Family/Feeling useless/A scandal in Parliament/A scandal at home/War!
One morning, I woke up and realized that I was home. The Zeroday was quiet -- it was only two in the afternoon and I was the first out of bed -- and as I padded downstairs in a dressing gown that I'd found in a charity shop for a pound, I saw the signs of my new family all around me. Jem was a pretty fair artist, and he'd taken to decorating our walls with gigantic, detailed charcoal murals, working late into the night, drawing whatever struck his fancy, blending scenes of London's streets into elaborate anatomical studies he copied out of books into caricatures of us and the people we brought home, me with my nose huge and my teeth crooked and snarled; Dog with his spots swollen and multiplied all over his face; Chester so horsey that he had pointy ears and a tail. Most of all, he caricatured himself: scrawny, rat-faced, knock-kneed, grinning an idiot's grin with a dribble of spit rolling off his chin, clutching a piece of charcoal, and drawing himself into existence.
We'd got tired of getting splinters from the floor and had gone on a painting binge, with Chester leading the work -- he'd helped out his dad, who was a builder, back home. We sanded and painted the floor a royal blue and it was as smooth as tile under my bare feet. The dishes were drying in the clean rack beside the sink, and I picked up my favorite coffee cup -- it was a miniature beer stein, studded with elaborate spikes and axes, an advertisement for some fantasy RPG, and we'd found eight hundred of them in a skip one night -- and made coffee in Jem's sock-dripper, just the way he'd shown me. The fridge was full, the sofa had a Cecil-shaped dent in it that I settled into with a sigh, and the room still smelled faintly of oregano and garlic from the epic spaghetti sauce we'd all made the night before.
I heard another person's footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Twenty picking her way down them, dressed in one of my long T-shirts and a pair of my boxers and looking so incredibly sexy I felt like my tongue was going to unroll from my mouth across the floor like a cartoon wolf.
“COFFEE,” she said, and took my cup from me and started to slurp noisily at it.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I said, sticking my face up the shirt's hem and kissing her little tummy. She squealed and pushed my head away and gave me a kiss that tasted of sleep and warm and everything good in my world. She sat down beside me and picked up her lappie and opened the lid, rubbed her finger over the fingerprint reader until it recognized her. “What's happening in the world?”
I shrugged. “Dunno -- only been up for five minutes myself.” She snuggled into me and began to poke at the computer. And there and then, cuddling the woman I loved, in the pub I'd made over with my own hands and with the help of mates who were the best friends I'd ever had, I realized that this was the family I'd always dreamed of finding. This was the home I'd always dreamed of living in. This was the life I'd always wished I had. I was as lucky as a lucky thing.
And pretty much as soon as that feeling had filled me up like a balloon and sailed me up the ceiling, I remembered my parents and my sister and the life I'd left behind, and the balloon deflated, sending me crashing to the ground. I made a small noise in the back of my throat, like a kitten that's been separated from its mum, and 26 looked into my face.
“What is it?” she said. “Christ, you look like your best friend just died.”
I shook my head and tried for a smile. “It's nothing, love, don't worry about it.”
She tapped me lightly on the nose, hard enough to make me blink. “Don't give me that, Cec. Something's got you looking like you're ready to blow your brains out, and when you're that miserable, it's not just your business -- it's the business of everyone who cares about you. I.e., me. Talk.”
I looked away, but she turned my head so that I was looking into her bottomless brown eyes. “It's nothing. It's just.” I really wanted to look away, but she wouldn't let me. “Okay, I miss me mam. Happy?”
She tsked. “Boys are such idiots. Of course you miss your family -- how long has it been since you saw them?”
I did the maths in my head. “Ten months,” I said. Then I thought again. “Hey, I'm turning seventeen next month!”
“We'll bake you a cake. Now, how long has it been since you called 'em?”
I shook my head. “I haven't, not really. Once, but only for a few minutes. Didn't work out so well.” I'd told Twenty about how I came to leave Bradford, of course, but I hadn't told her much else about my family. I didn't like to talk about them, because talking about them led to thinking about them and thinking about them led to misery.
She glared. “That's terrible! How could you go that long without even calling? Your mum and dad must be beside themselves with worry! For all they know, you're lying dead in a ditch or being forced to peddle your pretty arse in a dungeon in Soho.” She got up from the sofa and faced me, hands on her hips. “I know you, boyo. You're not a bastard. It can't feel good to be this rotten to your parents. You owe it to yourself to call them up.”
I spread my hands with helplessness. “I know you're right, but how can I do it? It's been so long? What do I say?”
“You say sorry, idiot boy. Then you say I love you and I'm alive and doing fine. Do you think it's going to get any easier if you keep on procrastinating? Call them. Now.”
“But,” I said, and stopped. I was fishing for an excuse -- any excuse. “If I call them from my mobile, they'll have my number and they'll trace me. I'm only sixteen still; one call to the cops and I'll be dragged back home.”
She rolled her eyes with the eloquent mastery of a teenaged girl. “Tell me you can't think of a way of making a call without having it traced back to you.”
I grimaced. She had me there. There were only about twenty free Internet phone services. Most of them were blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain, but I'd been routing around the censorwall since before my testicles dropped. “Fine,” I said. “I'll do it later.”
“What, when all your mates are awake and around and embarrassing you? The hell you will. There's no time like the present, boyo.”
So I found a headset and wiped it clean and screwed it into my ear and paired it up with my lappie and dialed Mum's number. It rang four times and bumped to voice mail, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I disconnected the phone. “No answer,” I said. “I'll try again later.”
“Don't tell me your whole family shares one phone? Are you from the past or some- thing?”
“You're too damn clever for your own good, 26. Fine, fine.” I called Dad's number. Four rings and... voice mail. “No answer,” I said, cheerfully. “Let's get some breakfast --”
“What about your sister, what's her name, Nora?”
“Cora,” I said. “You really paid attention when I told you about my family, didn't you?”
“I always pay attention,” she said. “That way, I can tell when you're lying to me, or yourself. I pay attention to everything. It's my super-power.”
I dialed Cora's number with a heavy heart, then held my breath as the phone rang: once, twice, three times --
“Hello?”
“Cora?”
“Who is this?” Her voice sounded thick, like she'd been sleeping. But it was the middle of the afternoon. I'd figured on her being at school. It was a Wednesday, after all. The school jammed all pupils' phones (though teachers and heads got special handsets that worked through the jammers).
