For the Win
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow;
novel
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1
For the Win,
2
INTRODUCTION
3
For the Win is my second young adult novel, and, like my 2008
book Little Brother , it is meant to do more than tell a story.
For the Win is a book about economics (a subject that suddenly
got a lot more relevant about halfway through the writing of this book,
when the world's economy slid unceremoniously into the toilet and got
stuck there), justice, politics, games and labor. For the Win
connects the dots between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the
way we play, and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we
seemed to get stuck there.
4
I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into
the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects like
"neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how we end
up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human brothers and
sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them.
5
But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by choosing to
buy or not buy something. Sometimes (often!), you need to organize to
make a difference.
6
This is the golden age of organizing. If there's one thing the
Internet's changed forever, it's the relative difficulty and cost of
getting a bunch of people in the same place, working for the same goal.
That's not always good (thugs, bullies, racists and loonies never had
it so good), but it is fundamentally game-changing .
7
It's hard to remember just how difficult this organizing stuff used to
be: how hard it was to do something as trivial as getting ten friends
to agree on dinner and a movie, let alone getting millions of people
together to raise money for a political candidate, get the vote out,
protest corruption, or save an endangered and beloved institution.
8
The net doesn't solve the problem of injustice, but it solves the first
hard problem of righting wrongs: getting everyone together and keeping
them together. You still have to do the even harder work of
risking life, limb, personal fortune, reputation,
9
Every wonderful thing in our world has fight in its history. Our
rights, our good fortune, our happiness and all that is sweet was paid
for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to
change the world for the better. Those risks are not diminished one
iota by the net. But the rewards are every bit as sweet.
10
AUDIOBOOK
11
The good folks at Random House Audio produced a fantastic audio
edition of this book. You can buy it on CD, or you can buy the MP3
version from a variety of online booksellers.
12
Unfortunately, you can't buy this book from the world's most popular
audiobook vendors: Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Audible. That's because
neither store would allow me to sell the audiobook on terms that I
believe are fair and just.
13
Specifically, Apple refused to carry the book unless it had "digital
rights management" on it. This is the technology that locks music to
Apple's devices. It's illegal to move DRM-crippled files to devices
that Apple hasn't blessed, which means that if I encourage you to buy
my works through Apple, I lose the ability to choose to continue to
sell to you from Apple's competition at some later date in the future.
That seems like a bad deal for both of us.
14
To its credit, Audible (which supplies all of the audiobooks on iTunes)
was willing to sell this book without DRM, but they insisted on
including their extremely onerous "end user license agreement," which
also prohibits moving my book to a device that Audible hasn't
approved. To make it easy for them, I offered to simply record a little
intro that said, "Cory Doctorow and Random House Audio grant you
permission to use this book in any way that does not violate copyright
law." That way, they wouldn't have to make any changes to their
site or the agreements you have to click through to use it. But Audible
refused.
15
I wouldn't sell this book through Wal-Mart if they insisted that you
could only shelve it on a Wal-Mart bookcase and I won't sell it through
any online retailer that imposes the same requirement on your virtual
bookshelves. That's also why you won't find my books for sale for the
Kindle or iPad stores -- both stores insist on the right to lock you
into terms that I believe are unfair and bad for both of us.
16
I'm pretty bummed about this. For the record, I would gladly sell
through both Apple and Audible if they'd let me sell it without DRM,
and under the world's shortest EULA ("Don't violate copyright law.") In
the meantime, I thank you in advance for patronizing online audiobook
sellers who respect the rights of both authors and audiences. And I am
especially grateful to Random House Audio for backing me in this fight
to get a fair deal for all of us.
17
THE COPYRIGHT THING
18
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped
you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about
copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a
long way, and more than that is too much.
19
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and
film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff
without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece
of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to
negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's
experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a
delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright
treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these
negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of
For the Win (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile
for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could
just about manage.
20
I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have
always done are expected to play in the same system as all these
hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an
elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant
global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books.
It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic
copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so.
Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and
it's a fine thing.
21
Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or
scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament has just passed
the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate
giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the
house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also
creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site
that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed
without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a
dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the
public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.
22
It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and
Canada have been negotiating a secret copyright treaty called "The
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) that has all the problems
that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan is to agree to
this in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's
poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell
goods to rich countries unless the do. In America, the plan is to pass
it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the
President. Though this began under Bush, the Obama administration has
pursued it with great enthusiasm.
23
So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon.
And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies
on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big
entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they
couldn't do any better than they're doing now.
24
So, basically, screw that . Or, as the singer, Wobbly and union
organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:
25
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for
a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our
permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a
dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote
it, that's all we wanted to do."
26
DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS
27
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who
want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous
spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers
are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book,
improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping
me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
28
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use,
and I think I've found it.
29
Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love
to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have
the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket
each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover,
which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old
neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself
30
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me
for the free ebooks.
31
I'm proposing that we put them together.
32
If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of For the
Win , email <
33
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of For the Win and you
want to donate something to say thanks, go to <
34
I've done this with three of my titles now, and gotten more than a
thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am
more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers
called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification."
That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?
35
ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS
36
Many scenes in this file have been dedicated to bookstores: stores that
I love, stores that have helped me discover books that opened my mind,
stores that have helped my career along. The stores didn't pay me
anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- but it seems
like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this
ebook and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to
suggest a few places you can pick it up!
37
Dedication:
38
For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better nation.
39
Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work
40
This scene is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.
Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made
me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the
age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the
Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back
into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little
Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was
18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she retired
to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why
people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and
plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th
anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by
Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle
West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!)
41
1 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada
M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993
1
<
42
In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did every
single night. But tonight, as Matthew thoughtfully chopsticked a
dumpling out of the styrofoam clamshell, dipped it in the red hot sauce
and popped it into his mouth, his little squadron did something
extraordinary: they began to win .
43
There were eight monitors on his desk, arranged in two ranks of four,
the top row supported on a shelf he'd bought from an old lady scrap
dealer in front of the Dongmen market. She'd also sold him the
monitors, shaking her head at his idiocy: at a time when everyone
wanted giant, 30" screens, why did he want this collection of dinky
little 9" displays?
44
So they'd all fit on his desk .
45
Not many people could play eight simultaneous games of Svartalfaheim
Warriors. For one thing, Coca Cola (who owned the game), had devoted a
lot of programmer time to preventing you from playing more than one
game on a single PC, so you had to somehow get eight PCs onto one desk,
with eight keyboards and eight mice on the desk, too, and room enough
for your dumplings and an ashtray and a stack of Indian comic books and
that stupid war-axe that Ping gave him and his notebooks and his
sketchbook and his laptop and --
46
It was a crowded desk.
47
And it was noisy. He'd set up eight pairs of cheap speakers, each glued
to the appropriate monitor, turned down low to the normal hum of
Svartalfaheim -- the clash of axes, the roar of ice-giants, the
eldritch music of black elves (which sounded a lot like the demo
programs on the electric keyboards his mother had spent half her life
manufacturing). Now they were all making casino noise, pay off
noises, as his raiding party began to clean up. The gold rolled into
their accounts. He was playing trolls -- it was trolls versus elves in
Svartalfaheim, though there was an expansion module with light elves
and some kind of walking tree -- and he'd come through an instanced
dungeon that was the underground lair of a minor dark elvish
princeling. The lair was only medium hard, with a lot of crappy little
monsters early on, then a bunch of dark elf cannon-fodder to be mown
down, some traps, and then the level-boss, a wizard who had to be taken
out by the spell-casters in Matthew's party while the healers healed
them and the tanks killed anything that tried to attack them.
48
So far, so good. Matthew had run and mapped the dungeon on his second
night in-world, a quick reccy that showed that he could expect to do
about 400 gold's worth of business there in about 20 minutes, which
made it a pretty poor way to earn a living. But Matthew kept
very good notes, and among his notes was the fact that the very
last set of guards had dropped some mareridtbane, which was part of the
powerful Living Nightmare spell in the new expansion module. There were
players all over Germany, Switzerland and Denmark who were buying
mareridtbane for 800 gold per plant. His initial reccy had netted him
five plants. That brought the total expected take from the
dungeon up to 4,400 gold for 20 minutes, or 13,200 gold per hour --
which, at the day's exchange, was worth about $30, or 285 Renminbi.
49
Which was -- he thought for a second -- more than 71 bowls of
dumplings.
50
Jackpot.
51
His hands flew over the mice, taking direct control over the squad.
He'd work out the optimal path through the dungeon now, then head out
to the Huoda internet cafe and see who he could find to do runs with
him at this. With any luck, they could take -- his eyes rolled up as he
thought again -- a million gold out of the dungeon if they could
get the whole cafe working on it. They'd dump the gold as they went,
and by the time Coca Cola's systems administrators figured out anything
was wrong, they'd have pulled almost $3000 out of the game. That was a
year's rent, for one night's work. His hands trembled as he flipped
open a notebook to a new page and began to take notes with his left
hand while his right hand worked the game.
52
He was just about to close his notebook and head for the cafe -- he
needed more dumplings on the way, could he stop for them? Could he
afford to? But he needed to eat. And coffee. Lots of coffee -- when the
door splintered and smashed against the wall bouncing back before it
was kicked open again, admitting the cold fluorescent light from
outside into his tiny cave of a room. Three men entered his room and
closed the door behind them, restoring the dark. One of them found the
lightswitch and clicked it a few times without effect, then cursed in
Mandarin and punched Matthew in the ear so hard his head spun around on
his neck, contriving to bounce off the desk. The pain was blinding,
searing, sudden.
53
"Light," one of the men commanded, his voice reaching Matthew through
the high-pitched whine of his ringing ear. Clumsily, he fumbled for the
desk-lamp behind the Indian comics, knocked it over, and then one of
the men seized it roughly and turned it on, shining it full on
Matthew's face, making him squint his watering eyes.
54
"You have been warned," the man who'd hit him said. Matthew couldn't
see him, but he didn't need to. He knew the voice, the unmistakable
Wenjhou accent, almost impossible to understand. "Now, another
warning." There was a snick of a telescoping baton being
unfurled and Matthew flinched and tried to bring his arms up to shield
his head before the weapon swung. But the other two had him by the arms
now, and the baton whistled past his ear.
55
But it didn't smash his cheekbone, nor his collarbone. Rather, it was
the screen before him that smashed, sending tiny, sharp fragments of
glass out in a cloud that seemed to expand in slow motion, peppering
his face and hands. Then another screen went. And another. And another.
One by one, the man dispassionately smashed all eight screens, letting
out little smoker's grunts as he worked. Then, with a much bigger,
guttier grunt, he took hold of one end of the shelf and tipped it on
its edge, sending the smashed monitors on it sliding onto the floor,
taking the comics, the clamshell, the ashtray, all of it sliding to the
narrow bed that was jammed up against the desk, then onto the floor in
a crash as loud as a basketball match in a glass factory.
56
Matthew felt the hands on his shoulders tighten and he was lifted out
of his chair and turned to face the man with the accent, the man who
had worked as the supervisor in Mr Wing's factory, almost always
silent. But when he spoke, they all jumped in their seat, never sure of
whether his barely contained rage would break, whether someone would be
taken off the factory floor and then returned to the dorm that night,
bruised, cut, sometimes crying in the night for parents left behind
back in the provinces.
57
The man's face was calm now, as though the violence against the
machines had scratched the unscratchable itch that made him clench and
unclench his fists at all times. "Matthew, Mr Wing wants you to know
that he thinks of you as a wayward son, and bears you no ill will. You
are always welcome in his home. All you need to do is ask for his
forgiveness, and it will be given." It was the longest speech Matthew
had ever heard the man give, and it was delivered with surprising
tenderness, so it was quite a surprise when the man brought his knee up
into Matthew's balls, hard enough that he saw stars.
58
The hands released him and he slumped to the floor, a strange sound in
his ears that he realized after a moment must have been his voice. He
was barely aware of the men moving around his tiny room as he gasped
like fish, trying to get air into his lungs, air enough to scream at
the incredible, radiant pain in his groin.
59
But he did hear the horrible electrical noise as they tasered the box
that held his computers, eight PCs on eight individual boards, stuck in
a dented sheet-metal case he'd bought from the same old lady. The ozone
smell afterwards sent him whirling back to his grandfather's little
flat, the smell of the dust crisping on the heating coil that the old
man only turned on when he came to visit. He did hear them gather up
his notebooks and tread heavily on the PC case, and pull the shattered
door shut behind them. The light from the desklamp painted a crazy oval
on the ceiling that he stared at for a long time before he got to his
feet, whimpering at the pain in his balls.
60
The night guard was standing at the end of the corridor when he limped
out into the night. He was only a boy, even younger than Matthew --
sixteen, in a uniform that was two sizes too big for his skinny chest,
a hat that was always slipping down over his eyes, so he had to look up
from under the brim like a boy wearing his father's hat.
61
"You OK?" the boy said. His eyes were wide, his face pale.
62
Matthew patted himself down, wincing at the pain in his ear, the
shooting stabbing feeling in his neck.
63
"I think so," he said.
64
"You'll have to pay for the door," the guard said.
65
"Thanks," Matthew said. "Thanks so much."
66
"It's OK," the boy said. "It's my job."
67
Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists and headed out into the
Shenzhen night, limping down the stairs and into the neon glow. It was
nearly midnight, but Jiabin Road was still throbbing with music, food
and hawkers and touts, old ladies chasing foreigners down the street,
tugging at their sleeves and offering them "beautiful young girls" in
English. He didn't know where he was going, so he just walked, fast,
fast as he could, trying to walk off the pain and the enormity of his
loss. The computers in his room hadn't cost much to build, but he
hadn't had much to begin with. They'd been nearly everything he owned,
save for his comics, a few clothes -- and the war-axe. Oh, the war-axe.
That was an entertaining vision, picking it up and swinging it over his
head like a dark elf, the whistle of its blade slicing the air, the
meaty thunk as it hit the men.
68
He knew it was ridiculous. He hadn't been in a fight since he was ten
years old. He'd been a vegetarian until last year! He wasn't
going to hit anyone with a war axe. It was as useless as his smashed
computers.
69
Gradually, he slowed his pace. He was out of the central area around
the train station now, in the outer ring of the town center, where it
was dark and as quiet as it ever got. He leaned against the steel
shutters over a grocery market and put his hands on his thighs and let
his sore head droop.
70
Matthew's father had been unusual among their friends -- a Cantonese
who succeeded in the new Shenzhen. When Premier Deng changed the rules
so that the Pearl River Delta became the world's factory, his family's
ancestral province had filled overnight with people from the provinces.
They'd "jumped into the sea" -- left safe government factory jobs to
seek their fortune here on the south Chinese coast -- and everything
had changed for Matthew's family. His grandfather, a Christian minister
who'd been sent to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution -- had
never made the adjustment, a problem that struck many of the native
Cantonese, who seemed to stand still as the outsiders raced past them
to become rich and powerful.
71
But not Matthew's father. The old man had started off as a driver for a
shoe-factory boss -- learning to drive on the job, nearly cracking up
the car more than once, though the owner didn't seem to mind. After
all, he'd never ridden in a car before he'd made it big in Shenzhen.
But he got his break one day when the pattern-maker was too sick to
work and all production ceased while the girls who worked on the line
argued about the best way to cut the leather for a new order that had
come in.
72
Matthew's father loved to tell this story. He'd heard the argument go
back and forth for a day as the line jerked along slowly, and he'd sat
on his chair and thought, and thought, and then he'd stood up and
closed his eyes and pictured the calm ocean until the thunder of his
heartbeat slowed to a normal beat. Then he'd walked into the owner's
office and said, "Boss, I can show you how to cut those hides."
73
It was no easy task. The hides were all slightly different shapes --
cows weren't identical, after all -- and parts of them were higher
grade than others. The shoe itself, an Italian men's loafer, needed six
different pieces for each side, and only some of them were visible. The
parts that were inside the shoe didn't need to come from the finest
leather, but the parts outside did. All this Matthew's father had
absorbed while sitting in his chair and listening to the arguments.
He'd always loved to draw, always had a good head for space and design.
74
And before his boss could throw him out of the office, he'd plucked up
his courage and seized a pen off the desk and rooted a crumpled
cigarette package out of the trash -- expensive foreign cigarettes,
affected by all the factory owners as a show of wealth -- torn it open
and drawn a neat cowhide, and quickly shown how the shoes could be fit
to the hide with a minimum of wastage, a design that would get ten
pairs of shoes per hide.
75
"Ten?" the boss said.
76
"Ten," Matthew's father said, proudly. He knew that the most that
Master Yu, the regular cutter, ever got out of a hide was nine.
"Eleven, if you use a big hide, or if you're making small shoes."
77
"You can cut this?"
78
Now, before that day, Matthew's father had never cut a hide in his
life, had no idea how to slice the supple leather that came back from
the tanner. But that morning he'd risen two hours early, before anyone
else was awake, and he'd taken his leather jacket, a graduation present
from his own father that he'd owned and treasured for ten years, and
he'd taken the sharpest knife in the kitchen, and he'd sliced the
jacket to ribbons, practicing until he could make the knife slice the
leather in the same reliable, efficient arcs that his eyes and mind
could trace over them.
79
"I can try," he said, with modesty. He was nervous about his boldness.
His boss wasn't a nice man, and he'd fired many employees for
insubordination. If he fired Matthew's father, he would be out a job
and a jacket. And the rent was due, and the family had no savings.
80
The boss looked at him, looked at the sketch. "OK, you try."
81
And that was the day that Matthew's father stopped being Driver Fong
and became Master Fong, the junior cutter at the Infinite Quality Shoe
Factory. Less than a year later, he was the head cutter, and the family
thrived.
82
Matthew had heard this story so many times growing up that he could
recite it word-for-word with his father. It was more than a story: it
was the family legend, more important than any of the history he'd
learned in school. As stories went, it was a good one, but Matthew was
determined that his own life would have an even better story still.
Matthew would not be the second Master Fong. He would be Boss Fong, the
first -- a man with his own factory, his own fortune.
83
And like his father, Matthew had a gift.
84
Like his father, Matthew could look at a certain kind of problem and
see the solution. And the problems Matthew could solve involved
killing monsters and harvesting their gold and prestige items, better
and more efficiently than anyone else he'd ever met or heard of.
85
Matthew was a gold farmer, but not just one of those guys who found
themselves being approached by an Internet cafe owner and offered seven
or eight RMB to keep right on playing, turning over all the gold they
won to the boss, who'd sell it on by some mysterious process. Matthew
was Master Fong, the gold farmer who could run a dungeon once and tell
you exactly the right way to run it again to get the maximum gold in
the minimum time. Where a normal farmer might make 50 gold in an hour,
Matthew could make 500. And if you watched Matthew play, you could do
it too.
86
Mr Wing had quickly noticed Matthew's talent. Mr Wing didn't like
games, didn't care about the legends of Iceland or England or India or
Japan. But Mr Wing understood how to make boys work. He displayed their
day's take on big boards at both ends of his factory, treated the top
performers to lavish meals and baijiu parties in private rooms at his
karaoke club where there were beautiful girls. Matthew remembered these
evenings through a bleary haze: a girl on either side of him on a sofa,
pressed against him, their perfume in his nose, refilling his glass as
Mr Wing toasted him for a hero, extolling his achievements. The girls
oohed and aahed and pressed harder against him. Mr Wing always laughed
at him the next day, because he'd pass out before he could go with one
of the girls into an even more private room.
87
Mr Wing made sure all the other boys knew about this failing, made sure
that they teased "Master Fong" about his inability to hold his liquor,
his shyness around girls. And Matthew saw exactly what Boss Wing was
doing: setting Matthew up as a hero, above his friends, then making
sure that his friends knew that he wasn't that much of a hero,
that he could be toppled. And so they all farmed gold harder, for
longer hours, eating dumplings at their computers and shouting at each
other over their screens late into the night and the cigarette haze.
88
The hours had stretched into days, the days had stretched into months,
and one day Matthew woke up in the dorm room filled with farts and
snores and the smell of 20 young men in a too-small room, and realized
that he'd had enough of working for Boss Wing. That was when he decided
that he would become his own man. That was when he set out to be Boss
Fong.
89
This scene is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet
bookseller in the world. Amazon is amazing -- a "store" where
you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically
everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've
elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to
directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly
inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon
has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted
a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there like crazy
(looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from
Amazon approximately every six days ). Amazon's in the process
of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first
century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down
that thorny set of problems.
90
2
2
<
91
Wei-Dong Goldberg woke one minute before his alarm rang, the glowing
numbers showing 12:59. 1AM in Los Angeles, 6PM in China, and it was
time to go raiding.
92
He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and climbed out of his narrow bed --
his mom still put his goddamned Spongebob sheets on it, so he'd drawn
beards and horns and cigarettes on all the faces in permanent marker --
and crossed silently to his school-bag and retrieved his laptop, then
felt around on his desk for the little Bluetooth earwig, screwing it
into his ear.
93
He made a pile of pillows against the headboard and sat cross-legged
against them, lifting the lid and firing up his gamespy, looking for
his buds, all the way over there in Shenzhen. As the screen filled with
names and the games they could be found in, he smiled to himself. It
was time to play.
94
Three clicks later and he was in Savage Wonderland, spawning on his
clockwork horse with his sword in his hand, amid the garden of talking,
hissing flowers, ready to do battle. And there were his boys, riding up
alongside of him, their clockwork mounts snorting and champing for
battle.
95
"Ni hao!" he said into his headset, in as loud a whisper as he dared.
His father had a bladder problem and he got up all night long and never
slept very deeply. Wei-Dong couldn't afford that. If his parents caught
him at it one more time, they'd take away his computer. They'd ground
him. They'd send him to a military academy where they shaved your head
and you got beaten up in the shower because it built character. He'd
been treated to all these threats and more, and they'd made an
impression on him.
96
Not enough of an impression to get him to stop playing games in the
middle of the night, of course.
97
"Ni hao!" he said again. There was laughter, distant and flanged by
network churn.
98
"Hello, Leonard," Ping said. "You are learning your Chinese well, I
see." Ping still called him Leonard , but at least he was talking
in Mandarin to him now, which was a big improvement. The guys normally
liked to practice their English on him, which meant he couldn't
practice his Chinese on them .
99
"I practice," he said.
100
They laughed again and he knew that he'd gotten something wrong. The
intonation. He was always getting it wrong. He'd say, "I'll go aggro
those demons and you buff the cleric," and it would come out, "I am a
bowl of noodles, I have beautiful eyelashes." But he was getting
better. By the time he got to China, he'd have it nailed.
101
"Are we raiding?" he said.
102
"Yes!" Ping said, and the others agreed. "We just need to wait for the
gweilo." Wei-Dong loved that he wasn't the gweilo anymore. Gweilo meant
"foreign devil," and technically, he qualified. But he was one of the
raiders now, and the gweilos were the paying customers who shelled out
good dollars or euros or rupees or pounds to play alongside of them.
103
Here was the gweilo now. You could tell because he frequently steered
his horse off the path and into the writhing grasp of the living
plants, having to stop over and over to hack away their grasping vines.
After watching this show for a minute or two, he rode out and cast a
protection spell around them both, and the vines sizzled on the glowing
red bubble that surrounded them both.
104
"Thanks," the gweilo said.
105
"No problem," he said.
106
"Woah, you speak English?" The gweilo had a strong New Jersey accent.
107
"A little," Wei-Dong said, with a smile. Better than you, dummy ,
he thought.
108
"OK, let's do this thing," the gweilo said, and the rest of the party
caught up with them.
109
The gweilo had paid them to raid an instance of The Walrus's Garden, a
pretty hard underwater dungeon that had some really good drops in it --
ingredients for potions, some pretty good weapons, and, of course, lots
of gold. There were a couple prestige items that dropped there, albeit
rarely -- you could get a vorpal blade and helmet if you were very
lucky. The deal was, the gweilo paid them to run the instance with him,
and he could just hang back and let the raiders do all the heavy
lifting, but he'd come forward to deal the coup de grace to any big
bosses they beat down, so he'd get the experience points. He got to
keep the gold, the weapons, the prestige items, all of it -- and all
for the low, low cost of $75. The raiders got the cash, the gweilo got
to level up fast and pick up a ton of treasure.
110
Wei-Dong often wondered what kind of person would pay strangers to help
them get ahead in a game? The usual reason that gweilos gave for hiring
raiders was that they wanted to play with their friends, and their
friends were all more advanced than them. But Wei-Dong had joined games
after his friends and being the noob in his little group, he'd just
asked his buds to take him raiding with them, twinking him until his
character was up to their level. So if this gweilo had so many pals in
this game that he wanted to level up to meet them, why couldn't he get
them to power-level his character up with them? Why was he paying the
raiders?
111
Wei-Dong suspected that it was because the guy had no friends.
112
"Go d damn would you look at that?" It was at least the tenth
time the guy had said it in ten minutes as they rode to the seashore.
This time it was the tea-party, a perpetual melee that was a blur of
cutlery whistling through the air, savage chairs roaming in packs,
chasing luckless players who happened to aggro them, and a crazy-hard
puzzle in which you had to collect and arrange the crockery just so,
stunning each piece so that it wouldn't crawl away before you were done
with it. It was pretty cool, Wei-Dong had to admit (he'd solved the
puzzle in two days of hard play, and gotten the teapot for his trouble,
which he could use to summon genies in moments of dire need). But the
gweilo was acting like he'd never seen computer graphics, ever.
113
They rode on, chattering in Chinese on a private channel. Mostly, it
was too fast for Wei-Dong to follow, but he caught the gist of it. They
were talking about work -- the raids they had set up for the rest of
the night, the boss and his stupid rules, the money and what they'd do
with it. Girls. They were always talking about girls.
114
At last they were at the seaside, and Wei-Dong cast the Red Queen's Air
Pocket, using up the last of his oyster shells to do so. They all
dismounted, flapping their gills comically as they sloshed into the
water ("Go d damn ," breathed the gweilo).
115
The Walrus's Garden was a tricky raid, because it was different every
time you ran it, the terrain regenerating for each party. As the
spellcaster, Wei-Dong's job was to keep the lights on and the air
flowing so that no matter what came, they'd see it in time to prepare
and vanquish it. First came the octopuses, rising from the bottom with
a puff of sand, sailing through the water toward them. Lu, the tank,
positioned himself between the party and the octopuses, and, after
thrashing around and firing a couple of missiles at them to aggro them,
went totally still as, one after another, they wrapped themselves
around him, crushing him with their long tentacles, their faces crazed
masks of pure malevolence.
116
Once they were all engrossed in the tank, the rest of the party swarmed
them, the four of them drawing their edged weapons with a watery
clang and going to work in a writhing knot. Wei-Dong kept a
close eye on the tank's health and cast his healing spells as needed.
As each octopus was reduced to near death, the raiders pulled away and
Wei-Dong hissed into his mic, "Finish him!" The gweilo fumbled around
for the first two beasts, but by the end, he was moving efficiently to
dispatch them.
117
"That was sick ," the gweilo said. "Totally badass! How'd that
guy absorb all that damage, anyway?"
118
"He's a tank," Wei-Dong said. "Fighter class, heavy armor. Lots of
buffs. And I was keeping up the healing spells the whole time."
119
"I'm fighter class, aren't I?"
120
You don't know? This guy had a lot more money than
brains, that was for sure.
121
"I just started playing. I'm not much of a gamer. But you know, all my
friends --"
122
I know , Wei-Dong thought. All the cool kids you knew were
doing it, so you decided you had to keep up with them. You don't have
any friends -- yet. But you think you will, if you play. "Sure," he
said. "Just stick close, you're doing fine. You'll be leveled up by
breakfast time." That was another mark against the gweilo: he had the
money to pay for a power-levelling session with their raiding guild,
but he wasn't willing to pay the premium to do it in a decent American
timezone. That was good news for the rest of the guild, sure -- it
saved them having to find somewhere to do the run during daylight hours
in China, when the Internet cafes were filled with straights -- but it
meant that Wei-Dong had to be up in the middle of the night and then
drag his butt around school all the next day.
123
Not that it wasn't worth it.
124
Now they were into the crags and caves of the garden, dodging the eels
and giant lobsters that surged out of their holes as they passed.
Wei-Dong found some more oyster shells and surreptitiously picked them
up. Technically, they were the gweilo's to have first refusal over, but
they were needed if he was going to keep on casting the Air Pocket,
which he might have to do if they kept up at this slow pace. And the
gweilo didn't notice, anyway.
125
"You're not in China, are you?" the gweilo asked.
126
"Not exactly," he said, looking out the window at the sky over Orange
County, the most boring ZIP code in California.
127
"Where are you guys?"
128
"They're in China. Where I live, you can see the Disneyland fireworks
show every night."
129
"Go d damn ," the gweilo said. "Ain't you got better things to do
than help some idiot level up in the middle of the night?"
130
"I guess I don't," he said. Mixed in behind were the guys laughing and
catcalling in Chinese on their channel. He grinned to hear them.
131
"I mean, hell, I can see why someone in China'd do a crappy job for a
rotten 75 bucks, but if you're in America, dude, you should have some
pride , get some real work!"
132
"And why would someone in China want to do a crappy job?" The guys were
listening in now. They didn't have great English, but they spoke enough
to get by.
133
"You know, it's China . There's billions of 'em. Poor as
dirt and ignorant. I don't blame 'em. You can't blame 'em. It's not
their fault. But hell, once you get out of China and get to America,
you should act like an American. We don't do that kind of work."
134
"What makes you think I 'got out of China'?"
135
"Didn't you?"
136
"I was born here. My parents were born here. Their parents were born
here. Their parents came here from Russia."
137
"I didn't know they had Chinese in Russia."
138
Wei-Dong laughed. "I'm not Chinese, dude."
139
"You aren't? Well, go d damn then, I'm sorry. I figured you
were. What are you, then, the boss or something?"
140
Wei-Dong closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them again,
the carpenters had swum out of the wrecked galleon before them, their
T-squares and saws at the ready. They moved by building wooden boxes
and gates around themselves, which acted as barricades, and they worked
fast . On the land, you could burn their timbers, but that didn't
work under the sea. Once they had you boxed in, they drove long nails
through boards around you. It was a grisly, slow way to die.
141
Of course, they had the gweilo surrounded in a flash, and they all had
to pile on to fight them free. Xiang summoned his familiar, a boar, and
Wei-Dong spelled it its own air bubble and it set to work, tearing up
the planks with its tusks. When at last the carpenters managed to kill
it, it turned into a baby and floated, lifeless, to the ocean's
surface, accompanied by a ghostly weeping. Savage Wonderland
looked like it was all laughs, but it was really grim when you
got down to it, and the puzzles were hard and the big bosses were
really hard.
142
Speaking of bosses: they put down the last of the carpenters and as
they did, a swirling current disturbed the sea-bottom, kicking up sand
that settled slowly, revealing the vorpal blade and armor, encrusted in
barnacles. And the gweilo gave a whoop and a holler and dove for it
clumsily, as they all shouted at once for him to stop, to wait, and
then --
143
And then he triggered the trap that they all knew was there.
144
And then there was trouble.
145
The Jabberwock did indeed have eyes of flame, and it did make a
"burbling" sound, just like it said in the poem. But the Jabberwock did
a lot more than give you dirty looks and belch. The Jabberwock was
mean , it soaked up a lot of damage, and it gave as good as it
got. It was fast, too, faster than the carpenters, so one minute you
could be behind it and then it would do a barrel roll -- its tail like
a whip, cracking and knocking back anything that got in its way -- and
it would be facing you, rearing up with its spindly claws splayed, its
narrow chest heaving. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch -- and
once they'd caught you, the Jabberwock would beat you against the
hardest surface in reach, doing insane damage while you squirmed to get
free. And the burbling? Not so much like burping, really: more like the
sound of meat going through a grinder, a nasty sound. A bloody
sound.
146
The first time Wei-Dong had managed to kill a Jabberwock -- after a
weekend's continuous play -- he'd crashed hard and had nightmares about
that sound.
147
"Nice going, jackass," Wei-Dong said as he hammered on his keyboard,
trying to get all his spells up and running without getting
disemboweled by the nightmare beast before them. It had Lu and was
beating the everloving piss out of him, but that was OK, it was just
Lu, his job was to get beaten up. Wei-Dong cast his healing spells at
Lu while he swam back as fast as he could.
148
"Now, that's not nice," the gweilo said. "How the hell was I supposed
to know --"
149
"You weren't. You didn't know. You don't know. That's the point .
That's why you hired us . Now we're going to use up all our
spells and potions fighting this thing --" he broke off for a second
and hit some more keys "-- and it's going to take days to get it
all back, just because you couldn't wait at the back like you were
supposed to."
150
"I don't have to take this," the gweilo said. "I'm a customer, dammit."
151
"You want to be a dead customer, buddy?" Wei-Dong said. He'd
barely had any time to talk with his guildies on the whole raid, he'd
been stuck talking to this dumb English speaker. Now the guy was
mouthing off to him. It made him want to throw his computer against the
wall. See what being nice gets you?
152
If the gweilo replied, Wei-Dong didn't hear it, because the Jabberwock
was really pouring on the heat. He was out of potions and healing
spells and Lu wasn't going to last much longer. Oh, crap . It had
Ping in its other claw now, and it was worrying at his armor with a
long fang, trying to peel him like a grape. He tabbed over to his
voice-chat controller and dialled up the Chinese channel to full,
tuning out the gweilo.
153
It was a chaos of fast, profane dialect, slangy Chinese that mixed in
curse-words from Japanese comics and Indian movies. The boys were all
hollering, too fast for him to get more than the sense of things.
154
There was Ping, though, calling for him. "Leonard! Healing!"
155
"I'm out!" he said, hating how this was all going. "I'm totally empty.
Used it all up on Lu!"
156
"That's it, then," Ping said. "We're dead." They all howled with
disappointment. In spite of himself, Wei-Dong grinned. "You think he'll
reschedule, or are we going to have to give him his money back?"
157
Wei-Dong didn't know, but he had a feeling that this goober wasn't
going to be very cooperative if they told him that he'd gotten up in
the middle of the night for nothing. Even if it was his fault.
158
He sucked in some whistling breaths through his nose and tried to calm
down. It was almost 2AM now. In the house around him, all was silent. A
car revved its engine somewhere far away, but the night was so quiet
the sound carried into his bedroom.
159
"OK," he said. "OK, let me do something about this."
160
Every game had a couple of BFGs, Big Friendly Guns (or at least
some kind of Big Gun), that were nearly impossible to get and
nearly impossible to resist. In Savage Wonderland, they were also
nearly impossible to re-load: the rare monster blunderbuss that you had
to spend months gathering parts for fired huge loads of
sharpened cutlery from the Tea Party, and just collecting enough for a
single load took eight or nine hours of gameplay. Impossible to get --
impossible to load. Practically no one had one.
161
But Wei-Dong did. Ignoring the shouting in his headset, he backed off
to the edge of the blunderbuss's range and began to arm it, a laborious
process of dumping all that cutlery into the muzzle. "Get in front of
it," he said. "In front of it, now!"
162
His guildies could see what he was doing now and they were whooping
triumphantly, arraying their toons around its front, occupying its
attention, clearing his line of fire. All he needed was
one...more...second.
163
He pulled the trigger. There was a snap and a hiss as the powder in the
pan began to burn. The sound made the Jabberwock turn its head on its
long, serpentine neck. It regarded him with its burning eyes and it
dropped Ping and Lu to the oceanbed. The powder in the pan flared --
and died.
164
Misfire !
165
Ohcrapohcrapohcrap, he muttered, hammering, hammering on
the re-arm sequence, his fingers a blur on the mouse-buttons.
"Crapcrapcrapcrap."
166
The Jabberwock smiled, and made that wet meaty sound again. Burble
burble, little boy, I'm coming for you . It was the sound from his
nightmare, the sound of his dream of heroism dying. The sound of a
waste of a day's worth of ammo and a night's worth of play. He was a
dead man.
167
The Jabberwock did one of those whipping, rippling barrel-rolls that
were its trademark. The currents buffeted him, sending him rocking from
side to side. He corrected, overcorrected, corrected again, hit the
re-arm button, the fire button, the re-arm button, the fire button --
168
The Jabberwock was facing him now. It reared back, flexing its claws,
clicking its jaws together. In a second it would be on him, it would
open him from crotch to throat and eat his guts, any second now --
169
Crash! The sound of the blunderbuss was like an explosion in a
pots-and-pans drawer, a million metallic clangs and bangs as the sea
was sliced by a rapidly expanding cone of lethal, screaming metal
tableware.
170
The Jabberwock dissolved , ripped into a slowly rising mushroom
of meat and claws and leathery scales. The left side of its head ripped
toward him and bounced off him, settling in the sand. The water turned
pink, then red, and the death-screech of the Jabberwock seemed to carom
off the water and lap back over him again and again. It was a
fantastic sound.
171
His guildies were going nuts, seven thousand miles away, screaming his
name, and not Leonard, but Wei-Dong , chanting it in their
Internet Cafe off Jiabin Road in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong was grinning
ferociously in his bedroom, basking in it.
172
And when the water cleared, there again were the vorpal blade and
helmet in their crust of barnacles, sitting innocently on the ocean
floor. The gweilo -- the gweilo, he'd forgotten all about the gweilo!
-- moved clumsily toward it.
173
"I don't think so," said Ping, in pretty good English. His toon moved
so fast that the gweilo probably didn't even see him coming. Ping's
sword went snicker-snack, and the gweilo's head fell to the sand, a
dumb, betrayed expression on its face.
174
"What the --"
175
Wei-Dong dropped him from the chat.
176
"That's your treasure, brother," Ping said. "You earned it."
177
"But the money --"
178
"We can make the money tomorrow night. That was killer, dude !"
It was one of Ping's favorite English phrases, and it was the highest
praise in their guild. And now he had a vorpal blade and helmet. It was
a good night.
179
They surfaced and paddled to shore and conjured up their mounts again
and rode back to the guild-hall, chatting all the way, dispatching the
occasional minor beast without much fuss. The guys weren't too put out
at being 75 bucks' poorer than they'd expected. They were players
first, business people second. And that had been fun .
180
And now it was 2:30 and he'd have to be up for school in four hours,
and at this rate, he was going to be lying awake for a long
time. "OK, I'm going to go guys," he said, in his best Chinese. They
bade him farewell, and the chat channel went dead. In the sudden
silence of his room, he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. And
another sound -- a tread on the floor outside his door. A hand on the
doorknob --
181
Crapcrapcrap
182
He manged to get the lid of the laptop down and his covers pulled up
before the door opened, but he was still holding the machine under the
sheets, and his father's glare from the doorway told him that he wasn't
fooling anyone. Wordlessly, still glaring, his father crossed the room
and delicately removed the earwig from Wei-Dong's ear. It glowed
telltale blue, blinking, looking for the laptop that was now sleeping
under Wei-Dong's artistically redecorate Spongebob sheets.
183
"Dad --" he began.
184
"Leonard, it's 2:30 in the morning. I'm not going to discuss this with
you right now. But we're going to talk about it in the morning. And
you're going to have a long, long time to think about it afterward." He
yanked back the sheet and took the laptop out of Wei-Dong's now-limp
hand.
185
"Dad!" he said, as his father turned and left the room, but his father
gave no indication he'd heard before he pulled the bedroom door firmly
and authoritatively shut.
186
This scene is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's
magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is not
just notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such,
but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley, who likes to
perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the front of the
store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore you could ask
for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by
incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to know
about science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to take
orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when
I drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!
187
3 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1
888 893 4008
3
<
188
Mala missed the birdcalls. When they'd lived in the village, there'd
been birdsong every morning, breaking the perfect peace of the night to
let them know that the sun was rising and the day was beginning. That
was when she'd been a little girl. Here in Mumbai, there were some
sickly rooster calls at dawn, but they were nearly drowned out by the
neverending trafficsong: the horns, the engines revving, the calls late
in the night.
189
In the village, there'd been the birdcalls, the silence, and peace,
times when everyone wasn't always watching. In Mumbai, there was
nothing but the people, the people everywhere, so that every breath you
breathed tasted of the mouth that had exhaled it before you got it.
190
She and her mother and her brother slept together in a tiny room over
Mr Kunal's plastic-recycling factory in Dharavi, the huge squatter's
slum at the north end of the city. During the day, the room was used to
sort plastic into a dozen tubs -- the plastic coming from an endless
procession of huge rice-sacks that were filled at the shipyards. The
ships went to America and Europe and Asia filled with goods made in
India and came back filled with garbage, plastic that the pickers of
Dharavi sorted, cleaned, melted and reformed into pellets and shipped
to the factories so that they could be turned into manufactured goods
and shipped back to America, Europe and Asia.
191
When they'd arrived at Dharavi, Mala had found it terrifying: the
narrow shacks growing up to blot out the sky, the dirt lanes between
them with gutters running in iridescent blue and red from the
dye-shops, the choking always-smell of burning plastic, the roar of
motorbikes racing between the buildings. And the eyes, eyes from every
window and roof, all watching them as mamaji led her and her little
brother to the factory of Mr Kunal, where they were to live now and
forevermore.
192
But barely a year had gone by and the smell had disappeared. The eyes
had become friendly. She could hop from one lane to another with
perfect confidence, never getting lost on her way to do the marketing
or to attend the afternoon classes at the little school-room over the
restaurant. The sorting work had been boring, but never hard, and there
was always food, and there were other girls to play with, and mamaji
had made friends who helped them out. Piece by piece, she'd become a
Dharavi girl, and now she looked on the newcomers with a mixture of
generosity and pity.
193
And the work -- well, the work had gotten a lot better, just lately.
194
It started when she was in the games-cafe with Yasmin, stealing an hour
after lessons to spend a few Rupees of the money she'd saved from her
pay-packet (almost all of it went to the family, of course, but mamaji
sometimes let her keep some back and advised her to spend it on a treat
at the cornershop). Yasmin had never played Zombie Mecha, but of course
they'd both seen the movies at the little filmi house on the road that
separated the Muslim and the Hindu sections of Dharavi. Mala
loved Zombie Mecha, and she was good at it, too. She preferred
the PvP servers where players could hunt other players, trying to
topple their giant mecha-suits so that the zombies around them could
swarm over it, crack open its cockpit cowl and feast on the av within.
195
Most of the girls at the game cafe came in and played little games with
cute animals and trading for hearts and jewels. But for Mala, the
action was in the awesome carnage of the multiplayer war games. It only
took a few minutes to get Yasmin through the basics of piloting her
little squadron and then she could get down to tactics .
196
That was it, that was what none of the other players seemed to
understand: tactics were everything . They treated the
game like it was a random chaos of screeching rockets and explosions, a
confusion to be waded into and survived, as best as you could.
197
But for Mala, the confusion was something that happened to other
people. For Mala, the explosions and camera-shake and the screech of
the zombies were just minor details, to be noted among the Big Picture,
the armies arrayed on the battlefield in her mind. On that battlefield,
the massed forces took on a density and a color that showed where their
strengths and weaknesses were, how they were joined to each other and
how pushing one this one, over here, would topple that one over there.
You could face down your enemies head on, rockets against rockets, guns
against guns, and then the winner would be the luckier one, or the one
with the most ammo, or the one with the best shields.
198
But if you were smart , you didn't have to be lucky, or tougher.
Mala liked to lob rockets and grenades over the opposing armies,
to their left and right, creating box-canyons of rubble and debris that
blocked their escape. Meanwhile, a few of her harriers would be off in
the weeds aggroing huge herds of zombies, getting them really
mad, gathering them up until they were like locusts, blotting out the
ground in all directions, leading them ever closer to that box canyon.
199
Just before they'd come into view, her frontal force would peel off,
running away in a seeming act of cowardice. Her enemies would be buoyed
up by false confidence and give chase -- until they saw the harriers
coming straight for them, with an unstoppable, torrential pestilence of
zombies hot on their heels. Most times, they were too shocked to do
anything , not even fire at the harriers as they ran straight for
their lines and through them, into the one escape left behind in
the box-canyon, blowing the crack shut as they left. Then it was just a
matter of waiting for the zombies to overwhelm and devour your
opponents, while you snickered and ate a sweet and drank a little tea
from the urn by the cashier's counter. The sounds of the zombies
rending the armies of her enemies and gnawing their bones was
particularly satisfying.
200
Yasmin had been distracted by the zombies, the disgusting entrails, the
shining rockets. But she'd seen, oh yes, she'd seen how Mala's
strategies were able to demolish much larger opposing armies and she
got over her squeamishness.
201
And so on they played, drawing an audience: first the hooting derisive
boys (who fell silent when they watched the armies fall before her, and
who started to call her "General Robotwalla" without even a hint of
mockery), and then the girls, shy at first, peeking over the boys'
shoulders, then shoving forward and cheering and beating their fists on
the walls and stamping their feet for each dramatic victory.
202
It wasn't cheap, though. Mala's carefully hoarded store of Rupees
shrank, buffered somewhat by a few coins from other players who paid
her a little here and there to teach them how to really play. She knew
she could have borrowed the money, or let some boy spend it on her --
there was already fierce competition for the right to go over the road
to the drinkswalla and buy her a masala Coke, a fizzing, foaming spicy
explosion of Coke and masala spice and crushed ice that soothed the
rawness at the back of her throat that had been her constant companion
since they'd come to Dharavi.
203
But nice girls from the village didn't let boys buy them things. Boys
wanted something in return. She knew that, knew it from the movies and
from the life around her. She knew what happened to girls who let boys
take care of their needs. There was always a reckoning.
204
When the strange man first approached her, she thought about nice girls
and boys and what they expected, and she wouldn't talk to him or meet
his eye. She didn't know what he wanted, but he wasn't going to get it
from her. So when he got up from his chair by the cashier as she came
into the cafe, rose and crossed to intercept her with his smart linen
suit and good shoes and short, neatly oiled hair, and small moustache,
she'd stepped around him, stepped past him, pretended she didn't hear
him say, "Excuse me, miss," and "Miss? Miss? Please, just a moment of
your time."
205
But Mrs Dibyendu, the owner of the cafe, shouted at her, "Mala, you
listen to this man, you listen to what he has to say to you. You don't
be rude in my shop, no you don't!" And because Mrs Dibyendu was also
from a village, and because her mother had said that Mala could play
games but only in Mrs Dibyendu's cafe, Mrs Dibyendu being the sort of
person you could trust not to allow improper doings, or drugs, or
violence, or criminality, Mala stopped and turned to the man, silent,
expecting.
206
"Ah," he said. "Thank you." He nodded to Mrs Dibyendu. "Thank you." He
turned back to her, and to the army of boys and girls who'd gathered
around her, her army, the ones who called her General
Robotwallah and meant it.
207
"I hear that you are a very good player," he said. Mala waggled her
chin back and forth, half-closing her eyes, letting her chin say,
Yes, I'm a good player, and I'm good enough that I don't need to
boast about it.
208
"Is she a good player?"
209
Mala turned to her army, who had the discipline to remain silent until
she gave them the nod. She waggled her chin at them: go on .
210
And they erupted in an enthused babble, extolling the virtues of their
General Robotwallah, the epic battles they'd fought and won against
impossible odds.
211
"I have some work for good players."
212
Mala had heard rumors of this. "You represent a league?"
213
The man smiled a little smile and shook his head. He smelled of citrusy
cologne and betel, a sweet combination of smells she'd never smelled
before. "No, not a league. You know that in the game, there are players
who don't play for fun? Players who play to make money?"
214
"The kind of money you're offering to us?"
215
His chin waggled and he chuckled. "No, not exactly. There are players
who play to build up game-money, which they sell on to other players
who are too lazy to do the playing for themselves."
216
Mala thought about this for a moment. The containers went out of India
filled with goods and came back filled with garbage for Dharavi.
Somewhere out there, in the America of the filmi shows, there was a
world of people with unimaginable wealth. "We'll do it," she said.
"I've already got more credits than I can spend. How much do they pay
for them?"
217
Again, the chuckle. "Actually," he said, then stopped. Her army was
absolutely silent now, hanging on his every word. From the machines
came the soft crashing of the wars, taking place in the world inside
the network, all day and all night long. "Actually, that's not exactly
it. We want you and your friends to destroy them, kill their avs, take
their fortunes."
218
Mala thought for another instant, puzzled. Who would want to kill these
other players? "You're a rival?"
219
The man waggled his chin. Maybe yes, maybe no.
220
She thought some more. "You work for the game!" she said. "You work for
the game and you don't want --"
221
"Who I work for isn't important," the man said, holding up his fingers.
He wore a wedding ring on one hand, and two gold rings on the other. He
was missing the top joints on three of his fingers, she saw. That was
common in the village, where farmers were always getting caught in the
machines. Here was a man from a village, a man who'd come to Mumbai and
become a man in a neat suit with a neat mustache and gold rings
glinting on what remained of his fingers. Here was the reason her
mother had brought them to Dharavi, the reason for the sore throat and
the burning eyes and the endless work over the plastic-sorting tubs.
222
"What's important is that we would pay you and your friends --"
223
"My army," she said, interrupting him without thinking. For a moment
his eyes flashed dangerously and she sensed that he was about to slap
her, but she stood her ground. She'd been slapped plenty before. He
snorted once through his nose, then went on.
224
"Yes, Mala, your army. We would pay you to destroy these players. You'd
be told what sort of mecha they were piloting, what their player-names
were, and you'd have to root them out and destroy them. You'd keep all
their wealth, and you'd get Rupees, too."
225
"How much?"
226
He made a pained expression, like he had a little gas. "Perhaps we
should discuss that in private, later? With your mother present?"
227
Mala noticed that he didn't say, "Your parents," but rather, "Your
mother." Mrs Dibyendu and he had been talking, then. He knew about
Mala, and she didn't know about him. She was just a girl from the
village, after all, and this was the world, where she was still trying
to understand it all. She was a general, but she was also a girl from
the village. General Girl From the Village.
228
So he'd come that night to Mr Kunal's factory, and Mala's mother had
fed him thali and papadams from the women's papadam collective, and
they'd boiled chai in the electric kettle and the man had pretended
that his fine clothes and gold belonged here, and had squatted back on
his heels like a man in the village, his hairy ankles peeking out over
his socks. No one Mala knew wore socks.
229
"Mr Banerjee," mamaji said, "I don't understand this, but I know Mrs
Dibyendu. If she says you can be trusted..." She trailed off, because
really, she didn't know Mrs Dibyendu. In Dharavi, there were many
hazards for a young girl. Mamaji would fret over them endlessly while
she brushed out Mala's hair at night, all the ways a girl could find
herself ruined or hurt here. But the money.
230
"A lakh of rupees every month," he said. "Plus a bonus. Of course,
she'll have to pay her 'army' --" he'd given Mala a little chin waggle
at that, see, I remember "-- out of that. But how much would be
up to her."
231
"These children wouldn't have any money if it wasn't for my Mala!"
mamaji said, affronted at their imaginary grasping hands. "They're only
playing a game! They should be glad just to play with her!" Mamaji had
been furious when she discovered that Mala had been playing at the cafe
all these afternoons. She thought that Mala only played once in a
while, not with every rupee and moment she had spare. But when the man
-- Mr Banerjee -- had mentioned her talent and the money it could earn
for the family, suddenly mamaji had become her daughter's business
manager.
232
Mala saw that Mr Banerjee had known this would happen and wondered what
else Mrs Dibyendu had told him about their family.
233
"Mamaji," she said, quietly, keeping her eyes down in the way they did
in the village. "They're my army, and they need paying if they play
well. Otherwise they won't be my army for long."
234
Mamaji looked hard at her. Beside them, Mala's little brother Gopal
took advantage of their distraction to sneak the last bit of eggplant
off Mala's plate. Mala noticed, but pretended she hadn't, and
concentrated on keeping her eyes down.
235
Mamaji said, "Now, Mala, I know you want to be good to your friends,
but you have to think of your family first. We will find a fair way to
compensate them -- maybe we could prepare a weekly feast for them here,
using some of the money. I'm sure they could all use a good meal."
236
Mala didn't like to disagree with her mother, and she'd never done so
in front of strangers, but --
237
But this was her army, and she was their general. She knew what made
them tick, and they'd heard Mr Banerjee announce that she would be paid
in cash for their services. They believed in fairness. They wouldn't
work for food while she worked for a lakh (a lakh --
100,000 rupees! The whole family lived on 200 rupees a day!) of
cash.
238
"Mamaji," she said, "it wouldn't be right or fair." It occurred to Mala
that Mr Banerjee had mentioned the money in front of the army. He could
have been more discreet. Perhaps it was deliberate. "And they'd know
it. I can't earn this money for the family on my own, Mamaji."
239
Her mother closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, a sign that
she was trying to keep hold of her temper. If Mr Banerjee hadn't been
present, Mala was sure she would have gotten a proper beating, the kind
she'd gotten from her father before he left them, when she was a
naughty little girl in the village. But if Mr Banerjee wasn't here, she
wouldn't have to talk back to her mother, either.
240
"I'm sorry for this, Mr Banerjee," Mamaji said, not looking at Mala.
"Girls of this age, they become rebellious -- impossible."
241
Mala thought about a future in which instead of being General
Robotwallah, she had to devote her life to begging and bullying her
army into playing with her so that she could keep all the money they
made for her family, while their families went hungry and their mothers
demanded that they come home straight from school. When Mr Banerjee
mentioned his gigantic sum, it had conjured up a vision of untold
wealth, a real house, lovely clothes for all of them, Mamaji free to
spend her afternoons cooking for the family and resting out of the
heat, a life away from Dharavi and the smoke and the stinging eyes and
sore throats.
242
"I think your little girl is right," Mr Banerjee said, with quiet
authority, and Mala's entire family stared at him, speechless. An
adult, taking Mala's side over her mother? "She is a very good leader,
from what I can see. If she says her people need paying, I believe that
she is correct." He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief. "With all
due respect, of course. I wouldn't dream of telling you how to raise
your children, of course."
243
"Of course..." Mamaji said, as if in a dream. Her eyes were downcast,
her shoulders slumped. To be spoken to this way, in her own home, by a
stranger, in front of her children! Mala felt terrible. Her poor
mother. And it was all Mr Banerjee's fault: he'd mentioned the money in
front of her army, and then he'd brought her mother to this point --
244
"I will find a way to get them to fight without payment, Mamaji --" But
she was cut short by her mother's hand, coming up, palm out to her.
245
"Quiet, daughter," she said. "If this man, this gentleman , says
you know what you're doing, well, then I can't contradict him, can I?
I'm just a simple woman from the village. I don't understand these
things. You must do what this gentleman says, of course."
246
Mr Banerjee stood and smoothed his suit back into place with the palms
of his hands. Mala saw that he'd gotten some chana on his shirt and
lapel, and that made her feel better somehow, like he was a mortal and
not some terrible force of nature who'd come to destroy their little
lives.
247
He made a little namaste at Mamaji, hands pressed together at his
chest, a small hint of a bow. "Good night, Mrs Vajpayee. That was a
lovely supper. Thank you." he said. "Good night, General Robotwallah. I
will come to the cafe tomorrow at three o'clock to talk more about your
missions. Good night, Gopal," he said, and her brother looked up at
him, guiltily, eggplant still poking out of the corner of his mouth.
248
Mala thought that Mamaji might slap her once the man had left, but they
all went to bed together without another word, and Mala snuggled up to
her mother the same as she did every night, stroking her long hair. It
had been shining and black when they left the village, but a year
later, it was shot through with grey and it felt wiry. Mamaji's hand
caught hers and stilled it, the callouses on her fingers rough.
249
"Sleep, daughter," she murmured. "You have an important job, now. You
need your sleep."
250
The next morning, they avoided one another's eyes, and things were hard
for a week, until she brought home her first pay-packet, folded
carefully in the sole of her shoe. Her army had carved through the
enemy forces like the butcher's cleaver parting heads from chickens.
There had been a large bonus in their pay-packet, and even after she'd
paid Mrs Dibyendu and bought everyone masala Coke at the Hotel Hajj
next door, and paid the army their wages, there was almost 2,000 rupees
left, and she took Mamaji into the smallest sorting room in the loft of
the factory, up the ladder. Mamaji's eyes lit up when she saw the
money, and she'd kissed Mala on the forehead and taken her in the
longest, fiercest hug of their lives together.
251
And now it was all wonderful between them. Mamaji had begun to look for
a place for them further towards the middle of Dharavi, the old part
where the tin and scrap buildings had been gradually replaced with
brick ones, where the potters' kilns smoked a clean woodsmoke instead
of the dirty, scratchy plastic smoke near Mr Kunal's factory. Mala had
new school-clothes, new shoes, and so did Gopal, and Mamaji had new
brushes for her hair and a new sari that she wore after her work-day
was through, looking pretty and young, the way Mala remembered her from
the village.
252
And the battles were glorious .
253
She entered the cafe out of the melting, dusty sun of late day and
stood in the doorway. Her army was already assembled, practicing on
their machines, passing gupshup in the shadows of the dark, noisy room,
or making wet eyes at one another through the dim. She barely had time
to grin and then hide the grin before they noticed her and climbed to
their feet, standing straight and proud, saluting her.
254
She didn't know which one of them had begun the saluting business. It
had started as a joke, but now it was serious. They vibrated at
attention, all eyes on her. They had on better clothes, they looked
well-fed. General Robotwallah was leading her army to victory and
prosperity.
255
"Let's play," she said. In her pocket, her handphone had the latest
message from Mr Banerjee with the location of the day's target. Yasmin
was at her usual place, at Mala's right hand, and at her left sat
Fulmala, who had a bad limp from a leg that she'd broken and that
hadn't healed right. But Fulmala was smart and fast, and she grasped
the tactics better than anyone in the cafe except Mala herself. And
Yasmin, well, Yasmin could make the boys behave, which was a major
accomplishment, since left to their own they liked to squabble and
one-up each other, in a reckless spiral that always ended badly. But
Yasmin could talk to them in a way that was stern like an older sister,
and they'd fall into line.
256
Mala had her army, her lieutenants, and her mission. She had her
machine, the fastest one in the cafe, with a bigger monitor than any of
the others, and she was ready to go to war.
257
She touched up her displays, rolled her head from side to side, and led
her army to battle again.
258
This scene is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain of
bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes
and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across
the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and
grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and
keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and
others potential readers, the BandN stores kept the careers of many
writers afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly
afford to keep on their limited shelves. BandN has always had strong
community outreach programs, and I've done some of my best-attended,
best-organized signings at BandN stores, including the great events at
the (sadly departed) BandN in Union Square, New York, where the
mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the BandN in
Chicago that hosted the event after the Nebs a few years later. Best of
all is that BandN's "geeky" buyers really Get It when it comes to
science fiction, comics and manga, games and similar titles. They're
passionate and knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the
excellent selection on display at the stores.
259
4
4
<
260
Gold. It's all about gold.
261
But not regular gold, the sort of thing you dig out of the ground. That
stuff was for the last century. There's not enough of it, for one
thing: all the gold ever dug out of the ground in the history of the
world would only amount to a cube whose sides were the length of a
tennis court. And curiously, there's also too much of it: all the
certificates of gold ownership issued into the world add up to a cube
twice that size. Some of those certificates don't amount to anything --
and no one knows which ones. No one has independently audited Fort Knox
since 1956 FCK. For all we know, it's empty, the gold smuggled out and
sold, put in a vault, sold as certificates, then stolen again and put
into another vault, used as the basis for more certificates.
262
Not regular gold.
263
Virtual gold.
264
Call it what you want: in one game it's called "Credits," in another,
"Volcano Bucks." There are groats, Disney Dollars, cowries, moolah, and
Fool's Gold, and a million other kinds of gold out there. Unlike real
gold, there's no vault of reserves backing the certificates. Unlike
money, there's no government involved in their issue.
265
Virtual gold is issued by companies. Game companies. Game companies who
declare, "So many gold pieces can buy this piece of armor," or "So many
credits can buy this space ship" or "So much Jools can buy this
zeppelin." And because they say it, it is true. Countries and their
banks have to mess around with the ugly business of convincing citizens
to believe what they say: the government may say, "This social security
check will provide for all your needs in a month," but that doesn't
mean that the merchants who supply those needs will agree.
266
Companies don't have this problem. When Coca Cola says that 76 groats
will buy you one dwarvish axe in Svartalfaheim Warriors, that's it: the
price of an axe is 76 groats. Don't like it? Go play somewhere else.
267
Virtual money isn't backed by gold or governments: it's backed by
fun . So long as a game is fun, players somewhere will want to
buy into it, because as fun as the game is, it's always more fun if
you're one of the haves, with all the awesome armor and killer weapons,
than if you're some lowly noob have-not with a dagger, fighting your
way up to your first sword.
268
But where there's money to be spent, there's money to be made. For some
players, the most fun game of all is the game that carves them out a
slice of the pie. Not all the action belongs to the giant companies up
on their tall offices and the games they make. Plenty of us can get in
on the action from down below, where the grubby little people are.
269
Of course, this makes the companies bonkers . They're big daddy,
they know what's best for their worlds. They are in control .
They design the levels and the difficulty to make it all perfectly
balanced. They design the puzzles. They decree that light elves can't
talk to dark elves, that players on Russian servers can't hop onto the
Chinese servers, that it would take the average player 32 hours to
attain the Von Klausewitz drive and 48 hours to earn the Order of the
Armored Penguin. If you don't like it, you're supposed to leave :
you're not supposed to just buy your way out of it. Or if you
do, you should have the decency to buy it from them .
270
And here's a little something they won't tell you, these Gods of the
Virtual: they can't control it. Kids, crooks, and weirdos all
over the world have riddled their safe little terrarrium worlds with
tunnels leading to the great outdoors. There are multiple, competing
interworld exchanges: want to swap out your Zombie Mecha wealth for a
fully loaded spaceship and a crew of jolly space-pirates to crew it?
Ten different gangs want your business -- they'll fix you right up with
someone else's spaceship and take your mecha, arms and ammo into
inventory for the next person who wants to immigrate to Zombie Mecha
from some other magical world.
271
And the Gods are powerless to stop it. For every barrier they put up,
there are hundreds of smart, motivated players of the Big Game who will
knock it down.
272
You'd think it'd be impossible, wouldn't you? After all, these aren't
mere games of cops and robbers, played out in real cities filled with
real people. They don't need an all-points bulletin to find a fugitive
at large: every person in the world is in the database, and they own
the database. They don't need a search warrant to find the contraband
hiding under your floorboards: the floorboards, the contraband, the
house and you are all in the database -- and they own the database.
273
It should be impossible, but it isn't, and here's why: the biggest
sellers of gold and treasure, levels and experience in the worlds
are the game companies themselves . Oh, they don't call it
power-levelling and gold-farming -- they package it with prettier, more
palatable names, like "accelerated progress bonus pack" and "All
Together Now(TM)" and lots of other redonkulous names that don't fool
anyone.
274
But the Gods aren't happy with merely turning a buck on players who are
too lazy to work their way up through the game. They've got a much,
much weirder game in play. They sell gold to people who don't even
play the game . That's right: if you're a bigshot finance guy and
you're looking for somewhere to stash a million bucks where it will do
some good, you can buy a million dollars' worth of virtual gold, hang
onto it as the game grows and becomes more and more fun, as the value
of the gold rises and rises, and then you can sell it back for real
money through the official in-game banks, pocketing a chunky profit for
your trouble.
275
So while you're piloting your mecha, swinging your axe or commanding
your space fleet, there's a group of weird old grownups in suits in
fancy offices all over the world watching your play eagerly, trying to
figure out if the value of in-game gold is going to go up or down. When
a game starts to suck, everyone rushes to sell out their holdings,
getting rid of the gold as fast as they can before its value it
obliterated by bored gamers switching to a competing service. And when
the game gets more fun, well, that's an even bigger frenzy, as
the bidding wars kick up to high gear, every banker in the world trying
to buy the same gold for the same world.
276
Is it any wonder that eight of the 20 largest economies in the world
are in virtual countries? And is it any wonder that playing has become
such a serious business?
277
This scene is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles, my
drop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and
selective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out
with three or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's
like the owners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict
exactly what I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before
I walk into the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite
comics by wandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking
into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another
world. When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they
worked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic
based on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a
year ago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is
right at the top of the list.
278
5 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles,
CA 90026 +1 323 666 2228
5
<
279
Matthew stood outside the door of the Internet cafe, breathing deeply.
On the walk over, he'd managed to calm down a little, but as he drew
closer, he became more and more convinced that Boss Wing's boys would
be waiting for him there, and all his friends would be curled up on the
ground, beaten unconscious. He'd brought four of the best players with
him out of Boss Wing's factory, and he knew that Boss Wing wasn't happy
about that at all .
280
He was hyperventilating, his head swimming. He still hurt. It felt like
he had a soccer ball-sized red sun of pain burning in his underwear and
one of the things he wanted most and least to do was to find a private
spot to have a look in there. There was a bathroom in the cafe, so that
was that, it was time to go inside.
281
He walked up the four flights of stairs painfully, passing under the
gigantic murals from gamespace, avoiding the plastic plants on each
landing that reeked of piss from players who didn't want to wait for
the bathroom. From the third floor up, he was enveloped in the familiar
cloud of body odor, cigarette smoke and cursing that told him he was on
his way to his true home.
282
In the doorway, he paused and peered around, looking for any sign of
Boss Wing's goons, but it was business as usual: rows and rows of
tables with PCs on them, a few couples sharing machines, but mostly, it
was boys playing, skinny, with their shirts rolled up over their
bellies to catch any breeze that might happen through the room. There
were no breezes, just the eddies in the smoke caused by the growl of
all those PC fans whining as they sucked particulate-laden smoky air
over the superheated motherboards and monster video cards.
283
He slunk past the sign-in desk, staffed tonight by a new kid, someone
else just arrived from the provinces to find his fortune here in bad
old Shenzhen. Matthew wanted to grab the kid and carry him to the city
limits, explaining all the way that there was no fortune to be found
here anymore, it all belonged to men like Boss Wing. Go home, he
thought at the boy, Go home, this place is done.
284
His boys were playing at their usual table. They had made a pyramid
from alternating layers of Double Happiness cigarette packs and empty
coffee cups. They looked up as he neared them, smiling and laughing at
some joke. Then they saw the look on his face and they fell silent.
285
He sat down at a vacant chair and stared at their screens. They'd been
playing, of course. They were always playing. When they worked in Boss
Wing's factory, they'd pull an 18 hour shift and then they'd relax by
playing some more, running their own characters through the dungeons
they'd been farming all day long. It's why Boss Wing had such an easy
time recruiting for his factory: the pitch was seductive. "Get paid to
play!"
286
But it wasn't the same when you worked for someone else.
287
He tried to find the words to start and couldn't.
288
"Matthew?" It was Yo, the oldest of them. Yo actually had a family, a
wife and a young daughter. He'd left Boss Wing's factory and followed
Matthew.
289
Matthew stared at his hands, took a deep breath, and made a decision:
"Sorry, I just had a little fight on the way over here. I've got good
news, though: I've got a way to make us all very rich in a very short
time." And, from memory, Master Fong described the way he'd found into
the rich dungeon of Svartalfaheim Warriors. He commandeered a computer
and showed them, showed them how to shave the seconds off the run,
where to make sure to stop and grab and pick up. And then they each
took up a machine and went to work.
290
In time, the ache in his pants faded. Someone gave him a cigarette,
then another. Someone brought him some dumplings. Master Fong ate them
without tasting them. He and his team were at work, and they were
making money, and someday soon, they'd have a fortune that would make
Boss Wing look like a small-timer.
291
Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother. She
wanted to wish him a happy birthday. He had just turned 17.
292
This scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City of
Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the
world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering
shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something
I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a
veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious
about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the
stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport,
making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my
money!
293
6 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800
878 7323
6
<
294
Wei-Dong's game-suspension lasted all of 20 minutes. That's how long it
took him to fake a migraine, get a study-pass, sneak into the resource
center, beat the network filter and log on. It was getting very late
back in China, but that was OK, the boys stayed up late when they were
working, and they were glad to have him.
295
Wei-Dong's real name wasn't Wei-Dong, of course. His real name was
Leonard Goldberg. He'd chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the meanings of
Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East, which he liked
the sound of. This system for picking names worked well for the Chinese
kids he knew -- when their parents immigrated to the States, they'd
just pick some English name and that was it. Why not? Why was it better
to pick a name because your grandfather had it than because you liked
the sound of it?
296
He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it didn't make much of
an impression on them. They were cool with him being interested in
other cultures, but that didn't mean he could get out of having a
Bar-Mitzvah or that they would call him Wei-Dong. And it didn't mean
that they approved of him being up all night with his buds in China,
making money.
297
Wei-Dong knew that this could all be seen as very lame, an outcast kid
so desperate to make friends that he abandoned his high school
altogether and sucked up to someone in another hemisphere with free
labor instead. But it wasn't like that. Wei-Dong had plenty of friends
at Ronald Regan Secondary School. Plenty of kids thought that China was
the most interesting place in the world, loved the movies and the food
and the comics and the games. And there were lots of Chinese kids in
school too and while a couple clearly thought he was weird, lots more
got it. After all, most of them were into India the way he was into
China, so they had that in common.
298
And so what if he was skipping a class? It was Social Studies,
ferchrissakes! They were supposed to be studying China, but Wei-Dong
knew about ten times more about the subject than the teacher did. As he
whispered in Mandarin into his earwig, he thought that this was like an
independent study project. His teachers should be giving him bonus
marks.
299
"Now what?" he said. "What's the mission?"
300
"We were thinking of running the Walrus's Garden a few more times, now
that we've got it fresh in our heads. Maybe we could pick up another
vorpal blade." That's what the guys did when there weren't any paying
gweilos -- they went raiding for prestige items. It wasn't the most
exciting thing of all, but you never knew what might happen.
301
"I'm into it," he said. He had a free period after this one, then
lunch, so technically he could play for three hours solid. They'd all
be ready to log off and go to bed by then, anyway.
302
"You're a good gweilo, you know?" Wei-Dong knew Ping was kidding. He
didn't care if the guys called him gweilo. It wasn't a racist term, not
really, not like "chink" or "slant-eye." Just a term of affection. And
as nicknames went, "Foreign ghost" was actually kind of cool.
303
So they hit the Garden and ran it and they did pretty well, and they
went and put the money in the guild bank and went back for more. Then
they did it again. Somewhere in there, the bell rang. Somewhere in
there, some of his friends came and talked to him and he muted the
earwig and said some things back to them, but he didn't really know
what he'd said. Something.
304
Then, on the third run, the bad thing happened. They were almost to the
shore, and they'd banished their mounts. Wei-Dong was prepping the
Queen's Air Pocket, dipping into the monster supply of oyster shells
he'd built up on the previous runs.
305
And out they came, a dozen knights on huge, fearsome black steeds,
rising out of the water in unison, rending the air with the angry
chorus of their mounts and their battle-cries. The water fountained up
around them and they fell upon Wei-Dong and his guildies.
306
He shouted something into his earwig, a warning, and all around him in
the resource center, kids looked up from their conversations to stare
at him. He'd become a dervish, hammering away at his keyboard and
mousing furiously, his eyes fixed on the screen.
307
The black riders moved with eerie synchrony. Either they were monsters
-- monsters such as Wei-Dong had never encountered -- or they were the
most practiced, cooperative raiding party he'd ever seen. He had his
vorpal blade out now, and his guildies were all fighting as well. In
his earwig, they cursed in the Chinese dialects of six different
provinces. Under other circumstances, Wei-Dong would have taken notes,
but now he was fighting for his life.
308
Lu had bravely taken the point between the riders and the party, the
huge tank standing fast with his mace and broadsword, engaging all
twelve of the knights without regard for his own safety. Wei-Dong
poured healing spells on him as he attempted to make his own mark on
the riders with the vorpal blade, three times as long as he was.
309
The vorpal blade could do incredible damage, but it wasn't easy to use.
Twice, Wei-Dong accidentally sliced into members of his own party,
though not badly -- thank God, or he'd never hear the end of it -- but
he couldn't get a cut in on the black knights, who were too fast for
him.
310
Then Lu fell, going down on one knee, pierced through the throat by a
pike wielded by a rider whose steed's eyes were the icy blue of the
Caterpillar's mist. The rider lifted Lu into the air, his feet kicking
limply, and another knight beheaded him with a contemptuous swing of
his sword. Lu fell in two pieces to the gritty beach sand and in the
earwig, he cursed them, using an expression that Wei-Dong had
painstakingly translated into "Screw eight generations of your
ancestors."
311
With Lu down, the rest of them were practically helpless. They fought
valiantly, coordinating their attacks, pouring on fire from their magic
items and best spells, but the black knights were unbeatable. Before he
died, Wei-Dong managed to hit one with the vorpal blade and had the
momentary satisfaction of watching the knight stagger and clutch at his
chest, but then the fighter closed with him, drawing a pair of short
swords that he spun like a magician doing knife tricks. There was no
question of parrying him, and seconds later, Wei-Dong was in the sand,
watching the knight's spiked boot descend on his face, hearing the
crunch of his cheekbones and nose shattering under the weight. Then he
was respawning in the distant Lake of Tears, naked and unarmed, and he
had to corpse-run to the body of his toon before the bastards got his
vorpal blade.
312
He heard his guildies dying in the earwig, one after another, as he
ran, ghostly and ethereal, across the hills and dales of Wonderland. He
reached his corpse just in time to watch the knights loot the body, and
the bodies of his teammates. He rose up again, helpless and unarmed and
made flesh by the body of his toon, vulnerable.
313
One of the knights sent him a chat-request. He clicked it, silencing
the background noises from Shenzhen.
314
"You farmers aren't welcome here anymore, Comrade," the voice said. It
had an accent he didn't recognize. Maybe Russian? And the speaker was
just a kid! "We're patrolling now. You come back again, we'll hunt and
kill you again, and again, and again. You understand me, Chinee?" Not
just a kid: a girl -- a little girl, threatening him from
somewhere in the world.
315
"Who put you in charge, missy ?" he said. "And what makes you
think I'm Chinese, anyway?"
316
There was a nasty laugh. "Missy, huh? I'm in charge because I just
kicked your ass, and because I can kick it again, as many times as I
need to. And I don't care if you're in China, Vietnam, Indonesia -- it
doesn't make a difference. We'll kill you and all the farmers in
Wonderland. This game isn't farmable anymore. I'm done talking to you
now." And the black knight decapitated him with contemptuous ease.
317
He flipped back to the guild channel, ready to tell them about what had
just happened, his mind reeling, and that's when he looked up into the
face of his father, standing over him, with a look on his face that
could curdle milk.
318
"Get up, Leonard," he said. "And come with me."
319
He wasn't alone. There was Mr Adams, the vice-principal, and the
school's rent-a-cop, Officer Turner, and the guidance counsellor, Ms
Ramirez. They presented him with the stony faces of Mount Rushmore,
faces without a hint of mercy. His father reached over and took the
earwig out of his ear, gently, carefully. Then, with exactly the same
care, he dropped the earwig to the polished concrete floor of the
resource centre and brought his heel down on it, the crunch loud
in the perfectly silent room.
320
Leonard stood up. The room was full of kids pretending not to look at
him. They were all looking at him. He followed his father into the
hallway and as the door swung shut, he heard, unmistakably, the sound
of a hundred giggles in unison.
321
They boxed him in on the walk to the vice-principal's office, trapping
him. Not that he'd run -- he had nowhere to run to , but it still
made him feel claustrophobic. This was not good. This was very, very
bad.
322
Here's how bad it was: "You're going to send me to military
school ?"
323
"Not military school," Ms Ramirez said. She said it with that
maddening, patronizing guidance-counsellor tone. "The Martindale
Academy has no military or martial component. It's merely a very
structured, supervised environment. They have a fantastic track record
in helping students like you concentrate on grades and pull themselves
out of academic troubles. They've got a beautiful campus in a beautiful
location, and Martindale boys go on to fill many important --"
324
And on and on. She'd swallowed the sales brochure like a burrito and
now it was rebounding on her. He tuned her out and looked at his
father. Benny Rosenbaum wasn't the sort of person you could read
easily. The people who worked for him at Rosenbaum Shipping and
Logistics called him The Wall, because you couldn't get anything past
him, under him, through him, or over him. Not that he was a hardcase,
but he couldn't be swayed by emotional arguments: if you tried to
approach him with anything less than fully computerized logic, you
might as well forget it.
325
But there were little tells, little ways you could figure out what the
weather was like in old Benny. That thing he was doing with his watch
strap, working at the catch, that was one of them. So was the little
jump in the hinge of his jaw, like he was chewing an invisible wad of
gum. Combine those with the fact that he was away from his work in the
middle of the day, when he should be making sure that giant steel
containers were humming around the globe -- well, for Leonard, it meant
that the lava was pretty close to the surface of Mount Benny this
afternoon.
326
He turned to his dad. "Shouldn't we be talking about this as a family,
Dad? Why are we doing this here?"
327
Benny regarded him, fiddled with his watch strap, nodded at the
guidance counsellor and made a little "go-on" gesture that betrayed
nothing.
328
"Leonard," she said. "Leonard, you need to understand just how serious
this has become. You're one term paper away from flunking two of your
subjects: history and biology. You've gone from being an A student in
math, English and social studies to a C-minus. At this rate, you'll
have blown the semester by Thanksgiving. Put it this way: you've gone
from being in the ninetieth percentile of Ronald Regan Secondary School
Sophomores to the twelfth . This is a signal, Leonard, from you
to us, and it's signalling, S-O-S, S-O-S."
329
"We thought you were on drugs," his father said, absolutely calm. "We
actually tested a hair follicle from your pillow. I had a guy follow
you around. Near as I can tell, you smoke a little pot with your
friends, but you don't actually see your friends anymore, do you?"
330
"You tested my hair?"
331
His father made that go-on gesture of his, an old favorite of his. "And
had you followed. Of course we did. We're in charge of you. We're
responsible for you. We don't own you, but if you screw up so bad that
you end up spending the rest of your life as a bum, it'll be down to
us, and we'll have to bail you out. You understand that, Leonard? We're
responsible for you, and we'll do whatever we have to in order to make
sure you don't screw up your life."
332
Leonard bit back a retort. The sinking feeling that had started with
the crushing of his earwig had sunk as low as it would go. Now his
palms were sweating, his heart was racing, and he had no idea what
would come out of his mouth the next time we spoke.
333
"We used to call this an intervention, when I was your age," the
vice-principal said. He still looked like the real-estate agent he'd
been before he switched to teaching, the last time the market had
crashed. He was affable, inoffensive, his eyes wide and trustworthy.
They called him Babyface Adams in the halls. But Leonard knew about
salesmen, knew that no matter how friendly they appeared, they were
always on the lookout for weaknesses to exploit. "And we'd do it for
drug addicts. But I don't think you're addicted to drugs. I think
you're addicted to games."
334
"Oh come on ," Leonard said. "There's no such thing. I can show
you the research papers. Game addiction? That's just something they
thought up to sell newspapers. Dad, come on, you don't really believe
this stuff, do you?"
335
His dad pointedly refused to meet his gaze, directing his attention to
the Vice-Principal.
336
"Leonard, we know you're a very smart young man, but no one is so smart
as to never need help. I don't want to argue definitions of addictions
with you --"
337
"Because you'll lose. " Leonard spat it out, surprising himself
with the vehemence. Old Babyface smiled his affable, salesman's smile:
Oh yes, good sir, you're certainly right there, very clever of you.
Now, may I show you something in a mock-Tudor split-level with a
three-car garage and an above-ground pool?
338
"You're a very smart young man, Leonard. It doesn't matter if you're
medically addicted, psychologically dependent, or just --" he waved his
hands, looking for the right words -- "or if you just spend too darn
much time playing games and not enough time in the real world. None of
that matters. What matters is that you're in trouble. And we're going
to help you with that. Because we care about you and we want to see you
succeed."
339
It suddenly sank in. Leonard knew how these things went. Somewhere,
right now, Officer Turner was cleaning out his locker and loading its
contents into a couple of paper Trader Joe's grocery sacks. Somewhere,
some secretary was taking his name off of the rolls of each of his
classes. Right now, his mother was packing his suitcase back at home,
filling it with three or four changes of clothes, a fresh toothbrush --
and nothing else. When he left this room, he'd disappear from Orange
County as thoroughly as if he'd been snatched off the street by serial
killers.
340
Only it wouldn't be his mutilated body that would surface in a few
months time, decomposed and grisly, an object lesson to all the kiddies
of Ronald Reagan High to be on the alert for dangerous strangers. It
would be his mutilated personality that would surface, a
slack-jawed pod-person who'd been crammed into the
happy-well-adjusted-citizen mold that would carry him through an
adulthood as a good, trouble-free worker-bee in the hive.
341
"Dad, come on . You can't just do this to me! I'm your son! I
deserve a chance to pull my grades up, don't I? Before you send me off
to some brainwashing center?"
342
"You had your chance to pull your grades up, Leonard," Ms Ramirez said,
and the Vice-Principal nodded vigorously. "You've had all semester. If
you plan on graduating and going on to university, this is the time to
do something drastic to make sure that happens."
343
"It's time to go," his father said, ostentatiously checking his watch.
Honestly, who still wore a watch? He had a phone, Leonard knew, just
like all normal people. An old-fashioned wind-up watch was about as
useful in this day and age as an ear-trumpet or a suit of chain-mail.
He had a whole case full of them -- dozens of them. His father could
have all the ridiculous affectations and hobbies he wanted, spend a
small fortune on them, and no one wanted to send him off to the
nuthouse.
344
It was so goddamned unfair . He wanted to shout it as they led
him out to his father's impeccable little Huawei Darter. He bought new
one every year, getting a chunky discount straight from the factory,
who loaded his personal car into its own container and craned it into
one of Dad's big ships in port in Guangzhou. The car smelled of the
black licorice sweets that Dad sucked on, and of the giant steel
thermos-cup of coffee that Dad slipped into the cup-holder every
morning, refilling through the day at a bunch of diners where they
called him by his first name and let him run a tab.
345
And outside the windows, through the subtle grey tint, the streets of
Anaheim whipped past, rows of identical houses branching off of a huge,
divided arterial eight-lane road. He'd known these streets all his
life, he'd walked them, met the panhandlers that worked the tourist
trade, the footsore Disney employees who'd missed the shuttle, hiking
the mile to the cast-member parking, the retired weirdos walking their
dogs, the other larval Orange County pod-people who were still too
young or poor or unlucky to have a car.
346
The sky was that pure blue that you got in OC, no clouds, a postcard
smiley-face sun nearly at noontime high, perfect for tourist shots.
Leonard saw it all for the first time, really saw it, because he
knew he was seeing it for the last time.
347
"It's not so bad," his dad said. "Stop acting like you're going to
prison. It's a swanky boarding school, for chrissakes. And not one of
those schools where they beat you down in the bathroom or anything.
They're practically hippies up there. Your mother and I aren't sending
you to the gulag, kid."
348
"It doesn't matter what you say, Dad. Just forget it. Here's the facts:
you've kidnapped me from my school and you're sending me away to some
place where they're supposed to 'fix' me. You haven't given me any say
in this. You haven't consulted me. You can say how much you love me,
how much it's for my own good, talk and talk and talk, but it won't
change those facts. I'm sixteen years old, Dad. I'm as old as Zaidy
Shmuel was when he married Bubbie and came to America, you know that?"
349
"That was during the war --"
350
"Who cares? He was your grandfather, and he was old enough to start a
family. You can bet your ass he wouldn't have stood still for being
kidnapped --" His father snorted. "Kidnapped because his hobbies
weren't his parents' idea of a good time. God! What the hell is the
matter with you? I always knew you were kind of a prick, but --"
351
His father calmly steered the car to the curb and pulled over, changing
three lanes smoothly, with a shoulder-check before each, weaving
through the tourist traffic and gardeners' pickup trucks without
raising a single horn. He popped the emergency brake with one hand and
his seatbelt with the other, twisting in his seat to bring his face
right up to Leonard's.
352
"You are on thin goddamned ice, kid. You can make me the villain if you
want to, if you need to, but you know, somewhere in that hormone-addled
teenaged brain of yours, that this was your doing. How many
times, Leonard? How many times have we talked to you about balance,
about keeping your grades up, taking a little time out of your game?
How many chances did you get before this?"
353
Leonard laughed hotly. There were tears of rage behind his eyes, trying
to get out. He swallowed hard. "Kidnapped," he said. "Kidnapped and
shipped away because you don't think I'm getting good enough grades in
math and English. Like any of it matters -- when was the last time you
solved a quadratic equation Dad? Who cares if I get into a good
university? What am I going to get a degree in that will help me
survive the next twenty years? What did you get your degree in, again,
Dad? Oh, that's right, Ancient Languages. Bet that comes
up a lot when you're shipping giant containers of plastic garbage from
China, huh?"
354
His father shook his head. Behind them, cars were braking and honking
at each other as they maneuvered around the stopped Huawei. "This isn't
about me, son. This is about you -- about pissing away your life on
some stupid game. At least speaking Latin helps me understand Spanish.
What are you going to make of all your hours and years of killing
dragons?"
355
Leonard fumed. He knew the answer to this, somewhere. The games were
taking over the world. There was money to be made there. He was
learning to work on teams. All this and more, these were the reasons
for playing, and none of them were as important as the most important
reason: it just felt right , adventuring in-world --
356
There was a particularly loud shriek of brakes from behind them, and it
kept coming, getting louder and louder, and there was a blare of horns,
too, and the sound didn't stop, got louder than you could have imagined
it getting. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and --
357
Crash
358
The car seemed to leap into the air, rising up first on its front tires
in a reverse-wheelie and then the front wheels spun and the car shot
forward ten yards in a second. There was the sound of crumpling metal,
his father's curse, and then a clang like temple bells as his head
bounced off the dashboard. The world went dark.
359
This scene is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the
oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a
few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and
every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away
to Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids'
books. I'm a heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland,
and Books of Wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful,
limited-edition Alice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the
most inviting atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.
360
7 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212 989 3270
7
<
361
Mala was in the world with a small raiding party, just a few of her
army. It was late -- after midnight -- and Mrs Dibyendu had turned the
cafe over to her idiot nephew to run things. These days, the cafe
stayed open when Mala and her army wanted to use it, day or night, and
there were always soldiers who'd vie for the honor of escorting General
Robotwallah home afterwards. Mamaji -- Mamaji had a new fine flat, with
two complete rooms, and one of them was all for Mamaji alone, hers to
sleep in without the snuffling and gruffling of her two children. There
were places in Dharavi where ten or fifteen might have shared that
room, sleeping on coats -- or each other. Mamaji had a mattress,
brought to her by a strong young man from Chor Bazaar, carried with him
on the roof of the Marine Line train through the rush hour heat and
press of bodies.
362
Mamaji didn't complain when Mala played after midnight.
363
"More, just there," Sushant said. He was two years older than her, the
tallest of them all, with short hair and a crazy smile that reminded
her of the face of a dog that has had its stomach rubbed into ecstasy.
364
And there they were, three mecha in a triangle, methodically clubbing
zombies in the head, spattering their rotten brains and dropping them
into increasing piles. Eventually, the game would send out ghouls to
drag away the bodies, but for now, they piled waist deep around the
level one mechas.
365
"I have them," Yasmin said, her scopes locking on. This was a new kind
of mission for them, wiping out these little trios of mecha who were
grinding endlessly against the zombies. Mr Banerjee had tasked them to
this after the more aggressive warriors had been hunted to extinction
by their army. According to Mr Banerjee, these were each played by a
single person, someone who was getting paid to level up basic mecha to
level four or five, to be sold at auction to rich players. Always in
threes, always grinding the zombies, always in this part of the world,
like vermin.
366
"Fire," she said, and the pulse weapons fired concentric rings of force
into the trio. They froze, systems cooked, and as Mala watched, the
zombies swarmed over the mechas, toppling them, working relentlessly at
them, until they had found their way inside. A red mist fountained into
the sky as they dismembered the pilots.
367
"Nice one," she said, arching her back over her chair, slurping the
dregs of a cup of chai that had grown cold at her side. Mrs Dibyendu's
idiot nephew was standing barefoot in the doorway of the cafe, spitting
betel into the street, the sweet smell wafting back to her. The sleep
was gathering in her mind, waiting to pounce on her, so it was time to
go. She turned to tell her army so when her headphones filled with the
thunder of incoming mechas, and lots of them.
368
She slammed her bottom down into the seat and spun around, fingers
flying to the keyboard, eyes on the screen. The enemy mecha were coming
in locked in a megamecha configurations, fifteen -- no twenty --
of them joined together to form a bot so huge that she looked like a
gnat next to it.
369
"To me!" she cried, and "Formation," and her soldiers came to their
keyboard, her army initiating their own megamecha sequence, but it took
too long and there weren't enough of them, and though they fought
bravely, the giant enemy craft tore them to pieces, lifting each warbot
and peering inside its cowl as it ripped open the armor and dropped the
squirming pilot to the surging zombie tide at its feet. Too late, Mala
remembered her strategy, remembered what it had been like when she had
always commanded the weaker force, the defensive footing she
should have put her army on as soon as she saw how she was outmatched.
370
Too late. An instant later, her own mecha was in the enemy's clutches,
lifted to its face, and as she neared it, the lights on her console
changed and a soft klaxon sounded: the bot was attempting to infiltrate
her own craft's systems, to interface with them, to pwn them. That was
another game within this game, the hack-and-be-hacked game, and she was
very good at it. It involved solving a series of logic puzzles, solving
them faster than the foe, and she clicked and typed as she figured out
how to build a bridge using blocks of irregular size, as she figured
out how to open a lock whose tumblers had to be clicked just so to make
the mechanism work, as she figured out --
371
She wasn't fast enough. Her army gathered around her as her console
locked up, the enemy inside her mecha now, running it from bootloader
to flamethrower.
372
"Hello," a voice said in her headphones. That was something you could
do, when you controlled another player's armor -- you could take over
its comms. She thought of yanking out the headphones and switching to
speaker so that her army could listen in too, but some premonition
stayed her hand. This enemy had gone to some trouble to talk to her,
personally, so she would hear what it had to say.
373
"My name is Big Sister Nor," she said, and it was a she, a
woman's voice, no, a girl's voice -- maybe something in between.
Her Hindi was strangely accented, like the Chinese actors in the filmi
shows she'd seen. "It's been a pleasure to fight you. Your guild did
very well. Of course, we did better." Mala heard a ragged cheer and
realized that there were dozens of enemies on the chat channel, all
listening in. What she had mistaken for static on the channel was, in
fact, dozens of enemies, somewhere in the world, all breathing into
their microphones as this woman spoke.
374
"You are very good players," Mala said, whispering it so that only her
mic heard.
375
"I'm not just a player, and neither are you, my dear." There was
something sisterly in that voice, none of the gloating competitiveness
that Mala felt for the players she'd bested in the game before. In
spite of herself, Mala found she was smiling a little. She rocked her
chin from side to side -- Oh, you're a clever one, do go on --
and her soldiers around her made the same gesture.
376
"I know why you fight. You think you're doing an honest job of work,
but have you ever stopped to consider why someone would pay you to
attack other workers in the game?"
377
Mala shooed away her army, making a pointed gesture toward the door.
When she was alone, she said, "Because they muck up the game for the
real players. They interfere."
378
The giant mecha shook its head slowly. "Are you really so blind? Do you
think the syndicate that pays you does so because they care about
whether the game is fun ? Oh, dear."
379
Mala's mind whirred. It was like solving one of those puzzles. Of
course Mr Banerjee didn't care about the other players. Of course he
didn't work for the game. If he worked for the game, he could just
suspend the accounts of the players Mala fought. Cleaner and neater.
The solution loomed in her mind's eye. "They're business rivals, then?"
380
"Oh yes, you are as clever as I thought you must be. Yes indeed. They
are business rivals. Somewhere, there is a group of players just like
them, being paid to level up mecha, or farm gold, or acquire land, or
do any of the other things that can turn labor into money. And who do
you suppose the money goes to?"
381
"To my boss," she said. "And his bosses. That's how it goes." Everyone
worked for someone.
382
"Does that sound fair to you?"
383
"Why not?" Mala said. "You work, you make something or do something,
and the person you do it for pays you something for your work. That's
the world, that's how it works."
384
"What does the person who pays you do to earn his piece of your labor?"
385
Mala thought. "He figures out how to turn the labor into money. He pays
me for what I do. These are stupid questions, you know."
386
"I know," Big Sister Nor said. "It's the stupid questions that have
some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never
think to ask the stupid questions. Do you know what a union is?"
387
Mala thought. There were unions all over Mumbai, but none in Dharavi.
She'd heard many people speak of them, though. "A group of workers,"
she said. "Who make their bosses pay them more." She thought about all
she'd heard. "They stop other workers from taking their jobs. They go
on strike."
388
"That's what unions do , all right. But it's not much of a sense
of what they are. Tell me this: if you went to your boss and asked for
more money, shorter hours, and better working conditions, what do you
think he'd say?"
389
"He'd laugh at me and send me away," Mala said. It was an unbelievably
stupid question.
390
"You're almost certainly right. But what if all the workers he went to
said the same thing? What if, everywhere he went, there were workers
saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,'
and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there is a just reason for
doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere, demanded this treatment?"
391
Mala found she was shaking her head. "It's a ridiculous idea. There's
always someone poor who'll take the job. It doesn't matter. It won't
work." She found that she was furious. "Stupid!"
392
"I admit that it's all rather improbable," the woman said, and there
was an unmistakable tone of amusement in her voice. "But think for a
moment about your employer. Do you know where his employers are? Do you
know where the players you're fighting are? Where their customers are?
Do you know where I am?"
393
"I don't see why that matters --"
394
"Oh, it matters. It matters because although all these people are all
over the world, there's no real distance between them. We chat here
like neighbors, but I am in Singapore, and you are in India. Where?
Delhi? Kolkata? Mumbai?"
395
"Mumbai," she admitted.
396
"You don't sound like Mumbai," she said. "You have a lovely accent.
Uttar Pradesh?"
397
Mala was surprised to hear the state of her birth and her village
guessed so easily. "Yes," she said. She was a girl from the village,
she was General Robotwallah and this woman had taken the measure of her
very quickly.
398
"This game is headquartered in America, in a city called Atlanta. The
corporation is registered in Cyprus, in Europe. The players are all
over the world. These ones that you've been fighting are in Vietnam.
We'd been having a lovely conversation before you came and blew them
all to pieces. We are everywhere, but we are all here. Anyone your boss
ever hired to do your job would end up here, and we could find that
worker and talk to them. Wherever your boss goes, his workers will all
come and work here. And we will have a chat like this with them, and
talk to them about what a world we could have, if all workers
cooperated to protect each others' interests."
399
Mala was still shaking her head. "They'd just blow you away. Hire an
army like me. It's a stupid idea."
400
The giant metamecha lifted her up to its face, where its giant teeth
champed and clanged. "Do you think there's an army that could best us?"
401
Mala thought that maybe her army could, if they were in force, if they
were prepared. Then she thought of how much successful war you'd have
to persecute to win one of these giant beasts. "Maybe not. Maybe you
can do what you say you can do." She thought some more. "But in the
meantime, we wouldn't have any work."
402
The giant metal face nodded. "Yes, that's true. At first you may not
find yourself with your wages. And maybe your fellow workers would
contribute a little to help you out. That's another thing unions do --
it's called strike pay. But eventually, you, and me, and all of us,
would enjoy a world where we are paid a living wage, and where we labor
under livable conditions, and where our workplaces are fair and decent.
Isn't that worth a little sacrifice?"
403
There it was, "You ask me to make a sacrifice. Why should I sacrifice?
We are poor. We fight for a very little, because we have even less. Why
do you think that we should sacrifice? Why don't you sacrifice?"
404
"Oh, sister, we've all sacrificed. I understand that this is all very
new to you, and that it will take some getting used to. I'm sure we'll
see each other again, someday. After all, we all play in the same world
here, don't we?"
