeptical, but I felt a tickle inside. Jem was grinning like mad, and he hadn't been into the skunk yet, so there was something going on in that twisty mind of his. Something grand and wonderful.

“You remember that time Hester and your missus put on that brilliant show in Highgate Cemetery? The outdoor beamers and all?”

I nodded, and felt a little disappointed. Yeah, we could probably get a bunch of the Con- fusing Peach types out to some park and show this to them, but we knew by now that our message boards were full of supergrasses who'd fink us out to the law, and besides, what did it matter if our crowd saw this? They were already on our side.

Jem caught my expression and raised his hands. “Hear me out now! What if you had a fantastic beamer, a giant one, one that was powerful enough to, say, paint an image on the side of a building a good five hundred meters or more away?”

“Are you asking me 'what if' as in 'imagine that there was such a thing,' or as in 'I have such a thing?'” I asked, and my excitement was creeping back now, because I thought I knew what was coming next. For one thing, Aziz's helpers looked like they were about to bust and Aziz was nodding thoughtfully.

Jem waved his hands. “That's the wrong question. Just imagine it for a moment. Where would you screen your little tour-de-force if you could show it anywhere?”

“I don't know. Erm. Buckingham Palace?”

Jem snorted. “It'd only be seen by a load of tourists, mate.”

“The Tate? From across the river? It's got nice, big blank walls.”

Jem nodded. “Oh, that's good. Hadn't thought of that. But think bigger, son. What else is on the river? Some place were MPs are bound to see it?”

I could see other people in the room getting it, which was frustrating as anything. Hester laughed. Chester and Rabid Dog laughed harder. Rob and Dodger roared with laughter. Aziz and his gang pounded their fists on their thighs. Then, the light dawned for me.

“Knobbing Christ, Jem -- Parliament?” “Now you've got it!”

The Jammie Dodgers pulled off some insane stunts over the years, but nothing half so grand as the night we took over the House of Commons.

It wouldn't have been possible without The Monster, which is what Aziz and Co called this fantastic, forty thousand lumen beamer they'd rescued from a skip behind a cinema that was being pulled down in Battersea. None of them could believe that this astounding piece of kit could possibly work -- not until they googled it and discovered that it had been de- certified from use ten years before, thanks to a firmware crack that let bent projectionists harvest pristine, lossless copies of new-release films. Of course, I could have told them all about it: the NEC DCI Mark III was notorious for being thoroughly compromised within days of each of its patch-cycles, twenty-eight times in all over two years, before it was finally decertified and thereafter, no self-respecting digital film would play through its powerful lens.

Though I'd hardly been a tadpole when all this had happened, the zeroday film-release scene I'd grown up with was still wistful about that golden age, when new films would turn up online an hour before the worldwide premiere, smuggled out of the projection booth by someone who knew someone who knew someone. Of course, there were always screen- ers before the cinematic leak -- advanced copies that had been sent to reviewers or awards juries -- not to mention all those pre-release versions that leaked out of the edit-suites. But those tended to have big, ugly NOT FOR EXHIBITION watermarks on them, or were rough and unfinished. The Mark III was piracy's best friend in those long-ago days, and I'd as- sumed that all those beasts had been busted up for parts or melted down or beheaded and stuck up on the wall of the MPAA's chief pirate hunter's study.

And yet here it was, a huge box with a lens as big as a pie-plate and a massive, 240V safety plug.

“It draws more power than a room-full of Gro-Lites,” Aziz said ruefully, watching the power- meter on his mains outlet whir around.

“But look at that picture!” I said. I couldn't restrain myself from hopping from foot to foot. We'd brought it up on the roof of Aziz's warehouse and we'd focused the picture on a low tower-block over the road and across a field, a good kilometer away. At that distance, the picture was three stories tall, and even at this distance, it looked bleeding amazing. I zoomed in on it with my phone's camera, and with magnification at max, I could barely make out the tiniest amount of fuzz. The Mark III had been overbuilt, overengineered, and overpowered, and as Aziz swung the projector around on the dolly we'd lugged up to the roof, the huge image slid vertiginously over various walls and windows. I held my hand in front of it and made a shadow-doggy. Over the road, a giant's hand loomed up on the wall: Woof! Woof! But more like WOOF! WOOF!

