Big Brother's Little Sister

  Big Brother's Little Sister

  Book 1: Attack

  By Mike Bursell

  Chapter 1 – So far, so good

  They came for him during a double maths lesson, which was a surprise. I'd assumed that we had another couple of hours – maybe even till last period – but suddenly the classroom lights went off (what's the point of that, when it's bright sunlight outside?), the fire alarm started, and about 8 people in black body armour came through the window with guns. So far, so good, then.

  Chapter 2 – Just some girl

  Let's step back about nine months. First, I should introduce myself – I'm Lena. I'm nearly sixteen, short, wear glasses, and nobody notices me. And I'm just some girl who knows him. Well, the longer we can keep Them believing that, the better. Actually, I'm rather a lot more than that, but we'll get to that later, I hope. I should also, to remove any concerns that you may have at this point, point out that they (or “They” - the big, bad “They”, the people with the guns and body armour who came through the classroom windows) are confused, and that they don't get him. Though it's not quite that simple.

  We'll get there: don't worry. Anyway, who's “him”? That'll be Mo: the guy that They think They need to get. Mo is special – he's a really smart guy, in a computer-geeky kind of way. Unlike me, he doesn't wear glasses – so that's one stereotype gone – he's tallish and a bit gangly, he's got dark hair, and blue eyes. He's not exactly a fashion icon, but at least he can tie his own shoelaces and keep his shirt tucked in, which is better than about half the other boys in our year. On reflection, if he's lucky, he might turn out to be quite handsome in a year or two. That's if he gets to live that long: and no, I'm not joking about that bit. You see, when things started getting bad, he started getting all stressed, and talking about how he was going to sort it all out, and how he could bring down the Government. Most people just rolled their eyes and ignored him, but I listened, and as the days and weeks rolled by, I began to realise, from some of the things he was saying, that he might actually have the skills to do it.

  None of us at school liked the Government, obviously. Not with what they'd been doing to us, and pretty much everybody else under the age of 28 or so. Not letting more than six children meet up without an “approved” adult after 6pm. Stopping access to anything but “Government-friendly” (which means boring) Net content. Banning all music written after 1980. Tracking all spending by people under twenty-one. Banning us from cafés, closing skate parks, cinemas, youth clubs. Locking young people up overnight if they're found outside without permission. Anything they could find to make our lives less fun, less bearable, they did.

  But he kept saying that he could really make a difference to it all and actually stop them. Break them. And saying that sort of thing out loud, where people can hear you, just isn't at all clever: somebody may be listening, and paying the wrong sort of attention. So one day, I waited until lunchtime at school, and made sure I was directly behind him in the queue at dinnertime. It was really loud, as usual, with people shouting across the hall, the dinner staff dishing out food onto plates with a crash, and people jostling around us, trying to get in front, or to join their friends, or just messing around.

  While he was waiting to grab some salad, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, just loud enough to be heard above the din around us, “Mo, do shut up.”

  He jumped – I don't think he'd realised there was anyone near him, or he was just inhabiting some other world, inhabited by computers and viruses and networks – and turned round.

  “What?” he demanded, looking down to meet my eyes.

  “Shut up,” I told him. “About bringing society to a halt and stopping the networks working and all that.”

  He was too surprised to be angry. As I mentioned, I'm small, and I keep myself to myself, and I think he had to ponder for a second to remember my name, even though we've been in 82% of the same classes for the past 3 years.

  “Lena – what? Don't you believe me? Don't you think I can do it?” He may not have had time to get angry, but he was doing a good job of being pretty defensive. “Or don't you think it's worth doing: are you happy about what they're doing to us?” He was beginning to raise his voice, so I smoothly put a hand on his upper arm and thrust my thumbnail into his muscle. Hard. “Ow!”

  “Mo. Shut up,” I replied, calmly. “People are looking at you. They're noticing you. Turn around, get some lunch, and think what happens when people notice you these days.” He frowned, which made him look quite sweet. “Then I'll talk to you.” I paused. “If you're clever enough to shut up.” I let go of his arm and pushed him gently forward, letting him go on to serve himself with some not-very-green looking lettuce. When he looked round, a minute or so later, I was already in a different queue. He caught my eye, and looked like he was about to open his mouth to say something to me across the dining hall: loudly, no doubt. I raised my eyebrows at him, and he blinked, nodded, and thought better of it.

  I was pleased to see, as he sat down, that he'd done the bright thing, for a change, and sat on his own at an empty table. I took my time getting my tray filled up and watched him as he waved away a couple of his friends who had gone over to sit with him. They shrugged and went to sit on different table, guessing, I assumed, that he wanted to be alone to think complex geeky thoughts the way I know he sometimes does.

