It was like a slap across the face, and my first reaction was to shout and scream like a little kid, or run out of the room, or both. Instead, I swallowed a few times, and said, “What am I going to do with my future? I’m going to make art. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Look, I just want to make my films. I don’t really care how I have to live in order to get that done.”
“How about how we have to live while you get that done?” Dad said softly.
“That’s why I left,” I said. “It’s not fair for me to put all of you at risk so I can do my thing. With me gone, you won’t have to worry about my downloading.”
“We just have to worry about you.”
Of course, they were right, and there wasn’t anything to say about that. I reached out and squeezed Mum’s hand, then Dad’s. “I don’t have a good answer. I can put you at risk, or I can make you worried. But when I go back, I promise I’ll be much better about keeping in touch. I’ll call every day, come back for holidays some times. I promise.”
“When you go back,” Dad said.
“Well, yeah. Of course. You didn’t think I was going to stay, did you?”
“Son, you’re only seventeen. We have a responsibility—”
I jumped off the sofa like I’d been electrocuted. “Wait,” I said. “This is a visit. I can’t stay here. I’ve got a whole life now, people who are waiting for me, films to make, events we’re putting on—” I began to back toward the door.
Mum said, “Sit down, Trent! Come on, now, sit down. We’re not going to kidnap you. But wouldn’t you like to sleep in your own bed for a few nights? Have a home-cooked meal?”
The first thing that popped into my head were the mouth-watering, epic feeds that we brewed up in the huge kitchen at the Zeroday from all the ingredients that turned up in the skips. I had the good sense not to tell Mum that her cooking was well awful in comparison to our rubbish cuisine. “I’d love dinner,” I said, carefully not saying anything about “a few nights.” Mum smiled bravely and got delicately to her feet, holding onto the sofa arm and wobbling gently. “Erm, can I help with the cooking?” I found that I quite fancied showing Mum all the elite cookery skills I’d acquired.
She waved me off, though. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I can still cook a dinner for my own family in my own kitchen, son.” She limped off, back stiff.
“I didn’t mean to offend her,” I whispered to Dad.
He closed his eyes. “It’s all right,” he said. “She’s just touchy about her legs, is all. All the rehab clinics and physiotherapy only accept appointments over the net, and it’s too far for her to walk to the library, so Cora’s been booking her in, but it’s not a very good system and she hasn’t been getting enough treatment. It’s got her in a bad way.”
Dinner was just as awkward, though Cora tried bravely to make conversation and talked up all the fun things we’d got up to in London, how excited all her mates were to see me on the telly. Mum had made noodles with tinned tuna and tomato sauce and limp broccoli and oven chips, and it was just as awful as I remembered it being. I longed to take Cora out to the grocers in town and find a skip to raid and cook up some brilliant feed, but I knew that Mum would certainly take this as an indictment of her womanhood or something.
I went to my room and I lay in my narrow bed, listening to the Albertsons’ dogs barking through the thin wall. I heard Mum and Dad go to bed and mutter to one another for a long time, then the click of their bedside lamp. Sleep wouldn’t come. That morning, before I’d got on the bus, I’d been an adult, living on my own in the world, master of my destiny. Within minutes of crossing the threshold to my parents’ house, I was a boy again, and I felt about five years old and totally helpless. London felt a million miles away, and my life there felt like a silly kids’ fantasy of what life could be like on my own with no parents or teachers to push me around.
I was seized with the sudden conviction that if I stayed in that bed overnight, I’d wake up a small child again in my pajamas and housecoat, demanding to play with my toys. The dogs next door barked. My dad’s snores shook the walls, chased by my mum’s slightly quieter ones. I sat up in bed, put my knees over the edge, grabbed my bag, and stuffed it full of the things I’d brought, along with a few extra pairs of underwear and socks from my drawer. Then I tied my bootlaces together and slung them around my neck and padded on cat feet out of my room and down the corridor toward the front door and freedom.
