Pirate Cinema (11 page)

But the software stuff eluded me. I had built a frankencomputer of surpassing strangeness. What's more, I wanted my operating system to work with illegal, compromised drivers for all the cards and components that would get them to lie about which cards they were, to leak protected video out the back doors I'd rudely hacked into them, to pretend to insert watermarks while doing no such thing. This wasn't about of sticking in the drive and pressing GO.

"Want a bit of advice?" Aziz asked, round about midnight, as I cursed and rubbed my eyes and rebooted the computer for the millionth time.

I slumped. Jem was even less of a software guy than I was, and had taken over Aziz's bed, taking off his shoes and curling up and snoring loudly.

"Yeah," I said. "Advice would be good."

"Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just
do it
."

"Well, thank you, Buddha, for the zen riddle. You should consider putting that on an inspirational poster. Maybe with a little Yoda: 'There is no try, there is only do.'"

"Oh, ungrateful child. I'm not talking in metaphor -- I'm being literal. You're sitting there with all those tabs open in your browser, trying to work out every aspect of Linux microkernel messaging, binary compatibility between distributions, and look at that, you're trying to read up about compilers at the same time? Mate, you are trying to get a four-year computer science degree, on your own, in one evening. You will not succeed at this.

"It's not because you're not a smart and quick young man. I can see that you are. It's because this is impossible.

"What you're trying to do now, you're trying to learn something about as complicated as a language. You've learned one language so far, the one we're speaking in. But you didn't wait until you'd memorized all the rules of grammar and a twenty thousand word vocabulary before you opened your gob, did you? No, you learned to talk by saying goo-goo and da-da and 'I done a pee-poo'. You made mistakes, you backtracked, went down blind alleys. You mispronounced words and got the grammar wrong. But people around you understood, and when they didn't understand what you meant, you got better at that part of speech. You let the world tell you where you needed to focus your attention, and in little and big pieces you became an expert talker, fluent in English as she is spoke the world round.

"So that's what I mean when I say you need to stop trying to understand it and just do it. Look, what you trying to do with that network card?"

"Well, I googled its part number here to see why they had to stop making it. I figured, whatever it wasn't supposed to be doing, that's what I wanted it to do. It looks like the reason Cisco had to pull this one was because you can open a raw socket and change a MAC address. I don't really know what either of those things are, so I've been reading up on them over here, and that's got me reading up on IP chaining and --"

"Stop, stop! Okay. Raw sockets -- that just means that you can run programs that do their own network stuff without talking to the OS. Very useful if you want to try to, say, inject spoof traffic into a wireless network. And it's great for disguising your operating system: every OS has its own little idiosyncrasies in the way it does networks, so it's possible for someone you're talking to to tell if you're running Linux or Windows Scribble or a phone or whatever. So if there's something that won't talk to you unless you're on a locked-down phone, you can use raw sockets to pretend to be a crippled-up iPhone instead of a gloriously free frankenbox like this one.

"MAC addresses -- those are the hardwired serial numbers on every card. They identify the manufacturer, model number, and so on. Get sent along with your requests. So if they seize your computer, they can pull the MAC address and look at all the logged traffic to a pirate site and put two and two together. You don't want that.

"But with the right drivers, this card can generate a new, random MAC address every couple of minutes, meaning that the logs are going to see a series of new connections from exotic strangers who've never been there before. This is what you want. That's all you need to know for now. Just follow the recipes to get the drivers configured, and look up more detail as it becomes necessary. It's not like it's hard to learn new facts about networking -- just use a search engine. In the meantime, just do it."

I snorted a little laugh. Between the sleep deprivation and his enthusiasm, I was getting proper excited about it all.

From there, it went
much
faster. I learned not to worry about the parts I didn't understand, but at Aziz's urging I started a big note-file where I made a record of all the steps I was taking. This turned out to be a life-saver: any time I got stuck or something went well pear-shaped, I could go back through those notes and find the place where I went wrong. All my life, my teachers had been on me to take notes, but this was the first time I ever saw the point. I decided to do this more often. Who knew that teachers were so clever?

That was when life really took off at the squat. The next week, we scouted the council estate's wireless network and got an antenna aimed at one of their access points. It was encrypted of course, and locked to registered devices so that they could keep out miscreants who'd had their network access pulled for being naughty naughty copyright pirates.

But once we had the antenna set up, it was piss easy to get the password for the network. It was written on a sheet of paper stuck to the notice board inside the estate's leisure center: "REMEMBER: EFFECTIVE THIS MONTH, THE NETWORK PASSWORD IS CHANGING TO 'RUMPLE34PETER12ALBERT" After all, when you need a couple thousand people to know a secret, it's hard to keep it a secret.

Once we could decrypt the network traffic we were able to use Wireshark to dump and analyze all the traffic, and we quickly built up a list of all the MAC addresses in use on the system. There were thousands of them, of course: every phone had one, every computer, every game box, every set-top box for recording telly. Armed with these, we were able to use our forbidden network cards to impersonate dozens of devices at once, hopping from one MAC address to the next.

It was all brilliant, sitting in our cozy, candle-lit pub room, using our laptops, playing the latest dub-step revival music we'd pulled down from a pirate radio site, watching videos on darknet video sites, showing our screens to one another. Aziz had given me a little pocket beamer with a wireless card and we took turns grabbing it and splashing our screens on the blank wall behind the bar (we'd cleared away the broken mirror) with the projector.