  Now, although Mo doesn't know me particularly – look how he had to think hard to remember my name – I think I know him pretty well. Not in a scary, I'm-some-sort-of-stalker, I'm-watching-you-every-waking-moment kind of way. Obviously. No, it's just that, as I noted above, I've had around three years to get to know about him and all the other people in the classes I share. I pay attention, even when other people don't. And he's an interesting guy, so I paid him enough attention to get to know a bit about him.

  And I'd worked out pretty early on that he was interesting – or at least he had the potential to be interesting. Actually, when I first came across him, I overlooked him for a while, because he seemed to fit the standard “geeky guy who likes playing computer games, but doesn't really get what's going on in the systems themselves” mould. Not that I do in huge detail, let's be honest, but I think I've got a lot more of a clue than most people who use computers, which is everybody, these days, whether they think they do or not.

  But I realised, after a time, that he was a bit like me: he really did know what he was doing. And then I realised that he was a lot unlike me: he didn't just understand how basic systems worked, he could manipulate them, make them do what he wanted, program them, control them. Mo had the potential to be a real hacker.

  We should step aside for a moment to talk about that word. “Hacker” is one of those words which gets a lot of bad press. What it used to mean was “someone who's good at fiddling with complex things and making them do new and interesting stuff”. Those “complex things” didn't even need to be computers, actually, but that's what people ended up referring to. But along the way, bad people – well, people with bad intentions, which isn't quite the same thing at all – started doing bad stuff with computer systems – breaking into banks, scaring generals who thought that someone might launch their missiles, that sort of thing. And because the people who did those things were good at the stuff I said before, that made them “hackers”. Good hackers called the bad hackers “crackers”, but the newspapers and TV (remember TV? No, neither do I) had started using the word, so that was that. It used to be that it was OK to call yourself a hacker, though you'd need to explain it, but over the past year or so, nobody, and I mean nobody, in the UK and with a brain, does that any more. Because it's the sort of thing that gets you noticed. And then gets you in Trouble. With a capital “T”. W
ould it surprise you to discover that Mo did call himself a hacker? No, of course it wouldn't: he did.

  So, I sat down on the same table as Mo, diagonally from him, so that it didn't look like I was with him, and started eating. He was silent, eating slowly, and looking down at his food, not me. After getting through some salad and my main course, I said quietly, “So, decided to show some common sense, then, Mo?”

  He glanced up, took a bite of his burger, and nodded. He looked back down at his food, and munched away. I concentrated on mine, too. After a couple more mouthfuls, he spoke: “That hurt, you know, the thing with my arm.”

  I didn't look up. “Yes. Was supposed to.”

  I could see him pause for a moment – he'd obviously been expecting some sort of apology – and then take another mouthful. At the end of that, he carried on. “So, do you think we should just let them get away with it, or don't you think I'm good enough to do some damage?”

  I sighed. Boys: always, always wanting to prove themselves. “Mo, in a week's time, maybe less, you won't be able to do anything.” I looked up at him as he started, surprised.

  “Do you think things are moving that quickly? Do you think the Government will have that much control by this time next week? We've got to move! We've got to do something now!” He half stood up, ready to leap into immediate, but imaginary action. Just the Mo I'd expected: eager, energised, and hopelessly, hopelessly naïve.

  “No, Mo. Sit down.” He did, as I spoke quietly and calmly. “But if you carry on like this, shouting your mouth off and planning little attacks on random systems...” - at this he gasped: I'd made a guess at what he'd been planning, but I was right - “... you'll end up getting taken away and locked up. And no-one will know where you are, and no-one will be able to be able to get you out.” I paused. “And no-one will even care.”

  I glanced up. Mo looked scared, at last. “And that,” I continued, “would be a pity, wouldn't it?” Now he had the grace to look surprised, but nodded, even if he wasn't quite sure why.

  As I walked away from the table, leaving him to the rest of his meal, I wasn't sure if I'd got through to him, but as I stacked my tray up and put away my dirty cutlery, I heard and felt a buzz in my pocket that meant I'd got a message on my phone. I waited till I was in the corridor, out of sight, before looking at it. It was anonymous – which wasn't supposed to be possible on school grounds, or at all to an under-16's phone at all, come to that – and it was just one line. “What about you – would you care?” I smiled myself as I put my phone away and walked on to the library: I'd got him.

  Chapter 3 – Disruptive elements

  Depending on who you asked – and you had to be pretty careful who you did ask, these days – the trouble had started 6 years ago, 10 years ago, or some time around the beginning of the century. The official story that we were taught at school – under the subject heading of “history”, laughably – was that the second global financial crash had merged into a third, then fourth, until the country was in such a desperate economic state that the government had needed to introduce Emergency Measures.