As I reached for the doorknob, a hand landed heavily on my shoulder. I gave a little jump and a squeak and nearly dropped my bag as I turned around, giving myself a crick in the neck. It was my dad, unshaven, his dental appliance out so that his missing front teeth showed, looking grim. He reached out and turned the doorknob and opened the door, then jerked his head at it. I stepped out and he followed me, pulling the door closed behind him, but leaving it open a crack so it didn’t lock.
“Going away again, son?”
I hung my head. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I say good-bye like a proper person?
“Just—”
“Forget it,” Dad said. He looked like a huge, sad, broken bear. Without knowing why, I found myself wanting to hug him. I did. He hugged me back, and the strength in his arms was just as I remembered it from my childhood, when I believed my father could lift a car if he took a mind to. “We’re proud of you, son. Keep in touch with us, and stay safe.”
He fumbled for my hand and stuck something into it. I looked down and saw that it was a pair of fifty-pound notes.
“Dad,” I said, “I can’t take this. Honestly, I’m just fine. Really.” I’d seen for myself how tight things were around the flat, the soap in the bathroom made by pressing together carefully hoarded slivers from other bars. My parents were so broke they could barely afford to eat. This was a fortune for them.
“Take it,” he said, trying for a big, magnanimous style. “Your mother would worry otherwise.”
We had a kind of silly arm wrestle there on the doorstep as I tried to give it back to him, but in the end, he won—he was my dad, of course he won. He was strong enough to lift a car, wasn’t he?
He hugged me again, and I walked off to the coach-station, and with every step, I grew taller and older, so that by the time I bought my ticket (not using the fifties; those went into the little change-pocket in the corner of my jeans), I was a full-fledged adult.
Chapter 7
RAIDED!/LANDLORD SURPRISE/TAKING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
I bought more WiFi on the coach, but there was something wrong with it. I couldn’t access Confusing Peach or any of the secret sites that lived inside it—they just timed out. And two of the webmail accounts I used were also kaput, along with the voice-mail site I liked. I poked around and decided that the censorwall on the bus-company’s Internet had been updated with a particularly large and indiscriminate blacklist, so I tried some proxies I knew, but they didn’t help. I folded away my laptop and looked at the motorway zipping past, the dark night and the raindrops on the window, hoping for sleep or at least some kind of traveler’s trance, but my mind kept going back to the soap in the bathroom, my dad’s sad, missing teeth, my mum’s sagging skin and hollow, wet eyes.
I had the seat to myself, so I took out my mobile and called 26. I’d sent her a steady stream of texts from my parents’ place, until she’d sent me back a stern message telling me to stop worrying about her and pay attention to my family, damn it. But I’d missed her fearsomely, with a pang like a toothache, and now that I was headed home—ha! London was home now, there was a turn-up for the books!—I found myself trembling with anticipation of having her next to me, spooned up against her on my bed on the floor of the Zeroday, my face buried in the fragrant skin where her neck became her shoulder.
“Cecil?” she said. “Have you heard?” Her voice was tight, hushed.
“Heard what?”
“They’ve raided Confusing Peach. Took all the servers right out of the rack.”
“What?”
>
“They went at it like cavemen with stone axes! Took two hundred machines down—there’s thousands of sites offline!”
I felt the blood drain all the way to the soles of my feet. There were any number of reasons I could think of for the coppers to go after Confusing Peach—the drugs, the parties—but the timing of the raid made me think that this had more to do with our screening, and all the coverage it had garnered. Sam Brass from the MPA had looked like he was ready to blow a gasket before; now that I was on the front of the paper exhorting people to violate copyright, he must be in full-on volcano mode.
“Why’d they do it?”
26 sighed and didn’t say anything and I knew that I was right.
