#freetopiary: An Occupy Fable

By Peter Burnett

In an age of NSA spying and unprecedented government oversight, young Alan Stewart wants nothing to do with changethat is until he is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and forced to face reality.

Consumerism, passivity, apathy and distraction. The internet is no place to attempt changing anything that matters. A young Scottish drifter, Alan Stewart, struggles to come of age in a world he knows only through the world wide web. But come of age he does, learning something of truth and the price of freedom along the way. Arrested for a cybercrime he did not commit, Alan is shipped to Scotland's e-crime unit in Aberdeen with a young hacktivist known only as Topiary. After an escape worthy of The 39 Steps they set about establishing a Scottish Occupy camp, along with others who feel that social inequalities are rising to historically unprecedented heights.

Introduced to the story of Bradley Manning, Alan is forced to question his long-held political apathy and ask himself what he is prepared to do for the struggle. Another world is possible. Make ready your dreams. Inspired in part by a true story, #freetopiary is not just an insightful commentary on internet privacy and our rights in a world increasingly dependent on technology, but the touching story of a brotherhood and the bonds we develop in times of crisis.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781629140575

Book preview

1. The road that set me free

In this dime novel that I call a life I’ve never had the fortune to know anyone for long. My mum was always heavily into the drink, so we never did have much in the way of friends and family. There was one other person out there and that was Mum’s sister, but Mum wouldn’t speak to her in person – only online.

I grew up in the Scottish Borders, broke and without things most people take for granted, like a father, or hot water. All mum had going for her was a pile of old computers which she stored in a cellar beneath the kitchen. I passed the time studying these machines and I even taught myself the workings of wireless communication, but at school one day I left my notebook in class and when I went back for it, I found I was under investigation. The head told me that a person who breaks into a computer is called a hacker and that a hacker is a criminal.

‘Continue down this road and you’ll find yourself in Queer Street,’ he said. I pointed out that the notes I’d taken had come out of the school library, but that only got me suspended.

‘You’re going to have to work hard to get out of this, young man,’ said the head.

At Edinburgh University I studied software engineering as Mum and her sister had done, and after four years of accommodating the curriculum I emerged as another graduate with no job. Mum was still living in the village of Clarty and so I moved back in with her. She sellotaped my degree to the wall, where she could see it from her laptop. Like plumbing, cleaning wasn’t a priority with Mum and nobody had taken a rag to her house in the years I’d been away, and for six months I cleaned the house, applied for jobs and stared at that degree.

Although we didn’t know anyone in the village, Mum had online friends. In her heyday she’d administered many a computer network but those glory days were gone and her current life was condensed into one desktop rig in the living room. Mum had sat at that laptop for as long as I could remember. When I’d asked her for help with my homework at secondary school, her general answer to me was: ‘Google it.’ When she said to me that she was going to be meeting friends, it would mean a bottle of wine, logged into an internet chatroom.

So, my life after university was about getting a job. It wasn’t like I couldn’t find some part-time gig slinging bacon rolls or cleaning pans, but I was looking for something more. Above all I wanted to be paid to do the things I enjoyed, and that just happened to be writing software.

Like everyone else I dreamed of working for Google. The downside to this fantasy was that like other internet giants, Google’s hiring policy was unpredictable. At one time Google might have hired a geek like me – the sort of guys that worked hard at the back of the class, turning in Grade A reports and never fluffing a line – but by the time I was ready for them Google had grown out of nerds and wanted the kids who were the most popular.

So from my university class, Google hired two people, neither of whose academic standards met mine. One of the guys had cycled from Scotland to Turkey and the other was no more than a lousy hacker whose paper on cheating search engine URL pattern matching had simply landed on the right desk. The knowledge in a paper like that would have allowed a curious person the chance to wreak havoc on a shared web server – and yet that guy still got hired. He should have been thrown out of university, I thought, but instead he was snapped up, and I guess Google made an honest man of him. The downer was that I was left fending for myself and for someone who had spent ten years in front of the computer screen trying to do the right thing, that hurt.

‘Why don’t you work for Auntie?’ asked Mum. ‘Auntie has servers and builds thousands of websites all by herself. She could use you.’

‘She’s a spammer,’ I said, but Mum shrugged at that suggestion.

‘She’s a gifted software engineer and she could use your help,’ she answered.

Every week Mum suggested that I leave home and work for Auntie, and after six months I felt that it had became my last remaining option.

‘Should I really ask her for a job?’ I asked, and Mum nodded.

If Mum could answer while staring at her screen, she did.

‘Could you email and ask her for me?’ I said, and Mum shook her head.

‘She thinks I’m a drunk,’ said Mum, and buried her nose in her keyboard.

I wrote the email and received a reply, telling me to come to the farm. I pinged the email address out of interest, just to see what I could find, but the address was phony and the account untraceable, which fitted with what I’d heard of Auntie and her activities.

She lived on a farm in Fife, but it wasn’t a farm with crops and animals. Instead Auntie Catherine had a byre full of servers, on which she rented rack-space. On those same servers Auntie also recycled websites and domains, and if you want to know more about that I’ll explain it later. Recycling domains is legal, but it’s hardly moral or creative. And it does involve sending out an inordinate amount of spam.

The day that Mum began ordering her drinks online was my last day in her house. Every year after Christmas Mum tried to stop drinking and it always led to fights. When it got to the shouting stage, Mum told me that my being in the house made it worse for her, and so I announced that I would not go to the shop for her anymore. This was a crushing blow as Mum despised leaving the house, and that was when the bottles began to arrive by post.

‘Do it,’ I said. ‘Kill yourself if you want.’

She ignored me, slammed the door and went back online.

Due to the rigours of an uninspiring life, Mum had been able to re-invent herself online, where she was witty, clever, and a confidante to unsuspecting and equally lonely cyber travellers. They were all idiots as far as I could see but Mum talked about them as if they were the salt of the earth. They weren’t the salt of the earth though – they were the dregs of the internet. The main ones were Melody, Abubkar, Adam and Jun, but there were scores of them – and I knew everything about these online beings, most especially their opinions. Mum was always bringing her online family into arguments, quoting them to me. I’d seen their Facebook pages and most of them looked like sock puppets, but Mum liked them, and even managed to fall out with some of them. After a twelve hour drinking and social networking session, I saw Mum break a laptop once by throwing it on the table.

Mum said to me: ‘You young people will never know the satisfaction of slamming down the receiver on a rotary phone.’

‘I’m taking up Auntie’s offer,’ I said. ‘I’d like to know more about her setup and I really want to see the farm again.’

Mum was glad I was going to the farm because it meant she could drink more. Maybe she was sad for the same reason. Gladdest of all, I reckoned, would be my job prospects, because whatever I did with Auntie I was determined that I should make it sound great on my CV.

Never was any document more revised than my CV. I worked on its four, fascinating, fun-filled pages every evening, adding school computer clubs, university projects, and tunnelling into my memory for the crucial clue to my coming success. Then I would look at the CV in the morning and delete the school computer clubs for sounding corny, and blast the university projects, and be left with the same empty pages, the same empty feelings.

I hung about the house an extra day hoping for a word of encouragement from Mum, but none came. As usual, that night I went to bed to the smell of her cigarette smoke, the sound of her knocking things over and the thought of