405
Mala realized that the breathing she'd heard, the other voices on the
chat channel, had all fallen silent. For a short time, it had just been
Mala and this woman who called her "sister."
406
"What is your name?"
407
"I'm Nor-Ayu," she said. "But they call me 'Big Sister Nor.' All over
the world, they call me this. What do I call you?"
408
Mala's name was on the tip of her tongue, but she did not say it.
Instead, she said, "General Robotwallah."
409
"A very good name," Big Sister Nor said. "It was my pleasure to meet
you." With that, the giant mecha dropped her and turned and lumbered
away, crushing zombies under its feet.
410
Mala stood up and felt the many pops and snaps of her spine and
muscles. She had been sitting for, oh, hours and hours.
411
She rolled her head from side to side on her neck, working out the
stiffness there and she saw Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew watching her.
His lip was pouched with reeking betel saliva, and he was staring at
her with a frankness that made her squirm right to the pit of her
stomach.
412
"You stayed behind for me," he said, a huge grin on his face. His teeth
were brown. He wasn't really an idiot -- not soft in the head, anyway.
But he was very thick and very slow, with a brutal strength that Mrs
Dibyendu always described as his "special fortitude." Mala thought he
was just a thug. She'd seen him walking in the narrow streets of
Dharavi. He never shifted for women or old people, making them go
around him even when it meant stepping into mud or worse. And he chewed
betel all the time. Lots of people chewed betel, it was like smoking,
but her mother detested the habit and had told her so many times that
it was a "low" habit and dirty that she couldn't help but think less of
betel chewers.
413
He regarded her with his bloodshot eyes. She suddenly felt very
vulnerable, the way she'd felt all the time, when they'd first come to
Dharavi. She took a step to the right and he took a step to the right
as well. That was a line crossed: once he blocked her exit, he'd
announced his intention to hurt her. That was basic military strategy.
He had made the first move, so he had the initiative, but he'd also
showed his hand quickly, so --
414
She feinted left and he fell for it. She lowered her head like a bull
and butted it into the middle of his chest. Already off-balance, he
went down on his back. She didn't stop moving, didn't look back, just
kept going, thinking of that charging bull, running over him as she
made for the doorway without stopping. One heel came down on his
ribcage, the next on his face, mashing his lips and nose. She wished
that something had gone crunch but nothing did.
415
She was out the door in an instant and into the cool air of the dark,
dark Dharavi night. Around her, the sound of rats running over the
roofs, the distant sounds of the roads, snoring. And many other, less
identifiable sounds, sounds that might have been lurkers hiding in the
shadows around them. Muffled speech. A distant train.
416
Suddenly, sending her army away didn't seem like such a good idea.
417
Behind her, she heard a much clearer sound of menace. The idiot nephew
crashing through the door, his shoes on the packed earth road. She
slipped back into an alley between two buildings, barely wider than
her, her feet splashing through some kind of warm liquid that wafted an
evil stench up to her nose. The idiot nephew lumbered past into the
night. She stayed put. He lumbered back, looking in all directions for
her.
418
There she stood, waiting for him to give up, but he would not. Back and
forth he charged. He'd become the bull, enraged, tireless, stupid. She
heard his voice rasping in his chest. She had her mobile phone in her
hand, her other hand cupped over it, shielding the treacherous light it
gave off from its tiny screen. It was 12:47 now, and she had never been
alone at this hour in all her 14 years.
419
She could text someone in her army -- they would come to get her,
wouldn't they? If they were awake, or if their phones' chirps woke
them. No one was awake at this hour, though. And how to explain? What
to say?
420
She felt like an idiot. She felt ashamed. She should have predicted
this, should have been the general, should have employed strategy.
Instead, she'd gotten boxed in.
421
She could wait. All night, if necessary. No need to let her army know
of her weakness. Idiot nephew would tire or the sun would rise, it was
all the same to her.
422
Through the thin walls of the houses on either side of her, the sound
of snoring. The evil smell rose up from the liquid below her in the
ditch, and something slimy was squishing between her toes. It burned at
her skin. The rats scampered overhead, sounding like rain on the tin
roofs. Stupid, stupid, stupid, it was her mantra, over and over in her
mind.
423
The bull was tiring. The next time he passed, his breath came in
terrible wheezes that blew the stink of betel before him like sweet
rot. She could wait for his next pass, then run.
424
It was a good plan. She hated it. He had -- He'd threatened her. He'd
scared her. He should pay . She was the General Robotwallah, not
merely some girl from the village. She was from Dharavi, tough. Smart.
425
He wheezed past and she slipped out of the alley, her feet coming free
of the muck with audible plops . He was facing away from her
still, hadn't heard her yet, and he had his back to her. The stupid
boys in her army only fought face to face, talked about the "honor" of
hitting from behind. Honor was just stupid boy-things. Victory beat
honor.
426
She braced herself and ran toward him, both arms stiff, hands at
shoulder-height. She hit him high and kept moving, the way he had
before, and down he fell again, totally unprepared for the assault from
the rear. The sound he made on the dirt was like the sound of a goat
dropping at the butcher's block. He was trying to roll over and she
turned around and ran at him, jumping up in the air and landing with
both muddy feet on his head, driving his face into the mud. He shouted
in pain, the sound muffled by the dirt, and then lay, stunned.
427
She went back to him then, and knelt at his head, his hairy earlobe
inches from her lips.
428
"I wasn't waiting for you at the cafe. I was minding my own business,"
she said. "I don't like you. You shouldn't chase girls or the girls
might turn around and catch you. Do you understand me? Tell me you
understand me before I rip out your tongue and wipe your ass with it."
They talked like this on the chat-channels for the games all the time,
the boys did, and she'd always disapproved of it. But the words had
power, she could feel it in her mouth, hot as blood from a bit tongue.
429
"Tell me you understand me, idiot!" she hissed.
430
"I understand," he said, and the words came mashed, from mashed lips
and a mashed nose.
431
She turned on her heel and began to walk away. He groaned behind her,
then called out, "Whore! Stupid whore!"
432
She didn't think, she just acted. Turned around, ran at his still-prone
body, indistinct in the dusk, one step, two step, like a champion
footballer coming in for a penalty kick and then she did kick
him, the foetid water spraying off her shoe's saturated toe as it
connected with his big, stupid ribcage. Something snapped in there --
maybe several somethings, and oh, didn't that feel wonderful ?
433
He was every man who'd scared her, who'd shouted filthy things after
her, who'd terrorized her mother. He was the bus driver who'd
threatened to put them out on the roadside when they wouldn't pay him a
bribe. Everything and everyone that had ever made her feel small and
afraid, a girl from the village. All of them.
434
She turned around. He was clutching at his side and blubbering now,
crying stupid tears on his stupid cheeks, luminous in the smudgy
moonlight that filtered through the haze of plastic smoke that hung
over Dharavi. She would up and took another pass at him, one step, two
step, kick , and crunch , that satisfying sound from his
ribs again. His sobs caught in his chest and then he took a huge,
shuddering breath and howled like a wounded cat in the night,
screamed so loud that here in Dharavi, the lights came on and voices
came to the windows.
435
It was as though a spell had been broken. She was shaking and drenched
in sweat, and there were people peering at her in the dark. Suddenly
she wanted to be home as fast as possible, if not faster. Time to go.
436
She ran. Mala had loved to run through the fields as a little girl,
hair flying behind her, knees and arms pumping, down the dirt roads.
Now she ran in the night, the reek of the ditch water smacking her in
the nose with each squelching step. Voices chased her through the
night, though they came filtered through the hammer of her pulse in her
ears and later she could not say whether they were real or imagined.
437
But finally she was home and pelting up the steps to the third-floor
flat she had rented for her family. Her thundering footsteps raised
cries from the downstairs neighbors, but she ignored them, fumbled with
her key, let herself in.
438
Her brother Gopal looked up at her from his mat, blinking in the dark,
his skinny chest bare. "Mala?"
439
"It's OK," she said. "Nothing. Sleep, Gopal."
440
He slumped back down. Mala's shoes stank. She peeled them off, using
just the tips of her fingers, and left them outside the door. Perhaps
they would be stolen -- though you would have to be desperate indeed to
steal those shoes. Now her feet stank. There was a large jug of water
in the corner, and a dipper. Carefully, she carried the dipper to the
window, opened the squealing shutter, and poured the water slowly over
the her feet, propping first one and then the other on the windowsill.
Gopal stirred again. "Be quiet," he said, "it's sleep-time."
441
She ignored him. She was still out of breath, and the reality of what
she'd done was setting in for her. She had kicked the idiot nephew --
how many times? Two? Three? And something in his body had gone
crack each time. Why had he blocked her? Why had he followed her
into the night? What was it that made the big and the strong take such
sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of boys would do this to
girls and even grown women sometimes -- follow them, calling after
them, touching them, sometimes it even led to rape. They called it
"Eve-teasing" and they treated it like a game. It wasn't a game, not if
you were the victim.
442
Why did they make her do it? Why did all of them make her do it? The
sound of the crack had been so satisfying then, and it was so sickening
now. She was shaking, though the night was so hot, one of those
steaming nights where everything was slimy with the low-hanging, soupy
moisture.
443
And she was crying, too, the crying coming out without her being able
to control it, and she was ashamed of that, too, because that's what a
girl from the village would do, not brave General Robotwallah.
444
Calloused hands touched her shoulders, squeezed them. The smell of her
mother in her nose: clean sweat, cooking spice, soap. Strong, thin arms
encircled her from behind.
445
"Daughter, oh daughter, what happened to you?"
446
And she wanted to tell Mamaji everything, but all that came out were
cries. She turned her head to her mother's bosom and heaved with the
sobs that came and came and came in waves, feeling like they'd turn her
inside out. Gopal got up and moved into the next room, silent and
scared. She noticed this, noticed all of it as from a great distance,
her body sobbing, her mind away somewhere, cool and remote.
447
"Mamaji," she said at last. "There was a boy."
448
Her mother squeezed her harder. "Oh, Mala, sweet girl --"
449
"No, Mamaji, he didn't touch me. He tried to. I knocked him down.
Twice. And I kicked him and kicked him until I heard things breaking,
and then I ran home."
450
"Mala!" her mother held her at arm's length. "Who was he?" Meaning,
Was he someone who can come after us, who can make trouble for us,
who could ruin us here in Dharavi?
451
"He was Mrs Dibyendu's nephew, the big one, the one who makes trouble
all the time."
452
Her mothers fingers tightened on her arms and her eyes went wide.
453
"Oh, Mala, Mala -- oh, no."
454
And Mala knew exactly what her mother meant by this, why she was
consumed with horror. Her relationship with Mr Banerjee came from Mrs
Dibyendu. And the flat, their lives, the phone and the clothes they
wore -- they all came from Mr Banerjee. They balanced on a shaky pillar
of relationships, and Mrs Dibyendu was at the bottom of it, all resting
on her shoulders. And the idiot nephew could convince her to shrug her
shoulders and all would come tumbling down -- the money, the security,
all of it.
455
That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had driven
her to kick and kick and kick -- this oaf of a boy knew that he could
get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she couldn't afford
to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could not -- would not --
be sorry.
456
"I can talk with Mr Banerjee," she said. "I have his phone number. He
knows that I'm a good worker -- he'll make it all better. You'll see,
Mamaji, don't worry."
457
"Why, Mala, why? Couldn't you have just run away? Why did you have to
hurt this boy?"
458
Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her own
mother --
459
But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her mother
wasn't a general. She was just a girl from the village, all grown up.
She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and
poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone
who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them.
460
She wouldn't do it.
461
No matter what happened with Mr Banerjee and Mrs Dibyendu and her
stupid idiot nephew, she was not going to become that person.
462
This scene is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant
that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget
walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and
discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders
in Oxford Street in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction
evenings, where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak
about science fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city
(which happens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there
always seems to be a Borders brimming with great choices -- I'm
especially partial to the Borders on Union Square in San Francisco.
463
8
8
<
464
If you want to get rich without making anything or doing anything that
anyone needs or wants, you need to be fast .
465
The technical term for this is arbitrage . Imagine that you live
in an apartment block and it's snowing so hard out that no one wants to
dash out to the convenience store. Your neighbor to the right, Mrs
Hungry, wants a banana and she's willing to pay $0.50 for it. Your
neighbor to the left, Mr Full, has a whole cupboard full of bananas,
but he's having a hard time paying his phone bill this month, so he'll
sell as many bananas as you want to buy for $0.30 apiece.
466
You might think that the neighborly thing to do here would be to call
up Mrs Hungry and tell her about Mr Full, letting them consummate the
deal. If you think that, forget getting rich without doing useful work.
467
If you're an arbitrageur, then you think of your neighbors' regrettable
ignorance as an opportunity. You snap up all of Mr Full's bananas, then
scurry over to Mrs Hungry's place with your hand out. For every banana
she buys, you pocket $0.20. This is called arbitrage.
468
Arbitrage is a high-risk way to earn a living. What happens if Mrs
Hungry changes her mind? You're stuck holding the bananas, that's what.
469
Or what happens if some other arbitrageur beats you to Mrs Hungry's
door, filling her apartment with all the bananas she could ever need?
Once again, you're stuck with a bunch of bananas and nowhere to put
them (though a few choice orifices do suggest themselves here).
470
In the real world, arbitrageurs don't drag around bananas -- they buy
and sell using networked computers, surveying all the outstanding
orders ("bids") and asks, and when they find someone willing to pay
more for something than someone else is paying for it, they snap up
that underpriced item, mark it up, and sell it.
471
And this happens very, very quickly. If you're going to beat the other
arbitrageurs with the goods, if you're going to get there before the
buyer changes her mind, you've got to move faster than the speed of
thought. Literally. Arbitrage isn't a matter of a human being
vigilantly watching the screens for price-differences.
472
No, arbitrage is all done by automated systems. These little traderbots
rove the world's networked marketplaces, looking for arbitrage
opportunities, buying something and selling it in less than a
microsecond. A good arbitrage house conducts a billion or more
trades every day, squeezing a few cents out of each one. A billion
times a few cents is a lot of money -- if you've got a fast computer
cluster, a good software engineer, and a blazing network connection,
you can turn out ten or twenty million dollars a day.
473
Not bad, considering that all you're doing is exploiting the fact that
there's a person over here who wants to buy something and a person over
there who wants to sell it. Not bad, considering that if you and all
your arbitraging buddies were to vanish tomorrow, the economy and the
world wouldn't even notice. No one needs or wants your "service" but
it's still a sweet way to get rich.
474
The best thing about arbitrage is that you don't need to know a single,
solitary thing about the stuff you're buying and selling in order to
get rich off of it. Whether it's bananas or a vorpal blade, all you
need to know about the things you're buying is that someone over
here wants to buy them for more than someone over there
wants to sell them for. Good thing, too -- if you're closing the deal
in less than a microsecond, there's no time to sit down and google up a
bunch of factoids about the merchandise.
475
And the merchandise is pretty weird. Start with the fact that a lot of
this stuff doesn't even exist -- vorpal blades, grabthar's hammers, the
gold of a thousand imaginary lands.
476
Now consider that people trade more than gold: the game Gods sell all
kinds of funny money. How about this one:
477
Offered: Svartalfaheim Warriors bonds, worth 100,000 gold, payable six
months from now. This isn't even real fake gold -- it's the
promise of real fake gold at some time in the future. Stick that into
the market for a couple months, baby, and watch it go. Here's a trader
who'll pay five percent more than it was worth yesterday -- he's
betting that the game will get more popular some time between now and
six months from now, and so the value of goods in the game will go up
at the same time.
478
Or maybe he's betting that the game Gods will just raise the price on
everything and make it harder to clobber enough monsters to raise the
gold to get it, driving away all but the hardest-core players, who'll
pay anything to get their hands on the dough.
479
Or maybe he's an idiot.
480
Or maybe he thinks you're an idiot and you'll give him ten
percent tomorrow, figuring that he knows something you don't.
481
And if you think that's weird, here's an even better one!
482
Coca-Cola sells you a six-month Svartalfaheim Warriors 100,000 gold
bond, but you're worried that it's going to fall in value between now
and D-Day, when the bond matures. So you find another trader and you
ask him for some insurance: you offer him $1.50 to insure your bond. If
the bond goes up in value, he gets to keep the $1.50 and you get to
keep the profits from the bond. If the bond goes down in value, he has
to pay you the difference. If that's more than $1.50, he's losing
money.
483
This is basically an insurance policy. If you go to a life-insurance
company and ask them for a policy on your life, they'll make a bet on
how likely it is that you're going to croak, and charge you enough
that, on average, they make a profit (providing they're guessing
accurately at your chances of dying). So if the trader you're talking
to thinks that Svartalfaheim Warriors is going to tank, he might charge
you $10, or $100.
484
So far, so good, right?
485
Now, here's where it gets even weirder. Follow along.
486
Imagine that there's a third party to this transaction, some guy
sitting on the sidelines, holding onto a pot of money, trying to figure
out what to do with it. He watches you go to the trader and buy an
insurance policy for $1.50 -- if Svartalfaheim Warriors gets better,
you're out $1.50, if it gets worse, the trader has to make up the
difference.
487
After you've sealed your deal, this third party, being something of a
ghoul, goes up to the same trader and says, "Hey, how about this? I
want to place the same bet you've just placed with that guy. I'll give
you $1.50 and if his bond goes up, you keep it. If his bond goes down,
you pay me and him the difference." Essentially, this guy is
betting that your bond is junk, and so maybe he finds a taker.
488
Now he's got this bet, which is worth nothing if your bond goes up, and
worth some unknown amount if your bond craters. And you know what he
does with it?
489
He sells it .
490
He packages it up and finds some sucker who wants to buy his $1.50 bet
on your bond for more than the $1.50 he'll have to cough up if your
bond goes up. And the sucker buys it and then he sells it. And
then another sucker buys it and he sells it. And before you know
it, the 100,000 gold-piece bond you bought for $15 has $1,000 worth of
bets hanging off of it.
491
And this is the kind of thing an arbitrageur is buying and
selling. He's not carrying bananas from Mr Full to Mrs Hungry -- he's
buying and selling bets on insurance policies on promises of imaginary
gold.
492
And this is what he calls an honest day's work.
493
Nice work if you can get it.
494
This scene is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the oldest
independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and
down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo
Alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the
middle of Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney
park freak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if
you don't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've
bought myself an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every
visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a
brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) books about
Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science fiction,
and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.
495
9
9
<
496
Matthew Fong and his employees raided through the night and into the
next day, farming as much gold as they could get out of their level
while the getting was good. They slept in shifts, and they co-opted
anyone who made the mistake of asking what they were up to, dragooning
them into mining the dungeon with them.
497
All the while, Master Fong was getting the gold out of their accounts
as fast as it landed in them. He knew that once the game Gods got wind
of his operation, they'd swoop in, suspend everyone's accounts, and
seize any gold they had in their inventory. The trick was to be sure
that there wasn't anything for them to seize.
498
So he hopped online and hit the big brokerage message-boards. These
weren't just grey-market, they were blackest black, and you needed to
know someone heavy to get in on them. Matthew's heavy was a guy from
Sichuan, skinny and shaky, with several missing teeth. He called
himself "Cobra," and he'd been the one who'd introduced Matthew to Boss
Wing all those months before. Cobra worked for someone who worked for
someone who worked for one of the big cartels, tough criminal
organizations that had all the markets for turning game-gold into cash
sewn up.
499
Cobra had given him a login and a briefing on how to do deals on the
brokernet. Now as the night wore on, he picked his way through the
interface, listing his gold and setting an asking price that was half
of the selling price listed on the white, above-ground gold-store that
gweilos used to buy the game gold from the brokers.
500
He waited, and waited, and waited, but no one bought his gold. Every
game world was divided into local servers and shards, and when you
signed up, you needed to set which server you wanted to play on. Once
you'd picked a server, you were stuck there -- your toon couldn't just
wander between the parallel universes. This made buying and selling
gold all the more difficult: if a gweilo wanted to buy gold for his
toon on server A, he needed to find a farmer who had mined his gold on
server A. If you mined all your gold on server B, you were out of luck.
501
That's where the brokers came in. They bought gold from everyone, and
held it in an ever-shifting network of accounts, millions of toons who
fanned out all over the worlds and exchanged small amounts of gold at
irregular intervals, to fool the anti-laundering snoops in the game
logic that relentlessly hunted for farmers and brokers to bust.
502
Avoiding those filters was a science, one that had been hammered
together over decades in the real world before it migrated to the
games. If a big pension fund in the real world wanted to buy half a
billion dollars' worth of stock in Google, the last thing they want to
do is tip off everyone else that they're about to sink that much cash
into Google. If they did, everyone else would snap up Google stock
before they could get to it, mark it up, and gouge them on it.
503
So anyone who wants to buy a lot of anything -- who wants to move a lot
of money around -- has to know how to do it in a way that's invisible
to snoops. They have to be statistically insignificant, which means
that a single big trade has to be broken up into millions of little
trades that look like ordinary suckers buying and selling a little
stock for the hell of it.
504
No matter what secrets you're trying to keep and no matter who you're
trying to keep them from, the techniques are the same. In every game
world there were thousands of seemingly normal characters doing
seemingly normal things, giving each other seemingly normal sums of
money, but at the end of the day, it all added up to millions of gold
in trade, taking place right under the noses of the game Gods.
505
Matthew down-priced his gold, seeking the price at which a broker would
deign to notice him and take it off of him. All the trading took place
in slangy, rapid Chinese -- that was one of the ways the brokers kept
their hold on the market, since there weren't that many Russians and
Indonesians and Indians who could follow it and play along -- replete
with insults and wheedles. Eventually, Matthew found the magic price.
It was lower than he'd hoped for, but not by much, and now that he'd
found it, he was able to move the team's gold as fast as they could
accumulate it, shuttling dummy players in and out of the dungeon they
were working to take the cash to bots run by the brokers.
506
Finally, it dried up. First, the amount of gold in the dungeon sharply
decreased, with the gold dropping from 12,000 per hour to 8,000, then
2,000, then a paltry 100. The mareridtbane disappeared next, which was
a pity, because he was able to sell that directly, hawking it in the
big towns, pasting and pasting and pasting his offer into the chat
where the real players could see it. And then in came the cops,
moderators with special halos around them who dropped canned lectures
into the chat, stern warnings about having violated the game's terms of
service.
507
And then the account suspensions, the games vanishing from one screen
after another, popping like soap bubbles. They were all dropped back to
the login screens and they slumped, grinning crazy and exhausted, in
their seats, looking at each other in exhausted relief. It was over, at
last.
508
"How much?" Lu asked, flung backwards over his chair, not opening his
eyes or lifting his head. "How much, Master Fong?"
509
Matthew didn't have his notebooks anymore, so he'd been keeping track
on the insides of Double Happiness cigarette packages, long, neat
tallies of numbers. His pen flickered from sheet to sheet, checking the
math one final time, then, quietly, "$3,400."
510
There was a stunned silence. "How much?" Lu had his eyes open now.
511
Matthew made a show of checking the figures again, but that's all it
was, a show. He knew that the numbers were right. "Three thousand, four
hundred and two dollars and fourteen cents." It was double the biggest
score they'd ever made for Boss Wing. It was the most money any of them
had ever made. His share of it was more than his father made in a
month. And he'd made it in one night.
512
"Sorry, how much ?"
513
"8,080 bowls of dumplings, Lu. That much."
514
The silence was even thicker. That was a lot of dumplings. That was
enough to rent their own place to use as a factory, a place with
computers and a fast internet connection and bedrooms to sleep in, a
place where they could earn and earn, where they could grow rich as any
boss.
515
Lu leapt out of his chair and whooped, a sound so loud that the entire
cafe turned to look at them, but they didn't care, they were all out of
their seats now, whooping and dancing around and hugging each other.
516
And now it was the day, a new day, the sun had come up and gone down
and risen in their long labor in the cafe, and they had won. It was a
new day for them and for everyone around them.
517
They stepped out into the sun and there were people on the streets,
throngs buying and selling, touts hustling, pretty girls in good
clothes walking arm in arm under a single parasol. The heat of the day
was like a blast furnace after the air-conditioned cool of the cafe,
but that was good, too -- it baked out the funk of cigarette-mouth,
coffee-mouth, no-food-mouth. Suddenly, none of them were sleepy. They
all wanted to eat.
518
So Matthew took them out for breakfast. They were his team, after all.
They took over the back table at an Indian restaurant near the train
station, a place he'd overheard his uncle Yiu-Yu telling his parents
about, bragging about some business associate who took him there. Very
sophisticated. And he'd read so much about Indian food in his comics,
he couldn't wait to try some.
519
All the other customers in there were either foreigners or Hong Kong
people, but they didn't let that get to them. The boys sat at their
back table and played with their forks and ate plate after plate of
curry and fresh hot flatbreads called naan, and it was delicious and
strange and the perfect end to what had turned out to be the perfect
night.
520
Halfway through the dessert -- delicious mango ice-cream -- the
sleeplessness finally caught up with them all. They sat on their seats
in their torpor, hands over their bellies, eyes half-open, and Matthew
called for the check.
521
They stepped out again into the light. Matthew had decided to go to his
parents' place, to sleep on the sofa for a little while, before
figuring out what to do about his smashed room with its smashed door.
522
As they blinked in the light, a familiar Wenjhou accented voice said,
"You aren't a very smart boy, are you?"
523
Matthew turned. Boss Wing's man was there, and three of his friends.
They rushed forward and grabbed the boys before they could react, one
of them so big that he grabbed a boy in each hand and nearly lifted
them off their feet.
524
His friends struggled to get free, but Boss Wing's man methodically
slapped them until they stopped.
525
Matthew couldn't believe that this was happening -- in broad daylight,
right here next to the train station! People crossed the street to
avoid them. Matthew supposed he would have done so too.
526
Boss Wing's man leaned in so close Matthew could smell the fish he'd
had for lunch on his breath. "Why are you a stupid boy, Matthew? You
didn't seem stupid when you worked for Boss Wing. You always seemed
smarter than these children." He flapped his hand disparagingly at the
boys. "But Boss Wing, he trained you, sheltered you, fed you, paid you
-- do you think it's honorable or fair for you to take all that
investment and run out the door with it?"
527
"We don't owe Boss Wing anything!" Lu shouted. "You think you can make
us work for him?"
528
Boss Wing's man shook his head. "What a little hothead. No one wants to
force you to do anything, child. We just don't think it's fair for you
to take all the training and investment we made in you and run across
the street and start up a competing business. It's not right, and Boss
Wing won't stand for it."
529
The curry churned in Matthew's stomach. "We have the right to start our
own business." The words were braver than he felt, but these were
his boys, and they gave him bravery. "If Boss Wing doesn't like
the competition, let him find another line of work."
530
Boss Wing's man didn't give him any forewarning before he slapped
Matthew so hard his head rang like a gong. He stumbled back two steps,
then tripped over his heels and fell on his ass, landing on the filthy
sidewalk. Boss Wing's man put a foot on his chest and looked down at
him.
531
"Little boy, it doesn't work like that. Here's the deal -- Boss Wing
understands if you don't want to work at his factory, that's fine. He's
willing to sell you the franchise to set up your own branch operation
of his firm. All you have to do is pay him a franchise fee of 60
percent of your gross earnings. We watched your gold-sales from
Svartalfaheim. You can do as much of that kind of work as you like, and
Boss Wing will even take care of the sales end of things for you, so
you'll be free to concentrate on your work. And because it's your firm,
you get to decide how you divide the money -- you can pay yourself
anything you like out of it."
532
Matthew burned with shame. His friends were all looking at him, goggle
eyed, scared. The weight from the foot on his chest increased until he
couldn't draw a breath.
533
Finally, he gasped out, "Fine ," and the pressure went away. Boss
Wing's man extended a hand, helped him to his feet.
534
"Smart," he said. "I knew you were a smart boy." He turned to Matthew's
friends. "Your little boss here is a smart man. He'll take you places.
You listen to him now."
535
Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, his
men following him.
536
This scene is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's
legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run
business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some
books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book
empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get
books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is
the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling
bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to
schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!
537
10 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540
USA +1 630 355 2665
10
<
538
The car that had plowed into Wei-Dong's father's car was driven by a
very exasperated, very tired British man, fat and bald, with two angry
kids in the back seat and an angry wife in the front seat.
539
He was steadily, quietly cursing in British, which was a lot like
cursing in American, but with a lot more "bloodies" in it. He paced the
sidewalk beside the wrecked Huawei, his wife calling at him from inside
the car to get back in the bloody car, Ronald, but Ronald wasn't having
any of it.
540
Wei-Dong sat on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the
sidewalk, dazed in the noon sun, waiting for his vision to stop
swimming. Benny sat next to him, holding a wad of kleenex to staunch
the bleeding from his broken nose, which he'd bounced off of the
dashboard. Wei-Dong brought his hands up to his forehead to finger the
lump there again. His hands smelled of new plastic, the smell of the
airbag that he'd had to punch his way out of.
541
The fat man crouched next to him. "Christ, son, you look like you've
been to the wars. But you'll be all right, right? Could have been much
worse."
542
"Sir," Benny Rosenbaum said, in a quiet voice muffled by the kleenex.
"Please leave us alone now. When the police come, we can all talk, all
right?"
543
"'Course, 'course." His kids were screaming now, hollering from the
back seat about getting to Disneyland, when were they getting to
Disneyland? "Shut it, you monsters," he roared. The sound made Wei-Dong
flinch back. He wobbled to his feet.
544
"Sit down, Leonard," his father said. "You shouldn't have gotten out of
the car, and you certainly shouldn't be walking around now. You could
have a concussion or a spinal injury. Sit down," he repeated, but
Wei-Dong needed to get off the grass, needed to walk off the sick
feeling in his stomach.
545
Uh-oh. He barely made it to the curb, hands braced on the crumpled,
flaking rear section of the Huawei, before he started to barf, a geyser
of used food that shot straight out of his guts and flew all over the
wreck of the car. A moment later, his father's hands were on his
shoulders, steadying him. Angrily, he shook them off.
546
There were sirens coming now, and the fat man was talking intensely to
old Benny, though it was quiet enough that Wei-Dong could only make out
a few words -- insurance, fault, vacation -- all in a wheedling
tone. His father kept trying to get a word in, but the guy was talking
over him. Wei-Dong could have told him that this wasn't a good
strategy. Nothing was surer to make Volcano Benny blow. And here it
came.
547
"Shut your mouth for a second, all right? Just SHUT IT. "
548
The shout was so loud that even the kids in the back seat went silent.
549
"YOU HIT US, you goddamned idiot! We're not going to go halves on the
damage. We're not going to settle this for cash. I don't care if
you're jetlagged, I don't care if you didn't buy the extra
insurance on your rental car, I don't care if this will ruin
your vacation. You could have killed us, you understand that, moron?"
550
The man held up his hands and cringed behind them. "You were parked in
the middle of the road, mate," he said, a note of pleading in his
voice.
551
Everyone was watching them, the kids and the guy's wife, the
rubberneckers who slowed down to see the accident. The two men were
totally focused on each other.
552
In other words, no one was watching Wei-Dong.
553
He thought about the sound his earwig made, crunching under his
father's steel-toed shoe, heard the sirens getting closer, and...
554
He...
555
Left.
556
He sidled away toward the shrubs that surrounded a mini-mall and
gas-station, nonchalant, clutching his school-bag, like he was just
getting his bearings, but he was headed toward a gap there, a narrow
one that he just barely managed to squeeze through. He popped through
into the parking lot around the mini-mall, filled with stores selling
$3 t-shirts and snow-globes and large bottles of filtered water. On
this side of the shrubs, the world was normal and busy, filled with
tourists on their way to or from Disneyland.
557
He picked up his pace, keeping his face turned away from the stores and
the CCTV cameras outside of them. He felt in his pocket, felt the few
dollars there. He had to get away, far away, fast, if he was going to
get away at all.
558
And there was his salvation, the tourist bus that rolled through the
streets of the Anaheim Resort District, shuttling people from hotels to
restaurants to the parks, crowded with sugared-up kids and
conventioneers with badges hanging around their necks, and it was
trundling to the stop just a few yards away. He broke into a run,
stumbled from the pain that seared through his head like a lightning
bolt, then settled for walking as quickly as he could. The sirens were
very, very loud now, right there on the other side of the shrubs, and
he was almost at the bus and there was his father's voice, calling his
name and there was the bus and --
559
-- his foot came down on the bottom step, his back foot came up to join
it, and the impatient driver closed the doors behind him and released
the air-brake with a huge sigh and the bus lurched forward.
560
"Wei-Dong Rosenbaum," he whispered to himself, "you've just escaped a
parental kidnapping to a military school, what are you going to do
now?" He grinned. "I'm going to Disneyland!"
561
The bus trundled down Katella, heading for the bus-entrance, and then
it disgorged its load of frenetic tourists. Wei-Dong mingled with them,
invisible in the mass of humanity skipping past the huge,
primary-colored traffic pylons. He was on autopilot, remained on
autopilot as he unslung his school-bag to let the bored security goon
paw through it.
562
He'd had a Disneyland annual pass since he was old enough to ride the
bus. All the kids he knew had them too -- it beat going to the mall
after school, and even though it got boring after a while, he could
think of no better place to disappear into while thinking through his
next steps.
563
He walked down Main Street, heading for the little pink castle at the
end of the road. He knew that there were secluded benches on the
walkways around the castle, places where he could sit down and think
for a moment. His head felt like it was full of candy floss.
564
First thing he did after sitting down was check his phone. The ringer
had been off -- school rules -- but he'd felt it vibrating continuously
in his pocket. Fifteen missed calls from his father. He dialled up his
voicemail and listened to his dad rant about coming back right
now and all the dire things that would happen to him if he didn't.
565
"Kid, whatever you think you're doing, you're wrong about it. You're
going to come home eventually. The sooner you call me back, the less
trouble we're going to have. And the longer you wait -- you listen
to this, Leonard -- the longer you wait, the worse it's going to
be . There are worse things than boarding school, kid. Much, much
worse."
566
He stared vacantly at the sky, listening to this, and then he dropped
the phone as though he'd been scorched by it.
567
It had a GPS in it . They were always using phones to find
runaways and bad guys and lost hikers. He picked the phone up off the
pavement and slid the back out and removed the battery, then put it in
his jacket pocket, returning the phone to his jeans. He wasn't much of
a fugitive.
568
The police had been on the way to the accident when he left. They'd
arrived minutes later. The old man had decided that he'd run away, so
he'd be telling the cops that. He was a minor, and truant, and he'd
been in a car accident, and hell, face it, his family was rich. That
meant that the police would pay attention to his dad, which meant that
they'd be doing everything they could to locate him. If they hadn't yet
figured out where his phone was, they'd know soon enough -- they'd run
the logs and find the call from Disneyland to his voicemail.
569
He started moving, shoving his way through the crowds, heading back up
Main Street. He ducked around behind a barbershop quartet and realized
that he was standing in front of an ATM. They'd be shutting down his
card any second, too -- or, if they were smart, they'd leave the card
live and use it to track him. He needed cash. He waited while a pair of
German tourists fumbled with the machine and then jammed his card into
it and withdrew $500, the most the machine would dispense. He hit it
again for another $500, self-conscious now of the inch-thick wad of
twenties in his hand. He tried for a third withdrawal, but the machine
told him he'd gone to his daily limit. He didn't think he had much more
than $1,000 in the bank, anyway -- that was several years' worth of
birthday money, plus a little from his summer job working at a Chinese
PC repair shop at a mini-mall in Irvine.
570
He folded the wad and stuck it in his pocket and headed out of the
park, not bothering with the hand-stamp. He started to head for the
street, but then he turned on his heel and headed toward the Downtown
Disney shopping complex and the hotels that attached to it. There were
cheap tour-buses that went from there up to LA, down to San Diego, to
all the airports. There was no easier, cheaper way to get far from
here.
571
The lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel soared to unimaginable
heights, giant beams criss-crossing through the cavernous space.
Wei-Dong had always liked this place. It always seemed so
rendered , like an imaginary place, with the intricate marble
inlays on the floor, the ten-foot-high stained-glass panels set into
the sliding doors, the embroidered upholstery on the sofas. Now,
though, he just wanted to get through it and onto a bus to --
572
Where?
573
Anywhere.
574
He didn't know what he was going to do next, but one thing he did know,
he wasn't going to be sent away to some school for screwups, kicked off
the Internet, kicked off the games. His father wouldn't have allowed
anyone to do this to him , no matter what problems he was having.
The old man would never let himself be pushed around and shaken up like
this.
575
His mother would worry -- but she always worried, didn't she? He'd send
her email once he got somewhere, an email every day, let her know that
he was OK. She was good to him. Hell, the old man was good to him, come
to that. Mostly. But he was seventeen now, he wasn't a kid, he wasn't a
broken toy to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
576
The man behind the concierge desk didn't bat an eye when Wei-Dong asked
for the schedule for the airport shuttles, just handed it over.
Wei-Dong sat down in the darkest corner by the stone fireplace, the
most inconspicuous place in the whole hotel. He was starting to get
paranoid now, he could recognize the feeling, but it didn't help soothe
him as he jumped and stared at every Disney cop who strolled through
the lobby, doubtless he was looking as guilty as a mass-murderer.
577
The next bus was headed for LAX, and the one after, for the Santa
Monica airport. Wei-Dong decided that LAX was the right place to go.
Not so he could get on a plane -- if his dad had called the cops, he
was sure they'd have some kind of trace on at the ticket-sales windows.
He didn't know exactly how that worked, but he understood how
bottlenecks worked, thanks to gaming. Right now, he could be anywhere
in LA, which meant that they'd have to devote a gigantic amount of
effort in order to find him. But if he tried to leave by airplane,
there'd be a much smaller number of places they'd have to check to
catch him -- the airline counters at four or five airports in town --
and that was a lot more practical.
578
But LAX also had cheap buses to everywhere in LA, buses that
went to every hotel and neighborhood. It would take a long time, sure
-- an hour and a half from Disneyland to LAX, another hour or two to
get back to LA, but that was fine. He needed time -- time to figure out
what he was going to do next.
579
Because when he was totally honest with himself, he had to admit that
he had no freaking idea.
580
This scene is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the
University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many
specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction
buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met
him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and
it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store.
One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf
review" -- the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with
(generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books
you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have
clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the
University Bookstore are second to none.
581
11 4326 University Way NE,
Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ
11
<
582
Mala woke early, after a troubled sleep. In the village, she'd often
risen early, and listened to the birds. But there was no birdsong when
her eyes fluttered open, only the sussuration of Dharavi -- cars, rats,
people, distant factory noises, goats. A rooster. Well, that was a kind
of bird. A little smile touched her lips, and she felt slightly better.
583
Not much, though. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, stretched her arms.
Gopal still slept, snoring softly, lying on his stomach the way he had
when he was a baby. She needed the toilet, and, as it was light out,
she decided that she would go out to the communal one a little ways
away, rather than using the covered bucket in the room. In the village,
they'd had a proper latrine, deep dug, with a pot of clean water
outside of it that the women kept filled all the time. Here in Dharavi,
the communal toilet was a much more closed-in, reeking place, never
very clean. The established families in Dharavi had their own private
toilets, so the public ones were only used by newcomers.
584
It wasn't so bad this morning. There were ladies who got up even
earlier than her to slosh it out with water hauled from the nearby
communal tap. By nightfall, the reek would be eye-watering.
585
She loitered in the street in front of the house. It wasn't too hot
yet, or too crowded, or too noisy. She wished it was. Maybe the noise
and the crowds would drown out the worry racing through her mind. Maybe
the heat would bake it out.
586
She'd brought her mobile out with her. It danced with notifiers about
new things she could pay to see -- shows and cartoons and political
messages, sent in the night. She flicked them away impatiently and
scrolled through her address-book, stopping at Mr Banerjee's name and
staring at it. Her finger poised over the send button.
587
It was too early, she thought. He'd be asleep. But he never was, was
he? Mr Banerjee seemed to be awake at all hours, messaging her with new
targets to take her army to. He'd be awake. He'd have been up all
night, talking to Mrs Dibyendu.
588
Her finger hovered over the Send button.
589
The phone rang.
590
She nearly dropped it in surprise, but she managed to settle it in her
hand and switch off the ringer, peer at the face. Mr Banerjee, of
course, as though he'd been conjured into her phone by her thoughts and
her staring anxiety.
591
"Hello?" she said.
592
"Mala," he said. He sounded grave.
593
"Mr Banerjee." It came out in a squeak.
594
He didn't say anything else. She knew this trick. She used it with her
army, especially on the boys. Saying nothing made a balloon of silence
in your opponent's head, one that swelled to fill it, until it began to
echo with their anxieties and doubts. It worked very well. It worked
very well, even if you knew how it worked. It was working well on her.
595
She bit her lip. Otherwise she would have blurted something, maybe
He was going to hurt me or He had it coming or I did
nothing wrong .
596
Or, I am a warrior and I am not ashamed .
597
There . There was the thought, though it wanted to slip away and
hide behind He was going to hurt me , that was the thought she
needed, the platoon she needed to bring to the fore. She marshalled the
thought, chivvied it, turned it into an orderly skirmish line and
marched it forward.
598
"Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew tried to assault me last night, in case
you haven't heard." She waited a beat. "I didn't let him do it. I don't
think he'll try it again."
599
There was a snort, very faint, down the phone line. A suppressed laugh?
Barely contained anger? "I heard about it, Mala. The boy is in the
hospital."
600
"Good," she said, before she could stop herself.
601
"One of his ribs broke and punctured his lung. But they say he'll live.
Still, it was quite close."
602
She felt sick. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn't he
have left her alone? "I'm glad he'll live."
603
"Mrs Dibyendu called me in the night to tell me that her sister's only
son had been attacked. That he'd been attacked by a vicious gang of
your friends. Your 'army'."
604
Now she snorted. "He says it because he's embarrassed to have
been so badly beaten by me, just me, just a girl."
605
Again, the silence ballooned in the conversation. He's waiting for
me to say I'm sorry, that I'll make it up somehow, that he can take it
from my wages. She swallowed. I won't do it. The idiot made me
attack him, and he deserved what he got.
606
"Mrs Dibyendu," he began, then stopped. "There are expenses that come
from something like this, Mala. Everything has a cost. You know that.
It costs you to play at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. It costs me to have you do
it. Well, this has a cost, too."
607
Now it was her turn to be quiet, and to think at him, as hard as she
can, Oh yes, well, I think I already exacted payment from idiot
nephew. I think he's paid the cost.
608
"Are you listening to me?"
609
She made a grunt of assent, not trusting herself to open her mouth.
610
"Good. Listen carefully. The next month, you work for me . Every
rupee is mine, and I make this bad thing that you've brought down on
yourself go away."
611
She pulled the phone away from her head as if it had gone red hot and
burned her. She stared at the faceplate. From very far away, Mr
Banerjee said, "Mala? Mala? " She put the phone back to
her head.
612
She was breathing hard now. "It's impossible," she said, trying to stay
calm. "The army won't fight without pay. My mother can't live without
my pay. We'll lose our home. No," she repeated, "it's not possible."
613
"Not possible? Mala, it had better be possible. Whether or not you work
for me, I will have to make this right with Mrs Dibyendu. It's my duty,
as your employer, to do this. And that will cost money. You have
incurred a debt that I must settle for you, and that means that you
have to be prepared to settle with me ."
614
"Then don't settle it," she said. "Don't give her one rupee. There are
other places we can play. Her nephew brought it on himself. We can play
somewhere else."
615
"Mala, did anyone see this boy lay his hands on you?"
616
"No," she said. "He waited until we were alone."
617
"And why were you alone with him? Where was your army?"
618
"They'd already gone home. I'd stayed late." She thought of Big Sister
Nor and her metamecha, of the union. Mr Banerjee would be even angrier
if she told him about Big Sister Nor. "I was studying tactics," she
said. "Practicing on my own."
619
"You stayed alone with this boy, in the middle of the night. What
happened, really, Mala? Did you want to see what it was like to kiss
him like a fillum star, and then it got out of control? Is that how it
happened?"
620
"No! " She shouted it so loud that she heard people groaning in
their beds, calling sleepily out from behind their open windows. "I
stayed late to practice, he tried to stop me. I knocked him down and he
chased me. I knocked him down and then I taught him why he shouldn't
have chased me."
621
"Mala," he said, and she thought he was trying to sound fatherly now,
stern and old and masculine. "You should have known better than to put
yourself in that position. A general knows that you win some fights by
not getting into them at all. Now, I'm not an unreasonable man. Of
course, you and your mother and your army all need my money if you're
going to keep fighting. You can borrow a wage-packet from me during
this month, something to pay everyone with, and then you can pay it
back, little by little, over the next year or so. I'll take five in
twenty rupees for 12 months, and we'll call it even."
622
It was hope, terrible, awful hope. A chance to keep her army, her flat,
her respect. All it would cost her was one quarter of her earnings.
She'd have three quarters left. Three quarters was better than nothing.
It was better than telling Mamaji that it was all over.
623
"Yes," she said. "All right, fine. But we don't play at Mrs Dibyendu's
cafe anymore."
624
"Oh, no," he said. "I won't hear of it. Mrs Dibyendu will be glad to
have you back. You'll have to apologize to her, of course. You can
bring her the money for her nephew. That will make her feel better, I'm
sure, and heal any wounds in your friendship."
625
"Why?" There were tears on her cheeks now. "Why not let us go somewhere
else? Why does it matter?"
626
"Because, Mala, I am the boss and you are the worker and that is the
factory you work in. That's why." His voice was hard now, all the lilt
of false concern gone away, leaving behind a grinding like rock on
rock.
627
She wanted to put the phone down on him, the way they did in the movies
when they had their giant screaming rows, and threw their phones into
the well or smashed them on the wall. But she couldn't afford to
destroy her phone and she couldn't afford to make Mr Banerjee angry.
628
So she said, "All right," in a quiet little voice that sounded like a
mouse trying not to be noticed.
629
"Good girl, Mala. Smart girl. Now, I've got your next mission for you.
Are you ready?"
630
Numbly, she memorized the details of the mission, who she was going to
kill and where. She thought that if she did this job quickly, she could
ask him for another one, and then another -- work longer hours, pay off
the debt more quickly.
631
"Smart girl, good girl," he said again, once she'd repeated the details
back to him, and then he put the phone down.
632
She pocketed her phone. Around her, Dharavi had woken, passing by her
like she was a rock in a river, pressing past her on either side. Men
with shovels and wheelbarrows, boys with enormous rice-sacks on each
shoulder, filled with grimy plastic bottles on their way to some
sorting house, a man with a long beard and kufi skullcap and kurta
shirt hanging down to his knees leading a goat with a piece of rope. A
trio of women in saris, their midriffs stretched and striated with the
marks of the babies they'd borne, carrying heavy buckets of water from
the communal tap. There were cooking smells in the air, a sizzle of
dhal on the grill and the fragrant smell of chai. A boy passed by her,
younger than Gopal, wearing flapping sandals and short pants, and he
spat a stream of sickly sweet betel at her feet.
633
The smell made her remember where she was and what had happened and
what she had to do now.
634
She went past the Das family on the ground floor and trudged up the
stairs to their flat. Mamaji and Gopal were awake and bustling. Mamaji
had fetched the water and was making the breakfast over the propane
burner, and Gopal had his school uniform shirt and knee-trousers on.
The Dharavi school he attended lasted for half the day, which gave him
a little time to play and do homework and then a few more hours to work
alongside of Mamaji in the factory.
635
"Where have you been?" Mamaji said.
636
"On the phone," she said, patting the little pocket sewn of her tunic.
"With Mr Banerjee." She waggled her chin from side to side, saying
I've had business .
637
"What did he say?" Mamaji's voice was quiet and full of false
nonchalance.
638
Mamaji didn't need to know what transpired between Mr Banerjee and her.
Mala was the general and she could manage her own affairs.
639
"He said that all was forgiven. The boy deserved it. He'll make it fine
with Mrs Dibyendu, and it will be fine." She waggled her chin from side
to side again -- It's all fine. I've taken care of it .
640
Mamaji stared into the pan and the food sizzling in it and nodded to
herself. Though she couldn't see, Mala nodded back. She was General
Robotwallah and she could make it all good.
641
This scene is dedicated to Forbidden Planet, the British chain of
science fiction and fantasy book, comic, toy and video stores.
Forbidden Planet has stores up and down the UK, and also sports
outposts in Manhattan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot
in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do I escape with my wallet intact.
Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in bringing the gigantic
audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact with science
fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the future of
the field.
642
12
12
<
643
Wei-Dong had been to downtown LA once, on a class trip to the Disney
Concert Hall, but then they'd driven in, parked, and marched like
ducklings into the hall and then out again, without spending any time
actually wandering around. He remembered watching the streets go by
from the bus window, faded store windows and slow-moving people,
check-cashing places and liquor stores. And Internet cafes. Lots and
lots of Internet cafes, especially in Koreatown, where every strip mall
had a garish sign advertising "PC Baang" -- Korean for net-cafe.
644
But he didn't know exactly where Koreatown was, and he needed an
Internet cafe to google it, and so he caught the LAX bus to the Disney
Concert Hall, thinking he could retrace the bus-route and find his way
to those shops, get online, talk to his homies in Guangzhou, figure out
the next thing.
645
But Koreatown turned out to be harder to find and farther than he'd
thought. He asked the bus-driver for directions, who looked at him like
he was crazy and pointed downhill. And so he started walking, and
walking, and walking for block after dusty block. From the window of
the school-bus, downtown LA had looked slow-moving and faded, like a
photo left too long in a window.
646
On foot, it was frenetic, the movement of the buses, the homeless
people walking or wheeling or hobbling past him, asking him for money.
He had $1000 in his front jeans pocket, and it seemed to him that the
bulge must be as obvious as a boner at the blackboard in class. He was
sweating, and not just from the heat, which seemed ten degrees hotter
than it had been in Disneyland.
647
And now he wasn't anywhere near Koreatown, but had rather found his way
to Santee Alley, the huge, open-air pirate market in the middle of LA.
He'd heard about the place before, you saw it all the time in
news-specials about counterfeit goods busts, pictures of Mexican guys
being led away while grimly satisfied cops in suits or uniform baled up
mountains of fake shirts, fake DVDs, fake jeans, fake games.
648
Santee Alley was a welcome relief from the streets around it. He
wandered deep into the market, the storefronts all blaring their
technobrega and reggaton at him, the hawkers calling out their wares.
It was like the real market on which all the hundreds of in-game
markets he'd visited had been based upon and he found himself slowing
down and looking in at the gangster clothes and the bad souvenir junk
and the fake electronics. He bought a big cup of watermelon drink and a
couple of empanadas from a stall, carefully drawing a single twenty
from his pocket without bringing out the whole thing.
649
Then he'd found an Internet cafe, filled with Guatemalans chatting with
their families back home, wearing slick and tiny earwigs. The girl
behind the counter -- barely older than him -- sold him one that
claimed to be a Samsung for $18, and then rented him a PC to use it
with. The fake earwig fit as well as his real one had, though it had a
rough seam of plastic running around its length while his had been as
smooth as beach-glass.
650
But it didn't matter. He had his network connection, he had his earwig,
and he had his game. What more could he need?
651
Well, his posse, for starters. They were nowhere to be found. He
checked his new watch and pressed the button that flipped it to the
Chinese timezone. 5AM. Well, that explained it.
652
He checked his inventory, checked the guild-bank. He hadn't been able
to do the corpse run after he'd been snatched out of the game by his
father and the Ronald Reagan High Thought Police, so he didn't expect
to have his vorpal blade still, but he did, which meant that one of the
gang had rescued it for him, which was awfully thoughtful. But that was
just what guildies did for each other, after all.
653
It was coming up to dinner-time on the east coast, which meant that
Savage Wonderland was starting to fill up with people getting home from
work. He thought about the black riders who slaughtered them that
morning and wondered who they'd been. There were plenty of people who
hunted gold farmers, either because they worked for the game or for a
rival gold-farm clan, or because they were bored rich players who hated
the idea of poor people invading "their" space and working where they
played.
654
He knew he should flip to his email and check for messages from his
parents. He didn't like using email, but his parents were addicted to
it. No doubt they were freaking out by now, calling out the army and
navy and the national guard to find their wayward son. Well, they could
freak out all they wanted. He wasn't going to go back and he didn't
need to go back.
655
He had $1000 in his pocket, he was nearly 18 years old, and there were
lots of ways to get by in the big city that didn't involve selling
drugs or your body. His guildies had shown him that. All you needed to
earn a living was a connection to the net and a brain in your head. He
looked around the cafe at the dozens of Guatemalans talking to home on
their earwigs, many not much older than him. If they could earn a
living -- not speaking the language, not legal to work, no formal
education, hardly any idea of how to use technology beyond the little
bit of knowledge necessary to call home on the cheap -- then surely he
could. His grandfather had come to America and found a job when he was
Wei-Dong's age. It was a family tradition, practically.
656
It wasn't that he didn't love his parents. He did. They were good
people. They loved him in their way. But they lived in a bubble of
unreality, a bubble called Orange County, where they still had rows of
neat identical houses and neat identical lives, while around them,
everything was collapsing. His father couldn't see it, even though
hardly a day went by that he didn't come home and complain bitterly
about the containers that had fallen off his ship in yet another
monster storm, about the price of diesel sailing through the
stratosphere, about the plummeting dollar and the skyrocketing Renminbi
and the ever-tightening belts of Americans whose orders for goods from
South China were clobbering his business.
657
Wei-Dong had figured all this out because he paid attention and he saw
things as they were. Because he talked to China, and China talked back
to him. The fat and comfortable world he'd grown up in was not
permanent; scratched in the sand, not carved in stone. His friends in
China could see it better than anyone else could. Lu had worked as a
security guard in a factory in Shilong New Town, a city that made
appliances for sale in Britain. It had taken Wei-Dong some time to
understand this: the entire city, four million people, did nothing but
make appliances for sale in Britain, a country with eighty million
people.
658
Then, one day, the factories on either side of Lu's had closed. They
had all made goods for a few different companies, employing armies of
young women to run the machines and assemble the pieces that came out
of them. Young women always got the best jobs. Bosses liked them
because they worked hard and didn't argue so much -- at least, that's
what everyone said. When Lu left his village in Sichuan province to
come to south China, he'd talked to one of the girls who had come home
from the factories for the Mid-Autumn Festival, a girl who'd left a few
years before and found wealth in Dongguan, who'd bought her parents a
fine new two-storey house with her money, who came home every year for
the Festival in fine clothes with a new mobile phone in a designer bag,
looking like an alien or a model stepped fresh out of a magazine ad.
659
"If you go to a factory and it's not full of young girls, don't take a
job there," was her advice. "Any place that can't attract a lot of
young girls, there's something wrong with it." But the factory that Lu
worked at -- all the factories in Shilong New Town -- were filled with
young girls. The only jobs for men were as drivers, security guards,
cleaners and cooks. The factories boomed, each one a small city itself,
with its own kitchens, its own dormitories, its own infirmary and its
own customs checkpoint where every vehicle and visitor going in or out
of the wall got checked and inspected.
660
And these indomitable cities had crumbled. The Highest Quality
Dishwasher Company factory closed on Monday. The Boundless Energy
Enterprises hot-water heater plant went on Wednesday. Every day, Lu saw
the bosses come in and out in their cars, waving them through after
they'd flicked their IDs at him. One day, he steeled his nerve and
leaned in the window, his face only inches from that of the man who
paid his wages every month.
661
"We're doing better than the neighbors, eh, Boss?" He tried for a
jovial smile, the best he could muster, but he knew it wasn't very
good.
662
"We do fine," the boss had barked. He had very smooth skin and a smart
sport-coat, but his shoulders were dusted with dandruff. "And no one
says otherwise!"
663
"Just as you say, boss," Lu said, and leaned out of the window, trying
to keep his smile in place. But he'd seen it in the boss's face -- the
factory would close.
664
The next day, no bus came to the bus-stop. Normally, there would have
been fifty or sixty people waiting for the bus, mostly young men, the
women mostly lived in the dorms. Security guards and janitors didn't
rate dorm rooms. That morning, there were eight people waiting when he
arrived at the bus-stop. Ten minutes went by and a few more trickled to
the stop, and still no bus came. Thirty minutes passed -- Lu was now
officially late for work -- and still no bus came. He canvassed his
fellow waiters to see if anyone was going near his factory and might
want to share a taxi -- an otherwise unthinkable luxury, but losing his
job even was more unthinkable.
665
One other guy, with a Shaanxi accent, was willing, and that's when they
noticed that there didn't seem to be any taxis cruising on the road
either. So Lu, being Lu, walked to work, fifteen kilometers in the
scorching, melting, dripping heat, his security guard's shirt and coat
over his arm, his undershirt rolled up to bare his belly, the dust
caking up on his shoes. And when he arrived at the Miracle Spirit
condenser dryer factory and found himself in a mob of thousands of
screeching young women in factory-issue smocks, crowded around the
fence and the double-padlocked rattling it and shouting at the
factory's darkened doors. Many of the girls had small backpacks or
duffel-bags, overstuffed and leaking underwear and makeup on the
ground.
666
"What's going on?" he shouted at one, pulling her out of the mob.
667
"The bastards shut the factory and put us out. They did it at
shift-change. Pulled the fire-alarm and screamed 'Fire' and 'Smoke' and
when we were all out here, they ran out and padlocked the gate!"
668
"Who?" He'd always thought that if the factory were going to shut down,
they'd use the security guards to do it. He'd always thought that he,
at least, would get one last paycheck out of the company.
669
"The bosses, six of them. Mr Dai and five of his supervisors. They
locked the front gate and then they drove off through the back gate,
locking it behind them. We're all locked out. All my things are in
there! My phone, my money, my clothes --"
670
Her last paycheck. It was only three days to payday, and, of course,
the company had kept their first eight weeks' wages when they all
started working. You had to ask your boss's permission if you wanted to
change jobs and keep the money -- otherwise you'd have to abandon two
months' pay.
671
Around Lu, the screams rose in pitch and small, feminine fists flailed
at the air. Who were they shouting at? The factory was empty. The
factory was empty. If they climbed the fence, cutting the barbed wire
at the top, and then broke the locks on the factory doors, they'd have
the run of the place. They couldn't carry out a condenser dryer -- not
easily, anyway -- but there were plenty of small things: tools, chairs,
things from the kitchen, the personal belongings of the girls who
hadn't thought to bring them with when the fire alarm sounded. Lu knew
about all the things that could be smuggled out of the factory. He was
a security guard. Or had been. Part of his job had been to search the
other employees when they left to make sure they weren't stealing. His
supervisor, Mr Chu, had searched him at the end of each shift,
in turn. He wasn't sure who, if anyone, searched Mr Chu.
672
He had a small multitool that he clipped to his belt every morning.
Having a set of pliers, a knife, and a screwdriver on you all the time
changed the way you saw the world -- it became a place to be cut,
sliced, pried and unscrewed.
673
"Is that your only jacket?" he shouted into the ear of the girl he'd
been talking to. She was a little shorter than him, with a large mole
on her cheek that he rather liked.
674
"Of course not!" she said. "I have three others inside."
675
"If I get you those three, can I use this one?" He unfolded the pliers
on his multitool. They were joined by a set of cogs that compounded the
leverage of a squeezing palm, and the jaws of the plier were inset with
a pair of wicked-sharp wire-cutters. The girl in his village had worked
for a time in the SOG factory in Dongguan and she'd given him a pair
and wished him good luck in South China.
676
The girl with three more jackets looked up at the barbed wire. "You'll
be cut to ribbons," she said.
677
He grinned. "Maybe," he said. "I think I can do it, though."
678
"Boys," she hollered in his ear. He could smell her breakfast congee on
her breath, mixed with toothpaste. It made him homesick. "All right.
But be careful!" She shrugged out of the jacket, revealing a set of
densely muscled arms, worked to lean strength on the line. He wrapped
it around his left hand, then wrapped his own coat around that, so that
his hand looked like a cartoon boxing-glove, trailing sleeves flapping
down beneath it.
679
It wasn't easy to climb the fence with one hand wrapped in a dozen
thicknesses of fabric, but he'd always been a great climber, even in
the village, a daring boy who'd gotten a reputation for climbing
anything that stood still: trees, houses, even factories. He had one
good hand, two feet, and one bandaged hand, and that was enough to get
up the fifteen feet to the top. Once there, he gingerly wrapped his
left hand around the razorwire, careful to pull straight down on it and
not to saw from side to side. He had a vision of himself slipping and
falling, the razorwire slicing his fingers from his hand so that they
fell to the other side of the fence, wriggling like worms in the dust
as he clutched his mangled hand and screamed, geysering blood over the
girls around him.
680
Well, you'd better not slip, then , he thought grimly, carefully
unfolding the multitool with his other hand, flipping it around like a
butterfly knife (a move he'd often practiced, playing gunfighter in his
room or when no one else was around at the gate). He gingerly slid it
around the first coil of wire and squeezed down, watching the teeth on
the gears mesh and strain at one another, turning the leverage of his
right hand into hundreds of pounds of pressure bearing down right at
the cutting edge of the pliers. They bit into the wire, caught, and
then parted it.
681
The coil of wire sprang free with a twoingggg sound, and he
ducked away just in time to avoid having his nose -- and maybe his ear
and eye -- sliced off by the wire.
682
But now he could transfer his left hand to the top of the fence, and
put more weight on it, and reach for the second coil of wire with the
cutters, hanging way out from the fence, as far as he could, to avoid
the coil when it sprang free. Which it did, parting just as easily as
the other coil had, and flying directly at him, and it was only by
releasing his feet and dangling one-handed from the fence, slamming his
body into it, that he avoided having his throat cut. As it was, the
wire made a long scratch in the back of his scalp, which began to bleed
freely down his back. He ignored it. Either it was shallow and would
stop on its own, or it was deep and he'd need medical attention, but
either way, he was going to clear the fencetop.
683
All that remained now were three strands of barbed wire, and they were
tougher to cut than the razorwire had been, but the barbs were widely
spaced and the wire itself was less prone to crazy twanging whipsaws
than the coiled razorwire. As each one parted, there was a roar of
approval from the girls below him, and even though his scalp was
stinging fiercely, he thought this might just be his finest hour, the
first time in his life that he'd been something more than a security
guard who'd left his backwards town to find insignificance in Guandong
province.
684
And now he was able to unwind the jackets from around his hand and
simply hop over the fence and clamber down the other side like a
monkey, grinning all the way at the horde of young girls who were
coming up the other side in a great wave. It wasn't long before the
girl with three more jackets caught him up. He shook out her jacket --
sliced through in four or five places -- like a waiter offering a lady
her coat, and she delicately slid those muscular arms into it and then
she turned him around and poked at his scalp.
685
"Shallow," she said. "It'll bleed a lot, but you'll be OK." She planted
a sisterly kiss on his cheek. "You're a good boy," she said, and then
ran off to join the stream of girls who were entering the factory
through a smashed door.
686
Shortly, he found himself alone in the factory yard, amid the neat
gravel pathways and the trimmed lawns. He let himself into the factory
but he couldn't actually bring himself to take anything, though they
owed him nearly three months' wages. Somehow, it seemed to him that the
girls who'd used the tools should have their pick of the tools, that
the men who'd cooked the meals should have their pick of the things
from the kitchens.
687
Finally, he settled on one of the communal bicycles that were neatly
parked near the factory gates. These were used by all the employees
equally, and besides, he needed to get home and walking back with a
scalp wound in the mid-day heat didn't sound like much of a plan.
688
On the way home, the world seemed much changed. He'd become a criminal,
for one thing, which seemed to him to be quite a distance from a
security guard. But it was more than that: the air seemed clearer
(later, he read that the air was clearer, thanks to all the
factories that had shut down and the buses that had stayed parked).
Most of the shops seemed closed and the remainder were tended by
listless storekeepers who sat on their stoops or played Mah-Jongg on
them, though it was the middle of the day. All the restaurants and
cafes were shut. At a train-crossing, he watched an intercity train
shoot past, every car jammed with young women and their bags, leaving
Shilong New Town to find their way somewhere else where there was still
work.
689
Just like that, in the space of just a week or two, this giant city had
died. It had all seemed so incredibly powerful when he'd arrived, new
paved roads and new stores and new buildings, and the factories soaring
against the sky wherever you looked.
690
By the time he reached home -- dizzy from the aching cut on his scalp,
sweaty, hungry -- he knew that the magical city was just a pile of
concrete and a mountain of workers' sweat, and that it had all the
permanence of a dream. Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the
name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city
had died.
691
He thought he'd lie down for just the briefest of naps, but by the time
he got up and gathered a few things into a duffel-bag and got back on
his bike, not bothering to lock the door of his apartment behind him,
the train station was barricaded, and there was a long line of refugees
slogging down the road to Shenzhen, two days' walk away at least. He
was glad he'd taken the bicycle then. Later, he found a working ATM and
drew out some cash, which was more reassuring than he'd anticipated.
For a while there, it had seemed like the world had come to an end. It
was a relief to find out that it was just his little corner.
692
In Shenzhen, he'd started hanging out in Internet cafes, because they
were the cheapest places to sit indoors, out of the heat, and because
they were filled with young men like him, scraping by. And because he
could talk to his parents from there, telling them made-up stories
about his non-existent job-search, promising that he'd start sending
money home soon.
693
And that was where the guild found him, Ping and his friends, and they
had this buddy on the other side of the planet, this Wei-Dong character
who'd hung rapt on every turn of his tale, who'd told him that he'd
written it up for a social studies report at school, which made them
all laugh. And he'd found happiness and work, and he'd found a truth,
too: the world wasn't built on rock, but rather on sand, and it would
shift forever.
694
Wei-Dong didn't know how much longer his father's business would last.
Maybe thirty years -- but he thought it would be a lot less than that.
Every day, he woke in his bedroom under his Spongebob sheets and
thought about which of these things he could live without, just how
basic his life could get.
695
And here it was, the chance to find out. When his great-grandparents
had been his age, they'd been war-refugees, crossing the ocean on a
crowded boat, travelling on stolen papers, an infant in his
great-grandmother's arms and another in her belly. If they could do it,
Wei-Dong could do it.
696
He'd need a place to stay, which meant money, which meant a job. The
guild would cut him in for his share of the money from the raids, but
that wasn't enough to survive in America. Or was it? He wondered how
much the Guatemalans around him earned at their illegal dishwashing and
cleaning and gardening jobs.
697
In any event, he wouldn't have to find out, because he had something
they didn't have: a Social Security Number. And yes, that meant that
eventually his parents would be able to find him, but in another month,
he'd be 18 and it'd be too late for them to do anything about it if he
didn't want to cooperate.
698
In those hours where he'd planned for the demise of his family's
fortune, he'd settled quickly on the easiest job he could step into:
Mechanical Turk.
699
The Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to do was
prove that you were a decent player -- the game had the stats to know
it -- and sign up, and then log in whenever you wanted a shift. The
game would ping you any time a player did something the game didn't
know how to interpret -- talked too intensely to a non-player
character, stuck a sword where it didn't belong, climbed a tree that no
one had bothered to add any details too -- and you'd have to play
spot-referee. You'd play the non-player character, choose a behavior
for the stabbed object, or make a decision from a menu of possible
things you might find in a tree.
700
It didn't pay much, but it didn't take much time, either. Wei-Dong had
calculated that if he played two computers -- something he was sure he
could keep up -- and did a new job every twenty seconds on each, he
could make as much as the senior managers at his father's company. He'd
have to do it for ten hours a day, but he'd spent plenty of weekends
playing for 12 or even 14 hours a day, so hell, it was practically
money in the bank.
701
So he used the rented PC to sign onto his account and started filling
in the paperwork to apply for the job. All the while, he was conscious
of his rarely-used email account and of the messages from his parents
that surely awaited him. The forms were long and boring, but easy
enough, even the little essay questions where you had to answer a bunch
of hypothetical questions about what you'd do if a player did this or
said that. And that email from his parents was lurking, demanding that
he download it and read it --
702
He flipped to a browser and brought up his email. It had been weeks
since he'd last checked it and it was choked with hundreds of spams,
but there, at the top:
703
RACHEL ROSENBAUM -- WHERE ARE YOU???
704
Of course his mother was the one to send the email. It was always her
on email, sending him little encouraging notes through the school day,
reminding him of his grandparents' and cousins' and father's birthdays.
His father used email when he had to, usually at two in the morning
when he couldn't sleep for worry about work and he needed to bawl out
his managers without waking them up on the phone. But if the phone was
an option, Dad would take it.
705
WHERE ARE YOU???
706
The subject-line said it all, didn't it?
707
Leonard, this is crazy. If you want to be treated like an adult,
start acting like one. Don't sneak around behind our backs, playing
games in the middle of the night. Don't run off to God-knows-where to
sulk.
708
We can negotiate this like family, like grownups, but first you'll
have to COME HOME and stop behaving like a SPOILED BRAT. We love you,
Leonard, and we're worried about you, and we want to help you. I know
when you're 17 it's easy to feel like you have all the answers --
709
He stopped reading and blew hot air out his nostrils. He hated it when
adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was
young . As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like
the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness
that could only be cured by waiting five years. Why not just stick him
in a box and lock it until he turned 22?
710
He began to hit reply, then realized that he was logged in without
going through an anonymizer. His guildies were big into these -- they
were servers that relayed your traffic, obscuring your identity and the
addresses you were trying to avoid. The best ones came from Falun Gong,
the weird religious cult that the Chinese government was bent on
stamping out. Falun Gong put new relays online every hour or so,
staying a hop ahead of the Great Firewall of China, the all-seeing,
all-knowing, all-controlling server-farm that was supposed to keep 1.6
billion Chinese people from looking at the wrong kind of information.
711
No one in the guild had much time for Falun Gong or its quirky beliefs,
but everyone agreed that they ran a tight ship when it came to punching
holes in the Great Firewall. A quick troll through the ever-rotating
index-pages for Falun Gong relays found Wei-Dong a machine that would
take his traffic. Then he replied to his Mom. Let her try to run
his backtrail -- it would dead-end with a notorious Chinese religious
cult. That'd give her something to worry about all right!
712
Mom, I'm fine. I'm acting like an adult (taking care of myself,
making my own decisions). It might have been wrong to lie to you guys
about what I was doing with my time, but kidnapping your son to
military school is about as non-adult as you can get. I'll be in touch
when I get a chance. I love you two. Don't worry, I'm safe.
713
Was he, really? As safe as his great-grandparents had been, stepping
off the ship in New York. As safe as Lu had been, bicycling the cracked
road to Shenzhen.
714
He'd find a place to stay -- he could google "cheap hotel downtown los
angeles" as well as the next kid. He had money. He had a SSN. He had a
job -- two jobs, counting the guild work -- and he had plenty of
practice missions he'd have to run before he'd start earning. And it
was time to get down to it.
715
Part II: Hard work at play
716
This scene is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in
San Diego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to
sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to
teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby
La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a
store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll
always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the
store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the
store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've
never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
717
13 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San
Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
13
<
718
They came for the workers in the game and in the real world, a
coordinated assault that left Big Sister Nor's organization in tatters.
719
On that fateful night, she'd taken up the back room of Headshot, a PC
Baang in the Geylang district in Singapore, a neighborhood that
throbbed all night long from the roaring sex-trade from the legal
brothels and the illegal street-hookers. Any time after dark, the
Geylang's streets were choked with people, from adventurous diners
eating in the excellent all-night restaurants (almost all of them
halal, which always made her smile) to guest workers and Singaporeans
on the prowl for illicit thrills to the girls dashing out on their
breaks to the all-night supermarkets to do their shopping.
720
The Geylang was as unbuttoned as Singapore got, one of the few places
where you could be "out of bounds" -- doing something that was illegal,
immoral, unmentionable, or bad for social harmony -- without attracting
too much attention. Headshot strobed all night long with networked
poker games, big shoot-em-up tournaments, guestworkers phoning home on
the cheap, shouting over the noise-salad of all those games, and, on
that night, Big Sister Nor and her clan.
721
They called themselves the Webblies, which was an obscure little joke
that pleased Big Sister Nor an awful lot. Nearly a century ago, a group
of workers had formed a union called the Industrial Workers of the
World, the first union that said that all workers needed to stick up
for each other, that every worker was welcome no matter the color of
his skin, no matter if the worker was a woman, no matter if the worker
did "skilled" or "unskilled" work. They called themselves the Wobblies.
722
Information about the Wobblies was just one of the many "out of bounds"
subjects that were blocked on the Singaporean Internet, and so of
course Big Sister Nor had made it her business to find out more about
them. The more she read, the more sense this group from out of history
made for the world of right now -- everything that the IWW had
done needed doing today , and what's more, it would be easier
today than it had been.
723
Take organizing workers. Back then, you'd have to actually get into the
factory or at least stand at its gates to talk to workers about signing
a union card and demanding better conditions, higher wages and shorter
hours. Now you could reach those same people online, from anywhere in
the world. Once they were members, they could talk to all the other
members, using the same tools.
724
She'd decided to call her little group the Industrial Workers of the
World Wide Web, the IWWWW, and that was another of those jokes that
pleased her an awful lot. And the IWWWW had grown and grown and grown.
Gold farmers were easy pickings: working in terrible conditions all
over the world, for terrible wages, hated by the game-runners and the
rich players alike. They already understood about working in teams,
they'd already formed their own little guilds -- and they were better
at using the Internet than their bosses would ever be.
725
Now, a year later, the IWWWW had over 20,000 members signed up in six
countries, paying dues and filling up a fat strike fund that had
finally been called into use, in Shenzhen, the last place Big Sister
Nor had ever expected to see a walkout.
726
But they had, they had! The boss, some character named Wing, had
declared a lock-in at three of his "factories" -- Internet cafes that
he'd taken over to support his burgeoning army of workers -- in order
to take advantage of a sploit in Mushroom Kingdom, a Mario-based MMO
that had a huge following in Brazil. One of his workers had found a way
to triple the gold they took out of one of the dungeons, and he wanted
to extract every penny he could before Nintendo-Sun caught on to it.
727
The next thing she knew, her phone was rattling with urgent messages
relayed from her various in-game identities to tell her that the
workers had knocked aside the factory management and guards and stormed
out, climbing the sides of the buildings or the utility poles and
cutting the cafes' network links. They'd formed up out front and begun
to chant impromptu slogans -- mostly adapted from their in-game
battle-cries. And now they wanted to know what to do.
728
"It's a wildcat strike," Big Sister Nor said to her lieutenants, The
Mighty Krang and Justbob, the former a small Chinese guy with frosted
purple tips in his hair, the latter a Tamil girl in a beautiful,
immaculate sari and silk slippers -- a girl who had previously run with
one of the most notorious girl-gangs in Asia and spent three years in
prison for her trouble. "They've walked out in Shenzhen." She forwarded
the tweets and blips and alerts off her phone, then showed them her
screen while they waited for the forwards to land on their devices.
729
"It's crazy," The Mighty Krang said, dancing from foot to foot,
excitedly. "It's crazy, it's crazy, it's --"
730
"Wonderful," Justbob said, planting her palms on his shoulders and
bringing him back to the earth. "And overdue. I predicted this. I
predicted it from the start. As soon as you start collecting dues for a
'strike fund,' someone's going to go on strike. And la-la, here we are,
wildcatting the night away."
731
The next step was to head for headquarters, the back room at Headshot,
to slam themselves into their chairs and to hit the worlds, spreading
the word to all 20,000 members about the first-ever strike. Big Sister
Nor went to work on a plan:
732
1. Spread the word to the rank-and-file
733
2. Recruit in-world pickets to block the work-site so that Boss Wing
couldn't bring in scabs -- replacement workers -- to get the job done
734
3. Get the strike-leaders on the phone and talk about human-rights
lawyers, strike-pay, sleeping quarters for any workers who relied on
the factory for dorm-beds
735
4. Get footage and real-time reports from the strikers out to the human
rights wires, get the strike-leaders on interviews with the press
736
She'd done this before, in real life, on the other side of things, as a
wildcat strike leader walking off the line when the bosses at her
weaving factory in Taman Makmur announced pay cuts because their big
European distributor had cut its orders. It happened every year, but it
made her so angry -- the workers didn't get bonuses, sharing in the
good fortune when distributors increased their orders, but they were
made to share the burden when orders went down. Well, forget it, enough
was enough. She'd stood up in the middle of the factory floor and
denounced the bosses for the greedy, immoral bastards they were, and
when the security moved in to take her, she'd stood proud and strong,
ready to be beaten for her insolence.
737
Instead, her fellow workers had risen to her defense, the young women
around her getting to their feet and surrounding her, cheering her,
ululating cries shouting around waggling tongues that bounced off the
ceiling and filled the room and her heart, making them all brave, so
that the security men moved back, and they'd taken over the factory,
blocking the gates, shutting it down, and then someone from the
Malaysian Union of Textile Employees had been there to get them to sign
cards, and someone had made her picket captain and then --
738
And then it had all come crashing down around them, police vans moving
in, the police forming a line and ordering them to disperse, to get
back to work, to stop this foolishness before someone got hurt, barking
the orders through a bullhorn, glaring at them from beneath their riot
helmets, banging their truncheons on their shields, spraying them with
teargas.
739
Their line wavered, disintegrated, retreated. But they reformed in an
alley near the factory, amid a gang of staring children, and the women
from the MUTE collared the children and sent them running to get milk
-- cow's milk, goat's milk, anything they could find, and the MUTE
organizers had rinsed their eyes with the milk, holding their faces
still while they coughed and gagged. The fat-soluble CS gas rinsed
away, leaving them teary but able to see, and the coughs dispersed, and
someone produced a bag of charcoal-filter cycling masks, and someone
else had a bag of swimming goggles, and the women put them on and
pulled their hijabs over their noses, over the masks, so that they
looked like some species of snouted animal, and they reformed their
line and marched back, chanting their slogans.
740
The police gassed them again, but this time, the picket captains were
able to hold the line, to send brave women forward to grab the smoking
cannisters and throw them back over police lines. For a moment, it
looked like the police would charge, but the strikers and the
organizers had been feeding a photostream to the Internet using mobile
phones that tunneled through the national firewall, getting them up on
the human rights wires, and so the Ministry of Labour was getting phone
calls from the foreign press, and they were on the phone to the
Ministry of Justice, and the police withdrew.
741
The first skirmish was over, and the strikers settled in for a long
siege. No one got in or out of the factory without being harangued by
hundreds of young women, shoving literature detailing their working
conditions and grievances and demands through the windows of their cars
and buses. Some replacement workers got in, some picked fights, some
turned around and left. A unionized trucker refused to cross their
line, and wouldn't take away the load he'd been charged with picking
up, so it just sat there on the docks.
742
The days turned into weeks, and they fed their families as best as they
could with the strike pay, which came to a third of what they'd earned
in the plant, but the factory owners -- a subsidiary of a Dutch company
-- were hurting too. The MUTE organizers explained that the parent
company had to release its quarterly statement to its shareholders, who
would demand to know why this major factory was sitting idle instead of
making money. The organizers offered confident reassurances that when
this happened, the workers' demands would be met, the strike settled,
and they could get back to work.
743
So they hung in there, keeping their spirits up on the line, and then
--
744
The factory closed.
745
Big Sister Nor found out about it one night as she was playing Theater
of War VII, a game she'd played since she was a little girl. One of her
guildies was a girl whose brother had passed by the factory on his way
home from school, and he'd seen them moving the machines out of the
plant, driving away in huge lorries.
746
She'd texted everyone she knew, Get to the factory now , but by
the time they got there, the factory was dead, empty, the gates chained
shut. No one from the union met them. None of them answered her calls.
747
And the women she'd called sister, the women who'd saved her when she'd
said enough , they all looked to her and said, What do we do
now?
748
And she hadn't known. She'd managed to hold the tears in until she got
home, but then they'd flowed, and her parents -- who'd doubted her and
harangued her every step of the way -- scolded her for her foolishness,
told her it was her fault that all her friends were jobless.
749
She'd lain in bed that night, miserable, and had been woken by the soft
chirp of her phone.
750
I'm outside. It was Affendi, the MUTE organizer she'd been
closest to. Come to the door .
751
She'd crept outside on cat's feet and barely had time to make out
Affendi's outline before she collapsed into Nor's arms. She had been
beaten bloody, her eyes blacked, two of her fingers broken, her lips
mashed and one of her teeth missing. She managed a mangled smile and
whispered, "It's all part of the job."
752
The cheap hotel where the four organizers had shared a room was raided
just after dinner, the police taking them away. They'd been prepared
for this, had lawyers standing by to help them when it happened, but
they didn't get to call lawyers. They didn't go to the jailhouse.
Instead, they'd been taken to a shantytown behind the main
train-station and three policemen had stood guard while a group of
private security forces from the plant had taken turns beating them
with truncheons and fists and boots, screaming insults at them, calling
them whores, tearing at their clothes, beating their breasts and
thighs.
753
It only stopped when one of the women fell unconscious, bleeding from a
head-wound, eyelids fluttering. The men had fled then, after taking
their money and identity papers, leaving them weeping and hurt. Affendi
had managed to hide her spare mobile phone -- a tiny thing the size of
a matchbook -- in the elastic of her underpants, and that had enabled
her to call the MUTE headquarters for help. Once the ambulance was on
its way, she'd come to get Nor.
754
"They'll probably come for you, too," she said. "They usually try to
make an example of the workers who start trouble."
755
"But you told me that they were going to have to give in because of
their shareholders --"
756
Affendi held up a broken hand. "I thought they would. But they decided
to leave. We think they're probably going to Indonesia. The new laws
there make it much harder to organize the workers. That's how it goes,
sometimes." She shrugged, then winced and sucked air over her teeth.
"We thought they'd want to stay put here. The provincial government
gave them too much to come here -- tax breaks, new roads, free
utilities for five years. But there are new Special Economic Zones in
Indonesia that have even better deals." She shrugged again, winced
again. "You may be all right here, of course. Maybe they'll just move
on. But I thought you should be given the chance to get somewhere safe
with us, if you wanted to."
757
Nor shook her head. "I don't understand. Somewhere safe?"
758
"The union has a safe-house across the provincial line. We can take you
there tonight. We can help you find work, get set up. You can help us
unionize another factory."
759
A light rain fell, pattering off the palms that lined her street and
splashing down in wet, fat drops, bringing an earthy smell up from the
soil. A fat drop slid off an unseen leaf overhead and spattered on
Nor's neck, reminding her that she'd gone out of the house without her
hijab, something she almost never did. It seemed to her an omen, like
her life was changing in every single way.
760
"Where are we going?"
761
"You find out when we get there. I don't know either. That's why it's a
safe house -- no one knows where it is unless they have to. MUTE
organizers have been murdered, you understand."
762
Why didn't you tell me this when all this started? She wanted to
say. But her parents had told her. Management had warned them,
through bullhorns, that they were risking everything. She'd laughed at
them, filled with the feeling of sisterhood and safety, of
power . That feeling was gone now.
763
And she'd gone with Affendi, and she'd worked in a factory that was
much like the factory she'd left, and there had been a union fight much
like the one she'd fought, but this time, they were better prepared and
the workers had called Nor "Big Sister," a term of endearment that had
scared her a little, coming from the mouths of women much older than
her, coming from young girls who could never appreciate the danger.
764
And this time, the owners hadn't fled, the workers had won better
conditions, and Big Sister Nor found that she didn't want to make
textiles anymore. She found that she had a taste for the fight.
765
Now there was a young man, someone called Matthew Fong, in Shenzhen,
and he was relying on her to help him win his dignity, fair wages, and
a safe and secure workplace. And he was doing it in China, where
unofficial unions were illegal and where labor organizers sometimes
disappeared into prison for years.
766
The Mighty Krang could speak a beautiful Mandarin as well as his native
Cantonese, so he was in charge of giving soundbites to the foreign
Chinese press, that network of news-resources serving the hundreds of
millions of people of Chinese ancestry living abroad. They were key,
because they were intimately connected to the whole sprawling
enterprise of imports and exports, and when they spoke, the bureaucrats
in Beijing listened. And The Mighty Krang could put on a voice that was
so smoothly convincing you'd swear it was a newscaster.
767
Justbob was in charge of moral support for the strikers, talking to
them in broken Cantonese and Singlish and gamer-speak on conference
calls, keeping their morale up. She could work three phones and two
computers like a human octopus, her attention split across a dozen
conversations without losing the thread in any of them.
768
And Big Sister Nor? She was in-world, in several worlds, rallying
Webblies to the site of the Mushroom Kingdom, finding gamers converging
from all over Asia -- where it was night -- and from Europe -- where it
was day -- and America -- where it was morning. Management had wasted
no time moving replacement workers in. There were always desperate
subcontractors out in the provinces of China, ten kids in a dead
industrial town in Dongbei who'd been lured to computers with pretty
talk about getting paid to play. Across a dozen different shards of the
same Mushroom Kingdom world, a dozen alternate realities, they came,
and Big Sister Nor played general in a skirmish against them, as
strikers blocked the entrance to the dungeon and sent a stream of
pro-union chats and URLs to them even as they fought them to keep them
out of the dungeon.
769
The battle wasn't much of a fight, not at first. The replacement
workers were there to kill dumb non-player characters in a boring,
predictable way that wouldn't trigger the Mechanical Turks and bring
their operation to the attention of Nintendo-Sun. They were all
seasoned gamers, and they were used to teamplay, and many of the
Webblies had never fought side-by-side before. But the Webblies were
fighting for the movement, and the replacement workers -- they called
them "scabs," another old word from out of history -- were fighting
because they didn't know what else to do.
770
It was a rout. The scabs were sent back to their respawn points by the
thousand, unable to return to work until they'd done their corpse runs,
and the Webblies raised their swords and shot fireballs into the sky
and cheered in a dozen languages.
771
The news was good from Shenzhen, too, judging from what Justbob was
saying into her headsets and typing onto her screens. The strike-line
was holding, and while the police were there, they hadn't moved in --
in fact, it sounded like they'd moved to hold back the private factory
security!
772
Silently, Big Sister Nor thanked Matthew Fong for picking a fight that
-- seemingly -- they'd be able to win. She shouted up to Ezhil in the
front of Headshot, calling for ginseng bubble-tea all around, the
ginseng root would give them all a little shot of energy. Couldn't live
on caffeine and taurine alone!
773
"Ezhil!" she shouted a minute later, looking up from her mouse. "Bubble
tea!" If she'd been paying attention, she would have noticed the squeak
in his voice as he promised right away, right away.
774
But her attention was fixed on her screens, because that's where it was
all suddenly going very wrong indeed. What she'd taken for strikers'
victorious fireballs launched into the sky were landing among the
players now, inflicting major damage. Just as she was noticing this, a
volley of skidding, spiked turtle-shells came sliding in from
offscreen, in twelve worlds at once.
775
Ambush!
776
She barked the word into her headset in Mandarin, then Cantonese, then
Hindi, then English. The cry was taken up by the players and they
rallied, forming battle-squares, healers in the middle, tanks on the
outside, nimble thieves and scouts spreading out into the mushroom
forests, looking for the ambush.
777
This would work much better if they were a regular guild, all playing
on the side of the evil Bowser or of the valiant Princess Peach,
because if you were all on the same side, the game would coordinate
your movements for you, give you radar for where and how all the other
players were moving. But the strikers were from both sides of Mushroom
Kingdom's moral coin, and as far as the game was concerned, they were
sworn enemies. Their IMs were unintelligible to one another, and the
default option for any "opposing" av you clicked on was ATTACK, leading
to a lot of accidental skirmishes.
778
But gold farmers knew all about playing their own game, one that lived
on top of the game that the companies wanted them to play. The game's
communications tools were powerful and easy, but nothing (apart from
the ridiculous "agreement" you had to click every time you started up
the game) kept you from using anything you wanted. They favored free
chat systems developed to help corporate work-groups collaborate; since
these services always had free demo-versions available, hoping to snag
some office-person into buying 30,000 licenses for their mega-corp.
These systems even allowed them to stream screen-caps from their own
computers, and Big Sister Nor saw to it that these were arranged
sequentially, forming a huge, panoramic view of the entire battlefield.
779
She flicked through the battlescenes and the communications hub,
fingers flying on the keyboard. They had a Koopa Turbo Hammer in seven
of the worlds, a huge, whirling god-hammer that could clobber a score
of attackers on a single throw, and she had it brought forward, using
the scouts' screencaps to pinpoint the enemies' positions, conferring
them to the hammer-throwers, a passel of hulking Kongs with protruding
fangs and enormous, hairy chests.
780
That was seven battles down; in the remaining five, she ordered the
Peaches to form up with their umbrellas at the ready, then had two
Bowsers "bounce" each of them, sticking to them while doing minimum
damage. The Peaches unfurled their umbrellas and sailed into the air,
taking their Bowsers with them, to drop behind enemy lines, ready to
breathe fire and stomp the opposing forces. This was a devastating
attack, one that was only possible if you played the farmers' game,
cooperating through a side-channel -- normally, Bowsers and Princess
Peaches were on the opposite sides of the Great War that was at the
center of the Mushroom Kingdom story.
781
It should have worked -- the hammers, the Bowsers, the skilled players
of a dozen guilds, bristling with armament and armor, spelling and
firing and skirmishing.
782
It should have worked -- but it hadn't.
783
The mysterious attackers -- she'd branded them "Pinkertons" in her
mind, after the strike-breaking goons from the Pinkerton Detective
Agency who'd been the old Wobblies' worst enemies -- had seemingly
endless numbers, and every attack they launched seemed to do maximum
damage. Meanwhile, they were able to pull off incredible dodges and
defenses against the strikers' attacks. And their aim! Every fireball,
every turtle, every sound-bomb, every flung axe found its target with
perfect accuracy.
784
It was almost as though they were --
785
-- Cheating!
786
That had to be it. They were using aimhacks, dodgehacks, all the
prohibited add-on software that the game was supposed to be able to
spot and disable. Somehow, they'd gotten past the game's defenses. It
didn't matter. The game was always stacked against gold farmers.
787
"Pull back!" she shouted. "Retreat!" This was going to have to be
guerrilla war, jungle war, hiding in the bushes and sniping at them as
they'd sniped at her. She'd lure them into the clearing that marked the
dungeon's entrance and then they'd slip around them into the mushroom
forest, using their superior coordination to trump the hacks and
numbers the Pinkertons had on their side. In her headset, she heard the
ragged breathing, the curses in six languages, the laughter and
shouting of players all over the world, listening to her rap out
commands in all the different versions of Mushroom Kingdom that they
were fighting in.
788
She found that she was grinning. This was fun. This was a
lot more fun than being tear-gassed.
789
It had been Big Sister Nor's idea to use the games for organizing. Why
risk your neck in the factory or standing at its gates when you could
slip right in among the workers, no matter where they were in the
world, and talk to them about joining up? Plenty of the MUTE old guard
had thought she was crazy, but there was lots of support, too --
especially when Nor showed them that they could reach the Indonesian
textile workers who'd inherited her job when her factory had closed up
and moved on, simply by logging into Spirals of the Golden Snail, a
game that had taken the whole Malay peninsula by storm.
790
It didn't matter where you fought, it mattered whether you won. And the
more she thought about it, the more she realized that they could win
in-game. The bosses were better at firing teargas at them, but they
were better at lobbing fireballs, pulsed energy weapons, photon
torpedoes and savage flying fish -- and they always would be. What's
more, a striker who lost a skirmish in-game merely had to re-spawn and
do a corpse-run, possibly losing a little inventory in the process. A
striker who lost a skirmish AFK -- away from keyboard -- might end up
dead.
791
Big Sister Nor lived in perpetual fear of having someone's death on her
hands.
792
The battle was turning again. The Pinkertons had all fallen for her
gambit, letting them rush past and back into the mushroom forest,
effectively trading places. Now they were digging in the woods, laying
little ambushes, fortifying positions and laying down withering fire
from all directions. The breathing, gasping, triumphant muttering
voices in her head and the hastily clattered in-game chat gave her a
feeling like the battle was resting delicately balanced on her
fingertips, every shift and change dancing felt as a tremor against the
sensitive pads of her fingers.
793
Big Sister Nor called for her bubble tea again, realizing that a very
long time indeed had gone by since she'd first ordered it. This time,
no one answered. The skin on the back of her neck prickled and she
slipped her headphones off her head. Justbob and The Mighty Krang
caught on a second later, removing their earwigs. There was no noise at
all from the front of Headshot, none of the normal hyperactive calling
of gamer-kids, or the shouts of guestworkers phoning home on cheap
earwigs.
794
Big Sister Nor stood up quietly and quickly and backed up against the
wall, motioning to the others to do the same. On her screen, she saw
another rally by the Pinkertons, who'd taken advantage of the sudden
lack of strategic leadership to capture several of the small striker
strongholds. She inched her way toward the door and very, very,
very slowly tilted her head to see around the frame, then
whipped it back as quick as she could.
795
RUN , she mouthed to her lieutenants, and they broke for the rear
entrance, the escape hatch that Big Sister Nor always made sure of
before she holed up to do union work.
796
On their heels came the Pinkertons, the real world Pinkertons, Malay
men in workers' clothes, poor men, men armed with stout sticks and a
few chains, men who'd been making their way to the door when Big Sister
Nor chanced to look around it.
797
They shouted after them now, excited and tight voices, like the
catcalls of drunken boys on streetcorners when they were feeling the
bravery of numbers and hormones and liquor. That was a dangerous sound.
It was the sound of fools egging each other on.
798
Big Sister Nor hit the crashbar on the rear door with both palms,
slamming into it with the full weight of her body. The door's gas-lift
was broken, so it swung back like a mousetrap, and it was a good thing
it did, because it moved so fast that the two Pinkertons waiting to bar
their exit didn't have time to get out of the way. One was knocked over
on his ass, the other was slammed into the cinderblock wall with a
jarring thud that Big Sister Nor felt in her palms.
799
The door rebounded into her, knocking her back into The Mighty Krang,
who caught her, pushed her on, hands on her shoulderblades, breath
ragged in her ears.
800
They were in a dark, narrow, stinking alley behind that connected two
of the Lorangs, the small streets that ran off Geylang Road, and it was
time to R and G -- to run and gun, what you did when all your other
plans collapsed. Big Sister Nor had thought this through far enough to
make sure they had a back door, but no farther than that.
801
The Pinkertons were close behind, but they were all squeezed down into
the incredibly narrow confines of the alleyway, and no one could really
run or move faster than a desperate shuffle.
802
But then they broke free into the next Lorang, and Big Sister Nor broke
left, hoping to make it far enough up the road to get into sight of the
diners at the all-night restaurants.
803
She didn't make it.
804
One of the men threw his truncheon at her and it hit her square between
her shoulders, knocking the breath from her and causing her to go down
on one knee. Justbob twined one hand in her blouse and hauled her to
her feet with a sound of tearing cloth, and dragged her on, but they'd
lost a step to her fall, and now the men were on them.
805
Justbob whirled around, snarling, shouting a worldless cry, using the
movement as inertia for a wild roundhouse kick that connected with one
of the Pinkertons, a man with sleepy eyes and a thick mustache.
Justbob's foot caught him in the side, and they all heard the sound of
his ribs breaking under the toe of her demure sandal with its fake
jewels. The sandal flew on and clattered to the road with the cheap
sound of paste gems.
806
The men hadn't expected that, and there was a moment when they stopped
in their tracks, staring at their fallen comrade, and in that instant,
Big Sister Nor thought that -- just maybe -- they could get away. But
Justbob's chest was heaving, her face contorted in rage, and she
leapt at the next man, a fat man in a sweaty sportcoat, thumbs
aiming at his eyes, and as she reached him, the man beside him lifted
his truncheon and brought it down, glancing off her high, fine
cheekbone and then smashing against her collarbone.
807
Justbob howled like a wounded dog and fell back, landing a hard punch
in her attacker's groin as she fell back.