“Cora, it's me.” I didn't want to say my real name. It's silly, but I hadn't introduced myself to 26 as Trent yet. It's not like it was a big secret -- I'm sure my roommates had grassed on me -- but I felt weird being anyone apart from Cecil in front of her.
“Trent?”
“Yeah.” There was silence. “So, how are you?”
“Holy shit, I can't believe it! Trent, where the hell have you been? Mum and Dad think you're dead or something!”
“No,” I said. “I'm alive. I'm doing fine. You can tell them that.” There was stunned silence from the phone. “So,” I said. “So. How are you, then?”
She snorted. “Oh, we're all arsing wonderful here in old Bradford. Dad's still out of work, Mum's still fighting to get her benefits without queuing up at the Jobcenter, and I've just failed three of my subjects.”
It was like an icicle through the heart. I wanted to throw the laptop across the room. Instead, I took a deep breath and squeezed my hand into fists and then let them go. “How could you be failing in school, Cor? You're a supergenius.”
“It's just hard, okay? How many days could I skip breakfast to study at the library? How was I supposed to do my assignments late at night when the library was shut? Besides, who the hell cares? It's not as though I'm going to go to my deathbed whispering, 'If I'd only got better marks in GCSE Geography.'”
The icicle twisted. I used to say that line about deathbeds every time I brought home a failing grade. My little sister had learned well from my example.
“Say something,” she said.
“I --” I closed my eyes. “Cora, you need to do better in school. You've got too much brains to be failing. I know it's hard but --”
She interrupted me. “Oh, shut up your stupid hypocritical noise. You've got no idea how hard it is. As soon as things got bad, you buggered off to wherever you're hiding out. Don't you be lecturing me about my life. You're swanning around the world having adventures and I'm stuck --”
She broke up and I could hear that she was crying. I didn't know what to say. I looked with helpless anger at 26, who'd made me make this call. Her expression was full of sympathy and that softened me, made my anger turn to misery so that I thought I might start crying, too.
“I'm really sorry, Cora,” I said. “You're right, one hundred percent right. It's all my fault. I've got no call to lecture you on your behavior, not when I'm so far away.”
“Where are you, Trent? We're all so worried about you. It's all Mum and Dad talk about, when they're not getting at me about my schoolwork or shouting at one another about money.”
“I'm --” I shut my mouth. “I'm not ready to tell you that, yet. I'm sorry, Cora. I just can't take the risk. But how about if I give you a phone number where you can leave me a message?” As I talked, I went to a free voice mail service and signed up for an account, using a dodgy browser plugin that automatically generated a fake name and address in France, along with a one-time fake e-mail that it signed up for using the same details. A few seconds later, I had a phone number in Ghana.
“You're a suspicious sod,” she said. “Fine, give me the number.”
I read it to her. “Get a calling card from a newsagent to call it, otherwise it'll be a fortune. I'll check it once a day and get back to you, all right?”
She sighed. “It's good to hear your voice again, Trent.”
I smiled. “It's good to hear yours, too, Cora. I've missed you. All of you. Where are Mum and Dad, anyway?”
“Oh, they're at school. The head wanted to 'have a word with them' about me. I'm appar- ently on the slippery slope straight to hell.”
I groaned. This was clearly all my fault.
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “You messed us over when you got the net cut off, but they cut the net. It's not as though you committed a murder. Hell, Tisha's brother's in jail for murder and he gets to use the Internet! He's doing a degree in social work through the Open University. They're the bullies and the bastards. You're just an idiot.” She paused. “And we miss you.”
Tears were leaking out of my eyes and running down my cheeks. I was embarrassed to be crying in front of 26, but I couldn't stop. I swallowed snot and tears, snuffled up a breath. “I miss you too, Cora. All of you. But especially you. Call me, okay?”
She made a small, crying noise of her own that I took for assent and I disconnected.
I glared at 26, furious at her for making me go through that ordeal. But she put her arms around me and pushed my head against her neck and shoulder and made a “shh, shh,” sound that went straight to the back of my brain and I felt like I was five years old again, with a skinned knee, being comforted by a teacher as I bawled my eyes out. I couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop. It was like my brain had been filled with poison and pus, and it was finally all running out. I let it go.
The thing Cora said to me -- They cut off the net. They're the bullies and the bastards. -- resonated in my skull for the rest of the day. Who were they? I hadn't really thought about the people who got the laws passed that had changed my life forever -- not the bigwigs at the film and record companies nor the MPs who showed up and voted to mess over even more of the voters who lived in their districts.
When I tried to picture them, my image of them got all tangled up with all those educational copyright videos they'd made us watch in school, where big stars came on and told us how awful we all were to download their stuff without paying for it, and then they'd trot out some working stiffs -- a spark, a make up artist, a set builder -- who'd drone on about how hard he worked all day and how he needed to feed his kids. We'd just laugh at these -- the ancient, exquisitely preserved rock star we saw getting out of a limo crying poverty; the workers who claimed that we were taking food out of their kids' mouths by remixing videos or sharing music, when every kid I knew spent every penny he could find on music as well as downloading more for free.
But now I tried to imagine the men who bought and sold MPs like they were pop songs, who put laws into production like they were summer blockbusters, and got to specify ex- actly what they'd like the statute book to say about the people they didn't like. I realized that somewhere out there, there were gleaming office towers filled with posh, well-padded execs who went around in limos and black cabs, who lived in big houses and whose kids had all the money in the world, and these men had decided to ruin my family for the sake of a few extra pennies. There were actual human beings who were answerable for the misery and suffering of God knew how many people all around the world -- rich bastards who thought that they alone should own our culture, that they should be able to punish you for making art without their permission.
“What are you thinking about?” 26 said. She was sitting in the pub's snug, laptop before her, earpiece screwed in. She'd been on the phone and e-mail all day to Annika, planning some kind of big event for the next day, when they were hoping that people from all over the country would descend on their MPs' offices to complain about the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill. All kinds of groups had joined in, and volunteers were contacting long lists of members and supporters to see if they'd commit to going out. I couldn't join in, of course: I wasn't on the voter's roll. I didn't, technically, exist. Technically, the Zeroday was an abandoned building and no one lived there.
“I'm thinking about how all this work you're doing, it's all because some rich bastards want to get richer.”