“Of course, this only works if we don't care about getting nicked,” Dodger said. He'd sobered up quite a lot on the ride over in the back of Aziz's White Whale, and he'd made appreciative, electrician-type noises as we muscled it onto the roof, using a winch and crane that seemed to be made of rust and bird poop at first, but didn't even rock an inch as we hauled away like sailors at its ropes.

From the ground below, we heard 26 shouting: “Hey, you kids, stop splashing your pirate photons all over the shop!”

“How's it look from down there?” I called.

“Like the Bat-Signal,” she said. “But in a good way. Hang on, I'm coming up!”

And that, in a nutshell, was why I loved my girlfriend to tiny, adorable pieces: she'd gone home that afternoon in a miserable sulk, but when I'd called her and told her to drop ev- erything, right now, and get her fabulous arse over to Aziz's place, she'd dried her tears, worked out the night-bus routes, and trekked half-way across England (well, all right, Lon- don), without a second thought.

Aziz killed the projector, leaving sudden blackness in its wake. We all blinked and waited for our eyes to adjust. I heard 26 downstairs, then on the steep aluminum ladder that went up through the skylight. She nodded hello to all of us, then came and slipped her arm around my waist and nuzzled my neck. “Sorry,” she whispered into my ear.

“It's okay,” I whispered back.

Dodger shook his head. “Look, you lot, this is pretty amazing and all, but I'm not up for going to jail. Maybe I can get you your power and then scarper before you turn it on, yeah?”

“What's the problem?” 26 said.

Dodger thumped the Mark III. “Only that this thing is an absolute beacon,” he said. “These lunatics think they can shine it on Parliament tomorrow night, screen your man's home film on the House of Effing Commons, but we'll have the law on us in seconds. You said it yourself. That thing is like the Bat-Signal.”

“Hrm,” 26 said. It was the “hrm” she used when she was really thinking about something. “Any of you lot know much about pirate radio?”

We mumbled words to the effect of, Yeah, kinda. Heard of it, anyway.

“It used to be giant,” she said. “That was mostly before the net, of course. There were all these people, complete nutters really, and they'd climb up onto the roof of buildings and hide an all-weather broadcasting station up there. But then they'd add a second an- tenna, one that was meant to *receive* signals from anywhere that had line-of-sight to their rooftop.”

I could see where this was going. “They bounced the signal off another building! It was a relay, right?”

She patted me on the head. “That way, when Ofcom's enforcers went all-out to trace their signal back to the transmitter, they'd just find a box on a roof that could be fed from any of thousands and thousands of flats. They'd take the antenna down, and the broadcasters would just aim their little transmitter at another antenna they'd already prepared.”

“Oh,” we all said at once.

“Listen to that penny dropping,” she said, “it's a lovely, luvverly sight. Now, I'm no expert on optics, but I did just write my A level on physics, and I don't imagine it'd be insanely hard to make this work, especially if you're not particular about the image quality and just want to make a big spectacle without getting banged in jail, yeah? What we want is some big mirrors, and a good monocle or better yet, a telescope.”

Aziz was nodding so hard it looked like his head would come off. “I've got just the thing.”

Jem drummed his hands on the top of the projector. “I'll get started on the coffee,” he said. “Who wants some?”

As one, we each shot an arm into the air, and said, “I do,” and Jem said, “Right,” and scampered down the ladder.

Despite it being a short summer night, the time seemed to stretch out. Over the years, Aziz had accumulated all manner of monocles, SLR camera zoom lenses, telescopes, and other optics. There was also plenty of shiny stuff to be had, from outsized, clip on rear-view mirrors to satellite dishes lined with aluminum foil. The best results came from the smooth, bowl-shaped pot off the headlamp of a rusting old Range Rover Aziz had in back of his place. It had come out of the Rover a little dusty, but once we wiped it down with a lint-free cloth and then lined up the shot right, we could funnel the beam off the Mark III through a bugger-off huge Canon telephoto lens with a busted thread, then through a Minox tactical monocle, turning it into a pencil-beam of high-resolution light; thereafter, we could send it a good one hundred to two hundred meters into the headlamp pot, and bank it ninety degrees and into a building-side half a kilometer away. Sure, the final image was a lot more distorted, but --

“We could get four of these and spread ourselves out in hiding spots all along the south bank, set the projector up on the north side of the river, and hit Parliament over and over again, switching over every time we heard the sirens start,” I said.

“There's only two pots on the Range Rover,” Aziz said. “But there's a wrecker up the road we should be able to scout for more.”

“Lining up the shots at that distance will be tricky,” Chester said.