“It should be okay,” she said. I couldn’t figure out what she meant—how could it be okay? The sites that we used as our hubs and gathering place were down, and so were all those other sites. “I mean, the Confusing Peach people always said they kept the logs encrypted, and flushed them every two days in any event. And the main databases were all encrypted—remember last year when there were all those server crashes because of the high load from the encryption, and they were doing all that begging for us to send them money for an upgrade?”
I did remember it. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, just been annoyed. But now I knew what 26 meant when she said it was okay. She meant that they wouldn’t be able to use the Confusing Peach logs to figure out who we all were, where we all lived, what we were all up to.
I’d never given much thought to encryption, for all that I’d used it every day since I was a little kid putting together my first private laptop drives. Depending on how you looked at it, the theory was either very simple or incomprehensibly hard. The simple way of looking at it was that encryption systems were black boxes that took your files and turned them into perfectly unscrambleable gibberish that only you could gain access to. But, of course, I knew that it was a lot more complicated than that: crypto wasn’t a perfect and infallible black box, it was an insanely complicated set of mathematical proofs and implementation details that were incredibly hard to get right.
The news was always full of stories about banking security systems, smart cards, ATM records, and all manner of other sensitive information leaking out because someone had done the maths wrong, or forgot to turn off the debugging mode that dropped an unscrambled copy of everything into a maintenance file. After all, that’s what Aziz relied on, wasn’t it? Badly done crypto rendering beautiful bits of kit illegal or unusable?
And that was just the start of the problem when it came to crypto. Even assuming the programmers got it all right, then you had to deal with the users, idiots like me who just wanted to get on with the job and not get hassled by having to remember long, complicated passwords and that. So we used short passwords that were easy to guess—especially for a computer. We refused to run the critical software updates because we were too busy. We visited dodgy websites with our unpatched browsers and caught awful viruses that snooped on our crap passwords. It doesn’t matter how great the bank safe is if the banker uses 000 for a combination and forgets to lock the door half the time.
So maybe it was okay for us. Maybe Confusing Peach didn’t have any readable logs or databases of users and messages. Maybe all that happened is that the poor admins who ran it—a group of University of Nottingham physics students who’d been handing the admin duties on to younger students since before I was born—were now missing all their computers and answering hard questions in some police station basement.
But I didn’t think we should count on it.
“When did this all happen?”
“Just now,” she said. “Midnight raid. They didn’t even wait for the building maintenance people to let them into the server cages: they just cut through them with torches. Brought in camera crews and everything. It’s all over the news. The Motion Picture Association spokesman called it a ‘major victory against piracy and theft.’”
I swallowed again. “I am a total cock-up,” I said. “God, what have I done?”
“Trent McCauley,” she said sharply. I sat to attention. She had never called me by my real full name. “Stop it, this instant. This is not the time to wallow in self-pity, idiot boy. You didn’t do anything—we did it. I was putting on Pirate Cinemas before I even met you, remember? You’re not our leader, you fool—you’re one of us, and we’re all in this together. So stop putting on airs and taking credit for everything that we’ve all done, right now.”
I opened and shut my mouth like a fish. “Twenty,” I said at last. “I’m not saying that—”
“Yes, you are, whether or not you mean to. You need to get over feeling responsible for everyone and everything that goes on and realize that we’re all in this together.”
“I hate it when you’re right,” I said.
“I know. Apologize now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Right, doesn’t that feel better?”
It did. “Okay, boss. Now what do we do?”
“Come back to London and we’ll figure it out.”
* * *
I took night buses from Victoria to 26’s house, creeping across dark London, seeing it again with new eyes though I’d only been gone for a day. Everyone and everything seemed so strange—big, menacing, mysterious. I felt paranoid, didn’t want to get my laptop out in case someone robbed me for it. London didn’t feel like home anymore, but neither did Bradford—I guess that meant that I was genuinely homeless.