808
But now the Pinkertons were on them, and their arms were raised, their
truncheons held high, and as the first one swung into Big Sister Nor's
left breast, she cried out and her mind was filled with Affendi and her
broken fingers, her unrecognizably bruised face. Somewhere, just a few
tantalizing meters up the Lorang, night people were eating a huge feast
of fish and goat in curry, the smells in the air. But that was there.
Here, Big Siter Nor was infinitely far from them, and the truncheons
rose and fell and she curled up to protect her head, her breasts, her
stomach, and in so doing exposed her tender kidneys, her delicate
short-ribs, and there she lay, enduring a season in hell that went on
for an eternity and a half.
809
This scene is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian
megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction
bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew
that something big was going on right away, because two of our
smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd
been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters
raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending
its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing
in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety
of titles.
810
14
14
<
811
Connor Prikkel sometimes thought of math as a beautiful girl, the kind
of girl that he'd dreamt of wooing, dating, even marrying, while
sitting in the back of any class that wasn't related to math,
daydreaming. A beautiful girl like Jenny Rosen, who'd had classes with
him all through high-school, who always seemed to know the answer no
matter what the subject, who had a light dusting of freckles around her
nose and a quirky half-smile. Who dressed in jeans that she'd tailored
herself, in t-shirts she'd modded, stitching multiple shirts together
to make tight little half-shirts, elaborate shawls, mock turtelnecks.
812
Jenny Rosen had seemed to have it all: beauty and brains and, above
all, rationality: she didn't like the way that store-bought jeans fit,
so she hacked her own. She didn't like the t-shirts that everyone wore,
so she changed the shirts to suit her taste. She was funny, she was
clever, and he'd been completely, head-over-heels in love with her from
sophomore English right through to senior American History.
813
They'd been friendly through that time, though not really friends.
Connor's friends were into gaming and computers, Jenny's friends were
jocks and school-paper kids. But friendly, sure, enough to say hello in
the hallway, enough to become lab partners in sophomore physics (she
was a careful taker of notes, and her hair-stuff smelled
amazing , and their hands brushed against each other a hundred
times that semester).
814
And then, in senior year, he'd asked her out to a movie. Then she'd
asked him to a track rally. Then he'd asked her to work with him on an
American History project on Chinese railway workers that involved going
to Chinatown after school, and there they'd had a giant dim sum meal
and then sat in a park and talked for hours, and then they'd stopped
talking and started kissing.
815
And one thing led to another, and the kissing led to more kissing, and
then their friends all started to whisper, "Did you hear about Connor
and Jenny?" and she met his parents and he met hers. And it had all
seemed perfect.
816
But it wasn't perfect. Anything but.
817
In the four months, two weeks and three days that they were officially
a couple, they had approximately 2,453,212 arguments, each more blazing
than the last. Theoretically, he understood everything he needed to
about her. She loved sports. She loved to use her mind. She loved
humor. She loved silly comedies and slow music without words.
818
And so he would go away and plan out exactly how to deliver all these
things to her, plugging in her loves like variables into an equation,
working out elaborate schemes to deliver them to her.
819
But it never worked. He'd work it out so that they could go to a ball
game at ATandT Park and she'd want to go see a concert at Cow Palace
instead. He'd take her to see a new wacky comedy and she'd want to go
home and work on an overdue assignment. No matter how hard he tried to
get her reality and his theory to match up, he always failed.
820
In his heart of hearts, he knew it wasn't her fault. He knew that he
had some deficiency that caused him to live in the imaginary world he
sometimes thought of as "theory-land," the country where everything
behaved as it was supposed to.
821
After graduation, through his bachelor's degree in pure math at
Berkeley, his Masters in Signal Processing at Caltech, and the first
year of a PhD in economics at Stanford, he had occasion to date lots of
beautiful women, and every time, he found himself ground to pulp
between the gears of real-world and theory-land. He gave up on women
and his PhD on a fine day in October, telling the prof who was supposed
to be his advisor that he could find someone else to teach his freshman
math courses, grade his papers, and answer his email.
822
He walked off the Stanford campus and into the monied streets of Palo
Alto, and he packed up his car and drove to his new job, as chief
economist for Coca Cola's games division, and finally, he found a real
world that matched the beautiful elegance of theory-land.
823
Coca Cola ran or franchised anywhere from a dozen to thirty game-worlds
at any given time. The number of games went up or down according to the
brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:
824
a certain amount of difficulty
825
plus
826
a certain amount of your friends
827
plus
828
a certain amount of interesting strangers
829
plus
830
a certain amount of reward
831
plus
832
a certain amount of opportunity
833
equalled
834
fun
835
That was the equation that had come to him one day early in his second
semester of the PhD grind, a bolt of inspiration like the finger of god
reaching down into his brain. The magic was that equals sign, just
before the fun, because once you could express fun as a function of
other variables, you could establish its relationship to those
variables -- if we reduce the difficulty and the number of your friends
playing, can we increase the reward and make the fun stay the same?
836
This line of thought drove him to phone in a sick-call to his advisor
and head straight home, where he typed and drew and scribbled and
thought and thought and thought, and he phoned in sick the next day,
and the next -- and then it was the weekend, and he let his phone run
down, shut off his email and IM, and worked, eating when he had to.
837
By the time he found himself shoving fingerloads of butter into his
mouth, having emptied the fridge of all else, he knew he was onto
something.
838
He called them the Prikkel equations, and they described in elegant,
pure, abstract math the relationship between all the variables that
went into fun, and how fun equalled money, inasmuch as people would pay
to play fun games, and would pay more for items that had value in those
games.
839
Technically, he should have sent the paper to his advisor. He'd signed
a contract when he was accepted to the University giving ownership of
all his ideas to the school forever, in exchange for the promise of
someday adding "PhD" to his name. It hadn't seemed like a good idea at
the time, but the alternative was the awesomely craptacular job-market,
and so he'd signed it.
840
But he wasn't going to give this to Stanford. He wasn't going to
give it to anybody. He was going to sell it.
841
He didn't go back to campus after that, but rather plunged into a
succession of virtual worlds, plotting the time in hours it took him to
achieve different tasks, and comparing that to the price of gold in the
black-, grey- and white-market exchanges for in-game wealth.
842
Each number slotted in perfectly, just where he'd expected it to go.
His equations fit , and the world fit his equations. He'd finally
found a place where the irrational was rendered comprehensible. And
what's more, he could manipulate the world using his equations.
843
He decided to do a little fantasy trading: working from his equations,
he'd predicted that the gold in MAD Magazine's Shlabotnik's Curse was
wildly undervalued. It was an incredibly fun game -- or at least, it
satisfied the fun equation -- but for some reason, game money and elite
items were going for peanuts. Sure enough, in 36 hours, his imaginary
MAD Money was worth $130 in imaginary real money.
844
Then he took his $130 stake and sank it into four other game
currencies, spreading out his bets. Three of the four hit the jackpot,
bringing his total up to $200 in imaginary dollars. Now he decided to
spend some real money -- he already knew that he wasn't going back to
campus, so that meant his grad student grant would vanish shortly. He'd
need to pay the rent while he searched for a buyer for his equations.
845
He'd already proven to his own satisfaction that he could predict the
movement of game currencies, but now he wanted to branch out into the
weirder areas of game economics: elite items, the rare prestige items
that were insanely difficult to acquire in-game. Some of them had a
certain innate value -- powerful weapons and armor, ingredients for
useful spells -- but others seemed to hold value by sheer rarity or
novelty. Why should a purple suit of armor cost ten times as much as
the red one, given that both suits of armor had exactly the same play
value?
846
Of course, the purple one was much harder to come by. You had to either
buy it with unimaginable mountains of gold -- so players who saw your
av sporting it would assume that you had played your ass off to earn
for it -- or pull off some fantastic stunt to get it, like doing a
60-player raid on a nigh-unkillable boss. Like a designer label on an
otherwise unimpressive article of clothing, these items were valuable
because people who saw them assumed they had to cost a lot or be hard
to get, and thought more of the owner for having them. In other words,
they cost a lot because...they cost a lot!
847
So far, so good -- but could you use Prikkel's Equations to predict
how much they'd cost? Connor thought so. He thought you could
use a formula that combined the fun quotient of the game and the number
of hours needed to get the item, and derive the "value" of any elite
item from purple armor to gold pinstripes on your spaceship to a
banana-cream pie the size of an apartment block.
848
Yes, it would work. Connor was sure of it. He started to calculate the
true value of various elite items, casting about for undervalued items.
What he discovered surprised him: while virtual currency tended to rest
pretty close to its real value, plus or minus five percent, the
value-gap in elite items was gigantic . Some items routinely
traded for two or three hundred percent of their real value -- as
predicted by his Equations, anyway -- and some traded at a pittance.
849
Never for a moment did he doubt his equations, though a more humble or
more cautious person might have. No, Connor looked at this paradoxical
picture and the first thing that came into his head wasn't "Oops." It
was BUY !
850
And he bought. Anything that was undervalued, he bought, in great
storehouses, so much that he had to create alts and secondaries in many
worlds, because his primary characters couldn't carry all the
undervalued junk he was buying. He spent a hundred dollars -- two
hundred -- three hundred, snapping up assets, spreadsheeting their
nominal value. On paper, he was incredibly, unspeakably rich. On paper,
he could afford to move out of his one-bedroom apartment that was a
little too close to the poor and scary East Palo Alto for his suburban
tastes, buy a McMansion somewhere on the peninsula, and go into
business full time, spending his days buying magic armor and zeppelins
and flaming hamburgers, and his evening opening checks.
851
In reality, he was going broke. The theory said that these assets were
wildly undervalued. The marketplace said otherwise. He'd cornered the
market on several kinds of marvellous gew-gaws, but no one seemed to
actually want to buy them from him. He remembered Jenny Rosen, and all
the crushing ways that theory and reality could sometimes stop
communicating with one another.
852
When the first red bills came in, he stuck them under his keyboard and
kept buying. He didn't need to pay his cell phone bill. He didn't need
his cell-phone to buy magic lizards. His student loans? He wasn't a
student anymore, so he didn't see why he should worry about them --
they couldn't kick him out of school. Car payments? Let them repo it
(and they did, one night, at 2AM, and he waved goodbye to the little
hunk of junk as the repo man drove it away, then turned back to his
keyboard). Credit card bills? So long as there was one card that was
still good, one card he could use to pay the subscription fees for his
games, that was all that mattered.
853
Living close to East Palo Alto had its advantages: for one thing, there
were food-banks there, places where he could line up with other poor
people to get giant bricks of government cheese, bags of day-old bread,
boxes of irregular and unlovely root-vegetables. He fried all the
latter in an all-day starch festival and froze them, and then he
proceeded to live off of cheese and potato sandwiches, and one morning,
he realized that his entire body and everything that came out of it --
breath, burps, farts, even his urine -- smelled of cheese sandwiches.
He didn't care. There were ostrich plumes to buy.
854
Disaster struck: he lost track of which credit card he was ignoring and
had half of his accounts suspended when his monthly subscription fees
bounced. Half his wealth, wiped out. And the other card wasn't far
behind.
855
He thought he could probably call his parents and grovel a bit and get
a bus ticket to Petaluma, hole up in his folks' basement and lick his
wounds and be yet another small-town failure who came home with his
tail between his legs. He'd need a roll of quarters and a payphone, of
course, because his cellphone was now an inert, unpaid, debt-haunted
brick. Lucky for him, East Palo Alto was the kind of place where you
got lots of people who were too poor even to go into debt with a
cell-phone, people who also needed to use payphones.
856
He tucked himself into his grimy bed on a Wednesday morning and
thought, Tomorrow, tomorrow I will call them.
857
But tomorrow he didn't. And Friday he didn't, though he was now out of
government cheese and wasn't eligible for more until Monday. He could
eat potato sandwiches. He couldn't buy assets anymore, but he was still
tracking them, watching them trade and identifying the bargains he
would buy, if only he had a little more liquidity, a little more
cashish.
858
Saturday, he brushed his teeth, because he remembered to do that
sometimes, and his gums bled and there were sores on the insides of his
mouth and now he was ready to call his parents, but it was 11PM
somehow, how did the day shoot past, and they went to bed at 9 every
night. He'd call them on Sunday.
859
And on Sunday -- on Sunday -- on that magical, wonderful Sunday, on
Sunday --
860
THE MARKET MOVED!
861
There he was, pricing assets, recording their values in his
spreadsheet, and he realized that the asset he was booking -- a
steampunk leather gasmask adorned with a cluster of huge leathery
ear-trumpets and brass cogs and rivets (no better than a standard
gasmask in the blighted ecotastrophe world that was Rising Seas, but
infinitely cooler) -- had already been entered onto his sheet, weeks
before. Indeed, he'd booked the mask when its real world cash value was
about $0.18, against the $4.54 the Equations predicted. And now he was
booking it at $1.24, which meant that the 750 of them he had in
inventory had just jumped from $135 to $930, a profit of $795.
862
There was a strange sound. He realized after a moment that it was his
stomach, growling for food. He could flip his gasmasks now, take the
$795 onto one of his PayPal debit cards, and eat like a king. He might
even be able to buy back some of his lost accounts and recover his
assets.
863
But Connor did not consider doing this, even for a second. He dashed to
the sink and filled up three cooking pots with water and brought them
back to his desk, along with a cup. He filled the cup and drank it,
filled it and drank it, filling his stomach with water until it stopped
demanding to be filled. This was California, after all, where people
paid good money to go to "retreats" for "liquid fasting" and "detox."
So he could wait out food for a day or two... After all, his Equations
predicted that these things should go to $3,405. He was just getting
started.
864
And now the gasmasks were rising. He'd get up, go to the bathroom --
his kidneys were certainly getting a workout! -- and return to check
the listings on the official exchange sites and the black-market ones
where the gold-farmers hung out. He had a little formula for
calculating the real price, using these two prices as a kind of beacon.
No matter how he calculated it, his gasmasks were rising.
865
And yes, some of his other assets were rising, too. A robot dog, up
from $1.32 to $1.54, still pretty far off from the $8.17 he'd
predicted, but he owned a thousand of the things, which meant that he'd
just made $1,318.46 here, and he was just getting started.
866
Up and up the prices went, as asset after asset attained liftoff, and
he began to suspect that his asset-buying spree had coincided with an
inter-world depression across all virtual economies, which accounted
for the huge quantities of undervalued assets he'd found lying around.
There was probably an interesting cause for all those virtual economies
slumping at once, but that was something to study another day. As it
was, he was more interested in the fact that the economies were
bouncing back while he was sitting on mountains of dirt-cheap imaginary
gewgaws, knickknacks, tchotchkes and white-elephants, and that their
values were taking off like crazy.
867
And now it was time to convert some of those assets to money and some
of that money to food, rent, and paid-off bills. His collection of
articulated tentacles from Nemo's Adventures on the Ocean Floor were
maturing nicely -- he'd bought them at $0.22, priced them at $3.21, and
now they were trading at $3.27 -- so he dumped them, and regretted that
he'd only bought 400 of them. Still, he managed to dump them for a
handy $1150 profit (by the time he'd sold 300 of them, the price had
started to tip down again, as the supply of tentacles increased and the
demand diminished).
868
The money dribbled into his PayPal account and he used that to order
three pizzas, a gallon of orange juice and ten boxes of salad, paid off
his suspended accounts, and sent $400 to his landlord against the $3500
he owed for two months' rent, along with a begging letter promising to
pay the rest off within a day or two.
869
While he waited for the pizzas to arrive, he decided he'd better shower
and shave and try to do something about his hair, which had started to
go into dreadlocks from a month without seeing a hairbrush. In the end,
he just cut the tangles out, and got dressed in something other than
his filthy housecoat for the first time in a week -- marvelling at how
his jeans hungoff his prominent hips, how his t-shirt clung to his
wasted chest, his ribs like a xylophone through the pale skin. He
opened all the windows, aware of the funk of body-odor and stale
computer-filtered air in his apartment, and realized as he did that it
was morning, and thanked his lucky stars that he lived in a college
town, where you could get a pizza delivered at 8:30AM.
870
He barfed after eating the first pizza, getting most of it into the big
pot he'd used to hold his drinking water, big chunks of crust and
pepperoni, reeking of sour stomach-acid. He didn't let that put him
off. His PayPal account was now bulging, up to $50,000, and he was just
getting started. He switched to salads and juice, figuring it would
take a little while to get used to food again, and not having the time
just now to take a long bio-break. His body would have to wait. He
ordered an urn of coffee from a place that catered corporate meetings,
the kind of thing that held 80 cups' worth, and threw in a plate of
sliced veggie and some pastries.
871
Selling was getting easier now. The economies were bouncing back, and
from the tone of the thank-you messages he got from his buyers, he
understood that there was a kind of reverse-panic in the air, a sense
that players all over the world were starting to worry that if they
didn't buy this junk now, they'd never be able to buy it, because the
prices would go up and up and up forever.
872
And it was then that he had his second great flash, the second time
that the finger of God reached down and touched his mind, with a force
that shook him out of his chair and set him to pacing his living room
like a tiger, muttering to himself.
873
Once, when he'd been working on his Masters, he'd participated in a
study for a pal in the economics department. They'd locked twenty five
grad students into a room and given each of them a poker chip. "You can
do whatever you want with those chips," the experimenter had said. "But
you might want to hang onto them. Every hour, on the hour, I'm going to
unlock this door and give you twenty dollars for each poker chip you're
holding. I'll do this eight times, for the next eight hours. Then I'll
unlock the door for a final time and you can go home and your poker
chips will be worthless -- though you'll be able to keep all the money
you've acquired over the course of the experiment."
874
He'd snorted and rolled his eyes at the other grad students, who were
mostly doing the same. It was going to be a loooong eight hours. After
all, everyone knew what the value of the poker chips were: $160 in the
first hour, $140 in the next, $120 in the next and so on. What would be
the point of trading a poker chip to anyone else for anything less than
it was worth?
875
For the first hour, they all sat around and griped about how boring it
all was. Then, the experimenter walked back into the room with a tray
of sandwiches and 25 $20 bills. "Poker chips, please," he said, and
they dutifully held out their chips, and one by one, each received a
crisp new $20 bill.
876
"One down, seven to go," someone said, once the experimenter had left.
The sandwiches were largely untouched. They waited. They flirted in a
bored way, or made small talk. The hour ticked past.
877
Then, at 55 minutes past the hour, one guy, a real joker with red hair
and mischievous freckles, got out of the beat-up old orange sofa turned
to the prettiest girl in the room, a lovely Chinese girl with short
hair and homemade clothes that reminded Connor of Jenny's fashion, and
said, "Rent me your poker chip for five minutes? I'll pay you $20."
878
That cracked the entire room up. It was the perfect demonstration of
the absurdity of sitting around, waiting for the $20 hour. The Chinese
girl laughed, too, and they solemnly traded. In came the grad student,
five minutes later, with another wad of twenties and a cooler filled
with smoothies in tetrapaks. "Poker chips, please," he said, and the
joker held up his two chips. They all grinned at one another, like
they'd gotten one over on the student, and he grinned a little too and
handed two twenties to the redhead. The Chinese girl held up her extra
twenty, showing that she had the same as everyone else. Once he'd gone,
Red gave her back her chip. She pocketed it and went back to sitting in
one of the dusty old armchairs.
879
They drank their smoothies. There were murmured conversations, and it
seemed like a lot of people were trading their chips back and forth.
Connor laughed to see this, and he wasn't the only one, but it was all
in fun. Twenty dollars was the going rate for an hour's rental, after
all -- the exactly and perfectly rational sum.
880
"Give me your poker-chip for 20 minutes for $5?" The asker was at the
young end of the room, about 22, with a soft, cultured southern accent.
She was also very pretty. He checked the clock on the wall: "It's only
half past," he said. "What's the point?"
881
She grinned at him. "You'll see."
882
A five dollar bill was produced and the poker-chip left his custody.
The pretty southern girl talked with another girl, and after a moment,
$10 traded hands, rather conspicuously. "Hey," he began, but the
southern girl tipped him a wink, and he fell silent.
883
Anxiously, he watched the clock, waiting for the 20 minutes to tick
past. "I need the chip back," he said, to the southern girl.
884
She shrugged. "You need to talk to her," she said, jerking her thumb
over her shoulder, then she ostentatiously pulled a paperback novel --
The Fountainhead -- out of her backpack and buried her nose in
it. He felt a complicated emotion: he wanted to laugh, and he wanted to
shout at the girl. He chose laughter, conscious of all the people
watching him, and approached the other girl, who was tall and solidly
built, with a no-nonsense look that went perfectly with her no-nonsense
clothes and haircut.
885
"Yes?" she said, when he approached her.
886
"You've got my chip," he said.
887
"No," she said. "I do not."
888
"But the chip she sold you, I'd only rented it to her."
889
"You need to take it up with her," the girl who had his chip said.
890
"But it's my chip," he said. "It wasn't hers to sell to you." He didn't
want to say, I'm also pretty intimidated by anyone who has the gall
to pull a stunt like that. Was it his imagination, or was the
southern girl smiling to herself, a smug little smile?
891
"Not my problem, I'm afraid," she said. "Too bad."
892
Now everyone was watching very closely and he felt himself
blushing, losing his cool. He swallowed and tried to put on a
convincing smile. "Yeah, I guess I really should be more careful who I
trust. Will you sell me my chip?"
893
"My chip," she said, flipping it in the air. He was tempted to try and
grab it out of the air, but that might have led to a wrestling match
right here, in front of everyone. How embarrassing!
894
"Yeah," he said. "Your chip."
895
"OK," she said. "$15."
896
"Deal," he said, thinking, I've already earned $45 here, I can
afford to let go of $15.
897
"In seven minutes," she said. He looked at the clock: it was 11:54. In
seven minutes, she'd have gotten his $20. Correction: her $20.
898
"That's not fair," he said.
899
She raised one eyebrow at him, hoisting it so high it seemed like it'd
touch her hairline. "Oh really? I think that this chip is worth $120.
$15 seems like a bargain to you."
900
"I'll give you $20," the redhead said.
901
"$25," said someone else, laughing.
902
"Fine, fine," Connor said, hastily, now blushing so hard he actually
felt light-headed. "$15."
903
"Too late," she said. "The price is now $25."
904
He heard the room chuckle, felt it preparing to holler out a new price
-- $40? $60? -- and he quickly snapped, "$25" and dug out his wallet.
905
The girl took his money -- how did he know she would give him the chip?
He felt like an idiot as soon as it had left his hand -- and then the
experimenter came in. "Lunch!" he called out, wheeling in a cart laden
with boxed salads, vegetarian sushi, and a couple buckets of fried
chicken. "Poker chips!" The twenties were handed around.
906
The girl with his money spent an inordinate amount of time picking out
her lunch, then, finally, turned to him with a look of fakey surprise,
and said, "Oh right, here," and handed him his chip. The guy with the
red hair snickered.
907
Well, that was the beginning of the game, the thing that turned the
next five hours into one of the most intense, emotional experiences
he'd ever taken part in. Players formed buying factions, bought out
other players, pooled their wealth. Someone changed the wall clock,
sneakily, and then they all spent 30 minutes arguing about who's watch
or phone was more accurate, until the researcher came back in with a
handful of twenties.
908
In the sixth hour of the experiment, Connor suddenly realized that he
was in the minority, an outlier among two great factions: one of which
controlled nearly all the poker chips, the other of which controlled
nearly all the cash. And there was only two hours left, which meant
that his single chip was worth $40.
909
And something began to gnaw at his belly. Fear. Envy. Panic. The
certainty that, when the experiment ended, he'd be the only poor one,
the only one without a huge wad of cash. The savvy traders around them
had somehow worked themselves into positions of power and wealth, while
he'd been made tentative by his bad early experience and had stood pat
while everyone else created the market.
910
So he set out to buy more chips. Or to sell his chip. He didn't care
which -- he just wanted to be rich.
911
He wasn't the only one: after the seventh hour, the entire marketplace
erupted in a fury of buying and selling, which made no damned
sense because now, now the chips were all worth exactly $20
each, and in just a few minutes, they'd be absolutely worthless. He
kept telling himself this, but he also found himself bidding, harder
and harder, for chips. Luckily, he wasn't the most frightened person in
the room. That turned out to be the redhead, who went after chips like
a crackhead chasing a rock, losing all the casual cool he'd started
with and chasing chips with money, IOUs.
912
Here's the thing, cash should have been king . The cash would
still be worth something in an hour. The poker chips were like soap
bubbles, about to pop. But those holding the chips were the kings and
queens of the game, of the market. In seven short hours, they'd been
conditioned to think of the chips as ATMs that spat out twenties, and
even though their rational minds knew better, their hearts were all
telling them to corner the chip.
913
At 4:53, seven minutes before his chip would have its final payout, he
sold it to the Fountainhead lady for $35, smirking at her until she
turned around and sold it to the redhead for $50. The researcher came
into the room, handed out his twenties, thanked them for their time,
and sent them on their way.
914
No one met anyone else's eye as they departed. No one offered anyone
else a phone number or email address or IM. It was as if they'd all
just done something they were ashamed of, like they'd all taken part in
a mob beating or a witch-burning, and now they just wanted to get away.
Far away.
915
For years, Connor had puzzled over the mania that had seized that room
full of otherwise sane people, that had found a home in his own heart,
had driven him like an addiction. What had brought him to that shameful
place?
916
Now, as he watched the value of his virtual assets climb and climb and
climb, climb higher than his Equations predicted, higher than any sane
person should be willing to spend on them, he understood .
917
The emotion that had driven them in that experimenter's lab, that was
driving the unseen bidders around the world: it wasn't greed.
918
It was envy .
919
Greed was predictable: if one slice of pizza is good, it makes sense
that your intuition will tell you that five or ten slices would be even
better.
920
But envy wasn't about what was good: it was about what someone else
thought was good. It was the devil who whispered in your ear about your
neighbor's car, his salary, his clothes, his girlfriend -- better than
yours, more expensive than yours, more beautiful than yours. It was the
dagger through your heart that could drive you from happiness to misery
in a second without changing a single thing about your circumstances.
It could turn your perfect life into a perfect mess, just by comparing
it to someone who had more/better/prettier.
921
Envy is what drove that flurry of buying and selling in the lab. The
redhead, writing IOUs and emptying his wallet: he'd been driven by the
fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were getting.
Connor had sold his chip in the last hour because everyone else seemed
to have gotten rich selling theirs. He could have kept his chip to
himself for eight hours and walked out $160 richer, and used the time
to study, or snooze, or do yoga in the back. But he'd felt that siren
call: Someone else is getting rich, why aren't you?
922
And now the markets were running and everything was shooting up
in value: his collection of red oxtails (useful in the preparation of
the Revelations spell in Endtimes) should have been selling at $4.21
each. He'd bought them for $2.10 each. They were presently priced at
$14.51 each .
923
It was insane.
924
It was wonderful.
925
Connor knew it couldn't last. Eventually, there would be a marketwide
realization that these were overpriced -- just as the market had
recently realized that they had been underpriced. Bidding would cease.
The last, most scared person who bought an overpriced game asset would
be unable to flip it, would have to pay for it.
926
Rationally, he supposed he should sell at his Equation-predicted
number. Anything higher was just a bet on someone else's irrationality.
But still -- would he really be better off flipping his 50 oxtails for
$200, when he could wait a few minutes and sell them for $700? It
didn't have to be all or nothing. He divided his assets up into two
groups; the ones he'd bought most cheaply, he set aside to allow to
rise as far as they could. They represented his lowest-risk inventory,
the cheapest losses to absorb. The remaining assets, he flipped at the
second they reached the value predicted by his Equations.
927
He quickly sold out of the second group, leaving him to watch the
speculative assets climb higher and higher. He had a dozen games open
on his computer, flipping from one to the next, monitoring the chatter
and their associated websites and marketplaces, getting a sense for
where they were going. Filtering the tweets and the status messages on
the social networks, he felt a curious sense of familiarity: they were
going nuts out there in a way that was almost identical to the
craziness that had swept over the group in the poker-chip experiment.
In their hearts, everyone knew that peacock plumes and purple armor
were vastly overvalued, but they also knew that some people were
getting rich off of them, and that if the prices kept climbing that
they'd never be able to own one themselves.
928
Nevermind that they never wanted to own one before , of course!
The important thing wasn't what they needed or loved, it was the idea
that someone else would have something that they couldn't have.
929
Connor had made his second great discovery: Envy, not greed, was the
most powerful force in any economy.
930
(Later, when Connor was writing articles about this for glossy
magazines and travelling all over the world to talk about it, plenty of
people from marketing departments would point out that they'd known
this for generations had spent centuries producing ads that were aimed
squarely at envy's solar plexus. It was true, he had to admit -- but it
was also true that practically every economist he'd ever met had
considered marketing people to be a bunch of shallow, foolish court
jesters with poor math skills and had therefore largely ignored them)
931
He watched the envy mount, and tried to get a feel for it all, to track
the sentiments as they bubbled up. It was hard -- practically
impossible, honestly -- because it was all spread out and no one had
written the chat programs and the games and the social networks and the
twitsites to track this kind of thing. He ended up with a dozen
browsers open, each with dozens of tabs, flipping through them in a
high speed blur, not reading exactly, but skimming, absorbing the
sense of how things were going. He could feel the money and the
thoughts and the goods all balanced on his fingertips, feel their
weight shifting back and forth.
932
And so he felt it when things started to go wrong. It was a bunch of
subtle indicators, a blip in prices in this market, a joyous tweet from
a player who'd just discovered an easy-to-kill miniboss with a huge
storehouse stuffed with peacock feathers. The envy bubble was
collapsing. Someone had popped it and the air was whooshing out.
933
SELL!
934
At that moment, his speculative assets were theoretically worth over
four hundred thousand dollars , but ten minutes later, it was
$250,000 and falling like a rock. He knew this one too -- fear -- fear
that everyone else got out while the getting was good, that the musical
chairs had all been filled, that you were the most scared person in a
chain of terrorized people who bought overpriced junk because someone
even more scared would buy it off of you.
935
But Connor could rise above the fear, fly over it, flip his assets in a
methodical, rapidfire way. He got out with over $120,000 in cash, plus
the $80,000 he'd gotten from his "rationally priced" assets, and now
his PayPal accounts were bulging with profits and it was all over.
936
Except it wasn't.
937
One by one, his game accounts began to shut down, his characters kicked
out, his passwords changed. He was limp with exhaustion, his hands
trembling as he typed and re-typed his passwords. And then he noticed
the new email, from the four companies that controlled the twelve games
he'd been playing: they'd all cut him off for violating their Terms of
Service. Specifically, he'd "Interfered with the game economy by
engaging in play that was apt to cause financial panic."
938
"What the hell does that mean?" he shouted at his computer, resisting
the urge to hurl his mouse at the wall. He'd been awake for over 48
hours now, had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mere weekend,
and had been graced with a thunderbolt of realization about the way
that the world's economy ran. Oh, and he'd validated his Equations.
939
He could solve this problem later.
940
He didn't even make it into bed. He curled up on the floor, in a nest
of pizza boxes and blankets, and slept for 18 hours, until he was
awoken by the bailiff who came to evict him for being three months
behind on the rent.
941
This scene is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith, ensconced in
the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the
Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The
Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I lived
in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible
writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce
little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two
from my own appearances there.
942
15 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688
15
<
943
Yasmin didn't see Mala anymore. If you weren't in the gang, "General
Robotwallah" didn't want to talk to you.
944
And Yasmin didn't want to be in the gang.
945
She, too, had had a visit from Big Sister Nor. The woman had made
sense. They did all the work, they made almost none of the money. Not
just in games, either -- her parents had spent their whole lives
toiling for others, and those others had gotten wealthier and
wealthier, and they'd stayed in Dharavi.
946
Mr Banerjee had paid Mala's army more than any other slum-child could
earn, it was true, and they were getting paid for playing their game,
which had felt like a miracle -- at first. But the more Yasmin thought
about it, the less miraculous it became. Big Sister Nor showed her
pictures, in-game, of the workers whose jobs they'd been disrupting.
Some had been in Indonesia, some had been in Thailand, some had been in
Malaysia, some had been in China. And lots of them had been in India,
in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan, and in Bangladesh, where her parents had
come from. They looked like her. They looked like her friends.
947
And they were just trying to earn money, too. They were just
trying to help their families, the way Mala's army had. "You don't have
to hurt other workers to survive," Big Sister Nor told her. "We can all
thrive together."
948
Day after day, Yasmin had snuck into Mrs Dibyendu's Internet cafe
before the Army met -- not at Mrs Dibyendu's, but at a new Internet
shop a little further down the road, near the women's papadam
collective -- and chatted with Big Sister Nor and listened to her
stories of how it could be.
949
She'd never talked about it with anyone else in the army. As far as
they knew, she was Mala's loyal lieutenant, sturdy and dependable. She
had to enforce discipline in the ranks, which meant keeping the boys
from fighting too much and keeping the girls from ganging up on one
another with hissing, whispered rumors. To them, she was a stern,
formidable fighter, someone to obey unconditionally in battle. She
couldn't approach them to say, "Have you ever thought about fighting
for workers instead of fighting against them?"
950
No matter how much Big Sister Nor wanted her to.
951
"Yasmin, they listen to you, la, they love you and look up to you. You
say it yourself." Her Hindi was strangely accented and peppered with
English and Chinese words. But there were lots of funny accents in
Dharavi, dialects and languages from across Mother India.
952
Finally, she agreed to do it. Not to talk to the soldiers, but to talk
to Mala, who had been her friend since Yasmin had found her carrying a
huge sack of rice home from Mr Bhatt's shop with her little brother,
looking lost and scared in the alleys of Dharavi. She and Mala had been
inseparable since then, and Yasmin had always been able to tell her
anything.
953
"Good morning, General," she said, falling into step beside Mala as she
trekked to the community tap with a water-can in each hand. She took
one can from Mala and took her now free hand and gave it a sisterly
squeeze.
954
Mala grinned at her and squeezed back, and the smile was like the old
Mala, the Mala from before General Robotwallah had come into being.
"Good morning, Lieutenant." Mala was pretty when she smiled, her
serious eyes filled with mischief, her square small teeth all on
display. When she smiled like this, Yasmin felt like she had a sister.
955
They talked in low voices as they waited for the tap, passing gupshup
about their families. Mala's mother had met a man at Mr Bhatt's
factory, a man whose parents had come to Mumbai a generation before,
but from the same village. He'd grown up on stories about life in the
village, and he could listen to Mala's mamaji tell stories of that
promised land all day long. He was gentle and had a big laugh, and Mala
approved. Yasmin's Nani, her grandmother, had been in touch with a
matchmaker in London, and she was threatening to find Yasmin a husband
there, though her parents were having none of it.
956
Once they had the water, Yasmin helped Mala carry it back to her
building, but stopped her before they got there, in the lee of an
overhanging chute that workers used to dump bundled cardboard from a
second-story factory down to carriers on the ground. The factory hadn't
started up yet, so it was quiet now.
957
"Big Sister Nor asked me to talk to you, Mala."
958
Mala stiffened and her smile faded. They weren't talking as sisters
anymore. The hard look, the General Robotwallah look, was in her eyes.
"What did she say to you?"
959
"The same she said to you, I imagine. That the people we fight against
are also workers, like us. Children, like us. That we can live without
hurting others. That we can work with them, with workers everywhere --"
960
Mala held up her hand, the General's command for silence in the
war-room. "I've heard it, I've heard it. And what, you think she's
right? You want to give it all up and go back to how we were before?
Back to school, back to work, back to no money and no food and being
afraid all the time?"
961
Yasmin didn't remember being afraid all the time, and school hadn't
been that bad, had it? "Mala," she said, placatingly. "I just wanted to
talk about this with you. You've saved us, all of us in the Army,
brought us out of misery and into riches and work. But we work and work
for Mr Banerjee, for his bosses, and our parents work for bosses, and
the children we fight in the game work for bosses, and I just think --"
She drew in a breath. "I think I have more in common with the workers
than I do with the bosses. That maybe, if we all come together, we can
demand a better deal from all of them --"
962
Mala's eyes blazed. "You want to lead the Army, is that it? You want to
take us on this mission of yours to make friends with everyone,
to join with them to fight Mr Banerjee and the bosses, Mr Bhatt who
owns the factory and the people who own the game? And how will you
fight, little Yasmin? Are you going to upset the entire world so that
it's finally fair and kind to everyone?"
963
Yasmin shrank back, but she took a deep breath and looked into the
General's terrible eyes. "What's so wrong with kindness, Mala? What's
so terrible about surviving without harming other people?"
964
Mala's lip curled up in a snarl of pure disgust. "Don't you know by
now, Yasmin? Haven't you figured it out yet? Look around us!" She waved
her water can wildly, nearly clubbing an old woman who was inching
past, bearing her own water cans. "Look around! You know that there are
people all over the world who have fine cars and fine meals, servants
and maids? There are people all over the world who have toilets ,
Yasmin, and running water , and who get to each have their own
bedroom with a fine bed to sleep in! Do you think those people are
going to give up their fine beds and their fine houses and cars for
you ? And if they don't give it up, where will it come from? How
many beds and cars are there? Are there enough for all of us? In this
world, Yasmin, there just isn't enough. That means that there are going
to be losers and winners, just like in any game, and you get to decide
if you want to be a winner or a loser."
965
Yasmin mumbled something under her breath.
966
"What?" Mala shouted at her. "What are you saying, girl? Speak up so I
can hear you!"
967
"I don't think it's like that. I think we can be kind to other people
and that they will be kind to us. I think that we can stick together,
like a team, like the army, and we can all work together to make the
world a better place."
968
Mala laughed, but it sounded forced, and Yasmin thought she saw tears
starting in her friend's eyes. "You know what happens when you act like
that, Yasmin? They find a way to destroy you. To force you to become an
animal. Because they're animals. They want to win, and if you
offer them your hand, they'll slice off your fingers. You have to be an
animal to survive."
969
Yasmin shook her head, negating everything. "It's not true, Mala! Our
neighbors here, they're not animals. They're people. They're good
people. We have nothing and yet we all cooperate. We help each other
--"
970
"Oh fine, maybe you can make a little group of friends here, people who
would have to look you in the eye if they did you a dirty trick. But
it's a big world. Do you think that Big Sister Nor's friends in
Singapore, in China, in America, in Russia -- do you think
they'll think twice before they destroy you? In Africa, in --"
She waved her arm, taking in all the countries she didn't know the
names of, filled with teeming masses of predatory workers, ready to
take their jobs from them. "Listen: do you really care so much for
Chinese and Russians and all those other people? Will you take bread
out of your mouth to give it to them? For a bunch of foreigners
who wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire?"
971
Yasmin thought she knew her friend, but this was like nothing she'd
ever heard from Mala before. Where had all this Indian patriotism come
from? "Mala, it's foreigners who own all the games we're playing. Who
cares if they're foreigners? Isn't the fact that they're people enough?
Didn't you used to rage about the stupid caste system and say that
everyone deserved equality?"
972
"Deserved!" Mala spat the word out like a curse. "Who cares what you
deserve, if you don't get it. Fill your belly with deserve. Sleep on a
bed of deserve. See what you get from deserve!"
973
"So your army is about taking whatever they can get, even if it hurts
someone else?"
974
Mala stood up very straight. "That's right, it's my army,
Yasmin. My army! And you're not a part of it anymore. Don't bother
coming around again, because, because --"
975
"Because I'm not your friend or your lieutenant anymore," Yasmin said.
"I understand, General Mala Robotwallah. But your army won't last
forever and our sisterhood might have, if you'd only valued it more.
I'm sorry you are making this decision, General Robotwallah, but it's
yours to make. Your karma." She set down the water-can and turned on
her heel and started away, back stiff, waiting for Mala to jump on her
back and wrestle her into the mud, waiting for her to run up and hug
her and beg her for forgiveness. She got to the next corner, a narrow
laneway between more plastic recycling factories, and contrived to look
back over her shoulder as she turned, pretending to be dodging to avoid
a pair of goats being led by an old Tamil man.
976
Mala was standing tall as a soldier, eyes burning into her, and they
transfixed her for a moment, froze her in her tracks, so that she
really did have to dodge around the goats. When she looked back
again, the General had departed, her skinny arms straining with her
water-cans.
977
Big Sister Nor told her to be understanding.
978
"She's still your friend," the woman said, her voice emanating from the
gigantic robot that stood guard over a group of Webbly gold-farmers who
were methodically raiding an old armory, clearing out the zombies and
picking up the cash and weapon-drops that appeared every time they ran
the dungeon. "She may not know it, but she's on the side of workers.
The other side -- the boss's side -- they'll use her services, but
they'll never let her into their camp. The best she can hope for is to
be a cherished pet, a valuable bit of hired muscle. I don't think
she'll stay put for that, do you?"
979
But it wasn't much comfort. In one morning, Yasmin had lost her best
friend and her occupation. She started going to school again, but she'd
fallen behind in the work in the six months she'd been away and now the
master wanted her to stay back a year and sit with the grade four
students, which was embarrassing. She'd always been a good student and
it galled her to sit with the younger kids -- and to make things worse,
she was tall for her age and towered over them. Gradually, she stopped
attending the school.
980
Her parents were outraged, of course. But they'd been outraged when
Yasmin had joined the army, too, and her father had beaten her for ten
days running, while she refused to cry, refused to have her will
broken. In the end, they'd been won over by her stubbornness. And, of
course, by the money she brought home.
981
Yasmin could handle her parents.
982
Mrs Dibyendu's Internet Cafe was a sad place now that the Army had
moved on. Mala had forced that on Mr Banerjee, and had counted it as a
great show of her strength when she prevailed. But Yasmin thought she
never would have won the argument if Mrs Dibyendu hadn't been so eager
to get rid of the Army.
983
Yasmin doubted that Mrs Dibyendu had anticipated the effect that the
Army's departure would have on her little shop, though. Once the Army
had gone, every kid in Dharavi had moved with them -- no one under the
age of 30 would set foot in the cafe. No one except Yasmin, who now sat
there all day long, fighting for the workers.
984
"You are very good at this," Justbob told her. She was Big Sister Nor's
lieutenant, and her Hindi was terrible, so they got by in a broken
English that each could barely understand. Nevertheless, Justbob's play
was aggressive and just this side of reckless, utterly fearless, and
she screamed out fearsome battle-cries in Tamil and Chinese when she
played, which made Yasmin laugh even as the hairs on her arms stood up.
Justbob liked to put Yasmin in charge of strategy while she led the
armies of defenders from around the world who played on their side,
defending workers from people like Mala.
985
"Thank you," Yasmin said, and dispatched a squadron to feint at the
left flank of a twenty-cruiser unit of rusting battle-cars that
bristled with bolted-on machine-guns and grenade launchers. She mostly
played Mad Max: Autoduel and Civilization these days, avoiding Zombie
Mecha and the other games that Mala and her Army ruled in. Autoduel was
huge now, linked to a reality TV show in which crazy white people
fought each other in the deserts in Australia with killer cars just
like the ones in the game.
986
The opposing army bought the feint, turning in a wide arc to present
their forward guns to her zippy little motorcycle scouts who must have
looked like easy pickings -- the fast dirt-bikes couldn't support any
real arms or armor, so each driver was limited to hand-weapons, mostly
Uzis on full auto, spraying steel-jacketed rounds toward the heavily
armored snouts of the enemy, who returned withering fire with
tripod-mounted machine-guns and grenades.
987
But as they turned, they rolled into a double-row of mines Yasmin had
laid by stealth at the start of the battle, and then, as the cars
rocked and slammed into each other and spun out of control, Justbob's
dragoons swept in from the left, and their splendid battle-wagon came
in from the right -- a lumbering two-storey RV plated with triple-thick
armor, pierced with gun-slits for a battery of flame-throwers and
automatic ballistic weapons, mostly firing depleted uranium rounds that
cut through the enemy cars like butter. It wasn't hard to outrun the
battle-wagon, but there was nowhere for the enemy to go, and a few
minutes later, all that was left of the enemy were oily petrol fires
and horribly mutilated bodies.
988
Yasmin zoomed out and booted her command-trike around a dune to where
the work-party continued to labor, doing their job, excavating a buried
city full of feral mutants and harvesting its rich ammo-dumps and
art-treasures for the tenth time that day. Yasmin couldn't really talk
to them -- they were from somewhere in China called Fujian, and
besides, they were busy. They'd left their boss and formed a worker's
co-op that split the earnings evenly, but they'd had to go heavily into
debt to buy the computers to do it, and from what Yasmin understood,
their families could be hurt or even killed if they missed a payment,
since they'd had to borrow the money from gangsters.
989
It would have been nice if they'd had access to a better source of
money, but it certainly wouldn't be Yasmin. Her Army money had run out
a few weeks after she'd left Mala, and though the IWWWW paid her a
little money to guard union shops, it didn't come to much, especially
compared to the money Mr Banerjee had to throw around.
990
At least she wasn't hurting other poor people to survive. The goons
she'd just wiped out would get paid even though they'd lost. And she
had to admit it: this was fun . There was a real thrill in
playing the game, playing it well, getting this army of people to
follow her lead to cooperate and become an unstoppable weapon.
991
Then, Justbob was gone. Not even a hastily typed "gtg," she just wasn't
on the end of her mic. And there were crashing sounds, shouts in a
language Yasmin didn't speak. Distant screaming.
992
Yasmin flipped over to Minerva, the social networking site that the
Webblies favored, as she did a thousand times a day. Minerva had been
developed for gamers, and it had all kinds of nice dashboards that
showed you what worlds all your friends were in, what kind of battles
they were fighting and so on. It was easy to get lost in Minerva,
falling into a clicktrance of screencaps of famous battles,
trash-talking between guilds, furious arguments about the best way to
run a level -- and the endless rounds of gold-farmer bashing. One thing
she loved about Minerva was the auto-translate feature, whose database
included all kinds of international gamer shorthands and slangs,
knowing that Kekekekeke was Korean for LOL and a million other bits of
vital dialects. This made Minerva especially useful for the Webblies'
global network of guilds, worker co-ops, locals and clans.
993
Her dashboard was going crazy . Webblies from all over the world
were tweeting about something happening in China, a big strike from a
group of gold-farmers who'd walked out on their boss, and were now
picketing outside of their factories. Players from all over the world
were rushing to a site in Mushroom Kingdom to blockade some sploit that
they'd been mining before they walked out. Yasmin hadn't ever played
Mushroom Kingdom and she wouldn't be any use there -- you had to know a
lot about a world's weapons and physics and player-types before you
could do any damage. But judging from the status ticker zipping past,
there were plenty of Webblies available on every shard to fill the gap.
994
She followed the messages as they went by, watched the rallies and the
retreats, the victories and defeats, and waited on tenterhooks for the
battle to end when the GMs discovered what they were up to and banned
everyones' accounts. That was the secret weapon in all these battles:
anyone who snitched to the employees of the companies that ran the
worlds could destroy both teams, wiping out their accounts and loot in
an instant. No one could afford that -- and no one could afford to
fight in battles that were so massive that they caught the eye of the
GMs, either.
995
And yet, here were the Webblies, hundreds of them, all risking their
accounts and their livelihoods to beat back goons who were trying to
break a strike. Yasmin's blood sang -- this was it, this was what Big
Sister Nor was always talking about: Solidarity! An injury to one is an
injury to all! We're all on the same team -- and we stay together.
996
There were videos and pictures streaming from the strike, too -- skinny
Chinese boys blinking owlishly in the daylight, on busy streets in a
distant land, standing with arms linked in front of glass doorways,
chanting slogans in Chinese. Passers-by goggled at them, or pointed, or
laughed. Mostly they were girls, older than Yasmin, in their late teens
and early twenties, very well-dressed, with fashionable haircuts and
short skirts and ironed blouses and shining hair. They stared and some
of them talked with the boys, who basked in the attention. Yasmin knew
about boys and girls and the way they made each other act -- hadn't she
seen and used that knowledge when she was Mala's lieutenant?
997
And now more and more of the girls were joining the boys -- not exactly
joining, but crowding around them, standing in clumps, talking amongst
themselves. And there were police coming in too, lots of pictures of
the police filling in and Yasmin's heart sank. She could see, with her
strategist's eye, how the police positions would work in planning a
rush at the strikers, shutting off their escape routes, boxing them in
and trapping them when the police swept in.
998
Now the photos slowed, now the videos stopped. Gloved hands reached up
and snatched away cameras, covering lenses. The last audiofeed was
shouts, angry, scared, hurt --
999
And now the ticker at the bottom of her screen was going even crazier,
messages from the pickets in China about the police rush, and there was
a moment of unreality as Yasmin felt that she was reading about an
in-game battle again, set in some gameworld modelled on industrial
China, a place that seemed as foreign to her as Zombie Mecha or Mad
Max. But these were real people, skirmishing with real police, being
clubbed with real truncheons. Yasmin's imagination supplied images of
people screaming, writhing, trampling each other with all the vividness
of one of her games. It was a familiar scene, but instead of zombies,
it was young, pale Chinese boys and beautiful, fashionable Chinese
girls caught in the crush, falling beneath the truncheons.
1000
And then the messages died away, as everyone on the scene fell silent.
The ticker still crawled with other Webblies around the world, someone
saying that the Chinese police could shut down all the mobile devices
in a city or a local area if they wanted. So maybe the people were
still there, still recording and writing it down. Maybe they hadn't all
been arrested and taken away.
1001
Yasmin buried her face in her hands and breathed heavily. Mrs Dibyendu
shouted something at her, maybe concerned. It was impossible to tell
over the song of the blood in her ears and the hammer of the blood in
her chest.
1002
Out there, Webblies all over the world were fighting for a better deal
for poor people, and what did it matter? How could her solidarity help
those people in China? How could they help her when she needed
it? Where were Big Sister Nor and Justbob and The Mighty Krang now that
she needed them?
1003
She stumbled out into the light, blinking, thinking of those skinny
Chinese boys and the police in their strategic positions around them.
Suddenly, the familiar alleys and lanes of Dharavi felt sinister and
claustrophobic, as though people were watching her from every angle,
getting ready to attack her. And after all, she was just a girl, a
little girl, and not a mighty warrior or a general.
1004
Her treacherous feet had led her down the road, around a corner, behind
the yard where the women's baking co-op set out their papadams in the
sun, and past the new cafe where Mala and her army fought. They were in
there now, the sound of their boisterous play floating out on the air
like smoke, like the mouthwatering temptation smells of cooking food.
1005
What were they shouting about? Some battle they'd fought -- a battle in
Mushroom Kingdom. A battle against the Webblies. Of course. They were
the best. Who else would you hire to fight the armies of the Webblies?
She felt a sick lurch in her gut, a feeling of the earth dropping away
from beneath her feet. She was alone now, truly alone, the enemy of her
former friends. There was no one on her side except for some distant
people in a distant land whom she'd never met -- whom she'd probably
never meet.
1006
Dispirited, she turned away and headed for home. Her father was away
for a few days, travelling to Pune to install a floor for work. He
worked in an adhesive tile plant where they printed out fake stone
designs on adhesive-backed squares of durable vinyl that could be
easily laid in the office towers of Pune's industrial parks. There were
always tiles around their home, and Yasmin had never paid them much
attention until she started to game with Mala, and then she'd noticed
with a shock one day that the strange, angular blurring around the
edges of the fine "marble" veins in the tiles were the same compression
smears you got when the game's graphics started to choke, "JPEG
artifacts," they called them in the message boards. It was as though
the little imperfections that make the games slightly unreal were
creeping into the real world.
1007
That feeling was with her now as she ghosted away from the cafe, but
she was brought back to reality by a tap on her shoulder. She whirled
around, startled, feeling, for some reason, like she was about to be
punched.
1008
But it was Sushant, the tallest boy in Mala's army, who had never
blustered and fought like the other boys, but had stared intently at
his screen as though he wished he could escape into it. Yasmin found
herself staring straight down his eyes, and he waggled his chin
apologetically and smiled shyly at her.
1009
"I thought I saw you passing by," he said. "And I thought --" He
dropped his eyes.
1010
"You thought what?" she said. It came out harshly, an anger she hadn't
known she'd been feeling.
1011
"I thought I'd come out and..." He trailed off.
1012
"What? What did you think, Sushant?" Her own chin was wagging from side
to side now, and she leaned her face down toward his, noses just barely
apart. She could smell his lunch of spinach bahji on his breath.
1013
He shrank back, winced. Yasmin realized that he was terrified. Realized
that he had probably risked quite a lot just by coming out to talk to
her. Discipline was everything in Mala's army. Hadn't Yasmin been in
charge of enforcing discipline?
1014
"I'm sorry," she said, backing away. "It's nice to see you again,
Sushant. Have you eaten?" It was a formality, because she knew he had,
but it was what one friend said to another in Dharavi, in Mumbai --
maybe in all of India, for all Yasmin knew.
1015
He smiled again, a faltering little shy smile. It was heartbreaking to
see. Yasmin realized that she'd never said much to him when she was
Mala's lieutenant. He'd never needed cajoling or harsh words to get
down to work, so she'd practically ignored him. "I thought I'd come out
and say hello because we've all missed you. I hoped that maybe you and
Mala could --" Again he faltered, and Yasmin felt her own chin jutting
out involuntarily in a stubborn, angry way.
1016
"Mala and I have chosen different roads," she said, making a conscious
effort to sound calm. "That's final. Does it go well for her and you?"
1017
He nodded. "We win every battle."
1018
"Congratulations."
1019
"But now -- lately -- I've been thinking --"
1020
She waited for him to say more. The moment stretched. Grownups bumped
past them and she realized that they probably thought they were
courting, being a boy and a girl together. If news of that got back to
her father --
1021
But it didn't matter to her anymore. Her father was off installing JPEG
artifacts in an IT park in Pune. She was out of the army and out of
friends and out of school. What could anything matter.
1022
"I talk to your friends," he said at last.
1023
"My friends?" She didn't know she had any.
1024
"The Webblies. Your new army. They come to me while I fight, send me
private messages. At first I ignored them, but lately I've been on
drogue, and I have a lot of time to think. And they sent me pictures --
the people I was hurting. Kids like you and me, all over the world. And
it made me think." He paused, licked his lips. "About karma. About
hurting people to live. About all the things that they say. I don't
think I want to do this forever. Or that I can do it forever."
1025
Yasmin was at a loss for words. Were there really other people, right
here in Dharavi, right here in Mala's army, who felt as she did? She'd
never imagined such a thing, somehow. But here he was.
1026
"You know that Mala's army pays ten times what you can get with the
Webblies, right?"
1027
"For now," he said. "That's the point, right? Chee! If we fight now, we
can raise the wages of everyone who works for a living instead of
owning things for a living, right?"
1028
"I never thought of the division that way. Owning things for a living,
I mean."
1029
His shyness receded. He was clearly enjoying having someone to talk to
about this. "It all comes down to owning versus working. Someone has to
do the organizing, I guess -- there wouldn't be a Zombie Mecha if
someone didn't get a lot of people together, working to make all that
code. Someone has to pay the game-masters and do all of that. I
understand that part. It makes sense to me. My mother works in Mrs
Dotta's fabric-dyeing shop. Someone has to buy the dyes, get the cloth,
buy the vats and the tools, arrange to sell it once it's done,
otherwise, my mother wouldn't have a job. I always stopped there,
thinking, all right, if Mrs Dotta does all that work, and makes a job
for my mother, why shouldn't she get paid for it?
1030
"But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs Dotta's job is more
important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job without Mrs
Dotta's factory, but Mrs Dotta wouldn't have a factory without mamaji's
work, right?" He waggled his chin defiantly.
1031
"That's right," Yasmin said. She was nervous about being in public with
this boy, but she had to admit that it was exciting to hear this all
from him.
1032
"So why should Mrs Dotta have the right to fire my mother, but my
mother not have the right to fire Mrs Dotta? If they depend on each
other, why should one of them always have the power to demand and the
other one always have to ask for favors?"
1033
Yasmin felt his excitement, but she knew that there had to be more to
it than this. "Isn't Mrs Dotta taking all the risk? Doesn't she have to
find the money to start the factory, and doesn't she lose it if the
factory closes?"
1034
"Doesn't mamaji risk losing her job? Doesn't Mamaji risk growing sick
from the fumes and the chemicals in the dyes? There's nothing eternal
or perfect or natural about it! It's just something we all agreed to --
bosses get to be in charge, instead of just being another kind of
worker who contributes a different kind of work!"
1035
"And that's what you think you'll get from the Webblies? An end to
bosses?"
1036
He looked down, blushing. "No," he said. "No, I don't think so. I think
that it's too much to ask for. But maybe the workers can get a better
deal. That's what Big Sister Nor talks about, isn't it? Good pay, good
places to work, fairness? Not being fired just because you disagree
with the boss?"
1037
Or the general , Yasmin thought. Aloud, she said, "So you'll
leave the army? You want to be a Webbly?"
1038
Now he looked down further. "Yes," he said, at last. "Eventually. It
all keeps going around and around in my mind. I don't know if I'm ready
yet." He risked a look up at her. "I don't know if I'm as brave as
you."
1039
Anger surged through her, hot and irrational. How dare he talk
about her "bravery"? He was just using that as an excuse to go on
getting rich in Mala's army. He understood so well what was
wrong and what needed to be done. Understood it better than Yasmin! But
he didn't want to give up his comfort and friendships. That wasn't
cowardice, it was greed . He was too greedy to give it up.
1040
He must have seen this in her face, because he took a step back and
held up his hands. "It's not that I won't do it someday -- but I don't
know what good it would do for me to do this today, on my own. What
would change if I stopped fighting for Mala's army? She's just one
general with one army among hundreds all over the world, and I'm just
one fighter in the army. I --" He faltered. "What's the sense in giving
up so much if it won't make a difference?"
1041
Yasmin's anger boiled in her, ate at her like acid, but she bit her
tongue, because that little voice inside her was saying, "You're mostly
angry because you thought you had a comrade, someone who'd keep you
company, and it turned out that all he wanted to do was confess to you
and have you forgive him. And it was true. She was far more upset by
her loneliness than by his cowardice, or greed, or whatever it was.
1042
"I. Need. To. Go. Now," she said, biting on the words, keeping the
anger out of her voice by sheer force of will.
1043
She didn't wait for him to raise his eyes, just turned on her heel and
walked and walked and walked, through the familiar alleys of Dharavi,
not going anywhere but trying to escape anyway, like a chained animal
pacing off its patch. She was chained -- chained by birth and by
circumstance. Her family might have been rich. They might have been
high-caste. She might be in another country -- in America, in China, in
Singapore, all the distant lands. But she was here, and she had no
control over that. There was a whole world out there and this was where
fate had put her.
1044
She wouldn't be changing the world. She wouldn't be going to any of
those places. She hadn't even left Dharavi, except once with her
mother, when she took Yasmin and her brothers on a train to see a beach
where it had been hot and sandy and the water had been too dangerous to
swim in, so they'd stood on the shore and then walked down a road of
smart shops where they couldn't afford to shop, and then they'd waited
for the bus again and gone home. Yasmin had seen the multiverses of the
games, but she hadn't even seen Mumbai.
1045
Now where? She was tired and hungry, angry and exhausted. Home? It was
still afternoon, so her mother and brothers were all out working or in
school. That emptiness... It scared her. She wasn't used to being
alone. It wasn't a natural state in Dharavi. She was very thirsty, the
wind was blowing plastic smoke into her eyes and face, making her
nostrils and sinuses and throat raw. Mrs Dibyendu's cafe would have
chai, and Mrs Dibyendu would give her a cup of it and some computer
time on credit, because Mrs Dibyendu was desperate to save her cafe
from bankruptcy now that the army had abandoned it.
1046
Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew doled her out a cup of chai grudgingly. He
hadn't learned a thing from the savage beating that Mala had laid on
him. He still stood too close, still went out Eve teasing with his gang
of badmashes. Yasmin knew that he would have loved to take revenge on
Mala, and that Mala never went out after dark without three or four of
the biggest boys from the army. It made her furious. No matter how much
Mala had hurt her, she had the right to go around her home without
fearing this idiot. His upper lip was curled in a permanent sneer,
thanks to the scar Mala's feet had left behind.
1047
She sat down to a computer, logged in. She was sure that the idiot
nephew used all kinds of badware to spy on what they did on the
computers, but she'd bought a login fob from one of the shops at the
edge of Dharavi, and it did magic, logging her in with a different
password every time she sat down, so that her PayPal and game accounts
were all safe.
1048
Mindlessly, she plunged back into her usual routine. Login to Minerva,
check for Webbly protection missions in the worlds she played. But
there were no missions waiting. The Webbly feeds were all afire with
chatter about the strike in Shenzhen, rumors of the numbers arrested,
rumors of shootings. She watched it tick past helplessly, wondering
where all these rumors came from. Everyone seemed to know something
that she didn't know. How did they know?
1049
A direct message popped up on her screen. It was from a stranger, but
it was someone in the inner Webbly affinity group, which meant that Big
Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, or Justbob had manually approved her.
Anyone could join the outer Webblies, but there were very few inner
Webblies.
1050
> Hello, can you read this?
1051
It was a full sentence, with punctuation, and the question was as daft
as you could imagine. It was the kind of message her father might send.
She knew immediately that she was communicating with an adult, and one
who didn't game.
1052
> yes
1053
> Our mutual friend B.S.N. has asked me to contact you. You are in
Mumbai, correct?
1054
She had a moment's hesitation. This was a very grownup, very non-gamer
way to type. Maybe this was someone working for the other side? But
Mumbai was as huge as the world. "In Mumbai" was only slightly more
specific than "In India" or "On Earth."
1055
> yes
1056
> Where are you? Can I come and get you? I must talk with you.
1057
> talking now lol
1058
> What? Oh, I see. No, I must TALK with you. This is official
business. B.S.N. specifically said I must make contact with you.
1059
She swallowed a couple times, drained the dregs of her chai.
1060
> ok
1061
> Splendid. Where shall I come and get you from?
1062
She swallowed again. When they'd gone to the beach, her mother had been
very clear on this: Don't tell anyone you are from Dharavi. For
Mumbaikars, Dharavi is like Hell, the place of eternal torment, and
those who dwell here are monsters. This grown up sounded very
proper indeed. Perhaps he would think that Dharavi was Hell and would
leave her be.
1063
> dharavi girl
1064
> One moment.
1065
There was a long pause. She wondered if he was trying to get in touch
with Big Sister Nor, to tell her that her warrior was a slum-child, to
find someone better to help.
1066
> You know this place?
1067
It was a picture of the Dharavi Mosque, tall and imposing, looming over
the whole Muslim quarter.
1068
> course!!
1069
> I'll be there in about an hour. This is me.
1070
Another picture. It wasn't the middle-aged man in a suit she'd been
expecting, but a young man, barely older than a teenager, short gelled
hair and a leather jacket, stylish blue-jeans and black motorcycle
boots.
1071
> Can you give me your phone number? I will call you when I'm close.
1072
> lol
1073
> I'm sorry?
1074
> dharavi girl -- no phone for me
1075
She'd had a phone, when she was in Mala's army. They all had phones.
But it was the first thing to go when she quit the army. She still had
it in a drawer, couldn't bear to sell it, but it didn't work as a phone
anymore, though she sometimes used it as a calculator (all the games
had turned themselves off right after the service was disconnected, to
her disappointment).
1076
> Sorry, sorry. Of course. Meet you there in about an hour then.
1077
Her heart thudded in her chest. Meeting a strange man, going on a
secret errand -- it was the sort of thing that always ended in terrible
tragedy, defilement and murder, in the stories. And an hour from now
would be --
1078
> cant meet at the mosque
1079
It would be right in the middle of 'Asr, afternoon prayers, and the
Mosque would be mobbed by her father's friends. All it would take would
be for one of them to see her with a strange man, with gelled hair, a
Hindu judging from the rakhi on his wrist, poking free of the leather
jacket. Her father would go insane .
1080
> meet me at mahim junction station instead by the crash barriers
1081
It would take her an hour to walk there, but it would be safe.
1082
There was a pause. Then another picture: two boys straddling one of the
huge cement barriers in front of the station. It was where she and her
brothers had waited while their mother queued up for the tickets.
1083
> Here?
1084
> yes
1085
> OK then. I'll be on a Tata 620 scooter.
1086
Another picture of a lovingly polished little bike, a proud purple
gas-tank on its skeletal chromed frame. There were thousands of these
in Dharavi, driven by would-be badmashes who'd saved up a little money
for a pair of wheels.
1087
> ill be there
1088
She handed her cup to idiot nephew, not even seeing the grimace on his
face as she dashed past him, out into the roadway, back home to change
and put some few things in a bag before her mother or brothers came
home. She didn't know where she was going or how long she'd be away,
and the last thing she wanted was to have to explain this to her
mother. She would leave a note, one of her brothers would read it to
her mother. She'd just say, "Away on union business. Back soon. Love
you." And that would have to be enough -- because, after all, it was
all she knew.
1089
On the long walk to Mahim Junction station, she alternated between
nervous excitement and nervous dread. This was foolish, to be sure, but
it was also all she had left. If Big Sister Nor vouched for this man --
chee! she didn't even know his name! -- then who was Yasmin to doubt
him?
1090
As she got closer to the edge of Dharavi, the laneways widened to
streets, wide enough for skinny, shoeless boys to play ditch-cricket
in. They shouted things at her, "offending decency," as the
schoolteacher, Mr Hossain, had always said when the badmashes gathered
outside the school to call things to the girls as they left the
classroom. But she knew how to ignore them, and besides, she had picked
up her brother Abdur's lathi, using it as a walking stick, having tied
a spare hijab underscarf to the top to make it seem more innocuous.
They'd played gymnastics games in the schoolyard with sticks like
lathis, but without the iron binding on the tip. Still, she felt sure
she could swing it fearsomely enough to scare off any badmash who got
in her way on this fateful day. It was only at the station that she
realized she had no idea how they would carry it on the little scooter.
1091
She'd brought her phone along, just to tell the time with, and now an
hour had gone by and there was no sign of the man with the short gelled
hair. Another twenty minutes ticked past. She was used to this: nothing
in Dharavi ran on precise time except for the calls to prayer from the
mosque, the rooster crows in the morning, and the calls to muster in
Mala's army, which were always precisely timed, with fierce discipline
for stragglers who showed up late for battle.
1092
Trains came in and trains came out. She saw some men she recognized:
friends of her father who worked in Mumbai proper, who would have
recognized her if she hadn't been wearing her hijab pulled up to her
nose and pinned there. She was acutely aware of the Hindu boys' stare.
Hindus and Muslims didn't get along, officially. Unofficially, of
course, she knew as many Hindus as Muslims in Dharavi, in the army, in
school. But on the impersonal, grand scale, she was always
other . They were "Mumbaikars" -- "real" people from Mumbai. Her
parents insisted on calling the city "Bombay," the old name of the city
from before the fierce Hindu nationalists had changed it, proclaiming
that India was for Hindus and Hindus alone. She and her people could go
back to Bangladesh, to Pakistan, to one of the Muslim strongholds where
they were in the majority, and leave India to the real Indians.
1093
Mostly, it didn't touch her, because mostly, she only met people who
knew her and whom she knew -- or people who were entirely virtual and
who cared more about whether she was an Orc or a Fire Elf than if she
was a Muslim. But here, on the edge of the known world, she was a girl
in a hijab, an eye-slit and a long, modest dress and a stout stick, and
they were all staring at her.
1094
She kept herself amused by thinking about how she would attack or
defend the station using a variety of games' weapons-systems. If they
were all zombies, she'd array the mechas here, here and here, using the
railway bed as a channel to lure combatants into flamethrower range. If
they were fighting on motorcycles, she'd circle that way with her cars,
this way with her motorcycles, and pull the death-lorry in there. It
brought a smile to her face, safely hidden behind the hijab.
1095
And here was the man, pulling into the lot on his green motorcycle,
wiping the road dust off his glasses with his shirt-tail before tucking
it back into his jacket. He looked around nervously at the people
outside the station -- working people streaming back and forth,
badmashes and beggars loitering and sauntering and getting in
everyone's way. Several beggars were headed toward him now, children
with their hands outstretched, some of them carrying smaller children
on their hips. Even over the crowd noises, Yasmin could hear their sad,
practiced cries.
1096
She reached under her chin and checked the pin holding her hijab in
place, then approached the rider, moving through the beggars as though
they weren't there. They shied away from her lathi like flies dodging a
raised hand. He was so disconcerted by the beggars that it took him a
minute to notice the veiled young girl standing in front of him,
clutching a meter-and-a-half long stick bound in iron.
1097
"Yasmin?" His Hindi was like a fillum star's. Up close, he was very
handsome, with straight teeth and a neatly trimmed little mustache and
a strong nose and chin.
1098
She nodded.
1099
He looked at her lathi. "I have some bungee cables," he said. "I think
we can attach that to the side of the bike. And I brought you a
helmet."
1100
She nodded again. She didn't know what to say. He moved to the locked
carrier-box on the back of his bike, pushing away a little beggar-boy
who'd been fingering the lock, and pushed his thumb into the locking
mechanism's print-reader. It sprang open and he fished inside, coming
up with a helmet that looked like something out of a manga cartoon,
streamlined, with intricate designs etched into its surface in hot
yellow and pink. On the front of the helmet was a sticker depicting Sai
Baba, the saint that both Muslims and Hindus agreed upon. Yasmin
thought this was a good omen -- even if he was a Hindu boy, he'd
brought her a helmet that she could wear without defiling Islam.
1101
She took the manga Sai Baba helmet from him, noting that the sticker
was holographic and that Sai Baba turned to look her straight in the
eye as she hefted it. It was heavier than it looked, with thick padding
inside. No one in Dharavi wore crash-helmets on motorcycles -- and the
boy wasn't wearing one, either. But as she contemplated the narrow
saddle, she thought about falling off at 70 kilometers per hour on some
Mumbai road and decided that she was glad he'd brought it. So she
nodded a third time and lifted it over her head. It went on slowly, her
head pushing its way in like a hand caught in a tangled sleeve, pushing
to displace the fabric, which slowly gave way. Then she was inside it,
and the sounds around her were dead and distant, the sights all tinted
yellow through the one-way mirrored eye-visor. She felt tentatively at
her head -- which felt like it would loll forward under the helmet's
weight if she turned her face too quickly -- and found the visor's
catch and lifted it up. The sound got a little brighter and sharper.
1102
Meanwhile, the boy had been affixing the lathi along the bike's length,
to the amusement of the beggar children, who offered laughing advice
and mockery. He had a handful of bungee cords that he'd extracted from
the bike's box, and he wrapped them again and again around the pole,
finding places on the bike's skeletal chrome to fix the hooks, testing
the handlebars to ensure that he could still steer. At last he grunted,
stood, dusted his hands off on his jeans and turned to her.
1103
"Ready?"
1104
She drew in a deep breath, spoke at last. "Where are we going?"
1105
"Andheri," he said. "Near the film studios."
1106
She nodded as though she knew where that was. In a way, of course, she
did: there were plenty of movies about, well, the golden age of making
movies, when Andheri had been the place to be, glamorous and
bustling. But most of those movies had been about how Andheri's sun had
set, with all the big filmi production places moving away. What would
it be like today?
1107
"And when will we come back?"
1108
He waggled his chin, thinking. "Tonight, certainly. I'll make sure of
that. And some union people can come back with us and make sure you get
to your door safely. I've thought of everything."
1109
"And what is your name?"
1110
He stared at her for a moment, his jaw hanging open in surprise. "OK, I
didn't think of everything! I'm Ashok. Do you know how to ride a
scooter?"
1111
She shook her head. She'd seen plenty of people riding on motorcycles
and scooters, in twos and even in threes and fours -- sometimes a whole
family, with children on mothers' laps on the back -- but she'd never
gotten on one. Standing next to it now, it seemed insubstantial and
well, slippery , the kind of thing that was easier to fall off of
than to stay on.
1112
"OK," he said, waggling his chin, considering her clothing. "It's
harder with the dress," he said. "You'll have to sit side-saddle." He
climbed up on the bike's saddle and demonstrated, keeping his knees
together and pressed against the bike's side, twisting his body around.
"You'll have to hold onto me very tight." He grinned his movie-star
grin.
1113
Yasmin realized what a mistake this had all been. This strange man. His
motorcycle. Going off to Mumbai, away from Dharavi, to a strange place,
for a strange reason. And he had her lathi, which wasn't even hers, and
if she turned on her heel and went back into Dharavi, she'd still have
to explain the missing lathi to her brother, and the note to her
mother. And now she was going to get killed in Mumbai traffic with a
total stranger on the way to Bollywood's favorite ghost-town.
1114
But as hopeless as it was, it wasn't as hopeless as being alone, not in
the army, not in school, not in the Webblies. Not as hopeless as being
poor Yasmin, the Dharavi girl, born in Dharavi, bred in Dharavi.
1115
She levered herself sidesaddle onto the bike and Ashok climbed over the
saddle and sat down, his leather jacket pressed up against her side.
She tried to square her hips to face forward, and found herself in such
a precarious position that she nearly tipped over backwards.
1116
"You have to hold on," Ashok said, and the beggar children jeered and
made rude gestures. Shutting her eyes, she put her arms around his
waist, feeling how skinny he was under that fancy jacket, and
interlaced her fingers around his stomach. It was less precarious now,
but she still felt as though she would fall at any second -- and they
weren't even moving yet!
1117
Ashok kicked back the bike's stand and revved the engine. A cloud of
biodiesel exhaust escaped from the tailpipe, smelling like old cooking
oil -- it probably started out as old cooking oil, of course -- spicy
and stale. Yasmin's stomach gurgled and she blushed beneath her hijab,
sure he could feel the churning of her empty stomach. But he just
turned his head and said, "Ready?"
1118
"Yes," she said, but her voice came out in a squeak.
1119
They barely made it fifty meters before she shouted "Stop! Stop!" in
his ear. She had never been more afraid in all her life. She forced her
fingers to unlace themselves and drew her trembling hands back into her
lap.
1120
"What's wrong?"
1121
"I don't want to die!" she shouted. "I don't want to die on your maniac
bike in this maniac traffic!"
1122
He waggled his chin. "It's the dress," he said. "If you could only
straddle the seat."
1123
Yasmin patted her thighs miserably, then she hiked up her dress,
revealing the salwar -- loose trousers -- she wore beneath it. Ashok
nodded. "That'll do," he said. "But you need to tie up the legs, so
they don't get caught in the wheel. He flipped open his cargo box again
and passed her two plastic zip-strips which she used to tie up each
ankle.
1124
"Right, off we go," he said, and she straddled the bike, putting her
arms around his waist again. He smelled of his hair gel and of leather,
and of sweat from the road. She felt like she'd gone to another planet
now, even though she could still see Mahim Junction behind her. She
squeezed his waist for dear life as he revved the engine and maneuvered
the bike back into traffic.
1125
She realized that he'd been taking it easy for her sake before, driving
relatively slowly and evenly in deference to her precarious position.
Now that she was more secure, he drove like the baddest badmash she'd
ever seen in any action film. He gunned the little bike up the edge of
the ditch, beside the jerky, slow traffic, always on the brink of
tipping into the stinking ditch, being killed by a swerving driver or a
door opening suddenly so the driver could spit out a stream of betel;
or running over one of the beggars who lined the road's edge, tapping
on the windows and making sad faces at the trapped motorists.
1126
She'd piloted a million virtual vehicles in her career as a gamer, at
high speeds, through dangerous terrain. It wasn't remotely the same,
even with the helmet's reality-filtering padding and visor. She could
hear her own whimpering in her head. Every nerve in her body was
screaming Get off this thing while you can ! But her rational
mind kept on insisting that this boy clearly rode his bike through
Mumbai every day and managed to survive.
1127
And besides, there was so much Mumbai to see as they sped down the
road, and that was much more interesting than worrying about imminent
death. As they sped down the causeway, they neared a huge suspension
bridge, eight lanes wide, all white concrete and steel cables, proudly
proclaimed to be the Bandra-Worli Sea Link by an intricate sign in
Hindi and English. They sped up the ramp to it, riding close to the
steel girders that lined the bridge's edge, and beneath them, the sea
sparkled blue and seemed so close that she could reach down and skim
her fingertips in the waves. The air smelled of salt and the sea, the
choking traffic fumes whipped away by a wind that ruffled her dress and
trousers, pasting them to her body. Her fear ebbed away as they crossed
the bridge, and did not come back as they rolled off of it, back into
Mumbai, back into the streets all choked with traffic and people. They
swerved around saddhus, naked holy men covered in paint. They swerved
around dabbahwallahs, men who delivered home-cooked lunches from wives
to husbands all over the city, in tiffin pails arranged in huge wooden
frames, balanced upon their heads.
1128
She knew they were almost at Andheri when they passed the gigantic
Infinity Mall, and then turned alongside a high, ancient brick wall
that ran for hundreds of meters, fencing in a huge estate that had to
be one of the film studios. Outside the wall, along the drainage ditch,
was a bustling market of hawkers, open-air restaurants, beggars,
craftsmen, and, among them, film-makers in smart suits with dark
glasses, clutching mobile phones as they picked their way along. The
bike swerved through all this, avoiding a long line of expensive,
spotless dark cars that ran the length of the wall in an endless queue
to pass through the security checkpoint at the gatehouse.
1129
She took all this in as they sped down the length of the wall,
cornering sharply at the end, following it along to a much narrower
gate. Two guards with rifles attached to their belts by chains stood
before it, and they hefted their guns as Ashok drew nearer. Then he
drew closer still and the guards recognized him and stepped away,
revealing the narrow gap in the wall that was barely wide enough for
the bike to pass through, though Ashok took it at speed, and Yasmin
gasped when her billowing sleeves rasped against the ancient, pitted
brick.
1130
Passing through the gate was like passing into another world. Before
them, the studios spread forever, the farthest edge lost in the
pollution haze. Roads and pathways mazed the grounds, detouring around
the biggest buildings Yasmin had ever seen, huge buildings that looked
like train stations or airplane hangars from war films. The grounds
were all manicured grass, orderly fruit trees, and workmen going back
and forth on mysterious errands with toolbelts jangling around their
waists, carrying huge bundles of pipe and lumber and cloth.
1131
Ashok drove them past the hangars -- those must be the sound-stages
where they shot the movies, there was a good studio-map in Zombie Mecha
where you could fight zombies through a series of wood-backed film
scenery -- and toward a series of low-slung trailers that hugged the
wall to their left. Each one had a miniature fence in front of it, and
a small flower-garden, so neat and tidy that at first she thought the
flowers must be fake.
1132
Finally, Ashok slowed the bike and then coasted to a stop, killing the
engine. The engine noise still hummed in her ears, though, and she
continued to feel the thrum of the bike in her legs and bum. She
unlocked her hands from around Ashok's waist, prying her fingers apart,
and stepped off the bike, catching her toe on the lathi and falling to
the grass. Blushing, she got to her feet, unsteady but upright.
1133
Ashok grinned at her. "You all right there, sister?"
1134
She wanted to say something sharp and cutting in response, but nothing
came. The words had been beaten out of her by the ride. Suddenly, she
felt as though she could hardly breathe, and the fabric of her hijab
seemed filled with road dust that it released into her nose and mouth
with every inhalation. She carefully undid the pin and moved her hijab
so that it no longer covered her face.
1135
Ashok stared at her in horror. "You -- you're just a little girl!"
1136
She bridled and the words came to her again. "I am 14 -- there
were girls my age with husbands and babies in Dharavi! I'm a skilled
fighter and commander. I'm no little girl!"
1137
He blushed a purple color and clasped his hands at his chest
apologetically. "Forgive me," he said. "But -- Well, I assumed you were
18 or 19. You're tall. I've brought you all this way and you're, well,
you're a child! Your parents will be mad with worry!"
1138
She gave him her best steely glare, the one she used to make the boys
in the Army behave when they were getting too, well, boyish . "I
left them a note. And I'll be back tonight. And I'm old enough to worry
about this sort of thing on my own account, thank you very much. Now,
you've dragged me halfway across India for some mysterious purpose, and
I'm sure that it wasn't just to have me stand around here talking about
my family life."
1139
He recovered himself and grinned again. "Sorry, sorry. Right, we're
here for a meeting. It's important. The Webblies have never had much
contact with real unions, but now that Nor is in trouble, she's asked
me to take up her cause with the unions here. There's meetings like
this happening all over the world today -- in China and Indonesia, in
Pakistan and Mexico and Guatemala. The people waiting for us inside --
they're labor leaders, representatives of the garment-workers' union,
the steelworkers' union, even the Transport and Dock Workers' union --
the biggest unions in Mumbai. With their support, the Webblies can have
access to money, warm bodies for picket lines, influence and power. But
they don't know anything about what you do -- they've never played a
game. They think that the Internet is for email and pornography. So
you're here -- we're here -- to explain this to them."
1140
She swallowed a few times. There was so much in all that she didn't
understand -- and what she did understand, she wasn't very happy
about. For example, this real union business -- the Webblies
were a real union! But there was more pressing business than her
irritation, for example: "What do you mean we're here to
explain ? Are you a gamer?"
1141
He shook his head ruefully. "Haven't got the patience for it. I'm an
economist. Labor economist. I've spent a lot of time with BSN, working
out strategy with her."
1142
She wasn't exactly certain what an economist was, but she also felt
that admitting this might further undermine her credibility with this
man who had called her a child. "I need my lathi," she said.
1143
"You don't need a lathi in this meeting," he said. "No one will attack
us."
1144
"Someone will steal it," she said.
1145
"This isn't Dharavi," he said. "No one will steal it."
1146
That did it. She could talk about the problems in Dharavi. She
was a Dharavi girl. But this stranger had no business saying bad things
about her home. "I need my lathi in case I have to beat your brains out
with it for rubbishing my home," she said, between gritted teeth.
1147
"Sorry, sorry." He squatted down beside the bike and began to unravel
the bungee cords from around the lathi. She also went down on one knee
and began to worry at the zipstraps that tied up her trouser legs at
the ankles, but they only went in one direction, and once they'd locked
tight, they wouldn't loosen. Ashok looked up from the bungee cords.
1148
"You need to cut them off," he said. "Here, one moment." He fished in
his trouser-pocket and came up with a wicked flick-knife that he
snapped open. He took gentle hold of the strap on her right ankle and
slid the blade between it and her leg. She held her breath as he sliced
through the strap, then flicked the knife closed, turned to her other
leg, and, grasping her ankle, cut away the other strap. He looked up at
her. Their eyes met, then she looked away.
1149
"Be careful," she said, though he'd finished. He handed her the lathi.
She gripped it with numb fingers, nearly dropped it, gripped it.
1150
"OK," he said. "OK." He shook his head. "The people in there don't know
anything about you or what you do. They are a little, you know, old
fashioned." He smiled and seemed to be remembering something. "Very old
fashioned, in some cases. And they're not very good with children.
Young people, I mean." He held up his hands as she raised her lathi. "I
only mean to warn you." He considered her. "Maybe you could cover your
face again?"
1151
Yasmin considered this for a moment. Of course, she didn't want to
cover her face. She wanted to just go in as herself. Why shouldn't she
be able to? But wearing the hijab had some advantages, and one was that
no one would ask you why you were covering your face. Ashok had clearly
believed she was much older until she'd undraped it.
1152
Wordlessly, she unpinned the fabric, brought it across her face, and
repinned it. He gave her a happy thumbs up and said, "All right!
They're good people, you know. Very good people. They want to be on our
side." He swallowed, thought some, rocked his chin from side to side.
"But perhaps they don't know that yet."
1153
He marched to the door, which was made of heavy metal screen over
glass, and opened it, then gestured inside with a grand sweep of his
arm. Trying to look as dignified as possible, she stepped into the
gloom of the trailer, where it was cool and smelled of betel and chai
and bleach, and where a lazy ceiling fan beat the air, trailing long
snot-trails of dust.
1154
This was what she noticed first, and not the people sitting around the
room on sofas and easy-chairs. Those people were sunk deep into their
chairs and sitting silently, their eyes lost in shadow. But after a
moment, they began to shift minutely, staring at her. Ashok entered
behind her and said, "Hello! Hello! I'm glad you could all make it!"
1155
And then they stood, and they were all much older than her, much older
than Ashok. The youngest was her mother's age, and he was fat and sleek
and had great jowls and short hair in a fringe around his ears. There
were three others, another man in kurta pyjamas with a Muslim skull cap
and two very old women in sarees that showed the wrinkled skin on their
bellies.
1156
Ashok introduced them around, Mr Phadkar of the steelworkers' union, Mr
Honnenahalli of the transport and dock workers' union, and Mrs Rukmini
and Mrs Muthappa, both from the garment workers' union. "These good
people are interested in Big Sister Nor's work and so she asked me to
bring you round to talk to them. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Yasmin,
a trusted activist within the IWWWW organization. She is here to answer
your questions."
1157
They all greeted her politely, but their smiles never reached their
eyes. Ashok busied himself in a corner where there was a chai pot and
cups, pouring out masala chai for everyone and bringing it around on a
tray. "I will be your chaiwallah," he said. "You just all talk."
1158
Yasmin's throat was terribly dry, but she was veiled, and so she passed
on the chai, but quickly regretted it as the talk began.
1159
"I understand that your 'work' is just playing games, is that right?"
said Mr Honnenahalli, the fat man who worked with the Transport and
Dock Workers' union.
1160
"We work in the games, yes," Yasmin said.
1161
"And so you organize people who play games. How are they workers? They
sound like players to me. In the transport trade, we work."
1162
Yasmin rocked her chin from side to side and was glad of her veil. She
remembered her talk with Sushant. "We work the way anyone works, I
suppose. We have a boss who asks us to do work, and he gets rich from
our work."
1163
That made the two old aunties smile, and though it was dark in the
room, she thought it was a genuine one.
1164
"Sister," said Mr Phadkar, he in the skullcap, "tell us about these
games. How are they played?"
1165
So she told them, starting with Zombie Mecha, aided by the fact that Mr
Phadkar had actually seen one of the many films based on the game. But
as she delved into character classes, leveling up, unlocking
achievements, and so on, she saw that she was losing them.
1166
"It all sounds very complicated," Mr Honnenahalli said, after she had
spoken for a good thirty minutes, and her throat was so dry it felt
like she had eaten a mouthful of sand and salt. "Who plays these games?
Who has time?"
1167
This was something she often heard from her father, and so she told Mr
Honnenahalli what she always told him. "Millions of people, rich and
poor, men and women, boys and girls, all over the world. They spend
crores and crores of rupees, and thousands of hours. It's a game, yes,
but it's also as complicated as life in some ways."
1168
Mr Honnenahalli twisted his face up into a sour lemon expression.
"People in life make things that matter. They don't just --" He
flapped a hand, miming some kind of pointless labor. "They don't just
press buttons and play make believe."
1169
She felt her cheeks coloring and was glad again of the veil. Ashok held
up a hand. "If a humble chai-wallah may intervene here." Mr
Honnenahalli gave him a hostile look, but he nodded. "'Pressing buttons
and playing make believe' describes several important sectors of the
economy, not least the entire financial industry. What is banking, if
not pressing buttons and asking everyone to make believe that the
outcomes have value?"
1170
The old aunties smiled and Mr Honnenahalli grunted. "You're a clever
bugger, Ashok. You can always be clever, but clever doesn't feed people
or get them a fair deal from their employers."
1171
Ashok nodded as though this point had never occurred to him, though
Yasmin was pretty certain from his smile that he'd expected this, too.
"Mr Honnenahalli, there are over 9,000,000 people working in this
industry, and it turns over 500 crore rupees every year. It's averaging
six percent quarterly growth. And eight of the 20 largest economies in
the world are not countries, they're games, issuing their own currency,
running their own fiscal policies, and setting their own labor laws."
1172
Mr Honnenahalli scowled, making his jowls wobble, and raised his
eyebrows. "They have labor policies in these games?"
1173
"Oh yes," Ashok said. "Their policy is that no one may work in their
worlds without their permission, that they have absolute power to set
wages, hire and fire, that they can exile you if they don't like you or
for any other reason, and that anyone caught violating the rules can be
stripped of all virtual property and expelled without access to a
trial, a judge, or elected officials."
1174
That got their attention. Yasmin filed away that description. She'd
heard Big Sister Nor say similar things, but this was better put than
any previous rendition. And there was no denying its effect on the room
-- they jolted as if they'd been shocked and all opened their mouths to
say something, then closed them.
1175
Finally, one of the aunties said, "Tell me, you say that nine million
people work in these places: where? Bangalore? Pune? Kolkata?" These
were the old IT cities, where the phone banks and the technology
companies were.
1176
Ashok nodded, "Some of them there. Some right here in Mumbai." He
looked at Yasmin, clearly waiting for her to say something.
1177
"I work in Dharavi," she said. And did she imagine it, or did their
noses all wrinkle up a little, did they all subtly shift their weight
away from her, as though to escape the shit-smell of a Dharavi girl?
1178
"She works in Dharavi," Ashok said. "But only a million or two work
here in India. The majority are in China, or Indonesia, or Vietnam.
Some are in South America, some are in the United States. Wherever
there is IT, there are people who work in the games."
1179
Now the auntie sat back. "I see," she said. "Well, that's very
interesting, Ashok, but what do we have to do with China? We're not in
China."
1180
Yasmin shook her head. "The game isn't in China," she said, as though
explaining something to a child. "The game is everywhere. The players
are all in the same place."
1181
Mr Phadkar said, "You don't understand, sister. Workers in these places
compete with our workers. The big companies go wherever the work is
cheapest and most unorganized. Our members lose jobs to these people,
because they don't have the self-respect to stand up for a fair wage.
We can't compete with the Chinese or the Indonesians or the Vietnamese
-- even the beggars here expect better wages than they command!"
1182
Mr Honnenahalli patted his belly and nodded. "We are Indian workers. We
represent them. These workers, what happens to them -- it's none of our
affair."
1183
Ashok nodded. "Well, that's fine for your unions and your members. But
the union that Yasmin works for --"
1184
Mr Honnenahalli snorted, and his jowls shook. "It's not a union," he
said. "It's a gang of kids playing games!"
1185
"It's tens of thousands of organized workers in solidarity with one
another," Ashok said, mildly, as though he was a teacher correcting a
student. "In 14 countries. Look, these players, they're already
organized in guilds. That's practically unions already. You worry that
union jobs in India might become non-union jobs in Vietnam -- well,
here's how you can organize the workers in Vietnam, too! The companies
are multinational -- why should labor still stick to borders? What does
a border mean, anyway?"
1186
"Plenty, if the border is with Pakistan. People die for borders,
sonny. You can sit there, with your college education, and talk about
how borders don't matter, but all that means is that you're totally out
of touch with the average Indian worker. Indian workers want Indian
jobs, not jobs for Chinese or what-have-you. Let the Chinese organize
the Chinese."
1187
"They are ," Yasmin broke in. "They're striking in China right
now! A whole factory walked out, and the police beat them down. And I
helped them with their picket line!"
1188
Mr Honnenahalli prepared to bluster some more, but one of the old
aunties laid a frail hand on his forearm. "How did you help with a
picket-line in China from Dharavi, daughter?"
1189
And so Yasmin told them the story of the battle of Mushroom Kingdom,
and the story of the battle of Shenzhen, and what she'd seen and heard.
1190
"Wildcat strikes," Mr Honnenahalli said. "Craziness. No strategy, no
organization. Doomed. Those workers may never see the light of day
again."
1191
"Not unless their comrades rally to them," Ashok said. "Comrades like
Yasmin and her group. You want to see something workers are prepared to
fight for? You need to get to an internet cafe and see. See who is out
of touch with workers. You can talk all you want about 'Indian
workers,' but until you find solidarity with all workers, you'll
never be able to protect your precious Indian workers ." He was
losing his temper now, losing that schoolmasterish cool. "Those workers
got bad treatment from their employer so they went out. Their jobs can
just be moved -- to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Dharavi -- and their
strike broken. Can't you see it ? We finally have the same
tools as the bosses ! For a factory owner, all places are the same,
and it's no difference whether the shirts are sewn here or there, so
long as they can be loaded onto a shipping container when it's done.
But now, for us, all places are the same too! We can go anywhere just
by sitting down at a computer. For forty years, things have gotten
harder and harder for workers -- now it's time to change that."
1192
Yasmin felt herself grinning beneath the veil. That's it, Ashok, give
it to him! But then she saw the faces of the old people in the room:
stony and heartless.
1193
"Those are nice words," one of the aunties said. "Honestly. It's a
beautiful vision. But my workers don't have computers. They don't go to
Internet cafes. They dye clothing all day. When their jobs go abroad,
they can't chase them with your computers."
1194
"They can be part of the Webblies too!" Yasmin said. "That's the beauty
of it. The ones who work in games, we can go anywhere, organize
anywhere, and wherever your workers are, we are too! We can go
anywhere, no one can keep us out. We can organize dyers anywhere,
through the gamers."
1195
Mr Honnenahalli nodded. "I thought so. And when this is all done, the
Webblies organize all the workers in the world, and our unions, what
happens to them? They melt away? Or they're absorbed by you? Oh yes, I
understand very well. A very neat deal all around. You certainly do
play games over there at the Webblies."
1196
Ashok and Yasmin both started to speak at once, then both stopped, then
exchanged glances. "It's not like that," Yasmin said. "We're offering
to help. We don't want to take over."
1197
Mr Honnenahalli said, "Perhaps you don't, but perhaps someone else
does. Can you speak for everyone? You say you've never met this Big
Sister Nor of yours, nor her lieutenants, the Mighty Whatever and
Justbob."
1198
"I've met them dozens of times," Yasmin said quietly.
1199
"Oh, certainly. In the game. What is the old joke from America? On the
Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Perhaps these friends of yours are
old men or little children. Perhaps they're in the next Internet cafe
in Dharavi. The Internet is full of lies and tricks and filth, little
sister --" Her back stiffened. It was one thing to be called 'sister,'
but 'little sister' wasn't friendly. It was a dismissal. "And who's to
say you haven't fallen for one of these tricks?"
1200
Ashok held up a hand. "Perhaps this is all a dream, then. Perhaps you
are all figments of my imagination. Why should we believe in anything,
if this is the standard all must rise to? I've spoken to Big Sister Nor
many times, and to many other members of the IWWWW around the world.
You represent two million construction workers -- how many of them have
you met? How are we to know that they are real?"
1201
"This is getting us all nowhere," one of the aunties said. "You were
very kind to come and visit with us, Ashok, and you, too, Yasmin. It
was very courteous for you to tell us what you were up to. Thank you."
1202
"Wait," Ashok said. "That can't be all! We came here to ask you for
help -- for solidarity . We've just had our first strike, and our
executive cell is offline and missing --" Yasmin turned her head at
this. What did that mean? "And we need help: a strike fund,
administrative support, legal assistance --"
1203
"Out of the question," Mr Honnenahalli said.
1204
"I'm afraid so," said Mr Phadkar. "I'm sorry, brother. Our charter
doesn't allow us to intervene with other unions -- especially not the
sort of organization you represent."
1205
"It's impossible," said one of the aunties, her mouth tight and sorry.
"This just isn't the sort of thing we do."
1206
Ashok went to the kettle and set about making more chai. "Well, I'm
sorry to have wasted your time," he said. "I'm sure we'll figure
something out."
1207
They all stared at one another, then Mr Honnenahalli stood with a
wheeze, picking up an overstuffed briefcase at his feet and leaving the
little building. Mr Phadkar followed, smiling softly at the aunties and
waving tentatively at Yasmin. She didn't meet his eye. One of the
aunties got up and tried to say something to Ashok, but he shrugged her
off. She went back to her partner and helped her to her old, uncertain
feet. The pair of them squeezed Yasmin's shoulders before departing.
1208
Once the door had banged shut behind them, Ashok turned and hissed
bainchoad at the room. Yasmin had heard worse words than this
every day in the alleys of Dharavi and in the game-room when the army
was fighting, and hearing it from this soft boy almost made her giggle.
