17 KiB
Chapter II
Mr. Humbert
Sheiny didn't need to convince Chloe too much. She was the kind of girl that would do that herself. She just never had the same problem and thus never thought of it as a kind of way to make money. But since now she knows what Sheiny does, she cannot simply continue it with the man regularly. They do not pay her. What is point to continue? On the other hand, if they split the money fifty-fifty Chloe is more then willing to try out and make what ever this friend of Mr. Hambleton wants.
The funny thing is. The leader of the did, Sheiny is the one not sure about the whole "together" thing. Shame came into her. Chloe had no shame what so ever. But Sheiny started feeling herself above it. It was the day when Sheiny came to Chloe's home. Nothing special was needed. A camera. Any of their phone's one would do. A room. Chloe's would do. The absence of parents. Easy to wait for. Her mom was working evening shift that day. The camera was set and Chloe started to become excited. This was the moment when Sheiny pulled the switch.
"I can't do that." said Sheiny turning away from Chloe in shame "What are we doing? This is insanity. I've turned into a lesbian whore, fucking for some old men. Doing this for money.". Sheiny was disgust and nervous. Angry and unsure. Putting up the phone and removing her trousers was easy enough alone. But together. This is on another level of insanity. And more so. It's not even a boy she is doing it with. It's another girl. What is this? Sheiny started thinking about other ways to make money. Drugs? No, Richie with his gang. Think, think... Maybe she could try selling chocolate again. Sheiny sat down on Chloe's bed and started crying. All of this was still recorded by the camera.
Chloe observed it and didn't know the appropriate reaction that should be made. She sat beside Sheiny and hugged her carefully. "Fuck 'em old men." said Chloe in an attempt to calm Sheiny down. "How can you do that so easily?" Sheiny started asking Chloe "You hadn't have a single doubt about that all?". Chloe's first experience with it was when she downloaded Telegram for the first time. She had nobody to speak with, but she had a strong interest in Japanese Animation style called Anime, or in other words Manga. Some of those films are quite innocent. But most of them are really soft or even hard porn disguised as children cartoons. It might have been a sinister Japanese plan to turn all Western kids into sexual maniacs. It might have been that in Japan the rules are different. It wasn't much of a difference to Chloe why those cartoons existed. She just liked them. Searching up groups of Manga and Anime on Telegram lead her into talking to like-minded people. A lot of them were extremely pervy men.
Those cartoons desensitised her to sex. Chloe doesn't feel anything shameful in it. It's kind of terrifying, but Chloe now has a natural immunity against sexual trauma. She would probably just forget about anything happening to her. On the other hand Sheiny was not desensitised. She understood why Chloe didn't feel that anything was wrong. But that did not help Sheiny. They canceled the did and Sheiny went back home.
On the way back home Sheiny entered a local shop and bought a bottle of sparkling juice. She was drinking it and thinking about what had just happened. On her phone was the recording from the day. She did not delete it. She put her headphones and skipped back and forth through the video. Trying to remember what Chloe told her that day. As she finished the Juice she entered another shop and bought another bottle of it. For a moment she thought, this was way too much juice. She never had drunk so much of it. It had occurred to her that for the first time in her life she had more money in her pocket then for one bottle of juice. She looked at the remaining cash and it was not a small sum of money. She paused for a second and looked at the top of the phone's screen. It contained a clock. It said 17:36. A not so late evening. Sheiny contemplated for about 15 seconds and ran back towards Chloe.
"Let's try again!" screamed Sheiny as soon as Chloe opened the door. "Are you sure?" "Yes I am."
Sheiny took all of her remaining courage to overcome any of the fears that she previously had. Greed had won her for this instant. No moral reasoning could stop her. She would suppress it, distract from it, do anything but not to feel the shame. Chloe was stunned by that. She didn't except Sheiny to even talk to her ever more. But she broke into her house and exploded upon her. By the time Chloe's mom came back home they had multiple video files. All from different angles. Some were even shot on both of their phones simultaneously. Sheiny needed an editing software to turn this into something watchable.
Using the classroom was not possible. Neither Sheiny or Chloe had a computer at home and there was no video editors on F-Droid for a phone. She had to get a computer somehow. Mr. Hambleton was bothered again. He had 2 kids and a wife. Neither of them knew his true nature. Sheiny appeared in his doorstep as if having some kind of computer problem. Something to do with the class. She asked him to bring his laptop and they went into his car. It was a family van, but the back windows were dark enough, so you could conceal what you were doing. They were still close enough to his home. So connection to his WIFI was still possible.