Chester made a little tootling noise like he was blowing a bugle and Jem began to hum some revolutionary anthem I vaguely recognized -- that French song, the one that they used in the advert for the new Renault scooters. Even Rabid Dog rolled his eyes. They were okay about 26 coming by -- she was good company -- but they hated it when I talked politics. They seemed to think I was only interested in it because 26 was. Mostly, I think they were jealous that I had a girlfriend.
Twenty ignored them, as usual. “Well, yeah. 'Course.”
“So why don't we do something to them? Why are we mucking around with Members of Parliament, if they're not the ones who make the laws, not really? Why not go straight to the source? It's like we're trying to fix a leaky faucet by plastering the ceiling below it -- why don't we just stop the drip?”
She laughed. “What did you have in mind, assassination? I think you'd probably get into more trouble than you could handle if you tried it, boyo.”
I shook my head. “I don't know what I have in mind, but it just seems like such a waste of effort. These horrible wretches are sat in their penthouses, making the rest of us miserable, and they go off when they're done, go to some big house in the country. They get to eat in posh restaurants while we literally eat rubbish from skips --”
“What the hell's wrong with rubbish from skips?” Jem said, all mock-affronted.
I waved him off. “Nothing's wrong, Jem. You're the Sir Jamie Oliver of eating garbage, all right? But you get my point -- they make us suffer and what do we do? We ask people nicely to go to their MPs' offices and beg to have them debate a law that will put their kids in jail for downloading a film.”
“Well, what do you propose?” Chester said.
I was pacing now, and I thumped my hand against the door. “I don't know, okay? Maybe -- I don't know, maybe you should make videos of these fat bastards eating babies for a change, instead of picking on Bullingham all the time.”
Chester shook his head. “Wouldn't work, mate. No one knows who these people are. No one would recognize them. When I animate Bullingham eating babies and squishing puppies beneath his toned, spotty, hairy buttocks, it's, you know, it's commentary. No one has to ask, 'Who's the geezer with the babies in his gob, then?' Wouldn't work with some anonymous corporate stooge.”
I thumped the door again. “Fine. So let's make them famous! We'll follow them with cameras, go through their rubbish bins and post their embarrassing love letters, steal their kids' phones and expose all the music they take for free.”
“They'd do you for harassment.”
I glared at all of them. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Do nothing then. And when your mates start going to prison and you can't get any friends together for a protest movement because they're all banged up, you'll see I was right.”
I sat down on the sofa, as far away from Rabid Dog as I could. He still wasn't speaking much when Twenty was around, though he'd got better at talking when it was just the boys. There was an uncomfortable silence. I stared at my bare feet.
Jem cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “So, I've got news, if you're interested.”
Chester said, “I am interested in your news, good sire,” in an artificial voice.
“Well, I've been nosing around the town hall,” he said. “The title registry. Trying to figure out who actually owns this firetrap. After the way they ran us out the last time, I thought it must be some Russian mobster or something. But that ain't it at all. You will never guess who our landlord is.”
Chester said, “Um, is it Sir David Beckham?” “Nope.”
“The Archbishop of Canterbury?”
“Nope.”
“Mickey Mouse?”
“Nope.”
“Just tell us who it is,” I snapped. I wasn't in the mood for playfulness.
“Only the freaking Bow Council! They ended up assuming the title for this place when the faceless corporate entity that bought it up declared bankruptcy and vanished up their own arseholes. They owned heaps of property all around here, and owed millions to the banks, so when they vanished, it was the banks sitting on all this stuff, and they auctioned it off, and the council bought it. So basically, this is a public building.”
I was interested in spite of myself. “So it was the council that sent those goons in after us last time?” Somehow I figured that the local government would be gentler in its ap- proach.
“I wondered about that, too. But I found the minutes of a council meeting where they approved hiring this anti-squatter firm with the unimaginative name of SecuriCorp to get rid of scum like us. They're notorious, SecuriCorp, hire a lot of crazy thugs, properly brutal. They've got a whole business model built on being savage pricks.”
I shook my head. “Well, then, I suppose it's only a matter of time until they show up again.”
He laughed. “That's where you're wrong, chum. I did some more digging and looked up the Meter Point Administration Service. That tells you who supplies the electricity to the place. Our Authorized Energy Provider is Virgin Gas and Electric. So yesterday, I rang up their customer service line and introduced myself as the new tenant on these premises and asked to have a pay-as-you-go box fitted. They're doing the job this week.”
I shook my head. “You what?”
“It's brilliant, don't worry. They'll fit the mains box, and then we'll have to go buy top-ups on a card at the newsagent's. It's just a few pounds a week. But once we're paying for our power, we're not guilty of Abstraction of Electricity anymore. And that means they can't use SecuriCorp against us. Which means that they're going to have to get rid of us the hard way.” He bowed in his seat. “You may applaud now.”
Chester and Rabid Dog clapped enthusiastically, and I joined in with them. It was a clever little hack. Thinking of it only made me more miserable. Everyone else had a way to solve their problems.
Me, I was just useless.
The day of action on the Theft of IP Bill went off even better than Annika and her mates had planned. In Bow and other East London districts, the average MP heard from one hundred and fifty voters who showed up to explain why TIP was a bad idea. 26 dragged me out to the meeting with her MP, in Kensal Rise, a part of London I'd never been to before. It was a weird place, half posh and half run-down, with long streets of identical houses that ran all the way to the horizon.
Her MP's surgery was in a storefront between a florist and a dinky cafe that was rammed mums with babies. I was nervous as we rocked up, and got even more nervous when a bored security guard made us empty our pockets, marched us through a metal detector, and demanded to see our IDs.
26 was cool as a cuke. “You can't make us show ID to see our MP. It's the law: 'It is unlawful to place any condition on the ability of a lawful resident of an electoral district to communicate with his Member of Parliament, Councillor, or other representative.”
The security guard furrowed his brow like he was experiencing enlightenment (or taking a particularly difficult crap). 26 took a deep breath and prepared to throw more facts at him, but a voice called out from behind him, through an open door: “It's all right, James. I would recognize Ms. Khan's voice at a hundred yards on a busy street. Do come in, dear.”
It was a woman's voice, moderately affectionate, middle-aged. It belonged to a moderately affectionate, middle-aged woman sitting on a sofa in a small office crammed with book- cases, papers, little kids' pictures, and letters tacked to a huge notice-board, and a pair of huge, battered laser-printers that looked like they should be at Aziz's place. She stood up as we walked in, bangles on her wrist tinkling as she shook 26's hand.