But she heard the choke in his voice, like he was holding back tears,
and she didn't want to smile anymore. She reached up and unhooked her
hijab, repinning it around her neck, freeing her face to cool in the
sultry air the fan whipped around them. She crossed to Ashok and took a
cup of tea from him and sipped it as quickly as she could, relishing
the warm wet against her dry, scratchy throat. Now that her face was
clear of hijab, she could smell the strong reek of old betel spit, and
saw that the baseboards of the scuffed walls were stained pink with old
spittle.
1209
"Ashok," she said, using the voice she'd used to enforce discipline in
the army. "Ashok, look at me. What was that -- that meeting
about? Why was I here?"
1210
He sat down in the chair that Mr Phadkar had just vacated and sipped at
his chai.
1211
"Oh, I've made a bloody mess of it all, I have," he said.
1212
"Ashok," she said, that stern note in her voice. "Complain later. Talk
now. What did you just drag me halfway across Mumbai for?"
1213
"I've been working on this meeting for months, ever since Big Sister
Nor asked me to. I told her that I thought the trade unions here would
embrace the Webblies, would see the power of a global labor movement
that could organize everywhere all at once. She loved the idea, and
ever since then, I've been sweet-talking the union execs here, trying
to get them to see the potential. With their members helping us -- and
with our members helping them -- we could change the world. Change it
like that!" He snapped his fingers. "But then the strike broke out, and
Big Sister Nor told me she needed help right now , otherwise
those comrades would end up in jail forever, or worse. She said she
thought you'd be able to help, and we were all going to talk about it
before we came down, but then, when I was riding to get you --" He
broke off, drank chai, stared out the grimy, screened in windows at the
manicured grounds of the film studio. "I got a call from The Mighty
Krang. They were beaten. Badly. All three of them, though Krang managed
to escape. Big Sister Nor is in hospital, unconscious. The Mighty Krang
said he thought it was one of the Chinese factory owners -- they've
been getting meaner, sending in threats. And they've got lots of
contacts in Singapore."
1214
Yasmin finished her chai. Her hair itched with dust and sweat, and she
slid a finger up underneath it and scratched at a bead of sweat that
was trickling down her head. "All right," she said. "What had you hoped
for from those old people?"
1215
"Money," he said. "Support. They have the ear of the press. If their
members demanded justice for the workers in Shenzhen, rallied at the
Chinese consulates all around India..." He waved his hands. "I'm not
sure, to be honest. It was supposed to happen weeks from now, after I'd
done a lot more whispering in their ears, finding out what they wanted,
what they could give, what we could give them. It wasn't supposed to
happen in the middle of a strike." He stared miserably at the floor.
1216
Yasmin thought about Sushant, about his fear of leaving Mala's army. As
long as soldiers like him fought for the other side, the Webblies
wouldn't be able to blockade the strikes in-game. So. So she'd have to
stop Mala's army. Stop all the armies. The soldiers who fought for the
bosses were on the wrong side. They'd see that.
1217
"What if we helped ourselves?" she said. "What if we got so big that
the unions had to join us?"
1218
"Yes, what if, what if. It's so easy to play what if. But I can't see
how this will happen."
1219
"I think I can get more fighters in the games. We can protect any
strike."
1220
"Well, that's fine for the games, but it doesn't help the players. Big
Sister Nor is still in hospital. The Webblies in Shenzhen are still in
jail."
1221
"All I can do is what I can do," Yasmin said. "What can you do? What do
economists do?"
1222
He looked rueful. "We go to university and learn a lot of maths. We use
the maths to try to predict what large numbers of people will do with
their money and labor. Then we try to come up with recommendations for
influencing it."
1223
"And this is what you do with your life?"
1224
"Yes, I suppose it all sounds bloody pointless, doesn't it? Maybe
that's why I'm willing to take the games so seriously -- they're no
less imaginary than anything else I do. But I became an economist
because nothing made sense without it. Why were my parents poor? Why
were our cousins in America so rich? Why would America send its garbage
to India? Why would India send its wood to America? Why does anyone
care about gold?
1225
"That was the really strange one. Gold is such a useless thing, you
know? It's heavy, it's not much good for making things out of -- too
soft for really long-wearing jewelry. Stainless steel is much better
for rings." He tapped an intricate ring on his right hand on the arm of
the chair. "There's not much of it, of course. All the gold we've ever
dug out of the ground would form a cube with sides the length of a
tennis court." Yasmin had seen pictures of tennis courts, but she
wasn't clear how big this actually was. Not very large, she supposed.
"We dig it out of one hole in the ground and then put it in another
hole in the ground, some vault somewhere, and call it money. It seemed
ridiculous.
1226
"But everyone knows gold is valuable. How did they all agree on
this? That's where I started to get really fascinated. Because gold and
money are really closely related. It used to be that money was just an
easy way of carrying around gold. The government would fill a hole in
the ground with gold, and then print notes saying, 'This note is worth
so many grams of gold.' So rather than carrying heavy gold around to
buy things, we could carry around easy paper money.
1227
"It's funny, isn't it? We dig gold out of holes in the ground, weigh
it, and then put it in another hole in the ground! What good is gold?
Well, it puts a limit on how much money a government can make. If they
want to make more money, they have to get more gold from somewhere. "
1228
"Why does it matter how much money a country prints?"
1229
"Well, imagine that the government decided to print a crore of rupees
for every person in India. We'd all be rich, right?"
1230
Yasmin thought for a moment. "No, of course not. Everything would get
more expensive, right?"
1231
He waggled his chin. He was sounding like a schoolteacher again. "Very
good," he said. "That's inflation: more money makes everything more
expensive. If inflation happened evenly, it wouldn't be so bad. Say
your pay doubled overnight, and so did all the prices -- you'd be all
right, because you could just buy as much as you could the day before,
though it 'cost' twice as much. But there's a problem with this. Do you
know what it is?"
1232
Yasmin thought. "I don't know." She thought some more. Ashok was
nodding at her, and she felt like it was something obvious, almost
visible. "I just don't know."
1233
"A hint," he said. "Savings."
1234
She thought about this some more. "Savings. If you had money saved, it
wouldn't double along with wages, right?" She shook her head. "I don't
see why that's such a problem, though. We've got some money saved, but
it's just a few thousand rupees. If wages doubled, we'd get that back
quickly from the new money coming in."
1235
He looked surprised, then laughed. "I'm sorry," he said. "Of course.
But there are some people and companies and governments that have a
lot of savings. Rich people might save crores of rupees -- those
savings would be cut in half overnight. Or a hospital might have many
crores saved for a new wing. Or the government or a union might have
crores in savings for pensions. What if you work all your life for a
pension of two thousand rupees a month, and then, a year before you're
supposed to start collecting it, it gets cut in half?"
1236
Yasmin didn't know anyone who had a pension, though she'd heard of
them. "I don't know," she said. "You'd work, I suppose."
1237
"You're not making this easy," Ashok said. "Let me put it this way:
there are a lot of powerful, rich people who would be very upset if
inflation wiped out their savings. But governments are very tempted by
inflation. Say you're fighting an expensive war, and you need to buy
tanks and pay the soldiers and put airplanes in the sky and keep the
missiles rolling out of the factories. That's expensive stuff. You have
to pay for it somehow. You could borrow the money --"
1238
"Governments borrow money?"
1239
"Oh yes, they're shocking beggars! They borrow it from other
governments, from companies -- even from their own people. But if
you're not likely to win the war -- or if victory will wipe you out --
then it's unlikely anyone will voluntarily lend you the money to fight
it. But governments don't have to rely on voluntary payments, do they?"
1240
Yasmin could see where this was going. "They can just tax people."
1241
"Correct," he said. "If you weren't such a clearly sensible girl, I'd
suggest you try a career as an economist, Yasmin! OK, so governments
can just raise taxes. But people who have to pay too much tax are
unlikely to vote for you the next time around. And if you're a
dictator, nothing gets the revolutionaries out in the street faster
than runaway taxation. So taxes are only of limited use in paying for a
war."
1242
"Which is why governments like inflation, right?"
1243
"Correct again! First, governments can print a lot of money that they
can use to buy missiles and tanks and so on, all the while borrowing
even more, as fast as they can. Then, when prices and wages all go up
and up -- say, a hundred times -- then suddenly it's very easy to repay
all that money they borrowed. Maybe it took a thousand workers' tax to
add up to a crore of rupees before inflation, and now it just takes
one. Of course, the person who loaned you the money is in trouble, but
by that time, you've won the war, gotten reelected, and all without
crippling your country with debt. Bravo."
1244
Yasmin turned this over. She found it surprisingly easy to follow --
all she had to do was think of what happened to the price of goods in
the different games she played, going up and down, and she could easily
see how inflation would work to some players' benefit and not others.
"But governments don't have to use inflation just to win wars, do
they?" She thought of the politicians who came through Dharavi,
grubbing for the votes the people there might deliver. She thought of
their promises. "You could use inflation to build schools, hospitals,
that sort of thing. Then, when the debt caught up with you, you could
just use inflation to wipe it out. You'd get a lot of votes that way,
I'm quite sure."
1245
"Oh yes, that's the other side of the equation. Governments are always
trying to get re-elected with guns or butter -- or both. You can
certainly get a lot of votes by buying a lot of inflationary hospitals
and schools, but inflation is like fatty food -- you always pay the
price for it eventually. Once hyperinflation sets in, no one can pay
the teachers or nurses or doctors, so the next election is likely to
end your career.
1246
"But the temptation is powerful, very powerful. And that's where gold
comes in. Can you think of how?"
1247
Yasmin thought some more. Gold, inflation; inflation, gold. They danced
in her head. Then she had it. "You can't make more money unless you
have more gold, right?"
1248
He beamed at her. "Gold star!" he said. "That's it exactly. That's what
rich people like about gold. It is a disciplinarian, a policeman in the
treasury, and it stops government from being tempted into funding their
folly with fake money. If you have a lot of savings, you want to
discipline the government's money-printing habits, because every rupee
they print devalues your own wealth. But no government has enough gold
to cover the money they've printed. Some governments fill their vaults
with other valuable things, like other dollars or euros."
1249
"So dollars and euros are based on gold, then?"
1250
"Not at all!" No, they're backed by other currencies, and by little
bits of metal, and by dreams and boasts. So at the end of the day, it's
all based on nothing!"
1251
"Just like game-gold!" she said.
1252
"Another gold star! Even gold isn't based on gold! Most of the
time, if you buy gold in the real world, you just buy a certificate
saying that you own some bar of gold in some vault somewhere in the
world. The postman doesn't deliver a gold-brick through your mail-slot.
And here's the dirty secret about gold: there is more gold available
through certificates of deposit than has ever been dug out of the
ground."
1253
"How is that possible?"
1254
"How do you think it's possible?"
1255
"Someone's printing certificates without having the gold to back them
up?"
1256
"That's a good theory. Here's what I think happens. Say you have a
vault full of gold in Hong Kong. Call it a thousand bars. You sell the
thousand bars' worth of gold through the certificate market, and lock
the door. Now, some time later, someone -- a security guard, an
executive at the bank -- walks into the vault and walks out again with
ten gold bars from the middle of the pile. These ten bars of gold are
sold at a metals market, and they end up in a vault in Switzerland,
which prints certificates for its gold holdings and sells them
on. Then, one day, an executive at the Swiss bank helps himself to ten
bars from that vault and they get sold on the metals market.
Before you know it, your ten bars of gold have been sold to a hundred
different people."
1257
"It's inflation!"
1258
He clapped. "Top pupil! Correct. There's a saying from physics, 'It's
turtles all the way down.' Do you know it? It comes from a story about
a British physicist, Bertrand Russell, who gave a lecture about the
universe, how the Earth goes around the Sun and so on. And a little old
granny in the audience says, 'It's all rubbish! The world is flat and
rests on the back of a turtle!' And Russell says, 'If that's so, what
does the turtle stand on?' And the granny says, 'You can't fool me,
sonny, it's turtles all the way down!'" In other words, what lives
under the illusion is yet another illusion, and under that one is
another illusion again. Supposedly good currency is backed by gold, but
the gold itself doesn't exist. Bad currency isn't backed by gold, it's
backed by other currencies, and they don't exist. At the end of
the day, all that any of this is based on is, what, can you tell me?"
1259
"Belief," Yasmin said. "Or fear, yes? Fear that if you stop believing
in the money, you won't be able to buy anything. It is just like
game-gold! I remember one time when Zombie Mecha started charging for
buffs that used to be free and overnight, all the players left. The
people who were left behind were so desperate, walking around, trying
to hawk their gold and weapons, offering prices that were tiny compared
to just a few days before. It was like everyone had stopped believing
in Zombie Mecha and then it stopped existing! And then the game dropped
its prices and people came back and the prices shot back up again."
1260
"We call it 'confidence'," Ashok said. "If you have 'confidence' in the
economy, you can use its money. If you don't have confidence in the
economy, you want to get away from it and get it away from you. And
it's turtles all the way down. There's almost nothing that's worth
anything , except for confidence. Go to a steel foundry here in
Mumbai and you'll find men risking their lives, working in the fires of
hell in their bare feet without helmets or gloves, casting steel to
make huge round metal plates to cover the sewer entrances in America.
Why do they do it? Because they are given rupees -- which are worth
nothing unless you have confidence in them. And why are they given
rupees? Because someone -- the boss -- thinks that he'll get dollars
for his steel discs. What are dollars worth?"
1261
"Nothing?"
1262
"Nothing! Unless you believe in them. And what about the discs
-- what good are they? They're the wrong size for the sewer openings in
Mumbai. You could melt them down and do something else with them, but
apart from that, they're just bloody heavy biscuits that serve no
useful purpose. So why does any of this happen?"
1263
Yasmin said, "Oh, that's simple. You really don't know?"
1264
"It's easy? Please, tell me. It's not easy for me and I've been
studying it all my life."
1265
"It all happens because it's a game !"
1266
He looked offended. "Maybe it's a game for the rich and powerful -- but
it's not any fun for the poor and the workers and the savers who get
the wrong end of it."
1267
"Games don't need to be fun , they only have to be, I don't know,
interesting ? No, captivating ! There are so many times
when I find myself playing and playing and playing, and I can't stop
even though it's all gotten very boring and repetitive. 'One more
quest,' I tell myself. 'One more kill.' And then again, 'One more, one
more, one more.' The important thing about a game isn't how fun it is,
it's how easy it is to start playing and how hard it is to stop."
1268
"Aha. OK, that makes sense. What, specifically, makes it hard to stop?"
1269
"Oh, many little things. For example, in Zombie Mecha, if you stop
playing without going to a mecha-base, you get 'fatigued.' So when you
come back to the game, you play worse and earn fewer points for making
the same kills and running the same dungeons. So you think, 'OK, I'm
done for today, time to go back to a base.' And you run for a base,
which is never very close to the quests, and on the way, you get a new
quest, a short one that has a lot of good rewards. You do the quest.
Now you head for the base again, but again, you find yourself on a
quest, but this one is a little longer than it seemed, and now even
more time has gone by. Finally, you reach the base, but you've played
so much that you've almost levelled up, and it would be a pity to stop
playing now when just a few random kills would get you to the next
level and then you can buy some very good new weapons and training at
the base, so you hunt down some of the biters around the base-entrance,
and now you level up, and you get some good new weapons, and you've
also just unlocked many new quests. These quests are given to you when
you reach the base, and some of them look very interesting, and now
some of your friends have joined you, so you can group with them and
run the quests together, which will be much quicker and a lot more fun.
And by the time you stop, it's been three, sometimes four hours more
play than you thought you'd do."
1270
"This happens a lot?"
1271
"Oh yes. Many times a week for me. And I don't even play for points --
I play to help the union! The more play you do, the more sense it makes
to keep on playing. All this business with gold and rupees and dollars
and steel plates -- we play that game all the time, don't we? So of
course it works. Everyone plays it because everyone has played it all
their lives."
1272
"I can see why Big Sister Nor told me I must talk with you," he said.
"You're a very clever girl."
1273
She looked down.
1274
"What do we do about Big Sister Nor?"
1275
"She thinks we need to find money and support for the strikers. I think
she needs money and support for herself . She says she's fine,
but she's in hospital and it sounds like she was badly beaten."
1276
"How do we get her support from here? They're so far away." Thinking:
Mumbai's opposite corner is far away for me -- China might as well
be the moon or the Mushroom Kingdom. "And how do we know that Big
Sister Nor will be safe where she is?"
1277
"Both good questions," he said. "It's frustrating. They're so close
when we're all online, but so far when we need to do something that
involves the physical world." He began to pace. "This is Big Sister
Nor's department. She sees a way to tie up the virtual world and the
real world, to move work and ideas and money from one to the other."
1278
"Maybe we should just concentrate on the games, then? They're the part
we know how to use."
1279
"But these people are in trouble in the real world," Ashok said,
balling his hands into fists.
1280
And Yasmin found herself giggling, and then laughing, really laughing.
It was so obvious!
1281
"Oh, Ashok," she said, "oh, yes, they certainly are."
1282
And she knew just what to do about it.
1283
This scene is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK
bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has
the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great
stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff. Of particular
note is the Manchester Deansgate store, which has an outstanding
sf section.
1284
16
16
<
1285
Lu didn't know where to go. Boss Wing's dormitories were out of the
question, of course. And while he knew a dozen Internet cafes in
Shenzhen where he could sit and log on to the game, he didn't really
want to be playing just then. Not with everyone else in jail.
1286
But he had to sit down. He'd been hit hard in the head and on the
shoulder and he was very dizzy. He'd thrown up once already, holding
onto a bus-stop pole and leaning over the gutter, earning a
disapproving cluck from an old woman who walked past hauling a huge
barrow full of electronic waste.
1287
He had thought of texting Matthew and the others, to find out if the
police had them in custody, but he was afraid that the police would
track him back if he did, using the phone network to locate him and
pick him up.
1288
It had all felt so wonderful . They'd stood up from their
computers, chanting angrily, the war-chants from the games, which Boss
Wing and his goons never played, and so it had all been totally
perplexing to them. Their faces had gone from puzzlement to anger to
fear as all the boys in the room stood together and marched out of the
cafe, blocking the doorways so that no one could come in.
1289
And there had been girls, and old grannies, and young men stopping to
admire them as they stood, shoulder to shoulder, chanting bravely at
the cowardly goons from Boss Wing's factory, goons who'd been so tough
just a few minutes before, willing to slap you in the head if you
talked too much, ready to dock your pay, too. Ever since they'd tried
to go out on their own, life had gotten steadily worse. Boss Wing had a
huge operation, with plenty of in-game muscle to stand guard against
rich players who hunted the gold farmers for sport, but he was cruel
and cheap and you were lucky if you saw half the wages you'd earned
after all the fines for "breaking rules" had been charged against your
salary.
1290
Their phones rang and buzzed with photos from other Boss Wing factories
where the workers had gone out too, and there were wars in Mushroom
Kingdom as the Webblies kept anyone else from working their zone. And
the police came and they'd stayed brave, Matthew and Ping and all his
friends. They were workers, they were warriors, they were an army and
their cause was just. They would not be intimidated.
1291
And then the gas came. And then the clubs started swinging. And then
the screams had started. And then Lu had run, run through the stinging
clouds of gas and the chaos of battle -- so like and so unlike the
million battles he'd fought in the games -- and he'd thrown up and now
--
1292
Now he had no idea where to go.
1293
And then his phone rang. The number was blanked out, which made his
pulse hammer in his throat. Did the secret police blank out the number
when they called you? But if the secret police knew he existed and had
his phone number, they could just pick him up where he stood, using the
phone's damned tracking function.
1294
It wasn't the police. With trepidation, he slid his finger over the
talk button on the screen.
1295
"Wei?" he said, cautiously.
1296
"Lu? Is that you?" The call had the weird, echoey sound of a cheap
net-calling service, the digital fuzz of packets that travelled third
class on the global network. The accent was difficult, too,
thick-tongued and off-kilter. He knew the sound and he knew the voice.
1297
"Wei-Dong ?"
1298
"Yes!"
1299
"Wei-Dong in America ?" He hadn't heard from the strange gweilo
since they'd gone to Boss Wing and Ping had had to kick him out of the
guild. Boss Wing didn't allow them to raid with outside people, or even
talk to them in game. He had spyware on all his PCs that told him when
you broke those rules, and you lost a day's wages for the first
offense, a week's wages for the second.
1300
"Lu, it's me! Look, did I just see you and Ping getting beaten up by
the cops?"
1301
"I don't know, did you?" The disorientation from his head wound was
fierce, and he wondered if he was really having this conversation. It
was very strange.
1302
"I -- I just saw you getting beaten up on a video from Shenzhen. I
think I did. Was it you?"
1303
"We just got beaten up," he said. "I'm hurt."
1304
"Are you badly hurt? I couldn't reach Ping, so I tried you." He was
excited, his voice tight. "What happened?"
1305
Lu was still grappling with the idea that the gweilo had just called
him from thousands of kilometers away. "You saw me on the Internet in
America?"
1306
"Every gamer in the world saw you, Lu! You couldn't have timed it
better! After dinner is the busiest time on the servers, and the word
went around like nothing I've ever seen before. Everyone in every game
was chatting about it, passing around links to the video streams and
the photos. It was even on the real news! My neighbor banged on my wall
and asked me if I knew anything about it. It was incredible!"
1307
"You saw me getting beaten up on the Internet?"
1308
"Dude, everyone saw you getting beaten up on the Internet."
1309
Lu didn't know what to say. "Did I look good?"
1310
Wei-Dong laughed like a hyena. "You looked great !"
1311
A dam broke, Lu laughed and laughed and laughed, as all the tension
flooded out of him. He finally stopped, knowing that if he didn't he'd
throw up again. He was by the train station now, in the heavy
foot-traffic, all kinds of people moving purposefully around him as he
stood still, a woozy island in the rushing stream. He backed up to a
stairwell in front of a beauty parlor and sank to his haunches,
squatting and holding the phone to his head.
1312
"Wei-Dong?"
1313
"Yes."
1314
"Why are you calling me?"
1315
There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, broken by soft digital
flanging. "I wanted to help you," he said at last. "Help the Webblies."
1316
"You know about the Webblies?" Lu had half-believed that Matthew had
made them up, a fantasy army of thousands of imaginary friends who
would fight for them.
1317
"Know about them? Lu, they're the ass-kickingest guild in the world! No
one can beat them! Coca-Cola Games is sending us three memos a day
about them!"
1318
"Why does Coca-Cola send you memos?"
1319
"Oh." More silence. "Didn't I tell you? I'm working for them now. I'm a
Turk."
1320
"Oh," said Lu. He knew about the Turks, but he never really thought
about what kind of people would work in ten second increments making up
dialog for non-player characters or figuring out what happened when you
shot an office chair with a blunderbuss. "That must be interesting."
1321
Wei-Dong made a wet noise. "It's miserable," he said. "I run four
different sessions at once, and I'm barely earning enough to pay the
rent. And they make so much money off of us! Last month, they announced
quarterly profits and games with Turks are earning 30 percent more than
the ones without. They're hiring more Turks as fast as they can -- it's
all over the board here. But our wages aren't going up. So I've been
thinking of the Webblies, you know..." He trailed off. "Like maybe you
guys can help us if we help you? We all play for our money, right? So
why shouldn't we be on the same side."
1322
"Sounds right to me," Lu said. He was still trying to comprehend the
fact that the Webblies were apparently famous with American teenagers.
"Wait," he said, playing back Wei-Dong's accented, ungrammatical
speech. "You're paying rent?"
1323
"Yeah," Wei-Dong said. "Yeah! Living on my own now. It's great! I have
a crappy room in a, not sure what you call it, a hotel, kind of. But
for people who don't have any money. But I can get wireless here and
I've got four machines and there's plenty of stuff I can walk to, at
least compared to home --" He began to babble about his favorite
restaurants and the clubs that had all-ages nights and a million tiny
irrelevant details about Los Angeles, which might as well have been the
Mushroom Kingdom for all that it mattered to Lu. He let it wash over
him and tried to think of places he could go to recuperate. He
fleetingly wished for his mother, who always knew some kind of
traditional Chinese remedy for his ailments. They often didn't work,
but sometimes they did, and his mother's gentle application of them
worked their own magic.
1324
He was suddenly, nauseously, overwhelmingly homesick. "Wei-Dong," he
said, interrupting the virtual tour of Los Angeles. "I need to think
now. I don't know what to do. I'm hurt, I'm on the street, and I can't
call anyone in case the police trace the call. What do I do?"
1325
"Oh. Well. I don't know exactly. I was hoping that you'd know what
I should do, to tell you the truth. I want to get involved!"
1326
"I think I want to get uninvolved ." Lu's homesickness was
turning to anger. Who was this boy to call him from the other
side of the world, demanding to "get involved?" Didn't he have enough
problems of his own? "What can you do for me from there? What is any of
this -- this garbage worth? How will everyone going to jail make
my life better? How will having my head beaten in help make things
better? How?"
1327
"I don't know." Wei-Dong's voice was small and hurt. Lu struggled to
control his anger. The gweilo wanted to help. It wasn't his fault he
didn't know how to help. Lu didn't know how to help, either.
1328
"I don't know either," Lu said. "Why don't you think about how to help
and call me back. I need to find somewhere to rest, maybe a nurse or a
doctor. OK?"
1329
"Sure," the gweilo said. "Sure. Of course. I'll call you back soon,
don't worry."
1330
Every time a Hong Kong train came into the Shenzhen Railway Station, it
disgorged a massive crowd of people: Hong Kong people in sharp business
styles, rich kids, foreigners, and workers from Shenzhen returning from
contracts abroad, clutching backpacks. The dense group got broken up by
the taxi-rank and the shopping mall, and emerged as a diffuse cloud
onto the street where Lu had been talking. Now he worked his way back
through this crowd, listening to snatches of hundreds of conversations
about business, manufacturing -- and gold farming.
1331
It was on everyone's lips, talk about the strike, about the police
action, about the farmers. Of course most people in China had heard of
gold farming and all the stories about the money you could make by just
playing video games, but you never heard this kind of business-person
talking about it. Not smart, fancy people with obvious wealth and
power, the kind of people who skipped back and forth between Hong Kong
and Shenzhen, talking rapidly into their earwigs, telling other people
what to do.
1332
What had the gweilo said? Everyone saw you getting beaten up on the
Internet! Were these people looking closely at him? Now it seemed
they were. Of course, he was bloody, staring, red-eyed. Why wouldn't
they stare at him? But maybe --
1333
"You're one of them, aren't you?" She was 22 or 23, with perfect
fingernails on the hand she rested on his arm, coming on him from
behind. He gave an involuntary squeak and jump, and she giggled a
little. "You must be," she said. She held up her phone. "I watched the
video five times on the train. You should see the commentary. So ugly!"
1334
He knew about this. Any time something that made the government look
bad managed to find its way online, there was an army of commenters
who'd tweet and post and comment about how the government was in the
right, how the story was all wrong, how the people in it were guilty of
all kinds of terrible things. Lu knew he shouldn't believe any of it,
but it was impossible to read it all without feeling a little niggle of
doubt, then a little more, and then, like an ice-cube on a bruise, the
outrage he'd felt at first would go numb.
1335
The thought that he, himself, was at the center of one of these
smear-storms made him feel like he was going to throw up again. The
girl must have seen this, for she gave his arm a little squeeze. "Oh,
don't look so serious. You looked great on the video. I'm sure no one
believes all that rubbish!" She pursed her lips. "Well, of course,
that's not true. I'm sure lots of people believe it. But they're fools.
And so many more were inspired, I'm sure. I'm Jie."
1336
"Lu," Lu said, after trying and failing to come up with an alias. He
was not cut out to be a fugitive. "It was nice to meet you," he said,
and shrugged her hand off and set off deeper into the crowd.
1337
She grabbed his arm again. "Oh, please stop. We need to talk. Please?"
1338
He stopped. He didn't have much experience with girls, but something
about her voice made him want to stay. "Why do we need to talk?"
1339
"I want to get your story," she said. "For my show."
1340
"Your show ?"
1341
She leaned in close -- so close he could smell her perfume -- and
whispered, "I'm Jiandi," she said.
1342
He looked at her blankly.
1343
She shook her head. "Jiandi," she hissed. "Jiandi! From the Factory
Girl Show!"
1344
He shrugged. "What kind of show?"
1345
"Every night!" she said. "At 9PM! Twelve million factory workers listen
to me! They phone me with their problems. We go out over the net,
audio, through the, uh," she dropped her voice, "the Falun Gong
proxies."
1346
"Oh," he said, and began to move away.
1347
"It's not religious," she said. "I just help them with their problems.
The --" she dropped her voice "proxies are just how we get the
show into the factories. They try to block me because we tell the truth
about the work conditions -- the girls who are sexually pressured by
their bosses, the marketing rip-offs, the wage rip offs, lock-ins --"
1348
"OK," he said. "I get the picture. Thank you but no."
1349
"Come on ," she said and looked deep into his eyes. Hers were
dark and lined with thin, precise green eye-pencil, and her eyebrows
were shaped into surprised, sophisticated arches. "You look like you
need a place to clean up, and maybe a meal. I can get that for you."
1350
"You can?"
1351
"Lu, I'm famous ! I have advertisers who pay a lot to
sponsor my show. I have millions of supporters all over Shenzhen, even
in Guangzhou and Dongguan. Even in Shanghai and Beijing! I'm a hero to
them, Lu. I can put your story into the ears of every worker in the
Pearl River Delta like that !" She snapped her fingers in front
of his nose, making him blink and start back again. She laughed.
"You're cute," she said. "Come on, it'll be wonderful."
1352
"Where do we go?" he said, cautiously.
1353
"Oh, I have a place," she said.
1354
She grabbed his hand -- her fingers were dry and cool, and touched with
cold spots where the rings she wore met his skin. She led him away
through the crowd, which seemed to part magically before her. It had
all become like a dream now, with the pain crowding Lu's vision into a
hazy-edged tunnel. He wondered if she'd have something for the pain. He
wondered if she knew any traditional medicine, if she'd mix him up a
bitter tea with complicated scents and small bits of hard things
floating in it. All this he wondered, and the streets and sidewalks
slipped past beneath their feet like magic. You could automatically
follow your guildies in game, just click on them and select follow, and
the whole guild could do that when there was a lot of distance to
cover, so that only one player had to pay attention on the long march
across the world, while the others relaxed and smoked and ate and used
the toilet, while their characters trailed like a string of
pack-animals behind the leader.
1355
That's what this felt like, like he was a character whose player had
stepped out for a cigarette and a piss-break and the character bumped
along mindlessly behind the leader.
1356
"Do you live here?" he said as they reached the lobby of a tall
apartment building. It was a "handshake building," so close to the
building next to it that the tenants could lean out their windows and
shake hands with their neighbors across the lane. The lobby smelled of
cooking and sweat, but it was clean and there was a working intercom
and lock at the door.
1357
"No," she said. "I do some of my shows from here. There are two or
three of them, to confuse the jingcha." He thought it was funny to hear
her use the gamer clan term for police. She saw it, and said, "Oh yes,
the zengfu think I'm very biantai and they'd PK me if they could." He
laughed at this, because it was nearly impenetrable slang -- the
government think I'm a pervert so they want to "player-kill" -- destroy
-- me if they can. It was one thing to hear a boy with his shirt rolled
up over his belly and a cigarette hanging out of his face saying this,
another to hear this delicate, preciously made-up girl.
1358
The elevator was broken, so she led him up five flights of stairs, the
walls decorated with lavish graffiti: murals of curse-words, scenes of
factory life, phone numbers you could call to buy fake identity papers,
degrees, certificates. Lu's own dorm room was in a building that Boss
Wing rented, and he climbed twice this many stairs every day, but this
climb felt like it was going to kill him. On Jie's floor, there was an
old lady squatting by the stairway door, in the hall. She nodded at the
two of them.
1359
"Mrs Yun," Jie said, "I would like you to meet Hui. He is a mechanic
who has come to repair my air-conditioner." The old lady nodded curtly
and looked away.
1360
Jie attacked one of the apartment doors with a key ring, opening four
different locks with large, elaborate, thick keys and then putting her
shoulder into the door, which swung heavily back, clanging against a
door-stop with a metallic sound. She motioned him inside and closed the
door, shooting the four bolts from the inside and slapping at several
light-switches.
1361
The apartment had two big rooms, the living room in which they stood,
and a connecting bedroom that he could see from the doorway. There was
a little kitchen area against the wall beside them, and the rest of the
room was taken up with a sofa and a large desk with chairs on either
side of it, covered in a litter of recording gear: a mixer, several
large sets of headphones, and a couple of skinny mics on stands. Every
centimeter of wall-space was covered in paper: newspaper
clippings, letters, drawings -- all liberally sprinkled with stickers,
hearts, cute animal doodles.
1362
Jie waved her hand at it: "My studio!" she said, and twirled around.
"All my fan-mail and my press." She ran her fingers lightly over a
wall. Peering more closely at it, Lu saw that every letter began "Dear
Jiani" and that they were all written in neat, girlish hands. "I have a
post-box in Macau. My friends send the letters there and they scan them
and email them to me. All right under the zengfu's nose!"
1363
"And the old lady in the hall?"
1364
She flopped down on the sofa, her skirt riding up around her thighs,
and kicked her shoes in expert arcs to the mat by the door. "Our
building's answer to the bound-foot grannies' detective squad," she
said, and he laughed again at the slang. Back in Nanjing, they'd used
this term to talk about the little old ladies who were always snooping
around, gossiping about who was doing something evil or wicked. They
didn't really have bound feet -- the practice of binding little girls'
feet to the point where they grew up unable to walk properly was dead,
and he'd never seen a real bound foot outside of a museum, though the
grannies would always exclaim over the girls' feet, passing evil
remarks if a girl had large feet, cooing if she had small ones -- but
they acted all pinched anyway.
1365
"And she'll believe that I'm a repairman? I don't have any tools!"
1366
"Oh, no," Jie laughed again. It was a pretty sound. Lu could see how
she'd be a very popular netshow host. That laugh was infectious. "No,
she'll think we're having sex!"
1367
He felt himself turning red and stammering. "Oh -- Uh --"
1368
Now she was howling with laughter, head flung back, hair fanned out
over the sofa-cushions. "You should see your face! Look, so long as
Grandma Mao out there thinks I'm just a garden-variety slut, she won't
suspect that I'm really Jiandi, Scourge of the Politburo and Voice of
the Pearl River Delta, all right? Now, get your shoes off and let's
have a look at that head-wound."
1369
He did as he was bade, neatly lining his shoes up by the doorway and
stepping gingerly onto the dusty wooden floor. Jia stood and led him by
the shoulders to one of the rolling chairs by the desk and pushed him
down on it, then leaned over him and stared intently at his scalp.
"OK," she said. "First of all, you need to switch shampoo, you have
very greasy hair, it's shameful. Second of all, you appear to have a
pigeon's egg growing out of your head, which has got to sting a little.
I'll tell you what, I'll get you something cold to hold on it for a few
moments, then I want you to go have a shower and clean it out well. It
looks like it bled a little, but not much, which is lucky for you,
since scalp wounds usually bleed like crazy. Then, once we've got you
into a more civilized state, I'll put you on the Internet and make you
even more famous. Sound good?"
1370
He opened his mouth to object, but she was already spinning away and
digging through the small fridge, crouching, hair falling over her
shoulders in a way that Lu couldn't stop staring it. Now she had a bag
of frozen Hahaomai chicken dumplings -- he recognized the packaging, it
was what they ate for dinner most nights in Boss Wing's dormitory --
and was wrapping it in a tea-towel, and pressing it to his head. It
felt like it weighed 500 kilos and had been cooled to absolute zero,
but it also made his head stop throbbing almost immediately. He slumped
in the chair and closed his eyes and held the dumplings to the spot
where the zengfu -- the slang was infectious -- had given him a
love-tap. He tracked Jia's movements around him by the sounds she made
and the puffs of perfume and hair stuff whenever she passed close. This
was not bad, he thought -- a lot better than things had been an hour
ago when he'd been crouching in front of the station talking to the
gweilo.
1371
"Right," she said, "take these." He opened his eyes and saw that she
was holding out two chalky pills and a glass of water for him.
1372
"What are they?" he said, narrowing his eyes at the glare of the sunset
light streaming in the window. He'd been nearly asleep.
1373
"Poison," she said. "I've decided to put you out of your misery. Take
them."
1374
He took them.
1375
"The shower's through there," she said, pointing toward the bedroom.
"There's a towel on the toilet-seat, and I found some pajamas that
should fit you. We'll rinse out your clothes and put them on the heater
to dry while we talk. No offense, Mr Labor Hero, but you smell like
something long dead."
1376
He was blushing again, he could tell, and there was nothing for it but
to duck and scurry through the bedroom -- he had a jumbled impression
of a narrow bed with a thin blanket crumbled at the bottom, a litter of
stuffed animals, and mounds of fake handbags overflowing with clothing
and toiletries. Then he was in the bathroom, the sink-lip covered in
mysterious pots and potions, all the oddments of a girl which a million
billboards hinted at, but which he'd never seen in place, lids askew,
powder spilling out. It was all so much less glamorous than it appeared
on the billboards, where everything looked like it was slightly wet and
glistening, but it was much more exciting.
1377
Every horizontal space in the shower seemed to support some kind of
bottle. Lu bought big two liter jugs of shower gel that he could use as
shampoo, too, but after squinting at the labels, he found one that
appeared to be for bodies and another for hair, and made use of both.
The water on his head felt like little sharp stones beating against it,
and his shoulder began to throb as he rubbed the shampoo in. After the
shower, he cleared the steam off the mirror and craned around to get a
look at it, and could just make out the huge, raised bruise there, a
club-shaped purple bruised line surrounded by a halo of greeny-yellow
swelling.
1378
"There's something you can wear on the bed," Jia yelled from the other
side of the door. He cautiously turned the knob and found that she'd
drawn a curtain across the door to the bedroom, leaving him alone in
naked semi-darkness. On the bed, neatly folded, a pair of track pants
and a t-shirt for an employment bureau, the kind of thing they gave out
to the people who stood in front of them all day long, paid for every
person they brought in to apply for a job. It was a tight fit, but he
got it on, and balled up his clothes, which really did stink, and
peeked around the curtain.
1379
"Hello?"
1380
"Come on out here, beautiful!" she said, as he stepped out, his bare
feet on the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with a
delicate little sniffle. "Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo. Very
good. Very good for ladies' reproductive issues." She patted his
stomach. "You'll have a little baby there in no time!"
1381
He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally, the room
spinning around him.
1382
She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and gave
his hand a squeeze. "Don't worry," she said. "It's only teasing.
Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have given it to
you." And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew that smell from
-- he remembered wishing that his mother was there to give him some
herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand among the many bottles
in her shower.
1383
"Do you live here?" he said.
1384
"In this pit?" She made a face. "No, no! This is just one of my
studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes life
harder for the zengfu."
1385
"But the clothes, the bed?"
1386
"Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My show can
go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I have." She
smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn't ever noticed a girl's dimples
before. The head injury was making him feel woozy. Or maybe it was
love.
1387
"And now?"
1388
"And now we talk to you about what you've seen," she said. "My show
starts in --" she looked at the face of her phone -- "12 minutes. Just
enough time for you to have a drink and get comfortable." She fished in
her fridge and brought out a water filter jug and filled a glass from a
small rack next to the tiny sink. He took it and drank it greedily and
she fetched him the filter, setting it down on one side of the desk
before settling into the chair on the other side.
1389
She began to click and type and furrow her brow in an adorable way,
slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She waved to
him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his glass.
1390
"What kind of show is this again?"
1391
"You are such a boy !" she said, looking up from her screen,
fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks from her
manicured fingernails.
1392
He looked down at himself. "I suppose I am," he said.
1393
"What I mean is, if you were a girl, you'd know all about this. Every
factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting after
dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone and tell me
all their troubles and I tell them what they need to hear. Mostly, it
comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw you, find another job,
or be prepared to be screwed in more ways than one. If your boyfriend
is a deadbeat who won't work and borrows money from you, get a new
boyfriend, even if he is the 'love of your life.' If your girlfriends
are talking trash about you, confront them, have a good cry, and start
over. If your girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of
them. If you are screwing your girlfriend's boyfriend, stop -- dump
him, confess to her, and don't do it again." She was ticking these off
on her fingers like a shopping list.
1394
"It sounds a little repetitive," he said. He wondered if she was making
it up, or possibly delusional. Could there really be a show that every
factory girl listened to that he'd never heard of? He thought of how
little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had talked to him when he
worked as a security guard and decided that yes, it was totally
possible.
1395
"It's very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and me.
Some problems are universal. Some things you just can't say too often.
Anyway, that's not all there is to it. We have variety! We have you!"
1396
"Me," he said. "You're going to put me on a show with all these girls
on it? Why? Won't that make the police want to get me even more?"
1397
"Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your face is
everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be for them to
arrest you. Trust me."
1398
"How can you be sure? Have you ever done this before?"
1399
"Every day," she said, eyes wide. "I'm my own case study. The police
have been after me for two years now, and I've stayed out of their
clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!"
1400
"I don't think I understand how that works," he said.
1401
She looked at the face of her phone. "We've only got a minute. Here,
quickly, I'll explain: if you're a fugitive, being poor is hard. Even
harder than for non-fugitives. It's expensive being on the run. You
need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones that you can
abandon. You need to be able to pay li --" bribes -- "and you need to
be able to move fast. Being famous means that you have access to money
and favors from a lot of different people. My listeners keep me going,
either through direct donations or through my advertisers."
1402
"You have ads? Who would buy an ad on a fugitive's radio show?"
1403
She shrugged. "The Taiwanese," she said. The island of Taiwan had
considered itself separate from China since 1949 but China had never
stopped laying claim to it -- without much success. "Falun Gong,
sometimes." She saw the look of shock on his face. "Don't worry,
I'm not religious. But I'll take their money. They don't care if
I make fun of them on the show, so long as I run their ads, too."
1404
He shook his head. "It's all too strange," he said.
1405
She held up her hand for silence and swung down a little mic from one
of the headphones' earpieces. "Hello, girls!" she called into the mic,
clicking her mouse. "It's your best friend here, Sister Jiandi, the
friend you can always rely on, the friend who will never let you down,
the friend you can confide all your secrets in -- provided you don't
mind eight million factory girls finding out about it!" She giggled at
her own joke. "Oh, sisters, it's going to be a good night, I can tell!
I have a special surprise for you a little later, but first, let's
talk! Tonight I'm using Amazon France chat, chat.amazon.fr, so go and
sign up now. You'll get me at jiandi88888. Remember to use a couple of
the latest FLG proxies before you make the call -- and it looks like
the translation services at Yahoo.ru and 123india.in are both unblocked
at the moment, which should make it easier to sign up. Well, what are
you waiting for? Get signed up!"
1406
She clicked something and he heard a blaring ad for Falun Gong start in
his headphone and he slipped one off the side of his head. Jie swung
her mic away and pointed a finger at him. "Feeling the magic yet?"
1407
"This is it? This is your big show?"
1408
"Oh yes," she said. "We'll probably have to switch chats three or four
times tonight, as they update the firewall. It's fun! Wait, you'll
see." In his ear, the ad was wrapping up and he slipped the other
headphone back into place.
1409
"Talk to me," Jie said, her voice full of warmth. It took him a moment
to realize she was talking into her mic, to her audience, not to him.
Her fingers were working the keyboard and mouse.
1410
"Hello?"
1411
"Yes, darling, hello. You're live. Talk, talk! We've only got all
night!"
1412
"Oh, um --" The voice was female, with a strong Henan accent, and it
was scared.
1413
"It's OK, sweetie, my heart, it's OK. Tell me." Jie's voice was a coo,
a purr, a seduction. Her eyes were moist, her lips pursed in a gesture
of pure caring. Lu wanted to tell her his secrets.
1414
"It's just that --" The voice stopped. Crying noises. In the
background, the sounds of a busy factory dorm, girlish calls and
laughter and conversation. Jie made soothing shhh shhh sounds. "It's my
boss," the girl said. "He was so nice to me at first. He said he
was taking an interest in me because we are both from Henan. He said
that he would protect me. Show me around the city. We went to nice
places. A restaurant in the stock exchange. He took me to the Windows
on the World park and we dressed up like ancient warriors."
1415
"And he wanted something in return, didn't he?"
1416
"I knew he would. I listen to your show. But I thought it would be
different for me. I thought he was different. But he --" She broke off.
"After he kissed me, he told me he wanted to do more. Everything. He
told me I owed it to him. That I'd understood that when I accepted his
invitation, and that I would be cheating him if I didn't --" She began
to cry.
1417
Jie made a face, twirled her finger in an impatient gesture. Lu was
horrified by her callousness. But when the crying stopped, her voice
was again full of compassion and understanding.
1418
"Oh, sweet child, you've been done badly, haven't you? Well, of course
you knew it would happen, but the heart and the head don't always agree
with each other, do they? The question isn't whether you acted like a
fool -- because you did, you acted like a perfect fool -- the question
is what you can do about it now. Am I right?"
1419
"Yes." The voice was so tiny and soft he could barely hear it. He
pictured a girl shrunk to the size of a mouse, trembling in fear.
1420
"Well, that's simple. Not easy, but simple. Forfeit your last eight
weeks' wages and walk out of the factory first thing tomorrow morning.
Go down to a job-broker on Xi Li street and find something -- anything
-- that can get you started again. Then you call your boss's wife -- is
he married?"
1421
"Yes." The voice was a little bigger now.
1422
"Call his wife and tell her everything. Tell her what he did, what he
said, what you said back. Tell her you're sorry, and tell her you're
sorry her husband is such a sack of rotten, stinking garbage. Tell her
you walked away on the pay he was holding back, and that you've left
your job. And then you start to work again. And no matter what your new
boss says or does, don't go out with him. Do you understand?"
1423
"Call his wife --"
1424
"Call his wife, walk away from your pay, and start over. There's
nothing else that will work. You can't talk to this man. He has raped
you -- that's what it is, you know, when someone in power coerces you
into sex, it's rape, just rape -- and he'll do it again and again and
again. He'll do it to the other girls in the factory. You tell as many
as you can why you're leaving. In fact, you tell me what factory you
work in and the name of your boss, right now, and then millions and
millions of girls will know about it, too. They'll steer clear of this
dog, and maybe you'll save a few souls with your bravery. What do you
say?"
1425
"You want me to name my boss? Now? But I thought this was confidential
--"
1426
"You don't have to. But do you want another girl to go through
what you just went through? What do you think would have happened if
you had heard another girl speak his name on this show, last month,
before you went out with him. What will you do? Will you save your
sisters from the pain you're in? Or will you protect your bruised ego
and let the next girl suffer, and the next?" She waited a moment. The
girl on the phone said nothing, though the sounds of people moving
around the dorm could still be faintly heard. Lu imagined her under her
blanket on her bunk, hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, whispering
her secrets to millions of girls. What a strange world. "Well?"
1427
"I'll do it," the girl said.
1428
"What's that? Say it loud!"
1429
"I'll do it!" the girl said, and let out a little laugh, and the laugh
was echoed by the girlish voices near her, as the girls in her dorm
realized that the confession they'd been listening into on their
computers and phones and radios had been emanating from a bunk in their
midst. There was a squeal of feedback as one of the radios got too
close to the phone, and Jie's fingers clicked at the keyboard,
squelching the feedback but somehow leaving the other squeals, the
girlish squeals. They were cheering her, the girls in the dorm,
cheering her and chanting her name, her real name, now on the radio,
but it didn't matter, because the girl was laughing harder than ever.
1430
"It's Bau Peixiong," she said, laughing. "Bau Peixiong at the HuaXia
sports factory." She laughed, a liberated sound.
1431
"OK, OK, girls," Jie said into her mic, in a commanding tone. The
voices quieted. "Now, your sister has just made a sacrifice for all of
you, so you need to help her. She needs money -- your pig of a boss
won't give her the eight weeks' pay he's holding onto, especially not
after she calls his wife. She needs help packing, help finding a job.
Someone there is thinking of changing jobs, someone there knows where
there's a job for this girl. Tell her. Help her move out. Help her find
the new job. This is your duty to your sister. Promise me!"
1432
From the phone, a babble of girls saying, "I promise! I promise!"
1433
"Very good," Jie said. "Now, stay tuned friends, for soon I will be
unveiling a wonderful surprise!" A mouseclick and then there was
another ad, this time for a company that provided fake credentials for
people looking for work, guaranteed to pass database lookups. Both of
them slipped their headphones off and Jie drained her water-glass, a
little trickle sliding down her chin and throat. Lu suppressed a groan.
She was so beautiful, and all that power and confidence --
1434
"That was a pretty good opener, wasn't it?" she said, raising her
eyebrows at him.
1435
"Is it like this all the time?"
1436
"Oh, that was a particularly good one. But yes, most nights it goes
like that. Six or seven hours' worth of it. You still think it'd get
repetitious?"
1437
"I can see how that would stay interesting."
1438
"After all, you kill the same monsters over and over again all night
long, don't you? That must be pretty dull."
1439
He considered this. "Not really," he said. "It's the teamwork, I guess.
All of us working together, and it's not really the same every time --
the games vary the monster-spawning a lot. Sometimes you get really
good drops, too -- that can be very exciting! You're going down a
corridor you've cleared a dozen times, and you discover that this time
it's filled with 200 vampires and then one of them drops an epic sword,
and it's not boring at all anymore." He shrugged. "My guildie Matthew
says it's intermittent reinforcement."
1440
She held up a finger and said, "Hold on to that," and clicked and
started talking into her mic again, taking a call from another factory
girl, this one more angry than sad. "I had a friend who was selling
franchises for a line of herbal remedies," she said, and Jie rolled her
eyes.
1441
"Go on," she said. "Sounds like a great opportunity." The sarcasm in
her voice was unmistakable.
1442
"That's what I thought," the girl said. She sounded like she wanted to
punch something. "At first I thought it was about selling the herbal
remedies, and I liked that, because my mother always gave me herbs when
I was sick as a girl, and I thought that a lot of the girls here would
want to buy the remedies too because they missed home."
1443
"Yes," Jie said. "Who wouldn't want to remember her mommy?"
1444
"Exactly! Just what I thought. And my friend told me about how much
money I could make, but not from selling the herbs! She said that
selling the herbs would be my 'downliners' job, and that I would manage
them. I would be a boss!"
1445
"Who wouldn't want to be a boss?"
1446
"Right! She said that she was recruiting me to be in the top layer of
the organization, and that I would then go and recruit two of my
friends to be my salespeople. They'd each pay me for the right to sign
up more downliners, and that all the downliners would buy herbs from me
and then I would get a share of all their profits. She showed me how if
my two downliners signed up two more, and each of them signed up
two more, and so on, that I would have hundreds of downliners working
for me in just a few days! And if I only got a few RMB from each one,
I'd be making thousands every month, just for signing up two people."
1447
"A very generous friend," Jie said, and though she sounded like she was
joking, she wasn't smiling.
1448
"Yes, yes! That's what I thought. And all I needed to do was pay her
one small fee for the right to sell downline, and she would supply me
with herbs and sales kits and everything else I needed. She said that
she was signing me up because I was Fujianese, like her, and she wanted
to take care of me. She said I should find girls who were still back in
the village, girls I'd gone to school with, and call them and sign them
up, because they needed to make money."
1449
"Why would girls in the village need herbal remedies? Wouldn't they
have their mothers?"
1450
That stopped the angry, fast-talking girl. "I didn't think of that,"
she said, at last. "It seemed like I was going to be a hero for
everyone, and like I would escape from the factory and get rich. My
friend said she was going to quit in a few weeks and get her own
apartment. I thought about moving out of the dorm, having money to send
home --"
1451
"You dreamed about money and all that it could buy you, but you didn't
devote the same attention to figuring out whether this thing could
possibly work, right?"
1452
Another silence. "Yes," she said. "I have to say that this is true."
1453
"And then?"
1454
"It started OK. I sold a few downlines, but they were having trouble
making their downline commitments. And then my friend, she started to
ask me for her percentage of my income. When I told her I wasn't
receiving the income my downliners owed me, she changed."
1455
"Go on." Jie's eyes were fixed on the wall behind Lu's head. She was in
another world, it seemed, picturing the girl and her problem.
1456
"She got angry. She said that I had made a commitment to her, and that
she had made commitments to her uplines based on this, and that I would
have to pay her so that she could pay the people she owed. She made me
feel like I'd betrayed her, betrayed the incredible opportunity. She
said I was just a simple girl from a village, not fit to be a
business-woman. She called me all day, over and over, screaming,
'Where's my money?'"
1457
"So what did you do?"
1458
"I finally went to her. I cried. I told her I didn't know what to do.
And she told me that I knew, but that I didn't have the courage to do
it. She told me I had to go to my downliners, get tough on them, get
the money out of them. And if they wouldn't pay, I'd have to get the
money some other way: from my parents, my friends, my savings. I could
get new downliners next month."
1459
"And so you called up your downliners?"
1460
"I did." She drew in a heaving breath. "At first, I was gentle and kind
to them, but my friend called me over and over again, and I got angry.
Angry at them, not at her. It was their fault that I was having to
spend all this time and energy, that I couldn't sleep or eat. And so I
got meaner. I threatened them, begged them, shouted at them. These two
girls, they were my old friends. I'd known them since we were little
babies. I knew their secrets. I threatened to call my friend's father
and tell him that she had let a boy take naked pictures of her when she
was 15. I threatened to tell my other friend's sister that she had
kissed her boyfriend."
1461
"Did they pay what they owed you?"
1462
"At first. The first month, they paid. The next month, though, I had to
call them and shout at them some more. It was like I was sitting above
myself, watching a crazy stranger say these terrible things to my old,
old friends. But they paid again. And then, in the third month --" She
stopped abruptly. The silence swelled. Lu felt it getting thicker,
staticky.
1463
"What happened?"
1464
"Then one friend ate rat poison." Her voice was a tiny, far-away
whisper. More silence. "I had told her that I would go to her father
and -- and --" Silence. "It was how her mother had committed suicide
when we were both small. The same kind of poison. Her father was a hard
man, an Old One Hundred Names who had lived through the Cultural
Revolution. He has no mercy on him. When she couldn't get the money,
she stole it. Got caught. He was going to find out. And if he didn't, I
would tell him about the photos she'd taken. And she couldn't face
that. I drove her to kill herself. It was me. I killed her."
1465
"She killed herself," Jie said, her voice full of compassion. "It's the
women's disease in China. We're the only country in the world where
more women commit suicide than men. You can't take the blame for this."
She paused. "Not all of it."
1466
"That's not all," the girl said, all the anger gone out of her voice
now, nothing left behind but distilled despair.
1467
"Of course not," Jie said. "You still owe for this month. And next
month, and the month after."
1468
"My friend, the one who brought me into this, she knows...
things ... about me. The kind of things I knew about my friends.
Things that could cost me my job, my home, my boyfriend..."
1469
"Of course. That's how cuanxiao works." Lu had heard the term before.
"Network sales," is what it meant. There was always someone trying to
sell you something as part of a cuanxiao scheme. He used to laugh at
it. Now it seemed a lot more serious. "And somewhere, upline from here,
there's someone else in the cuanxiao, who has something on her. And
there are preachers who can convince you that you'll make a fortune
with cuanxiao, and that you just need to inspire your family and
friends."
1470
"You know him? Mr Lee. My friend took me to a meeting. Mr Lee seemed
like he was on fire, and he made me so sure that I would become rich if
only --"
1471
"I don't know Mr Lee. But there are hundreds of Mr Lees in Guandong
province. You know what we call them? Pharoahs, like the Egyptian kings
they buried in pyramids. That's because they sit on top of a pyramid of
fools like you. Beneath the pharoah, there's a pair of downliners, and
beneath them, two pairs, and beneath them, two more pairs, and so on,
all passing money up the power to some feudal idiot from the
countryside who knows how to talk a good line and has never worked a
day in his life. Did you ever study math?"
1472
"I got a gold medal in our canton's Math Olympiad!"
1473
"That's very good! Math is useful in this world. Let's do a little
math. If each level of the pyramid has double the number of members of
the previous level, how many members are there on the 10th level of the
pyramid?"
1474
"What? Oh. Um. 2 to the 10. That's --" 1024 Lu thought to
himself. "1024, right?"
1475
"Exactly. How many on the 30th level?"
1476
"Um..."
1477
Lu pulled out his phone, used the calculator, did some figuring.
1478
"Um...."
1479
"Oh, just guess."
1480
"It's big. A hundred thousand? No! About five hundred thousand."
1481
"You should give your medal back, sister. It's over a billion." Jie
tapped some numbers into her keyboard. "1,073,741,824 to be precise.
There's 1.6 billion people in China. Your herb salespeople were
supposed to recruit new downliners every two weeks. At that rate --"
She typed some more. "It would be just over a year before every person
in China was working in your pyramid, even the tiny babies and the
oldest grannies."
1482
"Oh."
1483
"You know about network selling, you must have. What year are you?"
Meaning, how many years since you left the village?
1484
"Four," the girl admitted. "I did know it. Of course. But I thought
this was different. I thought because there was a real product and
because it was only two people at a time --"
1485
"I don't think you thought about any of that, sister. I think you
thought about having a big apartment and a lot of money. Isn't that
right?"
1486
"There was money, though! It was working for weeks! My friend had made
so much --"
1487
"What level of the pyramid was she on? 10? 20? When you're stealing
from the new people to pay the old people, it's a good deal for the old
people. Not so good for the new people. People like you or your
downliners."
1488
"I'm a fool," the girl said. "I'm a monster! I destroyed my friends'
lives!" She was sobbing now, screaming out the confession for millions
of people to hear.
1489
"It's true," Jie said, mildly. "You're a fool and a monster, just like
thousands of other people. Now what are you going to do about it?"
1490
"What can I do? "
1491
"You can stop snivelling and pull yourself together. Your friend, the
one who recruited you? Someone's holding something over her, the way
that she was holding something over you. Sit down with her, and do
whatever it takes to get her out. The most evil thing about these
pyramids is that they turn friend against friend, make us betray the
people we love to keep from being betrayed ourselves. Even if you're
one of the lucky few at the top who makes some money from it, you pay
the price of your integrity, your friendships and your soul. The only
way to win is not to play."
1492
"But --"
1493
"But, but, but! Listen, foolish girl! You called me tonight because
your soul is stained with the evil that you did. Did you think I would
just tell you that it's all right, you did what you had to do, no blame
on you? No! You know me, I'm Jiandi. I don't grant absolution. I tell
you what you must do to pay for your crimes. You don't get to confess,
feel better and walk away. You have to do the hard work now -- you have
to set things to right, help your friends, restore your integrity and
conscience. Do you hear me?"
1494
"I hear you." Quiet, meek.
1495
"Say it louder." She snapped it like a general giving an order.
1496
"I hear you!"
1497
"LOUDER!"
1498
"I HEAR YOU!"
1499
"Good!" She laughed and rubbed at one ear. "I think they heard you in
Macau! Good girl. Go and do right now!"
1500
And she clicked something and another ad rolled in Lu's headphones. He
took them off, found that his eyes were moist with tears. "That poor
girl," he said.
1501
"There's thousands more like her," Jie said. "It's a sickness, like
gambling. It comes from not understanding numbers. They all win their
little math medals, but they don't believe in the numbers. Now, you
were about to tell me about some kind of reinforcement."
1502
"Intermittent reinforcement," he said. "My friend Matthew, he leads our
guild, he told me about it. It comes from experiments with rats.
Imagine that you have a rat who gets some food every time he pushes a
lever. How often do you think he pushes the lever?"
1503
"As often as he's hungry, I suppose. I kept mice once -- they knew when
it was time for food and they'd rush over to the corner of the cage
that I dropped their seeds and cheese into."
1504
"Right. Now, what about a lever that gives food every fifth time they
press the lever?"
1505
"I don't know -- less?"
1506
"About the same, actually, After a while, the rats figure out that they
need five presses for a food pellet and every time they want feeding,
they wander over and hit it five times. Now, what about a lever that
gives food out at random? Sometimes one press, sometimes one hundred
presses?"
1507
"They'd give up, right?"
1508
"Wrong! They press it like crazy, All day and all night. It's like
someone who wins a little money in the lottery one week and then plays
every week afterward, forever. The uncertainty drives them crazy, it's
the most addictive system of all. Matthew says it's the most important
part of game design -- one day you manage to kill a really hard NPC
with a lucky swing, and it drops some incredibly epic item, and you
make more money in ten seconds than you made all week, and you have to
keep going back to that spot, looking for a monster like it, thinking
it'll happen again."
1509
"But it's random, right?"
1510
"I'm not sure," he said. "Matthew says it is. I sometimes think that
the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when you're
just about to quit, you get another jackpot." He shrugged. "That's what
I'd do, anyway."
1511
"If it's random, it shouldn't make any difference what you do and where
you play. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads ten times
in a row, you've got exactly the same chance of it coming up heads an
eleventh time than if it had come up all tails, or half and half."
1512
"Matthew says stuff like that all the time. He says that although it
may be unlikely that you'll get ten heads in a row, each flip has
exactly the same chance."
1513
"Matthew sounds like he knows his math."
1514
"He does. You should meet him sometime." He swallowed. "If he ever gets
out of jail, that is."
1515
"Oh, we'll have to do something about that."
1516
She handled six more calls, running the show for another two hours,
breaking for commercials and promising all her listeners the most
exciting event of their lifetime if they just hung in. At first, Lu
listened attentively, but his head hurt and he was so tired, and
eventually he slumped in his seat and dozed, drifting in and out of
dreams as he listened to Jie berating the foolish factory girls of
South China.
1517
He woke to a sprinkle of ice-water on his face, gasped and sat up,
opening his eyes just in time to see Jie dancing back away from him,
laughing, her face glowing with excitement. "I love doing this
show!" she said. "You're up next, handsome!"
1518
He looked at his phone and realized that he'd dozed for an hour more,
and that it was well past supper time. His stomach rumbled. Jie had
taken off her shoes and socks and unbuttoned the top two buttons on her
red blouse. Her hair was down and her makeup was smudged. She looked
like she was having the time of her life.
1519
"Wha?" his head throbbed and it tasted like something had used his
mouth for a toilet.
1520
"Come on ," she said, and moved close again, snapping his
headphones on. "It's coming up on 8PM. This is when my listenership
peaks. They're back from dinner, they're finished gossiping, and
they're all sitting on their beds, tuning in on their computers and
phones and radios. And I've been hyping you for hours . Every
pretty girl in the Pearl River Delta is waiting to meet you, are you
ready?"
1521
"I -- I --" He suddenly couldn't find his tongue. "Yes!" he managed.
1522
"Get your headset on," she called, dashing around to her side of the
desk and pouncing on her seat. "We're live in 10, 9, 8..."
1523
He fumbled with his headset, swung the mic down, reached for the water
glass and gulped down too much, choked, tried to keep it in, choked
more, spilled water all down his front. Jie laughed aloud, gulping it
down as she spoke into her mic.
1524
"We're back, we're back, we're back, and now sisters, I have the
special surprise I've been promising you all night! A knight of the
people, a hero of the factory, a killer who has hunted pirates in space
and dragons in the hills, a professional gold-farmer named --" She
broke off. "What name shall I call you by, hero?"
1525
"Oh!" He thought for a second. "Tank," he said. "It's the kind of
player I am, the tank."
1526
"A tank!" She giggled. "That's just perfect. Oh, sisters, if only you
could see this big, muscled tank I have sitting here in my studio. Let
me tell you about Tank. I was watching a little video this afternoon,
and like many of you, I found myself watching something amazing: dozens
of boys, lined up outside an Internet cafe, blinking and pale as
newborn mice in the daylight. It seemed that they were a different kind
of factory boy, the legendary gold farmers of Shenzhen, and they were
demanding a better job, better pay, better conditions, and an end to
their vicious, greedy bosses. Does that sound familiar, sisters?
1527
"The police arrived, the dirty jingcha, with their helmets and clubs
and gas, cowards with their faces hidden and their brutal weapons in
hand to fight these boys who only wanted justice. But did the boys
flee? No! Did they go back to their jobs and apologize to their bosses?
No! The mouse army stood its ground, claimed their workplace as their
rightful home, the place their work paid for. And what did the jingcha
do? Tell me, Tank, what did they do?"
1528
Lu looked at her like she was crazy. She made urgent hand-gestures at
him as the silence stretched. "I, that is, they beat us up!"
1529
"They certainly did! Sisters, download this video now, please! Watch as
the jingcha charge the boys of Shenzhen, breaking their heads, gassing
them, clubbing them. And now, focus on one brave lad off to the left,
right at the 14:22 mark. Strong chin, wide eyes, a little freckles over
his nose, hair in disarray. See him stand his ground through the charge
with his comrades by his side? See the jingcha with his club who comes
upon the boy from behind and hits him in the shoulder, knocking him
down? See the club come up again and land on the poor boy's head, the
blood that flies from the wound?
1530
"That, sisters, is Tank, the boy sitting across from me, bloodied but
unbowed, brave and strong, standing up for the rights of workers --"
She dissolved into giggles. Lu giggled too, he couldn't help it. "Oh,
sorry, sorry. Look, he's a very nice boy, and not bad to look at, and
the jingcha laid into his head and shoulder like they were tenderizing
a steak, and all he was doing was insisting that he had the right to
work like a person and not an animal. And he's not alone. They call it
'The People's Republic of China,' but the people don't get any say in
the way it's run. It's all corruption and exploitation.
1531
"I thought the video was amazing, a real inspiration. And then I saw
him, our Tank, wandering dazed and bloody through --" she broke off.
"Through a location I will not disclose, so that the jingcha won't know
which video footage they need to review. I saw him and I told him I
wanted to introduce him to you, my friends, and then he told me the
most amazing story I've heard, and you know I hear a lot of
amazing stories here every night. A story about a global movement to
improve the lot of workers everywhere, and I hope that's the story
he'll tell us tonight. So, Tank, darling, start with your injuries.
Could you describe them to our friends out there?"
1532
And Lu did, and then he found himself going from there into the story
of how he came to be a gold farmer, what life was like for him, the
stories Matthew had told him about how Boss Wing had forced him and his
friends to go back to work in his factory, talking and talking until
the water was gone and his mouth was dry, and mercifully, she called
for another commercial.
1533
He sagged into his chair while she got him some more water. "You should
see the chat rooms," she said. "They're all in love with you, 'Tank'.
The way you rescued those girls' belongings in Shilong New Town! You're
their hero. There are dozens of them who claim that they were there on
that day, that they saw you climbing the fence. Listen to this, 'His
muscles rippled like iron bands as he clambered up the fence like a
mighty jungle creature...'" He snorted water up his sinuses, and Jie
gave his bicep a squeeze. "You need to work out some more, Jungle
Creature, your muscles have gone all soft!"
1534
"How do you have message boards? Don't they block them?"
1535
"Oh, that's easy," she said. "We just pick a random blog out there on
the net, usually one that no one has posted to in a year or two, and we
take over the comment board on one of its posts. Once they block it --
or the server crashes -- we switch to another one. It's easy -- and
fun!"
1536
He laughed and shook his head, which set his headache going again. He
winced and squeezed his head between his hands. "Sheer genius!"
1537
Now the commercial was ending, and they both sat down quickly in their
chairs and swung their mics into place. Lu was getting good at this
now, the talk coming to him the way it did when he was chatting with
his guildies. He'd always been the storyteller of the bunch.
1538
And the story went on -- he told of how the Webblies had come to him
and his guildies in game, had talked to them about the need for
solidarity and mutual aid to protect themselves from bosses, from
players who hunted gold-farmers, from the game company.
1539
"They want to unite Chinese workers," Jie said, nodding sagely.
1540
"No!" He surprised himself with his vehemence. "Uniting Chinese workers
would be useless. With gold farming, the work can just move to
Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India -- anywhere workers aren't
organized. It's the same with all work now -- your job can move in no
time at all to anywhere you can build a factory and dock a container
ship. There's no such thing as 'Chinese' workers anymore. Just workers!
And so the Webblies organize all of us, everywhere!"
1541
"That's a lot of workers," she said. "How many have you got?"
1542
He hung his head. "Jiandi," he said. "We can all see the counter, and
we all cheer when it goes up by a few hundred, but we're a long way
off."
1543
"Oh, Tank," she said. "Don't be discouraged. Tens of thousands of
people! That's fantastic -- and I'm sure we can get a few members for
you. How can my listeners join up?"
1544
"Eh? Oh!" He struggled to remember the procedure for this. "You need to
get at least 50 percent of your co-workers to agree to sign up, and
then we certify the union for your whole factory."
1545
"Ay-yah! 50 percent! The big factories have 50,000 workers! How do you
do that?"
1546
He shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "We've been mostly signing up
small game-factories, there's not many bigger than 200 workers. It has
to be possible, though. Trade unions all over the world have organized
factories of every size." He swallowed, understanding how lame he
sounded. "Look, this is usually Matthew's side of things. He
understands all of it. I'm just the tank, you understand? I stand in
the front and soak up all the damage. And you can't talk to Matthew
because he's in jail."
1547
"Ah yes, jail. Tell us about what happened today."
1548
So he told them the story of the battle, all those millions of girls
out there in the towns of Guangdong, and he found
himself...transported. Taken away back to the cafe, the shouting, the
police and the screams, his voice drifting to his ears from a long way
off through the remembered shouts in his ears. When he stopped, he
snapped back to reality and found Jie staring at him with wet eyes and
parted lips. He looked at his phone. It was nearly midnight.
1549
He shrugged, dry mouthed. "I -- Well, that's it, I suppose."
1550
"Wow," Jie breathed, and cued up another commercial. "Are you OK?"
1551
"My head feels like it's being crushed between two heavy rocks," he
said. He shifted his butt in his chair and winced. "And my shoulder's
on fire."
1552
"I've really kept you up," she said. "We're almost done here, though.
You're a really tough bastard, you know that?"
1553
He didn't feel tough. Truth be told, he felt pretty terrible about the
fact that he'd gotten away while his guildies had all been locked up.
Logically he knew that they wouldn't benefit from him being jailed
alongside of them, but that was logic, not feelings.
1554
"OK," she said. "We're back. What a story ! Sisters, didn't I
tell you I had something special tonight? Alas, it's nearly time to go
-- we all need some sleep before we go back to work in the morning,
don't we? Just one more thing: what are we going to do about
this? "
1555
Suddenly, she wasn't sleepy and soothing. Her eyes were wide, and she
was gripping the edge of her desk tightly. "We come here from our
villages looking to do an honest job for decent pay so that we can help
our families, so that we can live and survive. What do we get? Slimy
perverts who screw us on the job and off! Bastard criminals who destroy
anyone who challenges their rackets! Cops who beat us and put us in
jail if we dare to challenge the status quo!"
1556
"Sisters, it can't go on ! Tank here said there's no such thing
as a Chinese worker anymore, just a worker. I hadn't heard of these
Webblies of his before tonight, and I don't know if they're any better
than your boss or the thief running the network sales rip-off next
door, and I don't care. If there are workers around the world
organizing for a better deal, I want to be a part of it, and so do you!
1557
"I'll tell you what's going to happen next. Tank and I are going to
find the Webblies and we're going to plan something big. Something
huge ! I don't know what it will be, but it's going to change
things. There's millions of us! Anything we do is big .
1558
"I have a confession to make." Her voice got quieter. "A sin to
confess. I do this show because it makes me money. A lot of money. I
have to spend a lot to stay ahead of the zengfu, but there's plenty
left over. More than you make, I have to confess. It's been a long time
since I was as poor as a factory girl. I'm practically rich. Not
boss-rich, but rich, you understand?
1559
"But I'm with you. I didn't start this show to get rich. I started it
because I was a factory girl and I cared about my sisters. We've been
coming to Guangdong Province since Deng Xiaoping changed the rules and
made the factories here grow. It's been generations, sisters, and we
come, we poor mice from the country, and we are ground up by the
factories we slave in. For every Yuan we send home, our bosses put a
hundred in their pockets. And when we're done, then what? We become one
of the old grannies begging by the road.
1560
"So listen in tomorrow. We're going to find out more about these
Webblies, we're going to make a plan, and we're going to bring it to
you. In the meantime, don't take any crap off your bosses. Don't let
the cops push you or your sisters and brothers around. And be good to
each other -- we're all on the same side."
1561
She clicked her mouse and flipped the lid down on her laptop.
1562
"Whew!" she said. "What a night !"
1563
"Is your show like this every night?"
1564
"Not this good, Tank. You certainly improved things. I'm glad I
kidnapped you from the train station."
1565
"I am too," he said. He was so tired. "I guess I'll call you tomorrow
about the next show? Maybe we could meet in the morning and try to
reach the Webblies or find a way to try to call my guildies and see if
they're all still in jail?"
1566
"Call me? Don't be stupid, Tank. I'm not letting you out of my sight."
1567
"It's OK," he said. "I can find somewhere to sleep." When he'd first
arrived in Shenzhen, he'd spent a couple nights sleeping in parks. He
could do that again. It wasn't so bad, if it didn't rain in the night.
Had there been clouds that day? He couldn't remember.
1568
"You certainly can -- right through that doorway, right there." She
pointed to the bedroom.
1569
He was suddenly wide awake. "Oh, I couldn't --"
1570
"Shut up and go to bed. You've got a head injury, stupid. And you've
just given me hours of great radio show. So you need it and you've
earned it. Bed. Now."
1571
He was too tired to argue. He stumbled a little on the way to bed, and
she swept the clothes and toys and handbags from the bed onto the floor
just ahead of him. She pulled the sheet over him and kissed him on the
forehead as he settled in. "Sleep, Tank," she whispered in his ear.
1572
He wondered dimly where she would sleep, as she left the room and he
heard her typing on her computer again. He fell asleep with the sound
of the keys in his ears.
1573
He barely woke when she slid under the covers with him, snuggled up to
him and began to snore softly in his ear.
1574
But he was wide awake an hour later when ten police cars pulled up out
front of Houhai's buildings, sirens blaring, and a helicopter spotlight
bathed the entire building in light as white as daylight. She went
rigid beside him under the covers and then practically levitated out of
the bed.
1575
"Twenty seconds," she barked. "Shoes, your phone, anything else you
need. We won't come back here."
1576
Lu felt obscurely proud of how calm he felt as he stood up and, in an
unhurried, calm fashion, picked up his shoes -- factory workers' tennis
shoes, cheap and ubiquitous -- and laced them up, then pulled on his
jacket, then moved efficiently into the living room, where Jie was
hosing solvent over all the flat surfaces in the room. The smell was as
sharp as his headache, and intensified it.
1577
She nodded once at him, and then nodded at another pressure-bottle of
solvent and said, "You do the bathroom and the bedroom." He did,
working quickly. He guessed that this would wipe away anything like a
fingerprint or a distinctive kind of dirt. He was done in a minute, or
maybe, less, and she was at his elbow with a ziploc baggie full of
dust. "Vacuumed out of the seas of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen train," she
said. "Skin cells from a good million people. Spread it evenly, please.
Quickly now."
1578
The dust got up his nose and made him sneeze, and sunk into the creases
of his palms, and it was all a little icky, but his head was clear and
full of the sirens and the helicopter's thunder. As he scattered the
genetic material throughout, he watched Jie popping the drive out of
her computer and dropping the slender stick down her cleavage, and
that finally broke through his cool. Suddenly, he realized that
he'd spent the night sleeping next to this beautiful girl, and he
hadn't even kissed her, much less touched those mysterious and
intriguing breasts that now warmly embraced an extremely compromising
piece of storage media, a sliver of magnetic media that could put them
both in jail forever.
1579
She looked around and ticked off a mental checklist on her finger. Then
she snapped a decisive nod and said, "All right, let's go." She led him
out into the corridor, which was brightly lit and empty, leaving him
feeling very exposed. She pulled a short prybar out of her purse and
expertly pried open the steel door on a fuse-panel by the elevators,
revealing neat rows of black plastic breaker switches. She fished in
her handbag again and came out with a disposable butane lighter, which
she lit, applying the flame to a little twist of white vinyl or shiny
paper protruding like a pull-tab from an unobtrusive seam in the panel.
It sizzled and flashed and a twist of black smoke rose from it and then
the paper burned away, the spark disappearing into the panel.
1580
A second later, the entire panel-face erupted in a shower of sparks,
smoke and flame. Jie regarded it with satisfaction as black smoke
poured out of the plate. Then all the lights went out and the smoke
alarms began to toll, a bone-deep dee-dah dee-dah that drowned out the
helicopter, the sirens.
1581
She clicked a little red LED light to life and it bathed her face in
demonic light. She looked very satisfied with herself. It made Lu feel
calm.
1582
"Now what?" he said.
1583
"Now we stroll out with everyone else who'se running away from the fire
alarms."
1584
All through the building, doors were opening, bleary families were
emerging, and smoke was billowing, black and acrid. They headed for the
staircase, just behind the Bound-Foot Granny who they'd met the day
before. In the stairwell, they met hundreds, then thousands more
refugees from the building, all carrying armloads of precious
possessions, babies, elderly family members.
1585
At the bottom, the police tried to corral them into an orderly group in
front of the building, but there were too many people, too much
confusion. In the end, it was simple to slip through the police lines
and mingle with the crowd of gawkers from nearby buildings who'd turned
out to watch.
1586
This scene is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books, a
diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and
exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner
from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser
University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to
drop in and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I
got there, I discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in
a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic
treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so
palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who
stepped through the door.
1587
17 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604
684 0484
17
<
1588
Whether you're a revolutionary, a factory owner, or a little-league
hockey organizer, there's one factor you can't afford to ignore: the
CoaseCost.
1589
Ronald Coase was an American economist who changed everything with a
paper he published in 1937 called "The Theory of the Firm." Coase's
paper argued that the real business of any organization was
getting people organized. A religion is a system for organizing people
to pray and give money to build churches and pay priests or ministers
or rabbis; a shoe factory is a system for organizing people to make
shoes. A revolutionary conspiracy is a system for organizing people to
overthrow the government.
1590
Organizing is a kind of tax on human activity. For every minute you
spend doing stuff , you have to spend a few seconds making sure
that you're not getting ahead or behind or to one side of the other
people you're doing stuff with. The seconds you tithe to an
organization is the CoaseCost, the tax on your work that you pay for
the fact that we're human beings and not ants or bees or some other
species that manages to all march in unison by sheer instinct.
1591
Oh, you can beat the CoaseCost: just stick to doing projects that you
don't need anyone else's help with. Like, um...Tying your shoes? (Nope,
not unless you're braiding your own shoelaces). Toasting your own
sandwich (not unless you gathered the wood for the fire and the wheat
for the bread and the milk for the cheese on your own).
1592
The fact is, everything you do is collaborative -- somewhere out there,
someone else had a hand in it. And part of the cost of what you're
doing is spent on making sure that you're coordinating right, that the
cheese gets to your fridge and that the electricity hums through its
wires.
1593
You can't eliminate Coase costs, but you can lower it. There's two ways
of doing this: get better organizational techniques (say, "double-entry
book-keeping," an Earth-shattering 13th-century invention that is at
the heart of every money-making organization in the world, from
churches to corporations to governments), or get better technology.
1594
Take going out to the movies. It's Friday night, and you're thinking of
seeing a movie, but you don't want to go alone. Imagine that the year
was 1950 -- how would you solve this problem?
1595
Well, you'd have to find a newspaper and see what's playing. Then you'd
have to call all your friends' houses (no cellular phones, remember!)
and leave messages for them. Then you'd have to wait for some or all of
them to call you back and report on their movie preferences. Then you'd
have to call them back in ones and twos and see if you could convince a
critical mass of them to see the same movie. Then you'd have to get to
the theater and locate each other and hope that the show wasn't sold
out.
1596
How much does this cost? Well, first, let's see how much the movie is
worth: one way to do that is to look at how much someone would have to
pay you to convince you to give up on going to the movies. Another is
to raise the price of the tickets steadily until you decide not to see
a movie after all.
1597
Once you have that number, you can calculate your CoaseCost: you could
ask how much it would cost you to pay someone else to make the
arrangements for you, or how much you could earn at an after-school job
if you weren't playing phone tag with your friends.
1598
You end up with an equation that looks like this:
1599
[Value of the movie] - [Cost of getting your friends together to see
it] = [Net value of an evening out]
1600
That's why you'll do something less fun (stay in and watch TV) but
simple, rather than going out and doing something more fun but more
complicated. It's not that movies aren't fun -- but if it's too much of
a pain in the ass to get your friends out to see them, then the number
of movies you go to see goes way down.
1601
Now think of an evening out at the movies these days. It's 6:45PM on a
Friday night and the movies are going to all start in the next 20-50
minutes. You pull out your phone and google the listings, sorted by
proximity to you. Then you send out a broadcast text-message to your
friends -- if your phone's very smart, you can send it to just those
friends who are in the neighborhood -- listing the movies and the
films. They reply-all to one another, and after a couple volleys,
you've found a bunch of people to see a flick with. You buy your
tickets on the phone.
1602
But then you get there and discover that the crowds are so huge you
can't find each other. So you call one another and arrange to meet by
the snack bar and moments later, you're in your seats, eating popcorn.
1603
So what? Why should anyone care how much it costs to get stuff done?
Because the CoaseCost is the price of being superhuman .
1604
Back in the old days -- the very, very old days -- your ancestors were
solitary monkeys. They worked in singles or couples to do everything a
monkey needed, from gathering food to taking care of kids to watching
for predators to building nests. This had its limitations: if you're
babysitting the kids, you can't gather food. If you're gathering food,
you might miss the tiger -- and lose the kids.
1605
Enter the tribe: a group of monkeys that work together, dividing up the
labor. Now they're not just solitary monkeys, they're groups of
monkeys, and they can do more than a single monkey could do. They have
transcended monkeyness. They are supermonkeys .
1606
Being a supermonkey isn't easy. If you're an individual supermonkey,
there are two ways to prosper: you can play along with all your monkey
pals to get the kids fed and keep an eye out for tigers, or you can
hide in the bushes and nap, pretending to work, only showing up at
mealtimes.
1607
From an individual perspective, it makes sense to be the
lazy-jerk-monkey. In a big tribe of monkeys, one or two goof-offs
aren't going to bankrupt the group. If you can get away with napping
instead of working, and still get fed, why not do it?
1608
But if everyone does it, so much for supermonkeys. Now no one's
getting the fruit, no one's taking care of the kids, and damn, I
thought you were looking out for the tigers! Too many lazy
monkeys plus tigers equals lunch.
1609
So monkeys -- and their hairless descendants like you -- need some
specialized hardware to detect cheaters and punish them before the idea
catches on and the tigers show up. That specialized hardware is a layer
of tissue wrapped around the top of your brain called the neo-cortex --
the "new bark." The neo-cortex is in charge of keeping track of the
monkeys. It's the part of your brain that organizes people, checks in
on them, falls in love with them, establishes enmity with them. It's
the part of your brain that gets thoroughly lit up when you play with
Facebook or other social networking sites, and it's the part of your
brain that houses the local copies of the people in your life. It's
where the voice of your mother telling you to brush your teeth emanates
from.
1610
The neocortex is the CoaseCost as applied to the brain. Every sip of
air you breathe, every calorie you ingest, every lubdub of your heart
goes to feed this new bark that keeps track of the other people in your
group and what they're doing, whether they're in line or off the
reservation.
1611
The CoaseCost is the limit of your ability to be superhuman. If the
CoaseCost of some activity is lower than the value that you'd get out
of it, you can get some friends together and do it , transcend
the limitations that nature has set on lone hairless monkeys and
become a superhuman .
1612
So it follows that high Coase costs make you less powerful and low
Coase costs make you more powerful. What's more, big institutions with
a lot of money and power can overcome high Coase costs: a government
can put 10,000 soldiers onto the battlefield with tanks and food and
medics; you and your buddies cannot. So high Coase costs can limit
your ability to be superhuman while leaving the rich and
powerful in possession of super-powers that you could never attain.
1613
And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks.
If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world,
using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's
standard for the high and mighty. If anyone can create and sell virtual
wealth in a game, then we're all in the same economic shoes as the
multinational megacorps that start the games.
1614
And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker,
anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss's permission,
then, brother, look out, because the CoaseCost of demanding better pay,
better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a lot
cheaper. And the people who have the power aren't going to sit still
and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.
1615
This scene is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've
visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of
course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture,
and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had
when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles
published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most
exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like
2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of
those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because
they don't fit in my suitcase.
1616
18 Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave.,
Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249
18
<
1617
Coca Cola Games Command Central had been designed by one of the world's
leading film-set designers. The brief had called for a room that looked
like you could use it to run an evil empire, launch an intergalactic
explorer vessel, or command a high-tech mercenary army. Everything was
curved and brushed steel and spotlit and what wasn't chrome was black,
except for accents of cracked, worn-out black leather harvested from
vintage motorcycle jackets. There were screens everywhere, built into
the tables, rolled up in the ceiling or floor, even one on the back of
the door. Any wall could be drawn on with special pens that used RFIDs
and accelerometers to track their motions and transmit them to a
computer that recorded it all and splashed it across wireless
multitouch screens that were velcroed up all around the room.
1618
Slick photos of Command Central graced the Coca Cola Games recruiting
site and featured in a series of vanity documentaries CCG had
commissioned about itself, looking designer-fresh, filled with fit,
intense, laughing young people in smart clothes doing intelligent
things.
1619
Coca Cola Games Command Central was a lie.
1620
Ten seconds after the game-runners moved into Command Central, every
multitouch had been broken or stolen. The recessed terminals set into
the tables were obsolete before they were installed and now they
suffered an ignominious fate: serving as stands for cutting-edge
laptops equipped with graphics cards that ran so hot, their fans
sounded like jet-engines.
1621
Fifteen seconds later, every flat surface had been covered with
junk-food wrappers, pizza boxes, energy-drink cans, vintage sci-fi
novels, used kleenexes, origami orc-helmets folded out of post-it
notes, snappy hats, and the infinitely varied junky licensed crap that
CCG made from the game, from Pez dispensers to bicycle valve-caps to
trading cards to flick-knives.
1622
Twenty seconds after that, the room acquired the game-runner funk, a
heady mix of pizza-grease strained through armpit pores, cheap cologne,
unwashed hair, vintage Japanese denim, and motor oil.
1623
And now the sleek supergenius lair had become the exclusive
meeting-cave for a tribe of savage, hyper-competitive, extremely
well-paid game-runners, who holed up in there, gnashing their teeth and
shouting at each other for every hour that God sent. No cleaner would
enter the room, and even the personal assistants would only go so far
as the doorway, where they plaintively called out their bosses' names
and dodged the disgusting food-wrappers that were hurled at their heads
by the game-runners, who did not take kindly to having their work
interrupted.
1624
Connor Prikkel had found His People. Technically he was a
vice-president, but no one reported to him, except for a PA whose job
it was to fish him out of Command Central a couple times a month,
steam-clean him in the corporate gym, stick him in the corporate jet,
and fire him into crowds of players and press around the world to
explain -- with a superior smirk -- just how Coca Cola Games managed to
oversee three of the twenty largest economies in the world.
1625
The rest of the time, Connor's job was to work on his
fingerspitzengefuhl. That was a useful word. It was a German word, of
course. The Germans had words for everything , created by the
simple expedient of bashing as many smaller words as you needed
together until you got one monster mouth-murderer like
fingerspitzengefuhl that exactly and precisely conveyed something no
other language could even get close to.
1626
Fingerspitzengefuhl means "fingertip feel" -- that feeling you get when
you've got the world resting against the thick cushion of nerve-endings
on the tips of your fingers. That feeling when you've got a basketball
held lightly in your hands, and you know precisely where the next
bounce will take it when you let it go. That feeling you get when
you're holding onto a baby and you can feel whether she's falling
asleep now, or waking up. That feeling you get when your hands are
resting lightly on the handlebars of your bike, bouncing down a steep
hillside, gentle pressure on the brakes, riding the razor-edged line
between doing an end-over and reaching the bottom safely.
1627
Proprioception is your ability to sense where your body is in space
relative to everything else. It's a sixth sense, and you don't even
know you have it until you lose it -- like when you intertwine your
fingers and thread your hands through your arms and find that you
wiggle your left finger when you mean to move your right; or when you
step on a ghost step at the top of a staircase and your foot lands on
nothing.
1628
Fingerspitzengefuhl is proprioception for the world, an extension of
your sixth sense into everything around you. You have
fingerspitzengefuhl when you can tell, just by the way the air feels,
that your class is in a bad mood, or that your teammate is upcourt and
waiting for you to pass the ball.
1629
Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl meant that he could feel everything
that was happening in the games he ran. He could tell when there was a
run on gold in Svartalfaheim Warriors, or when Zombie Mecha's credits
take a dive. He could tell when there was a huge raiding guild making a
run at Odin's Fortress, six hundred humans embodied in six hundred avs,
coordinated by generals and captains and lieutenants. He could tell
when there was a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge in Zombie Mecha as
too many ronin tried to enter Manhattan to clear out the Flatiron
Building and complete the Publishing Quest.
1630
All this knowledge came to him through his ever-rotating, ever-changing
feeds -- charts, chat-transcripts, server logs, bars representing load
and memory and failover and rate of subscriber churn and every other
bit of changing information from in the game. They flickered past in a
colorful roll, on the display of his monster widescreen laptop, opacity
dialled down to 10 percent in the windows that sat over his playscreens
in which he ran four avs in both games.
1631
Every gamerunner had a different way of attaining fingerspitzengefuhl,
as personal as the thought you follow to go to sleep or the reason you
fall in love. Some like a lot of screens -- four or five. Some
listened to a lot of read-aloud text and eavesdropped gamechat. Some
only watched charts, some only logs, some only game-screens. Coca Cola
Games had hired some industrial psychologists to try to come and unpick
the game-runners' methods, try to create a system for reproducing and
refining it. They'd lasted a day before being tossed out of Command
Central amid a torrent of abuse and profanities.
1632
The game-runners didn't want to be systematized. They didn't want to be
studied. To be a game-runner was to attain fingerspitzengefuhl and
vice-versa. Game-runners didn't need shrinks to tell them when they had
fingerspitzengefuhl. When you had fingerspitzengefuhl, you fell into a
warm bath, a kind of hyper-alert coma, in which knowledge flowed in and
out of every orifice at maximum speed. Fingerspitzengefuhl needed
coffee and energy drinks, junk food and loud goddamned music, grunts of
your co-workers. Fingerspitzengefuhl didn't need industrial psychology.
1633
Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was the best. It guided the unconscious
dance of his fingers on his laptop, guided him to eavesdrop on the
right conversations, to monitor the right action, to spot the Webblies'
fight with the Pinkertons as it began. He grunted that special grunt
that alerted the rest of his tribe to danger, and stabbed at his screen
with a fat finger greased with pizza-oil. The knowledge rippled through
the room like a wave, bellies and chins wobbling as the whole tribe
tuned into the fight.
1634
"We should pull the plug on this," said Fairfax, a designer who'd
worked her way up to Command Central.
1635
"Forget it," said Kaden. "Twenty thousand gold on the Webblies."
1636
"Two-to-one?" said Palmer, the number two economist, who had earned his
PhD but hadn't invented the Prikkel Equations.
1637
"No bets," Connor said. "Just watch the play."
1638
"You're such a combat freak," said Kaden. "You chose the wrong
specialty. You should have been a military strategist."
1639
"Bad pay, stupid clothes, and you have to work for the government,"
Connor snapped, noting the stiffened spines of Kaden and Bill, both
recruited out of the Pentagon's anti-terror Delta Force command to help
analyze the big guilds' command-structures and figure out how to get
more money out of them.
1640
"Look at 'em go!" Fairfax said. Connor had a lot of time for her, even
though they often disagreed. She'd run big teams of level-designers,
graphic artists, AI specialists, programmers, the whole thing, and she
had a good top-down and bottom-up view of things.
1641
"They're good," Connor said. He clicked a little and colored each of
the avs with a national flag representing the country the IP address of
the player was registered to. "And it's a goddamned United Nations of
players, look at that. What language are they speaking?" He clicked
some more and took over the room's speakers, cleverly recessed into
walls and floors, now buried under mountains of pizza-cardboard. The
room filled with a gabble of heavily accented English mixed with
Mandarin. His ear picked out Indian accents, Chinese, something else --
Malay? Indonesian? There were players from the whole Malay Peninsula in
that mob.
1642
"And look at the Pinkertons," Fairfax said. She had a background in
programming artificial intelligences, a trade that had changed an awful
lot since the Mechanical Turks stepped in to backstop the AIs in game.
But she had invented the idea of giving the game's soundtrack its own
AI, capable of upping the drama-quotient in the music when momentous
things were afoot, and that holistic view of gameplay had landed her a
seat in Command Central. She was the one who ordered out for health
food and giant salads instead of burgers by the sack and pints of
icecream. "They're nearly in the same distribution as the Webblies!
Look at this --" she zoomed in on a scrolling list of IP addresses,
then pulled up another table, fiddled with their sort order. "Look!
These Pinkertons are fighting from a netblock that's within 200 meters
of these Webblies! They're neighbors! Oh, this is hella weird ."
1643
It was true. Connor banged out a quick script to find and pair any
players who were physically proximate to one another and to try for
maps where they were available. Mostly they weren't -- he'd tried
tracking down these rats before, tried to see where they lived, but
ended up with a dead end. They didn't live on roads -- they lived in
illegal squats, shantytowns in the world's slumzones. The best he could
do was month-old sat photos of these mazes, revealing mountains of
smoldering garbage, toxic open sewers, livestock pens... Connor felt
like he should visit one of these places, fly a team of rats out to
Command Central in the company jet, stick them in a lab and study them
and learn how to exterminate them.
1644
Because there was one chart Connor didn't need to load, the chart
showing overall stability of the game economy: his fingerspitzengefuhl
was filling him in just fine. The game economy was hosed .
1645
"OK people, there's plenty to do here. No one else respawns on that
shard. Create a new instance for the Caverns so any real players who
hit them don't have to wade through that mess. Get every one of those
accounts and freeze their assets." Esteban, who headed up customer
service, groaned.
1646
"You know they're mostly hacked," he said. "There's hundreds of
them! We're going to be untangling the assets for months ."
1647
Connor knew it. The legit players whose accounts had been stolen by the
warring clans of third-world rip-off artists didn't deserve to have
their assets frozen. What's more, there'd be plenty of them whose
assets were part of a larger guild bank that might have the wealth of
dozens or hundreds of players. Of course the Bad Guys knew this and
depended on it, knew it would make the game-runners cautious and slow
when it came time to shut down the accounts they were using to smuggle
around their illicit wealth.
1648
He made eye-contact with Bill, head of security. They'd been going back
and forth over whether it would be worth sucking some of Connor's
budget into the security department to develop some forensic software
that would ferret out the transaction histories of stolen accounts and
figure out what assets the original player legitimately owned and where
the dirty money ended up after it left his account. Connor hated to
part with budget, especially when it involved Bill, who was a pompous
ass who liked to act like he was some kind of super-cybercop rather
than a glorified systems administrator.
1649
But sometimes you had to bite the bullet. "We'll handle it," he said.
"Right, Bill?" The head of security nodded, and began to pound at his
keyboard, no doubt hiring a bunch of his old hacker buddies to come on
board for top dollar and write the code.
1650
"Yeah," Bill added. "Don't worry about it, we've got it covered."
1651
One by one, the combatants vanished as their accounts were shut down
and frozen out. Some of the soldiers reappeared in the new instance --
a parallel universe containing an identical dungeon, but none of the
same players -- using new avs, but they could tell who they were
because they originated from the same IP addresses as the kicked
accounts. "This is great," Connor said. "If they keep this up, we'll
have all their accounts nuked by the end of the day."
1652
But the Pinkertons and Webblies must have had the same thought, because
the logins dropped off to near-zero, then zero. The screens shifted,
the eating sounds began anew, and Connor went back to his economic
charts. As he'd felt, the price of assets, currency and derivatives had
gone bonkers. The market somehow knew when there was trouble in Gold
Farmer Land, and began to see-saw with the expectation that the price
of goods was about to change.