"Do you have your files backed up?" started Sheiny. She didn't want to edit the video on Windows. If she didn't care, she would've got some other Android video editor already. She looked up on F-Droid because she cared to keep everybody safe. It was not a matter of security for her. She was a little girl and she understood that nothing would've happened to her. It was morally unacceptable to put other people at risk. Even Mr. Hambleton. So she wanted to upgrade his device to something like GNU / Linux. And that's why she asked him if he had backed up his files.
This simple question turned into an almost fight. He refused to install GNU / Linux. He was a person that needed it the most. A person from a minority group that still wasn't recognized. He needed security and privacy most than perhaps anybody else. But he refused to install the software that provided it. It wasn't ignorance. It wasn't reliance on some software that he couldn't have otherwise. It was not some game incompatibility. It was not that he was afraid of the terminal. He was simply too paranoid to use it. Sheiny started talking about surveillance that is happening on other systems. She brought up the hack that she did, when she revealed his true nature. But he was still too paranoid to use GNU / Linux. His reasoning sounded something like this: If I use secure software, they ( the government ) will pay closer attention to me. Thus I need to use Windows and Google and Facebook. Which makes me lost in the noise of their data.
When Sheiny heard it, she got tired of him. She looked down as if defeated. Nothing already could help her to argue with Mr. Hambleton. "You have a unique position." Sheiny started her last attempt "You are a computer teacher. It's not weird to expect from you something like this. If they will ask, you can say that you are using it for the fun of it. For the nerdiness. But yet somehow you fail to recognize this. I do not understand you." Sheiny opened the door of his van and started walking towards her home. She would find a different computer, she thought. There is a whole week in-front. Mr. Hambleton stayed in the car stunned for another 15 or so minutes.
When Sheiny came back to school the next day, she started preparing a sort of privacy zone around her computer. She took big cardboard pieces from the art class and started building a wall around her computer. It was already the end of the school day. But Mr. Hambleton wasn't in the class for some reason. When trying to glue two pieces of the board together, one of them slipped from her hands and the corner of the board pressed a little start button on one of the other computers in the class.
Sheiny didn't notice it until the wall was finished. She looked at the cardboard monstrosity, trying to decide whether it was a terrible idea to begin with, when she realized that on a screen that wasn't her computer was a very familiar image. It was a default desktop of Ubuntu 17.04. She didn't use Ubuntu. She used straight up Debian. But this caught her attention non the less. Sheiny booted all 20 computers in the class. All of them turned into an Ubuntu session except of her own. Which asked her password in her modified login screen. What is going on here?
Sheiny went to the principal. She knocked carefully on his door and a deep old voice said "Come in.". Sheiny asked the principal about the computers room. And the change that it had. The principal said that there were changes in the school's policy and that Mr. Hambleton came up with this change today's morning. The principal said the Mr. Hambleton convinced him that teaching Windows was an unapologetic act from the school. He convinced the principal that it was not nice to teach kids to use software that is meant to take advantage from them and who's source code is not available to read. Further more from the words of the principal, Mr. Hambleton was a very big fan of Free Software, Richard Stallman and GNU / Linux.
Sheiny couldn't believe it. The man that argued with her all night against installing GNU / Linux was a GNU / Linux fan all along. She herself didn't much like Richard Stallman. Or should I say, Richard Stallman's appearance... He is a wise man, but not a kind of 15 to 17 year old, thin dude, that girls in her age adore. Though Sheiny would agree immensely that Richard was an influential figure on her too. Reading his blog or his Free Software manifesto was very enjoyable to her. It was a mind trilling sensation of already agreeing with all the words that come next. Richard is the kind of dude that will give you mixed feelings no matter where you are on the ideology spectrum. He is a funny man sometimes, but can be very weird and awkward other times. He has grown this kind of great and immense belly seen in horror movies. But his face is always light with a old granny smile. Sheiny had on her computer a very old image of Richard Stallman. It was a picture featured on his biography by Sam Williams. The original print. It is the only image where Richard looks acceptable to her as a kind of man. Even there he looked far from the ideal 17 year old boy. But his mind was a great substitute. In some weird way, she wanted that version of Richard Stallman to be her next customer. But it could not happen.
Richard Stallman is an influential figure on the lives of many people. Not only Sheiny, Chloe and Mr. Hambleton. He made a whole ideology of software development. He tried to preserve the freedom of computing from the capitalism and it's constant urge to own things. He coined the terms Free Software and Proprietary Software. Free Software means that people, that masses are ultimately in control of what the program does. Not some company. He described the four principals on which he judges whether the software is Free or not. He calls them the four essential freedoms. Because he believes that any software that's not giving you all four of those freedoms is subjugating you.