  Europe was (still) trying to cope with the Euro fall-out, China was busy expanding into Africa and Australia, and the US, the only other global player worth worrying about, was flipping between flavours of right-wing administrations whilst trying to maintain “Essential Liberties” to pay any attention to little old Great Britain. So, when our government started insisting that people referred to them as “the Government” with a capital “G”, removing ancient freedoms, repealing the last vestiges of the European Human Rights Act in the UK, raising the voting age to 28 and quietly re-introducing the death penalty, nobody paid that much attention.

  It really was slow. The Government weren't stupid, and for the first four years, they didn't do anything extreme. They implemented policies that the older generation would like, and vote for, and generally ignored younger people. And so younger people ignored them. Which meant that when the next General Election came along, the Government had a huge majority, and started to make some major changes, including making it very, very difficult for any other parties to win next time there was an election. And once they were in, they really were in, and could start doing what they wanted. They slowly took away younger people's rights, and gave more opportunities to older people. They did this, they did that, and they ignored the protests, or dealt with them quickly so that not enough people paid attention.

  I remember the day when people did start paying attention. I was catching up on the news with my Mum. She's old-fashioned, and thinks it's “good for us a family” - which means just me and her – to spend some time a few times a week sitting around watching video reports of the news. I think it's what her parents did, back in the days when they had old-style TV, and you couldn't choose when to watch the latest news, as it was only broadcast at a few set times through the day (I took the time to look this up once: it's true).

  I don't mind it, really – she's a police officer, so as she's often on odd shifts, we often don’t manage to sit down to eat at the same time every day. When we are together, sitting down at the same time to watch the latest stories and talk about them is good. On this occasion, we were sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea after a late-ish supper, as she'd only just come off a long shift.

  The first report was on some Government banking initiative – again. The Government always had something new, and however boring it was, they ensured that it was at the top of any news collection from any of the big press agencies. The press agencies didn't always do exactly what the Government wanted, but they knew that if they wanted to be able to keep their licence and not be shut down, they had at least to put out what the Government told them were “top stories”. And the Government had done a pretty good job of blocking most of the foreign news services, so you didn’t have many choices about what to watch. Mum and I chatted about how you couldn't tell one initiative from the last, but then again neither of us knows much about economics or “fiscal policy”, which is what the presenters kept going on about. Then came what was clearly the main news: a list of the latest civil liberties campaigners to have been locked up by the government. Mum muttered a bit at this: she wasn't a big fan of these people, who were always chaining themselves to railings and buildings, and making loads of work for her and the other police to manage. This didn't seem entirely fair to me: lots of the people who were demonised by the Government didn't really look like activists, from where I was sitting. They were just people who felt that young people deserved decent treatment. Many of them seemed to be teachers, lawyers, priests, rabbis, social workers and imams. But they made life difficult for the police, who were the ones sent in to move them on, or unchain them, or pick them up from the road they were lying down on. I could understand why Mum and her colleagues might not be their biggest fans.

  The news reporter was talking about how the Government had acknowledged that its approach up to this point hadn't worked, because every time they arrested someone, their friends, or family, or lawyers just popped up in their place, to make even more fuss than the first set of people had. Mum nodded in agreement: “They're a real pain”, she mumbled.

  We'd talked about this in the past. I generally reckoned that the government had been going too far in lots of areas, but Mum was on the front line, having to manage the problems that came up, and rather than blame the Government, she tended to take out her frustration on the people who reacted to the changes they made – that’s how it seemed to me, at least. But even she couldn't disagree that there had been some pretty major restrictions put in since the Government had come in. Nobody seemed to like them, but the people who cared the most are the people with the least power to complain, which suggested that the Government had really thought this through.

  “And so,” continued the reporter,” the Ministry of Justice has decided to encourage these criminals” – they showed footage of civil liberties campaigners in police handcuffs to be clear who they were talking about – “
to act responsibly by taking their dependants into protective custody for appropriate care and proper education.” The Prime Minister stood up and said a piece about how anybody who didn't agree with the Government – with him, basically – was a criminal, and had to be dealt with properly. Mum wanted to turn the news off at this point, partly because she hates the Prime Minister with a vengeance, and partly because, as a police officer, she doesn't like it when the definition of “criminal” gets turned round like that, at a politician's whim. But I stopped her, because this sounded important.

  It was at exactly this point that people realised that the country had changed, because the next footage to be shown was of confused-looking children from around seven up to fifteen or sixteen, being put into the back of police vans and driven away from their homes. Mum suddenly went very, very quiet.