1653
Connor's own holdings had dropped by 18 percent in 25 minutes, costing
him a cool $321,498.18.
1654
He popped open a chat to Bill.
1655
> This stuff you're commissioning with my budget
1656
> Yeah?
1657
> I want to use it to run every gold farmer to ground and throw him
out of the game
1658
> What?
1659
> It'll be there, in the transaction history. Some kind of
fingerprint in play-style and spending that'll let us auto-detect
farmers and toss them out. We're going to have a perfect, controlled,
farmer-free economy. The first of its kind
1660
> Connor every complex ecosystem has parasites.
1661
> Not this one
1662
> It won't work
1663
> Wanna bet? Let's make it $10K. I'll give you 2-1
1664
This scene is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary
independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by
accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London,
and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless
rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's
sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of
this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a
wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of
bookshelves.
1665
19 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202
+1 303 436 1070
19
<
1666
Ashok wove his pretty bike through the narrow alleys of Dharavi, his
headlamp slicing through the night. Yasmin's mother would be rigid with
worry and anger, and would probably beat her, but it was OK. She and
Ashok had sat in that studio shed for hours, talking it through,
getting meat on the bones of her idea, and he had left long, detailed
messages for Big Sister Nor before getting them back on his bike.
1667
Yasmin tapped him on the shoulder at each junction, showing him which
way to turn. Soon they were nearly at her family's house and shouted at
him to stop, hollering through the helmet. He killed the engine and the
headlight and her bum finally stopped vibrating, her legs complaining
about the hours she'd spent gripping the bike with the insides of her
thighs. She swung unsteadily off her bike and brought her hands up to
her helmet.
1668
Her hands were on her helmet when she heard the voices.
1669
"Is that her?"
1670
"I can't tell."
1671
They were whispering loudly, and a trick of the grilles over the
helmet's ear-coverings let her hear the sound as though it was
originating from right beside her. She put a firm hand on Ashok's
shoulder and squeezed.
1672
"It's her." The voice was Mala's, hard.
1673
Yasmin let go of Ashok's shoulder and brought her hand down to the
cables tying the lathi to the bike, while her free hand moved to the
helmet's visor, swinging it up. She'd repinned her hijab around her
neck and now she was glad she had, as she had pretty good visibility.
It had been a long time since she'd been in a physical fight, but she
understood the principles of it well, knew her tactics.
1674
The lathi was really well anchored -- Ashok hadn't wanted it to go
flying off while they were running down the motorway -- and now she
brought her other hand down to work at it blind, keeping her eyes on
the shadows around her, listening for the footsteps.
1675
"What about the man?"
1676
"Him too," Mala said.
1677
And then they charged, an army of them, coming from the shadows all
around them. "GO!" she said to Ashok, trying to keep him from
dismounting the bike, but he got to his feet, squared his shoulders,
and faced away from her, to the soldiers who were charging him. A rock
or lump of cement clanged off her helmet, making a sound like a cooking
pot falling to the floor, and now she tugged as hard as she could at
the lathi and at last it sprang free, the steel hooks on the tips of
the bunjee cables whipping around and smacking painfully into her
hands. She barely noticed, whirling with the two-meter stick held
overhead like a cricket-bat.
1678
And pulled up short.
1679
The boy closest to her was Sushant. Sushant, who, that afternoon, had
spoken of how he'd longed to join her cause. His face was a mask of
terror in the weak light leaking out of the homes around them. The
steel tip trembled over her shoulder as her wrists twitched. All she
would need to do is unwind the swing, let the long pole and its steel
end whistle through the air with all the whip-crack force penned up at
the lathi's end and she would bash poor Sushant's head in.
1680
And why not? After all, that's what Mala's army was here for.
1681
All this thought in the blink of an eye, so fast she didn't even
register that she'd thought it, but she did not swing the lathi through
the air at Sushant's head. Instead, she swept it at his feet, pulling
the swing so that it just knocked him backwards, flying into two more
soldiers behind him, boys who had once taken orders from her.
1682
"Stand down!" she barked, in the voice of command, and swung the lathi
back, sweeping it toward the army's feet like a broom. They took a
giant step back in unison, eyes crazed and rolling in the weak light.
Sushant was weeping. She'd heard bone break when the lathi's tip met
his ankle. He was holding onto the shoulders of the two soldiers he'd
knocked over, and they were struggling to keep him upright.
1683
No one said anything and there was just the collective breath of
Dharavi, thousands and thousands of chests rising and falling in
unison, breathing in each others' air, breathing in the stink of the
tanners and the burning reek from the dye factories and the sting of
the plastic smoke.
1684
Then Mala stepped forward. In her hand, she held -- what? A bottle?
1685
A bottle. With an oily rag hanging out of the end. A petrol bomb.
1686
"Mala!" she said, and she heard the shock in her own voice. "You'll
burn the whole of Dharavi down!" It was the tone of voice you use when
shouting into your headset at a guildie who was about to get the party
killed by accidentally aggroing some giant boss. The tone that said,
You're being an idiot, cut it out.
1687
It was the wrong tone to use with Mala. She stiffened up and her other
hand worked at the wheel of a disposable lighter -- snzz
snzz .
1688
Again, she moved before she thought, two running steps while she
brought the lathi up over her shoulder, feeling it thunk against
something behind her as it sliced up, then slicing it back down again,
in that savage, cutting arc, down at Mala's skinny legs, sweeping them
with the whole force of her body, and Mala skipped backwards, away from
the lathi, stumbled, went over backwards --
1689
-- and the lathi connected , a solid blow that made a sound like
the butcher's knife parting a goat's head from its neck, and Mala's
scream was so terrible that it actually brought people to their windows
(normally a scream in the night would make them stay back from it).
There was bone sticking out of her leg, glinting amid the blood that
fountained from the wound.
1690
And still she had the petrol bomb, and still she had the lighter, and
now the lighter was lit. Yasmin drew back her foot for a footballer's
kick, knowing as she wound up that she could cripple Mala's hand with a
good kick, ending her career as General Robotwallah.
1691
Afterwards, she remembered the voice that had chased itself around her
head as she drew back for that kick:
1692
Do it, do it and end your troubles. Do it because she would do it to
you. Do it because it will scare her army out of fighting you and the
Webblies. Do it because she betrayed you. Do it because it will keep
you safe.
1693
And she lowered her foot and instead leapt on Mala, pinning her
arms with her body. The lighter's flame licked at her arm, burning her,
and she ground it out. She could feel Mala's breath, snorting and
pained, on her throat. She grabbed Mala's left wrist, shook the hand
that held the bomb, smashed it against the ground until it broke and
spilled out the stinking petrol into the ditch that ran alongside the
shacks. She stood up.
1694
Mala's face was ashen, even in the bad light. The blood smell and the
petrol smell were everywhere.
1695
Yasmin looked to Ashok. "You need to take her to the hospital," she
said.
1696
"Yes," he said. He was holding onto the side of his head, eye squeezed
shut. "Yes, of course."
1697
"What happened to you?"
1698
He shrugged. "Got too close to your lathi," he said and tried for a
brave smile. She remembered the thunk as she'd drawn back for
her swing.
1699
"Sorry," she said.
1700
Mala's army stood at a distance, staring.
1701
"Go!" Yasmin said. "Go. This was a disaster. It was stupid and evil and
wrong. I'm not your enemy, you idiots. GO!"
1702
They went.
1703
"We have to splint her," Ashok said. "Make a stretcher, too. Can't move
her like that."
1704
Yasmin looked at him, raised an eyebrow.
1705
"My father's a doctor," he said.
1706
Yasmin went into the flat, climbed the stairs. Her mother sat up as she
entered the room and opened her mouth to say something, but Yasmin
raised on hand to her and, miraculously, she shut up. Yasmin looked
around the room, took the chair that sat in one corner, an armload of
rags from the bundle they used to keep the room clean, and left,
without saying a word.
1707
Ashok broke the chair into splints by smashing it against a nearby
wall. It was a cheap thing and went to pieces quickly. Yasmin knelt by
Mala and took her hand. Her breathing was shallow, labored.
1708
Mala squeezed her hand weakly. Then she opened her eyes and looked
around, confused. Her eyes settled on Yasmin. They looked at each
other. Mala tried to pull her hand away. Yasmin didn't let go. The hand
was strong, nimble. It had dispatched innumerable zombies and monsters.
1709
Mala stopped struggling, closed her eyes. Ashok brought over the
splints and rags and hunkered down beside them.
1710
Just before he began to work on her, Mala said something. Yasmin
couldn't quite make it out, but she thought it might be, Forgive
me.
1711
This scene is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers, the booksellers that
are in practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands
have just a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse),
but the big ones, like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare,
are as good as any neighborhood store. It takes something special to
bring a personal touch to an airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on
more than one long Chicago layover.
1712
20
20
<
1713
Wei-Dong couldn't get Lu off his mind. A barbarian stabbed a pumpkin
and he decided that the sword would be stuck for three seconds and then
play a standard squashing sound from his soundboard. He couldn't get Lu
off his mind. A pickpocket tried to steal a phoenix's tailfeather, and
he made the phoenix turn around and curse the player out, spitting
flames, shouting at him in Mandarin, his voice filtered through a
gobble-phaser so that it sounded birdy. He couldn't get Lu off his
mind. A zombie horde-leader tried to batter his way into a barricaded
mini-mall, attempting to go through a "Going out of business" signboard
that was only a texture mapped onto an exterior surface that had no
interior. Wei-Dong liked the guy's ingenuity, so he decided that it
would take 3,000 zombie-minutes to break it down, and when it fell, it
would map to the interior of the sporting-goods store where there were
some nice clubs, crossbows and machetes.
1714
And he couldn't get Lu off his mind.
1715
He'd always liked Lu. Of all the guys, Lu was the one who really got
into the games. He didn't just love the money, or the
friendship: he loved to play . He loved to solve puzzles, to take
down the big bosses on a huge raid, to unlock new lands and
achievements for his avs. Sometimes, as Wei-Dong worked his long shifts
making tiny decisions for the game, he thought about how much better it
would be to play, thanks to the work he was doing, and imagined the Lu
would approve of the artistry. It was nice to be on the other side of
the game, making the fun instead of just consuming it. The job was
long, it was hard, it didn't pay well, but he was part of the
show .
1716
But this wasn't a show anymore.
1717
His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He took it out, looked at
the face, put it on his desk. It was his mom. He'd relented and given
her his new number once he turned 18, justifying it to himself on the
ground that he was an adult now and she couldn't have him tracked down
and dragged back. But really, it was because he couldn't face spending
his 18th birthday alone. But he didn't want to talk to her now. He
bumped her to voicemail.
1718
She called back. The phone buzzed. He bumped it to voicemail. A second
later, the phone buzzed again. He reached to turn it off and then he
stopped and answered it.
1719
"Hi, Mom?"
1720
"Leonard," she said. "It's your father."
1721
"What?"
1722
She took a deep breath, let it out. "A heart attack. A big one. They
took him to --" She stopped, took in a deep breath. "They took him to
the Hoag Center. He's in the ICU. They say it's the best --" Another
breath. "It's supposed to be the best."
1723
Wei-Dong's stomach dropped away from him, sinking to a spot somewhere
beneath his chair. His head felt like it might fly away. "When?"
1724
"Yesterday," she said.
1725
He didn't say anything. Yesterday? He wanted to shriek it. His
father had been in the hospital since yesterday and no one had
told him?
1726
"Oh, Leonard," she said. "I didn't know what to do. You haven't spoken
to him since you left. And --"
1727
And ?
1728
"I'll come and see him," he said. "I can get a taxi. It'll take about
an hour, I guess."
1729
"Visiting hours are over," she said. "I've been with him all day. He
isn't conscious very much. I... They don't let you use your phone
there. Not in the ICU."
1730
For months, Wei-Dong had been living as an adult, living a life he
would have described as ideal, before the phone rang. He knew
interesting people, went to exciting places. He played games all
day , for a living. He knew the secrets of gamespace.
1731
Now he understood that a feeling of intense loneliness had been lurking
beneath his satisfaction all along, a bubbling pit of despair that
stank of failure and misery. Wei-Dong loved his parents. He wanted
their approval. He trusted their judgment. That was why he'd been so
freaked out when he discovered that they'd been plotting to send him
away. If he hadn't cared about them, none of it would have mattered.
Somewhere in his mind, he'd had a cut-scene for his reunion with his
parents, inviting them to a fancy, urban restaurant, maybe one of those
raw food places in Echo Park that he read about all the time in
Metroblogs. They'd have a cultured, sophisticated conversation about
the many amazing things he'd learned on his own, and his father would
have to scrape his jaw off his plate to keep up his end of the
conversation. Afterwards, he'd get on his slick Tata scooter, all
tricked out with about a thousand coats of lacquer over thin bamboo
strips, and cruise away while his parents looked at each other,
marvelling at the amazing son they'd spawned.
1732
It was stupid, he knew it. But the point was, he'd always treated this
time as a holiday, a little interlude in his family life. His vision
quest, when he went off to become a man. A real Bar-Mitzvah, one that
meant something.
1733
The thought that he might never see his father again, never make up
with him -- it hit him like a a blow, like he'd swung a hammer at a
nail and smashed his hand instead.
1734
"Mom --" His voice came out in a croak. He cleared his throat. "Mom,
I'm going to come down tomorrow and see you both. I'll get a taxi."
1735
"OK, Leonard. I think your father would like to see you."
1736
He wanted her to say something about how selfish he'd been to leave
them behind, what a bad son he'd been. He wanted her to say something
unfair so that he could be angry instead of feeling this
terrible, awful guilt.
1737
But she said, "I love you, Leonard. I can't wait to see you. I've
missed you."
1738
And so he went to bed with a million self-hating thoughts chanting in
unison in his mind, and he lay there in his bed in the flophouse hotel
for hours, listening to the thoughts and the shouting bums and
clubgoers and the people having sex in other rooms and the music
floating up from car windows, for hours and hours, and he'd barely
fallen asleep when his alarm woke him up. He showered and scraped off
his little butt-fluff mustache with a disposable razor and ate a peanut
butter sandwich and made himself a quadruple espresso using the
nitrous-powered hand-press he'd bought with his first paycheck and
called a cab and brushed his teeth while he waited for it.
1739
The cabbie was Chinese, and Wei-Dong asked him, in his best Mandarin,
to take him down to Orange County, to his parents' place. The man was
clearly amused by the young white boy who spoke Chinese, and they
talked a little about the weather and the traffic and then Wei-Dong
slept, dozing with his rolled-up jacket for a pillow, sleeping through
the caffeine jitter of the quad-shot as the early morning LA traffic
crawled down the 5.
1740
And he paid the cabbie nearly a day's wages and took his keys out of
his jacket pocket and walked up the walk to his house and let himself
in and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her housecoat,
eyes red and puffy, just staring into space.
1741
He stood in the doorway and looked at her and she looked back at him,
then stood uncertainly and crossed to him and gave him a hug that was
tight and trembling and there was wetness on his neck where her tears
streaked it.
1742
"He went," she breathed into his ear. "This morning, about 3 AM.
Another heart attack. Very fast. They said it was practically instant."
She cried some more.
1743
And Wei-Dong knew that he would be moving home again.
1744
The hospital discharged Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob
two days early, just to be rid of them. For one thing, they wouldn't
stay in their rooms -- instead, they kept sneaking down to the
hospital's cafeteria where they'd commandeer three or four tables,
laboriously pushing them together, moving on crutches and wheelchairs,
then spreading out computers, phones, notepads, macrame projects, tiny
lead miniatures that The Mighty Krang was always painting with fine
camel-hair brushes, cards, flowers, chocolates and shortbread sent by
Webbly supporters.
1745
To top it off, Big Sister Nor had discovered that three of the women on
her ward were Filipina maids who'd been beaten by their employers, and
was holding consciousness-raising meetings where she taught them how to
write official letters of complaint to the Ministry of Manpower. The
nurses loved them -- they'd voted in a union the year before -- and the
hospital administration hated them with the white-hot heat of a
thousand suns.
1746
So less than two weeks after being beaten within an inch of their
lives, Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, and Justbob stepped, blinking,
into the choking heat of mid-day in Singapore, wrapped in bandages,
splints and casts. Their bodies were broken, but their spirits were
high. The beating had been, well, liberating . After years of
living in fear of being jumped and kicked half-to-death by goons
working for the bosses, they'd been through it and survived. They'd
thrived. Their fear had been burned out.
1747
As they looked at one another, hair sticky and faces flushed from the
steaming heat, they began to smile. Then to giggle. Then to laugh, as
loud and as deep as their injuries would allow.
1748
Justbob swept her hair away from the eyepatch that covered the ruin of
her left eye, scratched under the cast on her arm, and said, "They
should have killed us."
1749
Part III: Ponzi
1750
This scene is dedicated to the Harvard Bookstore, a wonderful and
eclectic bookshop in the heart of one of the all-time kick-ass
world-class bookshopping neighborhoods, the stretch of Mass Ave that
runs between Harvard and MIT. The last time I visited the store, they'd
just gotten in an Espresso print-on-demand book machine that was hooked
up to Google's astonishing library of scanned public-domain books and
they could print and bind practically any out of print book from the
whole of human history for a few dollars in a few minutes. To plumb the
unimaginable depths of human creativity this represented, the store had
someone whose job it was to just mouse around and find wild titles from
out of history to print and stick on the shelves around the machine. I
have rarely felt the presence of the future so strongly as I did that
night.
1751
21 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138 USA, +1 (617)
661-1515
21
<
1752
The inside of the shipping container was a lot worse than Wei-Dong had
anticipated. When he'd decided to smuggle himself into China, he'd done
a lot of reading on the subject, starting with searches on human
trafficking -- which was all horror stories about 130 degree noontimes
in a roasting box, crammed in with thirty others -- and then into the
sustainable housing movement, where architects were vying to outdo one
another in their simple and elegant retrofits of containers into cute
little apartments.
1753
Why no one had thought to merge the two disciplines was beyond him. If
you're going to smuggle people across the ocean, why not avail yourself
of a cute little kit to transform their steel box into a cozy little
camper? Was he missing something?
1754
Nope. Other than the fact that people-smugglers were all criminal
dirtbags, he couldn't find any reason why a smuggle-ee couldn't enjoy
the ten days at sea in high style. Especially if the smuggle-ee was now
co-owner of a huge shipping and logistics company based in Los Angeles,
with the run of the warehouse and a Homeland Security all-access pass
for the port.
1755
It had taken Wei-Dong three weeks to do the work on the container. The
mail-order conversion kit said that it could be field-assembled by two
unskilled laborers in a disaster area with hand tools in two days. It
took him two weeks, which was a little embarrassing, as he'd always
classed himself as "skilled" (but there you go).
1756
And he had special needs, after all. He'd read up on port security and
knew that there'd be sensors looking for the telltale cocktail of
gasses given off by humans: acetone, isoprene, alpha pinene and lots of
other exotic exhaust given off with every breath in a specific ratio.
So he built a little container inside the container, an airtight box
that would hold his gasses in until they were at sea -- he figured he
could survive in it for a good ten hours before he used up all the air,
provided he didn't exercise too much. The port cops could probe his
container all they wanted, and they'd get the normal mix of volatiles
boiling off of the paint on the inside of the shipping container,
untainted by human exhaust. Provided they didn't actually open his
container and then get too curious about the hermetically sealed box
inside, he'd be golden.
1757
Anyway, by the time he was done, he had a genuinely kick-ass little
nest. He'd loaded up his Dad's Huawei with an entire apartment's worth
of IKEA furniture and then he'd hacked it and nailed it and screwed it
and glued it into the container's interior, making a cozy ship's cabin
with a king-sized bed, a chemical toilet, a microwave, a desk, and a
play area. Once they were at sea, he could open his little hatch and
string out his WiFi receiver -- tapping into the on-board WiFi used by
the crew would be simple, as they didn't devote a lot of energy to
keeping out freeloaders while they were in the middle of the ocean --
and his solar panel. He had some very long wires for both, because he'd
fixed the waybills so that his container would be deep in the middle of
the stack alongside one of the gaps that ran between them, rather than
on the outside edge: one percent of shipping containers ended up at the
bottom of the sea, tossed overboard in rough waters, and he wanted to
minimize the chance of dying when his container imploded from the
pressure of hundreds of atmospheres' worth of deep ocean.
1758
Inheritances were handier than he'd suspected. He was able to click
onto Huawei's website and order ten power-packs for their all-electric
runabouts, each one rated for 80 miles' drive. They were delivered
directly to the pier his shipping container was waiting on (he
considered the possibility that the power-packs had been shipped to
America in the same container he was installing them in, but he knew
the odds against it were astronomical -- there were a lot of
shipping containers arriving on America's shores every second). They
stacked neatly at one end of the container, with a barcoded waybill
pasted to them that said they were being returned as defective. They
arrived charged, and he was pretty sure that he'd be able to keep them
charged between the Port of Los Angeles and Shenzhen, using the solar
sheets he was going to deploy on the top of the container stack. He'd
tested the photovoltaic sheets on his father's Huawei and found that he
could fully charge it in six hours, and he'd calculated that he should
be able to run his laptop, air conditioner, and water pumps for four
days on each stack. 16 days' power would be more than enough to
complete the crossing, even if they got hit by bad weather, but it was
good to know that recharging was an option.
1759
Water had given him some pause. Humans consume a lot of water,
and while there was plenty of room in his space capsule -- as he'd come
to think of the container -- he thought there had to be a better way to
manage his liquid needs on the voyage than simply moving three or four
tons of water into the box. He was deep in thought when he realized
that the solar sheets were all water-proof and could be easily turned
into a funnel that would feed a length of PVC pipe that he could snake
from the top of the container stack into the space-capsule, where a
couple of sterile hollow drums would hold the water until he was ready
to drink it or shower in it. Afterwards, his waste water could just be
pumped out onto the ship's deck, where it would wash overboard with all
the other water that fell on the ship. If he packed enough water to
keep him going on minimal showers and cooking for a week, the odds were
good that they'd hit a rainstorm and he'd be topped up -- and if they
didn't he could ration his remaining water and arrive in China a little
smellier than he'd started.
1760
He loved this stuff. The planning was exquisite fun, a real googlefest
of interesting HOWTOs and advice. Lots of parts of the problem of
self-sufficiency at sea had been considered before this, though no one
had given much thought to the problem of travelling in style and
secrecy in a container. He was a pioneer. He was making notes and
planning to publish them when the adventure was over.
1761
Of course, he wouldn't mention the reason he needed to smuggle
himself into China, rather than just applying for a tourist visa.
1762
Wei-Dong's mother didn't know what to make of her son. His father's
death had shattered her, and half the time she seemed to be speaking to
him from behind a curtain of gauze. He found the anti-depressants her
doctor had prescribed and looked up the side-effects and decided that
his mother probably wouldn't be in any shape to notice that he was up
to something weird. Mostly she just seemed relieved to have him home,
and industriously involved in the family business. She hadn't even
blinked when he told her he was going to take a road trip up the coast,
a nice long drive up to Alaska with minimal net-access, phone activity
and so on.
1763
The last cargo to go into the space-capsule was three cardboard boxes,
small enough to load into the trunk of the Huawei, which he put in
long-term parking and double-locked after he'd loaded them up. Each one
was triple-wrapped in water-proof plastic, and inside them were
twenty-five thousand-odd prepaid game-cards for various MMOs. The
face-value of these cards was in excess of $200,000, though no money
changed hands when he collected them, in lots of a few hundred, from
Chinese convenience stores all over Los Angeles and Orange County. It
had taken three days to get the whole load, and it had been the
hairiest part of the gig so far. The cards were part of a regular deal
whereby the big gold-farmers used networks of overseas retailers to
snaffle up US playtime and ship it back to China, so that their
employees could get online using the US servers.
1764
Technically, that meant that all the convenience store clerks he
visited were part of a vast criminal underground, but none of them
seemed all that dangerous. Still, if any one of them had been
suspicious about the white kid with the bad Mandarin accent who was
doing the regular pickup, who knew what might happen?
1765
It hadn't, though. Now he had the precious cargo, the boxes of
untraceable, non-sequential game-credit that would let him earn
game-gold. It was all so weird, now that he sat there on his red
leather Ikea sofa, sipping an iced tea and munching a power bar and
contemplating his booty.
1766
Under their scratch-off strips, these cards contained unique numbers
produced by a big random-number generator on a server in America, then
printed in China, then shipped back to America, now destined for China
again. He thought about how much simpler it would have been to come up
with the random numbers in China in the first place, and chuckled and
put his feet up on the boxes.
1767
Of course, if they'd done that, he wouldn't have had any excuse to
build the space-capsule and smuggle himself into China.
1768
This scene is dedicated to London's Clerkenwell Tales, located
around the corner from my office in Clerkenwell, a wonderful and
eclectic neighborhood in central London. Peter Ho, the owner, is a
veteran of Waterstone's, and has opened up exactly the kind of small,
expertly curated neighborhood store that every bookish person yearns to
have in the vicinity. Peter makes a point of stocking small handmade
editions from local printers, and as a result, I'm forever dropping in
to say hello over my lunch break and leaving with an armload of
exquisite and gorgeous books. It's lethal. In a good way.
1769
22 30 Exmouth Market EC1R 4QE London +44 (0)20
7713 8135
22
<
1770
Ashok did his best thinking on paper, big sheets of it. He knew that it
was ridiculous. The smart thing to do would be to keep all the files
digital, encrypted on a shared drive on the net where all the Webblies
could get at it. But the numbers made so much more sense when they were
written neatly on flip-chart paper and tacked up all around the walls
of his "war-room" -- the back room at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe, rented by
Mala out of the army's wages from Mr Bannerjee.
1771
Oh yes, Mala was still drawing wages from Mr Bannerjee and her soldiers
were still fighting the missions he sent them on. But afterwards, in
their own time, they fought their own missions, in Mrs Dibyendu's shop.
Mrs Dibyendu was lavishly welcoming to them, grateful for the business
in her shop, which had been in danger of drying up and blowing away.
Idiot nephew had been sent back to Uttar Pradesh to live with his
parents, limping home with his tail between his legs and leaving Mrs
Dibyendu to tend her increasingly empty shop on her own.
1772
Mrs Dibyendu didn't mind the big sheets of paper. She loved
Ashok, smartly dressed and well turned out, and clearly thought that he
and Yasmin had something going on. Ashok tried gently to disabuse her
of this, but she wasn't having any of it. She brought him sweet chai
all day and all night, as he labored over his sheets.
1773
"Ashok," Mala called, limping toward him through the empty cafe,
leaning on the trestle-tables that supported the long rows of gasping
PCs.
1774
He stood up from the table, wiping the chai from his chin with his
hand, wiping his hand on his trousers. Mala made him nervous. He'd
visited her in the hospital, with Yasmin, and sat by her bed while she
refused to look at either of them. He'd picked her up when she was
discharged, and she'd fixed him with that burning look, like a holy
woman, and she'd nodded once at him, and asked him how her Army could
help.
1775
"Mala," he said. "You're early."
1776
"Not much fighting today," she said, shrugging. "Fighting Webblies is
like fighting children. Badly organized children. We knocked over
twenty jobsites before lunch and I had to call a break. The Army was
getting bored. I've got them on training exercises, fighting battles
against each other."
1777
"You're the commander, General Robotwallah, I'm sure you know best."
1778
She had a very pretty smile, Mala did, though you rarely got to see it.
Mostly you saw her ugly smiles, smiles that seemed to have too many
sharp teeth in them. But her pretty smile was like the sun. It changed
the whole room, made your heart glow. He understood how a girl like
this could command an Army. He stared at the pretty smile for a minute
and his tongue went dry and thick in his mouth.
1779
"I want to talk to you, Ashok. You're sitting here with your paper and
your figures, and you keep telling us to wait, wait a little, and
you'll explain everything. It's been months, Ashok, and still you say
wait, explain. I'm tired of waiting. The Army is tired of waiting.
Being double agents was amusing for a little while, and it's fun to
fight real Pinkertons at night, but they're not going to wait around
forever."
1780
Ashok held his hands out in a placating gesture that often worked on
Mala. She needed to know that she was the boss. "Look, it's not a
simple matter. If we're going to take on four virtual worlds at once,
everything has to run like clockwork, each piece firing after the
other. In the meantime --"
1781
She waved at him dismissively. "In the meantime, Bannerjee grows more
and more suspicious. The man is an idiot, not a moron. He will
eventually figure out that something is going wrong. Or his masters
will. And then --"
1782
"And then we'll have to placate him, or misdirect him. General, this is
a confidence game, a scam, running on four virtual worlds and twenty
real nations, with hundreds of confederates. Confidence games require
planning and cunning. It's not enough to go in, guns blazing --"
1783
"You think we don't understand planning? You think we don't understand
cunning ? Ashok, you have never fought. You should fight. It
would help you understand this business you've gotten into. You think
that we're thugs, idiot muscle. Running a battle requires as much skill
as anything you do -- I don't have a fine education, I am just a girl
from the village, I am just a Dharavi rat, but I am smart Ashok,
and don't you ever forget it."
1784
The worst part was, she was right. He did often think of her as
a thug. "Mala, I want to play, but playing would take me away from
planning."
1785
"You can't plan if you don't play. I'm the general, and I'm ordering
it. You'll join the junior platoon on maneuvers tomorrow at 10AM.
There's skirmishing, then theory, then a couple of battles overseen by
the senior platoon when they arrive. It will be good for you. They will
rag you some, because you are new, but that will be good for you, too."
1786
That look in her eyes, the fiery one, told him that he didn't dare
disagree. "Yes, General," he said.
1787
"And you will explain this business to me, now. You will learn my
world, I will learn yours."
1788
"Mala --"
1789
"I know, I know. I came in and shouted at you because you were taking
too long and now I insist that you take longer." She gave him that
smile. She wasn't pretty -- her features were too sharp for pretty --
but she was beautiful when she smiled. She was going to be a
heart-breaker when she grew up. If she grew up.
1790
"Yes, General."
1791
"Chai!" she called to Mrs Dibyendu, who brought it round quickly,
averting her eyes from Mala.
1792
"All right, let's start with the basic theory of the scam. Who is
easiest to trick?"
1793
"A fool," she said at once.
1794
"Wrong," he said. "Fools are often suspicious, because they've been
taken advantage of. The easiest person to trick is a successful person,
the more successful the better. Why is that?"
1795
Mala thought. "They have more money, so it's worth tricking them?"
1796
Ashok waggled his chin. "No, sorry -- by that reasoning, they should be
more suspicious, not less."
1797
Mala scraped a chair over the floor and sat down and made a face at
him. "I give up, tell me."
1798
"It's because if a man is successful at doing one thing, he's apt to
assume that he'll be successful at anything. He believes he's a
Brahmin, divinely gifted with the wisdom and strength of character to
succeed. He can't bear the thought that he just got lucky, or that his
parents just got lucky and left him a pile of Rupees. He can't stand
the thought that understanding physics or computers or cameras doesn't
make him an expert on economics or beekeeping or cookery.
1799
"And his intelligence and his pride work together to make him
easier to trick. His pride, naturally, but his intelligence,
too: he's smart enough to understand that there are lots of ways to get
rich. If you tell him a complex tale about how some market works and
can be tricked, he can follow along over rough territory that would
lose a dumber man.
1800
"And there's a third reason that successful men are easier to trick
than fools: they dread being shown up as a fool. When you trick them,
you can trick them again, make them believe that the scheme fell
through. They don't want to go to the police or tell their friends,
because if word gets out that some mighty and powerful man was tricked,
he stands to lose his reputation, without which he cannot recover his
fortune."
1801
Mala waggled her chin. "It all makes sense, I suppose."
1802
"It does," Ashok said.
1803
"I am a successful and powerful person," she said. Her eyes were
cat-slits.
1804
"You are," Ashok said, more cautiously.
1805
"So I would be easier to fool than any of the fools in my army?"
1806
Ashok laughed. "You are so sharp, General, it's a wonder you don't cut
yourself. Yes, it's possible that all of this is a giant triple-twist
bluff, aimed at fooling you. But what would I want to fool you for? As
rich as your Army has made you, you must know that I could be just as
rich by working as a junior lecturer in economics at IIT. But General,
at the end of the day, you either trust me or you don't. I can't prove
to you that you're inside the scheme rather than its target. If you
want out, that's fine. It will hurt the plan, but it won't be its
death. There's a lot of people involved here."
1807
Mala smiled her sunny smile. "You are a clever man," she said. "And for
now, I will trust you. Go on."
1808
"Let's step back a little. Do you want to learn some history?"
1809
"Will it help me understand why you're taking so long?"
1810
"I think so," he said. "I think it's a bloody good story, in any case."
1811
She made a go-on gesture and sipped her chai, her back very erect, her
bearing regal.
1812
"Back in the 1930s, the biggest confidence jobs were called 'The Big
Store.' They were little stage plays in which there was only one
audience-member, the 'mark' or victim. Everyone else was in the
play. The mark would meet a 'roper' on a train, who would feel him out
to see if he had any money. He'd sometimes give him a little taste of
the money to be made -- maybe they'd share some mysterious 'found'
money that he'd planted. That sort of thing makes the mark trust you
more, and also puts him in your power, because now you know that he's
willing to cheat a little.
1813
"Once the train pulled into the strange city and the mark got off,
every single person he met or talked with would be part of the trick.
If the mark was good at finance, the roper would hand him off to a
partner, the 'inside man' who would tell him about a scam he had for
winning horse races; if the mark was good at horse races, the scam
would be about fixing the stock market -- in other words, whatever the
mark knew the least about, that was the center of the game.
1814
"The mark would be shown a betting parlor or a stock-broker's office
filled with bustling, active people -- so many people that it was
impossible to believe that they could all be part of a scam.
Then he'd have the deal explained to him: the brokerage house or
betting parlor got its figures from a telegraph office -- this was
before computers -- that would phone in the results. The mark would
then be shown the 'telegraph office' -- another totally fake business
-- and meet a 'friend' of the inside man who was willing to delay the
results by a few minutes, giving them to the roper and the market just
quick enough to let them get their bets or buys down. They'd know the
winners before the office did, so they'd be betting on a sure thing.
1815
"And they'd try it -- and it would work! The mark could put a few
dollars down and walk away with a few hundred. It was an eye-popping
experience, a real thrill. The mark's imagination would start to work
on him. If he could turn a few dollars into hundreds, imagine what he
could do if he could put down all his money, along with whatever
money he could steal from his business, his family, his friends --
everyone. It wouldn't even be stealing, because he'd be able to pay
everyone back once he won big. And he'd go and get all the money he
could lay hands on, and he'd lay his bet and he'd lose!
1816
"And it would be his fault. The inside man wouldn't be able to believe
it, he'd said, 'Bet on this horse in the first race,' not 'Bet on this
horse for first place' or some similar misunderstanding. The mark's bad
hearing had cost them everything, all of them. There is a giant scene,
and before you know it, the police are there, ready to arrest everyone.
Someone shoots the policeman, there's blood and screaming, the place
empties out, and the mark counts himself lucky to have escaped with his
life. Of course, all the blood and shooting are fakes, too -- so is the
policeman. He's got a little blood in a bag in his mouth; they called
it a 'cackle-bladder': a fine word, no?
1817
"Now, at this stage, it may be that the mark is completely, totally
broke, not one paisa to his name. If that's the case, he gets away and
never hears from the roper or the inside man again. He spends the rest
of his life broke and broken, hating himself for having misheard the
instruction at the critical moment. And he never, ever tells anyone,
because if he did, it would expose this great man for a fool.
1818
"But if there's any chance he can get more money -- a friend he hasn't
cleaned out, a company bank account he can access -- they may contact
him again and offer him the chance to 'get even'. You can bet he
will -- after all, he's a king among men, destined to rule, who made
his fortune because he's better than everyone else. Why wouldn't he
play again, since the only reason he lost last time was that he
misheard an instruction. Surely that won't happen again!"
1819
"But it does," she said. Her eyes were shining.
1820
"Oh yes, indeed. And again, and again --"
1821
"And again. until he's been bled dry."
1822
"You've learned the first lesson," Ashok said. "Now, onto advanced
subjects. You know how a pyramid scheme works, yes?"
1823
She waved dismissively. "Of course."
1824
"Now, the pyramid scheme is just a kind of skeleton, and like a
skeleton, you can hang a lot of different bodies off of it. It can look
like a plan to sell soap, or a plan to sell vitamins, or something else
altogether. But the important thing is, whatever it's selling, it has
to seem like a good deal. Think back on the big store -- how do you
make something seem like a good deal?"
1825
Mala thought carefully. Ashok could practically see the gears spinning
in her head. Wah! She was smart , this Dharavi girl!
1826
"OK," she said. "OK -- it should be something the mark doesn't know
much about."
1827
"Got it in one!" Ashok said. "If the mark is smart and accomplished,
she'll assume that she knows everything about everything. Dangle some
bait for her that she doesn't really understand and she'll come along.
But there's a way to make even familiar subjects unfamiliar. Here, look
at this." He typed at the disused computer on a corner of his desk,
googled an image of a craps table at a casino.
1828
"This is a gambling game, craps. They play it with dice."
1829
"I've seen men playing it in the street," Mala said.
1830
"This is the casino version. See all the lines and markings?"
1831
She nodded.
1832
"These marks represent different bets -- double if it comes up this
way, triple if it comes up that way. The bets can get very, very
complicated.
1833
"Now, dice aren't that complicated. There are only 36 ways that a roll
can come up: one-one, one-two, one-three, and so on, all that way up to
six-six. It should be easy to tell whether a bet is any good: take the
chance of rolling two sixes, twice in a row: the odds are 36 times 36
to one. If the bet pays less than those odds, then you will eventually
lose money. If the bet pays more than those odds, then you will
eventually win money."
1834
Mala shook her head. "I don't really understand."
1835
"Imagine flipping a coin." He took out his wallet and opened a flap and
pulled out an old brass Chinese coin, pierced in the center with a
square. "One side is heads, one side is tails. Assuming the coin is
'fair' -- that is, assuming that both sides of the coin weigh the same
and have the same wind resistance, then the chances of a coin landing
with either face showing are 50-50, or 1-in-1, or just 'even'.
1836
"Now we play a fair game. I toss the coin, you call out which side you
think it'll land on. If you guess right, you double your bet; if not, I
take your money. If we play this game long enough, we'll both have the
same amount of money as we started with -- it's a boring game.
1837
"But what if instead I paid you triple if it landed on heads, provided
you took the heads-bet? All you need to do is keep putting money on
heads, and eventually you'll end up with all my money: when it comes up
tails, I win a little; when it comes up heads, you win a lot. Over
time, you'll take it all. So if I offered you this proposition, you
should take it."
1838
"All right," Mala said.
1839
"But what if it was a very complicated bet? What if there were two
coins, and the payout depended on a long list of factors; I'll pay you
triple for any double-head or double-tails, provided that it isn't the
same outcome as the last time, unless it is the third duplicate
outcome. Is that a good bet or a bad one?"
1840
Mala shrugged.
1841
"I don't know either -- I'd have to calculate the odds with pen and
paper. But what about this: what if I'll pay you 300 to one if
you win according to the rules I just set up. You lay down ten rupees
and win, I'll give you 3,000 back?"
1842
Mala cocked her head. "I'd probably take the bet."
1843
"Most people would. It's a fantastic cocktail: mix one part confusing
rules and one part high odds, and people will lay down their money all
day. Now, tell me this: would you bet ten rupees on rolling the dice
double-sixes, thirty times in a row?"
1844
"No!" Mala said. "That's practically impossible."
1845
Ashok spread his hands. "And now you have the second lesson: everyone
has some intuition about odds, even if they are, excuse me, a girl who
has never studied statistics." Mala colored, but she held her tongue.
It was true, after all. "Most people won't bet on nearly impossible
things, not even if you give brilliant odds. But you can disguise the
nearly impossible by making it do a lot of acrobatics -- making the
rules of the game very complicated -- and then lots of people, even
smart people, will place bets on propositions that are every bit as
unlikely as thirty double-sixes in a row. In fact, smart people are
especially likely to place those bets --"
1846
Mala held up her hand. "Because they're so smart they think they know
everything."
1847
Ashok clapped. "Star pupil! You should have been a con-artist or an
economist, if only you weren't such a fine General, General." She
grinned. Ashok knew that she loved to hear how good a general she was.
He didn't blame her: if he was a Dharavi girl who'd outsmarted the slum
and made a life, he'd be a little insecure too. It was just one more
thing to like about Mala and her scowling, hard brilliance. "Now, my
star pupil, put it all together for me."
1848
She began to recite, counting off on her fingers, like a schoolgirl
recounting a lesson. "To make a Ponzi scheme that works, that really
works, you need to have
1849
smart people
1850
who are surrounded by con-artists
1851
who are given a chance to bet on something complicated
1852
in a way that they're not good at understanding."
1853
Ashok clapped and Mala gave a small, ironic bow from her seat.
1854
"So that is what I am doing back here. Devising the scheme that will
take the economies of four entire worlds hostage, make them ours to
smash as we see fit. In order to do that, I need to do some very fine
work."
1855
Mala pointed at a chart that was dense with scribbled equations and
notations. "Explain," she commanded.
1856
"That is an entirely different sort of lesson," Ashok said. "For a
different day. Or perhaps a year."
1857
Mala's eyes narrowed.
1858
"My dear general," Ashok said, laying it on so thick that they both
knew he was doing it, and he saw the corners of Mala's lips tremble as
they tried to hold back her smile, "If I asked you to explain the order
of battle to me, you could do two things: either you could confer some
useful, philosophical principles for commanding a force; or you could
vomit up a lifetime's statistics and specifics about every weapon,
every character class, every technique and tip. The chances are that
I'd never memorize a tenth of what you had to tell me. I don't have the
background for it. And, having memorized it, I would never be able to
put it to use because I wouldn't have had the hard labor that you've
put in -- jai ho! -- and so I won't have the skeleton in my mind on
which I might lay the flesh of your teaching, my guru." He checked to
see if he'd laid it on too thickly, decided he hadn't, grinned and
namasted to her, just to ice the biscuit.
1859
Mala nodded regally, keeping her straight face on for as long as she
could, but as she left the room, hobbling on her cane, he was sure he
heard a girlish peal of giggles from her.
1860
Matthew's first plate of dumplings tasted so good he almost choked on
the saliva that flooded his mouth. After two months in the labor camp,
eating chicken's feet and rice and never enough of either, freezing at
night and broiling during the day, he thought that he had perfectly
reconstructed the taste of dumplings in his mind. On days when he was
digging, each bite of the shovel's tip into the earth was like the
moment that his teeth pierced a dumpling's skin, letting the steam and
oil escape, the meat inside releasing an aroma that wafted up into his
nostrils. On days when he was hammering, the round stones were the
tender dumplings in a mountain, the worn ground was the squeaking
styrofoam tray. Dumplings danced in his thoughts as he lay on the floor
between two other prisoners; they were in his mind when he rose in the
morning. The only time he didn't think about dumplings was when he was
eating chicken's feet and rice, because they were so awful that they
alone had the power to drive the ghost of dumplings from his
imagination.
1861
Those were the times he thought about what he was going to do when he
got out of jail. What he was going to do in the game. What the Webblies
were planning, and how he would play his part in that plan.
1862
The prison official that released him assumed that he was one of the
millions of illegal workers with forged papers who'd gone to Canton, to
the Pearl River Delta, to seek his fortune. He was half-way through a
stern, barked lecture about staying out of trouble and going back to
his village in Gui-Zhou or Sichuan or whatever impoverished backwater
he hailed from, before the man actually looked down at his records and
saw that Matthew was, indeed, Cantonese -- and that he would shortly be
transported, at government expense, back to Shenzhen. The man had
fallen silent, and Matthew, overcome with the comedy of the moment,
couldn't help but thank him profusely -- in Cantonese.
1863
There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep
lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery.
This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China
that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their
fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange
accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was
Cantonese, and this was not his people.
1864
Those were not his dumplings.
1865
It wasn't until he debarked at the outskirts of Shenzhen and
transferred to a metro subway that he started to feel at home. It
wasn't until then that he started to think about dumplings. The girls
on the metro were as he remembered them, beautiful and polished and
laughing and well fed. Skulking in the doorway of the train, watching
his reflection in the dark glass, he saw what an awful skeleton-person
he'd become. He had been a young man when he went in, a boy, really.
Now he looked five years older, and he was shifty and sunken, and there
was a scrub of wispy beard on his cheeks, accentuating their
hollowness. He looked like one of the mass of criminals and grifters
and scumbags who hung around the train station and the street corners
-- tough and desperate as a sewer rat. Unpredictable.
1866
Why not? Sewer rats got lots of dumplings. They had sharp teeth and
sharp wits. They were fast . Matthew grinned at his reflection
and the girls on the train gave him a wide berth when they pulled into
the next station.
1867
Lu met him at Guo Mao station, up on the street level, where the men
and women in brisk suits with brisk walks came and went from the stock
exchange, a perfect crowd of people to get lost in. Lu took both of his
hands in a long, soulful, silent shake and led them away toward the
stock exchange, where the identity counterfeiters were.
1868
These people kept Shenzhen and all of Guandong province running. They
could make you any papers you needed: working permits allowing a farm
girl to move from Xi'an to Shenzhen and make iPods; papers saying you
were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; driver's licenses, vendor's
licenses -- even pilot's licenses, according to the card one of them
gave him. They were old ladies, the friendly face of criminal empires
run by hard men with perpetual cigarettes and dandruff on the shoulders
of their dark suits.
1869
They walked in silence through the shouting grabbing crowds, the
flurries of cards advertising fake documents shoved in their hands by
grannies on all sides of them. Lu stopped in front of one granny and
bent and whispered in her ear. She nodded once and went back to waving
her cards, but she must have signalled a confederate somehow, because a
moment later, a young man got up off a bench and wandered into a
gigantic electronics mall and they followed him, threading their way
through stall after stall of parts for mobile phones -- keyboards,
screens, dialpads, diodes -- up an escalator to another floor of parts,
up another escalator and another floor, and one more to a floor that
was completely deserted. Even the electrical outlets were empty, bare
wires dangling from the receptacles, waiting to be hooked up to plugs.
1870
The boy was 100 meters ahead of them, and they trailed after him,
slipping into a hallway that led toward the emergency stairs. A little
side door was slightly ajar and Lu pushed it open. The boy wasn't there
-- he must have taken the stairs -- but there was another boy, younger
than Lu or Matthew, sitting in front of a computer, intently playing
Mushroom Kingdom. Matthew smiled -- it was always so strange to see a
Chinese person playing a game just for the fun of it, rather than as a
job. He looked up and nodded at the two of them. Wordlessly, Lu passed
him a bundle that the boy counted carefully, mixed Hong Kong dollars
and Chinese renminbi. He made the money disappear with a
nimble-fingered gesture, then pointed at a stool in a corner of the
room with a white screen behind it. Matthew sat -- still without a word
-- and saw that there was a little webcam positioned on the boy's desk,
pointing at him. He composed his features in an expression of
embarrassed seriousness, the kind of horrible facial expression that
all ID carried, and the boy clicked his mouse and gestured at the door.
"One hour," he said.
1871
Lu held the door for Matthew and led him down the fire-stairs, back
into the mall, back onto the street, back among the counterfeiters, and
a short way to a noodle stall that was thronged with people, and that's
when Matthew's mouth began to generate so much saliva that he had to
surreptitiously blot the corners of his lips on the sleeve of his cheap
cotton jacket.
1872
Moment later, he was eating. And eating. And eating. The first bowl was
pork. Then beef. Then prawn. Then some Shanghai dumplings, filled with
pork. And still he ate. His stomach stretched and the waistband of his
jeans pinched him, and he undid the top button and ate some more. Lu
goggled at him all the while, fetching more bowls of dumplings as
needed, bringing back chili sauce and napkins. He sent and received
some texts, and Matthew looked up from his work of eating at those
moments to watch Lu's fierce concentration as he tapped on his phone's
keypad.
1873
"Who is she?" Matthew asked, as he leaned back and allowed the latest
layer of dumplings to settle in his stomach.
1874
Lu ducked his head and blushed. "A friend. She's great. She organized,
you know --" He waved his chopsticks in the direction of the
counterfeiters' market. "She's -- I don't know what I would have done
without her. She's why I'm not in jail."
1875
Matthew smiled wryly. "You'd have gotten out by now." He plucked at his
loose shirt. "Though you might be a few sizes smaller."
1876
Lu showed Matthew a picture of a South China girl on his phone. She
looked like the perfect model of South China womanhood -- fashionable
clothes and hair, a carefully made up double-eyelid, an expression of
mischief and, what, power? That sense of being on top of her world and
the world in general. Matthew nodded appreciatively. "Lucky Lu," he
said.
1877
Lu dropped his voice. "She's amazing," he whispered. "She got me
papers, cancelled my phone, let the number go dead, then scooped it up
again with a different identity, then forwarded it through a --" he
looked around dramatically and pitched his voice even lower -- "Falun
Gong switchboard in Macau, then back to this phone. That's why you were
able to call me. It's incredible -- I'm still in touch with everyone,
but it's all through so many blinds that the zengfu have no idea where
I am or how to trace me."
1878
"How does she know all this?" Matthew asked, gently, the dumplings
settling like rocks in his stomach. He was a dead man. "How do you know
she isn't police herself?"
1879
"She can't be," Lu said. "You'll see why, once we meet up with her.
This much I'm sure of."
1880
But Matthew couldn't shake the knowledge that this girl would be taking
him back to prison. In prison, everyone had been an informant. If you
informed on your fellow prisoners, you got more food, more sleep,
lighter duty. The best informants were like little bosses, and the
other prisoners courted their favor like they were on the outside,
giving them the equivalent of the "3 Gs" -- golf, girls and gambling --
with whatever they could scrape up from the prison's walls. Matthew had
never informed and had never been informed upon. He always chose the
games he played, and he never played a game he couldn't win.
1881
And so he was numb when he met Jie, who smelled wonderful and had
fantastic manners and a twinkling smile. She had his new identity
papers, with the right picture, but a different name and identity
number, and a fingerprint that he was sure wasn't his own on the back.
She chatted amiably as they walked, about inconsequentialities, the
weather and the food, football scores and gossip about celebrities, a
too-perfect empty-head that made him even more suspicious of this girl
and her impeccable acting.
1882
She led them to a small, run-down handshake building in the old
Cantonese part of town. This was where Matthew had grown up, the
"city-within-a-city" that the Cantonese had been squeezed into as South
China ceased to be merely a place and had become a symbol for the New
China, the world's factory. Being back in these familiar streets made
him even more prickly, giving him the creeping certainty that he would
be recognized any second, that some poor boyhood friend of his would be
marked by this secret policewoman and sent to prison with him. He
steeled himself to keep walking, though with each step he wanted to
turn and bolt.
1883
The flat she led them to had once been half of a tiny apartment; now it
was reduced to a single, tiny room with piles of girly clothes and
shoes, several computers perched on cheap desks, a sink whose rim was
covered in cosmetics, and a screened-off area that presumably hid the
toilet. The shower was next to the stove and sink, a tiled square in
the corner with a drain set into the floor, a shower-head anchored to
the wall, a curtain rail bolted to the ceiling.
1884
Once the door was closed, Lu's girlfriend changed demeanour so
abruptly, it was as though she had removed a mask. Her face was now
animated with keen intelligence, her bearing aggressive and keen. "We
need to get you new clothes," she said. "A shave, a haircut, some money
--"
1885
One thing Matthew had learned in prison was the importance of not
getting carried along by other people's scripts. A forceful person
could do that: write a script, spin it out for you, put you in a role,
and before you knew it, you were smuggling sealed packages from one
part of the prison to another. Once someone else was writing the
script, you were all but helpless.
1886
"Wait," he said. "Just stop." She looked at him mildly. Lu was less
calm -- Matthew could tell at a glance that he was completely in this
woman's power. "Madame, I don't mean to be rude, but who the hell are
you, and why should I trust you?"
1887
She laughed. "You want to know if I'm zengfu," she said. Lu looked
scandalized, but she was taking it well. "Of course you do. I've got
money, apartments, I know where to get good ID papers --"
1888
"And you're very bossy," Matthew said.
1889
"I certainly am!" she said. "Now, have you ever heard of Jiandi?"
1890
He had heard that name. He thought about it for a moment,
casting his mind back to the distant, dreamlike time before prison.
"The radio lady?" he said, slowly. "The one who talks to the factory
girls?"
1891
"Yes," she said. "That's the one."
1892
"OK," he said. "I've heard of her."
1893
Lu grinned. "And now you've met her!"
1894
Matthew thought about this for a moment, staring into the girl's
carefully made-up eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. Finally he
said, "No offense, but anyone can claim to be someone who no one has
ever seen."
1895
Lu started to speak, but she held her hand up and silenced him. "He's
right," she said. "Tank, the only reason I'm walking around free, still
broadcasting, is that I am a very paranoid lady. Your friend's paranoia
is just good sense. Have you ever considered that you've never
listened to me broadcasting, Tank? You've been here plenty for
the broadcasts, but you've never tuned in. For all you know, I
am zengfu, infiltrating your ranks with a giant, elaborate
counterfeit that has other cops calling in, pretending to be listeners
to a show that never goes any farther than the room I'm sitting in."
Lu's mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. She laughed at him. "Don't
worry, I'm no cop. I'm just pointing out that you're a very trusting
sort of boy. Maybe too trusting. Your friend here is a little more
cautious, that's all. I thoroughly approve."
1896
Matthew found himself hoping that this girl wasn't a cop for the simple
reason that he was starting to like her. Not to mention that if she was
a cop, he'd go straight back to jail, but now that his panic was
receding, he was able to consider what she would be like as a comrade.
He liked the idea.
1897
"OK," he said. "So, if you're Jiandi, then it should be easy for you to
prove it. Just do a show, and I'll tune in and listen to it."
1898
"How do you know Jiandi isn't a cop?" She had a twinkle in her eye.
1899
"Not even the cops are that devious," he said. "They couldn't stand to
have all those Falun Gong ads and all that seditious talk about the
party -- it wouldn't last a week, let alone years and years."
1900
She nodded. "I think so, too. Lu, do you agree?"
1901
Lu, still miserable looking, nodded glumly.
1902
"Cheer up," she said. "You get to have a little solo time with your
friend!"
1903
They ended up at a new game cafe, far off on the metro line, by the
Windows on the World theme-park. Matthew's father had taken him there
once, and he'd gotten to dress up in ancient battle-armor, fire arrows
at targets while a man with a Cantonese accent dressed like an American
Indian gave him pointers. It had been fun, but nothing so nice as the
games that Matthew was already playing.
1904
The metro let them off just around the corner from it, in front of a
giant, run-down hotel that had been closed the last time Matthew came
through here. The game cafe was in the former restaurant, something
pirate themed with a huge fake pirate ship on the roof. Inside, it was
choked with smoke and the tables had been formed into the usual long
stretches with a PC every meter or so. About half of them were
occupied, and in one corner of the restaurant there were fifty or sixty
gamers who were clearly gold-farmers, working under the watchful eye of
an older goon with a hard face and a cigarette in one corner of his
mouth. It was incredibly hot inside the cafe, twenty degrees hotter
than outside, and it was as dark and dank as a cave. Matthew felt
instantly at home.
1905
Lu shoved some folded up bills at the old man behind the counter, an
evil-looking, toothless grandfather with a pronounced hump and two
missing fingers on one hand. Lu looked back at Matthew, then ordered a
plate of dumplings as well. The man drew a styrofoam tray out of a
chest freezer, punctured the film on top, and put it in the microwave
beside him at the reception desk. "Go," he croaked, "I'll bring them to
you."
1906
Matthew and Lu sat down at adjacent PCs far from the rest of the crowd,
next to a picture window that had been covered over with newspapers.
Matthew put his eye up to a rip in the paper and peeked out at the
ruins of an elaborate, nautical-themed swimming pool outside, complete
with twisting water-slides and fountains, now gone green and scummy.
"Nice hotel," he said.
1907
Lu was mousing his way over to Jiandi's web-page, weaving the
connection through a series of proxies, looking up the latest addresses
for her stream mirrors, finding one that worked. "I think we'll have 45
minutes at least before anyone notices that this PC is doing something
out-of-bounds. I trust that will be plenty of time for you to satisfy
your suspicious mind."
1908
Matthew saw that Lu was really angry, and he swallowed his own anger --
something else he'd had plenty of practice at in prison. "I just want
to be safe, Lu. This isn't a game." Then he heard his own words and
grinned. "OK, it is a game. But it's also real life. It has
consequences." He plucked at the shirt that hung loose on his skinny
body. "It wouldn't hurt you to be more careful."
1909
Lu said nothing, but his lips were pursed and white. The old man
brought them their dumplings and they ate them in silence. They were
miserable dumplings, filled with something that tasted like shredded
paper, but they were still better than prison chicken's feet.
1910
Matthew looked at the boy. He was always thoughtful -- a strange thing
for a tank to be -- and considerate, and brave. He hadn't been in
Matthew's original guild, but when Boss Wing had put him in charge of
the whole elite squad, they'd come willingly, seeing in Matthew a
strategist who could lead them to victory. And when Matthrew had
started whispering to them about the Webblies, Lu had been as excited
as anyone. All that seemed so long ago, a different life and different
time, before a policeman's baton had knocked him down, before he had
gone to prison, before he'd turned into the man he was now. But Matthew
was back in the world now, and Lu had been living on his wits for
months, and --
1911
"I owe you an apology," he said, setting down hs chopsticks. "I still
don't know if I can trust your friend, but I could have been a little
smarter about how I said it. It's been a strange day -- 36 hours ago, I
was wearing a prison uniform."
1912
Lu stared at him, and then a little smile snuck into the corners of his
mouth. "It's all right," he said. "Here, she's starting." He popped out
his earwig, already paired with the computer's sound-system, wiped it
on his sleeve, and handed it to Matthew. Matthew screwed it into his
ear.
1913
"Hello, sisters," came the familiar voice. "It's a little early, I
know, but this is a short and special broadcast for you lucky ladies
who have the day off, are sick in the infirmary, or happen to have
snuck headphones into the factory. Hello, hello, hello. Shall we take a
phone call or two?"
1914
Lu grinned at Matthew and stood and walked out of the cafe. Matthew
touched the earwig, thought about going after him, decided not to. A
moment later, Jiandi said, "There we go, hello, hello."
1915
"Hello Jiandi," said Lu. Matthew put his eye back up to the gap in the
newspaper-covered glass and found himself staring at a grinning Lu,
standing behind the building, phone to his head.
1916
"Tank!" she squealed. "How fantastic to hear from you again. It's been
ages since you came on my show! Tell me, Tank, what's on your mind
today?"
1917
"Justice," Lu/Tank said. Matthew found himself laughing quietly, and he
ducked his head so as not to draw attention. "Justice for working
people. We come to Guanddong Province because they say that we will be
rich. But when we get here, we have bad working conditions, bad pay,
and everything is stacked against us. No one can get real papers to
live here, so we all buy fakes, and the police know they can stop us at
any time and put us in jail or send us away because we don't have real
documents. Our bosses know it, so they lock us in, or beat us, or steal
our pay. I have been here for five years now, and I see how it works:
the rich get richer, the poor get used up and sent back to the village,
ruined. The corrupt government runs on bribes, not justice, and any
attempt by working people to organize for a better deal is met with
violence and war. The corrupt businessmen buy corrupt policemen who
work for corrupt government.
1918
"I've had enough! It's time for working people to organize -- one of us
is nothing. Together, we can't be stopped. China's revolutions have
come and gone, and still, the few are rich and the many are poor. It's
time for a worldwide revolution: workers in China, India, America --
all over -- have to fight together. We will use the Internet because we
are better at the Internet than our bosses are. The Internet is shaped
like a worker's organization: chaotic, spread out, without a few
leaders making all the decisions. We know how to interface with it. Our
bosses only understand the Internet when they can make it shaped like
them, forcing all our clicks through a few bottlenecks that they can
own and control. We can't be controlled. We can't be stopped. We will
win!"
1919
Jiandi laughed into the mic, a throaty, sexy sound. "Oh, Tank! So
serious! You make us all feel like silly children with your talk!
1920
"But he's right sisters, you know he is. We worry about our little
problems, our bosses trying to screw us or cheat us; police chasing us,
our networks infected and spied on, but we never ask why , what's
the system for ?" She drew in a deep breath. "We never ask what
we can do."
1921
A long silence. Matthew clicked on the computer, verified that he was
indeed tuned into the Factory Girl Show. He felt an unnameable emotion
inside his chest, in his belly. She was what she said she was. Not a
cop. Not a spy.
1922
Well, either that or the whole thing was a huge setup, and the police
had been running this woman's operation for years now, deceiving
millions, just to have this insider. That was an incredibly weird idea.
But sometimes the politburo was incredibly weird.
1923
"We'll know what to do. Soon enough, sisters, have no fear. Keep
listening -- tune in tonight for our regular show -- and someday
very soon we'll tell you what you can do. Wait and wait.
1924
"And you policemen and government bureaucrats and bosses listening now?
Be afraid."
1925
Her voice clicked off, and a cheerful lunatic started saying crazy
things about how great Falun Gong was, the traditional junk advertising
he'd heard on Jiandi's show before.
1926
He thoughtfully chewed another newspaper dumpling and waited for Lu to
make his way back into the cafe. He'd been out of prison for less than
two days and his life was a million times more interesting than it had
been just a few hours before. And he had dumplings. Things were
happening -- big things.
1927
Lu shook his hand again, and the two of them left quickly, heading for
the metro entrance. As they ran down the stairs, Lu leaned over and
said, quietly, "Wait until you hear what we've got planned." His voice
was tight, excited. Almost gleeful.
1928
"I can't wait," Matthew said. There was a hopeful feeling bubbling up
inside him now. When was the last time he'd felt hopeful? Oh yes. It
was when he quit Boss Wing's gold farm, taking his guildies with him,
and set up his own business. That hadn't ended well, of course. But the
hope had been delicious . It was delicious now.
1929
Justbob had her whole network online. These were the best fighters in
the IWWWW, passionate and committed. They'd been fighting off
Pinkertons and dodging game-security for a year, and it had made them
hard. Some of them had been beaten in real life, just like Justbob and
Krang and BSN, and it was quite a badge of honor to replace your
user-icon with a picture of your injuries -- an x-ray full of shattered
bones, a close up of a grisly row of stitches.
1930
She loved her fighters. And they loved her.
1931
"Hello, pretties," she cooed into her earwig, adjusting the icepack
she'd wedged between her tailbone and the chair. They were operating
out of a new cafe now, still in the Geylang, which was the best place
to be in Singapore if you wanted to be a little out of bounds without
attracting too much police attention. "Ready for the latest word?"
1932
There was a chorus of cheers from all around the world. Justbob spoke
Malay, Indonesian, English, Tamil, and a little Mandarin and Hindi, but
they tended to do things in English, which everyone spoke a little of.
There was a back-channel, of course, a text-chat where people helped
out with translations. They had to speak slow, but it worked.
1933
"We are going to take on four worlds, all at the same time: Mushroom
Kingdom, Zombie Mecha, Svartalfaheim Warriors, and Magic of Hogwarts."
She watched the backchannel, waited until the translations were all
sorted out. "What do I mean by 'take on?' I mean take over .
We're going to seize control of the economies of all four worlds: the
majority of the gold, prestige items, and power. We're going to do it
fast. We're going to be unstoppable: whenever an operation is
disrupted, we will have three more standing by. We're going to control
the destiny of every boss whose workers toil in those worlds. We're
going to rock their corporate masters. We're going to fight off every
Pinkerton, either converting them to our cause or beating them so badly
that they change careers.
1934
"To do this, we're going to need many thousands of players working in
coordination. Mostly that means doing what they do best: making gold.
But we also expect heavy resistance once word gets out about what we're
up to. We'll need fighters to defend our lines from Pinkertons, of
course, but we also need a lot of distraction and interference, all
over, including -- no, especially -- in worlds where we're
not going for it. We want game management thoroughly confused
until its too late. You will need proxies, lots of them , and as
many avs as you can level up. That's your number one task right now --
level as many avs as you can, so that you can switch accounts and jump
into a new fighter the second an old one gets disconnected." She
watched the backchatter for a second, then added, "Yes, of course,
we're working on that now. In a day or so, we'll have prepaid account
cards for all of you. They'll need US proxies to run, so make sure
you've got a good list of them."
1935
She watched the chatter for another moment. "Of course, yes, they will
try to shut down the proxies, but if they do, there will be
howls from their American players. Do you know how many
Americans sneak out of their work networks to play during the day using
those proxies? If they start blocking proxies, they'll be blocking some
of their best customers. And of course, many Mechanical Turks are on
school networks, using proxies to log in to their jobs. They can't
afford to block all those proxies -- not for long!"
1936
The back-channel erupted. They liked that. It was good strategy, like
when you aggroed a boss and then found a shelter that put some
low-level baddies between you and it, and provoked a fight where they
all fought each other instead of you. Justbob wished she could say more
about this, because the deviousness of it all had given her an all-day,
all-week, all-month smile when they'd worked it out in one of the
high-level cell meetings. But she understood the need for secrecy. It
was a sure bet that some of the fighters on this conference were
working for the other side; after all, some of their spies were
inside the companies, weren't they?
1937
"All right," she said, "all right. Enough talk-talk. Let's kill
something." Her headphone erupted in ragged cheering and she skirmished
with her commanders for a happy hour until The Mighty Krang came and
dragged her away so that she could eat dinner.
1938
Big Sister Nor waited until she was seated, with food on her plate --
sizzling cha kway teow and fried Hokkien noodles, smelling like
heaven-- before she started speaking. "All right," she said. "Our man's
landing in Shenzhen tomorrow. We've got people who'll help get him out
of the port safely, and he says he's got our cargo, no problems there.
He's been logging in on the voyage, he says he can get us hundreds of
Turks."
1939
The Mighty Krang waved his chopsticks at her. "Do you believe him?"
1940
Big Sister Nor chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. "I think I do," she
said. "He's all enthusiasm, that one. He's one of those kids who
absolutely loves gaming and wanted to be part of the 'magic,'
but discovered that he was working every hour God sent, and there were
always hidden rules that ended up docking his pay." The other two
nodded vigorously -- they recognized the pattern, it was the template
for sweatshops all over the world. "His employers told him to be
grateful to have such a wonderful opportunity and didn't he know that
there were plenty more who'd have his job if he didn't want it?"
1941
"OK, so he's upset -- what makes you think he can deliver lots of other
upset people?"
1942
She shrugged and speared a prawn. "He's a natural networker, a real
do-er. You should hear him talk about that shipping container of his!
It's a real hotel on the high seas. Very ingenious. And his guildies
say he's bloody sociable. A nice guy. The kind of guy you listen to."
1943
"The kind of guy you follow?" asked Justbob, scratching at her scarred
eye-socket. She could forget about the itch and the ache from the side
of her face when she was in conference with her warriors, but she lost
that precious distraction the rest of the time. And her dreams were
full of phantom aches from the ruined socket, and she sometimes woke
with tears on her face.
1944
Big Sister Nor said, "That's what I think."
1945
The Mighty Krang drank some watermelon juice and drew glyphs in the
table with the condensation. The waitress -- a pretty Tamil girl --
scowled at him with mock theatricality and wiped it away. All the
waitresses had crushes on The Mighty Krang. Even Justbob had to admit
that he was pretty. "I don't like the idea," he said. "This is about,
you know, workers ."
1946
Big Sister Nor fixed him with a level stare. "You mean 'he's white, I
don't trust him.' He's a worker, too -- even though he works for the
game. We're all workers. That's the point of the Webblies. All
workers in one big union -- solidarity. Start making differences
between workers who deserve the union and workers who don't and the
next thing you know, your job will be handed over to the workers you
left out of your little private clubhouse. Krang, if you're not clear
on this, you're in the wrong place. Absolutely the wrong place. Do I
make myself clear?"
1947
This was a different Big Sister Nor than the one they usually knew, the
motherly, patient, understanding one. Her voice was brittle and stern,
her stare piercing. Krang visibly wilted under its glare. "Fine," he
said, without much conviction. "Sorry." Justbob felt embarrassed for
him, but not sympathetic. He knew better.
1948
They finished the meal in silence. Big Sister Nor's phone buzzed at
her. She looked at the face, saw the number, put it back down again.
There was a rule: no taking calls during "family dinners" between the
three of them. But BSN was visibly anxious to get to this one. She
began to eat faster, as fast as she could with her twisted hand.
1949
"Who was it?" Justbob asked.
1950
"China," she said. "Urgent. Our boy from America."
1951
Ping didn't like the port. Too many cops. He had good papers, but not
even the best papers would stand up long to a cop who actually radioed
in the ID and asked about it. The counterfeiters claimed that they used
good identities for the fakes, real people who weren't in any kind of
trouble, but who knew whether to believe them?
1952
Anyway, it was just crazy. The gweilo was supposed to wait until the
ship came into dock, change into a set of clean clothes, pin on ID from
his father's company, and just walk out of the port, flashing
his identification at anyone who bothered to ask the skinny white kid
what he was doing, carrying two heavy cardboard boxes out of the secure
region. Once he made it clear of the port, Ping could take him away,
make him disappear into the mix of foreigners, merchants, and
business-people thronging the region.
1953
Ping had asked around, found a Webbly who's brother had worked as a
hauler the year before, gotten information about where Leonard would
most likely emerge, and had emailed all that info to Leonard as he
trundled across the ocean.
1954
But there weren't supposed to be this many cops, were there?
There were hundreds of them, it seemed like, and not just uniforms.
There were plenty of especially tall men with brush-cuts and earpieces,
dressed like civilians, but moving with far too much coordination and
purpose. Ping walked past the entrance twice, the first time conducting
an imaginary argument with someone over his phone, trying to exude an
aura of distraction that would make him seem harmless. The second time
he walked past while staring intently at a tourist map, trying to
maintain the show of helplessness. In between, he checked his watch,
saw that Leonard was an hour late, sent a message back to Lu and asked
him to see if he could email Big Sister Nor and find out what was going
on. This was the trickiest moment, since the ship's satellite link was
down while it was in dock, and so Leonard's stolen network connection
was down with it. Once he was clear of the port, they'd give him a
prepaid phone, get him back on the grid, but until then...
1955
He nearly dropped the tourist map when his phone went off. A nearby
cop, the tallest man he'd ever seen, looked hard at him and he smiled
sheepishly and withdrew his phone and tried to control the shaking in
his hands as he touched it to life, hoping the noise hadn't aggroed
him.
1956
"Is he with you?" Big Sister Nor's Mandarin was heavily accented, but
good. He recognized the voice instantly from many late-night chat
sessions and raids.
1957
"Hi!" he said, in a bright, brittle voice, trying to sound like he was
talking to a girlfriend or sister. "It's great to hear from you!"
1958
"You haven't seen him yet?"
1959
"That's right!" he said, pasting a fake grin on his face for the
benefit of the security man.
1960
"Shit. He was due out hours ago." Big Sister Nor went quiet. "OK,
here's the thing. Whatever happened to him, we need those boxes." She
cursed in some other language. "I should have just had him put the
boxes in the container. He wanted to come see you all so badly, though
--" She broke off.
1961
"OK!" he said, walking as casually as he could away from the cop. There
was a spot, a doorway in front of a closed grocery store down the road.
He could go there, sit down, talk this through.
1962
"A lot of cops where you are, huh? Don't answer. Listen, Ping, I need
to know -- can you get into the port? If he doesn't make it out?"
1963
He swallowed. "I don't think so," he whispered. He was almost to his
doorway now.
1964
"What if you have to?"
1965
He was a raid leader, a master strategist. He was no Matthew, but
still, he understood how to get in and out of tight places. And he'd
been a pretty good climber a few years ago, before he'd found
gold-farming. Maybe he could go over the fence? He felt like throwing
up at the thought. There were so many cameras, so many cops, the fence
was so high .
1966
"I'd try," he said. "But I would almost certainly go to jail." He'd
been held for three days in the local lockup along with most of the
strikers and then released. It had been bad enough -- not as bad as
Matthew's stories -- and he never wanted to go back. "You have to see
this place, Nor, it's like a fortress."
1967
She sighed. "I know what ports look like," she said. "OK, tell you what
-- you wait another hour, see if you can find him. I'll work on
something else here, and call you."
1968
"OK," he said.
1969
Casually, he drifted back along the length of the high fence that
guarded the port, keenly aware of the cameras drilling into the back of
his neck. How many times could he pass by before someone decided to
figure out what he was doing there? They should have brought a whole
party, half a dozen of the gang who could trade off looking for the
stupid gweilo. Ping shook his head in disgust. It had been fun to know
Leonard when he was a kid in California and they were five kids in
China -- exotic, even. No one else partied with exotic foreigners with
bad accents.
1970
It was even exciting when the gweilo had turned into a smuggler for the
cause, crossing the ocean with his booty of hard-earned prepaid
game-cards that would let them all fly under the game companies' radar.
1971
But it was no longer exciting now that he was about to go to jail
because some dumb kid from across the ocean couldn't figure out how to
get his ass out of the port of Shenzhen.
1972
It had gone better than Wei-Dong had any right to expect. After they
took to the sea, he'd cut the freighter's WiFi like butter and hopped
onto their satellite link. It was slow -- too slow for gaming -- but it
was OK for messaging and staying in touch with both the Webblies and
the cell of Turks he'd pieced together from the best people he knew.
He'd let himself out of the container on the first night and climbed up
to the top of the stack, trailing his solar rig and water collector
behind him, and affixed both to an inconspicuous spot on the outside
face of the topmost containers, where no crewmember could spot them.
Again, the operation went off without a hitch.
1973
By day three, he was wishing for some trouble. There was only so much
time he could spend watching the planning emerge on the Webbly boards,
especially since so many of the pieces of the plan were closely guarded
secrets, visible only as blank spots in his understanding of where he
was going and why he was going there. A thousand times a day, he was
struck with the absolute madness of his position -- a smuggler on the
high seas, going to make revolution in Asia, at the tender age of 18!
It was fabulous and terrifying, depending on what mood he was in.
1974
Mostly that mood was bored .
1975
There was nothing to do, and by day five, he was snaffling up all the
traffic on the boat, watching the lovesick crew of six Filipino sailors
sending long-distance romantic notes to their pining girlfriends. It
was entertaining enough downloading a Tagalog dictionary so he could
look up some of the phrases they dropped into the letters, but after a
while, that paled too.
1976
And there were still days to go, and the rains had come and
filled up his reservoirs, and so he had water to drink and cook with,
and so he didn't even have itchy skin or malnutrition to keep him
distracted, and so he'd started to do stupid things.
1977
He'd started to sneak around.
1978
Oh, only at night, of course, and at first, only among the containers,
where the crew rarely ventured. But there wasn't much to see in the
container spaces, just the unbroken, ribbed expanses of containers,
radio tagged and painted with huge numbers, stickered over and locked
tight.
1979
So then he started to sneak over to the crew's quarters.
1980
He knew what they'd look like. You can book passage on a freighter,
take a long, weird holiday drifting from port to port around the world.
The travel agents who sell these lonely, no-frills cruises had plenty
of online photos and videos and panoramas of the accommodations and
common rooms. They looked like institutional rooms everywhere, with big
scratched flat-panel displays, worn and stained carpet, sagging sofas,
scuffed tables and chairs. The difference being that shipside, all that
stuff was bolted down.
1981
But after days stuck inside his little secret fortress of solitude, any
change of scenery sounded like a trip to Disneyland and a half. And so
that's how he found himself strolling into the ship's kitchen at 2AM
ship's time -- they were living on Pacific time, and he'd shifted to
Chinese time after they put to sea, so this wasn't much of a hardship.
In the fridge, sandwich fixings, Filipino single-serving ice cream
cones, pre-made boba tea with huge pearls of tapioca in it, and cans of
Starbucks frappucino. He helped himself, snitching it all into a
shoulder-bag he'd brought along, scurrying back to his den to scarf it
down.
1982
That was the first night. The second night, he ate his snack in the TV
room, watching a bootleg DVD of a current-release comedy movie that
opened the day he left LA. He kept the sound low, and even used the
bathroom outside the common room on the corridor that led to the crew's
quarters. He crept around on tiptoe, and muted the TV every time the
ship creaked, his heart thundered as his eyes darted to each corner of
the room, seeking out a nonexistent hiding spot among the bolted-down
furniture.
1983
It was the best night of the trip so far.
1984
So the next night, he had to go further. After having a third pig out
and watching a Bollywood science fiction comedy movie about a turbanned
robot that attacked Bangalore, only to be vanquished by IT nerds, he
snuck down into the engine rooms.
1985
Now this was a change of scenery. The door to the engine room
was bolted but not locked, just like all the other doors on the ship
that he'd tried. After all, they were in the middle of the damned ocean
-- it wasn't like they had to worry about cat-burglars, right? (Present
company excepted, of course!).
1986
The big diesel engines were as loud as jets. He found a pair of greasy
soundproof earmuffs and slipped them over his ears, cutting the noise
down somewhat, but it still vibrated up through the soles of his
sneakers, making his bones shake. Everything down here was fresh and
gleaming, polished, oiled and painted. He trailed his fingers over the
control panels, gauges, shut-off valves, raised his arms to tickle the
flexi-hoses that coiled overhead. He'd gamed a couple of maps set in
rooms like this, but the experience in real life was something else. He
was actually inside the machine, inside an engine so powerful it
could move thousands of tons of steel and cargo halfway around the
world.
1987
Cool.
1988
As he slipped his muffs off and carefully re-hung them, he noticed
something he really should have spotted on the way in: a little optical
sensor by the engine-room door at the top of the steel crinkle-cut
nonskid stairs, and beside it, a pin-sized camera ringed with infrared
LEDs. Which meant...
1989
Which meant that he had tripped an invisible alarm when he entered the
room and broke the beam, and that he'd been recorded ever since he
arrived. Which meant...
1990
Which meant he was doomed .
1991
His fingers trembled as he worked the catch on the door and slipped out
into the steel shed that guarded the engine-room entrance at the crew
end of the deck. He looked left and right, waiting for a spotlight to
slice through the pitchy night, waiting for a siren to cut through the
roar of the ocean as they sliced it in two with the boat's mighty prow.
1992
It was quiet. It was dark. For now. The ship only had one night
watch-officer and one night-pilot, and from his network spying, he knew
the duty was an excuse to send email and download pornography, so it
may have been that neither of them had noticed the alert -- yet.
1993
He crept back among the containers, moving as fast as he dared,
painfully aware of how vividly he would stand out to anyone who even
casually glanced down from the ship's bridge atop the superstructure.
Once he reached the containers, he slipped onto the narrow walkway that
ringed the outside of the ship and took off running, racing for his
nest. As he went, he made a mental checklist of the things he would
have to do once he got there, reeling in his solar panels and antennas,
his water collectors. He'd button down his container as tight as a
frog's ass, and they could search for months before they'd get to his
-- meanwhile, he'd be in Shenzhen in a couple days. Then it would just
be a matter of evading the port security -- who'd be on high alert,
once the crew alerted them to the stowaway. Argh. He was such an
idiot. It was all going to crash and burn, just because he got
bored .
1994
Cursing himself, hyperventilating, running, he skidded out on the deck
and faceplanted into the painted, bird-streaked steel. The pain was
insane. Blood poured from his nose, which he was sure he'd broken. And
now the ship was rocking and pitching hard, and holy crap, look at
those clouds streaking across the sky!
1995
This was not going well. He cornered wobbily around the container
stack, had a hairy, one-foot-in-the-sky moment as the huge ship rolled
beneath him and his hand flailed wildly for the guardrail, then he
caught himself and finished the turn, racing to his container. Once
there, he scrambled along the runs that marked the course of the
life-support tentacles trailing from his box, and he disconnected each
one, working with shaking hands. Hugging the flexi-hose, cabling, solar
cells and antenna to his chest, he spidered down the container-faces
and slipped inside just as another roll sent him sprawling on his ass.
1996
He undogged the hatches on his airtight inner sanctum and let himself
in. The ship was rocking hard now, and his kitchen stuff, carelessly
left lying around, was rattling back and forth. He ignored it at first,
diving for his laptop and punching up the traffic-logs from the ship's
network, but after a can of tuna beaned him in the cheek, raising a
welt, he set the computer down and velcroed it into place, then
gathered up everything that was loose and dumped it into his
bolted-down chests. Then he went back to his traffic dumps, looking for
anything that sounded like an official notice of his discovery.
1997
The night-time traffic was always light, some telemetry, the flirty
emails from the skeleton crew. Tonight was no exception. The file
stopped dead at the point that he'd reeled in his antenna, but it
probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. The rain was pounding
down now, a real frog-strangler, sounding like a barrage of gravel on
the steel containers all around him. After a few minutes of this, he
found himself wishing he'd taken the earmuffs. A few minutes later and
he'd forgotten all about the earmuffs, and he was grabbing for a bag to
heave up his stolen food into. The barfing and the rolling didn't stop,
just kept going on and on, his stomach empty, trying to turn itself
inside-out, slimy puke-smears everywhere in the tiny cabin. He tried to
remember what you were supposed to do for sea-sickness. Watch the
horizon, right? No horizon in the container, just pitching walls and
floor and unsteady light from the battery-powered LED fixtures he'd
glued to the ceiling. The shadows jumped and loomed, increasing the
disorientation.
1998
It was the most miserable he'd ever been. It seemed like it would never
end. At a certain point, he found himself thinking of what it would be
like to be crammed in with 10 or 20 other people, in the pitch dark,
with no chemical toilet, just a bucket that might overturn on the first
pitch and roll. Crammed in and locked in, the door not due to be opened
for days yet, and no way to know what might greet you at the other side
--
1999
Suddenly, he didn't feel nearly so miserable. He roused himself to look
at his computer a little more, but staring at the screen instantly
brought back his sea-sickness. He remembered packing some ginger
tablets that were supposed to be good for calming the stomach -- he'd
read about them on a FAQ page for people going on their first ocean
cruise -- and searching for them in the rocking box distracted him for
a while. He gobbled two of them with water, noting that the tank was
only half full and resolving to save every drop now that his collector
was shut down.
2000
He wasn't sure, but it seemed like the storm was letting up. He drank a
little more water, checked in with his nausea -- a little better -- and
got back to the screen. It was a minor miracle, but there was no report
at all of him being spotted, no urgent communique back to corporate HQ
about the stowaway. Maybe they hadn't noticed? Maybe they had been
focused on the storm?
2001
And there the storm was again, back and even more fierce than it had
been. The rocking built, and built, and built. It wasn't sickening
anymore -- it was violent . At one point, Wei-Dong found himself
hanging on to his bed with both hands and feet, his laptop clamped
between his chest and the mattress, as the entire ship rolled to port
and hung there, teetering at an angle that felt nearly horizontal,
before crashing back and rocking in the other direction. Once,
twice more the ship rolled, and Wei-Dong clenched his teeth and fists
and eyes and prayed to a nameless god that they wouldn't tip right over
and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Container ships didn't go down
very often, but they did go down. And not only that -- about
half a percent of containers were lost at sea, gone over the side in
rough water. His father always took that personally. One percent didn't
sound like a lot, but, as Wei-Dong's father liked to remind him, that
was 20,000 containers, enough to build a high-rise out of. And the
number went up every year, as the seas got rougher and the weather got
harder to predict.
2002
All this went through Wei-Dong's head as he clung for dear life to his
bolted-down bed, battered from head to toe by loose items that he'd
missed when he'd packed everything into his chest. The ship groaned and
strained and then there was a deep metallic grating noise that he felt
all the way to his balls, and then --
2003
-- the container moved .
2004
It was a long moment and it seemed like everything had gone silent, as
the sensation of sliding across the massive deck tunneled through his
inner ear and straight into the fear center of his brain. In that
moment, he knew that he was about to die. About to sink and sink and
sink in a weightless eternity as the pressure of the ocean all around
him mounted, until the container imploded and smeared him across its
crumpled walls, dissipating in red streamers as the container fell to
the bottom of the sea.
2005
And then, the ship righted itself. There were tears in his eyes, and a
dampness from his crotch. He'd pissed himself. The rocking slowed,
slowed. Stopped. Now the ship was bobbing as normal, and Wei-Dong knew
that he would live.
2006
His hidey-hole was a wreck. His clothes, his toys, his survival gear --
all tossed to the four corners. Thankfully, the chemical toilet had
stayed put, with its lid dogged down tight. That would have been
messy . Puke, water, other spills slicked every available
surface. According to his watch, it was 4AM on his personal clock. That
made it, uh, 11AM ship's time, which was set to Los Angeles. If he'd
done the math right, it was about 6AM in their latitude, which should
be just about directly in line with New Zealand. Which meant the sun
would be up, and the crew would no doubt be swarming on deck, surveying
the damage and securing the remaining containers as best as they could
with the ship's little crane and tractors. And that meant that
he'd have to stay put, amid the sick and the bad air and the mess, wait
until that ship's night or maybe even the next night. And he had no
WiFi, either.
2007
Shit.
2008
He'd brought along some sleeping pills, just in case, as part of his
everything-and-the-kitchen-sink first-aid box. He found the sealed
plastic chest still bungied to one of the wire shelving units, beside
the precious two boxes of prepaid cards, still securely lashed to the
frame. As he broke the blisterpack and poured a stingy sip of water
into his tin cup, he had a moment's pause: what if they discovered his
container while he was drugged senseless?
2009
Well, what if they discovered it while he was wide awake? It's not like
he could run away .
2010
What an idiot he was.
2011
He ate the pills, then set about cleaning up his place as best as he
could, using old t-shirts as rags. He flipped over the mattress to
expose the unpissed-upon side, and wondered when the pills would take
effect. And then he found that he was too tired to do another thing
except for lying down with his cheek on the bare mattress and falling
into a deep and dreamless sleep.
2012
The pills were supposed to be a "non-drowsy" formula, but he woke
feeling like his head was wrapped in foam rubber. Maybe that was the
near-death experience. It was now the middle of ship's night, and real
night. Theoretically, it would be dark outside, and he could sneak out,
survey the damage, maybe rig up his WiFi antenna and find out whether
he was about to be arrested when they made port. But when he climbed
gingerly out of his inner box and tried to open the door of his
container, he discovered that it had been wedged shut. Not just sticky,
or bent at the hinge, but properly jammed up against the next
container, with several tons of cargo on the other side of the door for
him to muscle out of the way. Or not.
2013
He sat down. He had his headlamp on, as the inside of the container was
dark as the inside of a can of Coke. It splashed crazy shadows on the
walls, the stack of batteries, (he praised his own foresight at using
triple layers of steel strapping to keep them in place) the hatch
leading to his inner sanctum.
2014
By his reckoning, they were only three days out of Shenzhen, plus or
minus whatever course-corrections they'd have to make now that the
storm had passed. Theoretically, he could make it. He had the water,
the food, the electricity, provided that he rationed all three. But the
Webblies would be expecting him to check in before then, and the
boredom would drive him loopy.
2015
He thought about trying to saw through the steel container. It was
possible -- the container-converter message boards were full of talk
about what it took to cut up a container and use it for other purposes.
But nothing in his toolkit could manage it. The closest he could come
would be to drill a hole in the skin with his cordless drill. He'd used
it to assemble his nest, he had a couple spare boxes of high-speed bits
in his toolchest. His biggest bit, a small circular saw, would punch a
hole as big as his thumb, but only after he'd drilled a guide-hole
through the steel. 14 gauge steel, several times thicker than the
support-struts he'd drilled out when doing his interior work.
2016
It would make an unholy racket, but he was on the cargo deck, well away
from the deckhouse. Assuming no one was patrolling the deck, there was
no way he'd be heard over the sound of the sea and the rumble of the
diesels. He told himself that it was worth the risk of discovery, since
getting a hole would mean getting an antenna out, and therefore getting
onto the network and finding out whether he'd be safe once they got to
China.
2017
No time like the present. He found the toolchest, inside a bigger,
bolted-down box, and recovered the drill. He had a spare charger for
it, with an inverter that would run off the battery stack, and he
plugged it in and got it charging. He'd need a lot of batteries to get
through the ceiling.
2018
Several hours later, he realized that the ceiling might have been a
mistake. His shoulders, arms, and chest all burned and ached. He found
himself taking more and more frequent breaks, windmilling his arms, but
the ache wouldn't subside. His ears hurt too, from the echoey whining
racket of the drill, a hundred nightmares of the dentist's chair. He
kept an eye on his watch, telling himself he'd just work until the
morning shift came on duty, to reduce the risk that the sound would be
heard. But it was still an hour away from shift change when the battery
on his drill died, and he discovered that the last time he'd switched
batteries, he'd neglected to push the dead one all the way into the
charger, and now both his batteries were dead.
2019
That was as good an excuse as any to stop. He fingered the dent he'd
made in the sheet steel through all his hours of drilling. His
fingertip probed it, but barely seemed to sink in at all. He detached a
chair from its anchors and dragged it over, stood on it, and put an eye
to it, and saw a pinprick of dirty grey light, the first light of dawn,
glimmering at the bottom of his drill-hole.
2020
Sleep did not help his arms. If anything, it just made them worse. It
took him five minutes just to get to the point where he could lift his
arms over his face, working them back and forth. He had a little pot of
Tiger Balm, the red, smelly Chinese muscle rub, in his first-aid box,
and he worked it into his arms, shoulders, chest and neck, thinking, as
he did, This stuff isn't doing anything . A few minutes later, a
new burning spread across his skin, a fiery, minty feeling, hot and
cold at the same time. It was alarming at first, but a few seconds
later, it was incredible , like his muscles were all letting go
of their tension at once. He took up his drill, checked his watch --
middle of the first shift, but screw it, the engines were groaning, no
one would hear it -- and went to work.
2021
He punched through five minutes later. Five minutes! He'd been so
close! He put his eye to the hole again, saw sky, clouds, the shadows
of other containers nearby. His wireless antenna awaited. It had a big
heavy magnetic base, powerful rare-earth magnets that he'd used to
attach it to its earlier spot. They'd worked so well that he'd had to
plant both feet on either side of it and heave, like he was pulling up
a stubborn carrot. Now he didn't need the base, just the willowy wand
of the antenna itself. He disassembled the antenna, reattached it to
the bare wire-ends, and then gently, gingerly, fed it through his
dime-sized hole.
2022
He had a moment's pause as he fed it up, picturing it sticking up among
the even, smooth surfaces of the container-tops, as obvious as a boner
at the chalkboard, but he'd been drilling for so long, it seemed crazy
to stop now. A voice in his head told him that getting caught was even
crazier, but he shut that voice up by telling it to shut up, since
getting information on the ship's status would be vital to completing
his mission. And then the antenna was up.
2023
He grabbed his laptop and logged into the network and began snaffling
up traffic. He could watch it in realtime -- his sniffer would
helpfully group intercepted emails, clicks, pages, search terms and IMs
into their own reporting panels -- but that was just frustrating, like
watching a progress bar creep across the screen.
2024
Instead he went inside his sanctum and made himself a cup of instant
ramen noodles, using a little more of his precious electricity and
water, and then opened up a can of green tea with soymilk to wash it
down. He ate as slowly as he could, trying to savor every bite and tell
his stomach that food was OK, despite the rock and roll of the past
day. During the meal, he heard footsteps near his container, the
grumble of heavy machinery working at the containers, and his mouth
went dry at the thought of his antenna sticking up there.
2025
Why had he put it there? Because he couldn't bear the thought of
sitting, bored and restless, in his box for days more. Why was he doing
any of it? Why was he on his way to China? Why had he left home to be a
gamer? Why had he learned Chinese in the first place? Trapped with his
own thoughts, he found himself confronting some pretty ugly answers. He
hadn't wanted to be like all the other kids. He'd wanted to stand out,
be special. Different. To know and understand and be skilled at things
that his father didn't know anything about. To triumph. To be a part of
something bigger than himself, but to be an important part. To
be romantic and special. To care about a justice that his friends
didn't even know existed.
2026
It made him all feel sad and pathetic and needy. It made him want to go
plug into his laptop and get away from his thoughts.
2027
It worked. What he found on his laptop was nothing short of amazing.
First there was a haul of photos emailed from the captain back to the
shipping company, showing the cargo deck of the ship looking like a
tumbled Jenga tower, containers scattered everywhere, on their sides,
on their backs, at crazy angles. It looked as if the entire top layer
of boxes had slipped into the ocean, and then several more layers'
worth on the port side. He looked more closely. His container was on
the starboard side, and the container from the corresponding position
on the other side appeared to be gone. He looked up the ship's
manifest, found the serial number of the container, matched it to a
list of overboard boxes, swallowed. It had been pure random chance that
put his box on the starboard side. If he'd gone the other way, he'd be
raspberry jam in a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.
2028
He scanned the email traffic for information about the mysterious
stowaway, but it looked as though the storm had literally blown any
concern over him overboard. The manifest he had listed the value for
customs of all the containers on the ship. Most of them were empty, or
at least partially empty, as there wasn't much that America had that
China needed, except empty containers to fill with more goods to ship
to America. Still, the total value of the missing containers went into
the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He winced. That was going to be a
huge insurance bill.
2029
Now it was time to get his email, something that he'd been
putting off, because that was even riskier; if the ship's own
administrators were wiretapping their own network, they'd see his
traffic. Oh, it wouldn't look like email from him to Big Sister Nor and
his guildies and the Turks back in America. It'd look like gigantic
amounts of random junk, originating on an internal address that didn't
correspond to any known machine on the ship. Its destination was
unclear -- it hopped immediately into TOR, The Onion Router, which
bounced it like a pea in a maraca around the globe's open relays. He
was counting on the ship's lax IT security and the fact that the crew
were always connecting up new devices like phones and handheld games
they picked up in port to help him slide past the eyes of the network.
Still, if they were looking for a stowaway, they might think of looking
at the network traffic.
2030
He sat at his keyboard, fingers poised, and debated with himself. Deep
down, he knew how this debate would end. He could no more stay off the
network and away from his friends than he could stay cooped up in the
tin can without poking his antenna off the ship.
2031
So he did it. Sent emails, watched the network traffic, held his
breath. So far, so good. Then: a rumble and a clatter and a pair of
thunderous clangs from above. His heart thudded in his ears and
more metallic sounds crashed through the confined space. What was it?
He placed the noises, connected them to the pictures he'd seen earlier.
The crew had the forklift and tractor out, and the crane swinging, and
they were rearranging the containers for stability and trim. He yanked
his antenna in and dove for the inner sanctum, dogging his hatch and
throwing all loose objects into the lockers before flinging himself
over the bed and grabbing hold of the post and clinging to it with
fingers and toes as the container rocked and rolled for the second time
in 24 hours.
2032
"So where'd you end up?" Ping asked, passing Wei-Dong another parcel of
longzai rice and chicken folded in a lotus leaf. Ping had wanted to go
to the Pizza Hut, but Wei-Dong had looked so hurt and offended at the
suggestion, and had been so insistent on eating something "real" that
he'd taken the gweilo to a cafe in the Cantonese quarter, near the
handshake buildings. Wei-Dong had loved it from the moment they'd sat
down, and had ordered confidently, impressing both Ping and the waiter
with his knowledge of South Chinese food.
2033
Wei-Dong chewed, made a face. "On the bloody top of the stack, three
high!" he said. "With more containers sandwiched in on every side of
me, except the door side, thankfully! But I couldn't climb down the
stack with these." He thumped the dirty, beat up cardboard boxes beside
the table. "So I had to transfer the cards to my backpack and then
climb up and down that stack, over and over again, until I had it all
on the ground. Then I threw down the collapsed cardboard boxes, climbed
to the bottom, and boxed everything up again."
2034
Ping's jaw dropped. "You did all that in the port ?" He thought
of all the guards he'd seen, all the cameras.