Even the housemates became easier to deal with. Ryan and Sally hooked up, which was revolting, but it didn't last long, ending with a massive row that sent Sally home to Glasgow (finally!) and convinced Ryan that he needed some "alone time" to get over his heartbreak. With both of them gone the Zeroday's energy changed, and it became a place where there was always someone cooking something, making something, writing a story or a song. We had all the food we could eat, and we were getting along well with our neighbors, too -- even the drug dealers and their lookouts dropped by to see what we were up to, and seemed to find the whole thing hilarious, mystifying, and altogether positive.

Dodger turned out to be an incredible chef, able to cook anything with anything. He prepared epic meals that I can still taste today: caramelized leeks with roasted stuffed peppers, potatoes roasted in duck fat and dripping with gravy. Then there was the day he made his own jellied eels. It turned my stomach at first, just the thought of it, but that didn't stop me from eating sixteen of them once I'd tasted them!

I never did work out what happened between Jem and Dodger and the squat they'd shared before. I could tell that they were the best of mates, though Dodger was a good five years older than us. From what I could tell though, the old squat -- Dodger still lived there -- had gone through some kind of purge after a blazing row over chores or something stupid like that. Dodger spent so much time at ours, I couldn't figure out why he didn't just move in. We had it pretty comfortable, with fifteen good bedrooms that we'd scrounged furniture for, a lovely front room, all the Internet we could eat.

I never got to know Dodger that well, but Jem seemed to include me when he talked about the Jammie Dodgers, which was the imaginary youth gang that we all belonged to. It was also the name of his favorite biscuit: the old classic round biccie filled with raspberry jam. I didn't like the biccies much, but I was proud to be a JD, really. It was nice to belong.

We hadn't seen Dodger for a few days. It had come on full summer, and the pub was sweltering. We still didn't dare take the shutters down off the bottom windows, but we'd pried them off the upper stories and had pointed a few fans out the windows upstairs, blowing the rising hot air out the building, sucking in fresh air from below. It made the Zeroday a bit cooler, just barely livable. Like hanging about in a pizza oven an hour after the restaurant had shut.

It was three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. I was sitting in cutoff shorts and no T-shirt, staring at my laptop and trying not to think about the mountain of messages that Mum and Dad and my sister had piled up in my inbox and IM. I couldn't face opening any of them, and, of course, the longer I waited, the more angry and sad and awful it would be when I did.

Jem cocked his head. "Did you hear that?" he said. My computer's fan was working triple-time in the heat, trying to force cool air over the huge graphics card I'd wrestled into the chassis at Aziz's before it melted the whole thing to molten slag. It was proper loud, and sent out a plume of hot air that shimmered in the dim.

"Hear what?" I said. I covered the fan exhaust with a finger -- it was scalding -- and listened. There it was, the sound of a hundred tropical birds going mad with fear. It was the drugs-lookouts, and they were in a state about something. "Maybe the coppers are raiding that sugar-shack on the eighth floor," I said. "Want to go upstairs and have a peek out the window?"

Jem didn't say anything. He'd gone pale. "Get some trousers, shoes on, let's go," he said.

I gawped at him. "Jem?" I said. "What --"

"Do it," he snapped, and pelted up the stairs, rattling doorknobs and thumping doors, shouting, "Get moving, get moving, coppers!"

It felt like I was in a dream. For the first month after we'd claimed the Zeroday for our own, I'd lived in constant fear of a knock at the door: the coppers or the landlords come to muscle us out. Jem assured me that we couldn't be arrested for squatting -- it'd take a long court proceeding to get us out. But that didn't stop me worrying. According to Dodger, sometimes landlords would take the easy way out and send over some hard men with sticks or little coshes filled with pound coins that could shatter all the delicate bones in your face, your hands, your feet.

But you can't stay scared forever. I'd forgot that the Zeroday was anything except a utopian palace in Bow, our own little clubhouse. Now all the fear I'd left behind rushed back. I was so scared, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, like a nightmare of being chased. I ran up the stairs behind Jem, headed for my room. All the clothes I owned had come from charity shops or out of skips. I yanked on a pair of jeans. I had a good pair of trainers I'd bought at a charity shop, and I jammed my feet into them, and stuffed my socks into a pocket. I still had my laptop under my arm, and I turned around and legged it for the front door.

As I entered the room, I heard a thunderous knocking at the door and the baritone shout, "POLICE!" I froze to the spot. Upstairs, I could hear the sound of Jem hustling the rest of the house out the top-floor window and down the fire-stairs out back, telling them to go. The hammering grew louder.

I went back upstairs, saw Jem standing by the window, his face still pale, but composed and calm.

"Jem!" I said. "What's all the panic? You said the cops wouldn't do anything to us, just order us to appear at a hearing --"

He shook his head. "That was until this week. They've got new powers to bust us for 'abstraction of electricity.' Immediate arrest and detention. Dodger told me about it -- he's gone underground. Figures that they'd like to hang him up by the thumbs."

Abstraction of electricity? "What's abstraction of --"

"Stealing power," he said. "As in, what we've been doing here for months.
Go
!"

I went out the window. Downstairs, I heard the door splinter and bang open. Jem was right behind me on the fire-escape. Outside, it was a sunny summery day, hot and muggy, and the bird-calls from the drugs kids made it feel like a jungle. The fire stairs were ancient and rusted, crusted with bird-shite. I ran down them on tiptoe, noticing the patter of dry crap and dust on the ground beneath me, sure that at any moment, I'd hear a cop-voice shout, "There they are!" and the tromp of boots. But I touched down to the broken ground and looked up to check on Jem, who was vaulting down the steps five at a time, holding onto the shaking railing and swinging his body like a gymnast on a hobby-horse. The rest of the Zeroday's crew had already gone, disappearing into the estate, keeping behind the pub and out of sight of the men at the door.