Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Yes, I stole the bloody phone. But that lad got the best of the deal, have no fear: Cantina Dance Off had a secret mode that let you make Jabba get up to all kinds of disgusting sexy things with slave-girl Leia, not to mention what you could get Chewbacca to do to R2D2. It was pulled off the shelves in 48 hours and is the rarest video-game ever sold. As of today, copies are changing hands for upwards of 15,000 quid. So yeah, I stole the phone. But I could have bought Dance Off for three pounds and flogged it for 15 grand. The lad got the best of the deal. I’m an honest thief.

Cecil was at his edit suite when I came back to the squat, a pub in Bow that some previous owner had driven into bankruptcy and ruin, but not before covering its ancient brickwork in horrible pebble-dashing, covering its crazed hand-painted signs up with big laser-printed vinyl banners swirling with JPEG artifacts, and covering up the worn wooden floors with cheap linoleum. The bank—or whoever owned the derelict building—had never got round to turning off the electricity which powered the boiler that kept the damp from eating the building alive.

Cecil sat cross-legged on a banquette, scowling at his screens, hands flying over his mouse and trackball, scrubbing the video on his screens back and forth. He didn’t look up when I came down the stairs, having chinned myself to the upper floor by the moulding around back of the pub, through the window with the loose board. But he did look up when I sat the phone down in front of him, with a precise click as it touched the table before his keyboard. He looked at me, at the phone. Rubbed his eyes. Looked back at me.

“Oh, Fingo, you shouldn’t have,” he said, and smiled like a million watts at me, scratching at his stubbly chin and neck with his chewed-down fingernails. He picked up the phone in his nimble hands and turned it over and over.“Been ages since we had one of these. What’d you pay for it?”

I smiled. “15,000 pounds.”

He nodded. “They’re getting more expensive.”

There’s about eight of us in the Jammie Dodgers, which is what Cecil calls his gang. “About eight” because some come and go as their relationships with their families wax and wane. Cecil’s 17 and he isn’t the oldest of us—Sal is 20, and I once heard Amir admit to 22—but Cecil’s got all the ideas.

Cecil and I grew up on the same estate, in a part of east London where rows of Victorian paupers’ cottages had been taken over by rich children who turned the local pubs into “hotspots” where you wouldn’t find anyone over 25, where the fashion designers came to spy on the club-kids for next year’s “street wear” line. Pubs where you could get a pint for a couple pounds turned into places that sold “real ale” for a fiver and eye-wateringly expensive Scotch over perfectly formed ice-spheres.

We weren’t mates back then, not until both our families got dragged into the mandatory “safe network use” counselling sessions. He’d been downloading his obscure Keith Kennenson videos for his Great Work, whereas I’d just been looking to fill my phone up with music. We were both kids, dumb enough to do our wicked deeds without a proxy, and so we got the infamous red disconnection notice through the door, both our families were added to the blacklist of households that could not be legally connected to the net for a full year. We all got dragged down to the day-long seminars where a patronizing woman from the BPI explained how our flagrant piracy would destroy the very fabric of British society.

Between the videos where posh movie-stars and rockers explained how bad we were, and videos where the blokes that held the cameras and built the sets explained how hard they worked, Cecil and I began to pass files back and forth. He touched his phone to mine and I tapped the “allow” button and got a titanic wad of video in return. I picked out a few dozen of my favorite songs to pass back, then snuck off to the bathroom to watch, screwing in a headphone and turning the volume down.

It was about ten minutes’ worth of video, and it was of Keith Kennenson, of course. I knew him because he’d just played a hard-fighting cop who fought the mob in a flooded coastal California town, but this was from much earlier. Much earlier. It had scenes of Kennenson as a ten-year-old, talking with his dad (a character actor I recognized, but couldn’t place), then as a teenager, mouthing off to his teachers, then back to his dad—pretty sure that the character actor was in another role, but it was a very tight edit—then forward to the latest Kennenson cop role, and it became clear that this was all a flashback during a tense moment while Kennenson was hiding out from gangsters under a pier, his breath rasping in the wet dark.

“What the hell was that?” I whispered to him when I got back to my seat.

He grinned and rubbed his hands. “The Great Work,” he said, pronouncing the capital letters. “You know Keith Kennenson, yeah? Well, I’m making a movie that tells the story of all the lives he’s ever played, as though it were one, long life—from the kid he played on Two Sugars, Please to the Navy frogman in Drums of War to the President of the United States in Mr President, Please! to the supercop in Indefatigable —all cut together to make one incredible biopic!” He mimed a cackle and rubbed his hands together, earning us dirty looks from the BPI lady who’d been lecturing us about how poor Sir Keith Richards couldn’t afford to keep up his fleet of Bentleys and Rollers if we didn’t stop with our evil downloading. He ignored it. “The music you sent me looks pretty cool, too.”

I felt inadequate. But I also felt like he was a certified nutter.

At the tea-break, he grabbed me by the arm and hustled me outside of the leisure centre. We hid under the climbing frame in the playground and he sparked up a gigantic spliff—“it’s just something we grow in an abandoned building site, hardly gets you off,” he croaked—and passed it over. Then, as the munchies overtook him, he produced an entire packet of Jammie Dodgers—shortbread cookies with raspberry jam in the middles—from under his shirt, lifted from the snacks table.

“Jammie Dodgers! It’s so bloody Dickensian,” he said, giggling around a mouthful of cookie crumbs and fragrant smoke.

I laughed too. “We should start a gang!” I said.

And three months later, when my mum lost her benefits because she couldn’t go online to renew them and couldn’t get down to the Jobcentre to queue up for them, not with her legs; when his dad lost his job because he wasn’t able to put in the extra hours on email that everyone else was doing, that’s exactly what we did. We’d caused our families enough trouble—it was time to hit the road.

I put the new OS onto the Screenparty while I was recharging it. It was finicky work—the phone was so old that I had to update it three times before I could get it to the stage where it would even accept the latest bootleg Android flavour, the one with all the video codecs, even the patented ones. I was worried I’d end up bricking it, but I managed it. Thank Spaghetti Monster for HOWTOs!

But the battery wouldn’t take the charge. Age or a manufacturing defect had turned it into a dud. That sent me on another net-trawl, looking for a recipe to convert another battery for use. Turned out that HTC had followed Nokia’s lead in putting in a bunch of crypto on a little chip on the battery that it used to authenticate to the phone, to prove that it was a real, licensed battery—so I had to get a similar HTC battery and transfer the auth chip to it, which was even more finicky. It took the rest of the day, but when Cecil put one caffeine-shaky hand on my shoulder around 10PM, I was able to turn and beam at him and show him the phone in full glory. He beamed back at me and I knew I’d done right by him.