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15 <p>This book is distributed under a Creative Commons
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22 Under the following conditions:
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24 <li>Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner
25 specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that
26 suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).</li>
27 <li>Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial
28 purposes.</li>
29 <li>Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work,
30 you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or
31 similar license to this one.</li>
32 <li>For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others
33 the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a
34 link <a href=
36 <li>Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my
37 permission</li>
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39 More info here: <a href=
40 "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/</a>
47 subject that suddenly got a lot more relevant about halfway through
48 the writing of this book, when the world's economy slid
49 unceremoniously into the toilet and got stuck there), justice,
51 between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the way we play,
52 and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we seemed to
53 get stuck there.</p>
54 <p>I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper
55 into the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects
56 like "neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how
57 we end up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human
58 brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need
59 them.</p>
60 <p>But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by
61 choosing to buy or not buy something. Sometimes (often!), you need
62 to organize to make a difference.</p>
63 <p>This is the golden age of organizing. If there's one thing the
64 Internet's changed forever, it's the relative difficulty and cost
65 of getting a bunch of people in the same place, working for the
66 same goal. That's not always good (thugs, bullies, racists and
67 loonies never had it so good), but it is fundamentally
69 <p>It's hard to remember just how difficult this organizing stuff
70 used to be: how hard it was to do something as trivial as getting
71 ten friends to agree on dinner and a movie, let alone getting
72 millions of people together to raise money for a political
73 candidate, get the vote out, protest corruption, or save an
74 endangered and beloved institution.</p>
75 <p>The net doesn't solve the problem of injustice, but it solves
76 the first hard problem of righting wrongs: getting everyone
77 together and keeping them together. You still have to do the even
79 reputation,</p>
80 <p>Every wonderful thing in our world has fight in its history. Our
81 rights, our good fortune, our happiness and all that is sweet was
82 paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked
83 everything to change the world for the better. Those risks are not
84 diminished one iota by the net. But the rewards are every bit as
85 sweet.</p>
88 <p>The good folks at Random House Audio produced a
90 CD, or you can buy the MP3 version from a variety of online
92 myself on my site</a></p>
93 <p>Unfortunately, you can't buy this book from the world's most
94 popular audiobook vendors: Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Audible.
95 That's because neither store would allow me to sell the audiobook
96 on terms that I believe are fair and just.</p>
97 <p>Specifically, Apple refused to carry the book unless it had
98 "digital rights management" on it. This is the technology that
99 locks music to Apple's devices. It's illegal to move DRM-crippled
100 files to devices that Apple hasn't blessed, which means that if I
101 encourage you to buy my works through Apple, I lose the ability to
102 choose to continue to sell to you from Apple's competition at some
103 later date in the future. That seems like a bad deal for both of
104 us.</p>
105 <p>To its credit, Audible (which supplies all of the audiobooks on
107 they insisted on including their extremely onerous "end user
109 a device that Audible hasn't approved. To make it easy for them, I
110 offered to simply record a little intro that said, "Cory Doctorow
111 and Random House Audio grant you permission to use this book in any
112 way that does not violate copyright law." That way, they wouldn't
114 you have to click through to use it. But Audible refused.</p>
115 <p>I wouldn't sell this book through Wal-Mart if they insisted that
116 you could only shelve it on a Wal-Mart bookcase and I won't sell it
117 through any online retailer that imposes the same requirement on
118 your virtual bookshelves. That's also why you won't find my books
119 for sale for the Kindle or iPad stores -- both stores insist on the
120 right to lock you into terms that I believe are unfair and bad for
121 both of us.</p>
122 <p>I'm pretty bummed about this. For the record, I would gladly
123 sell through both Apple and Audible if they'd let me sell it
124 without DRM, and under the world's shortest EULA ("Don't violate
125 copyright law.") In the meantime, I thank you in advance for
126 patronizing online audiobook sellers who respect the rights of both
127 authors and audiences. And I am especially grateful to Random House
128 Audio for backing me in this fight to get a fair deal for all of
129 us.</p>
132 <p>The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably
133 tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox
134 views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a
135 little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.</p>
136 <p>I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my
137 publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't
138 just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without
139 cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good
140 position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've
141 got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and
142 licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency
143 that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's
144 just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or
146 put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still
147 only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.</p>
149 have always done are expected to play in the same system as all
151 that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer
152 at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one
153 of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan"
154 their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a
156 than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.</p>
157 <p>Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate
158 or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament has just
159 passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows
160 corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if
161 anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright
162 infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is
163 used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios
164 don't like. This law was passed without any serious public debate
165 in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which
166 our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge,
167 gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.</p>
168 <p>It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the
169 EU and Canada have been negotiating a secret copyright treaty
170 called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) that has
171 all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some.
172 The plan is to agree to this in secret, without public debate, and
173 then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by
174 refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless the
175 do. In America, the plan is to pass it without Congressional
176 debate, using the executive power of the President. Though this
177 began under Bush, the Obama administration has pursued it with
178 great enthusiasm.</p>
179 <p>So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be
180 soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone
181 who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If
182 the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's
183 mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.</p>
185 and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:</p>
187 #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it
188 without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause
189 we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it.
193 <p>Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from
194 readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate
195 their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations,
196 because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute
197 immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences
198 I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no
199 desire to cut them out of the loop.</p>
200 <p>But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to
201 good use, and I think I've found it.</p>
202 <p>Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd
203 love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but
204 don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around
206 won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at
207 Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can
208 adopt a class yourself <a href=
210 <p>There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to
211 thank me for the free ebooks.</p>
213 <p>If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of
216 name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to
217 <a href=
219 by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can
220 see it.</p>
222 and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to <a href=
224 and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to
225 Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a
226 copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free
227 to delete your address and other personal info first!) to <a href=
229 Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly
230 acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you
231 anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.</p>
232 <p>I've done this with three of my titles now, and gotten more than
233 a thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity.
234 I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my
235 readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant
239 <p>Many scenes in this file have been dedicated to bookstores:
240 stores that I love, stores that have helped me discover books that
241 opened my mind, stores that have helped my career along. The stores
242 didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about
243 it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. After all, I'm
244 hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper
245 book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick
246 it up!</p>
249 <p>For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better
250 nation.</p>
252 <h3>Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their
253 work</h3>
254 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto,
255 Canada. Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world,
256 and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first
257 time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya
259 Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into
260 the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little
261 Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I
262 was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she
263 retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about
264 how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a
265 bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the
266 years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an
267 anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by
268 Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson,
269 Tara Tallan --and me!)</i></p>
273 In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did
274 every single night. But tonight, as Matthew thoughtfully
275 chopsticked a dumpling out of the styrofoam clamshell, dipped it in
276 the red hot sauce and popped it into his mouth, his little squadron
278 <p>There were eight monitors on his desk, arranged in two ranks of
279 four, the top row supported on a shelf he'd bought from an old lady
280 scrap dealer in front of the Dongmen market. She'd also sold him
281 the monitors, shaking her head at his idiocy: at a time when
285 <p>Not many people could play eight simultaneous games of
286 Svartalfaheim Warriors. For one thing, Coca Cola (who owned the
287 game), had devoted a lot of programmer time to preventing you from
288 playing more than one game on a single PC, so you had to somehow
289 get eight PCs onto one desk, with eight keyboards and eight mice on
290 the desk, too, and room enough for your dumplings and an ashtray
291 and a stack of Indian comic books and that stupid war-axe that Ping
292 gave him and his notebooks and his sketchbook and his laptop and
293 --</p>
295 <p>And it was noisy. He'd set up eight pairs of cheap speakers,
296 each glued to the appropriate monitor, turned down low to the
297 normal hum of Svartalfaheim -- the clash of axes, the roar of
298 ice-giants, the eldritch music of black elves (which sounded a lot
299 like the demo programs on the electric keyboards his mother had
300 spent half her life manufacturing). Now they were all making casino
302 up. The gold rolled into their accounts. He was playing trolls --
303 it was trolls versus elves in Svartalfaheim, though there was an
304 expansion module with light elves and some kind of walking tree --
305 and he'd come through an instanced dungeon that was the underground
306 lair of a minor dark elvish princeling. The lair was only medium
307 hard, with a lot of crappy little monsters early on, then a bunch
308 of dark elf cannon-fodder to be mown down, some traps, and then the
309 level-boss, a wizard who had to be taken out by the spell-casters
310 in Matthew's party while the healers healed them and the tanks
311 killed anything that tried to attack them.</p>
312 <p>So far, so good. Matthew had run and mapped the dungeon on his
313 second night in-world, a quick reccy that showed that he could
315 minutes, which made it a pretty poor way to earn a living. But
317 fact that the very last set of guards had dropped some
318 mareridtbane, which was part of the powerful Living Nightmare spell
319 in the new expansion module. There were players all over Germany,
320 Switzerland and Denmark who were buying mareridtbane for 800 gold
326 dumplings.</p>
328 <p>His hands flew over the mice, taking direct control over the
329 squad. He'd work out the optimal path through the dungeon now, then
330 head out to the Huoda internet cafe and see who he could find to do
331 runs with him at this. With any luck, they could take -- his eyes
333 dungeon if they could get the whole cafe working on it. They'd dump
334 the gold as they went, and by the time Coca Cola's systems
335 administrators figured out anything was wrong, they'd have pulled
336 almost $3000 out of the game. That was a year's rent, for one
337 night's work. His hands trembled as he flipped open a notebook to a
338 new page and began to take notes with his left hand while his right
339 hand worked the game.</p>
340 <p>He was just about to close his notebook and head for the cafe --
341 he needed more dumplings on the way, could he stop for them? Could
342 he afford to? But he needed to eat. And coffee. Lots of coffee --
343 when the door splintered and smashed against the wall bouncing back
344 before it was kicked open again, admitting the cold fluorescent
345 light from outside into his tiny cave of a room. Three men entered
346 his room and closed the door behind them, restoring the dark. One
347 of them found the lightswitch and clicked it a few times without
348 effect, then cursed in Mandarin and punched Matthew in the ear so
349 hard his head spun around on his neck, contriving to bounce off the
350 desk. The pain was blinding, searing, sudden.</p>
352 through the high-pitched whine of his ringing ear. Clumsily, he
353 fumbled for the desk-lamp behind the Indian comics, knocked it
354 over, and then one of the men seized it roughly and turned it on,
355 shining it full on Matthew's face, making him squint his watering
356 eyes.</p>
358 couldn't see him, but he didn't need to. He knew the voice, the
359 unmistakable Wenjhou accent, almost impossible to understand. "Now,
361 being unfurled and Matthew flinched and tried to bring his arms up
362 to shield his head before the weapon swung. But the other two had
363 him by the arms now, and the baton whistled past his ear.</p>
364 <p>But it didn't smash his cheekbone, nor his collarbone. Rather,
365 it was the screen before him that smashed, sending tiny, sharp
366 fragments of glass out in a cloud that seemed to expand in slow
367 motion, peppering his face and hands. Then another screen went. And
368 another. And another. One by one, the man dispassionately smashed
369 all eight screens, letting out little smoker's grunts as he worked.
370 Then, with a much bigger, guttier grunt, he took hold of one end of
371 the shelf and tipped it on its edge, sending the smashed monitors
372 on it sliding onto the floor, taking the comics, the clamshell, the
373 ashtray, all of it sliding to the narrow bed that was jammed up
374 against the desk, then onto the floor in a crash as loud as a
375 basketball match in a glass factory.</p>
376 <p>Matthew felt the hands on his shoulders tighten and he was
377 lifted out of his chair and turned to face the man with the accent,
378 the man who had worked as the supervisor in Mr Wing's factory,
379 almost always silent. But when he spoke, they all jumped in their
380 seat, never sure of whether his barely contained rage would break,
381 whether someone would be taken off the factory floor and then
382 returned to the dorm that night, bruised, cut, sometimes crying in
383 the night for parents left behind back in the provinces.</p>
384 <p>The man's face was calm now, as though the violence against the
385 machines had scratched the unscratchable itch that made him clench
386 and unclench his fists at all times. "Matthew, Mr Wing wants you to
387 know that he thinks of you as a wayward son, and bears you no ill
388 will. You are always welcome in his home. All you need to do is ask
389 for his forgiveness, and it will be given." It was the longest
390 speech Matthew had ever heard the man give, and it was delivered
391 with surprising tenderness, so it was quite a surprise when the man
392 brought his knee up into Matthew's balls, hard enough that he saw
393 stars.</p>
394 <p>The hands released him and he slumped to the floor, a strange
395 sound in his ears that he realized after a moment must have been
396 his voice. He was barely aware of the men moving around his tiny
397 room as he gasped like fish, trying to get air into his lungs, air
398 enough to scream at the incredible, radiant pain in his groin.</p>
399 <p>But he did hear the horrible electrical noise as they tasered
400 the box that held his computers, eight PCs on eight individual
401 boards, stuck in a dented sheet-metal case he'd bought from the
402 same old lady. The ozone smell afterwards sent him whirling back to
403 his grandfather's little flat, the smell of the dust crisping on
404 the heating coil that the old man only turned on when he came to
405 visit. He did hear them gather up his notebooks and tread heavily
406 on the PC case, and pull the shattered door shut behind them. The
407 light from the desklamp painted a crazy oval on the ceiling that he
408 stared at for a long time before he got to his feet, whimpering at
409 the pain in his balls.</p>
410 <p>The night guard was standing at the end of the corridor when he
411 limped out into the night. He was only a boy, even younger than
412 Matthew -- sixteen, in a uniform that was two sizes too big for his
413 skinny chest, a hat that was always slipping down over his eyes, so
414 he had to look up from under the brim like a boy wearing his
415 father's hat.</p>
417 <p>Matthew patted himself down, wincing at the pain in his ear, the
418 shooting stabbing feeling in his neck.</p>
423 <p>Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists and headed out into
424 the Shenzhen night, limping down the stairs and into the neon glow.
425 It was nearly midnight, but Jiabin Road was still throbbing with
426 music, food and hawkers and touts, old ladies chasing foreigners
427 down the street, tugging at their sleeves and offering them
428 "beautiful young girls" in English. He didn't know where he was
429 going, so he just walked, fast, fast as he could, trying to walk
430 off the pain and the enormity of his loss. The computers in his
431 room hadn't cost much to build, but he hadn't had much to begin
432 with. They'd been nearly everything he owned, save for his comics,
433 a few clothes -- and the war-axe. Oh, the war-axe. That was an
434 entertaining vision, picking it up and swinging it over his head
435 like a dark elf, the whistle of its blade slicing the air, the
437 <p>He knew it was ridiculous. He hadn't been in a fight since he
439 He wasn't going to hit anyone with a war axe. It was as useless as
440 his smashed computers.</p>
441 <p>Gradually, he slowed his pace. He was out of the central area
442 around the train station now, in the outer ring of the town center,
443 where it was dark and as quiet as it ever got. He leaned against
444 the steel shutters over a grocery market and put his hands on his
445 thighs and let his sore head droop.</p>
446 <p>Matthew's father had been unusual among their friends -- a
447 Cantonese who succeeded in the new Shenzhen. When Premier Deng
448 changed the rules so that the Pearl River Delta became the world's
449 factory, his family's ancestral province had filled overnight with
450 people from the provinces. They'd "jumped into the sea" -- left
451 safe government factory jobs to seek their fortune here on the
452 south Chinese coast -- and everything had changed for Matthew's
453 family. His grandfather, a Christian minister who'd been sent to a
454 labor camp during the Cultural Revolution -- had never made the
455 adjustment, a problem that struck many of the native Cantonese, who
456 seemed to stand still as the outsiders raced past them to become
457 rich and powerful.</p>
458 <p>But not Matthew's father. The old man had started off as a
459 driver for a shoe-factory boss -- learning to drive on the job,
460 nearly cracking up the car more than once, though the owner didn't
461 seem to mind. After all, he'd never ridden in a car before he'd
462 made it big in Shenzhen. But he got his break one day when the
463 pattern-maker was too sick to work and all production ceased while
464 the girls who worked on the line argued about the best way to cut
465 the leather for a new order that had come in.</p>
466 <p>Matthew's father loved to tell this story. He'd heard the
467 argument go back and forth for a day as the line jerked along
468 slowly, and he'd sat on his chair and thought, and thought, and
469 then he'd stood up and closed his eyes and pictured the calm ocean
470 until the thunder of his heartbeat slowed to a normal beat. Then
471 he'd walked into the owner's office and said, "Boss, I can show you
473 <p>It was no easy task. The hides were all slightly different
474 shapes -- cows weren't identical, after all -- and parts of them
475 were higher grade than others. The shoe itself, an Italian men's
476 loafer, needed six different pieces for each side, and only some of
477 them were visible. The parts that were inside the shoe didn't need
478 to come from the finest leather, but the parts outside did. All
479 this Matthew's father had absorbed while sitting in his chair and
480 listening to the arguments. He'd always loved to draw, always had a
481 good head for space and design.</p>
482 <p>And before his boss could throw him out of the office, he'd
483 plucked up his courage and seized a pen off the desk and rooted a
484 crumpled cigarette package out of the trash -- expensive foreign
485 cigarettes, affected by all the factory owners as a show of wealth
486 -- torn it open and drawn a neat cowhide, and quickly shown how the
487 shoes could be fit to the hide with a minimum of wastage, a design
488 that would get ten pairs of shoes per hide.</p>
491 that Master Yu, the regular cutter, ever got out of a hide was
492 nine. "Eleven, if you use a big hide, or if you're making small
495 <p>Now, before that day, Matthew's father had never cut a hide in
496 his life, had no idea how to slice the supple leather that came
497 back from the tanner. But that morning he'd risen two hours early,
498 before anyone else was awake, and he'd taken his leather jacket, a
499 graduation present from his own father that he'd owned and
500 treasured for ten years, and he'd taken the sharpest knife in the
501 kitchen, and he'd sliced the jacket to ribbons, practicing until he
502 could make the knife slice the leather in the same reliable,
503 efficient arcs that his eyes and mind could trace over them.</p>
505 boldness. His boss wasn't a nice man, and he'd fired many employees
506 for insubordination. If he fired Matthew's father, he would be out
507 a job and a jacket. And the rent was due, and the family had no
508 savings.</p>
510 <p>And that was the day that Matthew's father stopped being Driver
511 Fong and became Master Fong, the junior cutter at the Infinite
512 Quality Shoe Factory. Less than a year later, he was the head
513 cutter, and the family thrived.</p>
514 <p>Matthew had heard this story so many times growing up that he
515 could recite it word-for-word with his father. It was more than a
516 story: it was the family legend, more important than any of the
517 history he'd learned in school. As stories went, it was a good one,
518 but Matthew was determined that his own life would have an even
519 better story still. Matthew would not be the second Master Fong. He
520 would be Boss Fong, the first -- a man with his own factory, his
521 own fortune.</p>
523 <p>Like his father, Matthew could look at a certain kind of problem
525 involved killing monsters and harvesting their gold and prestige
526 items, better and more efficiently than anyone else he'd ever met
527 or heard of.</p>
528 <p>Matthew was a gold farmer, but not just one of those guys who
529 found themselves being approached by an Internet cafe owner and
530 offered seven or eight RMB to keep right on playing, turning over
531 all the gold they won to the boss, who'd sell it on by some
532 mysterious process. Matthew was Master Fong, the gold farmer who
533 could run a dungeon once and tell you exactly the right way to run
534 it again to get the maximum gold in the minimum time. Where a
535 normal farmer might make 50 gold in an hour, Matthew could make
537 <p>Mr Wing had quickly noticed Matthew's talent. Mr Wing didn't
538 like games, didn't care about the legends of Iceland or England or
539 India or Japan. But Mr Wing understood how to make boys work. He
540 displayed their day's take on big boards at both ends of his
541 factory, treated the top performers to lavish meals and baijiu
542 parties in private rooms at his karaoke club where there were
543 beautiful girls. Matthew remembered these evenings through a bleary
544 haze: a girl on either side of him on a sofa, pressed against him,
545 their perfume in his nose, refilling his glass as Mr Wing toasted
546 him for a hero, extolling his achievements. The girls oohed and
547 aahed and pressed harder against him. Mr Wing always laughed at him
548 the next day, because he'd pass out before he could go with one of
550 <p>Mr Wing made sure all the other boys knew about this failing,
551 made sure that they teased "Master Fong" about his inability to
552 hold his liquor, his shyness around girls. And Matthew saw exactly
553 what Boss Wing was doing: setting Matthew up as a hero, above his
554 friends, then making sure that his friends knew that he wasn't
556 all farmed gold harder, for longer hours, eating dumplings at their
557 computers and shouting at each other over their screens late into
558 the night and the cigarette haze.</p>
559 <p>The hours had stretched into days, the days had stretched into
560 months, and one day Matthew woke up in the dorm room filled with
561 farts and snores and the smell of 20 young men in a too-small room,
562 and realized that he'd had enough of working for Boss Wing. That
563 was when he decided that he would become his own man. That was when
564 he set out to be Boss Fong.</p>
566 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet
567 bookseller in the world. Amazon is</i> <span style=
569 get practically any book ever published (along with practically
570 everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've
571 elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers
572 to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly
573 inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers.
574 Amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos,
575 even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there
576 like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy
577 something from Amazon approximately every</i> <span style=
579 of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first
580 century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing
581 down that thorny set of problems.</i></p>
582 <p><i><a href=
584 Amazon</a></i></p>
585 <p>Wei-Dong Goldberg woke one minute before his alarm rang, the
587 and it was time to go raiding.</p>
588 <p>He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and climbed out of his narrow
589 bed -- his mom still put his goddamned Spongebob sheets on it, so
590 he'd drawn beards and horns and cigarettes on all the faces in
591 permanent marker -- and crossed silently to his school-bag and
592 retrieved his laptop, then felt around on his desk for the little
593 Bluetooth earwig, screwing it into his ear.</p>
594 <p>He made a pile of pillows against the headboard and sat
595 cross-legged against them, lifting the lid and firing up his
596 gamespy, looking for his buds, all the way over there in Shenzhen.
597 As the screen filled with names and the games they could be found
598 in, he smiled to himself. It was time to play.</p>
599 <p>Three clicks later and he was in Savage Wonderland, spawning on
600 his clockwork horse with his sword in his hand, amid the garden of
601 talking, hissing flowers, ready to do battle. And there were his
602 boys, riding up alongside of him, their clockwork mounts snorting
603 and champing for battle.</p>
605 dared. His father had a bladder problem and he got up all night
606 long and never slept very deeply. Wei-Dong couldn't afford that. If
607 his parents caught him at it one more time, they'd take away his
608 computer. They'd ground him. They'd send him to a military academy
609 where they shaved your head and you got beaten up in the shower
610 because it built character. He'd been treated to all these threats
611 and more, and they'd made an impression on him.</p>
612 <p>Not enough of an impression to get him to stop playing games in
613 the middle of the night, of course.</p>
615 by network churn.</p>
618 he was talking in Mandarin to him now, which was a big improvement.
619 The guys normally liked to practice their English on him, which
622 <p>They laughed again and he knew that he'd gotten something wrong.
623 The intonation. He was always getting it wrong. He'd say, "I'll go
624 aggro those demons and you buff the cleric," and it would come out,
625 "I am a bowl of noodles, I have beautiful eyelashes." But he was
626 getting better. By the time he got to China, he'd have it
627 nailed.</p>
630 for the gweilo." Wei-Dong loved that he wasn't the gweilo anymore.
631 Gweilo meant "foreign devil," and technically, he qualified. But he
632 was one of the raiders now, and the gweilos were the paying
633 customers who shelled out good dollars or euros or rupees or pounds
634 to play alongside of them.</p>
635 <p>Here was the gweilo now. You could tell because he frequently
636 steered his horse off the path and into the writhing grasp of the
637 living plants, having to stop over and over to hack away their
638 grasping vines. After watching this show for a minute or two, he
639 rode out and cast a protection spell around them both, and the
640 vines sizzled on the glowing red bubble that surrounded them
641 both.</p>
645 accent.</p>
649 party caught up with them.</p>
650 <p>The gweilo had paid them to raid an instance of The Walrus's
651 Garden, a pretty hard underwater dungeon that had some really good
652 drops in it -- ingredients for potions, some pretty good weapons,
653 and, of course, lots of gold. There were a couple prestige items
654 that dropped there, albeit rarely -- you could get a vorpal blade
655 and helmet if you were very lucky. The deal was, the gweilo paid
656 them to run the instance with him, and he could just hang back and
657 let the raiders do all the heavy lifting, but he'd come forward to
658 deal the coup de grace to any big bosses they beat down, so he'd
659 get the experience points. He got to keep the gold, the weapons,
660 the prestige items, all of it -- and all for the low, low cost of
661 $75. The raiders got the cash, the gweilo got to level up fast and
662 pick up a ton of treasure.</p>
663 <p>Wei-Dong often wondered what kind of person would pay strangers
664 to help them get ahead in a game? The usual reason that gweilos
665 gave for hiring raiders was that they wanted to play with their
666 friends, and their friends were all more advanced than them. But
667 Wei-Dong had joined games after his friends and being the noob in
668 his little group, he'd just asked his buds to take him raiding with
669 them, twinking him until his character was up to their level. So if
670 this gweilo had so many pals in this game that he wanted to level
671 up to meet them, why couldn't he get them to power-level his
672 character up with them? Why was he paying the raiders?</p>
673 <p>Wei-Dong suspected that it was because the guy had no
674 friends.</p>
676 tenth time the guy had said it in ten minutes as they rode to the
677 seashore. This time it was the tea-party, a perpetual melee that
678 was a blur of cutlery whistling through the air, savage chairs
679 roaming in packs, chasing luckless players who happened to aggro
680 them, and a crazy-hard puzzle in which you had to collect and
681 arrange the crockery just so, stunning each piece so that it
682 wouldn't crawl away before you were done with it. It was pretty
683 cool, Wei-Dong had to admit (he'd solved the puzzle in two days of
684 hard play, and gotten the teapot for his trouble, which he could
685 use to summon genies in moments of dire need). But the gweilo was
686 acting like he'd never seen computer graphics, ever.</p>
687 <p>They rode on, chattering in Chinese on a private channel.