“Nice to see you again, dear. It's been a busy day, as I'm sure you know. Who's your gentleman friend?”
I had worn clean jeans and a T-shirt without anything rude written on it for the occasion, which was properly formal by Zeroday standards. Still, I felt as out of place as a fart in a palace.
“This is Cecil,” Twenty said. “He's been helping out with the organizing.” It was true -- I had spent a good twenty hours that week tweeting, e-mailing, calling, and messaging people from the mailing list, wheedling them to show up at their MPs' surgeries. I could rattle off ten reasons you should do it, three things you should stress with your MP, and five things you mustn't do without pausing for breath. It had made me feel a little less useless, but not much.
“Pleased to meet you, Cecil. I'm Letitia Clarke-Gifford, MP for Brent. Well, the two of you can certainly be very proud of yourselves. I've been seeing your army of supporters in lots of ten today, and I don't think I'll be able to get through them all even if I work through supper. From what I can tell, it's the same all over the country. I expect it's making quite an impression. A lot of my colleagues in Parliament like to use a rule of thumb that says a personal visit from a voter means that a hundred voters probably feel the same way. Even the very safest seats are in trouble when a thousand or more people are on your case about an issue.”
26 beamed. “I can't believe the turnout -- it's amazing!”
I blurted out, “So, will it work?”
Both turned to look at me. 26 looked irritated. The MP looked thoughtful.
“I'll tell you straight up, I'm not positive it will. It breaks my heart to say it, because your lot have clearly played by the rules and done everything you're supposed to do. When voters across the country are against legislation, when no one except a few big companies are for it, it just shouldn't become law.
“But the sad fact is that this is going to a three-line-whip vote.”
That jogged my memory, back to something Annika had said. “You mean if they don't vote in favor of it, they get kicked out of their own party?”
She nodded. “It may not sound like much to you, but you don't get to be an MP unless you've spent your whole life working in and for your party. All your friends will be in the party, your whole identity. It's a miniature death penalty. Now, if all of the MPs in caucus defied the whip, I don't think the party would cut them loose. But no MP can be really sure that her colleagues will vote for conscience, and no one wants to be the only one to stand up for a principle. They're all thinking to themselves, 'Hum, well, I'll hold my nose and vote for this today, and that means that I'll get to stay in parliament and have the chance to do good for my constituents the next time.' They call that 'realpolitik' -- which is a fancy way of saying, 'I've got no choice, so I'll pretend that it doesn't bother me.'”
I looked at 26. It seemed like the MP was just saying what I'd been saying all week long: there was no point in playing along with the politics game, because the other side got to make the rules. Twenty's rosebud mouth was pinched and angry.
“Why wouldn't the party let them vote the way the people want them to? It just doesn't make any sense.”
Clarke-Gifford shrugged. “Lots of reasons. The entertainment industry's always been big here. Exporting our culture is part of the old imperial tradition: we used to own half the world, some MPs think we might end up owning half the world's screens.
“Plus there's the fact that the members and the party bigwigs get courted heavily by all these famous people. They get to go to the best parties in the country. Their kids go on holidays with popstars' kids in exotic places. They go to premieres and get to go on the red carpet alongside of people who are literally legends, get their pictures in the papers next to film stars that every one of their voters idolize.
“When their good friends from the industry tell them that downloading is exactly like theft, they're inclined to believe them. After all, don't you believe the things that your mates tell you?”
“So we shouldn't have even bothered?” 26 looked like she might cry. I quietly slipped my hand into hers.
“No, no. No! It's not a wasted effort. If you lose this round, you can go back to your supporters and say, 'see, see how big the stitch-up is?' And they can go to their mates and say, 'Look, hundreds and thousands of people asked their MPs to do the right thing, but big business forced them into voting against the public interest. Don't you think you'd better get involved?' Little by little, your numbers will grow, until they can't afford to ignore you any longer. And in the meantime, there are some parties that let members vote their conscience, sometimes -- our party, and the Greens; the LibDems, too.”
I tried to imagine explaining to my parents why they should rise up and shout in the streets about this. After all, this was the issue that had cost them their jobs, their benefits, their daughter's education -- their son! But I couldn't imagine it. Mum could barely walk, let alone march down the road. And Dad? He'd be too busy trying to find a way to pay for dinner to join the revolution.
I looked at 26 again. She seemed to have got a little cheer and hope out of the MP, so I kept my gob shut.
Clarke-Gifford was also looking at 26, maybe thinking that she'd given her a little too much reality. “Besides, maybe I'm wrong,” she said, unconvincingly. “Maybe with all the support you lot have got today, the party won't dare whip the vote in case they have a rebellion in Parliament. After all, Labour doesn't want to be the party that votes for it if the Conserva- tives vote against it -- or vice-versa.”
26 smiled bravely (and beautifully, I might add) and said, “That's a really good point. If one party goes with us, it'll make the other one look really bad. That's something we could talk to Annika about. I still want you to meet her, Letitia -- you'd get on so well.”
The MP smiled. “Well, I'm having my annual constituency garden party next month. Why don't you bring her around then? There'll be little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and everything. Bring your young man, too. Now, if you'll excuse me, it sounds like there's a new group of constituents in the front room waiting to tell me how terribly important it is that I vote against a tremendously important piece of legislation.”
We passed them on the way out, a group of ten people, clutching paper notes for their meeting with their MP. 26 quizzed them on how they came to be there and whether they'd ever done something like this before. It turned out that they were a church reading circle, and four of the members had had their Internet cut off so they'd come out. And no, they'd never come out for something like this before, but enough was enough.
As we walked away down the street, 26's arm around my waist, my arm around her shoul- ders, I thought, What if they give up hope because the vote goes the wrong way? What had Annika said? “Eventually so many of us will be offline or in jail that there won't be any- one left to organize.” But 26 was warm under my arm, and she'd promised to introduce me to her mum and dad, which meant that I was going to learn her real name at last -- the visit to the MP's office had given me a surname, Khan, but her real first name remained a tan- talizing mystery. I'd asked her what it was on that first night together, and she'd confessed to Sally, but she later swore it was Deborah, Sita, and Craniosacral. She'd answer to any- thing I called her, and all her friends called her Twenty or 26, and I enjoyed the mystery, but I was looking forward to puncturing it. And thinking about finding out her real name distracted me from feeling nervous about meeting her family. I had met lots of my friends' parents before, but never my girlfriend's parents. I had recurring panics when I thought about shaking the hand of the mother of the girl that I'd had sex with the night before.