2035
Wei-Dong shook his head. "No," he said. "I couldn't take the chance. I
did it at night, in relays, the night before we got in. And I covered
it all in some plastic sheeting I had, which is a good thing because it
rained yesterday. There was a lot of water on the deck and some of it
leaked through the plastic, but the boxes seem OK. Let's hope the cards
are still readable. I figure they must be -- they're in plastic-wrapped
boxes inside."
2036
"But what about the crew seeing you?"
2037
Wei-Dong laughed. "Oh, I was shitting bricks the whole time over that,
I promise! I was in full sight of the wheelhouse most of the time,
though thankfully there wasn't any moon out. But yeah, that was pretty
freaky."
2038
Ping looked at the gweilo, his skinny arms, the fuzz of pubescent
moustache, the shaggy hair, the bad smell. When the boy had finally
emerged from the gate, confidently flashing some kind of badge at the
guard, Ping had wanted to strangle him for being so late and for
looking so relaxed about it. Now, though, he couldn't help but
admire his old guildie. He said so.
2039
Wei-Dong actually blushed, and his chest inflated, and he looked so
proud that Ping had to say it again. "I'm in awe," he said. "What a
story!"
2040
"I just did what I had to do," Wei-Dong said with an unconvincing,
nonchalant shrug. His Mandarin was better than Ping remembered it.
Maybe it was just being face to face rather than over a fuzzy,
unreliable net-link, the ability to see the whole body, the whole face.
2041
All of Ping's earlier worry and irritation melted away. He was overcome
by a wave of affection for this kid who had travelled thousands of
kilometers to be part of the same big guild. "Don't take this the wrong
way," he said, "but I have to tell you this. A few hours ago, I was
very upset with you. I thought it was just ego or stupidity, your
coming all this way with the boxes. I wanted to strangle you. I thought
you were a stupid, spoiled --" He saw the look on Wei-Dong's face, pure
heartbreak and stopped, held up his hands. "Wait! What I'm trying to
say is, I thought all this, but then I met you and heard your story,
and I realized that you want this just as much as I do, and have as
much at stake now. That you're a real, a real comrade ." The word
was funny, an old communist word that had been leached of color and
meaning by ten million hours of revolutionary song-singing in school.
But it fit.
2042
And it worked. Wei-Dong's chest swelled up even bigger, like a balloon
about to sail away, and his cheeks glowed like red coals. He fumbled
for words, but his Chinese seemed to have fled him, so Ping laughed and
handed him another lotus leaf, this one filled with seafood.
2043
"Eat!" he said. "Eat!" He checked the time on his phone, read the coded
messages there from Big Sister Nor. "You've got 10 minutes to finish
and then we have to get to the guild-house for the big call!"
2044
You're in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little
disoriented already, that's key. Maybe it's just a strange time to be
out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or very late
at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the suburbs, and no
one else is around.
2045
A stranger approaches you. He's well-dressed, smiling. His
body-language says, I am a friend, and I'm slightly out of place,
too. He's holding something. It's a pane of glass, large, fragile,
the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He's struggling with it.
It's heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he says, with a note of
self-awareness at the absurdity of this all, "Can you please hold this
for a second?" He sounds a little desperate too, like he's about to
drop it.
2046
You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.
2047
And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly plunges his
hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your keys, wallet and
cash into his own pockets. He never breaks eye-contact in the ten or 15
seconds it takes him to accomplish the task, and then he turns on his
heel and walks away (he doesn't run, that's important) very quickly,
for a dozen steps, and then he breaks into a wind-sprint of a
run, powering up like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.
2048
You're still holding onto the pane of glass.
2049
Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?
2050
What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break on the
strange pavement? Set it down carefully?
2051
Tell you one thing you're not going to do. You're not going to run with
it. Running with a ten kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in your hands is
even dumber than taking hold of it in the first place.
2052
"What's at work here?" Big Sister Nor was on the video-conference
window, with The Mighty Krang and Justbob to either side of her, heads
down on their screens, keeping the back-channel text-chat running while
Big Sister Nor lectured. She was speaking Mandarin, then Hindi. The
text-chat was alive in three alphabets and five languages, and
machine-translations appeared beneath the words. English for Wei-Dong,
Chinese for his guildies. There were a couple thousand people logged in
direct, and tens of thousands due to check in later when they finished
their shifts.
2053
"Dingleberry in K-L says 'Disorientation,'" The Mighty Krang said,
without looking up.
2054
Big Sister Nor nodded. "And?"
2055
"'Social Contract,'" said Justbob. "That's MrGreen in Singapore."
2056
BSN showed her teeth in a hard grin. "Singapore, where they know all
about the social contract! Yes, yes! That's just it. A person comes up
to you and asks you for help, you help; it's in our instincts, it's in
our upbringing. It's what keeps us all civilized."
2057
And then she told them a story of a group of workers in Phenom Penh,
gold farmers who worked for someone who was supposed to be very kindly
and good to them, took them out for lunch once a week, brought in good
dinners and movies to show when they worked late, but who always seemed
to make small... mistakes ... in their pay-packets. Not much, and
he was always embarrassed when it happened and paid up, and he was even
more embarrassed when he "forgot" that it was pay day and was a day,
two days, three days late paying them. But he was their friend, their
good friend, and they had an unwritten contract with him that said that
they were all good friends and you don't call your good friend a thief.
2058
And then he disappeared.
2059
They came to work one day -- three days after pay-day, and they hadn't
been paid yet, of course -- and the man who ran the Internet cafe had
simply shrugged and said he had no idea where this boss had gone. A few
of the workers had even worked through the day, and even the next,
because their good friend must be about to show up someday soon! And
then their accounts stopped working; all the accounts, all the
characters they'd been levelling, the personal characters they used for
the big rare-drop raids, everything.
2060
Some of them went home, some of them found other jobs. And eventually,
some of them ran into their old boss again. He was running a new gold
farm, with new young men working for him. The boss was so apologetic,
he even cried and begged their forgiveness; his creditors had called in
their loans and he'd had to flee to escape them, but he wanted to make
it up to the workers, his friends, whom he'd loved as sons. He'd put
them to work as senior members of his new farm, at double their old
wages, just give him another chance.
2061
The first pay-day was late. One day. Two days. Three days. Then, the
boss didn't come to work at all. Some of the younger, newer workers
wanted to work some more, because, after all, the boss was their dear
friend. And the old hands, the ones who'd just been taken for a second
time, they finally admitted to their fellow workers what they'd known
all along: the boss was a crook, and he'd just robbed them all.
2062
"That's how it works. You violate the social contract, the other person
doesn't know what to do about it. There's no script for it. There's a
moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you can empty out
his pockets."
2063
There were more stories like this, and they made everyone laugh,
sprinkles of "kekekekeke" in the chat, but when it was over, Wei-Dong
felt his first tremor of doubt.
2064
"What is it?" Jie asked him. She was very beautiful, and from what he
could understand, she was a very famous radio person, some kind of
local hero for the factory girls. It was clear that Lu was
head-over-heels in love with her, and everyone else deferred to her as
well. When she turned her attention on him, the whole room turned with
her. The room -- a flat in a strange old part of town -- was crowded
with people, hot and loud with the fans from the computers.
2065
"It's just," he said, waved his hands. He was suddenly very tired. He
hadn't had a nap or even a shower since sneaking out of the port, and
meeting all these people, having the videoconference with Big Sister
Nor, it was all so much. His Chinese fled him and he found himself
fumbling for the words. He swallowed, thought it through. "Look," he
said. "I want to help all the workers get a better deal, the Turks, the
farmers, the factory girls." They all nodded cautiously. "But is that
what we're doing here? Are we going to win any rights by, you know, by
being crooks? By ripping people off?"
2066
The group erupted into speech. Apparently he'd opened up an old debate,
and the room was breaking into its traditional sides. The Chinese was
fast and slangy, and he lost track of it very quickly, and then the
magnitude of what he'd done finally, really hit him . Here he
was, thousands of miles from home, an illegal immigrant in a country
where he stood out like a sore thumb. He was about to get involved in a
criminal enterprise -- hell he was already involved in it --
that was supposed to rock the world to its foundations. And he was only
18. He felt two inches tall and as flat as a pancake.
2067
"Wei-Dong," one of the boys said, in his ear. It was Matthew, who had a
funny, leathery, worn look to him, but whose eyes twinkled with
intelligence. "Come on, let's get you out of here. They'll be at this
for hours."
2068
He looked Matthew up and down. Technically, they were guildies, but who
knew what that meant anymore? What sort of social contract did they
really have, these strangers and him?
2069
"Come on," Matthew said, and his face was kind and caring. "We'll get
you somewhere to sleep, find you some clothes."
2070
That offer was too good to pass up. Matthew led him out of the
apartment, out of the building, and out in the streets. The sun had set
while they were conferenced in, and the heat had gone out of the air.
Matthew led him up and down several maze-like alleys, through some
giant housing blocks, and then into another building, this one even
more run-down than the last one. They went up nine flights of stairs,
and by the time they reached the right floor, Wei-Dong felt like he
would collapse. His thighs burned, his chest heaved and ached, and the
sweat was coursing down his face and neck and back and butt and thighs.
2071
"I had the same question as you," Matthew said. "When I got out of
jail."
2072
Wei-Dong willed himself not to edge away from Matthew. The apartment
was filled with thin mattresses, covering nearly the entire floor like
some kind of crazy, thick carpet. They sat on adjacent beds, shoes off.
Wei-Dong must have made some sign of his surprise, because Matthew
smiled a sad smile. "I went to jail for going on strike with other
Webblies. I'm not a murderer, Wei-Dong."
2073
Wei-Dong felt himself blushing. He mumbled and apology.
2074
"I had a long talk with Big Sister Nor. Here's what she told me: she
said that a traditional strike, where you take your labor away from the
bosses and demand a better deal, that it wouldn't work here. That we
needed to do that, but that we also needed to be able to show everyone
who has us at their mercy that they've overrated their power. When the
bosses say, 'We'll beat you up,' or when the police say, 'We'll put you
in jail,' or when the game companies say, 'We'll throw you out," we
need to be able to say, 'Oh no you won't!'"
2075
The sheer delight he put into this last phrase made Wei-Dong smile,
even though he was so tired he could barely move his face.
2076
He scrubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands and said, "Look, I
think my emotions are on trampolines today. It's been a very big day."
Matthew chuckled. "You understand."
2077
"I understand. I just wanted to let you know that this isn't just about
being a crook. It's about changing the power dynamics in the battle.
You're a fighter, you understand that, don't you? I hear you play
healers. You know what a raid is like with and without a healer?"
2078
Wei-Dong nodded. "It's a very different fight," he said. "Different
tactics, different feel."
2079
"A different dynamic. There's math to describe it, you know? I found a
research paper on it. It's fascinating. I'll email you a copy. What
we're doing here, we're changing the dynamic, the balance of power, for
workers everywhere. You'll see."
2080
Wei-Dong yawned and waved his fist over his mouth weakly.
2081
"You need to sleep," Matthew said. "Good night, comrade."
2082
Wei-Dong woke once in the night, and every mattress was filled, and
everyone was snoring and breathing and snuffling and scratching. There
must have been twenty guys in the room with him, a human carpet of
restless energy, cigarette-and-garlic breath, foot-odor, body-odor, and
muffled grumbles. It was so utterly unlike the ship, unlike his room in
the Cecil Hotel in LA, unlike his parents' home in Orange County... The
ground actually felt like it was sloping away for a minute, like the
storm-tossed deck of a container ship, and he thought for a wild,
disoriented minute that there was an earthquake, and pictured the
highrise buildings he'd seen clustered together on the way over
crashing into one another like dominoes. Then the land righted itself
again and the panic dissipated.
2083
He thought of his mother and knew that he'd have to find a PC and give
her a call the next day. They'd exchanged a lot of email while he was
on the ship, a lot of reminisces about his dad, and he'd felt closer to
her than he had in years.
2084
Thinking of his mother gave him an odd feeling of peace, not the
homesick he'd half-expected, and he drifted off again amid the farts
and the grunts and the human sounds of the human people he'd put
himself among.
2085
Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was going crazy. Like all the
game-runners, he had a sizeable portfolio of game assets and
derivatives. It wasn't exactly fair -- betting on the future of
game-gold when you got a say in that future put you at a sizeable
advantage over the people on the other side of the bets. But screw 'em
if they can't take a joke.
2086
Besides, his portfolio was so big and complex that he couldn't manage
it himself. Like everyone else, he had a broker, a guy who worked for
one of the big houses, a company that had once been an
auto-manufacturer before it went bankrupt, got bailed out, wrung out,
twisted and financialized until the only thing left of any value in it
was the part of the company that had packaged up and sold off the
car-loans suckers had taken out on its clunkermobiles.
2087
And his broker loved him, because whenever Connor phoned in an
order for a certain complex derivative -- say, a buy-order for $300,000
worth of insurance policies on six-month gatling gun futures from
Zombie Mecha -- then it was a good bet that there were going to be a
lot fewer gatling guns in Zombie Mecha in six months (or that the
gatling gun would get a power-up, maybe depleted uranium ammo that
could rip through ten zombies before stopping), driving the price of
the guns way, way up. The broker, in turn, could make money on that
prediction by letting his best clients in on the deal, buying gatling
gun insurance policies, or even gatling gun futures, or futures on
gatling gun insurance, raking in fat commissions and getting everyone
else rich at the same time.
2088
So Connor had an advantage. So who was complaining? Who did it hurt?
2089
And in turn, Connor's broker liked to call him up with hot tips on
other financial instruments he might want to consider, financial
instruments that came to him from his other clients, a diverse group of
highly placed people who were privy to all sorts of secrets and insider
knowledge. Every day this week, the broker, Ira, had called up Connor
and had a conversation that went like this:
2090
Ira: "Hey, man, is this a good time?"
2091
Connor (distractedly, locked in battle with his many screens and their
many feeds): "I've always got time for you, buddy. You've got my
money."
2092
Ira: "Well, I appreciate it. I'll try to be quick. We've got a new
product we're getting behind this week, something that kinda took us by
surprise. It's from Mushroom Kingdom, which is weird for us, because
Nintendo tends to play all that stuff very close and tight, leaving
nothing on the table for the rest of us. But we've got a line on a
fully hedged, no-risk package that I wanted to give you first crack at,
because we're in limited supply..."
2093
And from there it descended into an indecipherable babble of
banker-ese, like a bunch of automated text generated by searching the
web for "fully hedged" (meaning, we've got a bet that pays out if you
win and another that pays out if you lose, so no matter what, you come
out ahead, something that everyone promised and no one ever delivered)
and blowing around the text that came up in the search-result snippets,
like a verbal whirlwind with "fully hedged" in the middle of it.
2094
The thing was, Connor was really good at speaking banker-ese,
and this just didn't add up. The payoff was gigantic, 15 percent in a
single quarter, up to 45 percent in the ideal scenario, and that was in
a tight market where most people were happy to be taking in one or two
percent. This was the kind of promise he associated with crazy,
high-risk ventures, not anything "fully hedged."
2095
He stopped Ira's enthusiastically sputtering explanation, said, "You
said no-risk there, buddy?"
2096
Ira drew in a breath. "Did I say that?"
2097
"Yup."
2098
"Well, you know, everything 's got a risk. But yeah, I'm putting
my own money into this." He swallowed. "I don't want to pressure you
--"
2099
Connor couldn't help himself, he snorted. Ira had many things going for
him, but he was a pushy son of a bitch.
2100
"Really!" But he sounded contrite. "OK, let me be straight with you. I
didn't believe it myself, either. None of us did. You know what bond
salesmen are like, we've seen it all. But there were kids in the
office, straight out of school. These kids, they have a lot more time
to play than we do --" Connor repressed the snort, but just barely. The
last time Ira played a game, it had been World of Warcraft, in the dawn
of time. He was a competent, if unimaginative broker, but he was no
gamer. That's OK, he also wasn't a pork-farmer, but he could still buy
pork-futures. "-- and they were hearing about this stuff from other
players. They'd started buying in for themselves, using their monthly
bonuses, you know, it's kind of a tradition to treat that bonus money
as pennies from heaven and spend it on long-shot bets. Anyway, they
started to clean up, and clean up, and clean up."
2101
"So how do you know it's not tapped out?"
2102
"That's the thing. A couple of the old timers bought into it and you
know, they started to clean up too. And then I got in on it --"
2103
"How long ago?"
2104
"Two months ago," he said, sheepishly. "It's paying a monthly coupon of
16 percent on average. I've started to move my long-term savings into
it too."
2105
"Two months? How many of your other clients have you brought in on this
deal?" He felt a curious mixture of anger and elation -- how dare Ira
keep this to himself, and how fine that he was about to share it!
2106
"None!" Ira was speaking quickly now. "Look, Connor, all my cards on
the table now. You're the best customer I got. Without you, hell, my
take home pay'd probably be cut in half. The only reason I haven't
brought this to you before now is, you know, there wasn't any more to
go around! Any time there was an offer on these things, they'd be
snapped up in a second."
2107
"So what happened? Did all your greedy pals get their fill?"
2108
Ira laughed. "Not hardly! But you know how it goes, as soon as
something takes off like these vouchers, there's a lot of people trying
to figure out how to make more of them. Turns out there's a bank, one
of these offshore ones that's some Dubai prince's private fortune, and
the Prince is a doubter. The bank's selling very long bets against
these bonds on great terms. They're one-year coupons and they pay off
big if the bonds don't crash. So now there's some uncertainty in
the pool and some people are flipping, betting that the Prince knows
something they don't, buying his paper and selling their bonds. We've
gone one better: we've got a floating pool of hedged-off packages that
balance out the Prince's bets and these bonds, so no matter what
happens, you're in the green. We buy or sell every day based on the
rates on each. It's --"
2109
"Risk free?"
2110
"Virtually risk free. Absolutely."
2111
Connor's mouth was dry. There was something going on here, something
big. His mind was at war with itself. Finance was a game, the biggest
game, and the rules were set by the players, not by a designer.
Sometimes the rules went crazy and you got a little pocket of insanity,
where a small bet could give you unimaginable wins. He knew how this
worked. Of course he did. Hadn't he been chasing gold farmers up and
down nine worlds, trying to find their own little high-return pockets
and turn them inside out? At the same time, there was just no such
thing as a free lunch. Something that looked too good to be true
probably was too good to be true. All that and all the other sayings
he'd grown up with, all that commonsense that his simple parents had
gifted him with, them with their small-town house and no mortgage and
sensible retirement funds that would have them clipping coupons and
going to two-for-one sales for the rest of their lives.
2112
"Twenty grand," he blurted. It was a lot, but he could handle it. He'd
made more than that on his investments in the past 90 days. He could
make it up in the next 90 days if --
2113
"Twenty ? Are you kidding? Connor, look, this is the kind of
thing comes along once in a lifetime! I came to you first ,
buddy, so you could get in big. Shit, buddy, I'll sell you twenty
grand's worth of these things, but I tell you what --"
2114
It made him feel small, even though he knew it was supposed to
make him feel small. It was like there were two Connors, a cool,
rational one and an emotional one, bitterly fighting over control of
his body. Rational won, though it was a hard-fought thing.
2115
"Twenty's all I've got in cash right now," he lied, emotional Connor
winning this small concession. "If I could afford more --"
2116
"Oh!" Ira said, and Connor could hear the toothy smile in his voice.
"Connor, pal, I don't do this very often, and I'd appreciate it if
you'd keep this to yourself, but how about if I promise you that your
normal trades for today will pick up an extra, uh, make it 20 more, for
a total of 40 thousand. Would you want to plow that profit into these
puppies?"
2117
Connor's mouth went dry. He knew how this worked, but he'd long ago
given up on being a part of it. It was the oldest broker-scam in the
world: every day, brokers made a number of "off-book" trades, buying
stocks and bonds and derivatives on the hunch that they'd go up. Being
"off-book" meant that these trades weren't assigned to any particular
client's account; the money to buy them came out of the general account
for the brokerage house.
2118
At the end of the day, some -- maybe all -- of those trades would have
come out ahead. Some -- maybe all -- would have come out behind. And
that's when the magic began. By back-dating the books, the broker could
assign the shitty trades to shitty customers, cheapskates, or big,
locked-in, slow-moving customers, like loosely-managed estates for
long-dead people whose wealth was held in trust. The gains could be
written to the broker's best customers, like some billionaire that the
broker was hoping to do more business with. In this way, every broker
got a certain amount of discretion every day in choosing who would make
money and who would lose it. It was just a larger version of the
barista at the coffee shop slipping her regulars a large instead of a
medium every now and again, without charging for the upgrade. The
partners who ran the brokerages knew that this was going on, and so did
many of the customers. It was impossible to prove that you'd lost money
or gained money this way -- unless your broker told you at 9:15 on a
Tuesday morning that your account would have an extra $20,000 in it by
5PM.
2119
Ira had just taken a big risk in telling Connor what he was going to do
for him. Now that he had this admission, he could, theoretically, have
Ira arrested for securities fraud. That is, until and unless he gave
Ira the go-ahead, at which point they'd both be guilty, in on it
together.
2120
And there rational and emotional Connor wrestled, on the knife-edge
between wealth and conspiracy and pointless, gainless honesty. They
tumbled onto the conspiracy side. After all, Connor and the broker bent
the rules every time Connor ordered a trade on one of Coca Cola Games's
futures. This was just the same thing, only moreso.
2121
"Do it," he said. "Thanks, Ira."
2122
Ira's breath whooshed out over the phone, and Connor realized that the
broker had been holding his breath and waiting on his reply, waiting to
find out if he'd gone too far. The salesman really wanted to sell him
this package.
2123
Later, in Command Central, Connor watched his feeds and thought about
it, and something felt... hinky . Why had Ira been so eager?
Because Connor was such a great customer and Ira thought if he made
Connor a ton of money, Connor would give it back to him to continue
investing, making more and more money for him, and more and more
commissions for the broker?
2124
And now that his antennae were up, he started to see all kinds of
ghosts in his feeds, little hints of gold and elite items changing
hands in funny ways, valued too high or not high enough, all out of
whack with the actual value in-game. Of course, who knew what the
in-game value of anything could really be? Say the game-runners decided
to make the Zombie Mecha gatling guns fire depleted uranium ammo,
starting six months from now. The easy calculation had gatling guns
shooting up in value in six months, because it would make it possible
for the Mechas to wade through giant hordes of zombies without being
overpowered. But what if that made the game too easy, and lots
of players left? Once your buddies went over to Anthills and Hives and
started team-playing huge, warring hive-intelligences, would you want
to hang around Zombie Mecha, alone and forlorn, firing your gatling gun
at the zombies? Would the zombies stop being fun objectives and start
being mere collections of growling pixels?
2125
It took the subtle fingerspitzengefuhl of a fortune-teller to really
predict what would happen to the game when you nerfed or buffed one
character class or weapon or monster. Every change like this was
watched closely by game-runners for weeks, around the clock, and they'd
tweak the characteristics of the change from minute to minute, trying
to get the game into balance.
2126
The feeds told the story. Out there in gameland, there was a hell of a
lot of activity, trades back and forth, and it worried him. He started
to ask the other game-runners if they noticed anything out of the
ordinary but then something else leapt out of his feeds: there!
Gold-farmers!
2127
He'd been looking for them everywhere, and finding them. Gold farming
had a number of signatures that you could spot with the right feed. Any
time someone logged in from a mysterious Asian IP address, walked to
the nearest trading post, stripped off every scrap of armor and bling
and sold it, then took all the resulting cash and the entire contents
of her guild bank and turned it over to some level one noob on a free
trial account that had only started an hour before, who, in turn,
turned the money over to a series of several hundred more noobs who
quickly scattered and deposited it in their own guild banks, well, that
was a sure bet you'd found some gold farmer who was hacking accounts.
Hell, half the time you could tell who the farmers were just by looking
at the names they gave their guilds: real players either went for the
heroic ("Savage Thunder") or the ironic ("The Nerf Herders") or the
eponymous ("Jim's Raiders") but they rarely went by
"asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf2329" or, God help him,
707A55DF0D7E15BBB9FB3BE16562F22C026A882E40164C7B149B15DE7137ED1A.
2128
But as soon as he tweaked his feeds to catch them, the farmers figured
out how to dodge them. The guilds got good names, the hacked players
started behaving more plausibly -- having half-assed dialogue with the
toons they were buffing with all their goods -- and the gangs that
converged on any accidental motherlode in the game did a lot of
realistic milling about and chatting in broken English. Increasingly,
the players were logging in with prepaid cards diverted from the US
over American proxies, making them indistinguishable from the lucrative
American kid trade, who were apt to start playing by buying some
prepaid cards along with their Cokes and gum at the convenience store.
Those kids had the attention spans of gnats, and if you knocked them
offline after mistaking them for a gold farmer, they left and went
straight to a competing world and never again showed up in your game or
on your balance sheet.
2129
It was amazing how fast information spread among these creeps. Well,
not amazing. After all, information spread among normal players faster
than you'd believe too -- it was great, you hardly had to lift a finger
or spend a penny on marketing when you released some new elite items or
unveiled a new world. The players would talk it up for you, spreading
the word at the speed of gossip. And the same jungle telegraph ran
through the farmers' underground, he could see it at work.
2130
And there were more of them, a little guild of twenty, all grinding and
grinding the same campaign. They were fresh characters, created two
days before, and they'd been created by players who knew what they were
doing -- it was just the perfect balance between rezzers and tanks and
casters, a good mix of AOE and melee weapons. They'd levelled damned
fast -- he pulled up some forensics on some of the toons, felt his
fingerspitzengefuhl tingle as the game guttered like a flame in a
breeze. He'd installed the forensics packages over the howls of protest
from the admin team who'd shown him chart after chart about what
running the kind of history he wanted to see would do to server
performance. He'd gotten his forensics, but only after promising to use
them sparingly.
2131
And there it was: the players had levelled each other by going into a
PvP -- Player versus Player -- tournament area and repeatedly killing
one another. As soon as one of them dinged up a level, he would stand
undefended and let the other player kill him quickly. The game gave
megapoints for killing a higher level player. Once player two dinged,
they switched places, and laddered, one after the other, up to heights
that normal players would take forever to attain.
2132
The campaign they were running was simple: scrounging a mix of
earth-fairy wings and certain mushroom caps, giving them over to a
potion-master who would pay them in gold. It wasn't anything special
and it was a little below their levels, but when he charted out the
returns in gold and experience per hour, he saw that someone had
carelessly created a mission that would pay out nearly triple what the
regular campaign was supposed to deliver. He shook his head. How the
hell did they figure this stuff out? You'd need to chart every
single little finicky mission in the game and there were tens of
thousands of missions, created by designers who used software
algorithms to spin a basic scenario into hundreds of variants.
2133
And there they were, happily collecting their mushroom caps and killing
the brown fairies and plucking their wings. Every now and again they'd
happen on a bigger monster that wandered into their aggro zone and
they'd dispatch it with cool ease.
2134
His finger trembled over the macro that would suspend their accounts
and boot them off the server. It didn't move.
2135
He admired them, that was the problem. They were doing something
efficiently, quietly and well, with a minimum of fuss. They understood
the game nearly as well as he did, without the benefit of Command
Central and its many feeds. He --
2136
He logged in.
2137
He picked an av he'd buffed up to level 43, halfway up the ladder to
the maximum, which was 90. Regulus was an elf healer, tall and
whip-thin, with a huge rucksack bulging with herbs and potions. He was
a nominal member of one of the mid-sized player guilds, one of the ones
that would accept even any player for a small fee, which offered
training courses, guild-banking, scheduled events, all with the glad
sanction of Coca Cola. The right sort of people.
2138
> Hello
2139
Two months before, the players would have kept on running their
mission, blithely ignoring him. But that was one of the tell-tales his
feeds looked for to pick out the farmers. Instead, these toons all
waved at him and did little emotes, some of which were quite good
custom jobs including dance-moves, elaborate mime and other gestures.
If his feeds hadn't picked these jokers out as farmers, he'd have
pegged them as hardcore players. But they hadn't actually spoken or
chatted him anything. They were almost certainly Chinese and English
would be hard for them.
2140
> Wanna group?
2141
He offered them a really plum quest, one that had a crazy-high gold and
experience reward for a relatively nearby objective: retrieving
Dvalinn's runes from a deep cave that they'd have to fight their way
into, killing a bunch of gimpy dwarves and a couple of decent bosses on
the way. The quest was chained to one that led to a fight with
Fenrisulfr, one of the biggest bosses in Svartalfaheim Warriors, a
megaboss that you needed a huge party to take down, but which rewarded
you with enormous treasure. The whole thing was farmer-bait he'd cooked
up specifically for this kind of mission.
2142
After a decent interval -- short, but long enough for the players to be
puzzling through a machine-translation of the quest-text -- they gladly
joined, sending simple thanks over text.
2143
He pretended he saw nothing weird about their silence as they
progressed toward the objective, but in the meantime, he concentrated
on observing them closely, trying to picture them around a table in a
smoky cafe in China or Vietnam or Cambodia or Malaysia, twenty skinny
boys with oily hair and zits, cigarettes in the corners of their
mouths, squinting around the curl of smoke. Maybe they were in more
than one place, two or even three groups. They almost certainly had
some kind of back-channel, be it voice, text, or simply shouting at
each other over the table, because they moved with good coordination,
but with enough individualism that it seemed unlikely that this was all
one guy running twenty bots.
2144
> Where you from?
2145
He had to be aware that they were probably trying to figure out if he
was from the game, and if he made things too easy for them, he might
tip them off.
2146
One player, an ogre caster with a huge club and a bandoleer of mystic
skulls etched with runes, replied
2147
> We're Chinese, hope that's OK with you
2148
This was more frank than he'd expected. Other groups he'd approached
with the same gimmick had been much more close-lipped, claiming to come
from unlikely places in the midwest like Sioux Falls, places that
seemed to have been chosen by randomly clicking on a map of the USA.
2149
> China!
2150
he typed,
2151
> You seem pretty good with English then!
2152
The ogre -- Prince Simon, according to his stats -- emoted a little
bow.
2153
> I studied in school. My guildies aren't same good.
2154
Connor thought about who he was pretending to be: a young player in a
big American city like LA. What would he say to these people?
2155
> Is it late there?
2156
> Yes, after dinner. We always play after dinner.
2157
> Sounds like a lot of fun! I wish I had a big group of friends who
were free after dinner. It's always homework homework homework
2158
Connor's fictional persona was sharpening up for him now, a lonely
high-school kid in La Jolla or San Deigo, somewhere on the ocean,
somewhere white and middle class and isolated. Somewhere without
sidewalks. The kind of kid who might come across a plum quest live
Dvalinn's runes and have to go and round up a group of strangers to run
it with him.
2159
> It's a good time
2160
the ogre said. A pause.
2161
> My friend wants to know what you're studying?
2162
His persona floated an answer into his head.
2163
> I'm about to graduate. I've applied for civil engineering at a
couple of schools. Hope I get in!
2164
The ogre said,
2165
> I was a civil engineer before I left home. I designed bridges,
five bridges. For a high-speed train system.
2166
Connor mentally revised his image of the boys into young men, adults.
2167
> When did you leave home?
2168
> 2 years. No more work. I will go home soon though I think. I have
a family there. A little son, only 3
2169
The ogre messaged him an image. A grinning Chinese boy in a sailor
suit, toothy, holding a drippy ice cream cone like a baton, waving it
like a conductor.
2170
Connor's fictional 17 year old didn't have any reaction to the picture,
but his 36-year-old self did. A father leaving his son behind, plunging
off to find work. Connor hadn't ever had to support someone, but he'd
thought about it a lot. In Connor's world, where people's motives were
governed by envy and fear, the picture of this baby was seismic, an
earthquake shaking things up and making the furnishings fall to the
floor and shatter. He struggled to find his character.
2171
> Cute! You must miss him
2172
> A lot. It's like being in the army. I will do this for a few
years, then go home.
2173
What a world! Here was this civil engineer, accomplished, in love, a
father, living far away, working all day to amass virtual treasures,
playing cat-and-mouse with Connor and his people.
2174
> So what advice do you have for someone going into civil
engineering?
2175
The ogre emoted a big laugh.
2176
> Don't try to find work in China
2177
Connor emoted a big laugh too -- and led the party to Dvalinn's runes,
losing himself in the play even as he struggled to remain clinical and
observant. Some of his fellow gamerunners looked over his shoulder now
and again, watched them run the mission, made little cutting remarks.
Among the gamerunners, the actual game itself was slightly looked down
upon, something for the marks to play. The real game, the big game was
the game of designing the game, the game of tweaking all the variables
in the giant hamster cage that all the suckers were paying to run
through.
2178
But Connor never forgot how he came to the game, where his equations
had come from: from play , thousands of hours in the worlds,
absorbing their physics and reality through his fingers and ears and
eyes. As far as he was concerned, you couldn't do your job in the game
unless you played it too. He marked the snotty words, noticed who
delivered them, and took down his mental estimation of each one by a
few pegs.
2179
Now they were in the dungeon, which he'd just slapped together, but
which he nevertheless found himself really enjoying. As a raiding
guild, the Chinese were superb: coordinated, slick, smart. He had a
tendency to think of gold farmers as mindless droids, repeating a task
set for them by some boss who showed them how to use the mouse and
walked away. But of course the gold farmers played all day, every day,
even more than the most hardcore players. They were hardcore
players. Hardcore players he'd sworn to eliminate, but he couldn't let
himself forget that they were hardcore.
2180
They fought their way through to the big boss, and the team were so
good that Connor couldn't help himself -- he reached into the game's
guts and buffed the hell out of the boss, upping his level
substantially and equipping him with a bunch of special attacks from
the library of Nasties that he kept in his private workspace. Now the
boss was incredibly intimidating, a challenge that would require
flawless play from the whole team.
2181
> Oh no
2182
he typed.
2183
> What are we going to do?
2184
And the ogre sprang into action, and the players formed two ranks,
those with melee attacks in the vanguard, spellcasters, healers, ranged
attackers and AOE attackers in the back, seeking out ledges and other
high places out of range of the boss, a huge dire wolf with many ranged
spells as well as a vicious bite and powerful paws that could lash out
and pin a player until the wolf could bring its jaws to bear on him.
2185
The boss had a bunch of smaller fighters, dwarves, who streamed out of
the caves leading to the central cavern in great profusion, harassing
the back rank and intercepting the major attacks the forward guard
assembled. As a healer and rezzer, Connor ran to and fro, looking for
safe spots to sit down, meditate, and cast healing energy at the
fighters in the fore who were soaking up incredible damage from the big
boss and his minions. He lost concentration for a second and two of the
dwarves hit him with thrown axes, high and low, and he found himself
incapped, sprawled on the cave floor, with more bad guys on the way.
2186
His heart was thundering, that old feeling that reminded him that his
body couldn't tell the difference between excitement on screen and
danger in the real world, and when another player, one of the Chinese
whom he had not spoken with at all, rescued him, he felt a surge of
gratitude that was totally genuine, originating in his spine and
stomach, not his head.
2187
In the end, 12 of the 20 players were irreversibly killed in the
battle, respawned at some distant point too far away to reach them
before the battle ended. The boss finally howled, a mighty sound that
made stalactites thunder down from the ceiling and shatter into sprays
of sharp rock that dealt minor damage to the survivors of their party,
damage that they flinched away from anyway, as they were all running in
the red. The experience points were incredible -- he dinged up a full
level -- and there were several very good drops. He almost reached for
his workspace to add a few more to reward his comrades for their skill
and bravery, forcibly reminding himself that he was not on their
side , that this was research and infiltration.
2188
> You guys are great!
2189
The ogre emoted a bow and a little victory dance, another custom number
that was graceful and funny at once.
2190
> You play well. Good luck with your studies.
2191
Connor's fingers hovered over the keys.
2192
> I hope you get to see your family soon
2193
The ogre emoted a quick hug, and it made Connor feel momentarily
ashamed of what he did next. But he did it. He added the entire guild
to his watchlist, so that every message and move would be logged,
machine-translated into English. Every transaction they made -- all the
gold they sold or gave away -- would be traced and traced again as part
of Connor's efforts to unravel the complex, multi-thousand-party
networks that were used to warehouse, convert and distribute
game-goods. He had hundreds of accounts in the database already, and at
the rate he was going, he'd have thousands by the end of the week --
and it was already Wednesday.
2194
The police raided Jie's studio while she and Lu were out eating
dumplings and staring into each others' eyes. It was one of her backup
studios, but they'd worked out of it two days in a row, and had been
about to work out of it for a third. This was a violation of basic
security, but Jie's many apartments were fast filling up with Webblies
who had quit their farming jobs in frustration and joined the full-time
effort to amass gold and treasure for the plan.
2195
The dumpling shop was run by a young woman who looked after her two
year old son and her sister's four year old daughter, but she was
nevertheless always cheerful when they came in, if prone to making
suggestive remarks about young love and the dangers of early
parenthood.
2196
She was just handing them the bill -- Lu once again made a show of
reaching for it, though not so fast that Jie coudn't snatch it from him
and pay it herself, as she was the one with all the money in the
relationship -- when his phone went crazy.
2197
He pulled it out, looked at its face, saw that it was Big Sister Nor,
calling from a number that she wasn't supposed to be using for another
24 hours according to protocol. That means that she worried her old
number had been compromised, which meant that things were bad. Turning
to the wall and covering the receiver with his hand, he answered.
2198
"Wei?"
2199
"You've been burned." It was The Mighty Krang, whose Taiwanese accent
was instantly recognizable. "We're watching the webcams in the studio
now. Ten cops, tearing the place apart."
2200
"Shit!" he said it so loudly that the four year old cackled with
laughter and dumpling lady scowled at him. Jie slid close to him and
put her cheek next to his -- he instantly felt a little better for her
company -- and whispered, "What is it?"
2201
"You're all secure, right?"
2202
He thought about it for a second. All their disks were encrypted, and
they self-locked after ten minutes of idle time. The police wouldn't be
able to read anything off any of the machines. He had two sets of IDs
on him, the current one, which was due to be flushed later that day
according to normal procedure, and the next set, hidden in a pocket
sewn into the inside of his pants-leg. Ditto for his current and next
SIMs, one loaded in his current phone and a pouch of new ones in order
of planned usage inserted into a slit in his belt. He covered the
mouthpiece and whispered to Jie: "The studio's gone." She sucked air
past her teeth. "Are you all buttoned-up?"
2203
She clicked her tongue. "Don't worry about me, I've been doing this for
a lot longer than you." She began to methodically curse under her
breath, digging through her purse and switching out IDs and cracking
open her phone to swap the SIM. "I had really nice stuff in that
place," she said. "Good clothes. My favorite mic. We are such idiots.
Never should have recorded there twice in a row."
2204
The Mighty Krang must have heard, because he chuckled. "Sounds like
you're both OK?"
2205
"Well, Jiandi won't be able to go on the air tonight," he said.
2206
"Screw that," Jie said. She took the phone from him. "Tell Big Sister
Nor that we're going on air at the usual time tonight. Normal service,
no interruptions."
2207
Lu didn't hear the reply, but he could see from Jie's grimly satisfied
expression that The Mighty Krang had praised her. It had been Big
Sister Nor's idea to rig all the studios with webcams all the Webblies
could access, just in the front rooms. It was a little weird, trying to
ignore the all-seeing eye of the webcam screwed in over the door. But
when you're sleeping 20 to a room, it's easy to let go of your ideas
about privacy -- but all the same, Lu and Jie now sat far apart when
broadcasting, and snuck into the bathroom to make out afterward.
2208
And now the webcams had paid off. He took the phone back and listened
as The Mighty Krang narrated a play-back of the video, cops breaking
the door down, securing the space. Then an evidence team that spliced
batteries into the computers' power cables so they could be unplugged
without shutting down (Lu was grateful that Big Sister Nor had decreed
that all their hardware had to be configured to unmount and re-encrypt
the drives when they were idle), took prints and DNA. They already had
Lu's DNA, of course, because they'd sniffed out one of Jie's other
apartments. But Jie had been way ahead of this: she had a little pocket
vacuum cleaner, intended for clearing crumbs and gunk out of keyboards,
and she surreptitiously vacuumed out the seats whenever she took a
train or a bus, sucking up the random DNA of thousands of people, which
she carefully scattered around her apartments when she got in. He'd
laughed at the ingenuity of this, and she told him she'd read about it
in a novel.
2209
The evidence team brought in a panoramic camera and set it in the
middle of the room and the police cleared out momentarily as it swept
around in a tight, precise mechanical circle, producing a wraparound
high-resolution image of the room. Then the cops swept back in, minus
their paper overshoes, and put every scrap of paper and every piece of
optical and magnetic media into more bags, and then they destroyed the
place.
2210
Working with wrecking bars and wicked little knifes, and starting from
the corner under the front door, they methodically smashed every single
stick of furniture, every floor tile, every gyprock wall, turning it
all into pieces no bigger than playing-cards, heaping it behind them as
they went. They worked in near silence, without rushing, and didn't
appear to relish the task. This wasn't vandalism, it was absolute
annihilation. The policemen had the regulation brushcut short hair,
identical blue uniforms, paper face-masks, kevlar gloves. One drew
closer and closer to the webcam, spotted it -- a little pinhead with a
peel-away adhesive backing stuck up in a dusty corner -- and peeled it
away. His face loomed large in it for a moment, his pores, a stray hair
poking out of his nostrils, his eyes dead and predatory. Then chaos,
and nothing.
2211
"He stamped on it, we think," The Mighty Krang said. "So much for the
webcams. It'll be the first thing they look for next time. Still, saved
your ass, didn't it?"
2212
The description had momentarily taken away Lu's breath. All his things,
his spare clothes, the comics he'd been reading, a half-chewed pack of
energy gum he'd bought the day before, disappeared into the bowels of
the implacable authoritarian state. It could have been him.
2213
"We're going to move on to the next safe-house," he said. "We'll find
somewhere to broadcast from tonight."
2214
"You're bloody right we will," said Jie, from his side.
2215
They gave the old building a wide berth as they made their way down
into the Metro, and consciously forced themselves not to flinch every
time a police siren wailed past them. When they came back up to street
level, Jie took Lu's hand and said, out of the corner of her mouth,
"All right, Tank, what do we do now?"
2216
He shrugged. "I don't know. That was, uh, close ." He swallowed.
"Don't be mad if I say something?"
2217
She squeezed his fingers. "Say it."
2218
"You don't need to do this," he said. She stopped and looked at him,
her face white. Before they'd ever kissed, he always felt a void
between them, an invisible force-field he had to push his way through
in order to tell her how he felt. Once they'd become a couple, the
force-field had thinned, but not vanished, and every time he said or
did something stupid, he felt it pushing him away. It was back in force
now. He spoke quickly, hoping his words would batter their way through
it: "I mean, this is crazy . We're probably all going to go to
jail or get killed." She was still staring at him. "You're just --" He
swallowed. "You're good at this stuff, is what I'm trying to
say. You could probably broadcast your show for ten more years without
getting caught and retire a rich woman. You don't need to throw it away
on us."
2219
Her eyes narrowed. "Did I promise not to get mad?"
2220
He tried a little nervous smile. "Sort of?"
2221
She looked back and forth. "Let's walk," she said. "We stand out here."
They walked. Her fingers were limp in his hand, and then slipped out.
The force-field grew stronger. He felt more afraid than he had when The
Mighty Krang had described the action from the studio camera. "You
think I'm doing this all for money? I could have more money if I wanted
to. I could take dirtier advertisers. I could start a marketing scheme
for my girls and ask them to send me money -- there's millions of them,
if each one only sent me a few RMB, I'd be so rich I could retire."
2222
The handshake buildings loomed around them, and she broke off as they
found themselves walking single file down a narrow alley between two
buildings. She caught up with him and leaned in close, speaking so
softly it was almost a whisper. "I could just be another dirty
con-artist who comes to South China, steals all she can, and goes back
home to the countryside. I'm not doing that. Do you know why?"
2223
He fumbled for the words and she dug her fingernails into his palm. He
fell silent.
2224
"It's a rhetorical question," she said. "I'm doing it because I
believe in this . I was telling my girls to fight back against their
bosses before you ever played your first game. With or without you,
I'll be telling them to fight back. I like your group, I like the way
they cross borders so easily, even more easily than I get back and
forth from Hong Kong. So I'm supporting your friends, and telling my
girls to support them too. The problem you have is a worker's
problem, not a Chinese problem, not a gamer's problem. The factory
girls are workers and they want a good deal just as much as you and
your gamer friends do."
2225
She was breathing heavily, Lu noticed, angry little snorts through her
nose.
2226
He tried to say something, but all that came out was a mumble.
2227
"What?" she said, her fingernails digging in again.
2228
"I'm sorry," he said. "I just didn't want you to get hurt."
2229
"Oh, Tank," she said. "You don't need to be my big, strong protector.
I've been taking care of myself since I left home and came to South
China. It may come as a huge surprise to you, but girls don't need big,
strong boys to look after them."
2230
He was silent for a moment. They were almost at the entrance of the
safe house. "Can I just admit that I'm an idiot and we'll leave it at
that?"
2231
She pretended to think it over for a moment. "That sounds OK to me,"
she said. And she kissed him, a warm, soft kiss that made his feet
sweaty and the hairs on his neck stand up. She chewed his lower lip for
a moment before letting go, then made a rude gesture at the boys who
were calling down at them from a high balcony overhead.
2232
"OK," she said, "Let's go do a broadcast."
2233
It had all been so neatly planned. They would wait until after monsoon
season with its torrential rains; after Diwali with its religious
observances and firecrackers; after Mid-Autumn Festival when so many
workers would be back in their villages, where the surveillance was so
much less intense. They would wait until the big orders came in for the
US Thanksgiving season, when sweaty-palmed retailers hoped to make
their years profitable with huge sales on goods made and shipped from
the whole Pacific Rim.
2234
That had been a good plan. Everyone liked it. Wei-Dong, the boy who'd
crossed the ocean with their prepaid game-cards, had just about wet his
pants at the brilliance of it. "You'll have them over a barrel," he
kept repeating. "They'll have to give in, and fast ."
2235
The in-game project was running very well. That Ashok fellow in Mumbai
had worked out a very clever plan for signalling the vigor of their
various "investment vehicles" and the analysts who watched this were
eating it up. They were selling more bad paper than they could print.
It had surprised everyone, even Ashok, and they'd actually had to pull
some Webblies off sales-duty: it turned out that a surprising number of
people would believe any rumor they heard on an investment board or
in-game canteen.
2236
The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor were likewise very happy with the
date and had stuck a metaphorical pin in it, and began to plan. Justbob
was fine with this, but she was a warrior and so she understood that
the first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack. So while
Big Sister Nor and Krang and the other lieutenants in China and
Indonesia and Singapore and Vietnam and Cambodia were beavering away
making plans for the future, Justbob was leading skirmishers in
exercises, huge, world-spanning battles where her warriors ran their
armies up against one another by the thousand.
2237
Big Sister Nor hated it, said it was too high-profile, that it would
tip off the game-runners that there were armies massing in gamespace,
and then they would naturally wonder what the players were massing
for and it would all unravel. Justbob thought it was a lot more
likely that the gold-farmers and the elaborate cons would tip them off,
seeing as how armies were about as common in gamespace as onions were
in a stir-fry. She didn't try to tell this to Big Sister Nor, who
hardly played games at all any more. Instead, she obediently agreed to
take it easy, to be careful, and so on.
2238
And then she sent her armies against one another again.
2239
It wasn't like any other game anyone had ever played. The armies were
vast, running to the thousands and growing every day. She drilled them
for hours, and the generals and leaders and commandants and whatever
they called themselves dreamt up their best strategy and tactics,
devised nightmare ambushes and sneaky guerilla wars, and they sharpened
their antlers against one another.
2240
As Big Sister Nor's complaints grew more serious, Justbob presented her
with statistics on the number of high-level characters the Webblies now
had at their disposal, as the skirmishing was a fast way to level up.
She had players who controlled five or six absolute top-level toons,
each associated with its own prepaid account, each accessed via a
different proxy and untraceable to the others. Big Sister Nor warned
her again to be careful, and The Mighty Krang took her aside and told
her how irresponsible she was to endanger the whole effort with her
warring. She took off her eyepatch and scratched at the oozing scars
over the ruined socket, a disconcerting trick that never failed to send
The Mighty Krang packing with a greenish face.
2241
Justbob tried to keep the smile off her face when Big Sister Nor woke
her in the middle of the night to tell her that the plan was dead, and
the action had started, right then, in the middle of monsoon season, in
the middle of Diwali, with only weeks to go before Mid-Autumn Festival.
2242
"What did it?" she said, as she pulled on a long dress and wound her
hijab around her head. She'd spent most of her life in western dress,
dressing to shock and for easy getaways, but since she'd gone straight,
she'd opted for the more traditional dress. What it lacked in mobility
it made up for in coolness, anonymity, and the disorienting effect it
had on the men who had once threatened her (though it hadn't stopped
the thugs who'd cost her her eye).
2243
"Another strike in Dongguan. This time in Guangzhou. It's big."
2244
The room was stuffy. These rooms always were. But the September heat
had pushed the temperature up to stratospheric heights, so that the
cafe smouldered like the caldera of a dyspeptic volcano. The cafe's
owner, a scarred old man whom everyone knew to be a front for some
heavy gangsters, had sent a technician around with a screwdriver to
remove all the cases from the PCs so that the heat could dissipate more
readily from the sweating motherboards and those monster-huge graphics
cards that bristled with additional fans and glinted with copper
heatsinks. This might have been better for the computers, but it made
the room even hotter and filled it with a jet-engine roar that was so
loud the players couldn't even use noise-cancelling headsets to chat:
they had to confine all their communications to text.
2245
The cafe had once catered to gamers from off the street, along with
love-sick factory girls who spent long nights chatting with their
virtual boyfriends, homesick workers who logged in to spin lies about
their wonderful lives in South China for the people back home, as well
as the occasional lost tourist who was hoping to get a little online
time to keep up with friends and find cheap hotel rooms. But for the
past two years, it had exclusively housed an ever-growing cadre of
gold-farmers sent there by their bosses, who oversaw a dozen shifting,
interlocked businesses that formed and dissolved overnight, every time
a little trouble blew their way and it became convenient to roll up the
store and disappear like a genie.
2246
The boys in the cafe that night were all young, not a one over 17. All
the older boys had been purged the month before, when they'd demanded a
break after a 22-hour lock-in to meet a huge order from an upstream
supplier. Getting rid of those troublemakers had two nice effects for
their bosses: it let them move in a cheaper workforce and it let them
avoid paying for all those locked-in hours. There were always more boys
who'd play games for a living.
2247
And these boys could play . After a 12-hour shift, they'd hang
around and do four or five more hours' worth of raiding for fun .
The room was a cauldron in which boys, heat, noise, dumplings and
network connections were combined to make a neverending supply of stew
of wealth for some mostly invisible older men.
2248
Ruiling knew that there had been some other boys working there before,
older boys who'd had some kind of dispute with the bosses. He didn't
think about them much but when he did, he pictured slow, greedy fools
who didn't want to really work for a living. Lamers whose asses he
could kick back to Sichuan province or whatever distant place they'd
snuck to the Pearl River Delta from.
2249
Ruiling was a hell of a player. His speciality was PvP -- player versus
player -- because he had the knack of watching another player's
movements for a few seconds and then building up a near-complete view
of that player's idiosyncracies and weak spots. He couldn't explain it
-- the knowledge simply shone through at him, like an arrow in the
eye-socket. The upshot of this was that no one could level a character
faster than Ruiling. He'd simply wander around a game with a Chinese
name, talking in Chinese to the players he met. Eventually, one of them
-- some rich, fat, stupid westerner who wanted to play vigilante --
would start calling him names and challenge him to a fight. He'd
accept. He would kick ass. He'd gain points.
2250
It was amazing how satisfying this was.
2251
Ruiling had just finished twelve hours of this and had ordered in a
tray of pork dumplings and doused them in hot Vietnamese rooster red
sauce and chopsticked them into his mouth as fast as he could chew, and
now he was ready to relax with some after-work play. For this, he
always used his own toon, a char he'd started playing with when he was
a boy in Gansu. In some ways, this toon was him , so long had he
lived with it, lovingly buffing it, training it, dressing it in the
rarest of treasures. He had trained up innumerable toons and seen them
sold off, but Ruiling was his .
2252
Tonight, Ruiling partied with some other farmers he knew from other
parts of China, some of whom he'd known back in his village, some of
whom he'd never met. They were a ferocious nightly raiding guild that
pulled off the hardest missions in the worlds, the cream of the crop.
Word had gotten round and now every night he had an audience of players
who'd just been hired on, watching in awe as he kicked fantastic
quantities of ass. He loved that, loved answering their questions after
he was done playing, helping the whole team get better. And you know,
they loved him too, and that was just as great.
2253
They ran Buri's fortress, the palace of a long-departed god, the father
of gods, the powerful, elemental force that had birthed Svartalfaheim
and the universe in which it lay. It had fearsome guardians, required
powerful spells just to reach, and had never been fully run in the
history of Svartalfaheim. Just the kind of mission Ruiling loved to
try. This would be his sixth crack at it, and he was prepared to raid
for six hours straight if that's what it took, and so was the rest of
his party.
2254
And then he got Fenrir's Tooth. It was the rarest and most legendary
drop in all of Svartalfaheim Warriors, a powerful talisman that would
turn any wolf-pack or enthral them to the Tooth's holder. The message
boards had been full of talk about it, and several times there'd been
fraudulent auctions for it, but no one had ever seen it before.
2255
After Ruiling picked it up -- it had come from an epic battle with an
army of Sky Giants, in which the entire raiding party had been killed
-- he was so stunned by it that he couldn't speak for a moment. He just
pointed at the screen while his mouth opened and shut for a moment.
2256
The players watching him fell silent, too, following his gaze and his
finger, slowly realizing what had just happened. A murmur built through
the crowd, picking up steam, picking up volume, turning into a
roar , a triumphant shout that brought the entire cafe over to
see. Over the fans' noise they buzzed excitedly, a hormone-drenched
triumphant tribal chest-beating exercise that swept them all up. Every
boy imagined what it would be like to go questing with Fenrir's Tooth,
able to defeat any force with a flick of the mouse that would send the
wolf packs against your enemies. Every boy's heart thudded in his
chest.
2257
But there was another sound, getting louder and more insistent. An
older voice, raspy with a million cigarettes, a hard voice. "Sit down!
Sit down! Back to work! Everyone back to work!"
2258
It was Huang the foreman, shouting with a fearsome Fujianese accent. He
was rumored to be an ex-Snakehead, thrown out of the human smuggling
gang for killing too many migrants with rough treatment. Usually, he
sat lizardlike and motionless in the corner, smoking a succession of
cheap Chinese Class-D fake Marlboros, harsh and unfiltered, a lazy curl
of smoke giving him a permanent squint on one side of his face.
Sometimes players would forget he was there and their shouting and
horseplay would get a little out of control and then he would steal up
behind them on cat-silent feet and deliver a hard blow to the ear that
would send them reeling. It was enough of an object lesson -- "Don't
make the Snakehead mad or he'll lay a beating on you that you won't
forget" -- that he hardly ever had to repeat it.
2259
Now, though, he was clouting boys left and right, bellowing orders in a
loud, hoarse voice. The boys retreated to their computers in a shoving
rush, leaving Ruiling alone in his seat, an uncertain smile on his
face.
2260
"Boss," he said, "you see what I've done?" He pointed to his screen.
2261
Huang's face was as impassive as ever. He put a hard, heavy hand on
Ruiling's shoulder and leaned in to read the screen, his head wreathed
in smoke. Finally, he straightened. "Fenrir's Tooth," he said. He
nodded. "A bonus for you, Ruiling. Very good."
2262
Ruiling shrank back. "Boss," he said, respectfully, speaking loudly to
be heard over the computer fans. "Boss, that is my character. I am not
working now. It's my personal character."
2263
Huang turned to look at him, his eyes hard and his expression flat. "A
bonus," he said again. "Well done."
2264
"It's my character," Ruiling said, speaking more loudly. "No
bonus. It's mine ! I earned it, personally, on my own
time."
2265
He didn't even see the blow, it was that fast. One minute he was hotly
declaring that Fenrir's Tooth was his, the next he was sprawled on his
ass on the floor, his head ringing like a gong. The foreman put one
foot on his throat.
2266
The man said, "No bonus," clearly and distinctly, so that everyone
around could hear. Then he hawked up a huge mouthful of poisonous green
spit from the tar-soaked depths of his blackened lungs and carefully
spat in Ruiling's face.
2267
From the age of four, Ruiling had practised wushu, training with a man
in the village whom all the adults deferred to. The man had been sent
north during the Cultural Revolution, denounced and beaten and starved,
but he never broke. He was as gentle and patient as a grandmother, and
he was as old as the hills, and he could send an attacker flying
through the air with a flick of the wrist; break a board with his old
hands, kick you into the next life with one old, gnarled foot. For 12
years, Ruiling had gone three times a week to train with the old man.
All the boys had. It was just part of life in the village. He hadn't
practised since he came to South China, had all but forgotten that
relic of a different China.
2268
But now he remembered every lesson, remembered it deep in his muscles.
He gripped the ankle of the foot that was on his throat, twisted just
slightly to gain maximum leverage, and applied a small,
controlled bit of pressure and threw the foreman into the air,
sending him sailing in a perfect, graceful arc that terminated when his
head cracked against the side of one of the long trestle-tables,
knocking it over and sending a dozen flatscreens tumbling to the
ground, the crash audible over the computer fans.
2269
Ruiling stood, carefully, and faced the foreman. The man was groaning
on the ground, and Ruiling couldn't keep the small grin off his face.
That had felt good . He found that he was standing in a ready
stance, weight balanced evenly on each foot, feet spread for stability,
body side-on to the man on the ground, presenting a smaller target. His
hands were loosely held up, one before the other, ready to catch a
punch and lock the arm and throw the attacker, ready to counterstrike
high or low. The boys around him were cheering, chanting his name, and
Ruiling smiled more broadly.
2270
The foreman picked himself up off the floor, no expression at all on
his face, a terrible blankness, and Ruiling felt his first inkling of
fear. Something about how the man held himself as he stood, not
anything like the stance in the martial arts games he'd played in the
village. Something altogether more serious. Ruiling heard a high
whining noise and realized it was coming from his own throat.
2271
He lowered his hands slightly, extended one in a friendly, palm up way.
"Come on now," he said. "Let's be adults about this."
2272
And that's when the foreman reached under the shoulder of his
ill-fitting, rumpled, dandruff-speckled suit-jacket and pulled out a
cheap little pistol, pointed it at Ruiling, and shot him square in the
forehead.
2273
Even before Ruiling hit the ground, one eye open, the other shut, the
boys around him began to roar. The foreman had one second to register
the sound of a hundred voices rising in anger before the boys boiled
over, clambering over one another to reach him. Too late, he tried to
tighten his finger on the trigger of the gun he'd carried ever since
leaving behind Fujian province all those years before. By then, three
boys had fastened themselves to his arm and forced it down so that the
gun was aiming into the meat of his old thigh, and the .22 slug he
squeezed off drilled itself into the big femur before flattening on the
shattered bone, spreading out like a lead coin.
2274
When he opened his mouth to scream, fingers found their way into his
cheeks, viciously tearing at them even as other hands twined themselves
in his hair, fastened themselves to his feet and his arms, even yanked
at his ears. Someone punched him hard in the balls, twice, and he
couldn't breathe around the hands in his mouth, couldn't scream as he
tumbled down. The gun was wrenched from his hand at the same instant
that two fists drilled into his eyes, and then it was dark and painful
and infinite, a moment that stretched off into his unconsciousness and
then into -- annihilation.
2275
"So now what?" Justbob slurped at her congee, which they'd sent out
for, along with strong coffee and a plate of fresh rolls. At 3AM in the
Geylang, food choices were slightly limited, but they never went away
altogether.
2276
The Mighty Krang pulled up a video, waited for it to buffer, then
scrolled it past, fast. "Three of the boys caught the shooting -- the
execution -- on their phones. The goon who went down, well, he
doesn't look so good." A shot from inside the dark room, now abandoned,
the foreman on his back amid a wreck of broken computers and monitors,
motionless, both arms broken at the elbows, face a ruin of jelly and
blood. "We assume he's dead, but the strikers aren't letting anyone
in."
2277
"Strikers," Justbob said, and The Mighty Krang clicked another video.
This one took longer to load, some server somewhere groaning under the
weight of all the people trying to access it at once. That never
happened any more, it had been years since it had happened, and it made
Justbob realize how fast this thing must be spreading. The realization
scythed through her grogginess, made her eye spring open, the other
ruin work behind its patch.
2278
The video loaded. Hundreds of boys, gathered in front of an anonymous
multi-story building, the kind of place you pass by the thousand.
They'd tied their shirts around their faces, and they were pumping
their fists in the air and more people were coming out to join them.
Boys, old people, girls --
2279
"Girls?"
2280
"Factory girls. Jiandi. She did a special broadcast. Stupid. She nearly
got caught, chased out of another safe house. She's running out of bolt
holes. But she got the word out."
2281
"Did we know?"
2282
Big Sister Nor's face was a thundercloud, ominous and dark. "Of course
not. If we'd known, we would have told her not to do it. Chill out.
Hold off. We have a schedule, lots of moving parts."
2283
"The dead boy?"
2284
"There --" Krang said, and pointed his mouse at the edge of the video.
A trestle table, set up beside the boys, with the dead boy draped on
it. Looking closely, she could see the bullet hole in his forehead, the
streak of blood running down the side of his face.
2285
"Aha," Justbob said. "Well, we're not going to cool anything out now."
2286
Big Sister Nor said, "We don't know that. There's still a chance --"
2287
"There's no chance," Justbob said, and her finger stabbed at the
screen. "There are thousands of them out there. What's happening
in world?"
2288
"It's a disaster," Krang said. "Every gold-farming operation is in
chaos. Webblies are attacking them by the thousands. And it gets worse
as the day goes by. They're just waking up in China, so fresh forces
should be coming in --"
2289
Justbob swallowed. "That's not a disaster," she said. "That's battle.
And they'll win. And they'll keep on winning. From this moment forward,
I'd be surprised to see if any new gold comes onto the markets,
in any game. We can change logins as fast as the gamerunners shut down
accounts, and what's more, there are plenty of regular players who've
been skirmishing with us for the fun of it who'll shout bloody murder
if they lose their accounts. We've got the games sewn up." She kept her
face impassive, reached for a cup of tea, sipped it, set it down.
2290
Big Sister Nor stared at her for a long time. They had been friends for
a long time, but unlike Krang, Justbob wasn't in worshipful love with
Nor. She knew just how human Big Sister Nor could be, had seen her
screw up in small and big ways. Big Sister Nor knew it, too and had the
strength of character to listen to Justbob even when she was saying
things that Nor didn't want to hear.
2291
Krang looked back and forth between the two young women, feeling shut
out as always, trying not to let it show, failing. He got up from the
table, muttering something about going out for more coffee, and neither
woman took any notice.
2292
"You think that we're ready?" Big Sister Nor said after the safe-house
door clicked shut.
2293
"I think we have to be," said Justbob. "The first casualty of any
battle..."
2294
"I know, I know," Big Sister Nor said. "You can stop saying that now."
2295
When The Mighty Krang came back, he saw immediately how things had
gone. He distributed the coffee and got to work.
2296
Mrs Dibyendu's cafe was locked up tight, shutters drawn over the
windows and doors.
2297
"Hey!" called Ashok, rapping on the door. "Hey, Mrs Dibyendu! It's
Ashok! Hey!" It was nearly 7AM, and Mrs Dibyendu always had the cafe
open by 6:30, catching some of the early morning trade as the workers
who had jobs outside of Dharavi walked to their bus-stops or the train
station. It was unheard of for her to be this late. "Hey!" he called
again and used his key-ring to rap on the metal shutter, the sound
echoing through the tin frame of the building.
2298
"Go away!" called a male voice. At first Ashok assumed it came from one
of the two rooms above the cafe, where Mrs Dibyendu rented to a dozen
boarders -- two big families crammed into the small spaces. He craned
his neck up, but the windows there were shuttered too.
2299
"Hey!" he banged on the door again, loud in the early morning street.
2300
Someone threw the bolts on the other side of the door and pushed it
open so hard it bounced off his toe and the tip of his nose, making
both sting. He jumped back out of the way and the door opened again.
There was a boy, 17 or 18, with a huge, pitted machete the length of
his forearm. The boy was skinny to the point of starvation,
bare-chested with ribs that stood out like a xylophone. He stared at
Ashok from red-rimmed, stoned eyes, pushed lanky, greasy hair off his
forehead with the back of the hand that wasn't holding the machete. He
brandished it in Ashok's face.
2301
"Didn't you hear me?" he said. "Are you deaf? Go away!" The machete
wobbled in his hand, dancing in the air before his face, so close it
made him cross his eyes.
2302
He stepped back and the boy held his arm out further, keeping the
machete close to his face.
2303
"Where's Mrs Dibyendu?" Ashok said, keeping his voice as calm as he
could, which wasn't very. It cracked.
2304
"She's gone. Back to the village." The boy smiled a crazy, evil smile.
"Cafe is closed."
2305
"But --" he started. The boy took another step forward, and a wave of
alcohol and sweat-smell came with him, a strong smell even amid
Dharavi's stew of smells. "I have papers in there," Ashok said.
"They're mine. In the back room."
2306
There were other stirring sounds from the cafe now, more skinny boys
showing up in the doorway. More machetes. "You go now," the lead boy
said, and he spat a stream of pink betel-stained saliva at Ashok's
feet, staining the cuffs of his jeans. "You go while you can go."
2307
Ashok took another step back. "I want to speak to Mrs Dibyendu. I want
to speak to the owner!" he said, mustering all the courage he could not
to turn on his heel and run. The boys were filing out into the little
sheltered area in front of the doorway now. They were smiling.
2308
"The owner?" the boy said. "I'm his representative. You can tell me."
2309
"I want my papers."
2310
"My papers," the boy said. "You want to buy them?"
2311
The other boys were chuckling now, hyena sounds. Predator sounds. All
those machetes. Every nerve in Ashok's body screaming go . "I
want to speak with the owner. You tell him. I'll be back this
afternoon. To talk with him."
2312
The bravado was unconvincing even to him and to these street hoods it
must have sounded like a fart in a windstorm. They laughed louder, and
louder still when the boy took another rushing step toward him,
swinging the machete, just missing him, blade whistling past him with a
terrifying whoosh as he backpedaled another step, bumped into a man
carrying a home-made sledgehammer on his way to work, squeaked,
actually squeaked , and ran.
2313
Mala's mother answered his knock after a long delay, eyeing him
suspiciously. She'd met him on two other occasions, when he'd walked
"the General" home from a late battle, and she hadn't liked him either
time. Now she glared openly and blocked the doorway. "She's not
dressed," she said. "Give her a moment."
2314
Mala pushed past her, hair caught in a loose ponytail, her gait an
assertive, angry limp. She aimed a perfunctory kiss at her mother's
cheek, missing by several centimeters, and gestured brusquely down the
stairs. Ashok hurried down, through the lower room with its own family,
bustling about and getting ready for work, then down another flight to
the factory floor, and then out into the stinging Dharavi air. Someone
was burning plastic nearby, the stench stronger than usual, an instant
headache of a smell.
2315
"What?" she said, all business.
2316
He told her about the cafe.
2317
"Bannerjee," she said. "I wondered if he'd try this." She got out her
phone and began sending out texts. Ashok stood beside her, a head
taller than her, but feeling somehow smaller than this girl, this ball
of talent and anger in girl form. Dharavi was waking now, and the
muzzein's call to prayer from the big mosque wafted over the shacks and
factories. Livestock sounds -- roosters, goats, a cowbell and a big
bovine sneeze. Babies crying. Women struggled past with their water
jugs.
2318
He thought about how unreal all this was for most of the people he
knew, the union leaders he'd grown up with, his own family. When he
talked with them about Webbly business, they mocked the unreality of
life in games, but what about the unreality of life in Dharavi? Here
were a million people living a life that many others couldn't even
conceive of.
2319
"Come on," she said. "We're meeting at the Hotel U.P.."
2320
When he'd come to Dharavi, the "hotels" on the main road in the
Kumbharwada neighborhood had puzzled him, until he found out that
"hotel" was just another word for restaurant. The Webblies liked the
Hotel U.P., a workers' co-op staffed entirely by women who'd come from
villages in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh. It was mutual, the women
enjoying the chance to mother these serious children while they spoke
in their impenetrable jargon, a blend of Indian English, gamerspeak,
Chinese curses, and Hindi, the curious dialect that he thought of as
Webbli , as in Hindi .
2321
The Webblies, roused from their beds early in the morning, crowded in
sleepily, demanding chai and masala Cokes and dhosas and aloo poories.
The ladies who owned the restaurant shuttled pancakes and fried potato
popovers to them in great heaps, Mala paying for them from a wad of
greasy rupees she kept in a small purse she kept before her. Ashok sat
beside her on her left hand, and Yasmin sat on her right, eyes
half-lidded. The army had been out late the night before, on a group
trip to a little filmi palace in the heart of Dharavi, to see three
movies in a row as a reward for a run of genuinely excellent play.
Ashok had begged off, even though he'd been training with the army on
Mala's orders. He liked the Webblies, but he wasn't quite like them. He
wasn't a gamer, and it would ever be thus, no matter how much fighting
he did.
2322
"OK," Mala said. "Options. We can find another cafe. There is the 1000
Palms, where we used to fight --" she nodded at Yasmin, leaving the
rest unsaid, when we were still Pinkertons, still against the
Webblies . "But Bannerjee has something on the owner there, I've
seen it with my own eyes."
2323
"Bannerjee has something on every cafe in Dharavi," Sushant said. He
had been very adventurous in scouting around for other places for them
to play, on Yasmin's orders. Everyone in the army knew that he had a
crush on Yasmin, except Yasmin, who was seemingly oblivious to it.
2324
"And what about Mrs Dibyendu?" Yasmin said. "What about her business,
all the work she put into it?"
2325
Mala nodded. "I've called her three times. She doesn't answer. Perhaps
they scared her, or took her phone off of her. Or..." Again, she didn't
need to say it, or she is dead. The stakes were high, Ashok
knew. Very high. "And there's something else. The strike has started."
2326
Ashok jumped a little. What? It was too early -- weeks too
early! There was still so much planning to do! He pulled out his phone,
realized that he'd left it switched off, powered it up, stared
impatiently at the boot-screen, listening to the hubub of soldiers
around him. There were dozens of messages waiting for him, from
Big Sister Nor and her lieutenants, from the special operatives who'd
been working on the scam with him, from the American boy who'd been
coordinating with the Mechanical Turks. There had been fighting online
and off, through the night, and the Chinese were thronging the streets,
running from cops, regrouping. Gamespace was in chaos. And he'd been
arguing with drunken thug-boys at the cafe, eating aloo poories and
guzzling chai as though it was just another day. His heart began to
race.
2327
"We need to get online," he said. "Urgently."
2328
Mala broke off an intense discussion of the possibility of getting PCs
into a flat somewhere and bringing in a network link to look at him.
"Bad as that?"
2329
He held up his phone. "You've seen, you know."
2330
"I haven't looked since you came to my place. I knew that there was
nothing we could do until we found a place to work. It is bad, then."
It wasn't a question.
2331
They were all hanging on him. "They need our help," he said.
2332
"All right," Mala said. "All right. So. We go and we take over Mrs
Dibyendu's place again. Bannerjee doesn't own it. Everyone in her road
knows that. They will take our side. They must."
2333
Ashok gulped. "Force?" He remembered the boy: drunk, fearless, eyes
flat, the sharp machete trembling.
2334
The gaze Mala turned on him was every bit as flat. She could transform
like that, in a second, in an instant . She could go from pretty
young girl, charismatic, open, clever and laughing to stone-faced
General Robotwallah, ferocious and uncompromising. Her flat eyes
glittered.
2335
"Force if necessary, always," she said. "Force. Enough force that they
go away and don't come back. Hit them hard, scare them back to their
holes." Around the table, thirty-some Webblies stared at her, their
expressions mirrors of hers. She was their general, and before she came
into their lives, they had been Dharavi rats, working in factories
sorting plastic, going to school for a few hours every day to share
books with four other students. Now they were royalty, with more money
than their parents earned, jobs and respect. They'd follow her off a
cliff. They'd follow her into the Sun .
2336
But Yasmin cleared her throat. "Force if we must," she said. "But
surely no more than is necessary, and not even that if we can help it."
2337
Mala turned to her, back rigid, neck corded, jaw set. Yasmin met her
gaze with calm eyes and then... smiled , a small and sweet and
genuine smile. "If the General agrees, of course."
2338
And Mala melted, the tension going out of her, and she returned
Yasmin's smile. Something had changed between them since the night Mala
had attacked them, something had changed for the better. Now Yasmin
could defuse Mala with a look, a smile, a touch, and the army respected
it, treating Yasmin with reverence, sometimes going to her with their
grievances.
2339
"Of course," Mala said. "No more force than is absolutely necessary."
She picked up her cane -- topped with a silver skull, a gift from her
troops -- and made a few vicious swipes in the air, executed with the
grace of a fencer. He knew that there was a lead weight in the foot of
the cane, and he'd seen her knock holes in brick with a swing. Her
densely muscled forearms hardly trembled as she wielded the cane.
Behind her, one of the ladies who ran the restaurant looked on with
heartbreaking sorrow, and Ashok wondered how many young people she'd
seen ruined in her village and here in the city.
2340
"We go," Mala said, and scraped her chair back. Ashok fell in beside
her and the army marched down the main road three abreast, causing
scooters and motorcycles and goats and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws to
part around them. Many times Ashok had seen swaggering gangs of
badmashes on the street, had gotten out of their way. Now he was in
one, a collection of kids, just kids, the youngest a mere 13, the
eldest not yet 20, led by a limping girl with a long neck and hair in a
loose ponytail, and around them, people reacted with just the same
fear. It swelled Ashok's heart, the power and the fear, and he felt
ashamed and exhilarated.
2341
Before the door of Mrs Dibyendu, Mala stooped and pried a rock from the
crumbling pavement with her fingers, unmindful of the filth that slimed
it. She threw it with incredible accuracy, bowling it like a cricket
ball, crash , into the sheet-tin door of the cafe. Immediately,
she bent to pick up another rock, prying it loose before the echoes of
the first one had died down. Around them, in the narrow street, heads
appeared from windows and doorways, and curious pedestrians stopped to
look on.
2342
The door banged open and there was the boy who had threatened Ashok
earlier, eyes bloodshot and pink even from a safe distance. He held his
machete up like a sword, a snarl on his lips. It died as he
contemplated the 30 soldiers arrayed before him. Many had produced
lengths of wood or iron, or picked up rocks of their own. They stared,
unwavering, at the boy.
2343
"What is it?" He was trying for bravado, but it came out with a squeak
at the end. The machete trembled.
2344
"Careful," whispered Ashok, to himself, to Mala, to anyone who would
listen. A scared bully was even less predictable than a confident one.
2345
"Mrs Dibyendu asked us to come re-open her cafe for her," Mala said,
gesturing with her phone, held in her free hand. "You can go now."
2346
"The new owner asked us to watch his cafe," the boy said, and
everyone on the street heard both lies, Mala's and the boy's. Ashok
tried to figure out how old the boy was. 14? 15? Young, dumb, drunk and
angry and armed.
2347
"Careful," he whispered again.
2348
Mala pocketed her phone and hefted her rock, eyes never leaving the
boy.
2349
"Five," she said.
2350
He grinned at her and spat a stream of pink, betel saliva toward her
feet. She didn't move. No one moved.
2351
"Four."
2352
He raised the machete, point aimed straight at her. She didn't seem to
notice.
2353
"Three."
2354
Silence rang over the alley. Someone on a motorbike tried to push
through the crowd, then stopped, cutting the engine.
2355
"Two."
2356
The boy's eyes cut left, right, left again. He whistled then, hard and
loud, and there was a scrabble of bare feet from the cafe behind him.
2357
"One," Mala said. and raised the rock, winding up like a cricket bowler
again, whole body coiled, and Ashok thought, I have to do something.
Have to stop them. It's insane. But his mouth and his hands and his
feet had other ideas. He remained frozen in place.
2358
The boy raised his machete across his chest, and the hand that held it
trembled even more. Abruptly, Mala threw. The rock flew so fast it made
a sizzling sound in the hot, wet morning air, but it didn't smash the
boy's head in, but rather dashed itself to pieces against the
door-frame behind him, visibly denting it. The boy flinched as
shattered rock bounced off his bare face and chest and arm and back, a
few stray pieces pinging off the machete.
2359
"Leave," Mala said. Behind the boy, five more boys, crowding out of the
doorway, each with his machete. They raised their arms.
2360
"Fight!" hissed one of the boys, the smallest one. There was something
wrong with his head, a web of scar and patchy hair running down the
left side as though he'd had his head bashed in or been dragged. Ashok
couldn't look away from this little boy. He had a cousin that size, a
little boy who liked to play games in the living room and run around
with his friends. A little boy with shoes and clear eyes and three
meals a day and a mother who would tuck him up every night with a kiss
on the forehead.
2361
Mala fixed the boy with her gaze. "Don't fight," she said. "If you
fight, you lose. Get hurt. Run." The army raised their weapons, made a
low rumbling sound that raised to a growl. One of the boys was on his
phone, whispering urgently into it. Ashok saw their fear and felt a
featherweight of relief, these ones would go, not fight. "Run!" Mala
said, and stamped forward. The boys all flinched.
2362
And some of the army snickered at them, a hateful sound that he'd heard
a thousand times while in-game, a taunting sound that spread through
the ranks like a snake slithering around their feet, and the fear in
the boys' faces changed. Became anger.
2363
The moment balanced on a thread as fine as spider's silk, the
snickering soldiers, the boiling boys, the machetes, the clubs and
sticks, the rocks --
2364
The moment broke. The smallest boy held his machete over his head and
charged them, screaming something wordless, howling, really, a sound
Ashok had never heard a boy make. He got three steps before two rocks
caught him, one in the arm and the second in the face, a spray of blood
and a crunch of bone and a tooth that flew high in the air as the boy
fell backwards as if poleaxed.
2365
And the moment shattered. Machetes raised, the remaining five boys ran
for the army, a crazy look in their faces. Ashok had time to wonder if
the little boy lying motionless on the ground was the smaller brother
of one of the remaining badmashes and then the fight was joined. The
tallest boy, the one who'd answered the door that morning and spat at
him, hacked his way through two soldiers, dealing out deep cuts to
their chests and arms -- Ashok's face coated with a fine mist of
geysering arterial blood -- face contorted with rage. He was coming for
Mala, standing centimeters from Ashok, and the blood ran off his
machete and down his arm.
2366
Mala seemed frozen in place, and Ashok thought that he was about to
die, to watch her die first, and he tensed, blood roaring in his ears
so loudly it drowned out the terrible screams of the fighters around
him, desperate and about to grab for the boy. But as he shifted his
weight, Mala barked "NO!" at him, never shifting her eyes from the
leader, and he checked himself, stumbling a half-step forward. The boy
with the machete looked at him for the briefest of instants and Mala
whirled , uncoiling herself, using the weighted skull-tipped cane
to push herself off, then whipping out the arm, the gesture he'd seen
her mime countless times in battle lessons, and the weighted tip
crashed into the boy's forearm with a crack he heard over the
battle-sounds, a crack that he'd last heard that night so many months
before, when Mala and her army had come for him and Yasmin in the
night. Ashok the doctor's son knew exactly what that crack meant.
2367
A blur of fabric as Yasmin danced before him, stooping gracefully to
take the machete up, and the boy just watched, eyes glazed, shock
setting in already. Yasmin delicately and deliberately kicked him in
the kneecap, a well-aimed kick with the toe of her sandal, coming in
from the side, and the boy went down, crying in a little boy's voice,
calling out for his mother with a sound as plaintive as a baby bird
that's fallen from the nest.
2368
It had been mere seconds, but it was already over. Two of the boys were
running away, one was sobbing through a bloody mouth, two were
unconscious. Ashok looked for wounded soldiers. Three had been cut with
machetes, including the two he'd seen hurt by the leader as he ran for
Mala. Remembering the arterial blood, red and rich, Ashok found its
owner first, lying on the ground, eyes half open, breath labored. He
pushed his hands over the injury, a deep cut on the left arm that
spurted with each of the hammering beats of the boy's chest and he
shouted, "A shirt, anything, a bandage," and someone pressed a shirt
into his bloody hands and he applied hard pressure, staunching the
blood. "Someone call for a doctor," he said, making eye-contact with
Anam, a soldier he had hardly spoken to before. "You have a phone?" The
girl was shivering slightly, but she nodded and patted a handbag at her
side, absentmindedly swinging the length of iron in her hand. She
dropped it. "You call the doctor, you understand?" She nodded. "What
will you do?"
2369
"Call the doctor," she said, dreamily, but she began to dial. He turned
and grabbed the hand that had passed him the shirt, and he saw that it
was attached to Mala, who had stripped it off of another boy in her
army. Her chest was heaving, but her gaze was calm.
2370
"Hold here," he ordered, without a moment's scruple about dictating to
the general. This was first aid, it was what he had been trained for by
his father, long before he studied economics, and it brooked no
argument. He pressed her hand against the bloody rag and stood, not
hearing the crackle of his joints. He turned and found the next injured
person, and the next.
2371
And then he came to the boy, the little boy whose misshapen head had
caught his attention. The boy who'd been hit high and low with two
hard-flung rocks. The whole front of his jaw was crushed, a nightmare
of whitish bone and tooth fragments swimming in a jelly of semi-clotted
blood. When Ashok peeled back each eyelid, he saw that the left pupil
was as wide as a sewer entrance, and did not contract when he moved
away and let the sun shine full on it. "Concussion," he muttered to the
air, and Yasmin answered, "Is that bad?"
2372
"His brain is bleeding," Ashok said. "If it bleeds too much, he will
die." He said it simply, as if reading from a textbook. The boy smelled
terrible, and there were sores on his arms and chest and ankles,
swollen, overscratched and infected insect-bites and boils. "He has to
see a doctor." He looked back to the bleeding soldier. "Him too."
2373
He found the girl who'd promised to call a doctor. "Where is the
doctor?" He had no idea how much time had passed since he'd told her to
call. It could have been ten minutes or two hours.
2374
She looked confused. "The ambulance," she began. She looked around
helplessly. "It will come, they said."
2375
And now that he listened for it, he heard it, a distant dee-dah,
dee-dah. The narrow lane that housed Mrs Dibyendu's cafe would never
admit an ambulance. Without speaking, Yasmin ran for the main road, to
hail it. And now that Ashok was listening, he could hear: neighbors
with their heads stuck out of their windows and doorways, passing
furious opinion and gupshup. They cheered on Mala's army, rained curses
down on the badmashes with their machetes, lamented Mrs Dibyendu's
departure, chattered like tropical birds about how she had been forced
out, weeping, and chased down the road in the dark of night.
2376
Ashok was covered in blood. It covered his hands, his arms, his chest,
his face. His lips were covered in dried blood, and there was a coppery
taste in his mouth. His shirt and trousers -- soaked. He straightened
and looked around the crowded lane, up at the chatterers, blinking
owlishly. Around him, the soldiers and the wounded.
2377
Mala was whispering urgently in Sushant's ear, the boy listening
intently. Then he began to move among the soldiers, urging them inside.
The Webblies had work to do. The police would come soon, and the people
inside the building would have the moral authority to claim it was
theirs. The boys with their machetes, injured or gone, would have no
claim. Ashok wondered if he would be arrested, and, if he was, whether
he'd be able to get out. Maybe his father could take care of it. An
important man, a doctor, he could take care --
2378
Two ambulance technicians arrived, bearing heavy bags and collapsed
stretchers. They were locals, with Dharavi accents, sent from the
Lokmanya Tilak hospital, a huge pile with a good reputation. Quickly,
he described the injuries to the men, and they split up to look at the
most serious cases, the deep arterial cut and the concussion. Ashok
stayed near the small boy, feeling somehow responsible for him, more
responsible than for his own teammate, watched as the technician fitted
the boy with a neck-brace and then triggered the air-cannister that
filled it, immobilizing his head. Carefully, the technician seated a
plastic ring in the donut-hole center of the brace, over the boy's
ruined jaw and nose, so that the plastic wouldn't interfere with his
breathing. He unfurled his stretcher, snapped its braces to rigidity
and looked at Ashok.
2379
"You know the procedure?"
2380
Instead of answering, Ashok positioned himself at the boy's skinny
hips, putting a hand on each, ready to roll him up at the same time as
the medic, keeping his whole body in line to avoid worsening any spinal
injuries. The medic slid the stretcher in place, and Ashok rolled the
boy back. For one brief moment, he was supporting nearly all the boy's
weight in his hands and the child seemed to weigh nothing, nothing at
all, as though he was hollow. Ashok found that he was crying, silent
tears that slid down his face, collecting blood, slipping into his
mouth, doubly salty blood and tear mixture.
2381
Mala silently slipped her arm in his. She was very warm in the
oppressive heat of the morning. There would be a rain soon, the
humidity couldn't stay this high all day, the water would come together
soon and then the blood would wash away into the rough gutters that ran
the laneway's length.
2382
"He was a brave kid," Mala said.
2383
Ashok couldn't find a reply.
2384
"I think he thought that if he charged us with that knife, sliced one
of us up, we'd be so scared we'd go away forever."
2385
"You really understand him, then?" Ashok saw Yasmin steal over to them,
slip her fingers into Mala's.
2386
Mala didn't answer.
2387
Yasmin said, "Everyone thinks that you can win the fight by striking
first." Mala's arm tightened on Ashok's arm. "But sometimes you win the
fight by not fighting."
2388
Mala said, "We should call you General Gandhiji."
2389
"It'd be an honor, but I couldn't live up to Gandhi. He was a great
man."
2390
Ashok said, "Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man,
but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all
that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means
that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was
something he battled for, in his own mind, every day." He looked down
at the top of Mala's head, startled for a moment to realize that she
was shorter than him. He had a tendency to think of her as towering,
larger than life.
2391
Mala looked up at him and it seemed that her dark eyes were glowing in
the hot, steamy air, staring out from under her long lashes.
"Controlling yourself is overrated," she said. "There's plenty to be
said for letting go."
2392
There were so many eyes on them, so many people watching from every
corner of the road, and Ashok felt suddenly very self-conscious.
2393
Inside, the cafe was hardly recognizable. It stank like the den of some
sick animal that had gone to ground, and one corner had been used as a
toilet. Many of the computers had been carelessly moved, disconnecting
their wires, and one screen was in fragments on the floor. There were
betel-spit streaks around the floor, and empty bottles of cheap, fiery
booze so awful even the old drunks in the streets wouldn't drink it.
2394
But there was also a photo, much-creased and folded, of a worn but
still pretty woman, formally posed, holding a baby and a slightly
larger boy, whom Ashok remembered from the melee. The baby, he thought,
must have been that younger boy, and he wondered what had become of the
woman, and how she was separated from the sons she held with so much
love. And the more he wondered, the more numb and sorrowful he felt,
until the sorrow welled over him in black waves, like a tide coming in,
until he buckled at the knees and went down to the floor, and if any of
the soldiers saw him hold himself and cry, no one said a word.
2395
His papers were intact, mostly, in the back room where he'd worked, and
the network connection was still up, and the garbage was all swept out
the door and the windows were flung open and soon the sound of joyous
combat and soldierly high spirits filled Mrs Dibyendu's, as it had for
so many days before. Ashok fell into the numbers and the sheets, seeing
how he could work them with the new dates, and he was so engrossed that
he didn't even notice the sudden silence in the cafe that marked the
arrival of a policeman.
2396
The policeman -- fat, corrupt, an old Dharavi rat himself, and more a
creature of the slum than the children -- had already gotten an account
from the neighbors, heard that the machete-wielding badmashes had been
the invaders here, and he wasn't about to get exercised on behalf of
six little nobodies like them. But when there was a death, there had to
be paperwork...
2397
"Death?" Ashok said.
2398
"The small one. Dead by the time he reached the hospital."
2399
Ashok felt as though the floor was dropping away from him and the only
thing that distracted him and kept him from falling with it was the
gasp of dismay from Yasmin behind him, a sound that started off as an
exhalation of breath but turned into a drawn out whimper. He turned and
saw that she had gone so pale that she was actually green, and the
doctor's son in him noticed that her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.
2400
The fat policeman looked at her, and his lips twisted into a wet,
sarcastic smile. "Everything all right, miss?"
2401
"She's fine," Mala said, flatly. She was standing closer to the
policeman than was strictly necessary, too short to stare him in the
eye, but still she seemed to be looking down. Unconsciously, the
policeman shifted his weight back, then took a step back, then turned.
2402
"Good bye, then," he said, brandishing his notebook, containing Ashok's
identity card number; all the soldiers had claimed that they were never
registered for the card, which Ashok really doubted, but which the
policeman didn't question, as the air whistled out of his nostrils and
he sweated in his uniform. The rains had finally come, the skies
opening like floodgates, the rain falling in sheets the color of the
pollution they absorbed on their fall from the heavens. The clatter on
the tin walls and roof was like a firefight in some cheap game where
the guns all made metallic pong and ping sounds.
2403
Ashok watched as Yasmin drifted away into Mrs Dibyendu's little
"office," the room where she made the chai over a small gas burner;
watched as Mala followed her. He tried to work on his calculations, but
he couldn't concentrate until he saw Mala emerge, face slammed shut
into her General Robotwallah expression, but there were still tracks
from the tears on her cheeks. She looked straight through him and
started to bark orders to her soldiers, who had been setting the cafe
to rights and getting all the systems running again. A moment later,
they were all clicking, shouting, headsets on, shoulders tight, in
another world, and the battle was joined.
2404
Ashok found his way into Mrs Dibyendu's office, found Yasmin squatting
by the wall, heels flat on the ground, hands before her. She stared
silently into those hands, twining them around each other like snakes.
2405
"Yasmin," he whispered. "Yasmin?"
2406
She looked at him. There were no tears in her eyes, only an expression
of bottomless sorrow. "I threw the rock," she said. "The rock that hit
that little boy. I threw it. The one that hit him in the mouth. He
was..." She swallowed.
2407
"He was running at us with a machete," Ashok said. "He would have
killed us --"
2408
She chopped her hand through the air, a gesture full of
uncharacteristic violence. "We put ourselves in that position ,
in the position where we'd have to kill him! It was Mala. Mala, she
always wants to win before the battle is fought, win by annihilating
the enemy. And then to talk of Gandhi ?" She looked like she
was going to punch something, small hands balled in fists and then,
abruptly, she pitched forward and threw up, copiously, a complete
ejection of the entire contents of her stomach, more vomit than Ashok
had ever seen emerge from a human throat. In between convulsions, he
half-led, half-carried her out of the cafe, into the all-pounding rain,
and let her throw up into the laneway, which had become a rushing
river, the rain overflowing the narrow ditches on either side of it.
The water ran right up to the cracked slab of cement that served as Mrs
Dibyendu's doorstep, and Yasmin's hijab was instantly soaked as she
leaned out to spatter the water's turbulent surface with poories and
chai and bile. Her long dress clung to her narrow back and shoulders,
and it heaved with them as she labored for breath. Ashok was soaked
too, the blood-taste in his mouth again as the water washed the dried
blood down his face. The rain made talking impossible so he didn't have
to worry about soothing words.
2409
At last Yasmin straightened and then sagged against him. He put his arm
around her, grateful for the feeling of another human being, that
contact that penetrated his numbness. Something passed between them,
carried on the thudding of their hearts, transmitted by their skin, and
for a moment, he felt as though here, here at last, was someone who
understood everything about him and here was someone he understood. The
moment ended, ebbing away, until they were standing in an embarrassed,
awkward half-hug, and they wordlessly disentangled and went back in.
Someone had mopped up the vomit, using the rags that the badmashes had
left behind and then kicking them in a reeking ball in the corner.
Yasmin sat down at a computer and logged in, listening intently to the
chatter around her, catching the order of battle, while Ashok went to
his computer and got ready to talk to Big Sister Nor.
2410
The day the strike started, Wei-Dong was in the midst of his second
special assignment -- the first one had been to bring over the box of
prepaid cards, which had been handed off into the Webbly network to be
scratched off and then keyed in and sent to Big Sister Nor so she could
portion them out to the fighters.
2411
The second assignment was harder in some ways: he was charged with
finding other Mechanical Turks who might be sympathetic to the
strikers' cause and recruit them. Wei-Dong had never thought of himself
as much of a leader -- he'd always been a loner in school -- but Big
Sister Nor had talked to him at length about all the ways in which he
might convince his fellow Turks to consider joining this strange
enterprise.
2412
Technically, it was simple enough to accomplish. As a Turk, he had
access to the leaderboards of Turk activity, which Coca-Cola Online
made a big deal out of, updating them every ten minutes. The
leaderboards listed each Turk by name and showed which parts of the
game he or she hung out in, how many queries she or he handled per
hour, how highly rated the Turk's rulings and role-play were rated by
the players who were randomly surveyed by a satisfaction-bot that gave
out rare badges to any player who would fill in an in-game
questionnaire. The idea was to inspire the Turks by showing them how
much better their peers were doing. It worked, too -- Wei-Dong had
spent many a night trying to pump his stats so that he could get ahead
of the other Turks, scaling to the highest heights before being knocked
down by someone else's all-night run. And, of course, when you pulled
ahead of another Turk, you got to leave a public "message of
encouragement" for them, no more than 140 characters so that it could
be tweeted and texted straight to them, and these messages had pushed
the boundaries of extremely terse profanity and boasting.
2413
Wei-Dong had a new use for the boards: he was using them to figure out
which players were likely to switch sides. The game-runners had created
a facility for bulk-downloading historical data from them, and Turks
were encouraged to make crazy mash-ups and visualizations showing whose
play was the best. Wei-Dong had a different idea.
2414
For weeks now, he'd been downloading gigantic amounts of data from the
boards, piping it all into a database that Matthew had helped him build
and now he could run some very specialized queries on it, queries like,
"Show me Turks who used to lead the pack but have fallen off, despite
long hours of work." Or "Show me Turks who use a lot of profanity when
they're filling in the dialog for non-player characters." And
especially, "Show me Turks who have a below-average level of ratting
out gold-farmers to the bosses." This last one was a major enterprise
among Turks, who got a big bonus every time they busted a farmer. Most
of the Turks went "de-lousing" pretty often, looking to rack up the
extra cash. But a significant minority never, ever hunted the farmers,
and these were Wei-Dong's natural starting point.
2415
He had a long list of leads, and for each one, he had a timetable of
the Turk's habitual login hours and the parts of the world that the
Turk worked most often. Then it was only a matter of logging in using
one of the Webblies many, many toons, heading to that part of the
world, and invoking the Turk and hoping the right person showed up. It
would be easier to just use the Turk message boards, but if he did,
he'd be busted and fired in seconds. This way was less efficient but it
was a lot safer.
2416
Now he was in the Goomba's Star-Fields, a cloudscape in Mushroom
Kingdom where the power-up stars were cultivated in endless rows.
Players could quest here, taking jobs with comical farmers who'd put
them to work weeding the star patches and pulling up the ripe ones. It
was good for training up your abilities; a highly ranked Star Farmer
could get more power-up out of his stars.
2417
And here was the farmer, chewing a corn-stalk and puttering around his
barn, which was also made from clouds. He offered Wei-Dong a quest --
low-level, just pulling up weeds from some of the easier-to-reach
clouds, the ones that weren't patrolled by hostile Lakitus. Wei-Dong
accepted the quest, and then opened a chat with the farmer: "How long
have you owned this farm?"
2418
"Oh, youngster, I've been working this farm since I was but a boy --
and my pappy worked it before me and his pappy before him. Yep, I guess
you could say that we're a farming family, hee hee!"
2419
This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring himself to
type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole range of snappy
answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking a Turk was to get
outside the box.