688 Mostly, it was too fast for Wei-Dong to follow, but he caught the
689 gist of it. They were talking about work -- the raids they had set
690 up for the rest of the night, the boss and his stupid rules, the
691 money and what they'd do with it. Girls. They were always talking
692 about girls.</p>
693 <p>At last they were at the seaside, and Wei-Dong cast the Red
694 Queen's Air Pocket, using up the last of his oyster shells to do
695 so. They all dismounted, flapping their gills comically as they
696 sloshed into the water ("God<em>damn</em>," breathed the
697 gweilo).</p>
698 <p>The Walrus's Garden was a tricky raid, because it was different
699 every time you ran it, the terrain regenerating for each party. As
700 the spellcaster, Wei-Dong's job was to keep the lights on and the
701 air flowing so that no matter what came, they'd see it in time to
702 prepare and vanquish it. First came the octopuses, rising from the
703 bottom with a puff of sand, sailing through the water toward them.
704 Lu, the tank, positioned himself between the party and the
705 octopuses, and, after thrashing around and firing a couple of
706 missiles at them to aggro them, went totally still as, one after
707 another, they wrapped themselves around him, crushing him with
708 their long tentacles, their faces crazed masks of pure
709 malevolence.</p>
710 <p>Once they were all engrossed in the tank, the rest of the party
711 swarmed them, the four of them drawing their edged weapons with a
713 Wei-Dong kept a close eye on the tank's health and cast his healing
714 spells as needed. As each octopus was reduced to near death, the
715 raiders pulled away and Wei-Dong hissed into his mic, "Finish him!"
716 The gweilo fumbled around for the first two beasts, but by the end,
717 he was moving efficiently to dispatch them.</p>
721 of buffs. And I was keeping up the healing spells the whole
725 than brains, that was for sure.</p>
729 knew were doing it, so you decided you had to keep up with them.
730 You don't have any friends -- yet. But you think you will, if you
732 You'll be leveled up by breakfast time." That was another mark
733 against the gweilo: he had the money to pay for a power-levelling
734 session with their raiding guild, but he wasn't willing to pay the
735 premium to do it in a decent American timezone. That was good news
736 for the rest of the guild, sure -- it saved them having to find
737 somewhere to do the run during daylight hours in China, when the
738 Internet cafes were filled with straights -- but it meant that
739 Wei-Dong had to be up in the middle of the night and then drag his
740 butt around school all the next day.</p>
742 <p>Now they were into the crags and caves of the garden, dodging
743 the eels and giant lobsters that surged out of their holes as they
744 passed. Wei-Dong found some more oyster shells and surreptitiously
745 picked them up. Technically, they were the gweilo's to have first
746 refusal over, but they were needed if he was going to keep on
747 casting the Air Pocket, which he might have to do if they kept up
748 at this slow pace. And the gweilo didn't notice, anyway.</p>
751 Orange County, the most boring ZIP code in California.</p>
756 things to do than help some idiot level up in the middle of the
759 laughing and catcalling in Chinese on their channel. He grinned to
760 hear them.</p>
762 for a rotten 75 bucks, but if you're in America, dude, you should
765 guys were listening in now. They didn't have great English, but
766 they spoke enough to get by.</p>
768 'em. Poor as dirt and ignorant. I don't blame 'em. You can't blame
769 'em. It's not their fault. But hell, once you get out of China and
770 get to America, you should <em>act</em> like an American. We don't
780 <p>Wei-Dong closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them
781 again, the carpenters had swum out of the wrecked galleon before
782 them, their T-squares and saws at the ready. They moved by building
783 wooden boxes and gates around themselves, which acted as
785 burn their timbers, but that didn't work under the sea. Once they
786 had you boxed in, they drove long nails through boards around you.
787 It was a grisly, slow way to die.</p>
788 <p>Of course, they had the gweilo surrounded in a flash, and they
789 all had to pile on to fight them free. Xiang summoned his familiar,
790 a boar, and Wei-Dong spelled it its own air bubble and it set to
791 work, tearing up the planks with its tusks. When at last the
792 carpenters managed to kill it, it turned into a baby and floated,
793 lifeless, to the ocean's surface, accompanied by a ghostly weeping.
795 was really grim when you got down to it, and the puzzles were hard
797 <p>Speaking of bosses: they put down the last of the carpenters and
798 as they did, a swirling current disturbed the sea-bottom, kicking
799 up sand that settled slowly, revealing the vorpal blade and armor,
800 encrusted in barnacles. And the gweilo gave a whoop and a holler
801 and dove for it clumsily, as they all shouted at once for him to
802 stop, to wait, and then --</p>
805 <p>The Jabberwock did indeed have eyes of flame, and it did make a
806 "burbling" sound, just like it said in the poem. But the Jabberwock
807 did a lot more than give you dirty looks and belch. The Jabberwock
809 good as it got. It was fast, too, faster than the carpenters, so
810 one minute you could be behind it and then it would do a barrel
811 roll -- its tail like a whip, cracking and knocking back anything
812 that got in its way -- and it would be facing you, rearing up with
813 its spindly claws splayed, its narrow chest heaving. The jaws that
814 bite, the claws that catch -- and once they'd caught you, the
815 Jabberwock would beat you against the hardest surface in reach,
816 doing insane damage while you squirmed to get free. And the
817 burbling? Not so much like burping, really: more like the sound of
819 sound.</p>
820 <p>The first time Wei-Dong had managed to kill a Jabberwock --
821 after a weekend's continuous play -- he'd crashed hard and had
822 nightmares about that sound.</p>
824 keyboard, trying to get all his spells up and running without
825 getting disemboweled by the nightmare beast before them. It had Lu
826 and was beating the everloving piss out of him, but that was OK, it
827 was just Lu, his job was to get beaten up. Wei-Dong cast his
828 healing spells at Lu while he swam back as fast as he could.</p>
832 <em>point</em>. That's why you hired <em>us</em>. Now we're going
833 to use up all our spells and potions fighting this thing --" he
834 broke off for a second and hit some more keys "-- and it's going to
835 take <em>days</em> to get it all back, just because you couldn't
840 He'd barely had any time to talk with his guildies on the whole
841 raid, he'd been stuck talking to this dumb English speaker. Now the
842 guy was mouthing off to him. It made him want to throw his computer
843 against the wall. See what being nice gets you?</p>
844 <p>If the gweilo replied, Wei-Dong didn't hear it, because the
845 Jabberwock was really pouring on the heat. He was out of potions
846 and healing spells and Lu wasn't going to last much longer. Oh,
848 worrying at his armor with a long fang, trying to peel him like a
849 grape. He tabbed over to his voice-chat controller and dialled up
850 the Chinese channel to full, tuning out the gweilo.</p>
851 <p>It was a chaos of fast, profane dialect, slangy Chinese that
852 mixed in curse-words from Japanese comics and Indian movies. The
853 boys were all hollering, too fast for him to get more than the
854 sense of things.</p>
859 disappointment. In spite of himself, Wei-Dong grinned. "You think
860 he'll reschedule, or are we going to have to give him his money
862 <p>Wei-Dong didn't know, but he had a feeling that this goober
863 wasn't going to be very cooperative if they told him that he'd
864 gotten up in the middle of the night for nothing. Even if it was
865 his fault.</p>
866 <p>He sucked in some whistling breaths through his nose and tried
867 to calm down. It was almost 2AM now. In the house around him, all
868 was silent. A car revved its engine somewhere far away, but the
869 night was so quiet the sound carried into his bedroom.</p>
871 <p>Every game had a couple of BFGs, Big Friendly Guns (or at least
873 and nearly impossible to resist. In Savage Wonderland, they were
874 also nearly impossible to re-load: the rare monster blunderbuss
876 huge loads of sharpened cutlery from the Tea Party, and just
877 collecting enough for a single load took eight or nine hours of
878 gameplay. Impossible to get -- impossible to load. Practically no
879 one had one.</p>
880 <p>But Wei-Dong did. Ignoring the shouting in his headset, he
881 backed off to the edge of the blunderbuss's range and began to arm
882 it, a laborious process of dumping all that cutlery into the
884 <p>His guildies could see what he was doing now and they were
885 whooping triumphantly, arraying their toons around its front,
886 occupying its attention, clearing his line of fire. All he needed
887 was one...more...second.</p>
888 <p>He pulled the trigger. There was a snap and a hiss as the powder
889 in the pan began to burn. The sound made the Jabberwock turn its
890 head on its long, serpentine neck. It regarded him with its burning
891 eyes and it dropped Ping and Lu to the oceanbed. The powder in the
892 pan flared -- and died.</p>
897 <p>The Jabberwock smiled, and made that wet meaty sound again.
899 sound from his nightmare, the sound of his dream of heroism dying.
900 The sound of a waste of a day's worth of ammo and a night's worth
901 of play. He was a dead man.</p>
902 <p>The Jabberwock did one of those whipping, rippling barrel-rolls
903 that were its trademark. The currents buffeted him, sending him
904 rocking from side to side. He corrected, overcorrected, corrected
905 again, hit the re-arm button, the fire button, the re-arm button,
906 the fire button --</p>
907 <p>The Jabberwock was facing him now. It reared back, flexing its
908 claws, clicking its jaws together. In a second it would be on him,
909 it would open him from crotch to throat and eat his guts, any
910 second now --</p>
912 explosion in a pots-and-pans drawer, a million metallic clangs and
913 bangs as the sea was sliced by a rapidly expanding cone of lethal,
914 screaming metal tableware.</p>
916 mushroom of meat and claws and leathery scales. The left side of
917 its head ripped toward him and bounced off him, settling in the
918 sand. The water turned pink, then red, and the death-screech of the
919 Jabberwock seemed to carom off the water and lap back over him
921 <p>His guildies were going nuts, seven thousand miles away,
924 Road in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong was grinning ferociously in his bedroom,
925 basking in it.</p>
926 <p>And when the water cleared, there again were the vorpal blade
927 and helmet in their crust of barnacles, sitting innocently on the
928 ocean floor. The gweilo -- the gweilo, he'd forgotten all about the
929 gweilo! -- moved clumsily toward it.</p>
931 moved so fast that the gweilo probably didn't even see him coming.
932 Ping's sword went snicker-snack, and the gweilo's head fell to the
933 sand, a dumb, betrayed expression on its face.</p>
939 dude</em>!" It was one of Ping's favorite English phrases, and it
940 was the highest praise in their guild. And now he had a vorpal
941 blade and helmet. It was a good night.</p>
942 <p>They surfaced and paddled to shore and conjured up their mounts
943 again and rode back to the guild-hall, chatting all the way,
944 dispatching the occasional minor beast without much fuss. The guys
945 weren't too put out at being 75 bucks' poorer than they'd expected.
946 They were players first, business people second. And that had been
949 hours, and at this rate, he was going to be lying awake for a
951 best Chinese. They bade him farewell, and the chat channel went
952 dead. In the sudden silence of his room, he could hear his pulse
953 pounding in his ears. And another sound -- a tread on the floor
954 outside his door. A hand on the doorknob --</p>
956 <p>He manged to get the lid of the laptop down and his covers
957 pulled up before the door opened, but he was still holding the
958 machine under the sheets, and his father's glare from the doorway
959 told him that he wasn't fooling anyone. Wordlessly, still glaring,
960 his father crossed the room and delicately removed the earwig from
961 Wei-Dong's ear. It glowed telltale blue, blinking, looking for the
962 laptop that was now sleeping under Wei-Dong's artistically
963 redecorate Spongebob sheets.</p>
966 this with you right now. But we're going to talk about it in the
967 morning. And you're going to have a long, long time to think about
968 it afterward." He yanked back the sheet and took the laptop out of
969 Wei-Dong's now-limp hand.</p>
971 father gave no indication he'd heard before he pulled the bedroom
972 door firmly and authoritatively shut.</p>
974 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Borderlands Books, San Francisco's
975 magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is
976 not just notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs
977 and such, but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley,
978 who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the
979 front of the store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore
980 you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and
981 staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything
982 there is to know about science fiction. Even better, they've always
983 been willing to take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold
984 them for me to sign when I drop into the store, then they ship them
985 within the US for free!</i></p>
989 <p>Mala missed the birdcalls. When they'd lived in the village,
990 there'd been birdsong every morning, breaking the perfect peace of
991 the night to let them know that the sun was rising and the day was
992 beginning. That was when she'd been a little girl. Here in Mumbai,
993 there were some sickly rooster calls at dawn, but they were nearly
994 drowned out by the neverending trafficsong: the horns, the engines
995 revving, the calls late in the night.</p>
996 <p>In the village, there'd been the birdcalls, the silence, and
997 peace, times when everyone wasn't always watching. In Mumbai, there
998 was nothing but the people, the people everywhere, so that every
999 breath you breathed tasted of the mouth that had exhaled it before
1000 you got it.</p>
1001 <p>She and her mother and her brother slept together in a tiny room
1002 over Mr Kunal's plastic-recycling factory in Dharavi, the huge
1003 squatter's slum at the north end of the city. During the day, the
1004 room was used to sort plastic into a dozen tubs -- the plastic
1005 coming from an endless procession of huge rice-sacks that were
1006 filled at the shipyards. The ships went to America and Europe and
1007 Asia filled with goods made in India and came back filled with
1008 garbage, plastic that the pickers of Dharavi sorted, cleaned,
1009 melted and reformed into pellets and shipped to the factories so
1010 that they could be turned into manufactured goods and shipped back
1011 to America, Europe and Asia.</p>
1012 <p>When they'd arrived at Dharavi, Mala had found it terrifying:
1013 the narrow shacks growing up to blot out the sky, the dirt lanes
1014 between them with gutters running in iridescent blue and red from
1015 the dye-shops, the choking always-smell of burning plastic, the
1016 roar of motorbikes racing between the buildings. And the eyes, eyes
1017 from every window and roof, all watching them as mamaji led her and
1018 her little brother to the factory of Mr Kunal, where they were to
1019 live now and forevermore.</p>
1020 <p>But barely a year had gone by and the smell had disappeared. The
1021 eyes had become friendly. She could hop from one lane to another
1022 with perfect confidence, never getting lost on her way to do the
1023 marketing or to attend the afternoon classes at the little
1024 school-room over the restaurant. The sorting work had been boring,
1025 but never hard, and there was always food, and there were other
1026 girls to play with, and mamaji had made friends who helped them
1027 out. Piece by piece, she'd become a Dharavi girl, and now she
1028 looked on the newcomers with a mixture of generosity and pity.</p>
1029 <p>And the work -- well, the work had gotten a lot better, just
1030 lately.</p>
1031 <p>It started when she was in the games-cafe with Yasmin, stealing
1032 an hour after lessons to spend a few Rupees of the money she'd
1033 saved from her pay-packet (almost all of it went to the family, of
1034 course, but mamaji sometimes let her keep some back and advised her
1035 to spend it on a treat at the cornershop). Yasmin had never played
1036 Zombie Mecha, but of course they'd both seen the movies at the
1037 little filmi house on the road that separated the Muslim and the
1039 she was good at it, too. She preferred the PvP servers where
1040 players could hunt other players, trying to topple their giant
1041 mecha-suits so that the zombies around them could swarm over it,
1042 crack open its cockpit cowl and feast on the av within.</p>
1043 <p>Most of the girls at the game cafe came in and played little
1044 games with cute animals and trading for hearts and jewels. But for
1045 Mala, the action was in the awesome carnage of the multiplayer war
1046 games. It only took a few minutes to get Yasmin through the basics
1047 of piloting her little squadron and then she could get down to
1049 <p>That was it, that was what none of the other players seemed to
1051 the game like it was a random chaos of screeching rockets and
1052 explosions, a confusion to be waded into and survived, as best as
1053 you could.</p>
1054 <p>But for Mala, the confusion was something that happened to other
1055 people. For Mala, the explosions and camera-shake and the screech
1056 of the zombies were just minor details, to be noted among the Big
1057 Picture, the armies arrayed on the battlefield in her mind. On that
1058 battlefield, the massed forces took on a density and a color that
1059 showed where their strengths and weaknesses were, how they were
1060 joined to each other and how pushing one this one, over here, would
1061 topple that one over there. You could face down your enemies head
1062 on, rockets against rockets, guns against guns, and then the winner
1063 would be the luckier one, or the one with the most ammo, or the one
1064 with the best shields.</p>
1067 opposing armies, to their left and right, creating box-canyons of
1068 rubble and debris that blocked their escape. Meanwhile, a few of
1069 her harriers would be off in the weeds aggroing huge herds of
1071 they were like locusts, blotting out the ground in all directions,
1072 leading them ever closer to that box canyon.</p>
1073 <p>Just before they'd come into view, her frontal force would peel
1074 off, running away in a seeming act of cowardice. Her enemies would
1075 be buoyed up by false confidence and give chase -- until they saw
1076 the harriers coming straight for them, with an unstoppable,
1077 torrential pestilence of zombies hot on their heels. Most times,
1080 them, into the one escape left behind in the box-canyon, blowing
1081 the crack shut as they left. Then it was just a matter of waiting
1082 for the zombies to overwhelm and devour your opponents, while you
1083 snickered and ate a sweet and drank a little tea from the urn by
1084 the cashier's counter. The sounds of the zombies rending the armies
1086 satisfying.</p>
1087 <p>Yasmin had been distracted by the zombies, the disgusting
1088 entrails, the shining rockets. But she'd seen, oh yes, she'd
1090 larger opposing armies and she got over her squeamishness.</p>
1091 <p>And so on they played, drawing an audience: first the hooting
1092 derisive boys (who fell silent when they watched the armies fall
1093 before her, and who started to call her "General Robotwalla"
1094 without even a hint of mockery), and then the girls, shy at first,
1095 peeking over the boys' shoulders, then shoving forward and cheering
1096 and beating their fists on the walls and stamping their feet for
1097 each dramatic victory.</p>
1098 <p>It wasn't cheap, though. Mala's carefully hoarded store of
1099 Rupees shrank, buffered somewhat by a few coins from other players
1100 who paid her a little here and there to teach them how to really
1101 play. She knew she could have borrowed the money, or let some boy
1102 spend it on her -- there was already fierce competition for the
1103 right to go over the road to the drinkswalla and buy her a masala
1104 Coke, a fizzing, foaming spicy explosion of Coke and masala spice
1105 and crushed ice that soothed the rawness at the back of her throat
1106 that had been her constant companion since they'd come to
1107 Dharavi.</p>
1108 <p>But nice girls from the village didn't let boys buy them things.
1109 Boys wanted something in return. She knew that, knew it from the
1110 movies and from the life around her. She knew what happened to
1111 girls who let boys take care of their needs. There was always a
1112 reckoning.</p>
1113 <p>When the strange man first approached her, she thought about
1114 nice girls and boys and what they expected, and she wouldn't talk
1115 to him or meet his eye. She didn't know what he wanted, but he
1116 wasn't going to get it from her. So when he got up from his chair
1117 by the cashier as she came into the cafe, rose and crossed to
1118 intercept her with his smart linen suit and good shoes and short,
1119 neatly oiled hair, and small moustache, she'd stepped around him,
1120 stepped past him, pretended she didn't hear him say, "Excuse me,
1123 you listen to this man, you listen to what he has to say to you.
1124 You don't be rude in my shop, no you don't!" And because Mrs
1125 Dibyendu was also from a village, and because her mother had said
1126 that Mala could play games but only in Mrs Dibyendu's cafe, Mrs
1127 Dibyendu being the sort of person you could trust not to allow
1128 improper doings, or drugs, or violence, or criminality, Mala
1129 stopped and turned to the man, silent, expecting.</p>
1131 you." He turned back to her, and to the army of boys and girls
1133 her General Robotwallah and meant it.</p>
1135 her chin back and forth, half-closing her eyes, letting her chin
1136 say, <em>Yes, I'm a good player, and I'm good enough that I don't
1137 need to boast about it.</em></p>
1139 <p>Mala turned to her army, who had the discipline to remain silent
1140 until she gave them the nod. She waggled her chin at them: <em>go
1142 <p>And they erupted in an enthused babble, extolling the virtues of
1143 their General Robotwallah, the epic battles they'd fought and won
1144 against impossible odds.</p>
1147 <p>The man smiled a little smile and shook his head. He smelled of
1148 citrusy cologne and betel, a sweet combination of smells she'd
1149 never smelled before. "No, not a league. You know that in the game,
1150 there are players who don't play for fun? Players who play to make
1154 players who play to build up game-money, which they sell on to
1155 other players who are too lazy to do the playing for
1157 <p>Mala thought about this for a moment. The containers went out of
1158 India filled with goods and came back filled with garbage for
1159 Dharavi. Somewhere out there, in the America of the filmi shows,
1160 there was a world of people with unimaginable wealth. "We'll do
1164 was absolutely silent now, hanging on his every word. From the
1165 machines came the soft crashing of the wars, taking place in the
1166 world inside the network, all day and all night long. "Actually,
1167 that's not exactly it. We want you and your friends to destroy
1169 <p>Mala thought for another instant, puzzled. Who would want to
1175 fingers. He wore a wedding ring on one hand, and two gold rings on
1176 the other. He was missing the top joints on three of his fingers,
1177 she saw. That was common in the village, where farmers were always
1178 getting caught in the machines. Here was a man from a village, a
1179 man who'd come to Mumbai and become a man in a neat suit with a
1180 neat mustache and gold rings glinting on what remained of his
1181 fingers. Here was the reason her mother had brought them to
1182 Dharavi, the reason for the sore throat and the burning eyes and
1183 the endless work over the plastic-sorting tubs.</p>
1187 moment his eyes flashed dangerously and she sensed that he was
1188 about to slap her, but she stood her ground. She'd been slapped
1189 plenty before. He snorted once through his nose, then went on.</p>
1191 players. You'd be told what sort of mecha they were piloting, what
1192 their player-names were, and you'd have to root them out and
1193 destroy them. You'd keep all their wealth, and you'd get Rupees,
1197 we should discuss that in private, later? With your mother
1200 "Your mother." Mrs Dibyendu and he had been talking, then. He knew
1201 about Mala, and she didn't know about him. She was just a girl from
1202 the village, after all, and this was the world, where she was still
1203 trying to understand it all. She was a general, but she was also a
1204 girl from the village. General Girl From the Village.</p>
1205 <p>So he'd come that night to Mr Kunal's factory, and Mala's mother
1206 had fed him thali and papadams from the women's papadam collective,
1207 and they'd boiled chai in the electric kettle and the man had
1208 pretended that his fine clothes and gold belonged here, and had
1209 squatted back on his heels like a man in the village, his hairy
1210 ankles peeking out over his socks. No one Mala knew wore socks.</p>
1212 Mrs Dibyendu. If she says you can be trusted..." She trailed off,
1213 because really, she didn't know Mrs Dibyendu. In Dharavi, there
1214 were many hazards for a young girl. Mamaji would fret over them
1215 endlessly while she brushed out Mala's hair at night, all the ways
1216 a girl could find herself ruined or hurt here. But the money.</p>
1218 course, she'll have to pay her 'army' --" he'd given Mala a little
1222 Mala!" mamaji said, affronted at their imaginary grasping hands.
1223 "They're only playing a game! They should be glad just to play with
1224 her!" Mamaji had been furious when she discovered that Mala had
1225 been playing at the cafe all these afternoons. She thought that
1226 Mala only played once in a while, not with every rupee and moment
1227 she had spare. But when the man -- Mr Banerjee -- had mentioned her
1228 talent and the money it could earn for the family, suddenly mamaji
1229 had become her daughter's business manager.</p>
1230 <p>Mala saw that Mr Banerjee had known this would happen and
1231 wondered what else Mrs Dibyendu had told him about their
1232 family.</p>
1234 they did in the village. "They're my army, and they need paying if
1236 <p>Mamaji looked hard at her. Beside them, Mala's little brother
1237 Gopal took advantage of their distraction to sneak the last bit of
1238 eggplant off Mala's plate. Mala noticed, but pretended she hadn't,
1239 and concentrated on keeping her eyes down.</p>
1241 friends, but you have to think of your family first. We will find a
1242 fair way to compensate them -- maybe we could prepare a weekly
1243 feast for them here, using some of the money. I'm sure they could
1245 <p>Mala didn't like to disagree with her mother, and she'd never
1246 done so in front of strangers, but --</p>
1247 <p>But this was her army, and she was their general. She knew what
1248 made them tick, and they'd heard Mr Banerjee announce that she
1249 would be paid in cash for their services. They believed in
1250 fairness. They wouldn't work for food while she worked for a lakh
1254 to Mala that Mr Banerjee had mentioned the money in front of the
1255 army. He could have been more discreet. Perhaps it was deliberate.
1256 "And they'd know it. I can't earn this money for the family on my
1258 <p>Her mother closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, a sign
1259 that she was trying to keep hold of her temper. If Mr Banerjee
1260 hadn't been present, Mala was sure she would have gotten a proper
1261 beating, the kind she'd gotten from her father before he left them,
1262 when she was a naughty little girl in the village. But if Mr
1263 Banerjee wasn't here, she wouldn't have to talk back to her mother,
1264 either.</p>
1266 Mala. "Girls of this age, they become rebellious --
1268 <p>Mala thought about a future in which instead of being General
1269 Robotwallah, she had to devote her life to begging and bullying her
1270 army into playing with her so that she could keep all the money
1271 they made for her family, while their families went hungry and
1272 their mothers demanded that they come home straight from school.