In answer, Rabid Dog pulled a laser-pointer out of his shirt pocket. “What about a laser- sight?” he said. He turned it on and aimed it at the pot we'd set up half-way down the road from Aziz's place. It neatly cornered and showed up on the building-side where we'd been testing out the video.

The sun was rising now, and there was more traffic, and the projector light was harder to see. But it didn't matter. This would work.

“What about the CCTVs?” Dodger said.

“Hats,” Jem said. “Pull 'em down low. Wear anonymous stuff -- jeans and tees, that sort of thing.”

Dodger made a face. “Forget it,” he said. “They'll put your piccie on the evening news, call you a terrorist, someone'll shop you by breakfast. Count me out,” he said.

“When did you get to be such a scared little kitten? I thought you were meant to be all hard and fearless, Dodge.” Jem and Dodger rarely fought anymore, but when they did, it was like watching brothers go at it, that same total abandon, that same fast and scary escalation.

Aziz raised his hands. “Calmness,” he said. “Calmness, please. Jem, Dodger, there's something we'd like to show you.” He nodded at one of his acolytes, Brenda, who went to a shelf and took down one of the familiar mosquito-zapping hats.

Dodger made a rude noise. “That thing barely has a brim! It wouldn't do you any good.” Aziz rolled his eyes. “It's not a disguise. Brenda?”

Brenda took off the flat-cap she wore. Her kinky black hair sprung out into a halo. She stuffed it back under the mosquito hat and smiled.

“Observe,” Aziz said, and held up his phone so that the camera lens shone at her.

Zap.

An instantaneous line of green light snapped out of the hat and drilled directly into the lens. There was a light crackling sound from Aziz's phone, and then the screen went dark. He chucked it onto a workbench that I now noticed was covered in lightly charred, semi-obsolete phones.

“I got the idea from those posh anti-paparazzi handbags,” he said. “The ones that detect a camera-focus and detonate a flash before it can shoot? Scourge of the tabloid photog, they are. I thought that I could probably use the optics in one of these things to find CCTVs, anything with a camera. You wear one of these going down the street and anything close enough to get a decent look at you will be fried before you come into range. What's more, you'll blend right in wearing these things -- everyone's got 'em. Don't suppose they'll last long, once the law figures out what we're about, but I figure we might as well use them for something fabulous while we can. I've got eight ready -- should be plenty for a projector crew and four runners to take on the reflectors. At this rate, we should be able to light up the House of Commons for a good two or three hours and still get away clean.”

Dodger's mouth was slack, his eyes wide. Jem slapped him lightly across one cheek.

“Right,” Jem said. “How's that suit you, Dodger my boy?”

When I'd first cut the “It's Not Fair,” short, I'd automatically inserted my usual credit-reel, with my little Cecil B. DeVil pitchfork-and-horns logo and URLs. I excised this, then went over the file with a hexadecimal editor, looking for any serial numbers, user keys, or other metadata that might lead back to me. Just to be on the safe side, I ran the video through an online transcoder, upsampling the video and audio by a tiny amount, then downsampling it again. The resulting file was minutely fuzzier (which hardly mattered, given the projection method we were planning on using), but I felt better about the possibility that there might be some sort of sneaky serial numbers or other scary snitchware lurking in the file.

We built several quick-and-dirty pages to host it, embedding the video from five different sources, including ZeroKTube, but also using several YouTubes that punters would be able to access without having to install any software. But the really tricky thing was, we also embedded the TheyWorkForYou page that tracked the vote-record for each MP on the upcoming TIP-Ex vote. Because the vote hadn't happened yet, all this showed was N/A in each MP's voting column; but once they'd cast their vote, it would be there, searchable by post-code. A single link would place a phone call or send an e-mail to the MP's office, and a second link went to a page with the platforms of all the MPs' competitors in the upcoming election.

The message wasn't subtle: “We're watching you. We will let every voter in the country know about how you voted in this one. You may think it'll be hard to get re-elected if your party chucks you out for going against the whip, but it'll be just as hard to get your seat back if thousands of your constituents go door-to-door explaining to their neighbors how you sold them down the river.”

Granted, it wasn't much different from the message that we'd been sending them all along, all the way back to the first TIP vote, but the numbers had been steadily growing, and with the media splash from our creative projector-graffiti, we were hoping they might take this a little more seriously.