Oh, didn't I mention? Yes. We were having sex. Lots of it. And it was wicked. It didn't happen until the third time she stayed over -- we snogged and stuff, but I kept stopping short. Eventually, she asked me why I wasn't trying to shag her and I hemmed and hawed and confessed that I'd never done it before. She gave me a big, sloppy kiss, said, “I'll be gentle,” and stripped off. Since then, we'd been at it like rabbits. Disgusting. Drove my flatmates around the bend with our carrying on and grunting and that.
Yeah, I was pretty made up about all of it. But I had this nightmarish daydream in which I shook her mother's hand and blurted, “Very pleased to meet you, ma'am. It's really lovely, having it off with your precious daughter.”
“Nervous about meeting my parents?” Twenty said.
“Naw,” I lied.
They lived in one of the terraced Victorian row-houses with a little garden out front. Twenty pointed out the stumps of an iron fence that had once surrounded the garden: “During World War Two, everyone pulled up their steel fencing and that to make into battleships. But there wasn't any good way to recycle the metal so the government just dumped it all into the English Channel.”
“I did not know that,” I said. “Um. Look, are we going to go meet your mum and dad?”
She laughed and gave my arse a swat. “Calm down, boyo. You'll do fine. It's not fashion- able to say it, but my parents are actually quite cool.”
You know how houses have smells that their owners never seem to notice? 26's house smelled great. Like the cedar chips they'd spread on the paths in the public parks every spring, mixed with something like lemon peel and wet stone.
The place had wooden floors and wooden steps leading up to an upper story, coathooks and framed antique maps, and books.
Thousands of books.
They teetered in stacks on the stairs and in the hallway. Shelves ran the length of the corridor, just about head-height, packed with a double row of books, some turned sideways to fit in the cramped space. They were in a state of perfect (and rather glorious) higgledy- piggledy, leather bound antiques next to cheap paperbacks, horizontal stacks of oversized art books and a boxed encyclopedia serving as a little side-table, its top littered with keys, packets of kleenex, rolled pairs of gloves, umbrellas, and, of course, more books.
26 waved a hand at them: “My parents are readers,” she said. “I can see that.”
She turned and called up the stairs, “Oh, parents! I'm home! I've brought a boy!”
A woman's voice called down, “The prodigal daughter! I was on the verge of turning your bedroom into a shrine for my dear, departed offspring!”
26 rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “I'll just be in the kitchen, eating all your food, all right?”
I followed her down the short hallway, past a sitting room -- more books, a comfy sofa and chair, a small telly covered in dust -- and into an airy kitchen that led into a glass conservatory that showed a small back garden planted with rows of vegetables and wild- flowers.
She went straight to the fridge and began pulling out stuff -- a tall glass pitcher of what looked like iced tea or apple juice (it turned out to be iced mint tea, and delicious, too), half a rhubarb-strawberry pie, a small cheeseboard under a glass bell. She handed it to me and I balanced it on the parts of the kitchen table that weren't buried in reading material. 26 jerked a thumb over her shoulder: “Glasses in that cupboard and cutlery in the drawer underneath it.”
I fetched them down, and she cut us both generous slices of pie and thick slices of Red Leicester cheese, and poured out two tall glasses of tea. I sat down and she plunked herself in my lap. At that moment, I heard footsteps on the stairs. “Get off,” I whispered, horrified at the thought of meeting her mum with her on my lap.
She waggled her eyebrows at me. “Why?” “Come on,” I said. “Don't do this.”
She winked at me, and said, “She'll love you,” and leapt off my lap just as her mum came into the kitchen.
She was a tall Indian lady with bobbed hair shot with gray, smile lines bracketing a mouth that was just like 26's. She wore a pretty sundress that left her muscular arms bare, and her bare feet showed long toes with nails painted electric blue.
26 pointed at her toes: “Love them!” she said, and gave her mum a full body hug that I knew well (it was her specialty). “Mum, this is Cecil, the boy who's been kidnapping me to East London all summer. Cecil, this is my mum, Amrita.”
I stood up awkwardly and shook her hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Khan,” I said, aware that my hands were dripping with sudden, clammy sweat.
She gave me a quick up-and-down look and I was glad I'd dressed up a little for the MP meeting. “Nice to meet you too, Cecil. I see that 26 has got you something to eat al- ready.” I looked at Twenty -- her mum had called her 26! -- and saw that she was grinning smugly.
“It's delicious,” I said. I was on good-manners autopilot.
“So, tell me how your big meeting went,” she said, settling in on another chair after moving its stack of books to the top of the pile on the next chair. She leaned across the table and used 26's fork to nick a large bite of her pie, then made to get another one, but 26 slapped her wrist. Both were smiling, though.
“Letitia said it was all a waste of time,” 26 said. “The vote is fixed.”
“I can't believe that's what she really said,” her mum said. She looked at me.
“Well,” I said, “not exactly. But she did say that she thought it would be hard for other politicians to vote our way because their parties would punish them.”
Her mum winced. “Yes, I was worried about that, too.” She sighed. “I'm sorry, darling. You never can tell. Maybe getting people worked up about this will pay off later, with a bigger movement --”
“That's what Letitia said,” 26 said snappishly. “Fine. I get it, it's fine.”
Her mum nodded and pointedly looked at me. “Where do you go to school, Cecil?” she said.
Erm. I looked at my hands. “I don't, really,” I said. “Well. It's like --”
26 said, “Cecil left home because he got his family cut off from the Internet by downloading too much.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “I'm sorry to hear that. Where are you living now?”
“With friends,” I said. It was true, as far as it went, but I knew I was blushing. Technically, I was homeless. Well, technically I was a squatter, which was worse than homeless in some ways. 26's house wasn't posh, and it was obvious that her parents weren't rich, but they weren't the same kind of people as my family. The books, the funny toenails, how young her mum looked -- it made me realize what people were talking about when they talked about “class.” I had to make a proper effort to stop myself squirming.
“Where's Dad?” 26 said, changing the subject without much subtlety. “He's down the cellar, messing about in his lab.”
“Is he a scientist?” I said. I had a vision of a white-coated, German-accented superbrain, and felt even more inadequate.
They both laughed though. “No,” her mum said. “He brews beer. He's mad about it. He hardly drinks the stuff, but he loves to make it. I think he just enjoys all the toys and gadgets.”
“Want to see?” 26 said. “Erm, sure,” I said.