2420
"Do you like farming?"
2421
"Ay-yuh, you might say I do. It's a good living -- when the sun shines!
Hee hee!"
2422
Wei-Dong rolled his eyes. Who wrote this stuff? "What problems
do you have as a farmer?"
2423
"Oh, it's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"
2424
Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself, a Turk
would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.
2425
"Do you have any problems apart from lack of sunshine?"
2426
"Oh, youngster, you don't want to hear an old farmer's complaints. Many
and many a day I have toiled in these fields and my hands are tired.
Let's speak of more pleasant things, if you please." That was more like
it. The dialog was the kind of thing an enthusiastic role-playing Turk
would come up with, and that fit the profile of the Turk he was after.
2427
"Is your name Jake Snider?" he typed.
2428
The character didn't move for a second. "I ken not this Jake Snider,
youngster. You'd best be on with your chores, now."
2429
"I think you are Jake Snider and I think you know that you're
not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You're pulling down more hours
than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose that is? Did
you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best quarter, ever? And that
the entire executive group got a 20 percent raise? Did you know that
Coke systematically rotates Turks who make too much money out of duty,
replacing them with newbies who don't know how to maximize their
revenue?"
2430
The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder. Wei-Dong
followed.
2431
"Wait! Here's the thing. It doesn't have to be this way ! Workers
can organize and demand a better deal from their bosses. Workers
are organizing. You give it two more months and you'll be out on
the street. Isn't your pay and your dignity worth fighting for?
2432
The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a second
that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had logged out. But
no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer's movements, a little
hesitation. There was still someone home. "I know you can't talk to me
in-game. Here's an email address -- <
2433
He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to game
management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter of
minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one more
prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing happened.
Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a few minutes
later, when his email pinged.
2434
> Tell me more
2435
It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.
2436
"You should go to Hong Kong," Lu said to Jie, holding her hand tightly
and staring into her eyes. "You can do the show from there. It's
safer."
2437
Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed his
hand. "I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won't do it and I
want you to stop talking about it. I'm a Webbly, just like you, just
like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong,
technically , but what would I broadcast about ? I'm a
journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what's going on, to report
on it. I can't do that from HK."
2438
"But it's not safe --"
2439
She cut him off with a chopping gesture. "Of course it's not safe! I
haven't been interested in safety since the day I went on the air.
You're not safe. My factory girls aren't safe. The Webblies on the
picket lines aren't safe. Why should I be safe?"
2440
Lu bit down on the words: because I love you . Secretly, he was
relieved. He didn't know what he'd do if Jie was in Hong Kong and he
was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another flat in a
handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys all
studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in. They
slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went out to
work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more than two or
three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to themselves. Just
the day before, two boys had been followed out of a cafe by a couple of
anonymous hard men who methodically kicked the everloving crap out of
them, right on the public street, sending one to the hospital.
2441
"You know it's only a matter of time until this place is blown," is
what Lu said. "Someone will get careless and be followed home, or one
of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who trek in and
out of the flat at all hours, and then --"
2442
"And then we'll move to another one," she said. "I have been renting
and blowing off apartments for longer than you've been killing trolls.
So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I'll keep on earning, and
if I keep on earning, I can keep on renting."
2443
"How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours every
night telling factory girls to fight back against their bosses?"
2444
A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that always
melted his heart. "Oh, Tank," she said. "The advertisers don't care
what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are listening, and they
are listening ."
2445
She patted his hands. "Now, I want you to go and find me a Webbly to
interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it's all going. Any more
protests?"
2446
He shook his head. "Not the noisy kind. Too many arrests." There were
over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over south China. "But you heard
about Dongguan?"
2447
She shook her head.
2448
"The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of making
a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very slowly around
the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating ice cream."
2449
"Ice-cream?"
2450
He grinned. "Ice-cream. After the jingcha started to arrest anyone who
even looked like he was going to protest, they started posting
these very public notices: 'show up at such-and-such a place and buy an
ice-cream.' Dozens, then hundreds of them, eating ice-cream, grinning
like maniacs, and the police were there, staring at each other like
mannequins, like, Are we going to arrest these boys for eating
ice-cream? And then someone got the bright idea of buying
two ice-creams and giving one away to someone random passing by.
It's the easiest recruitment tool you can imagine!"
2451
She laughed so long and hard that tears ran down her face. "I love you
guys," she said. "I can't wait to talk about this on tonight's
show."
2452
"If they get arrested for eating ice-cream, they're going to switch to
getting together and smiling at each other. Can you imagine?
Are we going to arrest these boys for smiling? "
2453
Her laughter broke through the invisible wall that separated them from
the lounging, off-shift Webblies, who demanded to know what was so
funny. Not all of them knew about the ice-cream -- they were too busy
patrolling the worlds, keeping the gold-farms from being run with
replacement workers -- but everyone agreed that it was pure genius.
2454
Soon they were downloading videos of the ice-cream eating, and then
another shift of boys trickled in and wanted to be let in on the joke,
and before they knew it, they were planning their own ice-cream eating
festival, and the general hilarity continued until Jie and Lu slipped
away to 'cast her show for the night, grabbing a couple of hysterical
Webblies to interview in between the calls from the factory girls.
2455
As Lu put his head down on his pillow and draped his arm around Jie's
narrow shoulders and put his face in her thick, fragrant hair, he had a
moment's peace and joy, real joy, knowing that they couldn't possibly
lose.
2456
The strike was entering its second week when the empire struck back.
Connor had known about the strike for days, but he hadn't taken action
right away. At first he wasn't sure he wanted to take action.
The parasites were keeping each other busy, after all, and the strikers
were doing a better job of shutting down the gold markets than he ever
had (much as it hurt to admit it). Plus there was something
fascinating about the organization of these characters -- they
all came in through proxies, but by watching their sleep schedules and
sniffing their chatter he knew that they were scattered all across the
Pacific Rim and the subcontinent. Sitting there in his god's eye, in
Command Central, he felt like he had a front-row seat to an amazing and
savage flea circus in which exotic, armored insects fought each other
endlessly, moving in precise regimented lines that spoke of military
discipline.
2457
But he couldn't leave them to do this forever. He wasn't the only one
in Command Central who'd noticed that this was going on, and the
derivative markets were starting to pick up on the news, yo-yo-ing so
crazily that even the mainstream press had begun to sniff around.
Game-gold markets had been an exotic, silly-season news-story a couple
years back but these days the only people who paid attention to them
were players: high-volume traders controlling huge fortunes that bought
and sold game gold and its many sub-species in a too-fast-to-follow
blur. Until, of course, word started to leak out about these Webblies
and their pitched battles, their ice-cream socials, their global span
-- and now corporate PR was calling Command Central five times a day,
trying to get a meeting so they could agree on what to tell the press.
2458
So first thing on Monday morning, he gathered all of Command Central,
along with some of the cooler -- that is, less neurotically paranoid --
lawyers and a couple of the senior PR people in one of Coke's secure
board-rooms for a long session with the white-board.
2459
"We should just exterminate these parasites," Bill said. "You can have
the ten grand." Connor and Bill's bet had become a running joke in
Command Central, but Connor and Bill knew that it was deadly serious.
They were both part of the financial markets, and they knew that a bet
was just another kind of financial transaction, and had to be honored.
2460
Connor's smile was grim. He hadn't known whether the security chief
would come over to his side; he was such a pragmatist about these
things. Maybe they'd get something done after all. "You know I'm with
you, but the question is, how high a price are we prepared to pay to
get rid of these people?"
2461
"No price is too high," said Kaden, who prided himself on being the
most macho guy in Command Central -- the kind of guy who won't shut up
about his gun collection and his karate prowess. Kaden might have been
a black belt 20 years ago, but five years in Command Central had made
him lavishly, necklessly fat, and unable to go up a flight of stairs
without losing his breath.
2462
Bill -- no lightweight himself -- craned his head around to stare
fishily at Kaden. He made a dismissive grunt and said, "Oh, really?"
2463
Kaden -- called out in front of a room full of people -- colored, dug
in. "Goddamned right. These crooks are in our worlds. We can
outspend and outmanoeuvre them. We just have to have the balls to do
what it takes, instead of pussying out the way we always do."
2464
Bill grunted again, a sound like a cement-mixer with indigestion. "No
price is too high?"
2465
"Nope."
2466
"How about shutting down the game? Is that price too high?"
2467
"Don't be stupid."
2468
"I don't think I'm the one being stupid. There's an upper limit on how
much this company can afford to spend on these jerks. If removing them
from the game costs us more than leaving them there, we're just
shooting ourselves in the head. So let's stop talking about 'pussying
out' and 'no cost is too high' and set some parameters that we can turn
into action, all right?"
2469
"I just mean to say --"
2470
Bill got out of his seat and turned all the way around to face Kaden,
fixing him with a withering stare. "Go," he said. "Just go. You're a
pretty good level designer, but I've seen better. And as a person,
you're a total waste. You've got nothing useful to add to this
discussion except for stupid slogans. We've heard the stupid slogans.
Go buff your paladin or something and let the grownups get on with it."
2471
Silence descended on the meeting room. Connor, standing at the front of
the room, thought about telling Bill to back off, but the thing was, he
was right, Kaden was a total ass, and letting him talk would just
distract them all from getting the job done.
2472
Kaden sat, mouth open and fishlike, for a moment, then looked around
for support. He found none. Bill made a condescending little shooing
gesture. Kaden's face went from red to purple.
2473
"Just go," Connor said, and that broke the moment. Kaden slunk out of
the room like a whipped dog and they all turned back to Connor.
2474
"OK," Connor said. "Here's the thing: this has to be about solving the
problem, not posturing or thumping our chests. So let's stick to the
problem." He nodded at Bill.
2475
Bill stood, turned around to face the audience. "Here's what doesn't
work: IP addresses. They're coming in from proxies all over the US, and
they can find proxies faster than we can blacklist them. Plus we've got
tons of legit customers -- expats, mostly -- who live in China and
around Asia and use these proxies to escape their local network blocks.
But even if we were willing to throw those customers under a bus to
stop the gold-farmers, we couldn't.
2476
"Also doesn't work: payment tracing. These accounts are bought on legit
prepaid cards. The farmers are all paying customers, in other words. We
could shut off the prepaid cards and insist on credit cards, but they'd
just get prepaid credit cards. And every kid in America and Canada and
Europe who pays for her account with prepaid cards from the corner
store would be out of luck. That's a lot of customers to throw under
the bus -- and they'll just move on to one of our competitors. Plus,
those prepaid cards are gold . Kids buy them and half the time
they don't use them -- they're free money for us.
2477
"Finally doesn't work: Behavioral profiling. Yes, these characters have
some stereotypical behaviors, like running the same grinding tasks for
hours, or engaging in these giant, epic battles. But this is also
characteristic of a huge number of normal players -- again, these are
people we don't want to throw under the bus.
2478
"So what will work?"
2479
Connor nodded. "One thing I know we can do is get more mileage out of
the busts we make. Once we positively identify a farmer, we should be
able to take out his whole network by backtracking the people he's
chatted with, the ones he's partied with, his guildies."
2480
Bill was shaking his head and made a rumbling sound. "That's the sound
of your bus running over more legit players. These cats can easily blow
that strategy just by recruiting normal players for their raids and
fights. Hell, we designed it that way."
2481
"The money'll be easier to trace," said Fairfax, interrupting them. She
looked from one to the other. "I mean, these farmer types have to
dispose of their gold, and if we take it back from any player that
bought it --"
2482
"They'd go crazy," Connor said.
2483
"It's against the terms of service," she said. "They know they're
cheating. It'd be justice. On what basis could they complain? They
agree to the terms every time they log on."
2484
Connor sighed. The terms of service were 18 screens long and required a
law degree to understand. They prohibited every conceivable in-game
activity, up to and including having fun. Technically, every player
violated the terms every day, which meant that if they wanted to, they
could kick off anyone at any time (of course, this too was allowed in
the terms: "Coca-Cola Games, Ltd reserves the right to terminate your
account at any time, for any reason"). "The problem is that too many
players think that buying gold is all right. We sell gold, after all,
on our own exchanges, all the time. If you nuked every account involved
in a gold-farming buy, we'd depopulate the world by something like 80
percent. We can't afford it."
2485
"80 percent? No way --"
2486
"Look," he said. "I've been going after the farmers now for months.
It's the first time we've ever tried to be systematic about them,
instead of just slapping them down when the activity gets a little too
intense. I can show you the numbers if you want, show you how I worked
this out, but for now, let's just say that I'm the expert on this
subject and I'm not making this up."
2487
Fairfax looked chastened. "Fine," she said. "So you want to go after
the known associates of the farmers we bust, even though we can all see
how easy it will be to defeat."
2488
Connor shrugged. "OK, sure. They'll get around it, eventually. But
we'll have some time to get on them."
2489
Bill cleared his throat, shook his head again. "You have any idea how
much transactional data we're going to have to store to keep a record
of every person every player has ever talked to or fought with? And
then someone will have to go over all those transactions, one by one,
every time we bust a player, to make sure we're getting real
confederates and not innocent by-standers. Where are all those people
going to come from?"
2490
Someone in the audience -- it was Baird, the lawyer Connor hated the
least -- said, "What about the Mechanical Turks?"
2491
Connor and Bill stared at each other, mouths open. The lawyer looked
slightly nervous. "I mean --"
2492
"Of course ," Connor said. "And we could do it for free. Just let
the Turks keep any gold from the accounts of busted players."
2493
One of the other economists was young Palmer, and he reminded Connor of
himself a few years back. Connor hated him. His eager hand shot up. "I
thought the point was to keep all that gold out of the market," he
said. "How can we control the monetary supply if these goombas are
allowed to flood the market with cheap money?"
2494
Connor waved his hands. "Yes, theoretically these cats are outside our
monetary planning, but even going flat out, they just don't move the
market that much. And if they do, we can restrict the supply at our
side, or adjust the basic in-game costs up or down... And it's not as
if the Turks will turn around and spend the gold right away, or dump it
through one of the official exchanges, especially if we keep the
exchange rate low through that period."
2495
Young Palmer opened his mouth again and Connor stopped him. "Look, this
is all model-able. Let's stipulate that we can take care of the
monetary supply and move on." In the back of his mind, he knew that he
was dismissing a potentially explosive issue with a lot more cavalier
abandon than was really warranted, but the fact was this was his chance
to take care of the gold farmers once and for all, with the full weight
of the company behind him, and if that screwed up the economy a little,
well, they'd fix it later. They controlled the economy, after all.
2496
Later, at his desk in Command Central, he looked up from his feeds and
saw a room full of the smartest, toughest people in the company -- in
the world -- bent to the same task, ferreting out the parasites that
he'd been chasing for months. And if he himself had once been a kind of
gold-farmer, a speculator of in-game assets, well, so what? He
graduated to something better.
2497
The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million
gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact
was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to
everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through them.
"When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits -- especially not
the apple." It was a quote one of his economics profs had kept written
in the corner of his white-board, and any time a student started
droning on about compassion for the poor, the old prof would just tap
the board and say, "Are you willing to share your lunch with 30,000
people?"
2498
And hell, there were at least three million gold-farmers in the world.
Let them get their own goddamned apples.
2499
"Sea-level" is a term that refers to the average level of all the
world's oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled halfway
with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and induce some
tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the water. You can
tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the water to slosh around,
making it higher at one end than another. But overall, there's a single
level to that water, a surface height that you can easily discern.
2500
Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from one edge
of the sea to the other -- and really, there's only one sea, a single,
continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water that wraps around
all the continents -- though the storms may blow up waves here and
there, in the end, there's only so much water in the ocean, and it more
or less comes to an easily agreed-upon height. Sea level.
2501
Same with money. There's only so much value in the world: only so much
stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you could exchange
it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the stuff there is for
sale). It doesn't matter, really, whether the money is in dollars or
gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or euros or yen. Add it all
together and what you've got is the ocean. What you've got is sea
level.
2502
So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What happens
if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will the
monetary seas rise, drowning the land?
2503
No.
2504
Printing more money doesn't make more money. Printing more money is
like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons. Converting 343
quintillion gallons of ocean into 1.6 sextillion liters (give or take)
doesn't give you any more water. Gallons and liters are measurements of
water, not water itself.
2505
And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you double the
amount of currency in circulation, you double the price of everything
on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of currency isn't.
That's called inflation, and it can be savage.
2506
Say you're a dictator of a tin-pot republic. For decades, you've lined
your pockets at the peoples' expenses, taxing the crap out of everyone
and embezzling it into your secret off-shore bank-account in Honduras.
Eventually, you've moved so much wealth out of the country that people
are ready to eat their shoes. They start to get angry. At you.
2507
Normally, you'd just have your soldiers go and make examples of a few
hundred dissidents and leave their grisly, carved up remains by the
roadside in shallow graves as a means of informing your loyal subjects
of what they can expect if they keep this kind of thing up.
2508
But soldiers -- even the real retarded sadists -- don't work for free.
They want paying. And if you've taken all the money out of the country
and put it in your bank account, you need something to pay them with.
2509
No problem. You're a dictator. Just call up the treasury department and
order them to print up a couple trillion ducats or gold certificates or
wahoonies or whatever you call your money, and you start paying the
troops. It works -- for a while. The troops take their dough into town
and use it to buy drinks and snazzy clothes and big meals. They send it
home to their families, who use it to buy lumber and tile and steel and
cement to improve their houses, or to buy farm implements and pay the
hired hands to help them bring up the next crop.
2510
But as the amount of money in circulation grows, it gradually becomes
worth less. The bar raises its drink prices because the landlord has
raised the rent. The landlord has raised the rent because the cost of
feeding his family has gone up, because the farmer isn't willing to
sell his crops for the old prices, because she's paying double for
diesel for the tractor and triple for water.
2511
And then the soldiers show up at the dictator's palace and explain,
pointedly, with bayonets (if necessary), why their old wages are no
longer sufficient.
2512
No problem. Just call up the treasury and order up another trillion
wahoonies. And watch it all happen again.
2513
This is called inflation, and it's the cheap sugar high of governments.
Like a cramming student sucking down energy beverages, a government can
only print money for so long before they have to pay the price. It's
not pretty, either. Families that carefully saved all their lives for
their retirement suddenly find their tidy nest-egg is insufficient to
cover the price of a dinner out. Every penny of savings is wiped out in
the blink of an eye, and suddenly you need a lot more soldiers on the
job to keep your loyal subject from gutting you like a fish and hanging
you upside down from your own palace's tallest chimney.
2514
If you're a very cheeky dictator, you'll go one further: take
all the savings in the banks that are denominated in real money --
euros or dollars or yen -- and convert them into wahoonies at today's
exchange rate. Use all that real money to pay the army for a day or two
more, but you'd better save enough to pay for airfare to some place
very, very far away.
2515
If you think inflation is scary, try deflation . As people get
poorer -- as less and less money is in circulation -- the value of
money goes up. This is good news for savers: the wahoonie you banked
last year is worth twice as much this year. But it's bad news for
everyone else: only an idiot borrows money in deflationary times, since
the wahoonie you borrow today will be worth twice as much next year
when you repay it. Deflation is uneven, too: the cost of food may crash
because of some amazing new fertilizer, which means you can buy twice
as much cassava per wahoonie. But this means that farmers are only
earning half as much, and won't pay as much for cable TV. The cable
company hasn't had its costs go down, though, so the reduced
payment means less profits. Businesses start to fail, which means more
people have less money, which drives prices down and down and down.
Before long, no one can afford to make or buy anything .
2516
In other words, the amount of money in circulation is a big deal.
Theoretically, this amount is watched carefully by clever, serious
economists. In practice, all the world's money is in one big swirling,
whirling pool. Dollars and ducats and wahoonies and euros, blended
together willy nilly, and when one government goes to the press and
starts to churn out bales of bank-notes, everyone gets the sugar high.
And when things crash, and peoples' savings go up in smoke, the
deflationary death-spiral kicks in, and prices sink, and more companies
fail -- and governments go back to the printing press.
2517
So in practice, this big engine that determines how much food is grown,
whether you'll have to sell your kidneys to feed your family, whether
the factory down the road will make Zeppelins, whether the restaurant
on the corner can afford the coffee beans, all this important stuff has
no one in charge of it . It is a runaway train, the driver dead
at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their
possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and
each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
2518
There is a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely
argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the driver is
really dead, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just
calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These
people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay
them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing
all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent
their hats from falling off on the next corner.
2519
Everyone else ignores them.
2520
"Hey, Connor!" his broker said, his voice tight and nervous, his cheer
transparently false.
2521
"What's wrong?"
2522
"Cut to the chase, huh, man?" Ira's voice was so tight it twanged.
"You're such a straight-shooter. It's why you're my favorite customer."
2523
"What's wrong , Ira?" Command Central roared around him, a buzz
of shouts and conversations and profanity.
2524
"So, you remember those bonds we took you into?"
2525
Connor's chest tightened. He forced himself to stay calm. "I remember
them."
2526
"Well, they were paying out really well -- you saw the statements.
Eight percent last month --"
2527
"I saw the statements."
2528
"Well."
2529
"Ira," Connor said. "Stop being such a goddamned salesman and tell me
what the hell is going on, or I'm going to hang up this phone and call
your boss."
2530
"Connor," Ira said, his voice hurt. "Look, we're buddies --"
2531
"We're not buddies. You're a salesman. I'm your customer. I'm hanging
up now."
2532
"Wait! Come on, wait! OK, here it is. There's a little...liquidity
crisis in the underlying assets."
2533
Connor translated the broker-speak into English. "They don't have any
money."
2534
"They don't have any money this month ," he said. "Look, the
coupon on this contract has been through the roof for more than a year.
Ultimately, it can't lose, either, because of how we've packaged it
with a credit-default swap. But right now, this instant, they're having
a tough one-time-only squeeze."
2535
After the first month's interest had paid out, Connor had liquidated
several other holdings and bought more of the bonds, bought big. So big
that the brokerage had FedExxed him a bottle of Champagne. He'd lost
track of how much he had tied up with Ira's "fully hedged" scheme, but
he knew it was at least $150,000. That had seemed like such a good bet
--
2536
"What kind of one-time-only squeeze?"
2537
"Nintendo," the broker said. "They've loosened up their monetary policy
lately. The star-farmers in Mushroom Kingdom are bringing up huge
crops, and so Mario coins are dropping off in cost. But the word is
that this is just a temporary gambit because they've had such a huge
rush of new players who can't afford to keep up with the old-timers, so
they're trying to lower commodity prices to keep those players onboard.
But once those players catch up and start demanding more power-ups, the
prices'll bounce back."
2538
It sounded plausible to Connor. After all, they'd done similar things
in their own games. The experienced players howled as inflation lowered
the value of their savings, but a player who'd been honing his toon for
two years wasn't going to quit over something like that. The new blood
was vital to keeping the game on track, replacements for the players
who got old, or bored, or poor -- any of the reasons behind the churn
that caused some players to resign every month.
2539
Churn was one of his biggest economic problems. You could minimize it
in lots of sneaky ways: email a former player to tell him that you were
about to delete the toon he hadn't touched in a year and there was a
one-in-three chance that he'd sign up to play again, rather than doom
this forgotten avatar to the bit-bucket. But ultimately some players
would leave, and the only thing for it was to bring new players in.
2540
The broker was still droning on. " -- so really, we expect a huge surge
in four to eight weeks, more than enough to make up for the drop. And
if things go bad enough, there's always the prince and his bets --"
2541
"What's the bottom line?" Connor said.
2542
"Bottom line," Ira said. "Bottom line is that there's no coupon this
month. The underlying bonds are selling at a 20 percent discount off
face value." He swallowed audibly. "That's sixty percent off what you
paid for them in this package. But if things get bad enough, you'll
recoup with the insurance --"
2543
Connor tried to keep listening, but his breath was coming in tight
little gasps. Sixty percent! He'd just had more than half his net worth
vanish into thin air. The worst part was that he had other obligations
-- a mortgage, payments due on some of the little startups he'd bought
into, money to pay the contractors who were fixing up the holiday
cottage he'd bought as a rental property in Bermuda. Without the cash
he'd been expecting from these investments, he could lose it all.
2544
Oblivious, the broker kept talking. "-- which is why our recommendation
today is to buy. Double down."
2545
"Excuse me?" Connor said, loud enough that the people closest to him in
Command Central looked up from their feeds to stare at him. He scowled
at them until they looked away. "Did you say buy ?"
2546
"There's never been a better time," the salesman said. Connor pictured
him in his cubicle, a short-haired middle-aged guy in an old suit that
had once been tailor made, a collection of bad habits glued to a phone,
chewed-down fingernails and twitching knees, a trashcan beside him
filled with empty coffee cups, screens everywhere around him flickering
like old silent films. "Look, any idiot can buy when the market is up,
but how much higher does the market go when it's already at the top?
The only way to make real money, big money, is to bet against the herd.
When everyone else is dumping their holdings, that's the time to buy,
when it's all down in the basement."
2547
Connor knew that this made sense. It was the basis of his Prikkel
equations, it was the basis of all the fortunes he'd amassed to date.
Buying stuff that everyone else wanted was a safe, uninteresting bet
that paid practically nothing. Buying into the things that everyone
else was too dumb to want -- that was how you got rich .
2548
"Ira," Connor said, "I hear what you're saying, but you've seen my
accounts. I can't afford to double down. I'm maxxed out."
2549
"Connor, pal," he said, and Connor heard the smile in his voice and he
smiled himself, a reflex he couldn't tamp down even if he'd wanted to.
"You're not tapped out. You've got a liquidity problem. You have a
relationship with this brokerage. That's worth something. Hell, that's
worth everything . We got you into this problem, and we'll get
you out of it. If you need some credit, that's absolutely do-able. Let
me talk to our credit department and get back to you. I'm sure we can
make it all work."
2550
Connor was overcome by an eerie, schizophrenic sensation. It was as if
his brain had split into two pieces. One piece was shaking its head
vigorously, saying Oh no, you're out of your mind, there's no way
I'm putting more money into this thing. No, no, no, Christ, no!
2551
But there was another part of his mind that was saying He's right,
the best time to buy is at the bottom of the market. These things have
been paying out big-time. The explanation makes sense. Just think of
how you'll feel when you don't buy in and the security bounces back,
all that money you'll miss out on. Think of how you'll feel if you
clean up and can buy a bigger house, another income property, a new
car. Think of how all these jerks will drool with envy when you make a
killing .
2552
And his mouth opened and the words that came out of it were, "All
right, that sounds great. I'll take as much as you can sell me on
margin." On margin: that was when you bought securities with borrowed
money, because you were sure that the bets would pay off before you had
to pay the money back. It was a dangerous game: if the margin call came
before the bets paid off -- or if they never paid off -- it could wipe
you out.
2553
But these were not bets, really. The way that the brokerage had
packaged them, they were fully hedged. The worse the underlying bonds
did, the more the bets against them from the Prince paid off. There
might be some minor monthly variations, but when it was all said and
done, he just couldn't lose.
2554
"Buy," he said. "Buy, buy, buy."
2555
Through the rest of the day, he was so preoccupied with worry over his
precarious position that he didn't even notice when every other
executive in Command Central had a nearly identical conversation with
their brokers.
2556
Wei-Dong's mother was the perfect reality check when it came to games
and the Webblies. He'd never appreciated it before he left home, but
once he'd gone to work as a Turk, his mom had tried to re-establish
contact by clipping stories about games and gamers and emailing them to
him. It was always stuff he'd absorbed through his pores months before,
being reported to outsiders with big screaming OMG WTF headlines that
made him snicker.
2557
But he came to appreciate his mom's clippings as a glimpse into a
parallel universe of non-gamers, people who just didn't get how
important all this had become. The best ones were from the financial
press, trying to explain to weirdos who invested in game-gold exactly
what they had bought.
2558
And those clippings were even more important now that he'd come to
China. Mom still thought he was in Alaska, and he made sure to pepper
his occasional emails to her with references to the long nights and
short days, the wilderness, the people -- a lot of it cut-and-pasted
verbatim from the tweets of actual Alaska tourists.
2559
Today, three weeks into the strike, she sent him this:
2560
A UNION FOR VIDEO-GAMERS?
2561
They call themselves the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, and
they claim that there are over 100,000 of them today, up from 20,000
just a few weeks ago. They spend their days and nights in multiplayer
video-games, toiling to extract wealth from the game-engines, violating
the game companies' exclusive monopoly over game-value. The crops these
"gold farmers" raise are sold on to rich players in America, Europe and
the rest of the developed world, and the companies that control the
games say that this has the potential to disrupt the carefully balanced
internal economies --
2562
Wei-Dong spacebarred through the article, skimming down. It was
interesting to see one of his mother's feeds talking about Webblies,
but they were so... old school about it. Explaining everything.
2563
Then he stopped, scrolled back up.
2564
...mysterious, influential pirate radio host who calls herself Jiandi,
whose audience is rumored to be in the tens of millions, creating a
rare and improbable alliance between traditional factory workers and
the gamers. This phenomenon is reportedly repeating itself around the
Pacific Rim, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam, though it's
unclear whether the "IWWWW" chapters in these countries are mere
copycats or whether they're formally affiliated, under a single
command.
2565
Wei-Dong looked up from his screen at the mattress where Lu and Jie had
collapsed after staggering in from the latest broadcast, Jie's face so
much younger in repose. Could she really be this famous DJ that Mom --
Mom , all the way across the world in Los Angeles -- was reading
about?
2566
There was more, screens and screens more, but what really caught his
attention was the mention of the "market turmoil" that was sending bond
and stock prices skittering up and down. He didn't understand that
stuff very well -- every time someone had attempted to explain it to
him, his eyes had glazed over -- but it was clear that the things that
they were doing here were having an effect, a massive effect,
all over the world.
2567
He almost laughed aloud, but caught himself. Matthew was sleeping all
of six inches from where he sat, and he'd run the picket-skirmishes for
22 hours straight before keeling over. Wei-Dong had fought too, but
he'd been mostly tasked to recruiting more Turks to his little list of
friendly operatives, a much less intense kind of game. Still, he should
be sleeping, not pecking at his laptop. In six hours, he'd be back on
shift, with only a bowl of congee and a plate of dumplings to start the
day.
2568
He folded down his laptop's lid and stretched his arms over his head,
noting as he did the rank smell of his armpits. The single shower --
ringed with a scary-looking electrical heater that warmed up the water
as it passed through the showerhead -- wasn't sufficient for all the
Webblies who slept in the flat, and he'd skipped bathing for two days
in a row. He wasn't the only one. The apartment smelled like the locker
rooms at school or like the homeless shelter near Santee Alley that he
used to pass when he went out for groceries.
2569
He heard a little chirp from somewhere nearby, the cricket-soft buzz of
a mobile phone ringing. He watched as Jie sleepily pawed at the little
purse by her pillow, its strap already looped around her arm, and
extracted a phone, blearily answered it: "Wei?"
2570
Her sleepy eyes sprang open with such force that he actually heard her
eyelids crinkling. Her bloodshot eyes showed her whole iris, and she
leapt up, shouting in slangy Chinese that came so fast he couldn't
understand her at first.
2571
But then he caught it: "Police! Outside! GO GO GO!"
2572
There were 58 Webblies sleeping in the safe-house, and in an instant
they all shot out of their blankets, most of them already dressed, and
jammed their toes into their shoes and grabbed little shoulder-bags
containing their data and personal possessions and crowded into the
doorway. They worked in near-silence, the only sound urgent whispers
and curses as they stepped on each others' shoes. Some made for the
window, leaping out to grab the balcony of the opposite handshake
building, and now there was shouting from the street as the oncoming
police spotted them.
2573
He joined the crush of bodies, pushing grimly into the narrow hallway,
then sprinting in the opposite direction to most of the Webblies, for
he had seen Jie running that way, holding tight to Lu's hand, and Jie
seemed to have the survival instincts of a city rat. If she was running
that way, he'd run that way too.
2574
But she'd gotten ahead of him, and when he skidded around the corner
and found himself looking at a short length of corridor ending with an
unmarked door, neither she nor Lu were anywhere to be seen. He paused
for a second, then the unmistakable sound of a gunshot and a rising
wave of panicked screams drove him forward, hurtling for the unmarked
door, hand stretched out to turn the knob --
2575
-- which was locked!
2576
He bounced off the door, stunned, and went on his ass, and shouted a
single, panicked "Shit!" as he cracked his head on the dirty tile
floor. As he struggled back into a seated position, he saw the door
crack open. Jie's bloodshot eye peeked out at him, and she swore in
imaginative, slangy Chinese. "Gweilo," she hissed, "quickly!"
2577
He got to his feet quickly and reached the door in two quick steps. Her
long fingernails dug into his arm as she dragged him inside the dimly
lit space, which he saw now was a kind of supply closet that someone
had converted into sleeping quarters, with a rolled up bed in one
corner and a corner of one shelf cleared of cleaning products and
disinfectant and piled with a meager stack of clothes and collection of
toiletries and a small vanity mirror.
2578
"The matron," Jie said, whispering so quietly that Wei-Dong could
barely hear her. "She gets to live in here for free. She and I have an
arrangement." Lu was on his hands and knees behind her, silently
rearranging the crowded space, working with a small LED flashlight
clamped between his teeth. He was breathing heavily, his skinny arms
trembling as he hefted the giant bottles of bleach and strained to set
them down without making a sound.
2579
"Can I help?" Wei-Dong whispered.
2580
Jie rolled her eyes. "Does it look like there's room to help?" she
said. She was so close to him that he could see her individual
eyelashes, the downy hair on her earlobes. If he took a deep breath,
he'd probably crush her.
2581
He shook his head minutely. "Sorry."
2582
Lu made a satisfied grunt and detached the entire bottom shelf from its
bracket. Wei-Dong could see that he'd uncovered an access-hatch set
into the wall, and it showered dust and paint-chips onto the floor in a
cockroach-wing patter as he worked it loose. He passed it back and Jie
tried to grab it, but there wasn't room to maneuver it in the small
space.
2583
From the other side of the door, he heard the tromp, tromp, tromp of
heavy boots, heard the thudding and pounding on the doors, the muffled
and frightened conversations of people roused from their beds in the
middle of the night.
2584
With a low, frustrated, frightened sound Jie grabbed the hatch cover
and moved it out of the way, bashing him so hard in the nose that he
had to stuff his fist in his mouth to stop from crying out. She gave
him a contemptuous look and shoved the hatch into his hands. It was
about 30 inches square, filthy, awkward, made from age-softened
plywood.
2585
Lu had passed through the hatch already, and now Jie was following, her
bare legs flashing in the half-light of the room, and then Wei-Dong was
alone, and the tromp of the boots was louder. Someone was scuffling in
the hallway, a man, shouting in outrage; a woman, screaming in terror;
a baby, howling.
2586
Wei-Dong knelt down and peered into the tiny opening. It was pitch dark
in there. He carefully leaned the cover up against the wall beside the
opening and then climbed in. The floor on the other side was unfinished
concrete, gritty and dusty. He couldn't see a thing as he pulled
himself forward on his elbows, commando-style, his breath rasping in
his ears. He inched forward, feeling cautiously ahead for obstructions
and then discovered that he was holding something soft and pliant and
warm. Jie's breast.
2587
She hissed like a snake and swiped his hand away with sudden violence.
He began to stammer an apology, but she hissed again: "Shhh!"
2588
He bit back the words.
2589
"Close up the grating," she said. He cautiously began to turn around.
The little space was a mere meter high and he repeatedly smashed his
head into the ceiling, which had several unforgiving metal pipes
running along it that bristled with vicious joints and tees. And he
kicked both Jie and Lu several times.
2590
But he eventually found himself with his head and arms outside the
hatch, and he desperately fitted his fingers to the inside of the grill
and inched it into place. It was nearly impossible to manoeuvre it into
the tight space, but he managed, his fingers white -- and all the
while, the sounds from the corridor grew louder and louder.
2591
"Got it," he gasped and slithered away. There were voices from just
outside the door now, deep, impatient male voices and an angry, shrill
woman's voice telling them that this was the stupid broom closet and to
stop being so stupid. Someone shook the doorknob and then put a
shoulder into the door, which shuddered.
2592
Wei-Dong bit his tongue to hold in the squeak and pushed back even
more, the fear on him know, a live thing in his chest. Jie and Lu
pushed at him as he collided with them, but he barely felt it. All he
felt was the fear, fear of the armed men on the other side of the door,
about to come through and see the closet and the obvious gap on the
bottom shelf where things had been shoved aside. Wei-Dong was suddenly
and painfully aware of how far he was from home, an illegal immigrant
with no rights in a country where no one else had rights, either. He
would have cried if he hadn't been scared to make a sound.
2593
"Come on," Jie whispered, a sound barely audible as another crash
rocked the door. Someone had a key in the lock now, jiggling it. She
clicked a tiny red LED to life and it showed him the shape of the
space: a long, low plumbing maintenance area. The pipes above them
gurgled and whooshed softly as the water sluiced through them.
2594
Lu was beside him, Jie ahead of them, and she was arm-crawling to the
opposite side of the area. He followed as quickly as he could, ears
straining for any sound from behind him.
2595
Jie swore under her breath.
2596
"What?" Lu said.
2597
"I can't find the other grating," she said. "I thought it was right
here, but --"
2598
Wei-Dong understood now. The maintenance area occupied a dead-space
between their building and the one behind it, and somewhere around
here, there was a grating like the one they'd come through, a little
wormhole into another level of the game. Jie's survival instincts were
incredibly sharp, that much had been obvious, so he wasn't altogether
surprised to discover that she had a back door prepared.
2599
He peered into the darkness, his whole body slicked with sweat and
grimed with the ancient dust covering the floor.
2600
"The last time, there was a light on the other side. It was easy to
find," she said, her voice near panic. He heard the unmistakable sound
of the police entering the utility closet behind them, then voices.
2601
"We need to search the whole wall," Lu said. "Split up."
2602
So Wei-Dong found himself squirming over Jie's bare calves, tearing his
jeans on one of the low pipes as he did so. He patted the wall blindly,
feeling around. Away from the small red light, it was pitch black,
disorienting, frightening. Nearby, he heard the sounds of Jie and Lu
searching too.
2603
And then, he found it, his baby fingertip slipping into a grating hole,
then he patted around it, felt its full extent. "Here, here!" he
whispered loudly, and the other two began to struggle his way. He
jiggled the grating, trying to find the trick that would make it come
away, but it appeared to be screwed in. Increasingly desperate, he
shook the grating, causing a rain of dust and dried paint to fall on
his hands. He was gripping the metal so hard he could feel it cutting
into one finger, a trickle of blood turning into mud as it mixed with
the dirt.
2604
"Light," he said. "Can't see anything."
2605
A hand patted the length of his leg, feeling its way up his body, to
his arm, then pressed the little light into his hand. Jie's hand, slim
and girlish. He clicked the red light to life and peered intently at
the grating. It wasn't screwed in, but it needed to be pushed slightly
forward before it would lift out. He stuck the light's handle between
his teeth and pushed and lifted and the grating popped
free.
2606
Just as it did, a long cone of light sliced through the crawlspace, and
then a martial voice demanded "Halt!" The light bathed him, making him
squint, and Jie thumped him in the thigh and said, "GO!"
2607
He went, commando crawling again, Jie's slim hands pushing him to hurry
him along. He emerged into a tiled space, dirty and dark, the floor wet
and slimy. He stood up cautiously, worried about hitting his head
again, then stooped to help Jie through. There were more shouts coming
from the other side of the grating now, and the light spilled out of it
and painted the greenish scum on the old, cracked grey tile floor.
"Halt!" again, and "Halt" once more, as Jie finished wriggling through
and he bent to grab Lu, peering into the now-brilliantly-lit
crawlspace. Lu had been searching for the grating at the other end of
the crawlspace and he was going as fast as he could, his face a mask of
determination and fear, lips skinned back from his teeth, blood flowing
freely from a scalp wound.
2608
"Halt!" again, and Lu put on a burst of speed, and there was the
unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. Lu's eyes grew wide and he
flung his arms out before him and dug his hands into the ground and
pulled himself along, scrambling with his toes.
2609
"Come on," Wei-Dong begged, practically in tears. "Come on, Lu!"
2610
A gunshot, that flat sound he'd heard in the distance when he was
living in downtown LA, but with an alarming set of whining aftertones
as the bullet bounced from one pipe to another. Water began to gush
onto the floor, and Lu was still too far away. Wei-Dong went down on
his belly and crawled halfway into the space, holding his arms out:
"Come on, come on," crooning it now, not sure if he was speaking
English or Chinese.
2611
And Lu came, and: "HALT!" and another gunshot, then two more, and the
water was everywhere, and the whining ricochets were everywhere and
then --
2612
Lu screamed , a sound like nothing Wei-Dong had ever heard. The
closest he'd heard was the wail of a cat that he'd once seen hit by a
car in front of his house, a cat that had lain in the street with its
spine broken for an eternity, screaming almost like a human, a wail
that made his skin prickle from his ankles to his earlobes. Then, Lu
stopped . Lay stock still. Wei-Dong bit his tongue so hard he
felt blood fill his mouth. Lu's eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting.
He opened his mouth as though he had just had the most profound insight
of his life, and then blood sloshed out of his mouth, over his lips,
and down his chin.
2613
"Lu!" Wei-Dong called, and was torn between the impulse to go forward
and get him and the impulse to back out and run as fast as he could,
all the way to California if he could --
2614
And then, "STAY WHERE YOU ARE," in that barking, brutal Chinese, and
the gun was cocked again. He smelled the blood from his own mouth and
from Lu, and Lu slumped forward. Then a gunpowder smell. Then --
2615
-- another shot, which whined and bounced with a deadly sound that left
his ears ringing.
2616
"STAY WHERE YOU ARE," the voice said, and Wei-Dong scrambled backwards
as fast as he could.
2617
Jie yanked him to his feet, her face grimed with dust and streaked with
tears. "Lu?" she said.
2618
He shook his head, all his Chinese gone for a moment, no words at all
available to him.
2619
Then Jie did an extraordinary thing. She closed her eyes, drew in a
deep breath, drew it in and in, squeezed her fists and her arms and her
neck muscles so that they all stood out, corded and taut.
2620
And then she blew it all out, unclenched her fists, relaxed her neck,
and opened her eyes.
2621
"Let's go," she said, and, with a single smooth motion, turned to the
door behind her and shot the bolt, turned the knob and opened it into
another apartment-building corridor, smelling of cooking spices and
ancient, ground-in body-odor and mold. The dim light from the hallway
felt bright compared to the twilight he'd been in since diving through
the bolt-hole, and he saw that he was in a disused communal shower, the
walls green with old mold and slime.
2622
Jie dug a pair of strappy sandals out of her purse and calmly and
efficiently slipped them on. She produced two sealed packets of
wet-wipes, handed one to Wei-Dong and used the other's contents to wipe
her face, her hands, her bare legs, working with brisk strokes. Though
Wei-Dong's heart was hammering and the adrenalin was surging through
his body, he forced himself to do the same, shoving the dirty wipes in
his pocket until there were no more. There were more shouts from the
grating behind them, and distant sounds from the street below, and
Wei-Dong knew it was hopeless, knew that they were cornered.
2623
But if Jie was going to march on, he would too. Lu was behind him, with
the coppery blood smell, the bonfire smell of the gunpowder. Ahead of
him was China, all of China, the country he'd dreamed of for years, not
a dream anymore, but a brutal reality.
2624
Jie began to walk briskly, her arm waving back and forth like a
metronome as she crossed the length of the building and opened the door
to the stairway without breaking stride. Wei-Dong struggled to keep up.
They pelted down three flights of stairs, the grimy, barred windows
allowing only a grey wash of light. It was dawn outside.
2625
Only one flight remained, and Jie pulled up abruptly, wheeled on her
heel and looked him in the eye. Her eyes were limned with red, but her
face was composed. "Why do you have to be white?" she said. "You stand
out so much. Walk five paces behind me, three paces to the side, and if
they catch you, I won't stop."
2626
He swallowed. Tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Lu was dead
upstairs. The police were outside the door -- he heard calls,
radio-chatter, engines, sirens, shouts -- and they were murderous.
2627
He wanted to say, Wait, don't, don't open the door, let's hide
here. But he didn't say it. They were doomed in here. The police
knew which building they'd entered. The longer they waited, the sooner
it would be before they sealed the exits and searched every corner and
nook.
2628
"Understood," he managed, and made his face into a smooth mask.
2629
One more flight.
2630
Jie cracked the door and the dawn light was rosy on her face. She put
her eye to the crack for a moment, then opened it a little wider and
slipped out. Wei-Dong counted to three, slowly, making his breath as
slow as the count, then went out the door himself.
2631
Chaos.
2632
The street was a little wider than most of the lanes near the handshake
buildings, a main road that was just big enough to admit a car. A car
idled at one end of it, two policemen outside it. Three more police
were just entering the building he'd come out of, using a glass door a
few yards away. The blue police-car bubble-lights painted the walls
around them with repeating patterns of blue and black. Somewhere
nearby, shouting. Lots of shouting. Boyish yells of terror and agony,
the thud of clubs, screaming from the balconies, no words, just the
wordless slaughterhouse soundtrack of dozens of Webblies being beaten.
Beaten, while Lu lay dead or dying in the crawlspace.
2633
He turned left, the direction that Jie had gone, just in time to see
her disappearing down a narrow laneway, turning sideways to pass into
it. He wasn't sure how he could follow her injunction to stay to one
side of her in a space that narrow, but he decided he didn't care. He
wasn't going to try to make his own way out of the labyrinth of
Cantonese-town.
2634
As soon as he entered the alley, though, he regretted it. A policeman
who happened to look down the alley would see him instantly and he'd be
a sitting target, impossible to miss. He looked over his shoulder so
much as he inched along that he tripped and nearly went over, only
stopping himself from falling to the wet, stinking concrete between the
buildings by digging his hands into the walls on either side of him.
Ahead of him, Jie cleared the other end of the alley and cut right. He
hurried to catch her.
2635
Just as he cleared the alley-mouth himself, he heard three more
gunshots, then a barrage of shots, so many he couldn't count them. He
froze, but the sounds had been further away, back where the Webblies
had emerged from their safe house. It could only mean one thing. He bit
his cheek and swallowed the sick feeling rising in his throat and
scrambled to keep up with Jie.
2636
Jie walked quickly -- too quickly; he almost lost her more than once.
But eventually she turned into a metro station and he followed her
down. He'd used the ticket-buying machines before -- they were labelled
in Chinese and English -- and he bought a fare to take him to the end
of the line, feeding in some RMB notes from his wallet. The machine
dropped a plastic coin like a poker chip into its hopper and he took it
and rubbed it on the turnstile's contact-point and clattered down the
stairs with the sparse crowd of workers headed for early shifts.
2637
He positioned himself by one of the doors and reached into his pocket
for a worn tourist guide to Shenzhen, taken from the free stack at the
info-booth at the train-station. It was perfect camouflage, a kind of
invisibility. There was always a gweilo or two puzzling over a tourist
map on the metro, being studiously ignored by the flocks of perfectly
turned-out factory girls who avoided them as probable perverts and
definite sources of embarrassment.
2638
Jie got off four stops later, and he jumped off at the last minute. As
he did, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the
car-doors and saw that one side of his hair was matted with dried blood
which had also run down his neck and dried there. He cursed himself for
his smugness. Invisible! He was probably the most memorable thing the
metro riders saw all that day, a grimy, bloody gweilo on the train.
2639
He followed Jie up the escalator and saw her pointedly nod toward a
toilet door. He went and jiggled the handle, but it was locked. He
turned to go, and the door opened. Behind it was an ancient
grandmother, with a terrible hump that bent her nearly double.
2640
She gave him a milky stare, pursed her lips and began to close the
door.
2641
"Wait!" he said in urgent, low Chinese.
2642
"You speak Chinese?"
2643
He nodded. "Some," he said. "I need to use the bathroom."
2644
"10 RMB," she said. He was pretty sure that she wasn't the official
bathroom-minder, but he wasn't going to argue with her. He dug in his
pocket and found two crumpled fives and passed them to her. It came to
$1.25 and he was pretty sure it was an insane amount of money to pay
for the use of the bathroom, but he didn't care at this point.
2645
The bathroom was tiny and cramped with the old woman's possessions
bundled into huge vinyl shopping bags. He positioned himself by the
sink and stared at his reflection in the scratched mirror. He looked
like he'd been through a blender, head-first. He ran the water and used
his cupped hands to splash it ineffectually on his hair and neck,
soaking his t-shirt in the process.
2646
"That's no way to do it," the old woman shouted from behind him. She
twisted off the faucet with her arthritic hand. He looked silently at
her. He didn't want to get into an argument with this weird old crone.
2647
"Shirt off," she said, in a stern voice. When he hesitated, she gave
his wrist an impatient slap. "Off!" she said. "Shirt off, lean forward,
hair under the tap. Honestly!"
2648
He did as he was bade, bending deeply at the waist to get his hair
under the faucet in the small, dirty sink. She cranked the tap full
open and used her trembling hands to wash out his hair and scrub at his
bloody neck. When he made to stand up, she slapped his back and said,
"Stay!"
2649
He stayed. Eventually, she let him up, and dug through her bags until
she found a tattered old men's shirt that she handed to him. "Dry," she
said.
2650
The shirt smelled of must and city, but was cleaner than anything he
was wearing. He towelled at his hair, careful of the tender cut on his
scalp.
2651
"It's not deep," she said. "I was a nurse, you'll be OK. A stitch or
two, if you don't want the scar."
2652
"Thank you," Wei-Dong managed. "Thank you very, very much."
2653
"Ten RMB," she said, and smiled at him, practically toothless. He gave
her two more fives and put his t-shirt on. It smelled terrible, a thick
reek of BO and blood, but it was a black tee with a picture of a
charging orc and it didn't show the blood.
2654
"Go," she said. "No more fighting."
2655
He left, dazed, and found his way into the station, looking for Jie.
She was waiting by the escalator to the surface, fixing her makeup in a
small mirror that just happened to give her a view of the bathroom
door. She snapped the compact shut and ascended to the surface. He
followed.
2656
"Forty two dead," Big Sister Nor said to Justbob and The Mighty Krang.
"Forty two dead in Shenzhen. A bloodbath."
2657
"War," Justbob said.
2658
"War," The Mighty Krang said, with a viciousness that neither of them
had ever heard from him before. He saw their looks, balled his fists,
glared. "War," he said, again.
2659
"Not a war," Big Sister Nor said. "A strike."
2660
"A strike," General Robotwallah announced to her troops. "No more gold
gets in or out of any of our games."
2661
"Forty two dead," Yasmin said, in a voice leaden with sorrow.
2662
Forty three , Ashok thought, remembering the boy, and sure
enough, Yasmin mouthed Forty three as she sat down.
2663
"We'll need defense here," General Robotwallah said. "Bannerjee will
find more badmashes to try to take us out of this place."
2664
Sushant stood up and held up a machete that the boys had left behind.
"We took this place. We'll hold it," he said, all teen bravado. Ashok
felt like he would be sick.
2665
Yasmin and the General looked intensely at one another, a silent
conversation taking place.
2666
"No more violence," the General said, in the voice of command.
2667
Sushant deflated, looked humiliated. "But what if they come for us with
knives and clubs and guns?" he said, defiant.
2668
Yasmin stood up and walked to stand next to her general. "We make sure
they don't," she said.
2669
Ashok stood and went to his little back room and began to place phone
calls.
2670
"Sisters!" Jie said, throwing her head back and clenching her fists.
She'd been calm enough as she sat down in the basement of the Internet
cafe, a private room the owner rented out discreetly to porno
freelancers who needed a network connection away from the public eye.
But now it seemed as if all the sorrow and pain she had shoved down
into herself when Lu was shot was pouring out.
2671
"SISTERS! " she said again, and it was a howl, as horrible as the
noise Lu had made, as horrible as the noise that half-dead cat had made
in the street in front of Wei-Dong's house.
2672
The cafe was in the shuttered Intercontinental hotel, in the
theme-restaurant that sported a full-size pirate ship sticking out of
the roof, its sails in tatters. The man behind the desk had negotiated
briskly with Jie for the space, studiously ignoring Wei-Dong lurking a
few steps behind her. She'd motioned him along with a jerk of her head
and led him to the private room, which had once been a restaurant
store-room.
2673
Once the door clicked shut behind them, she produced a bootable USB
stick and restarted the computer from it, fitted an elegant, slender
earwig to her ear and passed one to Wei-Dong, which he screwed into his
own ear. After some futzing with the computer she signalled to him that
they were live and commenced to howl like a wounded thing.
2674
"Sisters! My sisters! " she said, and tears coursed down her
face. "They killed him tonight. Poor Tank, my Tank. His name, his real
name was Zha Yue Lu, and I loved him and he never harmed another human
being and the only thing he was guilty of was demanding decent pay,
decent working conditions, vacation time, job security -- the things we
all want from our jobs. The things our bosses take for granted.
2675
"They raided us last night, the vicious jingcha, working for the bosses
as they always have and always will. They beat down the door and the
boys ran like the wind, but they caught them and they caught them and
they caught them. Lu and I tried to escape through the back way and
they --" She broke then, tears coursing down her face, a sob bigger
than the room itself escaping her chest. The mixer-readouts on the
computer screen spiked red from the burst of sound. "They shot him like
a dog, shot him dead."
2676
She sobbed again, and the sobs didn't stop coming. She beat her fists
on the table, tore at her hair, screamed like she was being cut with
knives, screamed until Wei-Dong was sure that someone would burst the
door down expecting to find a murder in progress.
2677
Tentatively, he uncrossed his legs and got to his feet and crossed to
her and caught her beating fists in his hands. She looked at him,
unseeing, and stuck her face into his chest, the hot tears soaking
through his t-shirt, the cries coming and coming. She pulled away for a
moment, gasped, "I'm sorry, I'll be back in a few minutes," and clicked
something, and the mixer levels on the screen flatlined.
2678
On and on she cried, and soon Wei-Dong was crying too -- crying for his
father, crying for Lu, crying for all the gunshots he'd heard on the
way out of the handshake buildings. They rocked and cried together like
that for what seemed like an eternity, and then Jie gently disengaged
herself and turned back to her computer and clicked some more.
2679
"Sisters," she said, "for years now I've sat at this mic, talking to
you about love and family and dreams and work. So many of us came here
looking to get away from poverty, looking to find a decent wage for a
decent day's work, and instead found ourselves beating off perverted
bosses, being robbed by marketing schemes, losing our wages and being
tossed out into the street when the market shifts.
2680
"No more," she said, breathing it so low that Wei-Dong had to strain to
hear it. "No more," she said, louder. "NO MORE!" she shouted and stood
up and began to pace, gesturing as she did.
2681
"No more asking permission to go to the bathroom! No more losing our
pay because we get sick! No more lock-ins when the big orders come in.
No more overtime without pay. No more burns on our arms and hands from
working the rubber-molding machinery -- how many of you have the
idiotic logo of some stupid company branded into your flesh from an
accident that could have been prevented with decent safety clothes?
2682
"No more missing eyes. No more lost fingers. No more scalps torn away
from a screaming girl's head as her hair is sucked into some giant
machine with the strength of an ox and the brains of an ant. NO MORE!"
2683
"Tomorrow, no one works. No one. Sisters, it's time. If one of you
refuses to work, they just fire you and the machines grind on. If you
all refuse to work, the machines stop .
2684
"If one factory shuts down, they send the police to open it again,
soldiers with guns and clubs and gas. If all the factories shut
down, there aren't enough police in the world to open them again."
2685
She looked at her screen. It was going crazy. She clicked in a call.
Wei-Dong heard it in his earpiece.
2686
"Jiandi," a breathy, girly voice said. "Is this Jiandi?"
2687
"Yes, sister, it is," she said. "Who else?" She smiled a thin smile.
2688
"Have you heard about the other deaths, in the Cantonese quarter in
Shenzhen? The boys they shot?"
2689
Wei-Dong felt like he was falling. The girl was still speaking.
2690
"-- 42 of them, is what we heard. There were pictures, sent from phone
to phone. Google for 'the fallen 42' and you'll find them. The police
said it was lies, and just now, they said that they were a criminal
gang, but I recognized some of those boys from the strike before, the
one you told us about --"
2691
Wei-Dong dug out his phone and began to google, typing so quickly he
mashed the keys and had to retype the query three times, a process made
all the more cumbersome by the need to use proxies to get around the
blocks on his phone's network connections. But then he got it, and the
photos dribbled into his phone's browser as slow as glaciers, and soon
he was looking at shot after shot of fallen boys, lying in the narrow
lanes, arms thrown out or held up around their faces, legs limp. The
cam-phone photos were a little out of focus, and the phone's small
screen made them even less distinct, but the sight still hit him like a
hammerblow.
2692
The girl was still speaking. "We've all seen them and the girls in my
dorm are scared, and now you're telling us to walk out of our jobs. How
do you know we won't be shot too?"
2693
Jie's mouth was opening and closing like a fish. She held her hand out
and snapped her fingers at Wei-Dong, who passed her his phone. Her face
was terrible, her lips pulled away from her teeth, which clicked
rhythmically as she looked at the photos.
2694
"Oh," she said, as if she hadn't heard the girl's question. "Oh," she
said, as if she'd just realized some deep truth that had evaded her all
her life.
2695
"Jiandi?" the girl said.
2696
"You might be shot," Jie said, slowly, as if explaining something to a
child. "I might be shot. But they can't shoot us all."
2697
She paused, considering. Tears rolled off her chin, stained the collar
of her shirt.
2698
"Can they?"
2699
She clicked something and a commercial started.
2700
"I can't finish this," she said in a dead voice. "I can't finish this
at all. I should go home."
2701
Wei-Dong looked down at his hands. "I don't think that would be safe."
2702
She shook her head. "Home ," she said. "The village. Go back.
There's a little money left. I could go home and my parents could find
some boy for me to marry and I could be just another girl in the
village, growing old. Have my one baby and pray it's a boy. Swallow
pesticide when it gets to be too much." She looked into his eyes and he
had to steel himself to keep from flinching away. "Do you know that
China is the only country where more women commit suicide than men?"
2703
Wei-Dong spoke, his voice trembling. "I can't pretend that I know what
your life is like, Jie, but I can't believe that you want to do that.
There are 42 dead. I don't think we can stop here." Thinking I am so
far from home and don't know how I'll get back. Thinking, If she
goes, I'll be all alone. And then thinking, Coward and
wanting to hit his head against something until the thoughts stopped.
2704
She reached for the keyboard and he knew enough about her work
environment to see that she was getting ready to shut down.
2705
"Wait!" he said. "Come on, stop." He fished for the words. In the weeks
since he'd arrived in China, he'd begun to think in Chinese, even dream
in it sometimes, but now it failed him. "I --" He beat his fists on his
thighs in frustration. "It won't stop now," he said. "If you go home to
the village, it will keep going, but it won't have you. It won't have
Jiandi, the big sister to all the factory girls. When Lu told me about
you, I thought he was crazy, thought there was no way you could
possibly have that many listeners. He thought you were some kind of
god, or a queen, a leader of an army of millions. He told me he thought
you didn't understand how important you are. How you --" He paused,
gathered the words. "You're shiny. That's what he said. You shine,
you're like this bright, shiny thing that people just want to chase
after, to follow. Everyone who meets you, everyone who hears you, they
trust you, they want you to be their friend.
2706
"If you go, the Webblies will still fight, but without you, I think
they'll lose."
2707
She glared at him. "They'll probably lose with me, too. Do you have any
idea what a terrible burden you put on me? You all put on me?
It's absolutely unfair. I'm not your god, I'm not your queen. I'm a
broadcaster!"
2708
The heat rose in Wei-Dong. "That's right! You're a broadcaster. You
don't work for some government channel like CCTV, though, do you?
You're underground, criminal. You spent years telling factory girls to
stand up for their rights, years living in safe-houses and carrying
fake IDs. You set yourself up to be where you are now. I can't believe
that you didn't dream about this. Look me in the eye and tell me that
you didn't dream about being a leader of millions, about having
them all follow you and look up to you! Tell me!"
2709
She did something absolutely unexpected. She laughed. A little laugh, a
broken laugh, a laugh with jagged shards of glass in it, but it was a
laugh anyway. "Yes," she said. "Yes, of course. With a hairbrush for a
microphone, in front of my parents' mirror, pretending to be the DJ
that they all listened to. Of course. What else?"
2710
Her smile was so sad and radiant it made Wei-Dong weak in the knees. "I
never thought I'd end up here, though. I thought I'd be a pretty girl
on television, recognized in the street. Not a fugitive."
2711
Wei-Dong shrugged, back on familiar territory. "The future's a weirder
place than we thought it would be when we were little kids. Look at
gold-farming, how weird is that?"
2712
She grinned. "No weirder than making rubber bananas for Swedish
department-store displays. That was my first job when I came here, you
know?" She rolled up her sleeves and showed him her arms. They were
crisscrossed with old burn-scars. "Then making cheap beads for
something called 'Mardi Gras.' Boss Chan liked me, liked how I worked
with the hot plastic. No complaining, even though we didn't have masks,
even though I was burned over and over again." She twisted her forearm
and he saw that she had the Nike logo branded backwards, in bubbled,
wrinkled scar there. "Afterwards, I worked on the same kind of machine,
in a shoe factory. You see the logo? Many of us have it. It's like we
were cattle, and the factory branded us one at a time."
2713
"Are you going to talk to the people again?"
2714
She slumped. Slipped in her earwig. Began to prod at the computer.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I must. As long as they'll listen, I must."
2715
Matthew wept as he walked, pacing the streets without seeing. He'd been
one of the first ones out of the building when the police raided, and
he'd slipped through the cordon before they'd tightened it, slipping
into another handshake building, one he'd played in as a boy, and
running up the stairs to the roof, where he'd lain on his belly amid
the broken glass and pebbles, staring down at the street below as the
police chased down and caught his friends, one after the other, a line
of Webblies face-down on the ground, groaning from the occasional kick
or punch when they violated the silence and tried to speak with one
another.
2716
The police began to methodically cuff and hood them, starting at one
end, working in threes -- one to cuff, one to hood, and one to stand
guard with his rifle. It seemed to go on forever, and Matthew saw that
he was far from the only person observing the sick spectacle: the
laundry-hung balconies of the handshake buildings shivered as people
piled out onto them, their mobile phones aimed at the laneway below.
Matthew got out his own phone, zooming in methodically on each face,
trying to get a picture of each Webbly before he was hooded, thinking
vaguely of putting the images on the big Webbly boards, sending them to
the foreign press, the dissident bloggers who used their offshore
servers.
2717
Then, sudden movement. Ping was thrashing on the ground, limbs
flailing, head cracking against the pavement hard enough to be heard
from Matthew's perch six stories up. Matthew knew with hopeless
certainty that it was one of his friend's epileptic seizures, which
didn't come on very often, but which were violent and terrifying for
those around him. The cops tried to grab his arms and legs, and one of
them got a hard kick in the knee for his trouble, and then Ping's arm
cracked the hooded prisoner beside him, who rolled away, stumbled to
his feet, and the cops waded in, rifle-butts raised and ready.
2718
What happened next seemed to take forever, an eternity during which
Matthew struggled not to scream, struggled on the edge of indecision,
of impotence, of being driven to run to the street below for his
comrades and of being too scared to move from the spot.
2719
A policeman cracked the hooded Webbly who was on his feet across the
kidneys, and the boy screeched and staggered and happened to catch hold
of the rifle-butt. The two grappled for the gun while the boys on the
pavement shouted, other policemen closing in, and then one of them
unholstered his revolver and calmly shot the hooded boy in the head,
the hood spattered and red as the boy fell.
2720
That was it. The boys leapt to their feet and charged , warriors
screaming their battle-cries, unarmed children scared and brave and
stupid, and the police guns fired, and fired, and fired.
2721
The cordite smell overpowered his senses, a smell like the fireworks he
and his friends used to set off on New Year's. Mingled with it, the
blood smell, the shit smell of boys whose bowels had let go. Matthew
cried silently as he aimed his phone at the carnage, shooting and
shooting, and then a policeman looked up at the crowd observing the
massacre and shouted something indistinct, the camera lens on his
helmet glinting in the dawn light, and Matthew ducked back as the rest
of the policemen looked up, and then he heard the screaming, screaming
from all around, from all the balconies.
2722
He pelted across the roof, headed for the next building, vaulting the
narrow gap between the two with ease. Twice more he leapt from building
to building, running on sheer survival instinct, his mind a blank. Then
he found himself on the street, with no memory of having descended any
stairs, walking briskly, headed for the center of town, the streets
with the fancy shops and the pimps, the businessmen and the Internet
cafes filled with screaming boys killing orcs and blowing space-pirates
out of the sky and vanquishing evil super-villains.
2723
The tears coursed down his cheeks, and the early morning rush of people
on their way to work gave him a wide berth. He wasn't the first boy to
walk the streets of Shenzhen in tears, and he wouldn't be the last. He
randomly boarded a bus and paid the fare and sat down, burying his face
in his hands, choking back the sobs. He'd ridden the bus for a full
hour before he bothered to look up and see where he was headed.
2724
Then he had to smile. Somehow, he'd boarded a bus headed for Dafen, the
"oil painting village," where thousands of painters working in small
factories turned out millions of paintings. He'd gone there once with
Ping and the boys, on a rare day off, to wander the narrow streets and
marvel at the canvasses hung everywhere, in outdoor stalls and in open
shops and in huge galleries. The paintings were mostly in European
style, old fashioned, depicting life in ancient European cities, or the
tortured Jesus (these made Matthew squirm and remember his father's
stories of persecution) or perfect fruit sitting on tables. Some of the
shops and stalls had painters working at them, copying paintings out of
books, executing deft little brushstrokes and closing out the rest of
the world. The books themselves were printed in Dongguan -- Matthew
knew a factory girl who worked at the printer -- and something about
the whole scene had filled Matthew with an unnameable emotion at the
thought of all these painters creating work with their artist's eyes
and hands for use by foreigners who'd never come to China, never
imagine the faces and hands of the painters who made the work.
2725
And here they were, pulling up at the five-meter-tall sculpture of a
hand holding a brush, disgorging dozens of passengers by the side of
the road. All around him rose the tall housing blocks and long factory
buildings, the air scented with breakfast and oil paint and turpentine.
2726
Matthew came out of his funk enough to notice that many of his fellow
passengers wore paint-stained work-clothes and carried wooden
paint-boxes, and he joined the general throng that snaked into Dafen,
amid the murmur of conversation as workers greeted friends and passed
the gossip.
2727
The time he'd visited Dafen, he'd wandered into a gallery that sold
contemporary paintings by Chinese painters, showing Chinese settings.
He'd never had much use for art, but he'd been poleaxed by these ones.
One showed four factory girls, beautiful and young, holding mobile
phones and designer bags, walking down a rural village street at
Mid-Autumn Festival, the house-fronts and shop-windows hung with
lanterns. The village was old and poor, the street broken, the people
watching from the doorways with seamed peasant faces, pinched and dried
up. The four girls were glamorous aliens from another world, children
who'd been sent away to find their fortunes, who'd come back changed
into a different species altogether.
2728
And there'd been a picture of an old grandmother sleeping in a Dongguan
bus-shelter, toothless mouth thrown open, huddled under a fake designer
coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a picture of a
Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake buildings, hanging up
an illegal cable-wire. The images had been poignant and painful and
beautiful, and he'd stood there looking at them until the gallery owner
chased him out. These were for people with money, not people like him.
2729
Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as he saw
the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each others'
shoulders, in the shop's windows. It hadn't sold -- or maybe the
painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was a factory
full of painters devoted to making copies of this painting.
2730
He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of angry
voices. He thought he'd been hearing it for some time now, but it had
been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now it was growing
louder, and he wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. It was a chant,
thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic feet. The crowd
craned their necks around to locate the disturbance, and he joined
them.
2731
Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of young
men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with
beautifully calligraphed slogans: "NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY
UNFAIR!" "WE DEMAND WAGES!" "BOSS SIU IS CORRUPT!" The signs were
decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end of
the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of paper,
brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: "REMEMBER THE 42!" and
then one that simply said "IWWWW" in the funny Western script, and
Matthew felt a surge of elation.
2732
"Who are the 42?" he asked one of the painters, a pretty young woman
with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair behind
her ears. "It was three hours ago," she said, then looked at the time
on her phone. "Four hours ago." She shook her head, brought up some
pictures on her phone. "The police executed 42 boys in Cantonese town.
They say that the boys were criminals, but the neighbors say they were
just gold-farmers." She showed him the pictures. His friends, on the
ground, heads in hoods, being shot by policemen, reeling back under the
fire. The policemen anonymous behind their masks. The girl saw the
expression on his face and nodded. "Terrible, isn't it? Just terrible.
And the things the fifty-cent army have been saying about them --" The
fifty-cent army was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents -- 4
RMB -- to write patriotic comments and posts about the government.
2733
He found that he was sitting on the dirty sidewalk, holding the girl's
phone. She knelt down with him and said, "Hey, mister, are you all
right?"
2734
He nodded his head automatically, then shook it. Because he wasn't all
right. Nothing was all right. "No," he said.
2735
The girl looked at the sign she'd been painting and then at him. She
turned her back on the painting and took his chin, tilted his face up.
"Are you hurt?"
2736
"Not hurt," he said. "But." He shook his head. Pointed at her phone.
Drew out his own. Brought up the photos he'd taken while trembling on
the roof.
2737
"The same photos?" she said. Then looked closer. "Different photos.
Where'd you get them?"
2738
He said, "I took them," and it came out in a rasp. "They were my
friends."
2739
She jolted as if shocked, then bit her lip and paged through the
photos. She smelled of turpentine and her fingers were very long and
elegant. She reminded Matthew of an elf. "You were there?" It was only
half a question, but he nodded anyway. "Oh, oh, oh," she said, handing
him back the phone and giving him a strong, sisterly hug. "You poor
boy," she said.
2740
"We heard about it an hour ago, while we were settling in to work. We
gathered to discuss it, leaving our canvasses, and our boss, Boss Siu,
came by and demanded that we all get back to work. He wouldn't let us
tell him why we were gathered. He never does. It's like Jiandi says on
her radio show -- he controls our bathroom breaks, docks our wages for
talking or sometimes just for looking up for too long. And when he told
us we were all being docked, one of the girls stood up and shouted a
slogan, something like 'Boss Siu is unfair!' and though it was funny,
it was also so real , straight from her heart, and we all stood
up too and then --" She gestured at the line.
2741
Matthew remembered the day they'd walked out, a million years ago,
remembered the police arriving and taking them to jail, remembered his
vow never to go to jail again. And then he picked up the sign she'd
been making and gripped it by the corners and joined the line. He
wasn't the only one. He shouted the slogans, and his voice wasn't
hoarse anymore, it was strong and loud.
2742
And when the police finally did come, something miraculous happened:
the huge crowd of painters and other workers who'd gathered at the
factory joined ranks with the picketers and picked up their slogans.
They held their phones aloft and photographed the police as they
advanced, with masks and helmets and shields and batons.
2743
They held their ground.
2744
The police fired gas cannisters.
2745
Painters with big filter masks from the factories seized the cannisters
and calmly threw them through the factory windows, smoking out the
bosses and security men who'd been cowering there, and they came
coughing and weeping and wheezing.
2746
The crowd expanded, moved toward the police instead of
away from it, and a policeman darted forward out of his line,
club raised, mouth and eyes open very wide behind his facemask, and
three factory girls sidestepped him, tripped him, and the crowd closed
over him. The police line trembled as the man disappeared from view,
and just as it seemed like they would charge, the mob backed away, and
the man was there, moving a little but painfully, lying on the ground.
His helmet, truncheon and shield were gone, as was his utility belt
with its gun and its gas and its bundle of plastic cuffs.
2747
Now we have a gun , Matthew thought, and from a far distance
observed that he was thinking like a tactician again, not like a
terrorized boy, and he knew which way the police should come from next,
that alley over there, if they took it they'd control all the entrances
to the square, trapping the picketers.
2748
"We need people over there," he shouted to the painter girl, whose name
was Mei, and who had stood by his side, her fine slender arm upraised
as she called the slogans with him. "There and there. Lots of them. If
the police seal those areas off --"
2749
She nodded and pushed off through the crowd, tapping people on the
shoulder and shouting in their ears over the roar of the mob and the
police sirens and the oncoming chopper. That chopper made Matthew's
hands sweaty. If it dropped something on them -- gas, surely, not
bombs, surely not bombs he thought like a prayer -- there'd be
nowhere to hide. Protesters moved off to defend the alleyways he'd
pointed to, armed with bricks and rocks and cameraphones. The same
funnel-shaped alley-mouths that would make those alleys so deadly in
the hands of their enemies would make them easier to defend.
2750
The chopper was coming on now, and the cameraphones pointed at the sky,
and then the helicopter veered off and headed in a different direction
altogether. As Matthew raised his own phone to photograph it, he saw
that he'd missed several calls. A number he didn't recognize, overseas.
He dialled it back, crouching down low in the forest of stamping feet
to get out of the noise.
2751
"Hello?" a woman's voice said, in English.
2752
"Do you speak Chinese?" he said, in Cantonese.
2753
There was a pause, then the phone was handed off to someone else. "Who
is this?" a man's voice said in Mandarin.
2754
"My name is Matthew," he said. "You called me?"
2755
"You're one of the Shenzhen group?" the man said.
2756
"Yes," he said.
2757
"We've got another survivor!" he called out and sounded genuinely
elated.
2758
"Who is this?"
2759
"This is The Mighty Krang," the man said. "I work for Big Sister Nor.
We are so happy to hear from you, boy! Are you OK, are you safe?"
2760
"I'm in the middle of a strike," he said. "Thousands of painters in
Dafen. That's a village in Shenzhen, where they paint --"
2761
"You're in Dafen? We've been seeing pictures out of there, it looks
insane. Tell me what's going on."
2762
Without thinking, just acting, Matthew scaled a park bench and stood up
very tall and dictated a compact, competent situation report to the The
Mighty Krang, whom he'd seen on plenty of video-conferences with Big
Sister Nor and Justbob, snickering and clowning in the background. Now
he sounded absolutely serious and intent, asking Matthew to repeat some
details to ensure he had them clear.
2763
"And have you seen the other strikes?"
2764
"Other strikes?"
2765
"All around you," he said. "Lianchuang, Nanling and Jianying Gongyequ.
There's a factory on fire in Jianying Gongyequ. That's bad business.
Wildcatters -- if they'd talked to us first, we would have told them
not to. Still." He paused. "Those photos were something. The 42."
2766
"I have more."
2767
"Where'd you get them?"
2768
"I was there."
2769
"Oh."
2770
A long pause.
2771
"Matthew, are you safe where you are?"
2772
Matthew stood up again. The police line had fallen back, the
demonstration had taken on something of a carnival air, the artists
laughing and talking intensely. Some had instruments and were
improvising music.
2773
"Safe," he said.
2774
"OK, send me those photos. And stay safe."
2775
Two more helicopters now, not headed for them. Headed, he guessed, for
the burning factory in Jianying Gongyequ. He hoped no one was in it.
2776
Mr Bannerjee came for them that night, with another group of thugs, but
these weren't skinny badmashes, but grown adults, dirty men with knives
and clubs, men who smelled of betel and sweat and smoke and fiery
liquor, a smell that preceded them like a messenger shouting "beware,
beware." They came calling and joking through Dharavi, a mob that the
Webblies heard from a long way off. Mrs Dibyendu's neighbors came to
their windows and clucked worriedly and sent their children to lie down
on the floor.
2777
Mr Bannerjee led the procession, in his pretty suit, the mud sucking at
his fine shoes. He stood in the laneway before the door to Mrs
Dibyendu's cafe and put his hands on his hips and lit a cigarette,
making a show of it, all nonchalance as he puffed it to life and blew a
stream into the hot, wet air.
2778
He waited.
2779
Mala limped to the door and opened it. Behind her, the cafe was dark
and not a thing moved.
2780
Neither said a word. The neighbors looked on in worried silence.
2781
"Mala," Mr Bannerjee said, spreading his hands. "Be reasonable."
2782
Mala stepped onto the porch of the cafe and sat down, awkwardly folding
her legs beneath her. In a clear, loud voice, she said, "I work here.
This is my job. I demand the right to safe working conditions, decent
wages, and a just and fair workplace."
2783
Mr Bannerjee snorted. The men behind him laughed. He took a step
forward, then stopped.
2784
One by one, Mala's army filed out of the cafe, in a disciplined,
military rank. Each one sat down, until the little porch was crowded
with children, sitting down.
2785
Mr Bannerjee snorted again, then laughed. "You can't be serious," he
said. "You want, you want, you want. When I found you, you were a
Dharavi rat, no money, no job, no hope. I gave you a good job, good
wages, and now you want and want and want?" He made a dismissive noise
and waved his hand at her. "You will remove yourself from my cafe and
take your schoolchums with you, or you will be hurt. Very badly."
2786
The neighbors made scandalized clucking noises at that and Mr Bannerjee
ignored them.
2787
"You won't hurt us," Mala said. "You will go back to your fine house
and your fine friends and you will leave us alone to control our
destiny."
2788
Mr Bannerjee said nothing, only smoked his cigarette in the night and
stared at them, considering them like a scientist who's discovered a
new species of insects.
2789
"You are making mischief, Mala. I know what you are up to. You are
disrupting things that are bigger than you. I tell you one more time.
Remove yourself from my cafe."
2790
Mala made a very soft spitting sound, full of contempt.
2791
Mr Bannerjee raised his hand and his mob fell silent, prepared
themselves.
2792
And then there was a sound. A sound of footsteps, hundreds of them.
Thousands of them. An army marching down the laneway from both sides,
and then they were upon them. Ashok leading the column from the left,
old Mrs Rukmini and Mr Phadkar leading the column from the right.
2793
The columns themselves were composed of union workers -- textile
workers, steel workers, train workers. Ashok's phonecalls and photos
and stories had paid off. Hundreds of text messages were sent and
workers were roused from their beds and they hastily dressed and
gathered to be picked up by union busses and driven all across Mumbai
to Dharavi, guided in to Mrs Dibyendu's shop by Ashok, who had
whispered his thanks to the leaders who had given him their support.
2794
The workers halted, just a few paces from the gangsters and their evil
smells. Ashok looked at the two groups, the sitting army and the
standing mob, and he deliberately and slowly sat down.
2795
The exquisitely elderly ladies leading the other column did the same.
The sitting spread, moving back through the group, and if any worker
thought of his trousers or her sari before sitting in the grime of the
Dharavi lane, none said a word and none hesitated.
2796
Bannerjee swallowed audibly. One of the neighbors leaning out of a
window snickered. Bannerjee glared up at the windows. "Houses in slums
like this burn down all the time," he said, but his voice quavered. The
neighbor who'd snickered -- a young shirtless man with burns up and and
down his bare chest from some old accident -- closed his shutters. A
moment later, he was on the street. He walked up to Bannerjee, looked
him in the eye, and then, deliberately, folded his legs and sat down
before him. Bannerjee raised his leg as if to kick and the crowd
growled , a low, savage sound that made the hair on the back of
Mala's neck stand up, even as she made it herself. It sounded as though
all of Dharavi was an angry dog, straining at its leash, threatening to
lunge.
2797
More neighbors drifted into the street -- old and young, men and women.
They'd known Mrs Dibyendu for years. They'd seen her driven from her
home and business. They were making the same noise. They sat too.
2798
Mr Bannerjee looked at Mala and opened his mouth as if to say
something, then stopped. She stared at him with utter calm, and then
smiled broadly. "Boo," she said, softly, and he took a step back.
2799
His own men laughed at this and he went purple in the dim light of the
street. Mala bit her tongue to keep from laughing. He looked so
comical!
2800
He turned with great dignity to look at his men, who were so tense they
practically vibrated. Mala watched in stupefied awe as he grabbed one
at random and slapped him, hard, across the face, a sound that rang
through the narrow laneway. It was the single dumbest act of leadership
she'd ever seen, so perfectly stupid you could have put it in a jar and
displayed it for people to come and marvel at.
2801
The man regarded Bannerjee for a moment, his eyes furious, his fists
bunched. He was shorter than Bannerjee, but he was carrying a length of
wood and the muscles in his bare forearms jerked and bunched like a
basketful of snakes. Deliberately, the man spat a glob of evil, pink,
betel-stained saliva into Bannerjee's face, turned on his heel and
walked away, delicately picking his way through the sitting Webblies
and workers and neighbors. After a moment, the rest of Bannerjee's mob
followed.
2802
Bannerjee stood alone. The saliva slid down his face. Mala thought
If he takes out a gun and starts blazing away, it wouldn't surprise
me in the least. He was totally beaten, humiliated before children
and the poor of Dharavi, and there were so many cameraphone flashes
dancing in the night it was like a disco in a movie.
2803
But perhaps Bannerjee didn't have a gun, or perhaps he had more
self-control than Mala believed. In any case, he, too, turned on his
heel and walked away. At the end of the alley, he turned back and said,
in a voice that could be heard above the buzz of conversation that
sprang up in his wake, "I know where your parents live, Mala," and then
he walked away altogether into the night.
2804
The crowd roared with triumph as he disappeared. Ashok helped her
stand, his hand lingering in hers for longer than was strictly
necessary. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for hugging Yasmin,
who was crying, happy tears like the ones they'd shared so many times
before. Yasmin was as thin as a piece of paper but her arms were
strong, and oh, it did feel good to be held for a moment, instead of
holding everyone else up.
2805
She let go at last and turned to Ashok. "They came," she said.
2806
Instead of answering, he led her to two tiny old ladies, and a man with
a skullcap and a beard. "Mr Phadkar, Mrs Rukmini and Mrs Muthappa," he
said. "This is Mala. They call her General Robotwallah. Her workers
have been defending the strike. They are unbeatable, so long as they
have a place to work."
2807
Mr Phadkar looked fierce. "You will always have a place to work,
General," he said, in a voice that was pitched to carry to the workers
who gathered around them, excitedly passing whispered accounts of the
historic meeting back through their ranks.
2808
The old ladies rolled their eyes at one another, which made Mala smile.
They each took one of her hands in their calloused, dry old hands and
squeezed. "You were very brave," one said. "Please, introduce us to
your comrades."
2809
They chatted all night, and the women's papadam collective brought them
food, and there was chai, and as there were far too many people to fit
in the little cafe, the party occupied the whole of the laneway and
then out into the street. Mala and her fighters fought on through the
night in shifts, stepping out on their breaks to mingle, making
friends, bringing them into the cafe to explain what they did and how
they did it.
2810
And there were reporters asking questions, and the gupshup flew up and
down the streets and lanes of Dharavi, picking up steam as the roosters
began to call and the first of the early risers walked to the toilets
and the taps and had their ears bent. The bravery of the children, the
valor of the workers, the evil of the sinister Bannerjee in his suit
and the thugs he'd brought with him -- it was a story straight off the
movie screen, and every new ear it entered was attached to a mouth that
was anxious to spread it.
2811
Mala and Yasmin's parents came to see them the next morning, as they
sat groggy after a night like no other night, on the porch of Mrs
Dibyendu's cafe. The parents didn't know what to make of their strange
daughters, but they were visibly proud of them, even Yasmin's father,
which clearly surprised Yasmin, who'd looked like she expected a
beating.
2812
As their mothers gathered them into their bosoms, Mala looked at
Yasmin, and saw the haunted look in Yasmin's eye and knew, just
knew that she was thinking of the little boy who'd died.
2813
How did she know? Because Mala herself had never stopped thinking of
him, and thinking of how she'd taken the actions that led to his death.
And because Mala herself knew that no amount of sitting down peacefully
and braving thugs with her moral force instead of her army would ever
wipe the stain of that boy's death off her karma.
2814
And then Mamaji kissed Mala's forehead and murmured many things in her
ear, and her little brother emerged from behind her skirts and demanded
to be shown how it all worked and stared at her with so much admiration
that she thought he'd burst and for a moment, it was all golden.
2815
Ashok looked on from his little office, meeting with the union leaders,
talking to Big Sister Nor. Something big was brewing with him, she
knew, something even bigger than this miracle that he'd pulled off. She
fobbed her brother off on a group of boys who were eager to teach him
some of the basics and bask in the pure hero-worship radiating off of
him, then slipped back into Ashok's room and perched at his side on a
stool, moving a pile of papers away first.
2816
"That was incredible," she said. "Absolutely incredible." She said it
quietly, with conviction. "You're our saviour."
2817
He snorted through his nose, then scrubbed at his eyes with his fists.
"Mala, my general, you do a hundred incredible things every day. The
only reason all those people came out is because I could show them what
you'd done, explain how you had organized these children, these
slum-rats, into a disciplined force that was committed to justice."
2818
She squirmed on her seat. "I'm just bloodthirsty," she said. "I'm just
one of those people who fights all the time." Thinking again of the
boy, the dead boy. His blood was still under Ashok's fingernails.
2819
He turned and, just for an instant, touched her arm. The gesture was
gentle, tender. No one had ever touched her quite like that. It broke
something in her, some flood-dam that had safely contained all the pain
and fear and shame, and she had to turn and run blindly out into the
lane and around a corner to weep and weep biting her lip to keep from
screaming out her grief. Though she heard some of the others looking
for her, she kept silent and did not let them find her. Then she
realized she was hiding in the same place in which she'd hidden from
Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew, and that broke another dam and it was
quite some time before she could get herself under control and head
back into the laneway again.
2820
She didn't get very far. Out front of dozens of businesses, there were
small groups of people boisterously shouting rhymed chants about
working conditions and pay. Crowds gathered to talk to each other, and
there were arguments, laughter, a fistfight. She stood in the middle of
the road and thought, How can this be?
2821
And at that moment, she realized that she was not alone. All over
Dharavi, all over the world, there were people like her who wanted
more, demanded more, with a yearning that was always just there,
beneath the skin, and it only took the lightest scratch to let it out.
2822
She didn't go back to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. Instead, she took her
walking stick and limped all around Dharavi, up and down the streets
where the tiny factories would normally have been hives of activity.
Many of them were, but many were not -- many had workers and crowds out
front, and it was like a virus that was spreading through the streets
and lanes and alleys, and now it was as if all the crying had lightened
her so that her feet barely touched the ground, as though she might fly
away at any instant.
2823
She was just turning to go back to her army and maybe a few hours'
sleep when they grabbed her, hit her very hard on the head, and dragged
her into a tiny, stinking room.
2824
Confidence is a funny thing. When lots of people believe something is
valuable, it becomes valuable. So if you're selling game-gold and
people think game-gold is valuable, they buy it.
2825
But it's better than that. If there's a wide-spread belief that
Svartalfaheim Warriors swords are valuable, then even people who
don't think they're valuable will buy them, because they believe
they can sell them to people who do believe that they're
valuable.
2826
And when people who buy to sell to others start to bid on Svartalfaheim
swords, the price of the swords goes up. Of course it does: the more
buyers there are for something, the higher the price goes. And the
higher the price goes, the more buyers there are, because hey, if the
price is high, there must be plenty of suckers who'll take the swords
off your hands in a little while for an even higher price.
2827
Confidence makes value. Value makes more value, which makes more
confidence. Which makes more value.
2828
But it's not infinite. Think of a cartoon character who runs off a
cliff and keeps running madly in place, able to stay there until
someone points out that he's dancing on air, at which point he plummets
to the sharp rocks beneath him.
2829
For so long as everyone believes in the value of a Svartalfaheim sword,
the sword will be valuable, and get more valuable. As the pool of
people who might buy a Svartalfaheim sword grows -- say, because
they're getting calls from their brokers offering to sell them
elaborate, complex sword futures (a contract to buy a sword at a later
date), or because their smart-ass nieces and nephews are talking them
up -- the likelihood that someone will say, "Are you kidding me?
This is a sword in a video game !" goes up.
2830
Indeed, this doubter might have other choice observations, like this:
"If everyone has these swords, doesn't that mean that there's
more swords than anyone could possibly use? Doesn't that mean that
they're not valuable, but valueless ?"
2831
Or if the doubter is impossibly old fashioned, he might even say: "What
if the people who run this Fartenstein game decide to change the number
of swords available by just deleting a ton of them? Or by
printing up a kazillion more? Or change the swords into toothpicks?"
2832
Oh, the sword-speculators will reply, they'll never do that, it
would ruin the game, they can't afford to do that. And here's the
thing: they're half-right. So long as the game-runners believe that
messing around with the swords will piss off all these people who own,
speculate on, buy and sell swords, they can't afford to do it.
2833
These cartoon characters run in place on air, shouting that the swords
will always go up in value, shouting that the game-runners will never
nerf or otherwise bork them, and they can stay there, up in the air,
waving their swords, being joined by others who are convinced by their
arguments and the incontrovertible fact that they are indeed not
falling, until...
2834
Until...
2835
Until there's enough widespread confidence in the proposition that they
will fall. Until the press starts to publish wide-eyed stories about
the absurdity of ever believing in the value of these swords, pointing
out that the fall is inevitable, that it was pre-ordained from the
moment the first speculator bought his first sword.
2836
Think of the belief in infallible swords as a solar system. In the
center, there's the sun, gigantic and white-hot, exerting gravity on
the planets and asteroids that spin around and around it. At the outer
edge is the dandruff of planetesimals and asteroids, weakly caught in
the gravity, only halfway committed to being part of the system. As the
sun begins to cool off, begins to shrink with the force of disbelief,
these outer hangers-on fly away. These are the tasters, the people who
bought one or two little swords or sword-futures or "fully hedged
complex sword derived securities" because everyone else was doing it.
They hear that this thing is too good to be true and see the prices
start to drop and so they sell off what they've got, take a small loss,
and tell their friends.
2837
Well, now there's a bunch of people saying that swords aren't really
that valuable. Less confidence equals lower prices. And there's more
swords on the market. More swords equals lower prices. The larger
planets, closer in, the investors with a fair bit of money in imaginary
cutlery, these folks see the prices dip and continue to fall. They hear
the brokers and analysts scurrying around saying, "No, no, the sun will
burn bright forever, the sun will never dim! Prices will come up again.
This is temporary."
2838
Here's the thing: if the brokers and analysts can convince these bigger
investors that they're right, they will be right . If these
bigger investors hold on to their swords, the market will stay healthy
for a while longer.
2839
But if they aren't convincing enough, if these bigger investors lose
confidence and start selling, they'll never stop. That's because the
first seller to get out of the sword-market will get the highest
price for his goods. But once he gets out, his swords will be on the
market (remember, more swords equals lower prices) and everyone else
will get a lower price. And when they sell, the prices will go
down further, panicking more investors, putting more swords on the
market, forcing the prices down further.
2840
Somewhere in there, the game-runners are apt to have a minor freak-out
and then a major one. They'll start to mess with the sword-supply.
They'll take swords out of the market, or put swords in, or nerf
swords, or buff the hell out of them, anything to keep the fun from
collapsing out of the game.
2841
And that'll probably make things worse, because this isn't an exact
science, it's a bunch of guesswork, and there are ten zillion ways to
get this wrong and so few ways to get it right.
2842
The sun gets smaller, and dimmer, and the close-in planets are feeling
the tug of oblivion now, the call of deep space that says, "Spin away,
spin away to forever, for the sun is dying!"
2843
They don't want to spin away. They want to hang on. They have so many
swords in the bank, they're practically made of swords. They've
made a fortune buying and selling swords. Of course, they spent the
fortune on more swords. Or different swords. Or axes. But whatever
they've spent it on, it's basically the same thing, because every
broker knows that you won't get in trouble for recommending that people
buy things that have always been profitable.
2844
If the sword market collapses, these planets -- these major, committed
investors -- will die. They will be wiped out. They have pledged their
lives and love and immortal souls to magic swords, and if the swords
break their hearts, they will never recover. So as the market for
swords gets crummier and crummier and crummier and crummier, they grow
more and more insistent that everything is fine, just fine, it'll all
be back to "normal" any day now. They can't afford to lose confidence,
because they aren't going to fly off into space. They're going to fall
into the dying sun and will be incinerated in its glowing heart.
2845
But denial only works for so long. The sun is dying. No one wants your
swords. Your swords are worthless. Even the people who need a sword to
kill some elves or orcs or random wildlife critters are faintly
embarrassed by the fact, because worthless swords are now the subject
of numerous jokes about idiotic investment schemes and corrupt
brokerages and loony investors who got swept up in the heat of the
moment. These people go and kill monsters with bows and clubs for a
while, because everyone knows how much swords suck.
2846
How low can the value of a sword go? Subzero, as it turns out. Not only
can a sword become worthless, it can actually cost you money to get rid
of it. Oh, not the sword itself, of course, but the derivatives
of the swords. The bets on swords. Where someone else has made a bet on
whether your sword will go up or down in value, and then packaged it up
with a bunch of other bets, just figuring out which bets are in which
packages can cost so much money that you end up losing money, even on
winning bets.
2847
Confidence is great, but it isn't everything. Reality catches up with
everyone, eventually. All suns extinguish themselves. All cartoon
characters eventually plummet to the bottom of the canyon. And every
sword is eventually worthless.
2848
Command Central was bedlam. The game-runners snarled at each other like
bad-tempered, huge-bellied dinosaurs, and ate like dinosaurs, too,
sending out for burgers, pizza, buckets of chicken, huge thick shakes
Anything they could scarf down one-handed while they labored over their
screens and shouted insults at one another.
2849
Connor hardly noticed. He was deep in his feeds. Bill's new security
subroutines let him run every player's actions backwards and forwards
like a video, branching off into other players' timelines every time
they crossed paths in a party, a PvP combat session, a trade, or a
conversation. It was an ocean of information, containing every secret
of every player in every game that Coke ran.
2850
It was too much information. He was looking for something very precise
-- the identities of gold-farmers -- but what he had was every damned
thing ever uttered or done in-game. It was a wondrous toy and an
infinite distraction, and practically every spare moment Connor could
muster was spent writing scripts and filters to help him make sense of
it.
2851
Just now he was watching a feed of every player who had PvP killed
another player, where the dead player's toon had earned more than 1000
Mario coins in the previous hour. This was turning out to be a rich
vein of potential gold-farmers and Webblies. He was just trying to
figure out how to write a script that would also grab the player IDs of
anyone who was nearby during one of these fights, when he
realized that Command Central had gotten even noisier than usual,
devolving into raw chaos.
2852
He looked up. "What's wrong?" he said, even as his fingers moved to
call up general feeds showing the overall health of the game and its
systems. And even before anyone answered he saw what was wrong. Server
load had spiked across every game-shard, redlining the server-clusters
seated in air-conditioned freight containers all over the world. It
seemed as though every single metric for server-load was at peak --
calculations per second, memory usage, disk churn. But on closer
examination, he saw that this wasn't quite true: network load was down.
Way down. Somehow, these vast arrays of computing power were all being
made to work so hard they were in danger of collapsing, but it was all
happening without anyone talking very much to the servers.
2853
Indeed, network load was so low that it seemed that hardly
anyone could be logged into these servers -- and yes, there it was, the
number of players logged in was low and falling -- a million players,
then 800,000, then 500,000, then 300,000, and finally the games
stabilized at about 40,000 sessions. Another click revealed why: the
system was kicking off players as the load increased, trying to make
room in memory and on the CPUs for whatever monster process was tearing
through the frigid shipping containers.
2854
"What the hell is going on?" he said, shouting into the general din.
Kaden was on the phone with ops, shouting at the systems administrators
to get on it, trace every process on the boxes, identify whatever
species of strangler vine was loose in the machines, choking them to
death.
2855
Bill, meanwhile, had set loose his special team of grey-hat
hackers to try and figure out if there were any of their black-hat
brethren loose on the systems, crackers who'd broken in to steal
corporate secrets, amass virtual wealth, or simply crash the thing,
either to benefit a competitor, seek ransom or simply destroy for the
pleasure of destruction.