1273 When Mr Banerjee mentioned his gigantic sum, it had conjured up a
1274 vision of untold wealth, a real house, lovely clothes for all of
1275 them, Mamaji free to spend her afternoons cooking for the family
1276 and resting out of the heat, a life away from Dharavi and the smoke
1277 and the stinging eyes and sore throats.</p>
1279 quiet authority, and Mala's entire family stared at him,
1280 speechless. An adult, taking Mala's side over her mother? "She is a
1281 very good leader, from what I can see. If she says her people need
1282 paying, I believe that she is correct." He wiped at his mouth with
1283 a handkerchief. "With all due respect, of course. I wouldn't dream
1286 downcast, her shoulders slumped. To be spoken to this way, in her
1287 own home, by a stranger, in front of her children! Mala felt
1288 terrible. Her poor mother. And it was all Mr Banerjee's fault: he'd
1289 mentioned the money in front of her army, and then he'd brought her
1290 mother to this point --</p>
1292 --" But she was cut short by her mother's hand, coming up, palm out
1293 to her.</p>
1295 <em>gentleman</em>, says you know what you're doing, well, then I
1296 can't contradict him, can I? I'm just a simple woman from the
1297 village. I don't understand these things. You must do what this
1299 <p>Mr Banerjee stood and smoothed his suit back into place with the
1300 palms of his hands. Mala saw that he'd gotten some chana on his
1301 shirt and lapel, and that made her feel better somehow, like he was
1302 a mortal and not some terrible force of nature who'd come to
1303 destroy their little lives.</p>
1304 <p>He made a little namaste at Mamaji, hands pressed together at
1305 his chest, a small hint of a bow. "Good night, Mrs Vajpayee. That
1307 Robotwallah. I will come to the cafe tomorrow at three o'clock to
1308 talk more about your missions. Good night, Gopal," he said, and her
1309 brother looked up at him, guiltily, eggplant still poking out of
1310 the corner of his mouth.</p>
1311 <p>Mala thought that Mamaji might slap her once the man had left,
1312 but they all went to bed together without another word, and Mala
1313 snuggled up to her mother the same as she did every night, stroking
1314 her long hair. It had been shining and black when they left the
1315 village, but a year later, it was shot through with grey and it
1316 felt wiry. Mamaji's hand caught hers and stilled it, the callouses
1317 on her fingers rough.</p>
1320 <p>The next morning, they avoided one another's eyes, and things
1321 were hard for a week, until she brought home her first pay-packet,
1322 folded carefully in the sole of her shoe. Her army had carved
1323 through the enemy forces like the butcher's cleaver parting heads
1324 from chickens. There had been a large bonus in their pay-packet,
1325 and even after she'd paid Mrs Dibyendu and bought everyone masala
1326 Coke at the Hotel Hajj next door, and paid the army their wages,
1328 smallest sorting room in the loft of the factory, up the ladder.
1329 Mamaji's eyes lit up when she saw the money, and she'd kissed Mala
1330 on the forehead and taken her in the longest, fiercest hug of their
1331 lives together.</p>
1332 <p>And now it was all wonderful between them. Mamaji had begun to
1333 look for a place for them further towards the middle of Dharavi,
1334 the old part where the tin and scrap buildings had been gradually
1335 replaced with brick ones, where the potters' kilns smoked a clean
1336 woodsmoke instead of the dirty, scratchy plastic smoke near Mr
1337 Kunal's factory. Mala had new school-clothes, new shoes, and so did
1338 Gopal, and Mamaji had new brushes for her hair and a new sari that
1339 she wore after her work-day was through, looking pretty and young,
1340 the way Mala remembered her from the village.</p>
1342 <p>She entered the cafe out of the melting, dusty sun of late day
1343 and stood in the doorway. Her army was already assembled,
1344 practicing on their machines, passing gupshup in the shadows of the
1345 dark, noisy room, or making wet eyes at one another through the
1346 dim. She barely had time to grin and then hide the grin before they
1347 noticed her and climbed to their feet, standing straight and proud,
1348 saluting her.</p>
1349 <p>She didn't know which one of them had begun the saluting
1350 business. It had started as a joke, but now it was serious. They
1351 vibrated at attention, all eyes on her. They had on better clothes,
1352 they looked well-fed. General Robotwallah was leading her army to
1353 victory and prosperity.</p>
1355 latest message from Mr Banerjee with the location of the day's
1356 target. Yasmin was at her usual place, at Mala's right hand, and at
1357 her left sat Fulmala, who had a bad limp from a leg that she'd
1358 broken and that hadn't healed right. But Fulmala was smart and
1359 fast, and she grasped the tactics better than anyone in the cafe
1360 except Mala herself. And Yasmin, well, Yasmin could make the boys
1361 behave, which was a major accomplishment, since left to their own
1362 they liked to squabble and one-up each other, in a reckless spiral
1363 that always ended badly. But Yasmin could talk to them in a way
1364 that was stern like an older sister, and they'd fall into line.</p>
1365 <p>Mala had her army, her lieutenants, and her mission. She had her
1366 machine, the fastest one in the cafe, with a bigger monitor than
1367 any of the others, and she was ready to go to war.</p>
1368 <p>She touched up her displays, rolled her head from side to side,
1369 and led her army to battle again.</p>
1371 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national
1372 chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were
1373 vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples
1374 to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of
1375 titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had
1376 stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were
1377 convenient to families, working people and others potential
1378 readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers
1379 afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly
1380 afford to keep on their limited shelves. B&N has always had
1381 strong community outreach programs, and I've done some of my
1382 best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stores, including
1383 the great events at the (sadly departed) B&N in Union Square,
1384 New York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took
1385 place, and the B&N in Chicago that hosted the event after the
1387 buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and
1388 manga, games and similar titles. They're passionate and
1389 knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent
1390 selection on display at the stores.</i></p>
1391 <p><i><a href=
1393 Barnes and Noble, nationwide</a></i></p>
1395 <p>But not regular gold, the sort of thing you dig out of the
1396 ground. That stuff was for the last century. There's not enough of
1397 it, for one thing: all the gold ever dug out of the ground in the
1398 history of the world would only amount to a cube whose sides were
1399 the length of a tennis court. And curiously, there's also too much
1400 of it: all the certificates of gold ownership issued into the world
1401 add up to a cube twice that size. Some of those certificates don't
1402 amount to anything -- and no one knows which ones. No one has
1403 independently audited Fort Knox since 1956 FCK. For all we know,
1404 it's empty, the gold smuggled out and sold, put in a vault, sold as
1405 certificates, then stolen again and put into another vault, used as
1406 the basis for more certificates.</p>
1410 another, "Volcano Bucks." There are groats, Disney Dollars,
1411 cowries, moolah, and Fool's Gold, and a million other kinds of gold
1412 out there. Unlike real gold, there's no vault of reserves backing
1413 the certificates. Unlike money, there's no government involved in
1414 their issue.</p>
1415 <p>Virtual gold is issued by companies. Game companies. Game
1416 companies who declare, "So many gold pieces can buy this piece of
1418 Jools can buy this zeppelin." And because they say it, it is true.
1419 Countries and their banks have to mess around with the ugly
1420 business of convincing citizens to believe what they say: the
1421 government may say, "This social security check will provide for
1422 all your needs in a month," but that doesn't mean that the
1423 merchants who supply those needs will agree.</p>
1425 groats will buy you one dwarvish axe in Svartalfaheim Warriors,
1426 that's it: the price of an axe is 76 groats. Don't like it? Go play
1427 somewhere else.</p>
1428 <p>Virtual money isn't backed by gold or governments: it's backed
1430 want to buy into it, because as fun as the game is, it's always
1431 more fun if you're one of the haves, with all the awesome armor and
1432 killer weapons, than if you're some lowly noob have-not with a
1433 dagger, fighting your way up to your first sword.</p>
1434 <p>But where there's money to be spent, there's money to be made.
1435 For some players, the most fun game of all is the game that carves
1436 them out a slice of the pie. Not all the action belongs to the
1437 giant companies up on their tall offices and the games they make.
1438 Plenty of us can get in on the action from down below, where the
1439 grubby little people are.</p>
1441 big daddy, they know what's best for their worlds. They are <em>in
1442 control</em>. They design the levels and the difficulty to make it
1443 all perfectly balanced. They design the puzzles. They decree that
1444 light elves can't talk to dark elves, that players on Russian
1445 servers can't hop onto the Chinese servers, that it would take the
1447 hours to earn the Order of the Armored Penguin. If you don't like
1451 <p>And here's a little something they won't tell you, these Gods of
1453 weirdos all over the world have riddled their safe little
1454 terrarrium worlds with tunnels leading to the great outdoors. There
1455 are multiple, competing interworld exchanges: want to swap out your
1456 Zombie Mecha wealth for a fully loaded spaceship and a crew of
1457 jolly space-pirates to crew it? Ten different gangs want your
1458 business -- they'll fix you right up with someone else's spaceship
1459 and take your mecha, arms and ammo into inventory for the next
1460 person who wants to immigrate to Zombie Mecha from some other
1461 magical world.</p>
1462 <p>And the Gods are powerless to stop it. For every barrier they
1463 put up, there are hundreds of smart, motivated players of the Big
1464 Game who will knock it down.</p>
1465 <p>You'd think it'd be impossible, wouldn't you? After all, these
1466 aren't mere games of cops and robbers, played out in real cities
1467 filled with real people. They don't need an all-points bulletin to
1468 find a fugitive at large: every person in the world is in the
1469 database, and they own the database. They don't need a search
1470 warrant to find the contraband hiding under your floorboards: the
1471 floorboards, the contraband, the house and you are all in the
1472 database -- and they own the database.</p>
1473 <p>It should be impossible, but it isn't, and here's why: the
1474 biggest sellers of gold and treasure, levels and experience in the
1477 it with prettier, more palatable names, like "accelerated progress
1479 redonkulous names that don't fool anyone.</p>
1480 <p>But the Gods aren't happy with merely turning a buck on players
1481 who are too lazy to work their way up through the game. They've got
1482 a much, much weirder game in play. They sell gold to people <em>who
1483 don't even play the game</em>. That's right: if you're a bigshot
1484 finance guy and you're looking for somewhere to stash a million
1485 bucks where it will do some good, you can buy a million dollars'
1486 worth of virtual gold, hang onto it as the game grows and becomes
1487 more and more fun, as the value of the gold rises and rises, and
1488 then you can sell it back for real money through the official
1489 in-game banks, pocketing a chunky profit for your trouble.</p>
1490 <p>So while you're piloting your mecha, swinging your axe or
1491 commanding your space fleet, there's a group of weird old grownups
1492 in suits in fancy offices all over the world watching your play
1493 eagerly, trying to figure out if the value of in-game gold is going
1494 to go up or down. When a game starts to suck, everyone rushes to
1495 sell out their holdings, getting rid of the gold as fast as they
1496 can before its value it obliterated by bored gamers switching to a
1498 that's an even bigger frenzy, as the bidding wars kick up to high
1499 gear, every banker in the world trying to buy the same gold for the
1500 same world.</p>
1502 world are in virtual countries? And is it any wonder that playing
1503 has become such a serious business?</p>
1505 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los
1506 Angeles, my drop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world.
1507 It's small and selective about what it stocks, and every time I
1508 walk in, I walk out with three or four collections I'd never heard
1509 of under my arm. It's like the owners, Dave and David, have the
1510 uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm looking for, and they
1511 lay it out for me seconds before I walk into the store. I
1512 discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics by wandering
1513 into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into one of the
1514 comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world. When
1515 my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they worked with
1516 local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on
1517 Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a year
1518 ago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is
1519 right at the top of the list.</i></p>
1523 <p>Matthew stood outside the door of the Internet cafe, breathing
1524 deeply. On the walk over, he'd managed to calm down a little, but
1525 as he drew closer, he became more and more convinced that Boss
1526 Wing's boys would be waiting for him there, and all his friends
1527 would be curled up on the ground, beaten unconscious. He'd brought
1528 four of the best players with him out of Boss Wing's factory, and
1530 <p>He was hyperventilating, his head swimming. He still hurt. It
1531 felt like he had a soccer ball-sized red sun of pain burning in his
1532 underwear and one of the things he wanted most and least to do was
1533 to find a private spot to have a look in there. There was a
1534 bathroom in the cafe, so that was that, it was time to go
1535 inside.</p>
1536 <p>He walked up the four flights of stairs painfully, passing under
1537 the gigantic murals from gamespace, avoiding the plastic plants on
1538 each landing that reeked of piss from players who didn't want to
1539 wait for the bathroom. From the third floor up, he was enveloped in
1540 the familiar cloud of body odor, cigarette smoke and cursing that
1541 told him he was on his way to his true home.</p>
1542 <p>In the doorway, he paused and peered around, looking for any
1543 sign of Boss Wing's goons, but it was business as usual: rows and
1544 rows of tables with PCs on them, a few couples sharing machines,
1545 but mostly, it was boys playing, skinny, with their shirts rolled
1546 up over their bellies to catch any breeze that might happen through
1547 the room. There were no breezes, just the eddies in the smoke
1548 caused by the growl of all those PC fans whining as they sucked
1549 particulate-laden smoky air over the superheated motherboards and
1550 monster video cards.</p>
1551 <p>He slunk past the sign-in desk, staffed tonight by a new kid,
1552 someone else just arrived from the provinces to find his fortune
1553 here in bad old Shenzhen. Matthew wanted to grab the kid and carry
1554 him to the city limits, explaining all the way that there was no
1555 fortune to be found here anymore, it all belonged to men like Boss
1557 place is done.</em></p>
1558 <p>His boys were playing at their usual table. They had made a
1559 pyramid from alternating layers of Double Happiness cigarette packs
1560 and empty coffee cups. They looked up as he neared them, smiling
1561 and laughing at some joke. Then they saw the look on his face and
1562 they fell silent.</p>
1563 <p>He sat down at a vacant chair and stared at their screens.
1564 They'd been playing, of course. They were always playing. When they
1565 worked in Boss Wing's factory, they'd pull an 18 hour shift and
1566 then they'd relax by playing some more, running their own
1567 characters through the dungeons they'd been farming all day long.
1568 It's why Boss Wing had such an easy time recruiting for his
1573 family, a wife and a young daughter. He'd left Boss Wing's factory
1574 and followed Matthew.</p>
1575 <p>Matthew stared at his hands, took a deep breath, and made a
1576 decision: "Sorry, I just had a little fight on the way over here.
1577 I've got good news, though: I've got a way to make us all very rich
1578 in a very short time." And, from memory, Master Fong described the
1579 way he'd found into the rich dungeon of Svartalfaheim Warriors. He
1580 commandeered a computer and showed them, showed them how to shave
1581 the seconds off the run, where to make sure to stop and grab and
1582 pick up. And then they each took up a machine and went to work.</p>
1583 <p>In time, the ache in his pants faded. Someone gave him a
1584 cigarette, then another. Someone brought him some dumplings. Master
1585 Fong ate them without tasting them. He and his team were at work,
1586 and they were making money, and someday soon, they'd have a fortune
1587 that would make Boss Wing look like a small-timer.</p>
1588 <p>Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother.
1591 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary
1592 "City of Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest
1593 bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery
1594 smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the
1595 same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've
1596 stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and
1597 they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the
1598 store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and
1599 there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just
1600 about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!</i></p>
1601 <p><i><a href=
1606 long it took him to fake a migraine, get a study-pass, sneak into
1607 the resource center, beat the network filter and log on. It was
1608 getting very late back in China, but that was OK, the boys stayed
1609 up late when they were working, and they were glad to have him.</p>
1610 <p>Wei-Dong's real name wasn't Wei-Dong, of course. His real name
1611 was Leonard Goldberg. He'd chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the
1612 meanings of Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East,
1613 which he liked the sound of. This system for picking names worked
1614 well for the Chinese kids he knew -- when their parents immigrated
1615 to the States, they'd just pick some English name and that was it.
1616 Why not? Why was it better to pick a name because your grandfather
1617 had it than because you liked the sound of it?</p>
1618 <p>He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it didn't make
1619 much of an impression on them. They were cool with him being
1620 interested in other cultures, but that didn't mean he could get out
1621 of having a Bar-Mitzvah or that they would call him Wei-Dong. And
1622 it didn't mean that they approved of him being up all night with
1623 his buds in China, making money.</p>
1624 <p>Wei-Dong knew that this could all be seen as very lame, an
1625 outcast kid so desperate to make friends that he abandoned his high
1626 school altogether and sucked up to someone in another hemisphere
1627 with free labor instead. But it wasn't like that. Wei-Dong had
1628 plenty of friends at Ronald Regan Secondary School. Plenty of kids
1629 thought that China was the most interesting place in the world,
1630 loved the movies and the food and the comics and the games. And
1631 there were lots of Chinese kids in school too and while a couple
1632 clearly thought he was weird, lots more got it. After all, most of
1633 them were into India the way he was into China, so they had that in
1634 common.</p>
1635 <p>And so what if he was skipping a class? It was Social Studies,
1636 ferchrissakes! They were supposed to be studying China, but
1637 Wei-Dong knew about ten times more about the subject than the
1638 teacher did. As he whispered in Mandarin into his earwig, he
1639 thought that this was like an independent study project. His
1640 teachers should be giving him bonus marks.</p>
1643 times, now that we've got it fresh in our heads. Maybe we could
1644 pick up another vorpal blade." That's what the guys did when there
1645 weren't any paying gweilos -- they went raiding for prestige items.
1646 It wasn't the most exciting thing of all, but you never knew what
1647 might happen.</p>
1649 then lunch, so technically he could play for three hours solid.
1650 They'd all be ready to log off and go to bed by then, anyway.</p>
1652 kidding. He didn't care if the guys called him gweilo. It wasn't a
1654 term of affection. And as nicknames went, "Foreign ghost" was
1655 actually kind of cool.</p>
1656 <p>So they hit the Garden and ran it and they did pretty well, and
1657 they went and put the money in the guild bank and went back for
1658 more. Then they did it again. Somewhere in there, the bell rang.
1659 Somewhere in there, some of his friends came and talked to him and
1660 he muted the earwig and said some things back to them, but he
1661 didn't really know what he'd said. Something.</p>
1662 <p>Then, on the third run, the bad thing happened. They were almost
1663 to the shore, and they'd banished their mounts. Wei-Dong was
1664 prepping the Queen's Air Pocket, dipping into the monster supply of
1665 oyster shells he'd built up on the previous runs.</p>
1666 <p>And out they came, a dozen knights on huge, fearsome black
1667 steeds, rising out of the water in unison, rending the air with the
1668 angry chorus of their mounts and their battle-cries. The water
1669 fountained up around them and they fell upon Wei-Dong and his
1670 guildies.</p>
1671 <p>He shouted something into his earwig, a warning, and all around
1672 him in the resource center, kids looked up from their conversations
1673 to stare at him. He'd become a dervish, hammering away at his
1674 keyboard and mousing furiously, his eyes fixed on the screen.</p>
1675 <p>The black riders moved with eerie synchrony. Either they were
1676 monsters -- monsters such as Wei-Dong had never encountered -- or
1677 they were the most practiced, cooperative raiding party he'd ever
1678 seen. He had his vorpal blade out now, and his guildies were all
1679 fighting as well. In his earwig, they cursed in the Chinese
1680 dialects of six different provinces. Under other circumstances,
1681 Wei-Dong would have taken notes, but now he was fighting for his
1682 life.</p>
1683 <p>Lu had bravely taken the point between the riders and the party,
1684 the huge tank standing fast with his mace and broadsword, engaging
1685 all twelve of the knights without regard for his own safety.
1686 Wei-Dong poured healing spells on him as he attempted to make his
1687 own mark on the riders with the vorpal blade, three times as long
1688 as he was.</p>
1689 <p>The vorpal blade could do incredible damage, but it wasn't easy
1690 to use. Twice, Wei-Dong accidentally sliced into members of his own
1691 party, though not badly -- thank God, or he'd never hear the end of
1692 it -- but he couldn't get a cut in on the black knights, who were
1693 too fast for him.</p>
1694 <p>Then Lu fell, going down on one knee, pierced through the throat
1695 by a pike wielded by a rider whose steed's eyes were the icy blue
1696 of the Caterpillar's mist. The rider lifted Lu into the air, his
1697 feet kicking limply, and another knight beheaded him with a
1698 contemptuous swing of his sword. Lu fell in two pieces to the
1699 gritty beach sand and in the earwig, he cursed them, using an
1700 expression that Wei-Dong had painstakingly translated into "Screw
1702 <p>With Lu down, the rest of them were practically helpless. They
1703 fought valiantly, coordinating their attacks, pouring on fire from
1704 their magic items and best spells, but the black knights were
1705 unbeatable. Before he died, Wei-Dong managed to hit one with the
1706 vorpal blade and had the momentary satisfaction of watching the
1707 knight stagger and clutch at his chest, but then the fighter closed
1708 with him, drawing a pair of short swords that he spun like a
1709 magician doing knife tricks. There was no question of parrying him,
1710 and seconds later, Wei-Dong was in the sand, watching the knight's
1711 spiked boot descend on his face, hearing the crunch of his
1712 cheekbones and nose shattering under the weight. Then he was
1713 respawning in the distant Lake of Tears, naked and unarmed, and he
1714 had to corpse-run to the body of his toon before the bastards got
1715 his vorpal blade.</p>
1716 <p>He heard his guildies dying in the earwig, one after another, as
1717 he ran, ghostly and ethereal, across the hills and dales of
1718 Wonderland. He reached his corpse just in time to watch the knights
1719 loot the body, and the bodies of his teammates. He rose up again,
1720 helpless and unarmed and made flesh by the body of his toon,
1721 vulnerable.</p>
1722 <p>One of the knights sent him a chat-request. He clicked it,
1723 silencing the background noises from Shenzhen.</p>
1725 said. It had an accent he didn't recognize. Maybe Russian? And the
1726 speaker was just a kid! "We're patrolling now. You come back again,
1727 we'll hunt and kill you again, and again, and again. You understand
1729 threatening him from somewhere in the world.</p>
1733 just kicked your ass, and because I can kick it again, as many
1734 times as I need to. And I don't care if you're in China, Vietnam,
1735 Indonesia -- it doesn't make a difference. We'll kill you and all
1736 the farmers in Wonderland. This game isn't farmable anymore. I'm
1737 done talking to you now." And the black knight decapitated him with
1738 contemptuous ease.</p>
1739 <p>He flipped back to the guild channel, ready to tell them about
1740 what had just happened, his mind reeling, and that's when he looked
1741 up into the face of his father, standing over him, with a look on
1742 his face that could curdle milk.</p>
1744 <p>He wasn't alone. There was Mr Adams, the vice-principal, and the
1745 school's rent-a-cop, Officer Turner, and the guidance counsellor,
1746 Ms Ramirez. They presented him with the stony faces of Mount
1747 Rushmore, faces without a hint of mercy. His father reached over
1748 and took the earwig out of his ear, gently, carefully. Then, with
1749 exactly the same care, he dropped the earwig to the polished
1750 concrete floor of the resource centre and brought his heel down on
1752 <p>Leonard stood up. The room was full of kids pretending not to
1753 look at him. They were all looking at him. He followed his father
1754 into the hallway and as the door swung shut, he heard,
1755 unmistakably, the sound of a hundred giggles in unison.</p>
1756 <p>They boxed him in on the walk to the vice-principal's office,
1757 trapping him. Not that he'd run -- he had nowhere to run
1759 not good. This was very, very bad.</p>
1763 maddening, patronizing guidance-counsellor tone. "The Martindale
1764 Academy has no military or martial component. It's merely a very
1765 structured, supervised environment. They have a fantastic track
1766 record in helping students like you concentrate on grades and pull
1767 themselves out of academic troubles. They've got a beautiful campus
1768 in a beautiful location, and Martindale boys go on to fill many
1770 <p>And on and on. She'd swallowed the sales brochure like a burrito
1771 and now it was rebounding on her. He tuned her out and looked at
1772 his father. Benny Rosenbaum wasn't the sort of person you could
1773 read easily. The people who worked for him at Rosenbaum Shipping
1774 and Logistics called him The Wall, because you couldn't get
1775 anything past him, under him, through him, or over him. Not that he
1776 was a hardcase, but he couldn't be swayed by emotional arguments:
1777 if you tried to approach him with anything less than fully
1778 computerized logic, you might as well forget it.</p>
1779 <p>But there were little tells, little ways you could figure out
1780 what the weather was like in old Benny. That thing he was doing
1781 with his watch strap, working at the catch, that was one of them.