Once her mum was out of the room, 26 whispered, “He's not my real dad, not biologically. But I think of him as my father.”
We descended the cellar stairs and came into a low room with a cement floor, the walls lined with tables and shelves containing enormous glass bottles, buckets, siphons, and charts hand-annotated with fat greasepencil. Her dad was bent over a huge glass bottle filled with murky liquid. He was wearing bluejeans and a green smock, and what I could see of his hair was wiry, short and gray.
“Dad,” 26 said, “I've got someone I'd like you to meet.”
He straightened and turned around. I was surprised. Mentally, I'd figured that 26 was mixed-race, so when I saw that her mum was Indian, I assumed her dad was white, but he was Indian, too. And then I remembered that he was her stepfather. I decided that I was absolutely rubbish at predicting peoples' racial background and resolved to do less of it from then on.
He was as kind as her mum, but he had ferocious concentration lines in his high forehead and a groove between his eyes you could lose a ten-p piece in. He blinked at us for a moment, then smiled.
“Dad, this is Cecil. Cecil, this is my dad, Roshan.”
He nodded appraisingly at me. I had a paranoid moment, thinking that he was about to ask me something like, “What makes you think that you're allowed to have sex with my daugh- ter?” But what he actually said was, “Could you give me a hand with something?”
26 tsked. “Dad, I didn't bring Cecil over so that you could turn him into a human fork- lift.”
He shushed her. “It's only that I need to get this --” he pointed at a waist-high glass bottle of brownish-black beer “-- onto that table.”
I was glad to be useful. “Of course!” I said, and went over to the bottle and squatted in front of it, taking hold of the neck and the bottom. He took the other side.
“One, two, three!”
We lifted. It was like trying to budge a house. The bottle must have weighed thirty-five stone. I strained, and so did he, his face going purple and a vein standing out in his lined forehead. We groaned and the bottle rose. We got it up to waist-height and staggered two steps to the table he'd indicated and put it down with a clunk. I mashed my fingers a bit and I yanked them free and squeezed my hand between my thighs.
“You all right?” he gasped. He was rubbing his biceps. “Yeah,” I said. “Didn't think we were going to make it.”
26 clucked her tongue again. “Dad, that was very naughty. You could have given yourself a heart attack.”
“Small sacrifice for art,” he said, and thumped the bottle, his wedding ring making it ring like a bell. “This is licorice stout,” he said. “With some Valerian root. It's a muscle relaxant. It's an experiment.”
“Mum says you're going to need to serve it over a dropcloth. She calls it incontinence in a glass.”
“She's probably right, but it's coming up a treat. Wait a tick.” He rummaged in a crate and pulled out a plastic pump. He fitted it over the bottle's neck and worked it vigorously, holding a chipped teacup under its spout. It gurgled, then trickled a stream of the dark beer into his cup. He passed it to me.
“Try a sip,” he said. “It's not quite ready, but I'm really liking where it's headed.”
I sniffed at it, a bit suspicious. It smelled...earthy. Like fresh-turned soil -- though I couldn't tell you where I'd smelled fresh-turned soil! -- or wet stone (I realized that this was where the wet-stone smell I'd noticed when we came into the house must have come from). It was so dark it looked like a black mirror. I tasted it. It was only slightly fizzy, and it was sour in that way that beer or rye bread are, and there were about twenty different flavors behind it, including a strong black licorice flavor that was improbably delicious and sharp inside that big, round earthy taste.
“Fwoar,” I said, and took another sip. Twenty's dad grinned as though I'd just paid him the highest of compliments.
He pumped another cup and passed it to 26, then one for himself. He held out his cup and we all clinked glasses and sipped some more.
“Hardly any alcohol in it, yet,” he said. “I'm going to try to make it very weak, four percent or so. The Valerian will pack a righteous corking kick.”
“What's Valerian?” I said.
Twenty said, “It's a herb. A sedative. I take it when I get my cramps, knocks me flat on my arse.”
“You're going to put it in beer?” I sniffed at the cup again. The dregs were swirling around the bottom, thick with gritty sediment.
He waggled his eyebrows and made his fingers dance. “Just a bit. A smidge. I'm think- ing, 'Dr Dutta's All-Purpose Wintertime Licorice Sleepytime Brew.' Going to make labels and everything. It will be brilliant on dark, awful winter nights, put your lights out like a switch.”
Twenty slurped the rest of hers back. “Dad's bonkers, but it's mostly a harmless kind of crazy. And when he's not making beer, he's a pretty fair barrister.”
He held his hands at his breastbone and made a funny little bow. I found myself really liking him. And his beer.
“What are you two up to?”
“I was going to take him round the neighborhood, show him some of my favorite places.”
He nodded. “Will you stay for dinner? I was going to grill some steak. And tofu wieners for Little Miss Veggiepants over there.”
“Dad,” she said. “I haven't been a vegetarian for months.”
He rolled his eyes. “Who can keep track. Meat for everyone, then. Okay with you, Cecil?”
“Sure,” I said, again, not wanting to seem rude, but wondering if 26 would mind. How long did she want me hanging around her parents? How long until I said or did something that embarrassed her and made them hate me and forbid her to see me?
“You're not a veggiepants, are you?”
“No sir,” I said, seriously. “I'll eat anything that doesn't eat me first.” I had to stop myself
explaining that I normally lived off a diet of rubbish harvested from skips.
“Good man,” he said. He kissed 26 on the top of her head. “Bring him back by seven o'clock and I'll have supper on the table.”
She grabbed my hand and dragged me upstairs. “Come on,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I'll show you my room.”
She slammed the door behind us as soon as we got into her room -- a bit bigger than my room back in Bradford, but every bit as crowded with papers, posters, a litter of memory sticks and keys and semi-functional beamers, along with a load of climbing gear and ropes hanging from hooks rudely screwed into the plaster.
She swept a pile of clothes off the single bed and pushed me down on it, then climbed on top and began to kiss me. “Still fancy me now that you've met my insane parental units?” she whispered in my ear.
I squeezed her bum. “'Course!” I said. “They're brilliant, you know. Really nice. I thought they'd hate me on sight.”
“Naw,” she said. “Compared to my last boyfriend, you're the catch of the century.”
I pulled my face away from hers. “You've never talked about him. Who was he?”