2856
Connor's money was on hackers. Each cluster was built and tested at
Coke Games HQ in Austin, burned in for three solid weeks after it was
all bolted into place in the shipping container. Once it had been
green-lighted, it was loaded onto a flatbed truck and shipped to a
data-center somewhere cold, preferably near a geothermal vent,
tide-farm or wind-farm. There were plenty of sites in Newfoundland and
Alaska, and some very good ones in Iceland and Norway, a few in Belgium
and some in Siberia. The beauty of using standard shipping containers
for their systems is that they were easy to ship (duh). The beauty of
sticking the containers somewhere cold was that the main cost of
running the systems was cooling off the machines as they relentlessly
rubbed electrons against each other, bouncing them through the
pinball-machine guts of the chips within them. On a cold day when the
wind was blowing, they could knock the cost of running one of those
containers in half.
2857
Coke bought their data-center slots in threes, keeping one empty. When
a new container arrived, it was slotted into the empty bay, run for a
week to make sure nothing had been hurt in transit, and then the oldest
container in a Coke-slot was yanked, loaded back onto a train, or ship,
or flatbed truck, and sent back to Austin, detouring at Mumbai or
Shenzhen or Lagos to drop off the computers within, stripped by work
crews who sent them off to the used server markets to be torn to pieces
and salvaged.
2858
The containers were all specialized, only handling local traffic, to
keep down network lag. But if one was overwhelmed, it could start
offloading on its brothers around the planet -- better to face a laggy
play experience than to be knocked off altogether. It was inconceivable
that every server on the planet would suddenly get a spike in players
and hit capacity and not be able to offer some support to the others.
Inconceivable, unless someone had sabotaged them.
2859
In the meantime, Connor had his feeds, his forensics, his gigantic
haystacks and their hidden needles. Let the others worry about the
downtime. He had bigger fish to fry.
2860
He plunged back in, writing ever-more-refined scripts to try to catch
the bad guys. He had a growing file of suspects to look into in more
depth, using another set of scripts and filters he'd been drafting in
the back of his mind. He already knew how he'd do it: he'd build his
files of bad guys, make it big and deep, follow them around the game,
see who else they knew, get thousands and thousands of accounts and
then:
2861
Destroy them.
2862
In one second, one instant , he'd delete every single one of
their accounts, make their gold and elite items vanish, toss every
single one out for terms-of-service violations. That part would be
easy . The terms of service were so ridiculously strict and yet
maddeningly vague that simply playing the game necessarily involved
violating them. He'd obliterate them from gamespace and send them all
back to their mommies crying. Thinking this kind of thing made him feel
dirty and good at the same time.
2863
He was deep in meditation when a fat, hairy hand reached over his
shoulder and slammed his laptop lid down so hard he heard the screen
crack, and then the hand reversed its course and slapped him so hard in
the back of the head that his face bounced off the table in front of
him.
2864
Command Central fell perfectly silent as Connor straightened up,
feeling and then tasting the blood pouring out of his nose. His ears
were ringing. He turned his head slowly, because his eyes wouldn't
focus properly and his head felt like it was barely attached to his
neck. Standing over him, snorting like freight engine, stood Kaden, the
head of ops, wearing a two-day beard and smelling of rancid sweat.
2865
"What --"
2866
The man drew back his beefy fist again, cocking it for another blow to
Connor's head and Connor flinched away involuntarily. He hadn't been in
a fight since his schoolyard days, and he couldn't believe that this
actual adult man had actually hit him with his actual fists. Something
was growing in his chest, bubbling over, headed into his arms and legs.
His breath came in short pants, every inhale bringing blood into his
mouth. His heart thudded. He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over
backwards and --
2867
Leapt!
2868
He pushed off with both legs, throwing his own considerable bulk into
Kaden's huge, protruding midsection. It was like a medicine ball, hard
and unyielding, and he rebounded off it, just as Kaden's fist clobbered
him again, getting him with a hard hammerblow in the back of the neck
that knocked him to the ground.
2869
He hit the ground with a thud that he felt in every bone in his body,
his head caroming off a table-leg. He got his palms underneath him and
shot to his feet again, coming all the way up, bringing his knee up
into Kaden's balls as he did, doubling the fat man over. His hands were
already in awkward fists and it was natural as anything to begin to
beat the man's head with them, hitting so hard the skin over his
knuckles split.
2870
It had only taken a few seconds, and now the rest of Command Central
reacted. Big hands grabbed his arms, waist, legs, pulled him away.
Across from him, four game-runners had Kaden pinned as well, shouting
at him to calm down, just calm the hell down, all right?
2871
He did, a little. Someone handed Connor a wad of pizza-parlor napkins
to press against his nose and someone else handed him an ice-cold can
of Coke from the huge cooler at the side of the room to press against
his aching neck.
2872
"What the hell is wrong with you?" he choked, glaring at Kaden, still
held fast by four beefy game-runners.
2873
"You goddamned idiot ! You brought down the whole goddamned
network. You and your stupid scripts! Do you have any idea how
much you've cost us with your little fishing-expedition?"
2874
Connor's anger and shock morphed into fear.
2875
"What are you talking about?"
2876
"Who ever wrote those damned forensics programs didn't have a
clue . They clobbered the servers so hard, taking priority over
every other job, until the system had to kick all the players off the
games so that it could tell you what they were doing. I'll tell
you what they were doing, Connor: they were trying to connect to the
server ."
2877
Connor shot a look at Bill, who had written the scripts, and saw that
the head of security had gone pale. Connor dimly remembered him saying
that the scripts were experimental and to use them sparingly, but they
had been so rewarding , it had given him such a thrill to sit
like a recording angel over the worlds, like Santa Claus detecting
everyone who was naughty and everyone who'd been nice --
2878
The enormity of what he'd done hit him almost as hard as Kaden's fist
had. He had shut down three of the twenty largest economies in the
world for a period of hours. Coke ran games that turned over more money
than Portugal, Poland or Peru. That was just the P's. If Coke's games
had been real countries, it would have been an act of war, or treason.
2879
It was easily the biggest screwup of his career. Of his life. Possibly
the biggest screwup in the entire history of the Coca Cola
corporation .
2880
Command Central seemed to recede, as if the room was rushing away from
him. Distantly, he heard the game runners hiss explanations to one
another, explaining the magnitude of his all-encompassing legendary
world-beating FAIL.
2881
Connor had never had a failure like this before. He'd screwed up here
and there on the way. But he'd never, ever, never, never --
2882
He shook his head. The hands restraining him loosened. Stiffly, he bent
to pick up his laptop. Slivers of plastic and glass rained down as he
lifted it. He couldn't meet anyone's eyes as he let himself out of the
room.
2883
He wasn't sure how he'd gotten home. His car was in the driveway, so
that implied that he'd driven himself, but he had no recollection of
doing so. And here he was, sitting at his dining-room table -- grand
and dusty, he ate his meals over the sink when he bothered to eat at
home at all -- and his phone was ringing from a long way off.
2884
Absently, he patted himself down, noticing as he did that he was
holding his car keys, which bolstered his hypothesis that he had driven
himself home. He found his phone and answered it.
2885
"Connor," Ira said, "Connor, I don't know how to tell you this --"
2886
Connor grunted. These were words you never wanted to hear from your
broker.
2887
"Connor are you there?"
2888
He grunted again. Somewhere, his brain was finding some space in which
to be even more alarmed.
2889
"Connor, listen. Are you listening? Connor, it's like this. Mushroom
Kingdom gold is collapsing, falling through the floor. There's
no bottom in sight."
2890
"Oh," Connor said. It came out in a breathless squeak.
2891
The broker sighed. He sounded half-hysterical. "It's worse than that,
though. That Prince in Dubai? Turns out he was writing paper that he
couldn't honor. He's broke, too."
2892
"He is," Connor said. A million miles away, a furious gorilla was
bearing its teeth and beating its hairy fists against the insides of
his skull, screeching something that sounded like You said it was
risk-free!
2893
"He isn't saying so, of course." Now the broker sounded more than
half-hysterical. He giggled, a laugh that ran up and down several
octaves like a drunk sliding his fingers up and down a piano's
keyboard."He's saying things like, 'We are experiencing temporary
cash-flow difficulties that have caused us to defer on some of our
financial obligations, due to overall instability in the market.' But
Connor --" He giggled again. "I've been around the block. I know what
financial BS sounds like. The prince is b-r-o-k-e."
2894
"He is," Connor said. You said it was risk-free! You said it was
risk-free!
2895
"And there's something else."
2896
Connor made a tiny sound like a whimper. The broker plunged on. "This
is my last day at Paglia and Kennedy. Actually, this may be Paglia and
Kennedy's last day. We just got our notices. Paglia and Kennedy sank a
lot of money into these bonds and their derivatives.
2897
"Everyone else ran off to steal some office supplies but I thought I
would stand here on the deck of the Titanic and make some phone calls
to my best clients. I put nearly everything into Mushroom Kingdom gold.
Not at first, you understand. But over time, bit by bit, the returns
were just so good --"
2898
"It was risk-free," Connor said, louder than he'd planned to.
2899
"Yeah," Ira said. "OK, Connor, buddy, OK. I have other calls to make."
Connor could tell the poor guy expected him to be grateful. He thought
he was making up for costing Connor -- how much? A hundred and eighty
thousand? Two hundred thousand? Connor didn't even know anymore.
2900
"Thanks for calling," he said. "Thanks, Ira. Take care of yourself." He
could barely choke the words out, but once he had, he actually felt a
little better.
2901
He hung up the phone and dropped it on the table, letting it clatter.
Somewhere out there, Coke's gameworlds were flickering back to life,
players logging in again, along with gold-farmers, Webblies,
Pinkertons, the whole crew. Not Connor, though. Connor had lived in a
game-world of one kind or another since he was seven years old, and now
he was willing to believe that he'd never visit one again.
2902
Any second now, he would be fired, he was quite sure. And maybe
arrested. And he was broke. Worse than broke -- he'd bought the last
round of securities from Paglia and Kennedy on margin, on borrowed
money, and he owed it back. Though with the brokerage going under they
may never come and ask for it.
2903
He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. Some smell -- the sweat
that soaked his shirt, the blood that caked his face, the musty smell
of the house -- triggered a strong memory of his place in Palo Alto,
near the Stanford campus, and the long, long time he'd spent there,
buying virtual assets, teetering on the brink of financial ruin and
even starvation. And just like that, he was free.
2904
Free of the terror of losing his job. Free of the terror of being
broke. Free of the rage at the gold-farmers. Free of the shouting,
roiling anger that was Command Central and free, finally free of his
fingerspitzengefuhl. The world was tumbling free and uncontrolled and
there wasn't a single thing he could do about it and wasn't that
fine ?
2905
There was an old song that went Freedom's just another word for
nothing left to lose and Connor suddenly understood what it all
meant.
2906
When he was eight years old, he'd decided to work on video games. It
was one of those ridiculous kid-things, like deciding to be an
astronaut or a ballerina or a cowboy or a deep-sea diver. Most kids
outgrow their dreams, go on to do something normal and boring. But
Connor had held onto it, finding his way into gamespace through the
most curious of means, and he had trapped himself there. Until today.
2907
Now the eight-year-old who'd sent him on a quest had finally released
him from it.
2908
He took a shower and iced his nose some more and put on a t-shirt and a
pair of baggy shorts he'd bought on holiday in the Bahamas the year
before (he'd spent most of the trip in his room, online, logged into
gamespace, keeping the fingerspitzengefuhl alive) and opened his door.
2909
Outside it was Atlanta. He'd lived in the city for seven years, gone to
its movie theaters and eaten at its restaurants, taken his parents
around to its tourist sites when they visited, but he had never really
lived there. It was like he'd been on an extended, seven-year
visit. He kicked on a pair of flip-flops he normally wore when he had
to go outside to get the mail and stepped out his door.
2910
He walked into the baking afternoon sun of Atlanta, breathing in the
humid air that was so wet it seemed like it might condense on the roof
of his mouth and drip onto his tongue. He got to the end of his walk
and looked up and down the street he'd lived on for all these years,
with its giant houses and spreading trees and disused basketball hoops
and he started walking. No one except maids and gardeners walked
anywhere in this neighborhood. Connor couldn't understand why. The
spreading trees smelled great, there were birds singing, even a snail
inching its way across the sidewalk. In half an hour, Connor saw more
interesting new things than he had in a month.
2911
Oh, the feeling of it all! A lightness in his head, an openness in his
chest. Old pains in his back and shoulders that had been there so long
he'd forgotten about them disappeared, leaving behind a comfortable
feeling as striking as the quiet after a refrigerator's compressor
shuts off, leaving behind unexpected silence.
2912
He was sweating freely, but he didn't mind. It just made the occasional
breath of wind feel that much better.
2913
Eventually, his bladder demanded that he head home, so he ambled back,
waving at the suspicious neighbors who peered at him from between the
curtains of their vast living-room windows. As he opened his door, he
heard his phone ringing. A momentary feeling of worry arced from his
throat to his balls, like a streak of lightning, but he forced himself
to relax again and headed for the bathroom. Whomever was calling would
leave a message. There, the voicemail had picked it up. He had to pee.
2914
He peed.
2915
The phone started ringing again.
2916
He went into the kitchen and rummaged in his freezer. There was a loaf
of brown bread there -- he never could get through a whole loaf before
it went moldy, so now he bought a dozen loaves at a time and froze
them. He chipped off two slices and put them in the toaster. There was
peanut butter from the health-food store, crunchy-style, with nothing
added. While the bread was toasting, he stirred the peanut butter with
a knife, mixing the oil that was floating on top with the ground
peanuts below. He had honey, but it had crystallized. No problem --
twenty seconds in the microwave and it was liquid again. What he really
wanted was bananas, but there weren't any (the phone was ringing again)
and he was hungry and wanted a sandwich now. He'd get bananas later.
2917
The sandwich was (the phone was ringing again) delicious. He needed
fresh bread though, he'd get some of that when he picked up the
bananas. Throw out the frozen (there it was again) bread. He'd eat
fresh from now on, and relish (and again) every bite.
2918
Up until the moment that his finger pressed the green button, he
believed that he was going to switch his phone off. But his finger came
down on the green button and the anxiety sizzled up his arm and spread
out from his shoulder to his whole body as the distant voice from the
phone's earpiece said, "Hello? Connor?"
2919
Connor watched as his hand wrapped itself around his phone and lifted
it to his ear.
2920
"Yes?" his mouth said, in the old, tight Connor voice.
2921
"It's Bill," the head of security said. "Can you come into the office?"
2922
Connor heaved a sigh. "I'll courier over my badge. You can pack up my
desk and ship it back. If you want to sue me, you'll have to hire a
process server and have him come out here."
2923
Bill's laugh was bitter and mirthless. "We're not suing you, Connor.
We're not firing you. We need your help."
2924
Connor swallowed. This was the one thing he hadn't anticipated: that
his life might come back and suck him into it again. "What the hell are
you talking about?"
2925
"We think it's your gold-farmers," Bill said. "They've got us by the
balls, and they're squeezing."
2926
Connor changed into his work clothes like a condemned man dressing for
his own hanging. He prayed that his car wouldn't start, but it was a
new car -- he bought a new one every year, just like everyone else in
Command Central -- and its electric motor hummed to life as he
eyeballed the retina-scanner in the sun-visor.
2927
He drove down his street again, seeing it all through the smoked glass
of his car, the rolled up windows and air-conditioning drowning out the
birdsong and shutting out the smells of the trees and the nodding
flowers. Too fast to spot a snail or a bird.
2928
He headed back to work.
2929
They came for Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob in the
dead of night, and this time they brought the police. The three of them
watched the police break down the door, accompanied by a pair of sour
Chinese men with the look of mainland gangsters, the kind who came to
Singapore on easy two-week tourist visas. Nor and her friends watched
the door be broken down from two Lorongs -- side-streets -- down, using
a webcam and streaming the video live to the Webblies' network and a
bunch of journalists they'd woken up as soon as they'd bugged out of
the old place, warned by a sympathetic grocer at the top of Geylang
Road.
2930
The fallback house wasn't nearly as nice as the one they'd vacated,
naturally, but the two quickly came into balance as the police
methodically smashed every piece of furniture in the place to
splinters. The Mighty Krang drew real-time annotations on the screen as
the police worked, sometimes writing in the dollar value of the
furniture being smashed, sometimes just drawing mustaches and
eye-patches on the police in the video. When the Chinese men took out
their dicks and began to piss on the wreckage, he leapt to his
trackpad, circled the members in question, drew arrows pointing to
them, and wrote "TINY!" in three languages before they'd finished.
2931
They watched as one of the policemen answered his phone, listened in as
he said, "Hello?" and "What?" and "Where?" and then "Here?" "Here?"
feeling around the place where the wall met the ceiling, until he found
the video camera. The look on his face -- a mixture of horror and fury
-- as he disconnected it was priceless.
2932
"Priceless," The Mighty Krang said, and turned to his companions, who
were far less amused than he was.
2933
"Oh, do lighten up," he said. "They didn't catch us. The strikers are
striking. Mumbai and Guandong are going crazy. The New York Times is
sending us about ten emails a minute. The Financial Times, too. And the
Times of London. That's just the English papers. Germans, French... And
the Times of India, of course, they've got a reporter in Dharavi, and
so do the Mumbai tabloids. We're six of the top twenty YouTube videos.
I've got --" he looked down, moused some -- "82,361 emails from people
to the membership address."
2934
Justbob glowered at him with her good eye. "Matthew is trapped in
Dafen. 42 are dead. We don't know where Jie and the white boy,
Wei-Dong, are."
2935
Big Sister Nor reached out her hands and they each took one of hers.
"Comrades," she said, "comrades. This is the moment, the one we planned
for. We've been hurt. Our friends have been hurt. More will be hurt
when this is over.
2936
"But people like us get hurt every single day . We get caught in
machines, we inhale poison vapors, we are beaten or drugged or raped.
Don't forget that. Don't forget what we go through, what we've been
through. We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and
we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will
lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And
then we'll lose again . And again . And we will fight on.
Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by
doing nothing."
2937
An alert popped up on Krang's screen, reminding him to switch a new
prepaid SIM card into his mobile phone. A second later, the same alert
came up on Big Sister Nor and Justbob's screens.
2938
Big Sister Nor smiled. "OK," she said. "Back to work."
2939
They swapped SIMs, pulling new ones out of dated envelopes they carried
in money-belts under their clothes. They powered up their phones. Both
Justbob and The Mighty Krang's phones rang as soon as they powered up.
2940
The Mighty Krang looked down at the number. "It's Wei-Dong," he said.
"Told you he was safe."
2941
Justbob looked at her phone. "Ashok," she said.
2942
They both answered their phones.
2943
Ashok knew that this time would come. For months, he'd slaved over
models of economic destruction: how much investment in junk
game-securities would it take to put the game-runners into a position
of total vulnerability? He'd modelled it a thousand ways, tried many
variables in his equations, sweated over it, woken in the night to pace
or ride his motorcycle around until the doubts left his mind.
2944
Somewhere out there, some distant follower of Big Sister Nor's had
convinced the Mechanical Turks to go to work selling his funny
securities. It had been easy enough to package them -- there were so
many companies that would let you roll your own custom security
packages together and market them, and all it took was to figure out
which one was most lax with its verification procedures and create an
account there and invent a ton of virtual wealth through it. Then he
logged into less-sloppy competitors and repackaged the junk he'd
created, making something that seemed a little more legit. Working his
way up the food chain, he'd gone from packager to packager, steadily
accumulating a shellac of respectability overtop of his financial
turds.
2945
Once they had acquired this sheen, brokers came hunting for his funny
money. And since the Webblies were diverting a sizeable chunk of
game-wealth into the underlying pool, he was able to make everything
seem as though it was growing at breakneck speed -- and it was. After
all, all those traders swapping the derivatives were driving up the
prices every time they completed a sale.
2946
Once, at about two in the morning, as Ashok watched the trading
proceed, he realized that he could simply quit the Webblies, sell the
latest batch of funny money, and retire. But he was never tempted. He'd
always known that it was possible to get rich by trampling on the
people around you, by treating them as suckers to be ripped off. He
couldn't do it.
2947
Of course, here he was, doing it , but this was different. His
little financial game could end well if all went according to plan, and
now it was time to see if the plan would go the way it was supposed to.
2948
Justbob took his call in her fractured English, which was better than
her Hindi, limited as it was to orders of battle and military cursing.
He told her that he needed to speak to Big Sister Nor, and she asked
him to wait a moment, as BSN was on the phone with someone else at the
time.
2949
In the background, he heard Big Sister Nor conversing in a mix of
Chinese and English, flipping back and forth in a way that reminded him
of his buddies at university and the way they'd have fun mixing up
English and Hindi words, turning out puns and obscurely dirty phrases
that nevertheless sounded innocent.
2950
He looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. It was 5AM and
outside, he could hear the birds singing. In the next room, Mala's army
fought on in tireless shifts, defending the strike. They slept in
shifts on the floor now, and there were fifty or sixty steel and
garment workers prowling the street out front, visiting other striking
sites around Dharavi with sign-up sheets, trying to organize the
workers of little five- or ten-person shops into their unions.
2951
He realized he was falling asleep. How long had it been since he'd last
slept for more than an hour or so? Days. He jerked his head up and
forced his eyes open and there was Yasmin before him, raccoon-eyed
beneath the hijab across her forehead. She was frowning, her mouth
bracketed by deep worry lines, another one above the bridge of her
nose. She was holding her lathi.
2952
"Yasmin?" he said.
2953
She bit her lip. "Mala is gone," she said. "No one's seen her for
hours. Twelve, maybe fourteen."
2954
He started to say something but then Big Sister Nor spoke on the phone,
"Ashok, sorry to keep you waiting."
2955
He looked to Yasmin, then back at his screen. "One second," he said to
the phone.
2956
"Yasmin, she's probably gone home to sleep --"
2957
Yasmin shook her head once, emphatically. He felt a jolt of fear.
2958
"Ashok?" Big Sister Nor's voice in his ear.
2959
"Come in," he said to Yasmin, "come here. Close the door."
2960
He stood up and held his chair out to Yasmin and dropped into a squat
beside her, heels on the ground. He pressed the speaker button on the
phone.
2961
"Nor," he said. He always felt faintly ridiculous calling this woman
"Big Sister," though the Webblies seemed to relish it in the same way
they loved saying General Robotwallah . "I have Yasmin with me
here. She tells me that Mala is missing, has been missing for some
hours."
2962
There was a momentary pause. "Ashok," Nor said, "that's terrible news.
But I thought you were calling about the other thing --"
2963
He looked at Yasmin, whose eyes were steady on him. He never talked
about the work he did for Big Sister Nor, but everyone knew he was up
to something back here.
2964
"Yes," he said. "The other thing. I need to talk to you about that. But
Yasmin is here and she tells me that Mala is missing."
2965
Big Sister Nor seemed to hear the gravity in his voice. She took a deep
breath, spoke in a patient voice: "You know Dharavi better than I do.
What do you think has happened?"
2966
He nodded to Yasmin. "I think that Bannerjee has her," she said. "I
think that he will hurt her, if he hasn't already."
2967
From the phone, The Mighty Krang's voice broke in. "I have Bannerjee's
phone number," he said. "From one of our people in Guzhen. He emailed
us a list of everyone in his boss's address book."
2968
Ashok found his hands were in fists. He'd only met Bannerjee once, but
that was enough. The man looked like he was capable of anything, one of
those aliens who could look at a fellow human being as nothing more
than an opportunity to make money. Yasmin's eyes were wide.
2969
"You want to phone him?"
2970
"Sure," The Mighty Krang sounded calm, even flippant, just as he did in
the inspirational videos he posted to the Webbly boards and YouTube.
"It's worth a try. Maybe he wants to ransom her."
2971
"Are you joking?"
2972
The light tone left his voice. "No, Yasmin, I'm not joking. Look, the
Webblies are powerful. Men like Bannerjee understand that. Once I got
Bannerjee's number, I used it to get a full workup on him. We have some
leverage over him. It's possible that we can make him see reason. And
if we can't --" He trailed off.
2973
"We're no worse off than before," Big Sister Nor finished.
2974
"When will we call him?"
2975
"Oh, now would be good. Negotiations are always best in the small
hours. Hang on, I'll get the number." The Mighty Krang typed some. "OK,
let's do this."
2976
"OK," Yasmin said in a tiny voice.
2977
"OK," Ashok said.
2978
"I'll keep you two muted for him, but live for me. Remember that -- if
you talk over him, I'll hear both, which might confuse me."
2979
"We'll mute our end," Ashok said. He saw that his battery was low and
fished around on his desk for a power-cable and plugged it in. Then he
muted the phone. He and Yasmin unconsciously leaned their heads
together over it, so that he could smell his sour breath and hers,
which smelled of vomit. She had been sick. He closed his eyes and it
felt as though there was sandpaper on the insides of his eyelids.
2980
After a few rings, a sleepy voice mumbled "Victory to Rama," in Hindi,
the traditional phone salutation. It made Ashok snort derisively. A man
like Bannerjee was about as pious as a turnip. As a jackal.
2981
"Mr Bannerjee," Big Sister Nor said in accented Hindi. "Good morning."
2982
"Who is it?" He had switched to English.
2983
"The Webblies," Big Sister Nor said.
2984
"For a Webbly," Bannerjee grunted, still sounding half-asleep, "you
sound an awful lot like an underage Chinese whore. Where are you
calling from, China-Doll? A brothel in Hong Kong?"
2985
"2,500 kilometers from HK, actually. And I'm Indonesian."
2986
Bannerjee grunted again. "But you are a whore, aren't you?"
2987
"Mr Bannerjee, I am a busy woman --"
2988
"A popular whore!"
2989
Yasmin hissed at the phone and Ashok double-checked that the mute was
on. It was.
2990
"-- a busy woman. I've called to make you an offer."
2991
"I have all the whores I need," he said. "Goodbye."
2992
"Mr Bannerjee! I'm calling to arrange for the release of Mala," Big
Sister Nor spoke quickly. "And I'm sure if you think about it for just
a moment, you'll realize that there's plenty I can offer you for her
safe return."
2993
Bannerjee said, "Mala is missing?" in a tone that could have won a
medal in the unconvincing Olympics.
2994
"Stop playing games, please. You know that we're not the police. We're
not going to have you arrested. We just want her back."
2995
"I'm sure you do. She's a delightful girl."
2996
Yasmin was grasping her opposite elbows so hard her knuckles were
white. Ashok had his fists bunched in the fabric of his trouser-legs.
He made himself loosen them. But Big Sister Nor just continued on, as
though she hadn't heard.
2997
"I'm sure you've seen what's happened to the gold markets. Prices are
on fire. No one can get any gold out of the gold farms, thanks to my
Webblies. If you could promise a farmer access to one spot, without
harassment, just think of what you could charge."
2998
Bannerjee chuckled. "And all I have to do is find Mala for you and give
her to you and you will guarantee this to me, is that right?"
2999
"That's the shape and size of it."
3000
"You will, of course, honor your end of the bargain once I've found her
for you."
3001
"Of course."
3002
There was a long silence. Finally, Big Sister Nor spoke again.
3003
"I understand your scepticism. I can give you my word of honor."
3004
Bannerjee made a rude sound, like a wet fart. "How about this: I get
the gold out of the game, then I find Mala for you."
3005
Ashok hated this game he was playing, pretending that he didn't have
Mala, but he could somehow find her. He wanted to crawl through the
phone and strangle the man.
3006
"How about if we just get you some gold?" It was The Mighty Krang
speaking.
3007
"Oh, there's more of you? Are you also an Indonesian whore 2500
kilometers from Hong Kong, or are you dialled in from some other exotic
locale?"
3008
"We can get the gold out of the game faster than anyone you could hire.
All the best gold farmers are in the union. The scabs they've got
working in the shops right now are so crap they'll probably screw up
and get themselves banned." Ashok loved that Krang wasn't playing
Bannerjee's taunting game either.
3009
Bannerjee snorted. "That's not bad," he said.
3010
"We could use an escrow service, one we both agree on." The
gold-markets ran on escrow services, trustworthy parties that would
hold gold and cash while a deal was closing, working for a small
percentage.
3011
"And you would return Mala to us?"
3012
"I would do everything I could to find the poor girl and get her into
your hands." Gold, silver and bronze medals in the 100-yard slime.
3013
They dickered over price and timing -- Mala ended up promising him a
300,000 Svartalfaheim runestones -- and Krang disconnected Bannerjee.
3014
"Brilliant," Ashok said, trying to force some enthusiasm into his
voice, while inside he was quavering at the thought of Mala in the
hands of Bannerjee.
3015
"Very good," Yasmin said.
3016
"Yes, yes," Big Sister Nor said. "And your team will get the runestones
for us, and I'm sure you'll do it quickly and well because she is your
general. All our problems should be that easy to solve. Now, Ashok, how
have you done with your complicated problem?"
3017
Ashok looked at Yasmin, who showed no signs of leaving.
3018
"I think we're there. The trick was to create a situation where they
can't put things back together without our help. Our accounts
control the gold underneath so many of these securities that if they
kick us all off, they'll create a massive crash, both in-game and
out-of-game. At the same time, they can't afford to leave us running
around freely, because there's a hundred ways we could crash the
system, too, from resigning in a huge group all at once to repeating
the Mushroom Kingdom job." Crashing the Mushroom Kingdom securities had
been easy -- Mushroom Kingdom was already riddled with scams that had
been flying under the radar of Nintendo's incompetent economist and
security teams. Ashok had used Webblies and some of the Mechanical
Turks that Big Sister Nor had supplied through her mysterious contact
on the inside, building up a catalog of all the other scams and then
giving them a nudge here and a shove there, using Webblies to produce
gold on demand when necessary.
3019
He'd gone into it thinking that he'd never manage to take on the
Mushroom Kingdom economy, believing that the security would be
all-knowing and all-powerful. But in truth, it had all been held
together with twine and wishful thinking, straining at the seams, and
it had only taken a little pushing and pulling to first make it swell
to unheard-of heights, and then to explode gloriously.
3020
"But we couldn't afford to repeat the Mushroom Kingdom job. There was
no way we could have pulled that one out of the nosedive, once it
started. It was doomed from the start. With Coca-Cola's games, we have
to be able to promise to put it all back together again if they play
cricket with us." Talking about his work made him forget momentarily
about Mala, let the iron bands around his chest loosen, just a little.
3021
"If we had kept things on schedule, it would have been much easier. But
you know, with things all chaotic, I had to rush things. I've been
dumping our gold reserves on the market for hours now, which has sent
the market absolutely crazy, especially after they had that crash. How
on Earth did you manage that?"
3022
Big Sister Nor snorted. "It wasn't me. We're not sure if they got
hacked, or some kind of big crash. It was well-timed, though."
3023
"Would you tell me if you had caused it?"
3024
Yasmin looked faintly shocked.
3025
"Ashok," BSN said, with mock sternness, "I tell everyone anything I
think they need to know, and I usually tell them anything they
think they need to know. We're not in the secrets business around
here."
3026
That made Ashok pause. He'd always thought of the operation as being
shrouded in secrecy. Certainly Big Sister Nor had never volunteered any
details about her contact with the Mechanical Turks -- but then, he'd
never asked, had he? Nor had he ever asked if he could discuss his
project with Mala's army. He shook his head. What if the secrecy had
been all in his mind?
3027
"OK," he said. "Fine. The problem is this: if I had enough time -- if I
had the time we'd planned on -- I'd be in a position to take
Svartalfaheim right up to the brink of collapse and then either save it
or let it collapse. It all comes down to how much gold we had in our
reserves, and how much of the trading we controlled.
3028
"But I've had to rush the schedule, which means that I can't give you
both. I can bring the economy to the brink of ruin, but when I do, I
need to know in advance whether we're going to let it blow up, or
whether we're going to let it recover. I can't decide later." He
swallowed. "I think that means we have to destroy it. I still have
Zombie Mecha and Clankers underway. We can show them our force by
taking out Svartalfaheim and then threaten to take out the other two."
3029
"Why do you want to do it that way?"
3030
He shook his head, realized she couldn't see him. "Listen, they're not
going to give in to you. You're going to go in there and start giving
them orders and they're going to assume you're some ridiculous
third-world crook. They're going to tell you to get lost. If you make a
threat and you can't make good on it, that'll be the last time you hear
from them. They'll never take you seriously after that."
3031
Big Sister Nor clucked her tongue. "Are we so easy to dismiss?"
3032
"Yes," Ashok said. "I know what the Webblies can do. But they
don't. And they won't, until we show them."
3033
"We have Mushroom Kingdom for that."
3034
That stopped him. "Yes, that's true of course. But that was so
easy --"
3035
"They don't know that. They don't know anything about us, as you point
out. So yes, maybe they'll assume we're weak and maybe they'll assume
we're strong. But one thing I know is, if they give us what we want and
then we destroy their game, they'll never trust us again."
3036
"So you're saying you want me to set this all up so that we can't make
good on our threat?"
3037
"If we have to choose --"
3038
"We do."
3039
"Then yes, that's just what I want, Ashok. I'll just have to be sure
that whatever happens, we don't need to carry out our threat."
3040
"OK," Ashok said. "I can do that."
3041
"Good. And Ashok?"
3042
"Yes?"
3043
"I need you to speak with them," she said. "With who ever they get to
talk to us. I'll be on the call, too, of course. But you need to talk
to them, to explain to them what we've done and what we can do."
3044
Ashok swallowed. "I'm not good at that sort of talk --"
3045
Yasmin made a rude noise. "Don't listen to him," she said. "You talked
the steelworkers and the garment-workers into coming to Dharavi!"
3046
"I did," he said. "I didn't think it would work -- they'd never
listened before. But once I explained what kind of situation you were
all in, the thugs, the violence, told them that all of Dharavi would
know if they came down --"
3047
"Once you really believed in it," Big Sister Nor said. "That's the
difference. I've heard you talk about the things you love, Ashok. You
are very convincing when it comes to that. The difference between all
the conversations you had with them before and the last one is that you
came to them as a Webbly last time, not as someone who was playing a
game to make himself feel like he was doing something important." The
criticism took him off guard and pierced him. He had been
playing a game at first, taken with his own cleverness at the vision of
kids all over the world running circles around the tired old unions
he'd hung around with all his life. But now, it wasn't a game anymore.
Or rather, it was a game, but it was one that he took deadly
serious.
3048
"OK," he said. "I'll talk to them."
3049
Now it was Jie's turn to watch Wei-Dong, as he typed furiously at his
keyboard, reaching out to hundreds of Mechanical Turks who'd said,
"Yes, yes, we're on your side; yes, we're tired of the crummy pay and
of always having the threat of being fired over our heads." He reached
out to them and what he told them all was:
3050
Now
3051
Now it begins, now we are ready, now we move. He sent them links to the
YouTube videos of the protests in China, the picket lines in India, the
workers who'd begun to walk off the job in Indonesia and Vietnam and
Cambodia, saying, "Us too, us all together, us too."
3052
Only it wasn't working the way it was supposed to. The Mechanical Turks
had been happy enough to seed a little disinformation, to pass on some
weird-sounding stock-tips or to look the other way when the Webblies
were fighting the Pinkertons, but they balked at going to Coke and
saying, "We demand, we want, we are all one." Just from their typing,
he could feel their fear, the terror that they might find themselves
without a job next month, that they might be the only ones who stood
up.
3053
But not all of them. First one, then five, then fifty, and finally over
a hundred of his Turks were with him, ready to put their names to a
list of dues-paying Webblies who wanted to bargain as a group with Coke
for a better deal. That was only 20 percent of what he'd bargained for,
but they still accounted for 35 of the top fifty performers on the
Webbly leaderboards.
3054
He kept up a running account for Jie, muttering in Chinese to her
between messages and quick voice calls.
3055
"Now what?" she said. She was jammed up in a corner of the room,
resting on her sweater, which she'd spread out over the filthy
mattress, eyes barely open.
3056
"Now I call Coke," he said. He had talked this over with Big Sister Nor
a dozen times, iterating through the plan, even role-playing it with
The Mighty Krang playing the management on the other end. But that
didn't mean that he was calm -- anything but, he felt like he might
throw up at any instant.
3057
"How is that supposed to work?"
3058
He closed his eyes, which were burning with exhaustion and dried tears.
"Are you hungry?"
3059
She nodded. "I was thinking of going upstairs for some dumplings," she
said.
3060
"Bring me some?"
3061
She got up and walked unsteadily to the door. She pulled a compact out
of her purse and looked at herself, made a face, then said, "Tea?"
3062
He'd drunk tea for years, but right now he needed coffee, no matter how
American that made him feel. "Coffee," he said. "Two coffees."
3063
She smiled a sad little smile. "Of course. I'll bring a syringe, too."
3064
But he was already back at his computer, screwing in his borrowed
earwig, dialling in on the employee-only emergency number.
3065
"Co' Cola Games level two support, this is Brianna speaking," the voice
was flat, American, bored, female, Hispanic.
3066
"I need to speak to someone in operations," he said. "This is Leonard
Goldberg, Turk number 4446E764."
3067
"Hello, Leonard. Can I have the fifth letter of your security code?"
3068
He had to think hard for a moment. Like the name Leonard Goldberg, like
his entire American life, the security code he used to communicate with
his employers seemed like it was in a distant fairytale land. "K for
kilo," he said. "No, wait, Z for Zulu."
3069
"And the second letter?"
3070
"A for alpha."
3071
"OK, Leonard, what can I do for you?"
3072
"I need to speak to someone in operations," he said. "Level four,
please."
3073
"What do you need to speak to operations about, please?" He could hear
her clicking away at her screen, looking up the escalation procedures.
Technically it wasn't supposed to be possible to go from level two
support to level four without going through level three. But the entire
escalations manual was available in the private discussion forums on
the unofficial Turk groups if you knew where to look for them.
3074
"I, uh, I think I found someone, who was, like, a pedophile? Like he
might have been trying to get some kids to give him their RL
addresses?" Kid-diddlers, mafia, terrorists or pirates, the four
express tickets to level four support. Anything that meant calling in
the federal cops or the international ones. He figured that a potential
pedophile would have just the right amount of ick to get him escalated
without the call being sent straight to the cops.
3075
Brianna typed something, read something, muttered "Just a minute, hon,"
read some more. "OK, level four it is." She parked him on hold.
3076
Jie came back with a styrofoam clamshell brimming over with steaming
dumplings and a bottle of nuclear-hot Vietnamese rooster sauce and a
pair of chopsticks. She picked one up, blew on it, dipped it in the
sauce and held it out to him. He popped it into his mouth and chewed
it, blowing out at the same time to try to cool off the scalding pork
inside. They shared a smile, then the call started up again.
3077
"Hello, Coca Cola Games, level four ops, Gordon speaking, your name
please."
3078
Leonard went through the authentication routine with Gordon again, his
password coming more easily to him this time.
3079
"All right, Leonard, I hear you found a pedophile? One moment while I
pull up your interaction history --"
3080
"Don't bother," Wei-Dong said, his pulse going so fast he felt like he
was going to explode. "I made that up."
3081
"Did you." It wasn't really a question.
3082
"I need to speak to Command Central," he said. "It's urgent."
3083
"I see."
3084
Wei-Dong waited. This Gordon character was supposed to get angry or
sarcastic, not quiet. The pause stretched until he felt he had
to fill it. "It's about the Webblies, I have a message for Command
Central."
3085
"Uh huh."
3086
Oh, for Christ's sake. "Gordon, listen. I know you think I'm just a kid
and you probably think I'm full of crap, but I need to speak to
Command Central right now. I promise you, if you don't connect me
with them, you'll regret it."
3087
"I will, will I? Well, listen, Leonard, I've been looking at your
interaction history and you certainly seem like an efficient worker, so
I'm going to go easy on you. You can't talk to Command Central.
Period. Tell me what you want, and I'll see that someone gets back to
you."
3088
This was something Wei-Dong had prepared for. "Gordon, please
relay the following to Command Central. Do you have a pen?"
3089
"Oh, this is all being recorded." There was the sarcasm he'd
been waiting for. He was getting under his skin. Right.
3090
"Tell them that I represent the Industrial Workers of the World Wide
Web, Local 56, and that we need to speak with Coca Cola Games's Chief
Economist immediately in order to avert a collapse on the scale of the
Mushroom Kingdom disaster. Tell them that we have two hours to act
before the collapse takes place. Did you get that?"
3091
"What? You're kidding --"
3092
"I'm serious. I'll hold while you tell them." He muted the connection
and immediately dialled back to Singapore and told Justbob what had
happened. She assured him that they'd get their economist on the line
as quickly as possible and put him on hold. He bridged both calls into
his earpiece but isolated them so that they wouldn't be able to hear
him, then told Jie what had just happened.
3093
"When can I interview you about this for the radio show?"
3094
He swallowed. "I think maybe never. Part of this story can probably
never be publicly told. We'll ask BSN, OK?"
3095
She made a face, but nodded. And now there was Gordon.
3096
"Leonard, you there, buddy?"
3097
"I'm here," he said.
3098
"You're logging in from a lot of proxies lately. Where exactly are you
located? We have you in LA."
3099
"I'm not in LA," Wei-Dong said, grinning. "I'm a little ways off from
there. You don't need to know where. How's it coming with Command
Central, Gordon? Time's a-wastin'." Keep the pressure up, that was a
critical part of the plan. Don't give them time to think. Get them to
run around like headless chickens.
3100
"I'm on it," Gordon said. He swallowed audibly. "Look, you're not
serious, are you?"
3101
"You saw what happened to Mushroom Kingdom, right?"
3102
"I saw."
3103
"OK then," Wei-Dong said. He'd been warned not to admit to any
wrongdoing personally.
3104
"You're serious?"
3105
"You know, 15 minutes have gone by already."
3106
Another swallow. "I'll be right back."
3107
A new line cut in, different background noise, chaotic, lots of
chatter. Gordon had probably been a teleworker sitting in his underwear
in his living room. This was different. This was a room filled with
angry, arguing people who were typing on keyboards like machineguns.
3108
"This is William Vaughan, head of security for Coca Cola Games. Hello,
Leonard."
3109
"Hello, Mr Vaughan." Leonard said. Be polite. That was part of the
plan, too. Real operators were grownups, polite, businesslike. "May I
speak with Connor Prikkel, please?" Prikkel's name had been easy enough
to google. Wei-Dong had spent some time watching videos of the man at
conferences. He seemed like an awkward, super-brainy academic type run
to fat. He typed a quick one-handed message to Justbob: Got cmd
ctnrl, where r u?
3110
"Mr Prikkel is away from the office. I have been asked to speak with
you in his stead."
3111
He had prepped for this, too. "I'm afraid that I need to talk with
Connor Prikkel personally."
3112
"That's not possible," Vaughan said, sounding like he was barely
holding onto his temper.
3113
"Mr Vaughan," Wei-Dong said. He hadn't spoken this much English for
weeks. It was weird. He'd started to think in Chinese, to dream in it.
"I don't know if uh, Gordon told you what I told him --"
3114
"Yes, he did. That's why you're talking to me now."
3115
"Mr Prikkel is qualified to evaluate what I have to say to him. I'm not
qualified to understand it. And no offense, I don't think you are
either."
3116
"I'll be the judge of that."
3117
Justbob sent him a message back: 5 min .
3118
"I've got a better idea," Wei-Dong said. "You get Mr Prikkel and call
me back. I'll leave you a voice-chat ID. You can listen in on the
call."
3119
"How about if I just trace where you're calling us from and we
call the police? Leonard, kid, you are working on my last good nerve
and I'm about to lose it with you. Fair warning."
3120
Wei-Dong tisked. He was starting to enjoy this. "Mr Vaughan, here's the
thing. In --" he looked at the clock -- "about ten minutes, you're
going to see total chaos in your gold markets. All those contracts that
Coke Games has written for gold futures are going to start to slide
into oblivion. You can spend the next ten minutes trying to trace me,
but you're not going to find me, and even if you do, you're not going
to be able to do anything about it, because I am an ocean away from the
nearest police force that will give you the time of day." The security
man started to choke out a response, but Wei-Dong kept talking. "I'd
prefer not to destroy the game. I love it. I love playing all
these games. You have my record there, you know it. We all feel that
way, all the Webblies. It's where we go to work every day. We
want it to succeed. But we want that to happen on terms that are
fair to us. So believe me when I tell you that I am calling to strike a
bargain that you can afford, that we can live with and that will save
the game and get everything back on track by the end of the day." He
looked at the clock again, did some mental arithmetic. "By tomorrow
morning, your time, that is."
3121
He could almost hear the gears turning in Vaughan's head. "You're in
Asia, somewhere?"
3122
"Is that the only thing that you got from that?"
3123
He made a little conciliatory snort. "You're a long way from home, kid.
Ten minutes, huh?"
3124
Wei-Dong said, "Eight, now. Give or take."
3125
"That's some pretty impressive economic forecasting."
3126
"When you've got 400,000 gold farmers working with a few thousand
Mechanical Turks, you can do some pretty impressive things." The
numbers were all inflated. But Vaughan would assume they were. If
Wei-Dong had given him the real numbers, he'd have underestimated their
strength. He liked how this was going.
3127
2 min more from Justbob.
3128
"OK, Vaughan, here's how Mr Prikkel can reach me. Sooner, rather than
later." He named the ID and the service, one that was run out of the
Mangalore Special Economic Zone. It was pretty reliable and easy to
sign up for, and they supported strong crypto and didn't log
connections. He'd heard that it was a favorite with diplomats from poor
countries that couldn't run their own servers.
3129
"Wait --"
3130
"Call me!" he said, and gave him the details once more.
3131
They'll call me back he typed to Justbob. Our guy wasn't
there.
3132
Justbob called him right away, and he heard The Mighty Krang and Big
Sister Nor holding another conversation in the background. "You hung
up?"
3133
"It wasn't the right guy. I think he was away, maybe on holidays or
something. They'll get him on the phone. no worries." But Justbob
sounded worried, and he didn't like that. He shrugged mentally. He'd
done the best he could, using his best judgement. He'd been shot at,
seen his friend killed. He'd smuggled himself halfway around the world.
He'd earned some autonomy.
3134
He ate some of the now-cold dumplings and tried not to worry as the
time stretched out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Justbob sent more and
more impatient notes. Jie fell asleep on the disgusting mattress, her
sweater spread out beneath her head, her face girlish and sad in
repose.
3135
Then his computer rang.
3136
"Hello?" Texting, Phone.
3137
"This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you needed to speak to me?"
3138
Now he texted and clicked the button that pulled Justbob and her
economist onto the call.
3139
No one in Command Central would meet Connor's eye when he came back
into the office, his nose swollen and his eyes red and puffy. He
grabbed a spare computer from the shelves by the door -- smashed
laptops weren't exactly unheard-of in the high-tension environment of
Command Central -- and plugged it in and powered it up.
3140
"The markets are going crazy," Bill said in a low voice, while around
them, Command Central's denizens -- minus Kaden, who seemed to have
been removed for his own good -- made a show of pretending not to
listen in. "Huge amounts of gold have hit the market in the past ten
minutes, and the price is whipsawing down."
3141
Connor nodded. "Sure, our normal monetary policy has had to assume that
a certain amount of gold would be entering the system from these
characters. When they stopped the flow a couple weeks ago, we had to
pick up production to keep inflation down. I had assumed that they were
too busy fighting to mine any more gold, but it looks like they spent
that time building up their reserves. Now that they're dumping it --"
3142
"Can you do something about it?"
3143
Connor thought. All the peace and serenity he'd attained just an hour
ago, when he was a man with nothing to lose, was melting away. He had
the curious sensation of his muscles returning to their habitual,
knotted states. But a new clarity descended on him. He'd been thinking
of the Webblies as a pack of gang-kids, fighting a gang-war with their
former bosses. This business, though, was sophisticated beyond anything
that some gangsters would kick up. It was an act of sophisticated
economic sabotage.
3144
"I'd better talk to this kid," he said, quickly paging through the
data, setting up feeds, feeling the return of his fingerspitzengefuhl.
3145
Bill made a sour face. "You think they're for real?"
3146
"I think we can't afford to assume they aren't." The voice was someone
else's. He recognized it: the voice of a company man doing the
company's business.
3147
A few minutes later, he said, "This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you
needed to speak to me?"
3148
"Mr Prikkel, it is very good to speak with you." The voice had a heavy
Indian accent, and the background was flavored with the unmistakable
sound of gamers at their games, shooting, shouting.
3149
Bill, listening in with his own earpiece, shook his head. "That's not
the kid."
3150
"I'm here too." This voice was young, unmistakably American. When it
cut in, the background changed, no gamers, no shouting. These two were
in different rooms. He had an intuition that they might be in different
countries , and he remembered all the battles he'd spied upon in
which the sides were from all over Asia and even Eastern Europe, South
America and Africa.
3151
"Mr Prikkel -- Doctor Prikkel," Connor supressed a laugh. The PhD was
purely honorary, and he never used it. "My name is Ashok Balgangadhar
Tilak. Allow me to begin by saying that, having read your publications
and watched dozens of your presentations, I consider you to be one of
the great economics thinkers of our age."
3152
"Thank you, Mr Tilak," Connor said. "But --"
3153
"So it is somewhat brash of me to say what I am about to say.
Nevertheless, I will say it: We own your games. We control the
underlying assets against which a critical mass of securities have been
written; further, we control the substantial number of those securities
and can sell them as we see fit, through a very large number of dummy
accounts. Finally, we have orders in ourselves for many of the sureties
that you have used to hedge this deal, orders that will automatically
execute should you try to float more to absorb the surplus."
3154
Connor typed furiously. "You don't expect me to take your word for
this?"
3155
"Naturally not. I expect you to look to the example of Mushroom
Kingdom. And to the turmoil in Svartalfaheim Warriors. Then I'd suggest
that you cautiously audit the books for Zombie Mecha and Clankers."
3156
"I will." Again, that company man's voice, from so far away. The feeds
were confirming it, though, the trading volume was insane, but
underneath it all there was a sense of directedness , as though
someone were making it all happen.
3157
"Very good."
3158
"Now, I suppose there's something coming here. Blackmail, I'm guessing.
Cash."
3159
"Nothing of the sort," said the Indian man, sounding affronted. "All
we're after is peace."
3160
"Peace."
3161
"Exactly. I can undo everything we've done, put the markets back
together again, stop the bleeding by unwinding the trades very
carefully and very gently, working with you to make a soft landing for
everyone. The markets will dip, but they'll recover, especially when
you make the announcement."
3162
"The announcement that we've made peace with you."
3163
"Oh yes," Ashok said. "Of course. Your employers expect that you can
run your economy like a toy train set, on neat rails. But we know
better. Gold-farming is an inevitable consequence of your marketplace,
and that pushes the train off the rails. But imagine this: what if your
employer were to recognize the legitimacy of gold farming as a
practice, allowing our workers to participate as legitimate actors in a
large and complex economy. Our exchanges would move above-ground, where
you could monitor them, and we would meet regularly with you to discuss
our membership's concerns and you would tell us about your employers'
concerns. There would still be underground traders, of course, but they
would be pushed off into the margins. Every decent farmer in the world
wants to join the Webblies, for we represent the best players and
everyone knows it. And we'll be at every non-union farm-site in every
game, talking to the workers about the deal they will get if they band
with us."
3164
"And all we have to do is... what?"
3165
"Cooperate. Union gold that comes out of Coke's games will be
legitimate and freely usable. We'll have a cooperative that buys and
sells, just like today's exchange markets, but it will all be
above-board, transparently governed by elected managers who will be
subject to recall if they behave badly."
3166
"So we replace one cartel with another one?"
3167
"Dr Prikkel, I wouldn't ever ask such a thing of you. No, of course
not. We don't object to other unionized operations in the space. I have
colleagues here from the Transport and Dock Workers' Union who are
interested in organizing some of these workers. Let there be as many
gold exchanges as the market can bear, all certified by you, all run by
the workers who create them."
3168
"What about the players , Mr Tilak? Do they get a say in this?"
3169
"Oh, I think the players have already had their say. After all, whom do
you suppose is buying all this gold?"
3170
"And you expect me to make all this happen in an hour?"
3171
The American kid broke in. "45 minutes now."
3172
"Of course not. Today, all we seek is an agreement in principle .
Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Coca Cola Games's board of
directors will have to approve. However, we are of the impression that
the board is likely to pay close attention to any recommendations
brought to it by its chief economist, especially one of your standing."
3173
Connor found himself grinning. These kids -- not just kids, he reminded
himself -- were gutsy. And what's more, they were gamers ,
something that was emphatically not true of CCG's board, who
were as boring a bunch of mighty captains of industry as you could hope
to find. "Is that it?"
3174
"No." It was the American kid again. He consulted his notes. Leonard
Goldberg. In LA. Except Bill was pretty sure this kid was in Asia
somewhere. He suspected there was a story in there.
3175
"Hello, Leonard."
3176
"Hi, Connor. I'm emailing you a list of names right now."
3177
"I see it." The message popped up in his public account, the one that
was usually filtered by an intern before he saw it. He grabbed it, saw
that it had been encrypted to his public key, decrypted it. It was a
list of names, with numbers beside them. "OK, go ahead."
3178
"That's the names of Turks who've joined the Webblies."
3179
"You've got Turks who want to moonlight as gold farmers?"
3180
"No." The boy said, speaking as though to an idiot. "I've got Turks who
want to join a union."
3181
"The Webblies."
3182
"The Webblies."
3183
Connor snorted. "I see. And is this union certified under US labor law?
Have you considered the fact that you are all independent contractors
and not employees?"
3184
The boy cut in. "Yes, yes, all of that. But these are your best Turks,
and they're Webblies, and we're all in it together."
3185
"You know, they'll never go for it."
3186
"Your teamsters are unionized. Your janitors are unionized. Now
your Mechanical Turks are --"
3187
"Son, you're not a union. Under US law, you're nothing."
3188
The Indian man cleared his voice. "That is all true, but this is
likewise true of IWWWW members around the world in all their respective
countries. Many countries prohibit all unions. And we ask you to
recognize these workers' rights."
3189
"We're not those workers' employers."
3190
"You claim you're not our employers either," said the boy, with
a maddening note of triumph in his voice. "Remember? We're 'independent
contractors', right?"
3191
"Exactly."
3192
"Dr Prikkel, let me explain. The IWWWW is open to all workers,
regardless of nationality or employment, and it will work for all those
workers' rights, in solidarity. Our gold farmers will stand up for our
Mechanical Turks, and vice versa."
3193
"Goddamned right," said the boy. "An insult to one --"
3194
"Is an insult to all. The gold farmers have a modest set of demands:
modest benefits, job security, a pension plan. All the same things that
we plan on asking our farmers' employers for. Nothing your division
can't afford."
3195
"Are you saying that your demands are contingent on recognizing the
demands from Mr Goldberg's friends."
3196
"Precisely."
3197
"And you will destroy the economy of Svartalfaheim Warriors in 45
minutes --"
3198
"38 minutes," said the kid.
3199
"Unless I agree in principle that we will do this?"
3200
"You have summed it all up admirably," said the Indian economist. "Well
done."
3201
"Can you give me a minute?"
3202
"I can give you 38 minutes."
3203
"37," said the kid.
3204
He muted them, and he and Bill stared at each other for a long time.
3205
"Is this as crazy as it sounds?"
3206
"Actually, the crazy part is that it's not all that crazy. Impossible,
but not crazy. We already let lots of third parties play with our
economies -- independent brokers, the people who buy and sell their
instruments. There's no technical reason these characters can't be a
part of our planning. Hell, if they can do what they say, we'll be way
more profitable than we are now.
3207
"For one thing, we won't need to crash the servers tracking them all
down."
3208
Connor grimaced. "Right. But then there's the impossible part. Leaving
out the whole thing about the Turks, which is just crazy ,
there's the fact that the board will never, ever, never, never --"
3209
Bill held a hand up. "Now, that's where I disagree with you. When you
meet with the board, you're always trying to sell them on some
weird-ass egghead financial idea that makes them worry that they're
going to lose their life's savings. When I go to them, it's to ask them
for some leeway to fight scammers and hackers. They understand scammers
and hackers, and they say yes. If we were to ask them together --"
3210
"You think this is a good idea?"
3211
"It's a better idea than chasing these kids around gamespace like
Captain Ahab chasing the white whale. The formal definition of insanity
is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome.
It's time we tried something different."
3212
"What about the Turks?"
3213
"What about them?"
3214
"They're looking for --"
3215
"They're looking to take about half a percent out of the company's
bottom line, if that. We spend more on your first-class plane tickets
to economics conferences every year than they want. Big freakin' deal."
3216
"But if we give in on this thing, they'll ask for more."
3217
"And if we don't give in on this, we're going to spend the next hundred
years chasing Chinese and Indian kids around gamespace instead of
devoting our energy to fighting real ripoffs and hacker creeps.
Security is always about choosing your battles. Every complex ecosystem
has parasites. You've got ten times more bacteria cells than blood
cells in your body. The trick with parasites is to figure out how to
co-exist with them."
3218
"I can't believe I'm hearing you say this."
3219
"That's because I'm not a gamer. I don't care who wins. I don't care
who loses. I'm a security expert. I care about what the costs are to
secure the systems that I'm in charge of. We can let these kids 'win'
some little battles, pay the cost for that, and save ten times as much
by not having to chase 'em."
3220
Connor shook his head. "What about them?" he said, rolling his eyes
around the room to encompass the rest of Command Central, most of whom
were openly eavesdropping now.
3221
Bill turned to them. "Hands up: who wants to make and run totally
kick-ass games that make us richer than hell?" Every hand shot up. "Who
wants to spend their time chasing a bunch of skinny poor kids around
instead of just finding a way to neutralize them?" A few hands stayed
defiantly in the air, among them Kaden, who had come back into the room
while Connor was on the phone and was now glaring at both of them. Bill
turned back to Connor. "I think we'll be OK," he said. He jerked his
head over his shoulder and said, loudly, "Those goons are so ornery
they'd say no if you asked them whether they wanted a lifetime's supply
of free ice-cream."
3222
300,000 runestones hadn't seemed like much when Yasmin started. After
all, the gold was for Mala, and Mala was all she could think of. And
she had Mala's army on her side, all of them working together.
3223
But it had been days since she'd slept properly, and there were
reporters every few minutes, pushing into Mrs Dibyendu's cafe with
their cameras and recorders and pads and asking her all sorts of mad
questions and she had to keep her temper and speak modestly and calmly
with them when every nerve in her body was shrieking Can't you see
how busy I am? Can't you see what I have to do? But the army
covered itself with glory and not one soldier lost his or her temper,
and the press all marvelled at them and their curious work.
3224
At least the steelworkers and garment workers had the sense not to
interrupt them, and they were mostly busy with their organizing
adventures in Dharavi to bother them anyway. The story of how they'd
saved this gang of Dharavi children from bad men with weapons had
spread to every corner, and the workers they'd inspired to walk off the
job were half in awe of them.
3225
Piece by piece, though, they were able to build the fortune. Yasmin
found them an instanced mission with a decent payoff, one that three or
four players could run at a time, and she directed them all into it,
sending them down the caverns after the dwarves and ogres below in
gangs, prowling up and down the narrow, blisteringly hot aisles between
the machines, pointing out ways of getting the work done faster, noting
each player's total, until, after a seeming eternity, they had it all.
3226
"Ashok," she said, banging unannounced into his office. He was bent
over his keyboard, earwig screwed in, muttering in English to his Dr
Prikkel in America. He held up a hand and asked the man to excuse him
-- she hated how subservient he sounded, but had to admit that he'd
been very cool when the negotiations had been underway -- and put him
on mute.
3227
"Yasmin?"
3228
"We have Mala's ransom," she said.
3229
"Yes," he said, "of course." He sent a quick message to the central
cell in Singapore and got Bannerjee's number, then quickly dialled it
on speaker. Bannerjee answered, this time in a much less fuzzy and
sleep-addled voice.
3230
"Victory to Rama!"
3231
"We have your money," Ashok said. "Our team are delivering it to the
escrow's hut now. You can check for yourself."
3232
"So serious, so businesslike. It's only a game, friend -- relax!"
3233
Yasmin felt like she might throw up. The man was so... evil .
What made a man that bad? She understood, really understood, how Mala
must feel all the time. A feeling like there were people who
needed to be punished and she was the person who must do
it. She pushed the feeling down.
3234
"All right, good. I see that it is there. I will tell you where to find
your friend when you tell the escrow agent to release the money, yes?"
3235
Ashok waggled his chin at the phone, thinking hard. Yasmin suddenly
realized something she should have understood from the beginning:
escrow agent or no, either they were going to have to trust Bannerjee
to let Mala go after they released the money, or Bannerjee would have
to trust them to release the money after he gave them Mala. Escrow
services worked for cash trades, not for ransoms. She felt even sicker.
3236
"You release Mala first and --"
3237
"Oh, come on. Why on Earth would I do that? You hold me in so much
contempt, there's no way you'll give me what you've promised. After
all, you can always spend 300,000 runestones. I, on the other hand,
have no particular use for a disrespectful little girl. Why wouldn't I
tell you where to find her?"
3238
Ashok and Yasmin locked eyes. She remembered the last time she'd seen
Mala, how tired she had been, how thin, how pained her limp. "Do it,"
she said, covering the mic with her hand.
3239
"The passphrase for the escrow is 'Victory to Rama'," Ashok said, his
tone wooden.
3240
Bannerjee laughed loudly, then put them on hold, cutting them off.
After a moment, Ashok looked at his screen, watching the alerts. "He's
taken the money." They waited a minute longer. Another minute. Ashok
redialled Bannerjee."
3241
"Victory to Rama," the man said, with a mocking voice. Right away,
Yasmin knew that he wouldn't give them Mala.
3242
"Mala," Ashok said.
3243
"Piss off," Bannerjee said.
3244
"Mala," Ashok said.
3245
"One million runestones," Bannerjee said.
3246
"Mala," Ashok said. "Or else."
3247
"Or else what?"
3248
"Or else I take everything."
3249
"Oh yes?"
3250
"I will take 30,000 now. And I will take 30,000 more every five minutes
until you give us Mala."
3251
Bannerjee began to laugh again, and Ashok cut him off again, then
transferred back to his American at Coca Cola.
3252
"Dr Prikkel," he said. "I know we're busy rescuing the economy from
ruin, but I have a small but important favor to ask of you."
3253
The American's voice was bemused. "Go ahead."
3254
Ashok gave him the name of the toon that Bannerjee had sent to the
escrow house. "He has kidnapped a friend of ours and won't give her
back."
3255
"Kidnapped?"
3256
"Taken her into captivity."
3257
"In the game?"
3258
"In the world."
3259
"Jesus."
3260
"And Rama too. We paid the ransom but --"
3261
Yasmin stopped listening. Ashok clearly thought he was the cleverest
man who ever walked God's Earth, but she'd had enough of games. She
sank down on her heels and regarded the dirty floor, her eyes going in
and out of focus from lack of sleep and food.
3262
Gradually, she became aware that Ashok was talking to Bannerjee again.
3263
"She is at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General. She was brought to the
casualty ward earlier today, without any name. She should still be
there."
3264
"How do you know she hasn't gone?"
3265
"She won't have gone," Bannerjee said. "Now get out of my bank account
or I will come down there and blow your balls off."
3266
It took Yasmin a moment to understand how Bannerjee could be so sure
that Mala hadn't left the hospital -- she must have been so badly
injured that she couldn't leave. She found that she was wailing, making
a sound like a cat in the night, a terrible sound that she couldn't
contain. Mala's army came running and she tried to stop so that she
could explain it to them, but she couldn't.
3267
In the end, they all walked to LT hospital together, a solemn
procession through the streets of Dharavi. A few people scurried
forward to ask what was going on, and once they were told, they joined.
More and more people joined until they arrived at the hospital in a
huge mob of hundreds of silent people. Ashok and Yasmin and Sushant
went to the counter and told the shocked ward sister why they were
there. She paged through her record-book for an eternity before saying,
"It must be this one." She looked at them sternly. "But you can't all
go. Who is the girl's mother?"
3268
Ashok and Yasmin looked back at the crowd. Neither of them had thought
to fetch Mala's mother. They were Mala's family. She was their general.
"Take us to her, please," Yasmin said. "We will bring her mother."
3269
The sister looked like she would not let them pass, but Ashok jerked
his head over his shoulder. "They won't leave until we see her, you
know." He waggled his chin good-naturedly and smiled and for a moment
Yasmin remembered how handsome he'd been when she'd first met him on
his motorcycle.
3270
The sister blew out an exasperated sigh. "Come with me," she said.
3271
They wouldn't have recognized Mala if she hadn't told them which bed
was hers. Her head had been shaved and bandaged, and one side of her
face was a mass of bruises. Her left arm was in a sling.
3272
Yasmin let out an involuntary groan when she saw her, and the ward
sister beside her squeezed her arm. "She wasn't raped," the woman
whispered in her ear. "And the doctor says there was no brain-damage."
3273
Yasmin cried now, really cried, the way she hadn't let herself cry
before, the cry from her soul and her stomach, the cry that wouldn't
let go, the cry that drove her to her knees as though she were being
beaten with a lathi. She curled up into a ball and cried and cried, and
the ward sister led her to a seat and tried to put a pill between her
lips but she wouldn't let it in. She needed to be alert and awake,
needed to stop crying, needed --
3274
Ashok squatted against the wall beside her, clenching and unclenching
his fists. "I'll ruin him," he muttered over and over again, ignoring
the stares of the other patients on the ward with their visitors. "I'll
destroy him."
3275
This got through to Yasmin. "How?"
3276
"Every piaster, ever runestone, every gold piece that man takes out of
a game we will take away from him. He is finished."
3277
"He'll find some other way to survive, some other way of hurting people
to get by."
3278
Ashok shook his head. "Fine. I'll find a way to ruin that, too. He is
powerful and strong and ruthless, but we are smart and fast and there
are so many of us."
3279
Dafen was full of choking smoke. Matthew pushed his way through the
crowds. He'd tried to bring the painter girl, Mei, with him, but she
had run into a group of her friends and had gone off with them,
stopping to kiss him hard on the lips, then laughing at his surprised
expression and kissing him again. The second time, he had the presence
of mind to kiss her back and for a second he actually managed to forget
he was in the middle of a riot. Mei's friends hooted and called at them
and she gave his bottom a squeeze and took his phone out of his fingers
and typed her number into it, hit SAVE. The phone network had died an
hour before, when the police retreated from Dafen and fell back to a
defensive cordon around the whole area.
3280
And then he was alone, making his way back toward the huge statue of
the hand holding the brush, the entrance to Dafen. Painters thronged
the streets, carrying beautifully made signs, singing songs, drinking
fiery, cheap baijiu whose smells mixed with the smoke and the oil paint
and the turpentine.
3281
The police line bristled as he peered around the corner of a cafe at
the edge of Dafen. He wasn't the only one eyeing them nervously --
there was a little group of white tourists cowering in the cafe,
clutching their cameras and staring incredulously at their dead phones.
Matthew listened in on their conversation, straining to understand the
rapid English, and gathered that they'd been brought here by a driver
from their hotel, a Hilton in Jiabin Road.
3282
"Hello," he said, trying his English out. He wished that the gweilo,
Wei-Dong, had let him practice more. "You need help?" He was intensely
self-conscious about how bad he must sound, his accent and grammar
terrible. Matthew prided himself on how well-spoken he was in Chinese.
3283
The eldest tourist, a woman with wrinkled arms and neck showing beneath
a top with thin straps, looked hard at him. She removed her oversized
sunglasses and assayed a little Chinese. "We are fine," she said, her
accent no better than Matthew's, which he found oddly comforting. She
was with three others, a man he took to be her husband and two young
men, about Matthew's age, who looked like a cross between her and the
husband: sons.
3284
"Please," he said. "I take you out, find taxi. You tell --" he tried to
find the word for policemen, couldn't remember it, found himself
searching through his game-vocabulary. "Knights? Paladins? Soldiers.
You tell soldiers I am guide. We all go."
3285
The boys grinned at him and he thought they must be gamers, because
they'd really perked up at paladins , and he tried grinning back
at them, though truth be told he didn't feel like doing anything. They
conferred in hushed voices.
3286
"No thank you," the older man said. "We're all right."
3287
He squeezed his eyes shut. He had to get somewhere that his phone would
work, had to check in with Big Sister Nor and find out where the others
were, what the plan was. He'd have to get new papers, maybe go to one
of the provinces or try to sneak into Hong Kong. "You help me," he
managed. "I no go without you. Without, uh, foreigners." He gestured at
the police, at their shields. "They not hurt foreigners."
3288
The older man's eyes widened in comprehension. They spoke again among
themselves. He caught the word "criminal."
3289
"I not criminal," he said. But he knew it was a lie and felt like they
must know it too. He was a criminal and a former prisoner, and he would
never be anything but, for his whole life; just like his grandfather.
3290
They all stared at him, then looked away.
3291
"Please," he said, looking at each one in turn. He jerked his head at
the police. "They hurt people soon."
3292
The woman drew in a deep breath, turned to the man, said, "We need to
get out of here anyway. It will be good to have a local."
3293
The taller of the two boys said, "What do you play?"
3294
"Svartalfaheim Warriors, Zombie Mecha, Mushroom Kingdom, Clankers, Big
Smoke, Toon," he said, ticking them off on his fingers.
3295
"All of them?" The boys boggled at him.
3296
He nodded. "All."
3297
They laughed and he laughed too, small sounds in the roar of the crowds
and the thunder of the choppers overhead.
3298
"You are sure about this?" the woman said. Adding, "Certain?" in
Chinese. He nodded twice.
3299
"Come with me," he said and drew in a deep breath and led them out
toward the police lines.
3300
Wei-Dong didn't want to wake Jie, but he needed to sleep. He finally
curled up on the floor next to the mattress, using his shoulderbag as a
pillow to get his face off of the filthy carpet. At first he lay rigid
in the brightly lit room, his mind swirling with all he'd seen and
done, but then he must have fallen asleep and fallen hard, because the
next thing he knew, he was swimming up from the depths of total
oblivion as Jie shook his shoulder and called his name. He opened his
eyes to slits and peered at her.
3301
"Wha?" he managed, then realized he was talking English and said,
"What?" in Chinese.
3302
"Time to go," she said. "Big Sister Nor says we have to move."
3303
He sat up. His mouth was full of evil-tasting salty paste, a stale
residue of dumplings and sleep. Self consciously, he breathed through
his nose.
3304
"Where?"
3305
"Hong Kong," she said. "Then..." She shrugged. "Taiwan, maybe?
Somewhere we can tell the story of the dead without being arrested.
That's the most important thing."
3306
"How are we going to cross the border? I don't have a Chinese visa in
my passport."
3307
She grinned. "That part is easy. We go to my counterfeiter."
3308
It was as good a plan as any. Wei-Dong had watched the Webblies change
papers again and again. Shenzhen was full of counterfeiters. He rode
the Metro apart from her again, staring at his stupid guide map and
trying to look like a stupid tourist, invisible. It was easier this
time around, because there was so much else going on -- factory girls
talking about Jie's radio show and "the 42," policemen prowling the
cars and demanding the papers of any group of three or more people,
searching bags and, once, confiscating a banner painted on a bedsheet.
Wei-Dong didn't see what it said, but the police took four screaming,
kicking girls off the train at the next station. Shenzhen was in chaos.
3309
They got off the train at the stock market station, and he followed
Jie, leaving a hundred yards between them. But he came up against her
when they got to the surface. The last time he'd been here, it had been
thronged with counterfeiters and touts handing out fliers advertising
their services, scrap-buyers with scales lining the sidewalks, hawkers
selling fruit and ices. Now it was wall-to-wall police, a cordon formed
around the entrance to the stock-market. Officers were stationed every
few yards on the street, too, checking papers.
3310
Jie picked up her phone and pretended to talk into it, but Wei-Dong
could see she just didn't want to look suspicious. He got out his
tourist-map and pretended to study it. Gradually, they both made their
way back into the station. She joined him at a large map of the
surrounding area.
3311
"Now what?" he whispered, trying not to move his mouth.
3312
"How were you going to get out of here?" she said.
3313
His stomach tightened. "I hadn't really thought about it much," he
said.
3314
She hissed in frustration. "You must have had some idea. How about the
way you got in?"
3315
He hadn't told anyone the details of his transoceanic voyage. It would
have felt weird to admit that he was part owner of a giant shipping
company. Besides, he didn't really feel like it was his. It was
his father's.
3316
Two policemen passed by, grim-faced, moving quickly, an urgent,
insectile buzz coming from their earpieces.
3317
"Really?"
3318
"If we could get into the port," he said. "I think I could get us
anywhere."
3319
She smiled, and it was the first real smile he'd seen on her face since
-- since before the shooting had started.
3320
"But I need to call my mother."
3321
The policemen that questioned Matthew were so tense they practically
vibrated, but the tourist lady put on a big show of being offended that
they were being stopped and demanded that they be allowed to go,
practically shouting in English. Matthew translated every word,
speaking over the policemen as they tried to ask him more questions
about how he'd come to be there and what had happened to get his
clothes so dirty with paint and mud.
3322
The tourist lady took out her camera and aimed it at the policemen, and
that ended the friendly discussion. Before she could bring the screen
up to her face, a policeman's gloved hand had closed around the lens.
The two boys moved forward and it looked like someone would start
shoving soon, and the man was shouting in English, and all the noise
was enough to attract the attention of an officer who gave the cops a
blistering tongue lashing for wasting everyone's time and waved them on
with a stern gesture.
3323
Matthew could hardly believe he was free. The tourists seemed to think
it was all a game as he urged them down the road a way, out of range of
the police cordon and away from the shouting. They walked up the
shoulder of the Shenhui Highway, staying right on the edge as huge
trucks blew past them so fast it sucked the breath out of their lungs.
3324
"Taxi?" the woman asked him.
3325
He shook his head. "I no think taxi today," he said. "Private car,
maybe."
3326
She seemed to understand. He began to wave at every car that passed
them by, and eventually one stopped, a Chang'an sedan that had seen
better days, its trunk held shut with a bungee cord that allowed the
lid to bang as the car rolled to a stop. It was driven by a man in a
dirty chauffeur's uniform. Matthew leaned in and said, "100 RMB to take
us to Jiabin Road." It was high, but he was sure the tourists could
afford it.
3327
"No, too far," the man said. "I have another job --"
3328
"200," Matthew said.
3329
The man grinned, showing a mouthfull of steel teeth. "OK, everyone in."
3330
They were on the road for a mere five minutes before his phone chirped
to let him know that he had voicemail waiting for him. It was Justbob,
from Big Sister Nor.
3331
"Mom?"
3332
"Leonard?"
3333
"Hi, Mom." He tried to ignore Jie who was looking at him with an
expression of mingled hilarity and awe. She had an encyclopedic
knowledge of gamer cafes with private rooms, and had brought them to
this one in the ground floor of a youth hostel that catered to
foreigners and had a room set off for karaoke and net-access.
3334
"It's been so long since I've heard your voice, Leonard."
3335
"I know, Mom."
3336
"How's your trip?"
3337
"Um, fine." He tried to remember where he told her he'd be. Portland?
San Francisco?
3338
"Oh, Leonard," she said, and he heard that she was crying. It was what,
8PM back in LA, and she was crying and alone. He felt so homesick at
that moment he thought he would split in two and he felt the tears
running down his own cheeks.
3339
"I love you, Mom," he blubbered.
3340
And they both cried for a long time, and when he risked a look at Jie,
she was crying too.
3341
"Mom," he said, choking back snot. "I have a favor to ask of you. A big
favor."
3342
"You're in trouble."
3343
"Yes." There was no point in denying it. "I'm in trouble. And I can't
explain it right now."
3344
"You're in China, aren't you?"
3345
He didn't know what to say. "You knew."
3346
"I suspected. It's that gamer thing, isn't it? I did the math on when
you answered my messages, when you called."
3347
"You knew?"
3348
"I'm not stupid, Leonard." She wasn't crying anymore. "I thought I
knew, but I didn't want to say anything until you told me."
3349
"I'm sorry, Mom."
3350
She didn't say anything.
3351
"Are you coming home?"
3352
He looked at Jie. "I don't know. Eventually. I have something I have to
do here, first."
3353
"And you need my help with that."
3354
"Mom, I need you to order a shipment from Shenzhen to Mumbai." Big
Sister Nor had suggested it, and Jie had shrugged and said that it was
fine with her, one place was as good as any other. "I'll give you the
container number. And you have to have Mr Alford call the port
authority here and tell them that I'm authorized to access it."
3355
"No, Leonard. I'll call the embassy, I'll get you home, but this is --"
He could picture her hand flapping around her head. "It's crazy, is
what it is."
3356
"Mom --"
3357
"No."
3358
"Mom, listen . This is about a lot more than just me. There are
people here, friends, whose lives are at stake. You can call the
embassy all you want but I won't go there. If you don't help me, I'll
have to do this on my own, and I have to be honest with you, Mom, I
don't think I'll be able to do it. But I can't abandon my friends."
3359
She was crying again.
3360
"I'm going to be at the port in --" he checked the screen of his phone
-- "in three hours. I've got my passport with me, that'll get me
inside, if you've got it squared away with the port authority.
The container number is WENU432134. It's at the western port. Do you
have that?"
3361
"Leonard, I won't do it."
3362
"WENU432134," he said, very slowly, and hung up.
3363
There were five of them in all. Matthew, Jie, Wing, Shirong, and
Wei-Dong. They'd stopped at a 7-11 on the way to the train station and
bought as much food as they could carry, asking the bemused clerk to
pack it in boxes and seal them with packing tape.
3364
As they approached the port, they stopped talking, walking slowly and
deliberately. Wei-Dong steeled himself and walked to the guard's booth.
He hadn't called his mother back. There hadn't been time. Shenzhen was
in chaos, police-checks and demonstrations everywhere, some riots,
spirals of black smoke heading into the sky.
3365
He motioned for Wing to join him. They had agreed that he would play
interpreter, to make Wei-Dong seem like more of a hopeless gweilo,
above suspicion. They'd found him some cheap fake Chinese Nike gear to
wear, a ridiculous track suit that reminded him of the Russian
gangsters he'd see around Santee Alley.
3366
Wordlessly, he handed his passport -- his real passport, held safely
all this time -- to the young man on the gate. "WENU432134," he said.
"Goldberg Logistics container."
3367
He waited for Wing to translate, watched him sketch out the English
letters on his palm.
3368
The security guard looked over his shoulder at the two policemen in the
booth with him. He picked up a scratched tablet and prodded at it with
a blunt finger, squinting at Wei-Dong's passport. Wei-Dong hoped that
he wouldn't try something clever, like riffling its pages looking for a
Chinese visa.
3369
He began to shake his head, said "I don't see it --"
3370
Wei-Dong felt sweat run down his butt-crack and over his thighs. He
craned his neck to see the screen. There it was, but the number had
been entered wrong, WENU432144. He pointed to it and said, "Tell him
that this is the one." He sent a silent thanks to his mother. The guard
compared the number to the one he'd entered and then seemed about to
let them pass. Then one of the policeman said, "Wait."
3371
The cop shouldered the security guard out of the way, took the passport
from him, examined it closely, holding a page up to the light to see
the watermark. "What are you bringing?"
3372
Wei-Dong waited for Wing to translate.
3373
"Samples," he said. "Clothes."
3374
He opened up the box at his feet and pulled out a folded tee-shirt
emblazoned with some Chinese characters that said "I'm stupid enough to
think that this shirt looks cool." Jie had found them from one of the
few stubborn peddlers left on the street outside of the Metro entrance
near the train station. The cop snorted and said, "Does he know what
this says?"
3375
Wing nodded. "Yes," he said. "But he thinks that other Americans won't.
If they like it, they will order twenty thousand from us!" He laughed,
and after a moment, the cop and the security guard joined in. The cop
slapped Wei-Dong on the shoulder and Wei-Dong forced a laugh out as
well.
3376
"OK," the cop said, handing back his papers. The security guard gave
them directions. "But you'll have to use the north gate to leave. We're
closing this one for the evening in half an hour."
3377
Wing made a show of translating for Wei-Dong, who had the presence of
mind to pretend to listen, but he was rocking on his heels, almost at
the point of collapse from lack of sleep and food.
3378
They walked in total silence to the container, and Wei-Dong managed to
only look over his shoulder once. Jie caught his eye when he did and
waggled a finger at him. He smiled wryly and looked ahead, following
the directions.
3379
The container was just as he'd left it, and his key fit the padlock.
The four marvelled at the cleverness of his work inside as they
efficiently unpacked their food.
3380
"Three nights, huh?" said Jie, as he pulled the door shut behind them.
3381
"After they load us."
3382
"When will that be?"
3383
He sighed. "I need to call my mother to find out." He pulled out his
phone and Jie handed him her last SIM and a calling card.
3384
Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang and Justbob had no warning this time.
Three men, small-time crooks working on contract for a man in Dongguan
who owned one of the big gold-exchanges, worked silently and
efficiently. They followed Justbob back from a Malaysian satay
restaurant that they were known to frequent, back to the latest
safe-house, a room over a massage-parlor on Changi Road, where the
Webblies could tap into the wireless from a nearby office building.
They waited patiently outside for all the windows to go dark.
3385
Then they methodically attached bicycle locks to each doorway. It was
nearly 5AM and the few passers-by paid them no particular attention.
Once they had locked each door, they hurled petrol bombs through
windows on the ground floor. They stayed just long enough to make sure
that the fires were burning cheerily before they got into two cars
parked around the corner and sped off. The next morning, they crossed
into Kuala Lumpur and did not return to Singapore for eight months,
drawing a small salary from the man in Dongguan while they laid low.
3386
Big Sister Nor was the first one awake, roused by the sound of three
windows smashing in close succession. She smelled the greasy smoke a
moment later and began to shout, in her loudest voice, "Fire! Fire!"
just as she had practiced in a thousand dreams.
3387
Justbob and The Mighty Krang were up an instant later. Justbob went to
the stairs and ventured halfway down toward the massage-parlor before
the flames forced her up again. The Mighty Krang broke out the window
with a chair -- it had been painted shut -- and leaned way out, far
enough to see the lock that had been added to the door. He breathlessly
but calmly reported this to Big Sister Nor, who had already popped the
drives out of their control machines. She handed them to him, listened
to Justbob's assessment of the staircase and nodded.
3388
They could hear the screams from the floor below them as the girls from
the massage parlor broke out their own windows and called for help. A
girl emerged, legs first, from one of the massage parlor's small, high
windows. She was screaming, on fire, rolling on the ground. A few
people were in the street below, talking into their phones -- the fire
department would be here soon. It wouldn't be soon enough. Choking
smoke was already filling the room, and they were forced to their
knees.
3389
"Out the window," Big Sister Nor gasped. "You'll probably break a leg,
but that's better than staying here."
3390
"You first," The Mighty Krang said.
3391
"Me last," she said, in a voice that brooked no argument. "After you
two are out." She managed a small smile. "Try to catch me, OK?"
3392
Justbob grabbed The Mighty Krang's arm and pulled him toward the
window. He got as far as the sill, then balked. "Too far!" he said,
dropping back to his belly. Justbob gave him a withering look, then
hauled herself over the sill, dropped so she was hanging by her arms,
then allowed herself to drop the rest of the way. If she made a sound,
it was lost in the roar of the flames that were just outside the door
now. The floor was too hot to touch.
3393
"GO!" Big Sister Nor said.
3394
"You're our leader, our Big Sister Nor," he said, and grabbed her arm.
"We're all nothing without you!" She shook his hand off.
3395
"No, you idiot," she said. "I am nothing more than the switchboard. You
all lead yourselves. Remember that!" She grabbed the waistband of his
jeans, just over his butt, and practically threw him out the window.
The air whistled past him for an instant, and then there was a
tremendous, jarring impact, and then blackness.
3396
Big Sister Nor was on fire, her loose Indian cotton trousers, her long
black hair. The room was all smoke now, and every breath was fire, too.
She smelled her own nose-hairs singe as a breath of scalding air passed
into her lungs, which froze and refused to work anymore. She stood and
took one step to the window, standing for a moment like a flaming
avatar of some tragic god in the window before she faltered, went down
on one knee, then the flames engulfed her.
3397
And below, the crowd on the street began to cry. Justbob cried too,
from the pavement where she was being tended by a passerby who knew
some first aid and was applying pressure to the ruin of her left leg.
The Mighty Krang was unconscious, with a broken arm and three broken
ribs.
3398
But he remembered what Big Sister Nor told him, and he wrote those
words down, typing them with his left hand in English, Malay, Hindi and
Chinese, recording them with his smoke-ruined voice from his hospital
bed.
3399
His words -- Big Sister Nor's words -- went out all over the world,
spreading from phone to message board to site to site. You lead
yourselves.
3400
The words were heard by factory girls all over South China, back on the
job after a few short days of energetic chaos, mass firings and mass
arrests. They were heard by factory boys all over Cambodia and Vietnam.
They were heard in the alleys of Dharavi and in the living rooms of
Mechanical Turks all over Europe, the US and Canada. They were
published in many languages on the cover of many newspapers and aired
on many broadcasts.
3401
These last treated the words as a report from a distant world -- "Did
you know that these strange games and the people who played them took
it all so seriously?" But for the people who needed to hear them, the
words were heard.
3402
They were heard by five friends who downloaded them over the achingly
slow network connection on the container ship, a day out of Shenzhen
port. Five friends who wept to hear them. Five friends who took
strength from them.
3403
They hid in the inner container when the ship entered the Mumbai
Harbor, heading for the Mumbai Port Trust. Wei-Dong had googled the
security procedures at Mumbai Port, and he didn't think they were using
gas chromatograph to detect smuggled people, but they didn't want to
take any chances. It was crowded, and the toilet had stopped working,
and they had only managed to gather enough water for one brief shower
each on the three day passage.
3404
They fell against one-another, then clung to the floor as the container
was lifted on a crane and set down again. They heard the outer door
open, then shut, and muffled conversations. Then they were rolling.
3405
Cautiously, they opened the inner door. The smell of Mumbai -- spicy,
dusty, hot and wet -- filled the container. Light streamed in from the
little holes Wei-Dong had drilled an eternity ago on the passage to
Shenzhen.
3406
Now they heard the sound of horns, many, many horns. Lots of motorcycle
engines, loud. Diesel exhaust. The huge, bellowing air-horn of the
truck their container had been placed upon. The truck stopped and
started many times, made a few slow, lumbering turns, then stopped. A
moment later, the engines stopped too.
3407
The five of them held their breaths, listened to the footsteps outside,
listened to a conversation in Hindi, adult male voices. Listened to the
scrape of the catch on the container's big rear doors.
3408
And then sunlight -- dusty, hot, with swirling clouds of dust and the
pong of human urine -- flooded into the container. They shielded their
eyes and looked into the faces of two grinning Indian men, with fierce
mustaches and neatly pressed shirts. The men held out their hands and
helped them down, one at a time, into a narrow alley that was entirely
filled by the truck, which neatly shielded them from view. Wei-Dong
couldn't imagine backing a truck into a space this narrow.
3409
The men gestured at the interior of the container, miming, Do you
have everything? Wei-Dong and Jie made sure everyone was clear and
then nodded. The men waggled their chins at them, shook Wei-Dong and
Jie's hands, brief and dry, and edged their way back along the space
between the truck and the alley's walls. The engine roared to life, a
cloud of diesel blew into their face, and the truck pulled away, lights
glowing over a handpainted sign on the bumper that read HORN PLEASE.
3410
The truck blew its horn once as it cleared the alley-mouth and turned
an impossibly tight right turn. The alley was flooded with light and
noise from the street, and then they saw a man and a girl walking down
it, toward them.
3411
They drew close. The girl was wearing some kind of headscarf with a
veil that covered most of her face. The man had short, gelled hair and
was dressed in a pressed white shirt tucked into black slacks. The two
groups stood and looked at one another for a long moment, then the man
held his hand out.
3412
"Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak," he said.
3413
"Leonard Goldberg," Leonard said. They shook. It was another short, dry
handshake.
3414
The girl held her hand out. "Yasmin Gardez," she said.
3415
She barely took his hand, and the shake was brief.
3416
"We all lead ourselves," Leonard said. He hadn't planned on saying it,
but it came out just the same, and Wing understood it and translated it
into Chinese, and for a moment, no one needed to say anything more.
3417
"We have places for you to stay in Dharavi," Yasmin said. Leonard
translated. "We all want to hear what you have to tell us. And we have
work for you, if you want."
3418
"We want to work," Wing said.
3419
"That's good," Ashok said, and they struck out.
3420
They emerged beside a hotel. The street before them thronged with
people, more than they could comprehend, and cars, and three-wheelers,
and bicycles, and trucks of all sizes. It was a hive of activity that
made even Shenzhen seem sedate. For a moment none of them said
anything.
3421
"Mumbai is a busy place," Yasmin said.
3422
"We have friends in the Transport and Dock Workers' Union," Ashok said,
casually, setting off down the crowded pavement, ignoring the children
who approached them, begging, holding their hands out, tugging at their
sleeves. Leonard felt as though he was walking through an insane dream.
"They were glad to help."
3423
The street ended at the ocean, a huge, shimmering harbor dotted with
ferries and other craft. Ahead of them spread an enormous plaza, the
size of several football fields stitched together, covered in gardens,
and, where it met the ocean, an enormous archway topped with minarets
and covered with intricate carvings, and all around them, thousands of
people, talking, walking, selling, begging, sleeping, running, riding.
3424
The five of them stopped and gaped. Three days locked in a container
with nothing to see that was more than a few yards away had robbed them
of the ability to easily focus on large, far-away objects, and it took
a long while to get it all into their heads. Yasmin and Ashok indulged
them, smiling a little.
3425
"The Gateway of India," Yasmin said, and Leonard translated absently.
3426
To one side stood a hotel as big as the giant conference center hotels
near Disneyland, done up like some kind of giant temple, vast and
ungainly. Leonard looked at it for a moment, then shooed away the
beggars that had approached them. Yasmin scolded them in Hindi and they
smiled at her and backed off a few paces, saying something clearly
insulting that Yasmin ignored.
3427
"It's incredible," Leonard said.
3428
"Mumbai is..." Ashok waved his hand. "It's amazing. Even where we're
going -- the other end of the Harbour Line, our humble home, is
incredible. I love it here."
3429
Wing said, "I loved it in China." He looked grave.
3430
"I hope that you can go back again some day," Ashok said. "All of you.
All of us. Anywhere we want."
3431
Jie said, "They put down the strikes in China." Leonard translated.
3432
Yasmin and Ashok nodded solemnly. "There will be other strikes," Yasmin
said.
3433
A man was approaching them. A white man, pale and obvious among the
crowds, trailing a comet-tail of beggars. Leonard saw him first, then
Ashok turned to follow his gaze and whispered "Oh, my, this is
interesting."
3434
The man drew up to them. He was fat, racoon-eyed, hair a wild mess
around his head. He was wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the
Coca-Cola Games logo and a pair of blue-jeans that didn't fit him well,
and Birkenstocks. He wouldn't have looked more American if he was
holding up the Statue of Liberty's torch and singing "Star Spangled
Banner."
3435
Ashok held his hand out. "Dr Prikkel, I presume."
3436
"Mr Tilak." They shook. He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, I believe."
3437
Leonard gulped and took the man's hand. He had a firm, American
handshake. The four Chinese Webblies were talking among themselves.
Leonard whispered to them, explaining who the man was, explaining that
he had no idea what he was doing there.
3438
"You'll have to forgive me for the dramatics," Connor Prikkel said. "I
knew that I would have to come to Mumbai to meet with you and your
extraordinary friends, curiosity demanded it. But once we put our
competitive intelligence people onto your organization, it wasn't hard
to find a hole in your mail server, and from there we intercepted the
details of this meeting. I thought it would make an impression if I
came in person."
3439
"Are you going to call the police?" Wing said, in halting English.
3440
Prikkel smiled. "Shit, no, son. What good would that do? There's
thousands of you Webbly bastards. No, I figure if Coca Cola Games is
going to be doing business with you, it'd be worth sitting down and
chatting. Besides, I had some vacation days I needed to use before the
end of the year, which meant I didn't have to convince my boss to let
me come out here."
3441
They were blocking the sidewalk and getting jostled every few seconds
as someone pushed past them. One of them nearly knocked Prikkel into a
zippy three-wheeled cab and Ashok caught his arm and steadied him.
3442
"Are you going to fire me?" Leonard said.
3443
Prikkel made a face. "Not my department, but to be totally honest, I
think that's probably a good bet. You and the other ones who signed
your little petition." He shrugged. "I can do stuff like take money out
of that bastard's account when your friend's life is at stake -- it's
not like he's gonna complain, right? But how Coke Games contracts with
its workforce? Not my department."
3444
Yasmin's eyes blazed. "You can't -- we won't let you."
3445
"That's a rather interesting proposition," he said, and two men holding
a ten-foot-long tray filled with round tin lunchpails squeezed past
him, knocking him into Jie. "One I think we could certainly have a good
time discussing." He gestured toward the huge wedding-cake hotel. "I'm
staying at the Taj. Care to join me for lunch?"
3446
Ashok looked at Yasmin, and something unspoken passed between them.
"Let us take you out for lunch," Ashok said. "As our guest. We
know a wonderful place in Dharavi. It's only a short train journey."
3447
Prikkel looked at each of them in turn, then shrugged. "You know what?
I'd be honored."
3448
They set off for the train station. Jie snorted. "I can't wait
to broadcast this." Leonard grinned. He couldn't wait either.
3449
Acknowledgements
3450
Thanks to Russell Galen, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and my beautiful and
enormously patient wife Alice -- I couldn't have written this without
you three.
3451
Thanks to the Silklisters, Rishab Ghosh, and Ashok Banker and Yoda,
Keyan Bowes, Rajeev Suri, Sachin Janghel, Vishal Gondal, Sushant
Bhalerao and Menyu Singhfor all your assistance in Mumbai.
3452
Thanks to LemonED, Andrew Lih, Paul Denlinger, Bunnie Huang, Kaiser
Kuo, Anne Stevenson-Yang, Leslie Chang, Ethan Zuckerman, John Kennedy,
Marilyn Terrell, Peter Hessler, Christine Lu, Jon Phillips, Henry Oh,
for invaluable aid in China.
3453
Thanks to Julian Dibbell, Ge Jin, Matthew Chew, James Seng, Jonas
Luster, Steven Davis, Dan Kelly and Victor Pineiro for help with the
gold farmers.
3454
Thanks to Max Keiser, Alan Wexelblat and Mark Soderstrom for economics
advice.
3455
Thanks to Thomas "CmdLn" Gideon, Dan McDonald, Kurt Von Finck,
Canonical, Inc, and Ken Snider for tech support!
3456
Thanks to MrBrown and the Singapore bloggers for unforgettable
street-dinners.
3457
Thanks also to JP Rangaswami and Marilyn Tyrell.
3458
Many thanks to Ken Macleod for letting me use IWWWW and "Webbly."
3459
Bio
3460
GPG key fingerprint: 0BC4 700A 06E2 072D 3A77 F8E2 9026 DBBE 1FC2 37AF
3461
3462
Cory Doctorow (doctorow@craphound.com / craphound.com ) is the author
of several science fiction novels. Some are for adults, others are for
young people and adults. He's also the author of a book of essays
(Content , Tachyon Books), a graphic novel (Cory Doctorow's
Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now , IDW) and two collections of
short stories, both currently in print from Thunder's Mouth Press.
3463
Born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London, England with
his wonderful wife, Alice, and his scrumptious two year old daughter,
Poesy. He formerly served as European Director of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and is a fellow of that organization. He is also
affiliated with the Open University Faculty of Computer Science (UK)
and the University of Waterloo Independent Studies Program (Canada).
3464
He is the co-editor and co-owner of the widely read blog Boing Boing
(boingboing.net) and writes columns for The Guardian newspaper,
Publishers Weekly , Locus Magazine , and Make
Magazine .
3465
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3479
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3489
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3495
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3510
Endnotes
3511
Endnotes