26 and I caught a nap together that afternoon in the Zeroday while Chester and Hester and Jem and Dog scouted locations; they'd done fantastic work finding us underground sites for the original Pirate Cinemas, and reckoned that between Google satellite images of the rooftops and a little ground surveying, they'd be able to find plenty of rooftops on the South Bank with a view of the Commons. They were also going to scout out the North Bank for sites that might be able to get a clear shot of the east wall, which would be tricky, but a lot more dramatic. Aziz and his elves were working on gluing heavy fixings to the lamp-posts so that they could be attached to whatever was handy and then fast-cemented into place once they were correctly lined up. If we got it all right, each crew would show up in hi-viz vests with cones and that, get the reflector into place, make sure it was working, fix it with fiendish adhesive, and scarper. The projector crew would hit each reflector until the law showed up and took it down -- they could just drape someone's jacket over the reflector, of course, but it might take them a while to hit on that strategy, and once the pic went dark, we'd wait a random interval and then switch to another one. The law would never know if they'd got all the sites -- and we'd save the last, a direct shot, for just before dawn, hours after the first hit, when the first of the morning commuters were coming across the bridges.

It was a risky strategy, but Jem insisted that it was our best one, the one that would make the biggest splash. And since he was going to work the projector, we couldn't really talk him out of it. He assured us that as soon as the picture was lined up, he'd do a runner and leave it running unattended until the lackwits and jobsworths at the Met took it down. We'd wear gloves and wipe everything down with bleach-wipes, and the laser-hats would take care of any CCTVs.

All this whirled through my mind as I tried to sleep in the middle of the hot, sunny afternoon, a wheezing fan blowing over me and 26. I tried to concentrate on my breath and the smell of her skin behind her ears and in the crook of her chin, but my stupid brain kept returning to the night's plan, and all the ways it could go wrong, and just how risky it was, and how much riskier it would be if I didn't get some sleep -- I'd be so logy and stupid with sleep- deprivation, I'd be bound to make some ridiculous cock-up and get us all sent away. Which, of course, made me even more anxious and even less able to sleep, and so on.

But at a certain point, it just doesn't matter how tightly you're wound or how much your mind is racing, sleep comes and takes its toll from you, and so sleep I did, and dream terrible, anxious dreams in which I was looking all over for the Bradford motor-coach station, then looking for my knapsack and lappie in Hyde Park, then looking for Jem in all our haunts, then looking for the Zeroday, which seemed to have moved of its own volition, then looking for 26, then looking for the mirrored pots of the Land Rover lights -- while a clashing brass band played on in the background, so loud it drowned out all thought, making it harder and harder to think straight. I was practically weeping with frustration when I realized that the brass band was my alarm, a little salute to Bradford and its brassy history, and it was time to get out of bed and commit some crimes by cover of dark.

I shook 26 awake, pulled on my clothes, then shook her awake again, for she had crawled back into bed and put a pillow over her head. “Come on, love,” I said, “time to go and save Britain.”

“Sod Britain,” she said from under the pillow.

“Time to go and put the screws to Parliament, then,” I said.

“That's a little better,” she said.

“Time to go and pull off the most amazing feat of pirate cinematry that the world has ever seen -- does that suit madam's taste?”

“Much better,” she said. “Come on, then, enough slacking. Let's do it!”

Perhaps the simplest thing to do here is catalog all the ways that this plan went wrong. Be- cause, of course, that's where all the excitement was -- but also because the plan mostly went right. The building site that the scouting party found was just perfect for the projector. Dodger was able to tap into the mains without even using any special kit, and the route they found up the scaffolding avoided all the vibration anti-climb sensors. Once up on top, they used one of the many winches to bring the projector up and got it settled in in a matter of minutes. Of the four other sites scouted for the reflector setups, two were iron-clad: one was a roped-off section of multi-story car park that was invisible from the street and from the parking area, but had a straight shot to Parliament and the building-site. The other was a pedestrian stairwell descending from the Embankment Rail bridge -- all it took was some safety yellow tape and a “NO ENTRY - CONSTRUCTION - WE REGRET THE INCONVE- NIENCE” sign at top and bottom to ensure that no company would be along.

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 pot-hole 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 non-ideal 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 hard-hats 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 semi-broken 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 freaking 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 possible 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.

Commercial interlude 3D

Fun fact! By this stage in the novel, an estimated* 98.43 percent of readers have actually purchased a hardcopy or commercial ebook for themselves, ‹donated a copy› to a school or library.

*Estimate is very approximate. Methodology not given. Citation needed.