She shrugged. “A major tosser, as it turns out. Not one of the highlights of my life and times. Caught him fondling my so-called best mate behind the school one day. I forgave him, but then I caught him snooping around my computer, reading my private stuff. That was unforgivable. So I put him out with the rubbish.”
Of course, I had a thousand daft questions, like “Did he shag better than me?” and “Was he white, too?” and “Was he smarter than me?” and “Was his thing bigger than mine?” and “Was he posh?” and so on. But as stupid as my undermind was, the stuff up front had the good sense to only say, “Well, there you go. Sounds like an idiot. But I'm glad to have someone to make me look good.”
She kissed me again. “Let's go see my stomping grounds.”
The Kensal Green Cemetery was even bigger than Highgate -- like a city for the dead, surrounded by a crumbling wall that had been patchily repaired, the outside road lined with shops selling headstones and statues of angels and that.
26 took me in through a gap in the wall hidden by tall shrubs that smelled of dog piss, which led into a field of knee-high wild grasses growing around crazy-tilted headstones whose names had been worn away by wind and rain and the passing of years.
“Isn't it magic?” she said, as we meandered through the stones, warm earth smells in our noses, preceded by the scampering sounds of small animals haring off through the grass to get out of our way. “It's where I got the idea for the screening in Highgate. I'd really love to do one here, next. We could get a pretty big crowd into the more remote bits of the place. I'd love to do the screenings every week, or maybe every fortnight. Get a big audience. That one in Highgate was like, the high point of my life.”
I wished yet again that I hadn't spent most of it getting so rat arsed. From what Rabid Dog and the others said, it had been absolutely, epically magisterial. “Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty stupendous.”
“But if we did it that often, we'd be sure to get rumbled.”
“Not if we changed locations. It wouldn't always have to be cemeteries. They're not going to be any good once autumn rolls in and it starts pissing down with rain practically every night. But there's loads of indoor places you could do it, too -- Jem's always scouting spots for squats, he can't help himself. Lots of boarded up warehouses type of thing. And then there's underground; saw a little urban infiltration video from these absolute nutters who go running around in the old Victorian sewers. Some of them, they're like castle dining halls. The Victorians were mad for grandeur. Can you imagine how fantastically cool it would be to lead a load of people in wellies down some damp tunnel and into a huge brick vault with popcorn and seats and a big screen?”
“Magisterial,” she said.
One thing led to another -- specifically, 26 led me deeper into the graveyard's secluded secret places -- and before long we sat in the lee of a stone mausoleum, soft moss beneath us, snogging like a pair of crazed ferrets. Eventually, 26 checked her phone and announced that we were about to be late for dinner and we ran through the now-closed graveyard, ducking back through the same crumbled section of wall.
Dinner was delicious and, after a few minutes, very friendly. Her dad was really funny, and had loads of stories about mad judges and dodgy clients. Her mum was more reserved -- and clearly a bit put off by the idea of her daughter having a boyfriend -- but she warmed and even let me help with the washing up, which turned into something of a party as 26 turned on some music from her phone and pitched in to help, too and soon we were dancing and singing around the kitchen.
When I kissed her good night at the door -- a brief one, as her parents were in the front room, reading in sight of the picture windows that overlooked the doorway -- she whispered, “You done good,” in my ear. The words stayed with me on the long tube journey home, and they had me smiling all the way.
If you care about any of this stuff, you already know what happened with Theft of Intellectual Property Bill: in the end, only thirty-nine MPs bothered to turn up for the vote. That left 611 absent without leave. I guess they were all having a lovely lie-in with the newspapers and a cup of tea. At first, I though that only thirty-nine attendees meant that we'd won -- I'd googled up the rules for Parliament and it said that you needed at least forty for a vote.
I was cheering about this on a Cynical April board when some clever bastard pointed out that the Speaker of the House -- the bloke who kept order and handed out the biscuits at tea-time -- also counted, bringing the total up to forty. The independent and Green candidates all voted against it, and so did many of the LibDems, but twenty-one Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs voted in favor of it, and it passed, with only fifty- five minutes' debate.
The office of every MP who took the day off work was flooded with calls from angry voters, but as Annika pointed out, they didn't really have to worry, most of them, since there wasn't anyone to vote for in their district who would have come out against the bill, not with their party's whips out and enforcing order.
Within a week of the law coming into effect, they had their first arrest. Jimmy Preston, the kid they took away, had some kind of mental problems -- autistic spectrum, they said on the BBC -- and he didn't go out much. But he'd collected 450,000 songs on his hard drive through endless, tedious, tireless hours of downloading. From what anyone could tell, he didn't even listen to them: he just liked cataloging them, correcting their metadata, organizing them. I recognized the motivation, having spent many comforting evenings tidying up and sorting out my multi-terabyte collection of interesting video clips (many of which I'd never even watched, but wanted to have handy in case they were needed for one of my projects). He had collected most of them before the law came into effect, but TIP also made it a crime to possess the files.
Six months later, the sentencing judge gave him five years in prison, the last year adult prison after he turned twenty-one -- because the Crown showed that his collection was valued at over twenty million pounds! -- and the media was filled with pictures of this scared-eyed seventeen-year-old kid in a bad-fitting suit, his teary parents hovering over his shoulder, faces pulled into anguished masks.
But he didn't serve five years. They found him hanging from the light fixture in his cell two weeks later. His cellmates claimed they hadn't noticed him climbing up on the steel toilet with a rope made from a twisted shirt around his neck, hadn't noticed as he kicked and choked and gurgled out his last breath. The rumor was that his body was covered in bruises from the beatings he'd received from the other prisoners. Jimmy didn't deal well with prison. We all got to know his name then -- until then, they'd kept it a secret because he was a minor -- and he went from being Mr. X to Dead Jimmy.
By that time, there were already fifteen more up before judges around the country. Most were kids. In each case, the Crown argued that the size of their collections qualified them for adult treatment after their twenty-first birthdays. In five more cases, the judge agreed. All were found guilty. Of course they were guilty. The law had been written to make them guilty.
It wasn't just kids, either. Every day, there was news about video- and file-hosting services shutting down. One, a site that had never been much for pirate clips, just mostly videos that people took while they were out playing and that, posted this notice to its front door:
After eight years of serving Britain's amateur videographers, filmmakers, and communi- ties, UKTube is shutting its doors. As you no doubt know, Parliament passed the Theft of Intellectual Property Act earlier this month, and with it, created a whole new realm of liability and risk for anyone who allows the public to host content online.