I texted 26 when I was outside her place and she silently opened the door for me. She led me up the dark stairs, past her parents’ bedroom, and into her room. We kissed for a long time, like we’d been apart for a hundred years. Then I slid in between the sheets beside her and cuddled up to her from behind. Her hair tickled my nose, but I didn’t mind. Had I thought that I had no home? Of course I did: wherever 26 was, that was home.
In the morning, I got up and unfolded my laptop. 26 was still spark out, snoring like the world’s cutest band saw, and I did what I always did first, hit Confusing Peach and began to read through the message boards, ping my mates, clear my queue of Tweets and mails and that.
I was at it for ten minutes before I realized that I was using Confusing Peach, which meant that it wasn’t down anymore! I skipped up to the front door of the site, to the announcements section I generally ignored, and found a proud message from one of Peach’s overseas admins, who boasted about how she and the Nottingham physics students had prepared for a raid years ago, building in redundant mirrors in three different countries (though she didn’t say which, and my IP trace did something funny I’d never seen before, bouncing back and forth between three routers—one in Sweden, one in Poland, and one in Macedonia—without seeming to resolve to any one machine).
I shook 26’s shoulder, then shook it again when she swatted at my hand. “Wake up,” I hissed. “Come on, wake up.”
She sat up, pulling the sheet over her, and nestled her chin in my neck, peering over my shoulder. “What?”
“Look,” I said, showing her the message.
“Holy cats,” she said. “Genius! What a bunch of absolute nerds. They must have had such a fun time playing superspy and setting up all those fail-overs and mirrors. I guess that means that we can probably trust their crypto, too.” She kissed my earlobe. “See? A night’s sleep fixes everything.”
Downstairs, I could hear her parents finishing their breakfast.
“What time is your first class?” I said.
She yawned and looked at her phone, beside the bed. “I’ve got an hour,” she said. “Plenty of time. Come on, let’s eat.”
I’d spent the night at her’s a few times, but I’d always waited until her parents left for work before skulking downstairs. Something about confronting them across the breakfast table—even if 26 and I hadn’t been having it off the night before, it was still too weird.
“Is it okay?” I said.
“Come on, chicken,” she said, and tossed m
e my jeans and a T-shirt of mine she’d worn home one night. I tugged it over my head, reveling in how it smelled of her.
Her parents were dressed already, and they were wrestling each other for space for their newspapers at the book-crowded table, drinking cups of coffee from a big press-pot and eating toast out of a tarnished toast-rack. Pots of jam and Marmite and various other spreads teetered on the book-piles.
They looked at me when I came in, muttered “Morning,” and went back to their papers. 26 gave them each a peck on the top of the head, poured us each an enormous cup of coffee (finishing the pot), and piled the remaining toast on a plate that she handed to me, then rummaged through the fridge for cheese and juice and three kinds of fruit and yogurt. Her mum quirked an eyebrow at her and muttered something about teenaged metabolisms and bottomless appetites and 26 stuck her tongue out.
“We’re inside-out with hunger, Mum!”
Her dad laughed. “I see you’ve deployed the auxiliary breakfast stomachs,” he said. “Go on, eat.”
We pigged out, and 26’s parents showed each other (and us) bits from the paper, and I made another pot of coffee—it wasn’t bad, though it wasn’t a patch on the stuff Jem made—and then 26 looked at her phone and yelped and announced she was late for class and dashed upstairs, leaving me alone with her parents. She was back down in a flash, dressed, a toothbrush in her mouth. She spat toothpaste in the kitchen sink, dropped the toothbrush in one of the coffee cups, and kissed us each before charging out the door.
I’d almost forgot I was eating breakfast with my girlfriend’s parents, but now it was as awkward as an awkward thing. I got up and began to wash up the breakfast dishes, but 26’s mum said, “We’ve got a dishwasher, Cecil, no need for that.”
Durr. I began to stack the dishes in the dishwasher, trying to project an air of responsible goodness. 26’s father cleared his throat and said, “What are your intentions for my daughter, young man?” in a stern voice.