1782 So was the little jump in the hinge of his jaw, like he was chewing
1783 an invisible wad of gum. Combine those with the fact that he was
1784 away from his work in the middle of the day, when he should be
1785 making sure that giant steel containers were humming around the
1786 globe -- well, for Leonard, it meant that the lava was pretty close
1787 to the surface of Mount Benny this afternoon.</p>
1790 <p>Benny regarded him, fiddled with his watch strap, nodded at the
1791 guidance counsellor and made a little "go-on" gesture that betrayed
1792 nothing.</p>
1794 serious this has become. You're one term paper away from flunking
1795 two of your subjects: history and biology. You've gone from being
1796 an A student in math, English and social studies to a C-minus. At
1797 this rate, you'll have blown the semester by Thanksgiving. Put it
1798 this way: you've gone from being in the ninetieth percentile of
1799 Ronald Regan Secondary School Sophomores to the <em>twelfth</em>.
1800 This is a signal, Leonard, from you to us, and it's signalling,
1803 calm. "We actually tested a hair follicle from your pillow. I had a
1804 guy follow you around. Near as I can tell, you smoke a little pot
1805 with your friends, but you don't actually see your friends anymore,
1808 <p>His father made that go-on gesture of his, an old favorite of
1809 his. "And had you followed. Of course we did. We're in charge of
1810 you. We're responsible for you. We don't own you, but if you screw
1811 up so bad that you end up spending the rest of your life as a bum,
1812 it'll be down to us, and we'll have to bail you out. You understand
1813 that, Leonard? We're responsible for you, and we'll do whatever we
1815 <p>Leonard bit back a retort. The sinking feeling that had started
1816 with the crushing of his earwig had sunk as low as it would go. Now
1817 his palms were sweating, his heart was racing, and he had no idea
1818 what would come out of his mouth the next time we spoke.</p>
1820 vice-principal said. He still looked like the real-estate agent
1821 he'd been before he switched to teaching, the last time the market
1822 had crashed. He was affable, inoffensive, his eyes wide and
1823 trustworthy. They called him Babyface Adams in the halls. But
1824 Leonard knew about salesmen, knew that no matter how friendly they
1825 appeared, they were always on the lookout for weaknesses to
1826 exploit. "And we'd do it for drug addicts. But I don't think you're
1829 can show you the research papers. Game addiction? That's just
1830 something they thought up to sell newspapers. Dad, come on, you
1832 <p>His dad pointedly refused to meet his gaze, directing his
1833 attention to the Vice-Principal.</p>
1835 so smart as to never need help. I don't want to argue definitions
1838 himself with the vehemence. Old Babyface smiled his affable,
1839 salesman's smile: <em>Oh yes, good sir, you're certainly right
1840 there, very clever of you. Now, may I show you something in a
1841 mock-Tudor split-level with a three-car garage and an above-ground
1842 pool?</em></p>
1844 you're medically addicted, psychologically dependent, or just --"
1845 he waved his hands, looking for the right words -- "or if you just
1846 spend too darn much time playing games and not enough time in the
1847 real world. None of that matters. What matters is that you're in
1848 trouble. And we're going to help you with that. Because we care
1850 <p>It suddenly sank in. Leonard knew how these things went.
1851 Somewhere, right now, Officer Turner was cleaning out his locker
1852 and loading its contents into a couple of paper Trader Joe's
1853 grocery sacks. Somewhere, some secretary was taking his name off of
1854 the rolls of each of his classes. Right now, his mother was packing
1855 his suitcase back at home, filling it with three or four changes of
1856 clothes, a fresh toothbrush -- and nothing else. When he left this
1857 room, he'd disappear from Orange County as thoroughly as if he'd
1858 been snatched off the street by serial killers.</p>
1859 <p>Only it wouldn't be his mutilated body that would surface in a
1860 few months time, decomposed and grisly, an object lesson to all the
1861 kiddies of Ronald Reagan High to be on the alert for dangerous
1863 would surface, a slack-jawed pod-person who'd been crammed into the
1864 happy-well-adjusted-citizen mold that would carry him through an
1865 adulthood as a good, trouble-free worker-bee in the hive.</p>
1867 son! I deserve a chance to pull my grades up, don't I? Before you
1870 Ramirez said, and the Vice-Principal nodded vigorously. "You've had
1871 all semester. If you plan on graduating and going on to university,
1872 this is the time to do something drastic to make sure that
1875 watch. Honestly, who still wore a watch? He had a phone, Leonard
1876 knew, just like all normal people. An old-fashioned wind-up watch
1877 was about as useful in this day and age as an ear-trumpet or a suit
1878 of chain-mail. He had a whole case full of them -- dozens of them.
1879 His father could have all the ridiculous affectations and hobbies
1880 he wanted, spend a small fortune on them, and no one wanted to send
1883 they led him out to his father's impeccable little Huawei Darter.
1884 He bought new one every year, getting a chunky discount straight
1885 from the factory, who loaded his personal car into its own
1886 container and craned it into one of Dad's big ships in port in
1887 Guangzhou. The car smelled of the black licorice sweets that Dad
1888 sucked on, and of the giant steel thermos-cup of coffee that Dad
1889 slipped into the cup-holder every morning, refilling through the
1890 day at a bunch of diners where they called him by his first name
1891 and let him run a tab.</p>
1892 <p>And outside the windows, through the subtle grey tint, the
1893 streets of Anaheim whipped past, rows of identical houses branching
1894 off of a huge, divided arterial eight-lane road. He'd known these
1895 streets all his life, he'd walked them, met the panhandlers that
1896 worked the tourist trade, the footsore Disney employees who'd
1897 missed the shuttle, hiking the mile to the cast-member parking, the
1898 retired weirdos walking their dogs, the other larval Orange County
1899 pod-people who were still too young or poor or unlucky to have a
1900 car.</p>
1901 <p>The sky was that pure blue that you got in OC, no clouds, a
1902 postcard smiley-face sun nearly at noontime high, perfect for
1903 tourist shots. Leonard saw it all for the first time, really
1905 time.</p>
1907 to prison. It's a swanky boarding school, for chrissakes. And not
1908 one of those schools where they beat you down in the bathroom or
1909 anything. They're practically hippies up there. Your mother and I
1912 facts: you've kidnapped me from my school and you're sending me
1913 away to some place where they're supposed to 'fix' me. You haven't
1914 given me any say in this. You haven't consulted me. You can say how
1915 much you love me, how much it's for my own good, talk and talk and
1916 talk, but it won't change those facts. I'm sixteen years old, Dad.
1917 I'm as old as Zaidy Shmuel was when he married Bubbie and came to
1921 start a family. You can bet your ass he wouldn't have stood still
1923 because his hobbies weren't his parents' idea of a good time. God!
1924 What the hell is the matter with you? I always knew you were kind
1926 <p>His father calmly steered the car to the curb and pulled over,
1927 changing three lanes smoothly, with a shoulder-check before each,
1928 weaving through the tourist traffic and gardeners' pickup trucks
1929 without raising a single horn. He popped the emergency brake with
1930 one hand and his seatbelt with the other, twisting in his seat to
1931 bring his face right up to Leonard's.</p>
1933 if you want to, if you need to, but you know, somewhere in that
1934 hormone-addled teenaged brain of yours, that this was <em>your</em>
1935 doing. How many times, Leonard? How many times have we talked to
1936 you about balance, about keeping your grades up, taking a little
1937 time out of your game? How many chances did you get before
1939 <p>Leonard laughed hotly. There were tears of rage behind his eyes,
1940 trying to get out. He swallowed hard. "Kidnapped," he said.
1941 "Kidnapped and shipped away because you don't think I'm getting
1942 good enough grades in math and English. Like any of it matters --
1943 when was the last time you solved a quadratic equation Dad? Who
1944 <em>cares</em> if I get into a good university? What am I going to
1945 get a degree in that will help me survive the next twenty years?
1946 What did you get your degree in, again, Dad? Oh, that's right,
1947 <em>Ancient Languages.</em> Bet <em>that</em> comes up a lot when
1948 you're shipping giant containers of plastic garbage from China,
1950 <p>His father shook his head. Behind them, cars were braking and
1951 honking at each other as they maneuvered around the stopped Huawei.
1952 "This isn't about me, son. This is about you -- about pissing away
1953 your life on some stupid game. At least speaking Latin helps me
1954 understand Spanish. What are you going to make of all your hours
1956 <p>Leonard fumed. He knew the answer to this, somewhere. The games
1957 were taking over the world. There was money to be made there. He
1958 was learning to work on teams. All this and more, these were the
1959 reasons for playing, and none of them were as important as the most
1961 --</p>
1962 <p>There was a particularly loud shriek of brakes from behind them,
1963 and it kept coming, getting louder and louder, and there was a
1964 blare of horns, too, and the sound didn't stop, got louder than you
1965 could have imagined it getting. He turned his head to look over his
1966 shoulder and --</p>
1968 <p>The car seemed to leap into the air, rising up first on its
1969 front tires in a reverse-wheelie and then the front wheels spun and
1970 the car shot forward ten yards in a second. There was the sound of
1971 crumpling metal, his father's curse, and then a clang like temple
1972 bells as his head bounced off the dashboard. The world went
1973 dark.</p>
1975 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder,
1976 the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're
1977 located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the
1978 Flatiron Building and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor
1979 people, I always sneak away to Books of Wonder to peruse their
1980 stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a heavy collector of
1981 rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder never
1982 fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They
1983 have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting
1984 atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.</i></p>
1987 <p>Mala was in the world with a small raiding party, just a few of
1988 her army. It was late -- after midnight -- and Mrs Dibyendu had
1989 turned the cafe over to her idiot nephew to run things. These days,
1990 the cafe stayed open when Mala and her army wanted to use it, day
1991 or night, and there were always soldiers who'd vie for the honor of
1992 escorting General Robotwallah home afterwards. Mamaji -- Mamaji had
1993 a new fine flat, with two complete rooms, and one of them was all
1994 for Mamaji alone, hers to sleep in without the snuffling and
1995 gruffling of her two children. There were places in Dharavi where
1996 ten or fifteen might have shared that room, sleeping on coats -- or
1997 each other. Mamaji had a mattress, brought to her by a strong young
1998 man from Chor Bazaar, carried with him on the roof of the Marine
1999 Line train through the rush hour heat and press of bodies.</p>
2002 her, the tallest of them all, with short hair and a crazy smile
2003 that reminded her of the face of a dog that has had its stomach
2004 rubbed into ecstasy.</p>
2005 <p>And there they were, three mecha in a triangle, methodically
2006 clubbing zombies in the head, spattering their rotten brains and
2007 dropping them into increasing piles. Eventually, the game would
2008 send out ghouls to drag away the bodies, but for now, they piled
2009 waist deep around the level one mechas.</p>
2011 new kind of mission for them, wiping out these little trios of
2012 mecha who were grinding endlessly against the zombies. Mr Banerjee
2013 had tasked them to this after the more aggressive warriors had been
2014 hunted to extinction by their army. According to Mr Banerjee, these
2015 were each played by a single person, someone who was getting paid
2016 to level up basic mecha to level four or five, to be sold at
2017 auction to rich players. Always in threes, always grinding the
2018 zombies, always in this part of the world, like vermin.</p>
2020 of force into the trio. They froze, systems cooked, and as Mala
2021 watched, the zombies swarmed over the mechas, toppling them,
2022 working relentlessly at them, until they had found their way
2023 inside. A red mist fountained into the sky as they dismembered the
2024 pilots.</p>
2026 the dregs of a cup of chai that had grown cold at her side. Mrs
2027 Dibyendu's idiot nephew was standing barefoot in the doorway of the
2028 cafe, spitting betel into the street, the sweet smell wafting back
2029 to her. The sleep was gathering in her mind, waiting to pounce on
2030 her, so it was time to go. She turned to tell her army so when her
2031 headphones filled with the thunder of incoming mechas, and
2033 <p>She slammed her bottom down into the seat and spun around,
2034 fingers flying to the keyboard, eyes on the screen. The enemy mecha
2035 were coming in locked in a megamecha configurations, fifteen -- no
2037 that she looked like a gnat next to it.</p>
2039 their keyboard, her army initiating their own megamecha sequence,
2040 but it took too long and there weren't enough of them, and though
2041 they fought bravely, the giant enemy craft tore them to pieces,
2042 lifting each warbot and peering inside its cowl as it ripped open
2043 the armor and dropped the squirming pilot to the surging zombie
2044 tide at its feet. Too late, Mala remembered her strategy,
2046 commanded the weaker force, the defensive footing she should have
2047 put her army on as soon as she saw how she was outmatched.</p>
2048 <p>Too late. An instant later, her own mecha was in the enemy's
2049 clutches, lifted to its face, and as she neared it, the lights on
2050 her console changed and a soft klaxon sounded: the bot was
2051 attempting to infiltrate her own craft's systems, to interface with
2052 them, to pwn them. That was another game within this game, the
2053 hack-and-be-hacked game, and she was very good at it. It involved
2054 solving a series of logic puzzles, solving them faster than the
2055 foe, and she clicked and typed as she figured out how to build a
2056 bridge using blocks of irregular size, as she figured out how to
2057 open a lock whose tumblers had to be clicked just so to make the
2058 mechanism work, as she figured out --</p>
2059 <p>She wasn't fast enough. Her army gathered around her as her
2060 console locked up, the enemy inside her mecha now, running it from
2061 bootloader to flamethrower.</p>
2063 could do, when you controlled another player's armor -- you could
2064 take over its comms. She thought of yanking out the headphones and
2065 switching to speaker so that her army could listen in too, but some
2066 premonition stayed her hand. This enemy had gone to some trouble to
2067 talk to her, personally, so she would hear what it had to say.</p>
2070 something in between. Her Hindi was strangely accented, like the
2071 Chinese actors in the filmi shows she'd seen. "It's been a pleasure
2072 to fight you. Your guild did very well. Of course, we did better."
2073 Mala heard a ragged cheer and realized that there were dozens of
2074 enemies on the chat channel, all listening in. What she had
2075 mistaken for static on the channel was, in fact, dozens of enemies,
2076 somewhere in the world, all breathing into their microphones as
2077 this woman spoke.</p>
2079 only her mic heard.</p>
2081 something sisterly in that voice, none of the gloating
2082 competitiveness that Mala felt for the players she'd bested in the
2083 game before. In spite of herself, Mala found she was smiling a
2084 little. She rocked her chin from side to side -- <em>Oh, you're a
2085 clever one, do go on</em> -- and her soldiers around her made the
2086 same gesture.</p>
2088 work, but have you ever stopped to consider why someone would pay
2090 <p>Mala shooed away her army, making a pointed gesture toward the
2091 door. When she was alone, she said, "Because they muck up the game
2094 Do you think the syndicate that pays you does so because they care
2096 <p>Mala's mind whirred. It was like solving one of those puzzles.
2097 Of course Mr Banerjee didn't care about the other players. Of
2098 course he didn't work for the game. If he worked for the game, he
2099 could just suspend the accounts of the players Mala fought. Cleaner
2100 and neater. The solution loomed in her mind's eye. "They're
2103 They are business rivals. Somewhere, there is a group of players
2104 just like them, being paid to level up mecha, or farm gold, or
2105 acquire land, or do any of the other things that can turn labor
2108 Everyone worked for someone.</p>
2111 something, and the person you do it for pays you something for your
2116 He pays me for what I do. These are stupid questions, you
2119 have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most
2120 people never think to ask the stupid questions. Do you know what a
2122 <p>Mala thought. There were unions all over Mumbai, but none in
2123 Dharavi. She'd heard many people speak of them, though. "A group of
2125 thought about all she'd heard. "They stop other workers from taking
2128 a sense of what they are. Tell me this: if you went to your boss
2129 and asked for more money, shorter hours, and better working
2132 unbelievably stupid question.</p>
2134 went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he went, there
2135 were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be
2136 treated this way,' and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there
2137 is a just reason for doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere,
2140 There's always someone poor who'll take the job. It doesn't matter.
2143 there was an unmistakable tone of amusement in her voice. "But
2144 think for a moment about your employer. Do you know where his
2145 employers are? Do you know where the players you're fighting are?
2149 are all over the world, there's no real distance between them. We
2150 chat here like neighbors, but I am in Singapore, and you are in
2155 <p>Mala was surprised to hear the state of her birth and her
2156 village guessed so easily. "Yes," she said. She was a girl from the
2157 village, she was General Robotwallah and this woman had taken the
2158 measure of her very quickly.</p>
2160 Atlanta. The corporation is registered in Cyprus, in Europe. The
2161 players are all over the world. These ones that you've been
2162 fighting are in Vietnam. We'd been having a lovely conversation
2163 before you came and blew them all to pieces. We are everywhere, but
2164 we are all here. Anyone your boss ever hired to do your job would
2165 end up here, and we could find that worker and talk to them.
2166 Wherever your boss goes, his workers will all come and work here.
2167 And we will have a chat like this with them, and talk to them about
2168 what a world we could have, if all workers cooperated to protect
2172 <p>The giant metamecha lifted her up to its face, where its giant
2173 teeth champed and clanged. "Do you think there's an army that could
2175 <p>Mala thought that maybe her army could, if they were in force,
2176 if they were prepared. Then she thought of how much successful war
2177 you'd have to persecute to win one of these giant beasts. "Maybe
2178 not. Maybe you can do what you say you can do." She thought some
2181 not find yourself with your wages. And maybe your fellow workers
2182 would contribute a little to help you out. That's another thing
2183 unions do -- it's called strike pay. But eventually, you, and me,
2184 and all of us, would enjoy a world where we are paid a living wage,
2185 and where we labor under livable conditions, and where our
2186 workplaces are fair and decent. Isn't that worth a little
2189 sacrifice? We are poor. We fight for a very little, because we have
2190 even less. Why do you think that we should sacrifice? Why don't
2193 very new to you, and that it will take some getting used to. I'm
2194 sure we'll see each other again, someday. After all, we all play in
2196 <p>Mala realized that the breathing she'd heard, the other voices
2197 on the chat channel, had all fallen silent. For a short time, it
2202 <p>Mala's name was on the tip of her tongue, but she did not say
2205 meet you." With that, the giant mecha dropped her and turned and
2206 lumbered away, crushing zombies under its feet.</p>
2207 <p>Mala stood up and felt the many pops and snaps of her spine and
2208 muscles. She had been sitting for, oh, hours and hours.</p>
2209 <p>She rolled her head from side to side on her neck, working out
2210 the stiffness there and she saw Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew
2211 watching her. His lip was pouched with reeking betel saliva, and he
2212 was staring at her with a frankness that made her squirm right to
2213 the pit of her stomach.</p>
2215 His teeth were brown. He wasn't really an idiot -- not soft in the
2216 head, anyway. But he was very thick and very slow, with a brutal
2217 strength that Mrs Dibyendu always described as his "special
2218 fortitude." Mala thought he was just a thug. She'd seen him walking
2219 in the narrow streets of Dharavi. He never shifted for women or old
2220 people, making them go around him even when it meant stepping into
2221 mud or worse. And he chewed betel all the time. Lots of people
2222 chewed betel, it was like smoking, but her mother detested the
2223 habit and had told her so many times that it was a "low" habit and
2224 dirty that she couldn't help but think less of betel chewers.</p>
2225 <p>He regarded her with his bloodshot eyes. She suddenly felt very
2226 vulnerable, the way she'd felt all the time, when they'd first come
2227 to Dharavi. She took a step to the right and he took a step to the
2228 right as well. That was a line crossed: once he blocked her exit,
2229 he'd announced his intention to hurt her. That was basic military
2230 strategy. He had made the first move, so he had the initiative, but
2231 he'd also showed his hand quickly, so --</p>
2232 <p>She feinted left and he fell for it. She lowered her head like a
2233 bull and butted it into the middle of his chest. Already
2234 off-balance, he went down on his back. She didn't stop moving,
2235 didn't look back, just kept going, thinking of that charging bull,
2236 running over him as she made for the doorway without stopping. One
2237 heel came down on his ribcage, the next on his face, mashing his
2239 but nothing did.</p>
2240 <p>She was out the door in an instant and into the cool air of the
2241 dark, dark Dharavi night. Around her, the sound of rats running
2242 over the roofs, the distant sounds of the roads, snoring. And many
2243 other, less identifiable sounds, sounds that might have been
2244 lurkers hiding in the shadows around them. Muffled speech. A
2245 distant train.</p>
2246 <p>Suddenly, sending her army away didn't seem like such a good
2247 idea.</p>
2248 <p>Behind her, she heard a much clearer sound of menace. The idiot
2249 nephew crashing through the door, his shoes on the packed earth
2250 road. She slipped back into an alley between two buildings, barely
2251 wider than her, her feet splashing through some kind of warm liquid
2252 that wafted an evil stench up to her nose. The idiot nephew
2253 lumbered past into the night. She stayed put. He lumbered back,
2254 looking in all directions for her.</p>
2255 <p>There she stood, waiting for him to give up, but he would not.
2256 Back and forth he charged. He'd become the bull, enraged, tireless,
2257 stupid. She heard his voice rasping in his chest. She had her
2258 mobile phone in her hand, her other hand cupped over it, shielding
2259 the treacherous light it gave off from its tiny screen. It was
2261 years.</p>
2262 <p>She could text someone in her army -- they would come to get
2263 her, wouldn't they? If they were awake, or if their phones' chirps
2264 woke them. No one was awake at this hour, though. And how to
2265 explain? What to say?</p>
2266 <p>She felt like an idiot. She felt ashamed. She should have
2267 predicted this, should have been the general, should have employed
2268 strategy. Instead, she'd gotten boxed in.</p>
2269 <p>She could wait. All night, if necessary. No need to let her army
2270 know of her weakness. Idiot nephew would tire or the sun would
2271 rise, it was all the same to her.</p>
2272 <p>Through the thin walls of the houses on either side of her, the
2273 sound of snoring. The evil smell rose up from the liquid below her
2274 in the ditch, and something slimy was squishing between her toes.
2275 It burned at her skin. The rats scampered overhead, sounding like
2276 rain on the tin roofs. Stupid, stupid, stupid, it was her mantra,
2277 over and over in her mind.</p>
2278 <p>The bull was tiring. The next time he passed, his breath came in
2279 terrible wheezes that blew the stink of betel before him like sweet
2280 rot. She could wait for his next pass, then run.</p>
2281 <p>It was a good plan. She hated it. He had -- He'd threatened her.
2283 Robotwallah, not merely some girl from the village. She was from
2284 Dharavi, tough. Smart.</p>
2285 <p>He wheezed past and she slipped out of the alley, her feet
2287 away from her still, hadn't heard her yet, and he had his back to
2288 her. The stupid boys in her army only fought face to face, talked
2289 about the "honor" of hitting from behind. Honor was just stupid
2290 boy-things. Victory beat honor.</p>
2291 <p>She braced herself and ran toward him, both arms stiff, hands at
2292 shoulder-height. She hit him high and kept moving, the way he had
2293 before, and down he fell again, totally unprepared for the assault
2294 from the rear. The sound he made on the dirt was like the sound of
2295 a goat dropping at the butcher's block. He was trying to roll over
2296 and she turned around and ran at him, jumping up in the air and
2297 landing with both muddy feet on his head, driving his face into the
2298 mud. He shouted in pain, the sound muffled by the dirt, and then
2299 lay, stunned.</p>
2300 <p>She went back to him then, and knelt at his head, his hairy
2301 earlobe inches from her lips.</p>
2304 or the girls might turn around and catch you. Do you understand me?
2305 Tell me you understand me before I rip out your tongue and wipe
2306 your ass with it." They talked like this on the chat-channels for
2307 the games all the time, the boys did, and she'd always disapproved
2308 of it. But the words had power, she could feel it in her mouth, hot
2309 as blood from a bit tongue.</p>
2312 lips and a mashed nose.</p>
2313 <p>She turned on her heel and began to walk away. He groaned behind
2315 <p>She didn't think, she just acted. Turned around, ran at his
2316 still-prone body, indistinct in the dusk, one step, two step, like
2317 a champion footballer coming in for a penalty kick and then she
2319 saturated toe as it connected with his big, stupid ribcage.
2320 Something snapped in there -- maybe several somethings, and oh,
2322 <p>He was every man who'd scared her, who'd shouted filthy things
2323 after her, who'd terrorized her mother. He was the bus driver who'd
2324 threatened to put them out on the roadside when they wouldn't pay
2325 him a bribe. Everything and everyone that had ever made her feel
2326 small and afraid, a girl from the village. All of them.</p>
2327 <p>She turned around. He was clutching at his side and blubbering
2328 now, crying stupid tears on his stupid cheeks, luminous in the
2329 smudgy moonlight that filtered through the haze of plastic smoke
2330 that hung over Dharavi. She would up and took another pass at him,
2332 satisfying sound from his ribs again. His sobs caught in his chest
2334 a wounded cat in the night, screamed so loud that here in Dharavi,
2335 the lights came on and voices came to the windows.</p>
2336 <p>It was as though a spell had been broken. She was shaking and
2337 drenched in sweat, and there were people peering at her in the
2338 dark. Suddenly she wanted to be home as fast as possible, if not
2339 faster. Time to go.</p>
2340 <p>She ran. Mala had loved to run through the fields as a little
2341 girl, hair flying behind her, knees and arms pumping, down the dirt
2342 roads. Now she ran in the night, the reek of the ditch water
2343 smacking her in the nose with each squelching step. Voices chased
2344 her through the night, though they came filtered through the hammer
2345 of her pulse in her ears and later she could not say whether they
2346 were real or imagined.</p>
2347 <p>But finally she was home and pelting up the steps to the
2348 third-floor flat she had rented for her family. Her thundering
2349 footsteps raised cries from the downstairs neighbors, but she
2350 ignored them, fumbled with her key, let herself in.</p>
2351 <p>Her brother Gopal looked up at her from his mat, blinking in the
2354 <p>He slumped back down. Mala's shoes stank. She peeled them off,
2355 using just the tips of her fingers, and left them outside the door.
2356 Perhaps they would be stolen -- though you would have to be
2357 desperate indeed to steal those shoes. Now her feet stank. There
2358 was a large jug of water in the corner, and a dipper. Carefully,
2359 she carried the dipper to the window, opened the squealing shutter,
2360 and poured the water slowly over the her feet, propping first one
2361 and then the other on the windowsill. Gopal stirred again. "Be
2363 <p>She ignored him. She was still out of breath, and the reality of
2364 what she'd done was setting in for her. She had kicked the idiot
2365 nephew -- how many times? Two? Three? And something in his body had
2367 followed her into the night? What was it that made the big and the
2368 strong take such sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of
2369 boys would do this to girls and even grown women sometimes --
2370 follow them, calling after them, touching them, sometimes it even
2371 led to rape. They called it "Eve-teasing" and they treated it like
2372 a game. It wasn't a game, not if you were the victim.</p>
2373 <p>Why did they make her do it? Why did all of them make her do it?