According to our solicitors, we now have to pay a copyright specialist to examine each and every video you upload to make sure it doesn't infringe on copyright before we make it live. The cheapest of these specialists comes at about £200/hour, and it takes about an hour to examine a ten minute video.
Now, we get an average of fourteen hours' worth of video uploaded every minute. Do the maths: in order to stay on the right side of the law, we'd have to spend £16,800 a minute in legal fees. Even if there were that many solicitors available -- and there aren't! -- we only turn over about £4,000 a day. We'd go bankrupt in ten minutes at that rate.
We don't know if Parliament intended to shut down this site and all the others like it, or whether this side effect is just depraved indifference on their part. What we do know is that this site has never been a haven for piracy. We have a dedicated, round-the-clock team of specialists devoted to investigating copyright complaints and removing offending material as quickly as possible. We're industry leaders at it, and we spend a large amount of our operating budget on this.
But it didn't get us anywhere. Bending over to help the big film companies police their copyrights cost us a fortune, and they thanked us by detonating a legal suicide bomb in the middle of our offices. You hear a lot of talk about terrorism these days. That word gets thrown around a lot. But a terrorist is someone who attacks innocent civilians to make a point. We'll leave it to you to decide whether it applies here.
In the meantime, we've shut our doors. The hundred-plus Britons who worked for us are now looking for jobs. We've set up a page here where you can review their CVs if you're hiring. We vouch for all of them.
We struggled with the problem of what to do with all the video you've entrusted to us over the years. In the end, we decided to send a set of our backups to the Internet Archive, archive.org, which has a new server array in Iceland, where -- for the time being -- the laws are more sensible than they are here. The kind people at archive.org are working hard to bring it online, and once it is, you'll be able to download your creations again. Sorry to say that we're not sure when that will happen, though.
And that's it. We're done. Wait.
We're not quite done.
We have a message for the bullies from the big film studios and the politicians who serve them: UKTube is one of many legitimate, British businesses that you have murdered with the stroke of your pen this month. In your haste to deliver larger profits to a few enter- tainment giants, you've let them design a set of rules that outlaws anyone who competes with them: any place where normal, everyday people can simply communicate with one another.
We've been a place where dying people can share their final thoughts with their loved ones; where people in trouble can raise funds or support; where political movements were born and organized and sustained. All of that is collateral damage in your war on piracy -- a crime that you seem to have defined as “anything we don't like or that eats into our bottom line.”
Lucky for humanity, not every country will be as quick to sell out as Britain. Unlucky for Britain, though: our government has sacrificed our competitiveness and our future. Britain's best and brightest will not stay here long. Other countries will welcome them with open arms, and each one that leaves will be a loss for this backward-looking land.
That actually made the news, and they cornered some MPs who'd supported the legisla- tion about it, who sneered about histrionics and hysteria and theft, and they got some of the people who'd enjoyed using UKTube to talk about their favorite videos, and that was that.
But not for me. When UKTube shut down, half a dozen more followed. More and more proxies were blocked off by the ISP that supplied the council estate next to the Zeroday. It felt like there was a noose tightening around my neck, and it was getting harder to breathe every day.
26 thumped my mattress, and said, “Come to bed, Cecil, fecking hell, it's been hours. I'm going to have to get up for school soon.”
I jumped guiltily. I'd been sitting on the floor, back to the wall, knees drawn up and lap- top balanced on them, reading the debates online, reading about how much money the different parties had taken in from the big film and record and publishing companies in contributions.
I scrubbed at my eyes with my fists. “It's hopeless,” I said. “Bloody hopeless. We got all those people to go to their MPs. It didn't matter. We might as well have done nothing. What a waste.”
26 propped herself up on one elbow, the sheet slipping away from her chest, which got my pulse going. “Cecil,” she said. “Trent.” I startled again. She'd never called me that before. “Just because it didn't work, that doesn't mean it's hopeless, or a waste. At least now people understand how corrupt the process is, how broken the whole system is. The film studios just keep repeating the word theft over and over again, the way the coppers do with terrorism, hoping that our brains will switch off when we hear it.” She put on a squeaky cartoon voice. “Stealing is wrong, kids! It makes for a good, simplistic story that idiots can tell one another over their Egg McMuffins in the morning.
“But once they start passing these dirty laws through their dirty tricks, they show us all how corrupt they are. If it's just theft, then why do they need to get their laws passed in the dead of the night, without debate or discussion? Pissing hell, if it's just theft, then why aren't the penalties the same as for thieving? Nick a film from HMV and you'll pay a twenty-quid fine, if that. Download the same film from some Pirate Bay in Romania and they stick you in jail. Bugger that.
“Maybe now the average Daily Mail reader will start to ask himself, 'How come they never have to sneak around to get a law passed against actual theft? What if this isn't just stealing after all?'”
I could tell what she was trying to do, make me feel better. I could have gone along with it, told her she was right and crawled into bed with her and tried to get some sleep. But I wasn't in the mood. I was feeling nasty and angry. “Why should they wake up this time? Your mate Annika, doesn't she say that there've been eleven other copyright laws in the past fifteen years? Are we supposed to wait for ten or fifteen more? When will this great uprising finally take place? How many kids will we see in prison before it happens?”
I was shaking and my hands were in fists. 26's eyes were wide open now, the sleep gone. She looked momentarily angry and I was sure we were about to have our usual stupid barney, a bicker that went nowhere because we were both too stubborn to back down. But then her face softened and she shifted over to me and put a warm arm around my shoulders.
“Hey,” she said. “What's got you so lathered up?”
“I just keep thinking that this could be me. It probably will be me, someday. Or it'll be my sister, Cora. She's careful, but what if she messes up? She needs to be perfectly careful every time. They just need to catch her once.”
She cuddled me for a long moment. “So what do you want to do?”
I thumped the floor so hard my fist felt like I'd smashed it with a hammer. “I don't know. Fight. Fight back. Jesus, they're going to get me sooner or later. Why not go down swinging? Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?”
She didn't say anything.
“We should do something,” I said. “We should do -- I don't know. We should blow up all the cinemas.”
“Oh, that'll make people sympathetic to your cause.”
“Wait till they're empty,” I said. “Of course.”
“Keep thinking,” she said.
“Okay, fine. But I want to go to war now. No more complaining. No more campaigning. Time to do something real.
Revenge of Commercial interlude
Hell yeah! Trent's got a plan! He's a man of action! He's bold! He's ready to make a move! And so are you, right?