Those freedoms are as follows. Freedom zero, to use the software as you with and for whatever purpose. Freedom one, to study how the software works. To read it's source code. And to make modifications to it. Making it so the software does only the things that the user wants it to do. And only the way the user wants. These two first freedoms insure that each user has total personal control over the software. But another two freedoms were needed to help people that were not programmers. Not everybody is a programmer. Chloe is not, for example. But she can benefit from Free Software because of the other two freedoms. Freedom two, to give or sell exact copies of the software. To share. To publish the software even if the original developer got bored of it, or has no more motivation to continue developing it. And lastly, the third freedom. The freedom to give or sell modified versions of the program. This way any user that has any problem with how the program works thus far, can publish a changed version. A fork, so to speak. And other users will be able to choose from forks, the one that suits them most.
In Windows, which lead to the hack by Sheiny, you can only have the version of Microsoft. They can put anything in there and nobody has control over functions on that system. Mr. Hambleton how ever good programmer he would've been, couldn't edit out the vulnerability. The source code was unobtainable. But with GNU / Linux the way it's developed, insures that nobody will put anything malicious. They are running a constant risk of some other fork being better at anything then themselves. And there is always freedom to borrow changes from one fork to another. And thus those systems are much more secure, much less annoying and much more customize-able.
Sheiny's cardboard construction failed. As she came back to class, Mr. Hambleton already disassembled it. He was standing there and looking at all the computers, proud of himself. Sheiny came in and didn't even notice that her building effort was broken. "I bought a new computer." said Mr. Hambleton "I put it in the shed. I set it up so the files are encrypted.". Sheiny failed to understand why is he saying it. "Congratulations" was her answer. "You don't understand, do you?" he continued "You don't need cardboard constructions. We have five days left. I made an editing studio for you.". Sheiny now remembered. She had the stuff to edit. There was the meeting with Mr. Humbert later that week. After school she took Chloe with her to Mr. Hambleton's shed and there they made their new masterpiece.
And so the week had passed by and there was the day when Mr. Hambleton will show their stuff to the new customer. They drove not too far from where they were. About 15 minutes walk, Sheiny measured. And it was an old cinema. An old 1960s Cinerama. It had one screening room but no clients. Occasionally some poor people would visit that place to see an old movie. New films were never shown there. Unless a digital copy, downloaded from the internet. But it was rare. Mr. Humbert was the owner of that place now. Once upon the time he was a movie producer. He didn't produce anything people actually watched. But he knew the business.
When the girls came to Mr. Humbert, they expected a new customer. Instead he offered them a business opportunity. The picture that Sheiny found on Mr. Hambleton's computer did not came from the Dark Web. It came from Mr. Humbert. His true business was to sell stuff like that to people that would refuse to pay with crypto-currency. He was money laundering with a movie theater. People would come to buy the stuff, but he would record it as if enough people came to watch movies. His proposition was very simple. The girls would make new stuff. And he would sell it. They would split 33% to each. Girls would have 33%, Mr. Hambleton had 33% and Mr. Humbert had 34%.
Sheiny didn't like this math. So she immediately started arranging a different split. Mr. Humbert calmed her down. "Let's see the stuff first" he said "what if it's garbage?". He closed the entrance to the cinema and brought up a projector. This was the first feature film directed and edited by Sheiny. There were four people in the audience. Her little illegal film was shown in a real Cinerama cinema with it's curved, wide screen. It was somewhat a majestic moment in her life. She was slightly ashamed. I mean of course she was. But from the other side, a true film producer is watching. A true film producer had put this film in a cinema. Sheiny was proud of herself. After the film had ended and Mr. Hambleton came back from the toiler. God know what he was doing there. They finally arranged a new deal. 65% came to Sheiny. He directorial talent was unquestionable. 20% came to Chloe. She was extraordinary experienced at making men excited. She was worth the money. Mr. Humbert would keep the remaining 20% and Mr. Hambleton agreed to a gratis copy of the film on each release.
And so the business had started. Mom started questioning where the money is coming from. Chloe dropped all conversations with the men on Telegram. And Sheiny didn't feel hungry. Something that bothered Sheiny was that experience in the cinema. Ones in the while they would repeat it. But she wanted the place full of audience. She started thinking about maybe a normal, legal film that she could do. But it was too complex. Any scene outside the boundaries of a room was unthinkable.
They could buy actors. But nobody would treat her seriously. So Sheiny focused meanwhile on bringing the quality of her current show up. She bought new cameras with better sensors. She bought lenses, lights, tripods and other various rigs. She equipped both Mr. Hambleton's shed and her own house with new, powerful computers. Now she wanted to expend the number of actors. And a good way to make the show a little bit more interesting was to find somebody that would fit into her category of a nice looking young man. Mr. Hambleton would agree, but he was resembling Richard Stallman more then a 15 to 17 year old thin boy. She had to look further.