2374 The sound of the crack had been so satisfying then, and it was so
2375 sickening now. She was shaking, though the night was so hot, one of
2376 those steaming nights where everything was slimy with the
2377 low-hanging, soupy moisture.</p>
2378 <p>And she was crying, too, the crying coming out without her being
2379 able to control it, and she was ashamed of that, too, because
2380 that's what a girl from the village would do, not brave General
2381 Robotwallah.</p>
2382 <p>Calloused hands touched her shoulders, squeezed them. The smell
2383 of her mother in her nose: clean sweat, cooking spice, soap.
2384 Strong, thin arms encircled her from behind.</p>
2386 <p>And she wanted to tell Mamaji everything, but all that came out
2387 were cries. She turned her head to her mother's bosom and heaved
2388 with the sobs that came and came and came in waves, feeling like
2389 they'd turn her inside out. Gopal got up and moved into the next
2390 room, silent and scared. She noticed this, noticed all of it as
2391 from a great distance, her body sobbing, her mind away somewhere,
2392 cool and remote.</p>
2396 down. Twice. And I kicked him and kicked him until I heard things
2399 Meaning, <em>Was he someone who can come after us, who can make
2400 trouble for us, who could ruin us here in Dharavi?</em></p>
2403 <p>Her mothers fingers tightened on her arms and her eyes went
2404 wide.</p>
2406 <p>And Mala knew exactly what her mother meant by this, why she was
2407 consumed with horror. Her relationship with Mr Banerjee came from
2408 Mrs Dibyendu. And the flat, their lives, the phone and the clothes
2409 they wore -- they all came from Mr Banerjee. They balanced on a
2410 shaky pillar of relationships, and Mrs Dibyendu was at the bottom
2411 of it, all resting on her shoulders. And the idiot nephew could
2412 convince her to shrug her shoulders and all would come tumbling
2413 down -- the money, the security, all of it.</p>
2414 <p>That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had
2415 driven her to kick and kick and kick -- this oaf of a boy knew that
2416 he could get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she
2417 couldn't afford to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could
2418 not -- would not -- be sorry.</p>
2420 number. He knows that I'm a good worker -- he'll make it all
2424 <p>Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her
2425 own mother --</p>
2426 <p>But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her
2427 mother wasn't a general. She was just a girl from the village, all
2428 grown up. She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too
2429 much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to
2430 become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't
2431 afford to anger them.</p>
2433 <p>No matter what happened with Mr Banerjee and Mrs Dibyendu and
2434 her stupid idiot nephew, she was not going to become that
2435 person.</p>
2437 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling
2438 giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never
2439 forget walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in
2440 Singapore and discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! For many
2441 years, the Borders in Oxford Street in London hosted Pat Cadigan's
2442 monthly science fiction evenings, where local and visiting authors
2443 would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet their
2444 fans. When I'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a
2445 great book for my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders
2446 brimming with great choices -- I'm especially partial to the
2447 Borders on Union Square in San Francisco.</i></p>
2448 <p><i><a href=
2450 worldwide</a></i></p>
2451 <p>If you want to get rich without making anything or doing
2452 anything that anyone needs or wants, you need to be
2455 you live in an apartment block and it's snowing so hard out that no
2456 one wants to dash out to the convenience store. Your neighbor to
2457 the right, Mrs Hungry, wants a banana and she's willing to pay
2458 $0.50 for it. Your neighbor to the left, Mr Full, has a whole
2459 cupboard full of bananas, but he's having a hard time paying his
2460 phone bill this month, so he'll sell as many bananas as you want to
2462 <p>You might think that the neighborly thing to do here would be to
2463 call up Mrs Hungry and tell her about Mr Full, letting them
2464 consummate the deal. If you think that, forget getting rich without
2465 doing useful work.</p>
2466 <p>If you're an arbitrageur, then you think of your neighbors'
2467 regrettable ignorance as an opportunity. You snap up all of Mr
2468 Full's bananas, then scurry over to Mrs Hungry's place with your
2469 hand out. For every banana she buys, you pocket $0.20. This is
2470 called arbitrage.</p>
2471 <p>Arbitrage is a high-risk way to earn a living. What happens if
2472 Mrs Hungry changes her mind? You're stuck holding the bananas,
2473 that's what.</p>
2474 <p>Or what happens if some other arbitrageur beats you to Mrs
2475 Hungry's door, filling her apartment with all the bananas she could
2476 ever need? Once again, you're stuck with a bunch of bananas and
2477 nowhere to put them (though a few choice orifices do suggest
2478 themselves here).</p>
2479 <p>In the real world, arbitrageurs don't drag around bananas --
2480 they buy and sell using networked computers, surveying all the
2481 outstanding orders ("bids") and asks, and when they find someone
2482 willing to pay more for something than someone else is paying for
2483 it, they snap up that underpriced item, mark it up, and sell
2484 it.</p>
2485 <p>And this happens very, very quickly. If you're going to beat the
2486 other arbitrageurs with the goods, if you're going to get there
2487 before the buyer changes her mind, you've got to move faster than
2488 the speed of thought. Literally. Arbitrage isn't a matter of a
2489 human being vigilantly watching the screens for
2490 price-differences.</p>
2491 <p>No, arbitrage is all done by automated systems. These little
2492 traderbots rove the world's networked marketplaces, looking for
2493 arbitrage opportunities, buying something and selling it in less
2494 than a microsecond. A good arbitrage house conducts a
2496 out of each one. A billion times a few cents is a lot of money --
2497 if you've got a fast computer cluster, a good software engineer,
2498 and a blazing network connection, you can turn out <em>ten or
2500 <p>Not bad, considering that all you're doing is exploiting the
2501 fact that there's a person over here who wants to buy something and
2502 a person over there who wants to sell it. Not bad, considering that
2503 if you and all your arbitraging buddies were to vanish tomorrow,
2504 the economy and the world wouldn't even notice. No one needs or
2506 <p>The best thing about arbitrage is that you don't need to know a
2507 single, solitary thing about the stuff you're buying and selling in
2508 order to get rich off of it. Whether it's bananas or a vorpal
2509 blade, all you need to know about the things you're buying is that
2512 you're closing the deal in less than a microsecond, there's no time
2513 to sit down and google up a bunch of factoids about the
2514 merchandise.</p>
2515 <p>And the merchandise is pretty weird. Start with the fact that a
2516 lot of this stuff doesn't even exist -- vorpal blades, grabthar's
2517 hammers, the gold of a thousand imaginary lands.</p>
2518 <p>Now consider that people trade more than gold: the game Gods
2519 sell all kinds of funny money. How about this one:</p>
2522 gold -- it's the promise of real fake gold at some time in the
2523 future. Stick that into the market for a couple months, baby, and
2524 watch it go. Here's a trader who'll pay five percent more than it
2525 was worth yesterday -- he's betting that the game will get more
2526 popular some time between now and six months from now, and so the
2527 value of goods in the game will go up at the same time.</p>
2528 <p>Or maybe he's betting that the game Gods will just raise the
2529 price on everything and make it harder to clobber enough monsters
2530 to raise the gold to get it, driving away all but the hardest-core
2531 players, who'll pay anything to get their hands on the dough.</p>
2534 ten percent tomorrow, figuring that he knows something you
2535 don't.</p>
2538 gold bond, but you're worried that it's going to fall in value
2539 between now and D-Day, when the bond matures. So you find another
2540 trader and you ask him for some insurance: you offer him $1.50 to
2541 insure your bond. If the bond goes up in value, he gets to keep the
2542 $1.50 and you get to keep the profits from the bond. If the bond
2543 goes down in value, he has to pay you the difference. If that's
2545 <p>This is basically an insurance policy. If you go to a
2546 life-insurance company and ask them for a policy on your life,
2547 they'll make a bet on how likely it is that you're going to croak,
2548 and charge you enough that, on average, they make a profit
2549 (providing they're guessing accurately at your chances of dying).
2550 So if the trader you're talking to thinks that Svartalfaheim
2554 <p>Imagine that there's a third party to this transaction, some guy
2555 sitting on the sidelines, holding onto a pot of money, trying to
2556 figure out what to do with it. He watches you go to the trader and
2557 buy an insurance policy for $1.50 -- if Svartalfaheim Warriors gets
2558 better, you're out $1.50, if it gets worse, the trader has to make
2559 up the difference.</p>
2560 <p>After you've sealed your deal, this third party, being something
2561 of a ghoul, goes up to the same trader and says, "Hey, how about
2562 this? I want to place the same bet you've just placed with that
2563 guy. I'll give you $1.50 and if his bond goes up, you keep it. If
2564 his bond goes down, you pay me <em>and</em> him the difference."
2565 Essentially, this guy is betting that your bond is junk, and so
2566 maybe he finds a taker.</p>
2567 <p>Now he's got this bet, which is worth nothing if your bond goes
2568 up, and worth some unknown amount if your bond craters. And you
2569 know what he does with it?</p>
2571 <p>He packages it up and finds some sucker who wants to buy his
2573 up if your bond goes up. And the sucker buys it and then
2577 off of it.</p>
2579 and selling. He's not carrying bananas from Mr Full to Mrs Hungry
2580 -- he's buying and selling bets on insurance policies on promises
2581 of imaginary gold.</p>
2585 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc, the
2586 oldest independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores
2587 up and down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View
2588 and Palo Alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer
2589 bookstore in the middle of Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim.
2590 I'm a stone Disney park freak (see my first novel, Down and Out in
2591 the Magic Kingdom if you don't believe it), and every time I've
2592 lived in California, I've bought myself an annual Disneyland pass,
2593 and on practically every visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown
2594 Disney. They stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even
2595 critical) books about Disney, as well as a great variety of kids
2596 books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean
2597 cappuccino.</i></p>
2598 <p><i><a href=
2599 "http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproduct&isbn=0765322166">
2600 Compass Books/Books Inc</a></i></p>
2601 <p>Matthew Fong and his employees raided through the night and into
2602 the next day, farming as much gold as they could get out of their
2603 level while the getting was good. They slept in shifts, and they
2604 co-opted anyone who made the mistake of asking what they were up
2605 to, dragooning them into mining the dungeon with them.</p>
2606 <p>All the while, Master Fong was getting the gold out of their
2607 accounts as fast as it landed in them. He knew that once the game
2608 Gods got wind of his operation, they'd swoop in, suspend everyone's
2609 accounts, and seize any gold they had in their inventory. The trick
2610 was to be sure that there wasn't anything for them to seize.</p>
2611 <p>So he hopped online and hit the big brokerage message-boards.
2612 These weren't just grey-market, they were blackest black, and you
2613 needed to know someone heavy to get in on them. Matthew's heavy was
2614 a guy from Sichuan, skinny and shaky, with several missing teeth.
2615 He called himself "Cobra," and he'd been the one who'd introduced
2616 Matthew to Boss Wing all those months before. Cobra worked for
2617 someone who worked for someone who worked for one of the big
2618 cartels, tough criminal organizations that had all the markets for
2619 turning game-gold into cash sewn up.</p>
2620 <p>Cobra had given him a login and a briefing on how to do deals on
2621 the brokernet. Now as the night wore on, he picked his way through
2622 the interface, listing his gold and setting an asking price that
2623 was half of the selling price listed on the white, above-ground
2624 gold-store that gweilos used to buy the game gold from the
2625 brokers.</p>
2626 <p>He waited, and waited, and waited, but no one bought his gold.
2627 Every game world was divided into local servers and shards, and
2628 when you signed up, you needed to set which server you wanted to
2629 play on. Once you'd picked a server, you were stuck there -- your
2630 toon couldn't just wander between the parallel universes. This made
2631 buying and selling gold all the more difficult: if a gweilo wanted
2632 to buy gold for his toon on server A, he needed to find a farmer
2633 who had mined his gold on server A. If you mined all your gold on
2634 server B, you were out of luck.</p>
2635 <p>That's where the brokers came in. They bought gold from
2636 everyone, and held it in an ever-shifting network of accounts,
2637 millions of toons who fanned out all over the worlds and exchanged
2638 small amounts of gold at irregular intervals, to fool the
2639 anti-laundering snoops in the game logic that relentlessly hunted
2640 for farmers and brokers to bust.</p>
2641 <p>Avoiding those filters was a science, one that had been hammered
2642 together over decades in the real world before it migrated to the
2643 games. If a big pension fund in the real world wanted to buy half a
2644 billion dollars' worth of stock in Google, the last thing they want
2645 to do is tip off everyone else that they're about to sink that much
2646 cash into Google. If they did, everyone else would snap up Google
2647 stock before they could get to it, mark it up, and gouge them on
2648 it.</p>
2649 <p>So anyone who wants to buy a lot of anything -- who wants to
2650 move a lot of money around -- has to know how to do it in a way
2651 that's invisible to snoops. They have to be statistically
2652 insignificant, which means that a single big trade has to be broken
2653 up into millions of little trades that look like ordinary suckers
2654 buying and selling a little stock for the hell of it.</p>
2655 <p>No matter what secrets you're trying to keep and no matter who
2656 you're trying to keep them from, the techniques are the same. In
2657 every game world there were thousands of seemingly normal
2658 characters doing seemingly normal things, giving each other
2659 seemingly normal sums of money, but at the end of the day, it all
2660 added up to millions of gold in trade, taking place right under the
2661 noses of the game Gods.</p>
2662 <p>Matthew down-priced his gold, seeking the price at which a
2663 broker would deign to notice him and take it off of him. All the
2664 trading took place in slangy, rapid Chinese -- that was one of the
2665 ways the brokers kept their hold on the market, since there weren't
2666 that many Russians and Indonesians and Indians who could follow it
2667 and play along -- replete with insults and wheedles. Eventually,
2668 Matthew found the magic price. It was lower than he'd hoped for,
2669 but not by much, and now that he'd found it, he was able to move
2670 the team's gold as fast as they could accumulate it, shuttling
2671 dummy players in and out of the dungeon they were working to take
2672 the cash to bots run by the brokers.</p>
2673 <p>Finally, it dried up. First, the amount of gold in the dungeon
2676 next, which was a pity, because he was able to sell that directly,
2677 hawking it in the big towns, pasting and pasting and pasting his
2678 offer into the chat where the real players could see it. And then
2679 in came the cops, moderators with special halos around them who
2680 dropped canned lectures into the chat, stern warnings about having
2681 violated the game's terms of service.</p>
2682 <p>And then the account suspensions, the games vanishing from one
2683 screen after another, popping like soap bubbles. They were all
2684 dropped back to the login screens and they slumped, grinning crazy
2685 and exhausted, in their seats, looking at each other in exhausted
2686 relief. It was over, at last.</p>
2689 <p>Matthew didn't have his notebooks anymore, so he'd been keeping
2690 track on the insides of Double Happiness cigarette packages, long,
2691 neat tallies of numbers. His pen flickered from sheet to sheet,
2694 now.</p>
2695 <p>Matthew made a show of checking the figures again, but that's
2696 all it was, a show. He knew that the numbers were right. "Three
2697 thousand, four hundred and two dollars and fourteen cents." It was
2698 double the biggest score they'd ever made for Boss Wing. It was the
2699 most money any of them had ever made. His share of it was more than
2700 his father made in a month. And he'd made it in one night.</p>
2703 <p>The silence was even thicker. That was a lot of dumplings. That
2704 was enough to rent their own place to use as a factory, a place
2705 with computers and a fast internet connection and bedrooms to sleep
2706 in, a place where they could earn and earn, where they could grow
2707 rich as any boss.</p>
2708 <p>Lu leapt out of his chair and whooped, a sound so loud that the
2709 entire cafe turned to look at them, but they didn't care, they were
2710 all out of their seats now, whooping and dancing around and hugging
2711 each other.</p>
2712 <p>And now it was the day, a new day, the sun had come up and gone
2713 down and risen in their long labor in the cafe, and they had won.
2714 It was a new day for them and for everyone around them.</p>
2715 <p>They stepped out into the sun and there were people on the
2716 streets, throngs buying and selling, touts hustling, pretty girls
2717 in good clothes walking arm in arm under a single parasol. The heat
2718 of the day was like a blast furnace after the air-conditioned cool
2719 of the cafe, but that was good, too -- it baked out the funk of
2720 cigarette-mouth, coffee-mouth, no-food-mouth. Suddenly, none of
2721 them were sleepy. They all wanted to eat.</p>
2722 <p>So Matthew took them out for breakfast. They were his team,
2723 after all. They took over the back table at an Indian restaurant
2724 near the train station, a place he'd overheard his uncle Yiu-Yu
2725 telling his parents about, bragging about some business associate
2726 who took him there. Very sophisticated. And he'd read so much about
2727 Indian food in his comics, he couldn't wait to try some.</p>
2728 <p>All the other customers in there were either foreigners or Hong
2729 Kong people, but they didn't let that get to them. The boys sat at
2730 their back table and played with their forks and ate plate after
2731 plate of curry and fresh hot flatbreads called naan, and it was
2732 delicious and strange and the perfect end to what had turned out to
2733 be the perfect night.</p>
2734 <p>Halfway through the dessert -- delicious mango ice-cream -- the
2735 sleeplessness finally caught up with them all. They sat on their
2736 seats in their torpor, hands over their bellies, eyes half-open,
2737 and Matthew called for the check.</p>
2738 <p>They stepped out again into the light. Matthew had decided to go
2739 to his parents' place, to sleep on the sofa for a little while,
2740 before figuring out what to do about his smashed room with its
2741 smashed door.</p>
2742 <p>As they blinked in the light, a familiar Wenjhou accented voice
2744 <p>Matthew turned. Boss Wing's man was there, and three of his
2745 friends. They rushed forward and grabbed the boys before they could
2746 react, one of them so big that he grabbed a boy in each hand and
2747 nearly lifted them off their feet.</p>
2748 <p>His friends struggled to get free, but Boss Wing's man
2749 methodically slapped them until they stopped.</p>
2750 <p>Matthew couldn't believe that this was happening -- in broad
2751 daylight, right here next to the train station! People crossed the
2752 street to avoid them. Matthew supposed he would have done so
2753 too.</p>
2754 <p>Boss Wing's man leaned in so close Matthew could smell the fish
2755 he'd had for lunch on his breath. "Why are you a stupid boy,
2756 Matthew? You didn't seem stupid when you worked for Boss Wing. You
2757 always seemed smarter than these children." He flapped his hand
2758 disparagingly at the boys. "But Boss Wing, he trained you,
2759 sheltered you, fed you, paid you -- do you think it's honorable or
2760 fair for you to take all that investment and run out the door with
2765 wants to force you to do anything, child. We just don't think it's
2766 fair for you to take all the training and investment we made in you
2767 and run across the street and start up a competing business. It's
2770 start our own business." The words were braver than he felt, but
2772 Wing doesn't like the competition, let him find another line of
2774 <p>Boss Wing's man didn't give him any forewarning before he
2775 slapped Matthew so hard his head rang like a gong. He stumbled back
2776 two steps, then tripped over his heels and fell on his ass, landing
2777 on the filthy sidewalk. Boss Wing's man put a foot on his chest and
2778 looked down at him.</p>
2780 Wing understands if you don't want to work at his factory, that's
2781 fine. He's willing to sell you the franchise to set up your own
2782 branch operation of his firm. All you have to do is pay him a
2783 franchise fee of 60 percent of your gross earnings. We watched your
2784 gold-sales from Svartalfaheim. You can do as much of that kind of
2785 work as you like, and Boss Wing will even take care of the sales
2786 end of things for you, so you'll be free to concentrate on your
2787 work. And because it's your firm, you get to decide how you divide
2789 <p>Matthew burned with shame. His friends were all looking at him,
2790 goggle eyed, scared. The weight from the foot on his chest
2791 increased until he couldn't draw a breath.</p>
2793 away. Boss Wing's man extended a hand, helped him to his feet.</p>
2795 Matthew's friends. "Your little boss here is a smart man. He'll
2797 <p>Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked
2798 away, his men following him.</p>
2800 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's
2801 legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run
2802 business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some
2803 books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book
2804 empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that
2805 get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of
2806 these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge,
2807 rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books,
2808 direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!</i></p>
2809 <p><i><a href=
2810 "http://site.booksite.com/5156/search/?q=for%20the%20win%20doctorow&search=yes&custcat=">
2813 <p>The car that had plowed into Wei-Dong's father's car was driven
2814 by a very exasperated, very tired British man, fat and bald, with
2815 two angry kids in the back seat and an angry wife in the front
2816 seat.</p>
2817 <p>He was steadily, quietly cursing in British, which was a lot
2818 like cursing in American, but with a lot more "bloodies" in it. He
2819 paced the sidewalk beside the wrecked Huawei, his wife calling at
2820 him from inside the car to get back in the bloody car, Ronald, but
2821 Ronald wasn't having any of it.</p>
2822 <p>Wei-Dong sat on the narrow strip of grass between the road and
2823 the sidewalk, dazed in the noon sun, waiting for his vision to stop
2824 swimming. Benny sat next to him, holding a wad of kleenex to
2825 staunch the bleeding from his broken nose, which he'd bounced off
2826 of the dashboard. Wei-Dong brought his hands up to his forehead to
2827 finger the lump there again. His hands smelled of new plastic, the
2828 smell of the airbag that he'd had to punch his way out of.</p>
2830 you've been to the wars. But you'll be all right, right? Could have
2833 kleenex. "Please leave us alone now. When the police come, we can
2836 the back seat about getting to Disneyland, when were they getting
2837 to Disneyland? "Shut it, you monsters," he roared. The sound made
2838 Wei-Dong flinch back. He wobbled to his feet.</p>
2840 out of the car, and you certainly shouldn't be walking around now.
2841 You could have a concussion or a spinal injury. Sit down," he
2842 repeated, but Wei-Dong needed to get off the grass, needed to walk
2843 off the sick feeling in his stomach.</p>
2844 <p>Uh-oh. He barely made it to the curb, hands braced on the
2845 crumpled, flaking rear section of the Huawei, before he started to
2846 barf, a geyser of used food that shot straight out of his guts and
2847 flew all over the wreck of the car. A moment later, his father's
2848 hands were on his shoulders, steadying him. Angrily, he shook them
2849 off.</p>
2850 <p>There were sirens coming now, and the fat man was talking
2851 intensely to old Benny, though it was quiet enough that Wei-Dong
2852 could only make out a few words -- <em>insurance, fault,
2853 vacation</em> -- all in a wheedling tone. His father kept trying to
2854 get a word in, but the guy was talking over him. Wei-Dong could
2855 have told him that this wasn't a good strategy. Nothing was surer
2856 to make Volcano Benny blow. And here it came.</p>
2859 <p>The shout was so loud that even the kids in the back seat went
2860 silent.</p>
2862 on the damage. We're not going to settle this for cash. I don't
2863 <em>care</em> if you're jetlagged, I don't <em>care</em> if you
2864 didn't buy the extra insurance on your rental car, I don't
2865 <em>care</em> if this will ruin your vacation. You could have
2868 parked in the middle of the road, mate," he said, a note of
2869 pleading in his voice.</p>
2870 <p>Everyone was watching them, the kids and the guy's wife, the
2871 rubberneckers who slowed down to see the accident. The two men were
2872 totally focused on each other.</p>
2874 <p>He thought about the sound his earwig made, crunching under his
2875 father's steel-toed shoe, heard the sirens getting closer,
2876 and...</p>
2879 <p>He sidled away toward the shrubs that surrounded a mini-mall and
2880 gas-station, nonchalant, clutching his school-bag, like he was just
2881 getting his bearings, but he was headed toward a gap there, a
2882 narrow one that he just barely managed to squeeze through. He
2883 popped through into the parking lot around the mini-mall, filled
2884 with stores selling $3 t-shirts and snow-globes and large bottles
2885 of filtered water. On this side of the shrubs, the world was normal
2886 and busy, filled with tourists on their way to or from
2887 Disneyland.</p>
2888 <p>He picked up his pace, keeping his face turned away from the
2889 stores and the CCTV cameras outside of them. He felt in his pocket,
2890 felt the few dollars there. He had to get away, far away, fast, if
2891 he was going to get away at all.</p>
2892 <p>And there was his salvation, the tourist bus that rolled through
2893 the streets of the Anaheim Resort District, shuttling people from
2894 hotels to restaurants to the parks, crowded with sugared-up kids
2895 and conventioneers with badges hanging around their necks, and it
2896 was trundling to the stop just a few yards away. He broke into a
2897 run, stumbled from the pain that seared through his head like a
2898 lightning bolt, then settled for walking as quickly as he could.
2899 The sirens were very, very loud now, right there on the other side
2900 of the shrubs, and he was almost at the bus and there was his
2901 father's voice, calling his name and there was the bus and --</p>
2902 <p>-- his foot came down on the bottom step, his back foot came up
2903 to join it, and the impatient driver closed the doors behind him
2904 and released the air-brake with a huge sigh and the bus lurched
2905 forward.</p>
2907 escaped a parental kidnapping to a military school, what are you
2909 <p>The bus trundled down Katella, heading for the bus-entrance, and
2910 then it disgorged its load of frenetic tourists. Wei-Dong mingled
2911 with them, invisible in the mass of humanity skipping past the
2912 huge, primary-colored traffic pylons. He was on autopilot, remained
2913 on autopilot as he unslung his school-bag to let the bored security
2914 goon paw through it.</p>
2915 <p>He'd had a Disneyland annual pass since he was old enough to
2916 ride the bus. All the kids he knew had them too -- it beat going to
2917 the mall after school, and even though it got boring after a while,
2918 he could think of no better place to disappear into while thinking
2919 through his next steps.</p>
2920 <p>He walked down Main Street, heading for the little pink castle
2921 at the end of the road. He knew that there were secluded benches on
2922 the walkways around the castle, places where he could sit down and
2923 think for a moment. His head felt like it was full of candy
2924 floss.</p>
2925 <p>First thing he did after sitting down was check his phone. The
2926 ringer had been off -- school rules -- but he'd felt it vibrating
2927 continuously in his pocket. Fifteen missed calls from his father.
