Pirate Cinema (46 page)

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 Confusing 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 screeners 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 assumed 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
everything
,
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, London), 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 antenna, 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 --