2928 He dialled up his voicemail and listened to his dad rant about
2930 happen to him if he didn't.</p>
2932 You're going to come home eventually. The sooner you call me back,
2933 the less trouble we're going to have. And the longer you wait --
2934 <em>you listen to this, Leonard</em> -- the longer you wait,
2935 <em>the worse it's going to be</em>. There are worse things than
2937 <p>He stared vacantly at the sky, listening to this, and then he
2938 dropped the phone as though he'd been scorched by it.</p>
2940 find runaways and bad guys and lost hikers. He picked the phone up
2941 off the pavement and slid the back out and removed the battery,
2942 then put it in his jacket pocket, returning the phone to his jeans.
2943 He wasn't much of a fugitive.</p>
2944 <p>The police had been on the way to the accident when he left.
2945 They'd arrived minutes later. The old man had decided that he'd run
2946 away, so he'd be telling the cops that. He was a minor, and truant,
2947 and he'd been in a car accident, and hell, face it, his family was
2948 rich. That meant that the police would pay attention to his dad,
2949 which meant that they'd be doing everything they could to locate
2950 him. If they hadn't yet figured out where his phone was, they'd
2951 know soon enough -- they'd run the logs and find the call from
2952 Disneyland to his voicemail.</p>
2953 <p>He started moving, shoving his way through the crowds, heading
2954 back up Main Street. He ducked around behind a barbershop quartet
2955 and realized that he was standing in front of an ATM. They'd be
2956 shutting down his card any second, too -- or, if they were smart,
2957 they'd leave the card live and use it to track him. He needed cash.
2958 He waited while a pair of German tourists fumbled with the machine
2959 and then jammed his card into it and withdrew $500, the most the
2960 machine would dispense. He hit it again for another $500,
2961 self-conscious now of the inch-thick wad of twenties in his hand.
2962 He tried for a third withdrawal, but the machine told him he'd gone
2964 the bank, anyway -- that was several years' worth of birthday
2965 money, plus a little from his summer job working at a Chinese PC
2966 repair shop at a mini-mall in Irvine.</p>
2967 <p>He folded the wad and stuck it in his pocket and headed out of
2968 the park, not bothering with the hand-stamp. He started to head for
2969 the street, but then he turned on his heel and headed toward the
2970 Downtown Disney shopping complex and the hotels that attached to
2971 it. There were cheap tour-buses that went from there up to LA, down
2972 to San Diego, to all the airports. There was no easier, cheaper way
2973 to get far from here.</p>
2974 <p>The lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel soared to unimaginable
2975 heights, giant beams criss-crossing through the cavernous space.
2976 Wei-Dong had always liked this place. It always seemed so
2978 marble inlays on the floor, the ten-foot-high stained-glass panels
2979 set into the sliding doors, the embroidered upholstery on the
2980 sofas. Now, though, he just wanted to get through it and onto a bus
2981 to --</p>
2984 <p>He didn't know what he was going to do next, but one thing he
2985 did know, he wasn't going to be sent away to some school for
2986 screwups, kicked off the Internet, kicked off the games. His father
2988 what problems he was having. The old man would never let himself be
2989 pushed around and shaken up like this.</p>
2990 <p>His mother would worry -- but she always worried, didn't she?
2991 He'd send her email once he got somewhere, an email every day, let
2992 her know that he was OK. She was good to him. Hell, the old man was
2993 good to him, come to that. Mostly. But he was seventeen now, he
2994 wasn't a kid, he wasn't a broken toy to be shipped back to the
2995 manufacturer.</p>
2996 <p>The man behind the concierge desk didn't bat an eye when
2997 Wei-Dong asked for the schedule for the airport shuttles, just
2998 handed it over. Wei-Dong sat down in the darkest corner by the
2999 stone fireplace, the most inconspicuous place in the whole hotel.
3000 He was starting to get paranoid now, he could recognize the
3001 feeling, but it didn't help soothe him as he jumped and stared at
3002 every Disney cop who strolled through the lobby, doubtless he was
3003 looking as guilty as a mass-murderer.</p>
3004 <p>The next bus was headed for LAX, and the one after, for the
3005 Santa Monica airport. Wei-Dong decided that LAX was the right place
3006 to go. Not so he could get on a plane -- if his dad had called the
3007 cops, he was sure they'd have some kind of trace on at the
3008 ticket-sales windows. He didn't know exactly how that worked, but
3009 he understood how bottlenecks worked, thanks to gaming. Right now,
3010 he could be anywhere in LA, which meant that they'd have to devote
3011 a gigantic amount of effort in order to find him. But if he tried
3012 to leave by airplane, there'd be a much smaller number of places
3013 they'd have to check to catch him -- the airline counters at four
3014 or five airports in town -- and that was a lot more practical.</p>
3016 that went to every hotel and neighborhood. It would take a long
3017 time, sure -- an hour and a half from Disneyland to LAX, another
3018 hour or two to get back to LA, but that was fine. He needed time --
3019 time to figure out what he was going to do next.</p>
3020 <p>Because when he was totally honest with himself, he had to admit
3021 that he had no freaking idea.</p>
3023 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the
3024 University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many
3025 specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science
3026 fiction buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan --
3027 I first met him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto
3028 in 2003 -- and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on
3029 display at the store. One great predictor of a great bookstore is
3030 the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little bits of cardboard
3031 stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews
3032 extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff
3033 at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane's
3034 tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore are
3035 second to none.</i></p>
3036 <p><i><a href=
3037 "http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=Title&ISBN=9780765322166">
3040 <p>Mala woke early, after a troubled sleep. In the village, she'd
3041 often risen early, and listened to the birds. But there was no
3042 birdsong when her eyes fluttered open, only the sussuration of
3043 Dharavi -- cars, rats, people, distant factory noises, goats. A
3044 rooster. Well, that was a kind of bird. A little smile touched her
3045 lips, and she felt slightly better.</p>
3046 <p>Not much, though. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, stretched her
3047 arms. Gopal still slept, snoring softly, lying on his stomach the
3048 way he had when he was a baby. She needed the toilet, and, as it
3049 was light out, she decided that she would go out to the communal
3050 one a little ways away, rather than using the covered bucket in the
3051 room. In the village, they'd had a proper latrine, deep dug, with a
3052 pot of clean water outside of it that the women kept filled all the
3053 time. Here in Dharavi, the communal toilet was a much more
3054 closed-in, reeking place, never very clean. The established
3055 families in Dharavi had their own private toilets, so the public
3056 ones were only used by newcomers.</p>
3057 <p>It wasn't so bad this morning. There were ladies who got up even
3058 earlier than her to slosh it out with water hauled from the nearby
3059 communal tap. By nightfall, the reek would be eye-watering.</p>
3060 <p>She loitered in the street in front of the house. It wasn't too
3061 hot yet, or too crowded, or too noisy. She wished it was. Maybe the
3062 noise and the crowds would drown out the worry racing through her
3063 mind. Maybe the heat would bake it out.</p>
3064 <p>She'd brought her mobile out with her. It danced with notifiers
3065 about new things she could pay to see -- shows and cartoons and
3066 political messages, sent in the night. She flicked them away
3067 impatiently and scrolled through her address-book, stopping at Mr
3068 Banerjee's name and staring at it. Her finger poised over the send
3069 button.</p>
3070 <p>It was too early, she thought. He'd be asleep. But he never was,
3071 was he? Mr Banerjee seemed to be awake at all hours, messaging her
3072 with new targets to take her army to. He'd be awake. He'd have been
3073 up all night, talking to Mrs Dibyendu.</p>
3076 <p>She nearly dropped it in surprise, but she managed to settle it
3077 in her hand and switch off the ringer, peer at the face. Mr
3078 Banerjee, of course, as though he'd been conjured into her phone by
3079 her thoughts and her staring anxiety.</p>
3083 <p>He didn't say anything else. She knew this trick. She used it
3084 with her army, especially on the boys. Saying nothing made a
3085 balloon of silence in your opponent's head, one that swelled to
3086 fill it, until it began to echo with their anxieties and doubts. It
3087 worked very well. It worked very well, even if you knew how it
3088 worked. It was working well on her.</p>
3089 <p>She bit her lip. Otherwise she would have blurted something,
3095 thought she needed, the platoon she needed to bring to the fore.
3096 She marshalled the thought, chivvied it, turned it into an orderly
3097 skirmish line and marched it forward.</p>
3101 <p>There was a snort, very faint, down the phone line. A suppressed
3102 laugh? Barely contained anger? "I heard about it, Mala. The boy is
3107 <p>She felt sick. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn't
3110 sister's only son had been attacked. That he'd been attacked by a
3115 waiting for me to say I'm sorry, that I'll make it up somehow, that
3117 it. The idiot made me attack him, and he deserved what he
3118 got.</em></p>
3120 come from something like this, Mala. Everything has a cost. You
3121 know that. It costs you to play at Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. It costs me
3123 <p>Now it was her turn to be quiet, and to think at him, as hard as
3124 she can, <em>Oh yes, well, I think I already exacted payment from
3125 idiot nephew. I think he's paid the cost.</em></p>
3127 <p>She made a grunt of assent, not trusting herself to open her
3128 mouth.</p>
3130 <em>me</em>. Every rupee is mine, and I make this bad thing that
3132 <p>She pulled the phone away from her head as if it had gone red
3133 hot and burned her. She stared at the faceplate. From very far
3134 away, Mr Banerjee said, "<em>Mala?</em> <em>Mala?</em>" She put the
3135 phone back to her head.</p>
3137 to stay calm. "The army won't fight without pay. My mother can't
3141 you work for me, I will have to make this right with Mrs Dibyendu.
3142 It's my duty, as your employer, to do this. And that will cost
3143 money. You have incurred a debt that I must settle for you, and
3144 that means that you have to be prepared to settle with
3147 There are other places we can play. Her nephew brought it on
3154 Sister Nor and her metamecha, of the union. Mr Banerjee would be
3155 even angrier if she told him about Big Sister Nor. "I was studying
3158 What happened, really, Mala? Did you want to see what it was like
3159 to kiss him like a fillum star, and then it got out of control? Is
3162 groaning in their beds, calling sleepily out from behind their open
3163 windows. "I stayed late to practice, he tried to stop me. I knocked
3164 him down and he chased me. I knocked him down and then I taught him
3167 now, stern and old and masculine. "You should have known better
3168 than to put yourself in that position. A general knows that you win
3169 some fights by not getting into them at all. Now, I'm not an
3170 unreasonable man. Of course, you and your mother and your army all
3171 need my money if you're going to keep fighting. You can borrow a
3172 wage-packet from me during this month, something to pay everyone
3173 with, and then you can pay it back, little by little, over the next
3174 year or so. I'll take five in twenty rupees for 12 months, and
3176 <p>It was hope, terrible, awful hope. A chance to keep her army,
3177 her flat, her respect. All it would cost her was one quarter of her
3178 earnings. She'd have three quarters left. Three quarters was better
3179 than nothing. It was better than telling Mamaji that it was all
3180 over.</p>
3184 glad to have you back. You'll have to apologize to her, of course.
3185 You can bring her the money for her nephew. That will make her feel
3190 the factory you work in. That's why." His voice was hard now, all
3191 the lilt of false concern gone away, leaving behind a grinding like
3192 rock on rock.</p>
3193 <p>She wanted to put the phone down on him, the way they did in the
3194 movies when they had their giant screaming rows, and threw their
3195 phones into the well or smashed them on the wall. But she couldn't
3196 afford to destroy her phone and she couldn't afford to make Mr
3197 Banerjee angry.</p>
3199 like a mouse trying not to be noticed.</p>
3202 <p>Numbly, she memorized the details of the mission, who she was
3203 going to kill and where. She thought that if she did this job
3204 quickly, she could ask him for another one, and then another --
3205 work longer hours, pay off the debt more quickly.</p>
3207 details back to him, and then he put the phone down.</p>
3208 <p>She pocketed her phone. Around her, Dharavi had woken, passing
3209 by her like she was a rock in a river, pressing past her on either
3210 side. Men with shovels and wheelbarrows, boys with enormous
3211 rice-sacks on each shoulder, filled with grimy plastic bottles on
3212 their way to some sorting house, a man with a long beard and kufi
3213 skullcap and kurta shirt hanging down to his knees leading a goat
3214 with a piece of rope. A trio of women in saris, their midriffs
3215 stretched and striated with the marks of the babies they'd borne,
3216 carrying heavy buckets of water from the communal tap. There were
3217 cooking smells in the air, a sizzle of dhal on the grill and the
3218 fragrant smell of chai. A boy passed by her, younger than Gopal,
3219 wearing flapping sandals and short pants, and he spat a stream of
3220 sickly sweet betel at her feet.</p>
3221 <p>The smell made her remember where she was and what had happened
3222 and what she had to do now.</p>
3223 <p>She went past the Das family on the ground floor and trudged up
3224 the stairs to their flat. Mamaji and Gopal were awake and bustling.
3225 Mamaji had fetched the water and was making the breakfast over the
3226 propane burner, and Gopal had his school uniform shirt and
3227 knee-trousers on. The Dharavi school he attended lasted for half
3228 the day, which gave him a little time to play and do homework and
3229 then a few more hours to work alongside of Mamaji in the
3230 factory.</p>
3233 tunic. "With Mr Banerjee." She waggled her chin from side to side,
3236 nonchalance.</p>
3237 <p>Mamaji didn't need to know what transpired between Mr Banerjee
3238 and her. Mala was the general and she could manage her own
3239 affairs.</p>
3241 it fine with Mrs Dibyendu, and it will be fine." She waggled her
3242 chin from side to side again -- <em>It's all fine. I've taken care
3244 <p>Mamaji stared into the pan and the food sizzling in it and
3245 nodded to herself. Though she couldn't see, Mala nodded back. She
3246 was General Robotwallah and she could make it all good.</p>
3249 <i>This scene is dedicated to Forbidden Planet, the British chain
3250 of science fiction and fantasy book, comic, toy and video stores.
3251 Forbidden Planet has stores up and down the UK, and also sports
3252 outposts in Manhattan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set
3253 foot in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do I escape with my wallet
3254 intact. Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in bringing the
3255 gigantic audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact
3256 with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical
3257 to the future of the field.</i></p>
3259 </p>
3261 </p>
3264 Dublin and New York City</a></i></p>
3265 <p>Wei-Dong had been to downtown LA once, on a class trip to the
3266 Disney Concert Hall, but then they'd driven in, parked, and marched
3267 like ducklings into the hall and then out again, without spending
3268 any time actually wandering around. He remembered watching the
3269 streets go by from the bus window, faded store windows and
3270 slow-moving people, check-cashing places and liquor stores. And
3271 Internet cafes. Lots and lots of Internet cafes, especially in
3272 Koreatown, where every strip mall had a garish sign advertising "PC
3274 <p>But he didn't know exactly where Koreatown was, and he needed an
3275 Internet cafe to google it, and so he caught the LAX bus to the
3276 Disney Concert Hall, thinking he could retrace the bus-route and
3277 find his way to those shops, get online, talk to his homies in
3278 Guangzhou, figure out the next thing.</p>
3279 <p>But Koreatown turned out to be harder to find and farther than
3280 he'd thought. He asked the bus-driver for directions, who looked at
3281 him like he was crazy and pointed downhill. And so he started
3282 walking, and walking, and walking for block after dusty block. From
3283 the window of the school-bus, downtown LA had looked slow-moving
3284 and faded, like a photo left too long in a window.</p>
3285 <p>On foot, it was frenetic, the movement of the buses, the
3286 homeless people walking or wheeling or hobbling past him, asking
3287 him for money. He had $1000 in his front jeans pocket, and it
3288 seemed to him that the bulge must be as obvious as a boner at the
3289 blackboard in class. He was sweating, and not just from the heat,
3290 which seemed ten degrees hotter than it had been in Disneyland.</p>
3291 <p>And now he wasn't anywhere near Koreatown, but had rather found
3292 his way to Santee Alley, the huge, open-air pirate market in the
3293 middle of LA. He'd heard about the place before, you saw it all the
3294 time in news-specials about counterfeit goods busts, pictures of
3295 Mexican guys being led away while grimly satisfied cops in suits or
3296 uniform baled up mountains of fake shirts, fake DVDs, fake jeans,
3297 fake games.</p>
3298 <p>Santee Alley was a welcome relief from the streets around it. He
3299 wandered deep into the market, the storefronts all blaring their
3300 technobrega and reggaton at him, the hawkers calling out their
3301 wares. It was like the real market on which all the hundreds of
3302 in-game markets he'd visited had been based upon and he found
3303 himself slowing down and looking in at the gangster clothes and the
3304 bad souvenir junk and the fake electronics. He bought a big cup of
3305 watermelon drink and a couple of empanadas from a stall, carefully
3306 drawing a single twenty from his pocket without bringing out the
3307 whole thing.</p>
3308 <p>Then he'd found an Internet cafe, filled with Guatemalans
3309 chatting with their families back home, wearing slick and tiny
3310 earwigs. The girl behind the counter -- barely older than him --
3311 sold him one that claimed to be a Samsung for $18, and then rented
3312 him a PC to use it with. The fake earwig fit as well as his real
3313 one had, though it had a rough seam of plastic running around its
3314 length while his had been as smooth as beach-glass.</p>
3315 <p>But it didn't matter. He had his network connection, he had his
3316 earwig, and he had his game. What more could he need?</p>
3317 <p>Well, his posse, for starters. They were nowhere to be found. He
3318 checked his new watch and pressed the button that flipped it to the
3320 <p>He checked his inventory, checked the guild-bank. He hadn't been
3321 able to do the corpse run after he'd been snatched out of the game
3322 by his father and the Ronald Reagan High Thought Police, so he
3323 didn't expect to have his vorpal blade still, but he did, which
3324 meant that one of the gang had rescued it for him, which was
3325 awfully thoughtful. But that was just what guildies did for each
3326 other, after all.</p>
3327 <p>It was coming up to dinner-time on the east coast, which meant
3328 that Savage Wonderland was starting to fill up with people getting
3329 home from work. He thought about the black riders who slaughtered
3330 them that morning and wondered who they'd been. There were plenty
3331 of people who hunted gold farmers, either because they worked for
3332 the game or for a rival gold-farm clan, or because they were bored
3333 rich players who hated the idea of poor people invading "their"
3334 space and working where they played.</p>
3335 <p>He knew he should flip to his email and check for messages from
3336 his parents. He didn't like using email, but his parents were
3337 addicted to it. No doubt they were freaking out by now, calling out
3338 the army and navy and the national guard to find their wayward son.
3339 Well, they could freak out all they wanted. He wasn't going to go
3340 back and he didn't need to go back.</p>
3342 there were lots of ways to get by in the big city that didn't
3343 involve selling drugs or your body. His guildies had shown him
3344 that. All you needed to earn a living was a connection to the net
3345 and a brain in your head. He looked around the cafe at the dozens
3346 of Guatemalans talking to home on their earwigs, many not much
3347 older than him. If they could earn a living -- not speaking the
3348 language, not legal to work, no formal education, hardly any idea
3349 of how to use technology beyond the little bit of knowledge
3350 necessary to call home on the cheap -- then surely he could. His
3351 grandfather had come to America and found a job when he was
3352 Wei-Dong's age. It was a family tradition, practically.</p>
3353 <p>It wasn't that he didn't love his parents. He did. They were
3354 good people. They loved him in their way. But they lived in a
3355 bubble of unreality, a bubble called Orange County, where they
3356 still had rows of neat identical houses and neat identical lives,
3357 while around them, everything was collapsing. His father couldn't
3358 see it, even though hardly a day went by that he didn't come home
3359 and complain bitterly about the containers that had fallen off his
3360 ship in yet another monster storm, about the price of diesel
3361 sailing through the stratosphere, about the plummeting dollar and
3362 the skyrocketing Renminbi and the ever-tightening belts of
3363 Americans whose orders for goods from South China were clobbering
3364 his business.</p>
3365 <p>Wei-Dong had figured all this out because he paid attention and
3366 he saw things as they were. Because he talked to China, and China
3367 talked back to him. The fat and comfortable world he'd grown up in
3368 was not permanent; scratched in the sand, not carved in stone. His
3369 friends in China could see it better than anyone else could. Lu had
3370 worked as a security guard in a factory in Shilong New Town, a city
3371 that made appliances for sale in Britain. It had taken Wei-Dong
3372 some time to understand this: the entire city, four million people,
3373 did nothing but make appliances for sale in Britain, a country with
3374 eighty million people.</p>
3375 <p>Then, one day, the factories on either side of Lu's had closed.
3376 They had all made goods for a few different companies, employing
3377 armies of young women to run the machines and assemble the pieces
3378 that came out of them. Young women always got the best jobs. Bosses
3379 liked them because they worked hard and didn't argue so much -- at
3380 least, that's what everyone said. When Lu left his village in
3381 Sichuan province to come to south China, he'd talked to one of the
3382 girls who had come home from the factories for the Mid-Autumn
3383 Festival, a girl who'd left a few years before and found wealth in
3384 Dongguan, who'd bought her parents a fine new two-storey house with
3385 her money, who came home every year for the Festival in fine
3386 clothes with a new mobile phone in a designer bag, looking like an
3387 alien or a model stepped fresh out of a magazine ad.</p>
3390 lot of young girls, there's something wrong with it." But the
3391 factory that Lu worked at -- all the factories in Shilong New Town
3392 -- were filled with young girls. The only jobs for men were as
3393 drivers, security guards, cleaners and cooks. The factories boomed,
3394 each one a small city itself, with its own kitchens, its own
3395 dormitories, its own infirmary and its own customs checkpoint where
3396 every vehicle and visitor going in or out of the wall got checked
3397 and inspected.</p>
3398 <p>And these indomitable cities had crumbled. The Highest Quality
3399 Dishwasher Company factory closed on Monday. The Boundless Energy
3400 Enterprises hot-water heater plant went on Wednesday. Every day, Lu
3401 saw the bosses come in and out in their cars, waving them through
3402 after they'd flicked their IDs at him. One day, he steeled his
3403 nerve and leaned in the window, his face only inches from that of
3404 the man who paid his wages every month.</p>
3406 a jovial smile, the best he could muster, but he knew it wasn't
3407 very good.</p>
3409 smart sport-coat, but his shoulders were dusted with dandruff. "And
3412 trying to keep his smile in place. But he'd seen it in the boss's
3413 face -- the factory would close.</p>
3414 <p>The next day, no bus came to the bus-stop. Normally, there would
3415 have been fifty or sixty people waiting for the bus, mostly young
3416 men, the women mostly lived in the dorms. Security guards and
3417 janitors didn't rate dorm rooms. That morning, there were eight
3418 people waiting when he arrived at the bus-stop. Ten minutes went by
3419 and a few more trickled to the stop, and still no bus came. Thirty
3420 minutes passed -- Lu was now officially late for work -- and still
3421 no bus came. He canvassed his fellow waiters to see if anyone was
3422 going near his factory and might want to share a taxi -- an
3423 otherwise unthinkable luxury, but losing his job even was more
3424 unthinkable.</p>
3425 <p>One other guy, with a Shaanxi accent, was willing, and that's
3426 when they noticed that there didn't seem to be any taxis cruising
3427 on the road either. So Lu, being Lu, walked to work, fifteen
3428 kilometers in the scorching, melting, dripping heat, his security
3429 guard's shirt and coat over his arm, his undershirt rolled up to
3430 bare his belly, the dust caking up on his shoes. And when he
3431 arrived at the Miracle Spirit condenser dryer factory and found
3432 himself in a mob of thousands of screeching young women in
3433 factory-issue smocks, crowded around the fence and the
3434 double-padlocked rattling it and shouting at the factory's darkened
3435 doors. Many of the girls had small backpacks or duffel-bags,
3436 overstuffed and leaking underwear and makeup on the ground.</p>
3438 mob.</p>
3440 shift-change. Pulled the fire-alarm and screamed 'Fire' and 'Smoke'
3441 and when we were all out here, they ran out and padlocked the
3444 shut down, they'd use the security guards to do it. He'd always
3445 thought that he, at least, would get one last paycheck out of the
3446 company.</p>
3448 They locked the front gate and then they drove off through the back
3449 gate, locking it behind them. We're all locked out. All my things
3451 <p>Her last paycheck. It was only three days to payday, and, of
3452 course, the company had kept their first eight weeks' wages when
3453 they all started working. You had to ask your boss's permission if
3454 you wanted to change jobs and keep the money -- otherwise you'd
3455 have to abandon two months' pay.</p>
3456 <p>Around Lu, the screams rose in pitch and small, feminine fists
3457 flailed at the air. Who were they shouting at? The factory was
3458 empty. The factory was empty. If they climbed the fence, cutting
3459 the barbed wire at the top, and then broke the locks on the factory
3460 doors, they'd have the run of the place. They couldn't carry out a
3461 condenser dryer -- not easily, anyway -- but there were plenty of
3462 small things: tools, chairs, things from the kitchen, the personal
3463 belongings of the girls who hadn't thought to bring them with when
3464 the fire alarm sounded. Lu knew about all the things that could be
3465 smuggled out of the factory. He was a security guard. Or had been.
3466 Part of his job had been to search the other employees when they
3467 left to make sure they weren't stealing. His supervisor, Mr Chu,
3469 wasn't sure who, if anyone, searched Mr Chu.</p>
3470 <p>He had a small multitool that he clipped to his belt every
3471 morning. Having a set of pliers, a knife, and a screwdriver on you
3472 all the time changed the way you saw the world -- it became a place
3473 to be cut, sliced, pried and unscrewed.</p>
3475 he'd been talking to. She was a little shorter than him, with a
3476 large mole on her cheek that he rather liked.</p>
3479 pliers on his multitool. They were joined by a set of cogs that
3480 compounded the leverage of a squeezing palm, and the jaws of the
3481 plier were inset with a pair of wicked-sharp wire-cutters. The girl
3482 in his village had worked for a time in the SOG factory in Dongguan
3483 and she'd given him a pair and wished him good luck in South
3484 China.</p>
3485 <p>The girl with three more jackets looked up at the barbed wire.
3489 congee on her breath, mixed with toothpaste. It made him homesick.
3490 "All right. But be careful!" She shrugged out of the jacket,
3491 revealing a set of densely muscled arms, worked to lean strength on
3492 the line. He wrapped it around his left hand, then wrapped his own
3493 coat around that, so that his hand looked like a cartoon
3494 boxing-glove, trailing sleeves flapping down beneath it.</p>
3495 <p>It wasn't easy to climb the fence with one hand wrapped in a
3496 dozen thicknesses of fabric, but he'd always been a great climber,
3497 even in the village, a daring boy who'd gotten a reputation for
3498 climbing anything that stood still: trees, houses, even factories.
3499 He had one good hand, two feet, and one bandaged hand, and that was
3500 enough to get up the fifteen feet to the top. Once there, he
3501 gingerly wrapped his left hand around the razorwire, careful to
3502 pull straight down on it and not to saw from side to side. He had a
3503 vision of himself slipping and falling, the razorwire slicing his
3504 fingers from his hand so that they fell to the other side of the
3505 fence, wriggling like worms in the dust as he clutched his mangled
3506 hand and screamed, geysering blood over the girls around him.</p>
3508 carefully unfolding the multitool with his other hand, flipping it
3509 around like a butterfly knife (a move he'd often practiced, playing
3510 gunfighter in his room or when no one else was around at the gate).
3511 He gingerly slid it around the first coil of wire and squeezed
3512 down, watching the teeth on the gears mesh and strain at one
3513 another, turning the leverage of his right hand into hundreds of
3514 pounds of pressure bearing down right at the cutting edge of the
3515 pliers. They bit into the wire, caught, and then parted it.</p>
3517 and he ducked away just in time to avoid having his nose -- and
3518 maybe his ear and eye -- sliced off by the wire.</p>
3519 <p>But now he could transfer his left hand to the top of the fence,
3520 and put more weight on it, and reach for the second coil of wire
3521 with the cutters, hanging way out from the fence, as far as he
3522 could, to avoid the coil when it sprang free. Which it did, parting
3523 just as easily as the other coil had, and flying directly at him,
3524 and it was only by releasing his feet and dangling one-handed from
3525 the fence, slamming his body into it, that he avoided having his
3526 throat cut. As it was, the wire made a long scratch in the back of
3527 his scalp, which began to bleed freely down his back. He ignored
3528 it. Either it was shallow and would stop on its own, or it was deep
3529 and he'd need medical attention, but either way, he was going to
3530 clear the fencetop.</p>
3531 <p>All that remained now were three strands of barbed wire, and
3532 they were tougher to cut than the razorwire had been, but the barbs
3533 were widely spaced and the wire itself was less prone to crazy
3534 twanging whipsaws than the coiled razorwire. As each one parted,
3535 there was a roar of approval from the girls below him, and even
3536 though his scalp was stinging fiercely, he thought this might just
3537 be his finest hour, the first time in his life that he'd been
3538 something more than a security guard who'd left his backwards town
3539 to find insignificance in Guandong province.</p>
3540 <p>And now he was able to unwind the jackets from around his hand
3541 and simply hop over the fence and clamber down the other side like
3542 a monkey, grinning all the way at the horde of young girls who were
3543 coming up the other side in a great wave. It wasn't long before the
3544 girl with three more jackets caught him up. He shook out her jacket
3545 -- sliced through in four or five places -- like a waiter offering
3546 a lady her coat, and she delicately slid those muscular arms into
3547 it and then she turned him around and poked at his scalp.</p>
3549 planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek. "You're a good boy," she
3550 said, and then ran off to join the stream of girls who were
3551 entering the factory through a smashed door.</p>
3552 <p>Shortly, he found himself alone in the factory yard, amid the
3553 neat gravel pathways and the trimmed lawns. He let himself into the
3554 factory but he couldn't actually bring himself to take anything,
3555 though they owed him nearly three months' wages. Somehow, it seemed
3556 to him that the girls who'd used the tools should have their pick
3557 of the tools, that the men who'd cooked the meals should have their
3558 pick of the things from the kitchens.</p>
3559 <p>Finally, he settled on one of the communal bicycles that were
3560 neatly parked near the factory gates. These were used by all the
3561 employees equally, and besides, he needed to get home and walking
3562 back with a scalp wound in the mid-day heat didn't sound like much
3563 of a plan.</p>
3564 <p>On the way home, the world seemed much changed. He'd become a
3565 criminal, for one thing, which seemed to him to be quite a distance
3566 from a security guard. But it was more than that: the air seemed
3568 to all the factories that had shut down and the buses that had
3569 stayed parked). Most of the shops seemed closed and the remainder
3570 were tended by listless storekeepers who sat on their stoops or
3571 played Mah-Jongg on them, though it was the middle of the day. All
3572 the restaurants and cafes were shut. At a train-crossing, he
3573 watched an intercity train shoot past, every car jammed with young
3574 women and their bags, leaving Shilong New Town to find their way
3575 somewhere else where there was still work.</p>
3576 <p>Just like that, in the space of just a week or two, this giant
3577 city had died. It had all seemed so incredibly powerful when he'd
3578 arrived, new paved roads and new stores and new buildings, and the
3579 factories soaring against the sky wherever you looked.</p>
3580 <p>By the time he reached home -- dizzy from the aching cut on his
3581 scalp, sweaty, hungry -- he knew that the magical city was just a
3582 pile of concrete and a mountain of workers' sweat, and that it had
3583 all the permanence of a dream. Somewhere, in a distant land he
3584 barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing
3585 machines, and so his city had died.</p>
3586 <p>He thought he'd lie down for just the briefest of naps, but by
3587 the time he got up and gathered a few things into a duffel-bag and
3588 got back on his bike, not bothering to lock the door of his
3589 apartment behind him, the train station was barricaded, and there
3590 was a long line of refugees slogging down the road to Shenzhen, two
3591 days' walk away at least. He was glad he'd taken the bicycle then.
3592 Later, he found a working ATM and drew out some cash, which was
3593 more reassuring than he'd anticipated. For a while there, it had
3594 seemed like the world had come to an end. It was a relief to find
3595 out that it was just his little corner.</p>
3596 <p>In Shenzhen, he'd started hanging out in Internet cafes, because
3597 they were the cheapest places to sit indoors, out of the heat, and
3598 because they were filled with young men like him, scraping by. And
3599 because he could talk to his parents from there, telling them
3600 made-up stories about his non-existent job-search, promising that
3601 he'd start sending money home soon.</p>
3602 <p>And that was where the guild found him, Ping and his friends,
3603 and they had this buddy on the other side of the planet, this
3604 Wei-Dong character who'd hung rapt on every turn of his tale, who'd
3605 told him that he'd written it up for a social studies report at
3606 school, which made them all laugh. And he'd found happiness and
3607 work, and he'd found a truth, too: the world wasn't built on rock,
3608 but rather on sand, and it would shift forever.</p>
3609 <p>Wei-Dong didn't know how much longer his father's business would
3610 last. Maybe thirty years -- but he thought it would be a lot less
3611 than that. Every day, he woke in his bedroom under his Spongebob
3612 sheets and thought about which of these things he could live
3614 <p>And here it was, the chance to find out. When his
3615 great-grandparents had been his age, they'd been war-refugees,
3616 crossing the ocean on a crowded boat, travelling on stolen papers,
3617 an infant in his great-grandmother's arms and another in her belly.
3618 If they could do it, Wei-Dong could do it.</p>
3619 <p>He'd need a place to stay, which meant money, which meant a job.
3620 The guild would cut him in for his share of the money from the
3621 raids, but that wasn't enough to survive in America. Or was it? He
3622 wondered how much the Guatemalans around him earned at their
3623 illegal dishwashing and cleaning and gardening jobs.</p>
3624 <p>In any event, he wouldn't have to find out, because he had
3625 something they didn't have: a Social Security Number. And yes, that
3626 meant that eventually his parents would be able to find him, but in
3627 another month, he'd be 18 and it'd be too late for them to do
3628 anything about it if he didn't want to cooperate.</p>
3629 <p>In those hours where he'd planned for the demise of his family's
3630 fortune, he'd settled quickly on the easiest job he could step
3631 into: Mechanical Turk.</p>
3632 <p>The Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to
3633 do was prove that you were a decent player -- the game had the
3634 stats to know it -- and sign up, and then log in whenever you
3635 wanted a shift. The game would ping you any time a player did
3636 something the game didn't know how to interpret -- talked too
3637 intensely to a non-player character, stuck a sword where it didn't
3638 belong, climbed a tree that no one had bothered to add any details
3639 too -- and you'd have to play spot-referee. You'd play the
3640 non-player character, choose a behavior for the stabbed object, or
3641 make a decision from a menu of possible things you might find in a
3642 tree.</p>
3643 <p>It didn't pay much, but it didn't take much time, either.
3644 Wei-Dong had calculated that if he played two computers --
3645 something he was sure he could keep up -- and did a new job every
3646 twenty seconds on each, he could make as much as the senior
3647 managers at his father's company. He'd have to do it for ten hours
3649 hours a day, so hell, it was practically money in the bank.</p>
3650 <p>So he used the rented PC to sign onto his account and started
3651 filling in the paperwork to apply for the job. All the while, he
3652 was conscious of his rarely-used email account and of the messages
3653 from his parents that surely awaited him. The forms were long and
3654 boring, but easy enough, even the little essay questions where you
3655 had to answer a bunch of hypothetical questions about what you'd do
3656 if a player did this or said that. And that email from his parents
3657 was lurking, demanding that he download it and read it --</p>
3658 <p>He flipped to a browser and brought up his email. It had been
3659 weeks since he'd last checked it and it was choked with hundreds of
3660 spams, but there, at the top:</p>
3662 <p>Of course his mother was the one to send the email. It was
3663 always her on email, sending him little encouraging notes through
3664 the school day, reminding him of his grandparents' and cousins' and
3665 father's birthdays. His father used email when he had to, usually
3666 at two in the morning when he couldn't sleep for worry about work
3667 and he needed to bawl out his managers without waking them up on
3668 the phone. But if the phone was an option, Dad would take it.</p>
3671 <p><em>Leonard, this is crazy. If you want to be treated like an
3672 adult, start acting like one. Don't sneak around behind our backs,
3673 playing games in the middle of the night. Don't run off to
3674 God-knows-where to sulk.</em></p>
3675 <p><em>We can negotiate this like family, like grownups, but first
3676 you'll have to COME HOME and stop behaving like a SPOILED BRAT. We
3677 love you, Leonard, and we're worried about you, and we want to help
3678 you. I know when you're 17 it's easy to feel like you have all the
3679 answers --</em></p>
3680 <p>He stopped reading and blew hot air out his nostrils. He hated
3681 it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was
3683 like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental
3684 illness that could only be cured by waiting five years. Why not
3686 <p>He began to hit reply, then realized that he was logged in
3687 without going through an anonymizer. His guildies were big into
3688 these -- they were servers that relayed your traffic, obscuring
3689 your identity and the addresses you were trying to avoid. The best
3690 ones came from Falun Gong, the weird religious cult that the
3691 Chinese government was bent on stamping out. Falun Gong put new
3692 relays online every hour or so, staying a hop ahead of the Great
3693 Firewall of China, the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling
3694 server-farm that was supposed to keep 1.6 billion Chinese people
3695 from looking at the wrong kind of information.</p>
3696 <p>No one in the guild had much time for Falun Gong or its quirky
3697 beliefs, but everyone agreed that they ran a tight ship when it
3698 came to punching holes in the Great Firewall. A quick troll through
3699 the ever-rotating index-pages for Falun Gong relays found Wei-Dong
3701 his Mom. Let her try to run his backtrail -- it would dead-end with
3702 a notorious Chinese religious cult. That'd give her something to
3703 worry about all right!</p>
3704 <p><em>Mom, I'm fine. I'm acting like an adult (taking care of
3705 myself, making my own decisions). It might have been wrong to lie
3706 to you guys about what I was doing with my time, but kidnapping
3707 your son to military school is about as non-adult as you can get.
3708 I'll be in touch when I get a chance. I love you two. Don't worry,
3709 I'm safe.</em></p>
3710 <p>Was he, really? As safe as his great-grandparents had been,
3711 stepping off the ship in New York. As safe as Lu had been,
3712 bicycling the cracked road to Shenzhen.</p>
3714 downtown los angeles" as well as the next kid. He had money. He had
3715 a SSN. He had a job -- two jobs, counting the guild work -- and he
3716 had plenty of practice missions he'd have to run before he'd start
3717 earning. And it was time to get down to it.</p>
3721 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy
3722 in San Diego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me
3723 in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference
3724 or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego
3725 in nearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the
3726 house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who
3727 know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and
3728 great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class
3729 from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final
3730 Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely
3731 fun party at a store.</i></p>
3732 <p><i><a href=
3736 They came for the workers in the game and in the real world, a
3737 coordinated assault that left Big Sister Nor's organization in
3738 tatters.
3739 <p>On that fateful night, she'd taken up the back room of Headshot,
3740 a PC Baang in the Geylang district in Singapore, a neighborhood
3741 that throbbed all night long from the roaring sex-trade from the
3742 legal brothels and the illegal street-hookers. Any time after dark,
3743 the Geylang's streets were choked with people, from adventurous
3744 diners eating in the excellent all-night restaurants (almost all of
3745 them halal, which always made her smile) to guest workers and
3746 Singaporeans on the prowl for illicit thrills to the girls dashing
3747 out on their breaks to the all-night supermarkets to do their
3748 shopping.</p>
3749 <p>The Geylang was as unbuttoned as Singapore got, one of the few
3750 places where you could be "out of bounds" -- doing something that
3751 was illegal, immoral, unmentionable, or bad for social harmony --
3752 without attracting too much attention. Headshot strobed all night
3753 long with networked poker games, big shoot-em-up tournaments,
3754 guestworkers phoning home on the cheap, shouting over the
3755 noise-salad of all those games, and, on that night, Big Sister Nor
3756 and her clan.</p>
3757 <p>They called themselves the Webblies, which was an obscure little
3758 joke that pleased Big Sister Nor an awful lot. Nearly a century
3759 ago, a group of workers had formed a union called the Industrial
3760 Workers of the World, the first union that said that all workers
3761 needed to stick up for each other, that every worker was welcome no
3762 matter the color of his skin, no matter if the worker was a woman,
3764 called themselves the Wobblies.</p>
3766 bounds" subjects that were blocked on the Singaporean Internet, and
3767 so of course Big Sister Nor had made it her business to find out
3768 more about them. The more she read, the more sense this group from
3771 what's more, it would be easier today than it had been.</p>
3772 <p>Take organizing workers. Back then, you'd have to actually get
3773 into the factory or at least stand at its gates to talk to workers
3774 about signing a union card and demanding better conditions, higher
3775 wages and shorter hours. Now you could reach those same people
3776 online, from anywhere in the world. Once they were members, they
3777 could talk to all the other members, using the same tools.</p>
3778 <p>She'd decided to call her little group the Industrial Workers of
3779 the World Wide Web, the IWWWW, and that was another of those jokes
3780 that pleased her an awful lot. And the IWWWW had grown and grown
3781 and grown. Gold farmers were easy pickings: working in terrible
3782 conditions all over the world, for terrible wages, hated by the
3783 game-runners and the rich players alike. They already understood
3784 about working in teams, they'd already formed their own little
3785 guilds -- and they were better at using the Internet than their
3786 bosses would ever be.</p>
3788 in six countries, paying dues and filling up a fat strike fund that
3789 had finally been called into use, in Shenzhen, the last place Big
3790 Sister Nor had ever expected to see a walkout.</p>
3791 <p>But they had, they had! The boss, some character named Wing, had
3792 declared a lock-in at three of his "factories" -- Internet cafes
3793 that he'd taken over to support his burgeoning army of workers --
3794 in order to take advantage of a sploit in Mushroom Kingdom, a
3795 Mario-based MMO that had a huge following in Brazil. One of his
3796 workers had found a way to triple the gold they took out of one of
3797 the dungeons, and he wanted to extract every penny he could before
3798 Nintendo-Sun caught on to it.</p>
3799 <p>The next thing she knew, her phone was rattling with urgent
3800 messages relayed from her various in-game identities to tell her
3801 that the workers had knocked aside the factory management and
3802 guards and stormed out, climbing the sides of the buildings or the
3803 utility poles and cutting the cafes' network links. They'd formed
3804 up out front and begun to chant impromptu slogans -- mostly adapted
3805 from their in-game battle-cries. And now they wanted to know what
3806 to do.</p>
3808 The Mighty Krang and Justbob, the former a small Chinese guy with
3809 frosted purple tips in his hair, the latter a Tamil girl in a
3810 beautiful, immaculate sari and silk slippers -- a girl who had
3811 previously run with one of the most notorious girl-gangs in Asia
3812 and spent three years in prison for her trouble. "They've walked
3813 out in Shenzhen." She forwarded the tweets and blips and alerts off
3814 her phone, then showed them her screen while they waited for the
3815 forwards to land on their devices.</p>
3819 and bringing him back to the earth. "And overdue. I predicted this.
3820 I predicted it from the start. As soon as you start collecting dues
3821 for a 'strike fund,' someone's going to go on strike. And la-la,
3823 <p>The next step was to head for headquarters, the back room at
3824 Headshot, to slam themselves into their chairs and to hit the
3826 first-ever strike. Big Sister Nor went to work on a plan:</p>
3829 Wing couldn't bring in scabs -- replacement workers -- to get the
3830 job done</p>
3832 human-rights lawyers, strike-pay, sleeping quarters for any workers
3833 who relied on the factory for dorm-beds</p>
3835 the human rights wires, get the strike-leaders on interviews with
3836 the press</p>
3837 <p>She'd done this before, in real life, on the other side of
3838 things, as a wildcat strike leader walking off the line when the
3839 bosses at her weaving factory in Taman Makmur announced pay cuts
3840 because their big European distributor had cut its orders. It
3841 happened every year, but it made her so angry -- the workers didn't
3842 get bonuses, sharing in the good fortune when distributors
3843 increased their orders, but they were made to share the burden when
3844 orders went down. Well, forget it, enough was enough. She'd stood
3845 up in the middle of the factory floor and denounced the bosses for
3846 the greedy, immoral bastards they were, and when the security moved
3847 in to take her, she'd stood proud and strong, ready to be beaten
3848 for her insolence.</p>
3849 <p>Instead, her fellow workers had risen to her defense, the young
3850 women around her getting to their feet and surrounding her,
3851 cheering her, ululating cries shouting around waggling tongues that
3852 bounced off the ceiling and filled the room and her heart, making
3853 them all brave, so that the security men moved back, and they'd
3854 taken over the factory, blocking the gates, shutting it down, and
3855 then someone from the Malaysian Union of Textile Employees had been
3856 there to get them to sign cards, and someone had made her picket
3857 captain and then --</p>
3858 <p>And then it had all come crashing down around them, police vans
3859 moving in, the police forming a line and ordering them to disperse,
3860 to get back to work, to stop this foolishness before someone got
3861 hurt, barking the orders through a bullhorn, glaring at them from
3862 beneath their riot helmets, banging their truncheons on their
3863 shields, spraying them with teargas.</p>
3864 <p>Their line wavered, disintegrated, retreated. But they reformed
3865 in an alley near the factory, amid a gang of staring children, and
3866 the women from the MUTE collared the children and sent them running
3867 to get milk -- cow's milk, goat's milk, anything they could find,
3868 and the MUTE organizers had rinsed their eyes with the milk,
3869 holding their faces still while they coughed and gagged. The
3870 fat-soluble CS gas rinsed away, leaving them teary but able to see,
3871 and the coughs dispersed, and someone produced a bag of
3872 charcoal-filter cycling masks, and someone else had a bag of
3873 swimming goggles, and the women put them on and pulled their hijabs
3874 over their noses, over the masks, so that they looked like some
3875 species of snouted animal, and they reformed their line and marched
3876 back, chanting their slogans.</p>
3877 <p>The police gassed them again, but this time, the picket captains
3878 were able to hold the line, to send brave women forward to grab the
3879 smoking cannisters and throw them back over police lines. For a
3880 moment, it looked like the police would charge, but the strikers
3881 and the organizers had been feeding a photostream to the Internet
3882 using mobile phones that tunneled through the national firewall,
3883 getting them up on the human rights wires, and so the Ministry of
3884 Labour was getting phone calls from the foreign press, and they
3885 were on the phone to the Ministry of Justice, and the police
3886 withdrew.</p>
3887 <p>The first skirmish was over, and the strikers settled in for a
3888 long siege. No one got in or out of the factory without being
3889 harangued by hundreds of young women, shoving literature detailing
3890 their working conditions and grievances and demands through the
3891 windows of their cars and buses. Some replacement workers got in,
3892 some picked fights, some turned around and left. A unionized
3893 trucker refused to cross their line, and wouldn't take away the
3894 load he'd been charged with picking up, so it just sat there on the
3895 docks.</p>
3896 <p>The days turned into weeks, and they fed their families as best
3897 as they could with the strike pay, which came to a third of what
3898 they'd earned in the plant, but the factory owners -- a subsidiary
3899 of a Dutch company -- were hurting too. The MUTE organizers
3900 explained that the parent company had to release its quarterly
3901 statement to its shareholders, who would demand to know why this
3902 major factory was sitting idle instead of making money. The
3903 organizers offered confident reassurances that when this happened,
3904 the workers' demands would be met, the strike settled, and they
3905 could get back to work.</p>
3906 <p>So they hung in there, keeping their spirits up on the line, and
3907 then --</p>
3909 <p>Big Sister Nor found out about it one night as she was playing
3910 Theater of War VII, a game she'd played since she was a little
3911 girl. One of her guildies was a girl whose brother had passed by
3912 the factory on his way home from school, and he'd seen them moving
3913 the machines out of the plant, driving away in huge lorries.</p>
3915 but by the time they got there, the factory was dead, empty, the
3916 gates chained shut. No one from the union met them. None of them
3917 answered her calls.</p>
3918 <p>And the women she'd called sister, the women who'd saved her
3921 <p>And she hadn't known. She'd managed to hold the tears in until
3922 she got home, but then they'd flowed, and her parents -- who'd
3923 doubted her and harangued her every step of the way -- scolded her
3924 for her foolishness, told her it was her fault that all her friends
3925 were jobless.</p>
3926 <p>She'd lain in bed that night, miserable, and had been woken by
3927 the soft chirp of her phone.</p>
3930 <p>She'd crept outside on cat's feet and barely had time to make
3931 out Affendi's outline before she collapsed into Nor's arms. She had
3932 been beaten bloody, her eyes blacked, two of her fingers broken,
3933 her lips mashed and one of her teeth missing. She managed a mangled
3935 <p>The cheap hotel where the four organizers had shared a room was
3936 raided just after dinner, the police taking them away. They'd been
3937 prepared for this, had lawyers standing by to help them when it
3938 happened, but they didn't get to call lawyers. They didn't go to
3939 the jailhouse. Instead, they'd been taken to a shantytown behind
3940 the main train-station and three policemen had stood guard while a
3941 group of private security forces from the plant had taken turns
3942 beating them with truncheons and fists and boots, screaming insults
3943 at them, calling them whores, tearing at their clothes, beating
3944 their breasts and thighs.</p>
3945 <p>It only stopped when one of the women fell unconscious, bleeding
3946 from a head-wound, eyelids fluttering. The men had fled then, after
3947 taking their money and identity papers, leaving them weeping and
3948 hurt. Affendi had managed to hide her spare mobile phone -- a tiny
3949 thing the size of a matchbook -- in the elastic of her underpants,
3950 and that had enabled her to call the MUTE headquarters for help.
3951 Once the ambulance was on its way, she'd come to get Nor.</p>
3957 decided to leave. We think they're probably going to Indonesia. The
3958 new laws there make it much harder to organize the workers. That's
3959 how it goes, sometimes." She shrugged, then winced and sucked air
3960 over her teeth. "We thought they'd want to stay put here. The
3961 provincial government gave them too much to come here -- tax
3962 breaks, new roads, free utilities for five years. But there are new
3963 Special Economic Zones in Indonesia that have even better deals."
3964 She shrugged again, winced again. "You may be all right here, of
3965 course. Maybe they'll just move on. But I thought you should be
3966 given the chance to get somewhere safe with us, if you wanted
3970 take you there tonight. We can help you find work, get set up. You
3972 <p>A light rain fell, pattering off the palms that lined her street
3973 and splashing down in wet, fat drops, bringing an earthy smell up
3974 from the soil. A fat drop slid off an unseen leaf overhead and
3975 spattered on Nor's neck, reminding her that she'd gone out of the
3976 house without her hijab, something she almost never did. It seemed
3977 to her an omen, like her life was changing in every single way.</p>
3980 it's a safe house -- no one knows where it is unless they have to.
3984 had warned them, through bullhorns, that they were risking
3985 everything. She'd laughed at them, filled with the feeling of
3987 now.</p>
3988 <p>And she'd gone with Affendi, and she'd worked in a factory that
3989 was much like the factory she'd left, and there had been a union
3990 fight much like the one she'd fought, but this time, they were
3991 better prepared and the workers had called Nor "Big Sister," a term
3992 of endearment that had scared her a little, coming from the mouths
3993 of women much older than her, coming from young girls who could
3994 never appreciate the danger.</p>
3995 <p>And this time, the owners hadn't fled, the workers had won
3996 better conditions, and Big Sister Nor found that she didn't want to
3997 make textiles anymore. She found that she had a taste for the
3998 fight.</p>
3999 <p>Now there was a young man, someone called Matthew Fong, in
4000 Shenzhen, and he was relying on her to help him win his dignity,
4001 fair wages, and a safe and secure workplace. And he was doing it in
4002 China, where unofficial unions were illegal and where labor
4003 organizers sometimes disappeared into prison for years.</p>
4004 <p>The Mighty Krang could speak a beautiful Mandarin as well as his
4005 native Cantonese, so he was in charge of giving soundbites to the
4006 foreign Chinese press, that network of news-resources serving the
4007 hundreds of millions of people of Chinese ancestry living abroad.
4008 They were key, because they were intimately connected to the whole
4009 sprawling enterprise of imports and exports, and when they spoke,
4010 the bureaucrats in Beijing listened. And The Mighty Krang could put
4011 on a voice that was so smoothly convincing you'd swear it was a
4012 newscaster.</p>
4013 <p>Justbob was in charge of moral support for the strikers, talking
4014 to them in broken Cantonese and Singlish and gamer-speak on
4015 conference calls, keeping their morale up. She could work three
4016 phones and two computers like a human octopus, her attention split
4017 across a dozen conversations without losing the thread in any of
4018 them.</p>
4019 <p>And Big Sister Nor? She was in-world, in several worlds,
4020 rallying Webblies to the site of the Mushroom Kingdom, finding
4021 gamers converging from all over Asia -- where it was night -- and
4022 from Europe -- where it was day -- and America -- where it was
4023 morning. Management had wasted no time moving replacement workers
4024 in. There were always desperate subcontractors out in the provinces
4025 of China, ten kids in a dead industrial town in Dongbei who'd been
4026 lured to computers with pretty talk about getting paid to play.
4027 Across a dozen different shards of the same Mushroom Kingdom world,
4028 a dozen alternate realities, they came, and Big Sister Nor played
4029 general in a skirmish against them, as strikers blocked the
4030 entrance to the dungeon and sent a stream of pro-union chats and
4031 URLs to them even as they fought them to keep them out of the
4032 dungeon.</p>
4033 <p>The battle wasn't much of a fight, not at first. The replacement
4034 workers were there to kill dumb non-player characters in a boring,
4035 predictable way that wouldn't trigger the Mechanical Turks and
4036 bring their operation to the attention of Nintendo-Sun. They were
4037 all seasoned gamers, and they were used to teamplay, and many of
4038 the Webblies had never fought side-by-side before. But the Webblies
4039 were fighting for the movement, and the replacement workers -- they
4040 called them "scabs," another old word from out of history -- were
4041 fighting because they didn't know what else to do.</p>
4042 <p>It was a rout. The scabs were sent back to their respawn points
4043 by the thousand, unable to return to work until they'd done their
4044 corpse runs, and the Webblies raised their swords and shot
4045 fireballs into the sky and cheered in a dozen languages.</p>
4046 <p>The news was good from Shenzhen, too, judging from what Justbob
4047 was saying into her headsets and typing onto her screens. The
4048 strike-line was holding, and while the police were there, they
4049 hadn't moved in -- in fact, it sounded like they'd moved to hold
4050 back the private factory security!</p>
4051 <p>Silently, Big Sister Nor thanked Matthew Fong for picking a
4052 fight that -- seemingly -- they'd be able to win. She shouted up to
4053 Ezhil in the front of Headshot, calling for ginseng bubble-tea all
4054 around, the ginseng root would give them all a little shot of
4055 energy. Couldn't live on caffeine and taurine alone!</p>
4057 "Bubble tea!" If she'd been paying attention, she would have
4058 noticed the squeak in his voice as he promised right away, right
4059 away.</p>
4060 <p>But her attention was fixed on her screens, because that's where
4061 it was all suddenly going very wrong indeed. What she'd taken for
4062 strikers' victorious fireballs launched into the sky were landing
4063 among the players now, inflicting major damage. Just as she was
4064 noticing this, a volley of skidding, spiked turtle-shells came
4065 sliding in from offscreen, in twelve worlds at once.</p>
4067 <p>She barked the word into her headset in Mandarin, then
4068 Cantonese, then Hindi, then English. The cry was taken up by the
4069 players and they rallied, forming battle-squares, healers in the
4070 middle, tanks on the outside, nimble thieves and scouts spreading
4071 out into the mushroom forests, looking for the ambush.</p>
4072 <p>This would work much better if they were a regular guild, all
4073 playing on the side of the evil Bowser or of the valiant Princess
4074 Peach, because if you were all on the same side, the game would
4075 coordinate your movements for you, give you radar for where and how
4076 all the other players were moving. But the strikers were from both
4077 sides of Mushroom Kingdom's moral coin, and as far as the game was
4078 concerned, they were sworn enemies. Their IMs were unintelligible
4079 to one another, and the default option for any "opposing" av you
4080 clicked on was ATTACK, leading to a lot of accidental
4081 skirmishes.</p>
4082 <p>But gold farmers knew all about playing their own game, one that
4083 lived on top of the game that the companies wanted them to play.
4084 The game's communications tools were powerful and easy, but nothing
4085 (apart from the ridiculous "agreement" you had to click every time
4086 you started up the game) kept you from using anything you wanted.
4087 They favored free chat systems developed to help corporate
4088 work-groups collaborate; since these services always had free
4089 demo-versions available, hoping to snag some office-person into
4091 allowed them to stream screen-caps from their own computers, and
4092 Big Sister Nor saw to it that these were arranged sequentially,
4093 forming a huge, panoramic view of the entire battlefield.</p>
4094 <p>She flicked through the battlescenes and the communications hub,
4095 fingers flying on the keyboard. They had a Koopa Turbo Hammer in
4096 seven of the worlds, a huge, whirling god-hammer that could clobber
4097 a score of attackers on a single throw, and she had it brought
4098 forward, using the scouts' screencaps to pinpoint the enemies'
4099 positions, conferring them to the hammer-throwers, a passel of
4100 hulking Kongs with protruding fangs and enormous, hairy chests.</p>
4101 <p>That was seven battles down; in the remaining five, she ordered
4102 the Peaches to form up with their umbrellas at the ready, then had
4103 two Bowsers "bounce" each of them, sticking to them while doing
4104 minimum damage. The Peaches unfurled their umbrellas and sailed
4105 into the air, taking their Bowsers with them, to drop behind enemy
4106 lines, ready to breathe fire and stomp the opposing forces. This
4107 was a devastating attack, one that was only possible if you played
4108 the farmers' game, cooperating through a side-channel -- normally,
4109 Bowsers and Princess Peaches were on the opposite sides of the
4110 Great War that was at the center of the Mushroom Kingdom story.</p>
4111 <p>It should have worked -- the hammers, the Bowsers, the skilled
4112 players of a dozen guilds, bristling with armament and armor,
4113 spelling and firing and skirmishing.</p>
4116 her mind, after the strike-breaking goons from the Pinkerton
4117 Detective Agency who'd been the old Wobblies' worst enemies -- had
4118 seemingly endless numbers, and every attack they launched seemed to
4119 do maximum damage. Meanwhile, they were able to pull off incredible
4120 dodges and defenses against the strikers' attacks. And their aim!
4121 Every fireball, every turtle, every sound-bomb, every flung axe
4122 found its target with perfect accuracy.</p>
4125 <p>That had to be it. They were using aimhacks, dodgehacks, all the
4126 prohibited add-on software that the game was supposed to be able to
4127 spot and disable. Somehow, they'd gotten past the game's defenses.
4128 It didn't matter. The game was always stacked against gold
4129 farmers.</p>
4131 be guerrilla war, jungle war, hiding in the bushes and sniping at
4132 them as they'd sniped at her. She'd lure them into the clearing
4133 that marked the dungeon's entrance and then they'd slip around them
4134 into the mushroom forest, using their superior coordination to
4135 trump the hacks and numbers the Pinkertons had on their side. In
4136 her headset, she heard the ragged breathing, the curses in six
4137 languages, the laughter and shouting of players all over the world,
4138 listening to her rap out commands in all the different versions of
4139 Mushroom Kingdom that they were fighting in.</p>
4142 <p>It had been Big Sister Nor's idea to use the games for
4143 organizing. Why risk your neck in the factory or standing at its
4144 gates when you could slip right in among the workers, no matter
4145 where they were in the world, and talk to them about joining up?
4146 Plenty of the MUTE old guard had thought she was crazy, but there
4147 was lots of support, too -- especially when Nor showed them that
4148 they could reach the Indonesian textile workers who'd inherited her
4149 job when her factory had closed up and moved on, simply by logging
4150 into Spirals of the Golden Snail, a game that had taken the whole
4151 Malay peninsula by storm.</p>
4152 <p>It didn't matter where you fought, it mattered whether you won.
4153 And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that they
4154 could win in-game. The bosses were better at firing teargas at
4155 them, but they were better at lobbing fireballs, pulsed energy
4156 weapons, photon torpedoes and savage flying fish -- and they always
4157 would be. What's more, a striker who lost a skirmish in-game merely
4158 had to re-spawn and do a corpse-run, possibly losing a little
4159 inventory in the process. A striker who lost a skirmish AFK -- away
4160 from keyboard -- might end up dead.</p>
4161 <p>Big Sister Nor lived in perpetual fear of having someone's death
4162 on her hands.</p>
4163 <p>The battle was turning again. The Pinkertons had all fallen for
4164 her gambit, letting them rush past and back into the mushroom
4165 forest, effectively trading places. Now they were digging in the
4166 woods, laying little ambushes, fortifying positions and laying down
4167 withering fire from all directions. The breathing, gasping,
4168 triumphant muttering voices in her head and the hastily clattered
4169 in-game chat gave her a feeling like the battle was resting
4170 delicately balanced on her fingertips, every shift and change
4171 dancing felt as a tremor against the sensitive pads of her
4172 fingers.</p>
4173 <p>Big Sister Nor called for her bubble tea again, realizing that a
4174 very long time indeed had gone by since she'd first ordered it.
4175 This time, no one answered. The skin on the back of her neck
4176 prickled and she slipped her headphones off her head. Justbob and
4177 The Mighty Krang caught on a second later, removing their earwigs.
4178 There was no noise at all from the front of Headshot, none of the
4179 normal hyperactive calling of gamer-kids, or the shouts of
4180 guestworkers phoning home on cheap earwigs.</p>
4181 <p>Big Sister Nor stood up quietly and quickly and backed up
4182 against the wall, motioning to the others to do the same. On her
4183 screen, she saw another rally by the Pinkertons, who'd taken
4184 advantage of the sudden lack of strategic leadership to capture
4185 several of the small striker strongholds. She inched her way toward
4187 see around the frame, then whipped it back as quick as she
4188 could.</p>
4190 the rear entrance, the escape hatch that Big Sister Nor always made
4191 sure of before she holed up to do union work.</p>
4192 <p>On their heels came the Pinkertons, the real world Pinkertons,
4193 Malay men in workers' clothes, poor men, men armed with stout
4194 sticks and a few chains, men who'd been making their way to the
4195 door when Big Sister Nor chanced to look around it.</p>
4196 <p>They shouted after them now, excited and tight voices, like the
4197 catcalls of drunken boys on streetcorners when they were feeling
4198 the bravery of numbers and hormones and liquor. That was a
4199 dangerous sound. It was the sound of fools egging each other
4200 on.</p>
4201 <p>Big Sister Nor hit the crashbar on the rear door with both
4202 palms, slamming into it with the full weight of her body. The
4203 door's gas-lift was broken, so it swung back like a mousetrap, and
4204 it was a good thing it did, because it moved so fast that the two
4205 Pinkertons waiting to bar their exit didn't have time to get out of
4206 the way. One was knocked over on his ass, the other was slammed
4207 into the cinderblock wall with a jarring thud that Big Sister Nor
4208 felt in her palms.</p>
4209 <p>The door rebounded into her, knocking her back into The Mighty
4210 Krang, who caught her, pushed her on, hands on her shoulderblades,
4211 breath ragged in her ears.</p>
4212 <p>They were in a dark, narrow, stinking alley behind that
4213 connected two of the Lorangs, the small streets that ran off
4214 Geylang Road, and it was time to R and G -- to run and gun, what
4215 you did when all your other plans collapsed. Big Sister Nor had
4216 thought this through far enough to make sure they had a back door,
4217 but no farther than that.</p>
4218 <p>The Pinkertons were close behind, but they were all squeezed
4219 down into the incredibly narrow confines of the alleyway, and no
4220 one could really run or move faster than a desperate shuffle.</p>
4221 <p>But then they broke free into the next Lorang, and Big Sister
4222 Nor broke left, hoping to make it far enough up the road to get
4223 into sight of the diners at the all-night restaurants.</p>
4225 <p>One of the men threw his truncheon at her and it hit her square
4226 between her shoulders, knocking the breath from her and causing her
4227 to go down on one knee. Justbob twined one hand in her blouse and
4228 hauled her to her feet with a sound of tearing cloth, and dragged
4229 her on, but they'd lost a step to her fall, and now the men were on
4230 them.</p>
4231 <p>Justbob whirled around, snarling, shouting a worldless cry,
4232 using the movement as inertia for a wild roundhouse kick that
4233 connected with one of the Pinkertons, a man with sleepy eyes and a
4234 thick mustache. Justbob's foot caught him in the side, and they all
4235 heard the sound of his ribs breaking under the toe of her demure
4236 sandal with its fake jewels. The sandal flew on and clattered to
4237 the road with the cheap sound of paste gems.</p>
4238 <p>The men hadn't expected that, and there was a moment when they
4239 stopped in their tracks, staring at their fallen comrade, and in
4240 that instant, Big Sister Nor thought that -- just maybe -- they
4241 could get away. But Justbob's chest was heaving, her face contorted
4243 sweaty sportcoat, thumbs aiming at his eyes, and as she reached
4244 him, the man beside him lifted his truncheon and brought it down,
4245 glancing off her high, fine cheekbone and then smashing against her
4246 collarbone.</p>
4247 <p>Justbob howled like a wounded dog and fell back, landing a hard
4248 punch in her attacker's groin as she fell back.</p>
4249 <p>But now the Pinkertons were on them, and their arms were raised,
4250 their truncheons held high, and as the first one swung into Big
4251 Sister Nor's left breast, she cried out and her mind was filled
4252 with Affendi and her broken fingers, her unrecognizably bruised
4253 face. Somewhere, just a few tantalizing meters up the Lorang, night
4254 people were eating a huge feast of fish and goat in curry, the
4255 smells in the air. But that was there. Here, Big Siter Nor was
4256 infinitely far from them, and the truncheons rose and fell and she
4257 curled up to protect her head, her breasts, her stomach, and in so
4258 doing exposed her tender kidneys, her delicate short-ribs, and
4259 there she lay, enduring a season in hell that went on for an
4260 eternity and a half.</p>
4262 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national
4263 Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science
4264 fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto
4265 and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two
4266 of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that
4267 they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the
4268 start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore
4269 could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of
4270 seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking
4271 the most amazing variety of titles.</i></p>
4272 <p><i><a href=
4274 Chapters/Indigo</a></i></p>
4275 <p>Connor Prikkel sometimes thought of math as a beautiful girl,
4276 the kind of girl that he'd dreamt of wooing, dating, even marrying,
4277 while sitting in the back of any class that wasn't related to math,
4278 daydreaming. A beautiful girl like Jenny Rosen, who'd had classes
4279 with him all through high-school, who always seemed to know the
4280 answer no matter what the subject, who had a light dusting of
4281 freckles around her nose and a quirky half-smile. Who dressed in
4282 jeans that she'd tailored herself, in t-shirts she'd modded,
4283 stitching multiple shirts together to make tight little
4284 half-shirts, elaborate shawls, mock turtelnecks.</p>
4285 <p>Jenny Rosen had seemed to have it all: beauty and brains and,
4286 above all, rationality: she didn't like the way that store-bought
4287 jeans fit, so she hacked her own. She didn't like the t-shirts that
4288 everyone wore, so she changed the shirts to suit her taste. She was
4289 funny, she was clever, and he'd been completely, head-over-heels in
4290 love with her from sophomore English right through to senior
4291 American History.</p>
4292 <p>They'd been friendly through that time, though not really
4293 friends. Connor's friends were into gaming and computers, Jenny's
4294 friends were jocks and school-paper kids. But friendly, sure,
4295 enough to say hello in the hallway, enough to become lab partners
4296 in sophomore physics (she was a careful taker of notes, and her
4298 against each other a hundred times that semester).</p>
4299 <p>And then, in senior year, he'd asked her out to a movie. Then
4300 she'd asked him to a track rally. Then he'd asked her to work with
4301 him on an American History project on Chinese railway workers that
4302 involved going to Chinatown after school, and there they'd had a
4303 giant dim sum meal and then sat in a park and talked for hours, and
4304 then they'd stopped talking and started kissing.</p>
4305 <p>And one thing led to another, and the kissing led to more
4306 kissing, and then their friends all started to whisper, "Did you
4307 hear about Connor and Jenny?" and she met his parents and he met
4308 hers. And it had all seemed perfect.</p>
4310 <p>In the four months, two weeks and three days that they were
4312 each more blazing than the last. Theoretically, he understood
4313 everything he needed to about her. She loved sports. She loved to
4314 use her mind. She loved humor. She loved silly comedies and slow
4315 music without words.</p>
4316 <p>And so he would go away and plan out exactly how to deliver all
4317 these things to her, plugging in her loves like variables into an
4318 equation, working out elaborate schemes to deliver them to her.</p>
4319 <p>But it never worked. He'd work it out so that they could go to a
4320 ball game at AT&T Park and she'd want to go see a concert at
4321 Cow Palace instead. He'd take her to see a new wacky comedy and
4322 she'd want to go home and work on an overdue assignment. No matter
4323 how hard he tried to get her reality and his theory to match up, he
4324 always failed.</p>
4325 <p>In his heart of hearts, he knew it wasn't her fault. He knew
4326 that he had some deficiency that caused him to live in the
4327 imaginary world he sometimes thought of as "theory-land," the
4328 country where everything behaved as it was supposed to.</p>
4329 <p>After graduation, through his bachelor's degree in pure math at
4330 Berkeley, his Masters in Signal Processing at Caltech, and the
4331 first year of a PhD in economics at Stanford, he had occasion to
4332 date lots of beautiful women, and every time, he found himself
4333 ground to pulp between the gears of real-world and theory-land. He
4334 gave up on women and his PhD on a fine day in October, telling the
4335 prof who was supposed to be his advisor that he could find someone
4336 else to teach his freshman math courses, grade his papers, and
4337 answer his email.</p>
4338 <p>He walked off the Stanford campus and into the monied streets of
4339 Palo Alto, and he packed up his car and drove to his new job, as
4340 chief economist for Coca Cola's games division, and finally, he
4341 found a real world that matched the beautiful elegance of
4342 theory-land.</p>
4343 <p>Coca Cola ran or franchised anywhere from a dozen to thirty
4344 game-worlds at any given time. The number of games went up or down
4345 according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:</p>
4358 <p>That was the equation that had come to him one day early in his
4359 second semester of the PhD grind, a bolt of inspiration like the
4360 finger of god reaching down into his brain. The magic was that
4361 equals sign, just before the fun, because once you could express
4362 fun as a function of other variables, you could establish its
4363 relationship to those variables -- if we reduce the difficulty and
4364 the number of your friends playing, can we increase the reward and
4365 make the fun stay the same?</p>
4366 <p>This line of thought drove him to phone in a sick-call to his
4367 advisor and head straight home, where he typed and drew and
4368 scribbled and thought and thought and thought, and he phoned in
4369 sick the next day, and the next -- and then it was the weekend, and
4370 he let his phone run down, shut off his email and IM, and worked,
4371 eating when he had to.</p>
4372 <p>By the time he found himself shoving fingerloads of butter into
4373 his mouth, having emptied the fridge of all else, he knew he was
4374 onto something.</p>
4375 <p>He called them the Prikkel equations, and they described in
4376 elegant, pure, abstract math the relationship between all the
4377 variables that went into fun, and how fun equalled money, inasmuch
4378 as people would pay to play fun games, and would pay more for items
4379 that had value in those games.</p>
4380 <p>Technically, he should have sent the paper to his advisor. He'd
4381 signed a contract when he was accepted to the University giving
4382 ownership of all his ideas to the school forever, in exchange for
4383 the promise of someday adding "PhD" to his name. It hadn't seemed
4384 like a good idea at the time, but the alternative was the awesomely
4385 craptacular job-market, and so he'd signed it.</p>
4386 <p>But he wasn't going to give this to Stanford. He wasn't going to
4388 <p>He didn't go back to campus after that, but rather plunged into
4389 a succession of virtual worlds, plotting the time in hours it took
4390 him to achieve different tasks, and comparing that to the price of
4391 gold in the black-, grey- and white-market exchanges for in-game
4392 wealth.</p>
4393 <p>Each number slotted in perfectly, just where he'd expected it to
4395 He'd finally found a place where the irrational was rendered
4397 world using his equations.</p>
4398 <p>He decided to do a little fantasy trading: working from his
4399 equations, he'd predicted that the gold in MAD Magazine's
4400 Shlabotnik's Curse was wildly undervalued. It was an incredibly fun
4401 game -- or at least, it satisfied the fun equation -- but for some
4402 reason, game money and elite items were going for peanuts. Sure
4404 imaginary real money.</p>
4406 currencies, spreading out his bets. Three of the four hit the
4407 jackpot, bringing his total up to $200 in imaginary dollars. Now he
4408 decided to spend some real money -- he already knew that he wasn't
4409 going back to campus, so that meant his grad student grant would
4410 vanish shortly. He'd need to pay the rent while he searched for a
4411 buyer for his equations.</p>
4412 <p>He'd already proven to his own satisfaction that he could
4413 predict the movement of game currencies, but now he wanted to
4414 branch out into the weirder areas of game economics: elite items,
4415 the rare prestige items that were insanely difficult to acquire
4416 in-game. Some of them had a certain innate value -- powerful
4417 weapons and armor, ingredients for useful spells -- but others
4418 seemed to hold value by sheer rarity or novelty. Why should a
4419 purple suit of armor cost ten times as much as the red one, given
4420 that both suits of armor had exactly the same play value?</p>
4421 <p>Of course, the purple one was much harder to come by. You had to
4422 either buy it with unimaginable mountains of gold -- so players who
4423 saw your av sporting it would assume that you had played your ass
4424 off to earn for it -- or pull off some fantastic stunt to get it,
4425 like doing a 60-player raid on a nigh-unkillable boss. Like a
4426 designer label on an otherwise unimpressive article of clothing,
4427 these items were valuable because people who saw them assumed they
4428 had to cost a lot or be hard to get, and thought more of the owner
4429 for having them. In other words, they cost a lot because...they
4430 cost a lot!</p>
4431 <p>So far, so good -- but could you use Prikkel's Equations to
4433 thought you could use a formula that combined the fun quotient of
4434 the game and the number of hours needed to get the item, and derive
4435 the "value" of any elite item from purple armor to gold pinstripes
4436 on your spaceship to a banana-cream pie the size of an apartment
4437 block.</p>
4438 <p>Yes, it would work. Connor was sure of it. He started to
4439 calculate the true value of various elite items, casting about for
4440 undervalued items. What he discovered surprised him: while virtual
4441 currency tended to rest pretty close to its real value, plus or
4442 minus five percent, the value-gap in elite items was
4444 hundred percent of their real value -- as predicted by his
4445 Equations, anyway -- and some traded at a pittance.</p>
4446 <p>Never for a moment did he doubt his equations, though a more
4447 humble or more cautious person might have. No, Connor looked at
4448 this paradoxical picture and the first thing that came into his
4450 <p>And he bought. Anything that was undervalued, he bought, in
4451 great storehouses, so much that he had to create alts and
4452 secondaries in many worlds, because his primary characters couldn't
4454 hundred dollars -- two hundred -- three hundred, snapping up
4455 assets, spreadsheeting their nominal value. On paper, he was
4456 incredibly, unspeakably rich. On paper, he could afford to move out
4457 of his one-bedroom apartment that was a little too close to the
4458 poor and scary East Palo Alto for his suburban tastes, buy a
4459 McMansion somewhere on the peninsula, and go into business full
4460 time, spending his days buying magic armor and zeppelins and
4461 flaming hamburgers, and his evening opening checks.</p>
4462 <p>In reality, he was going broke. The theory said that these
4463 assets were wildly undervalued. The marketplace said otherwise.
4464 He'd cornered the market on several kinds of marvellous gew-gaws,
4465 but no one seemed to actually want to buy them from him. He
4466 remembered Jenny Rosen, and all the crushing ways that theory and
4467 reality could sometimes stop communicating with one another.</p>
4468 <p>When the first red bills came in, he stuck them under his
4469 keyboard and kept buying. He didn't need to pay his cell phone
4470 bill. He didn't need his cell-phone to buy magic lizards. His
4471 student loans? He wasn't a student anymore, so he didn't see why he
4472 should worry about them -- they couldn't kick him out of school.
4473 Car payments? Let them repo it (and they did, one night, at 2AM,
4474 and he waved goodbye to the little hunk of junk as the repo man
4475 drove it away, then turned back to his keyboard). Credit card
4476 bills? So long as there was one card that was still good, one card
4477 he could use to pay the subscription fees for his games, that was
4478 all that mattered.</p>
4479 <p>Living close to East Palo Alto had its advantages: for one
4480 thing, there were food-banks there, places where he could line up
4481 with other poor people to get giant bricks of government cheese,
4482 bags of day-old bread, boxes of irregular and unlovely
4483 root-vegetables. He fried all the latter in an all-day starch
4484 festival and froze them, and then he proceeded to live off of
4485 cheese and potato sandwiches, and one morning, he realized that his
4486 entire body and everything that came out of it -- breath, burps,
4487 farts, even his urine -- smelled of cheese sandwiches. He didn't
4488 care. There were ostrich plumes to buy.</p>
4489 <p>Disaster struck: he lost track of which credit card he was
4490 ignoring and had half of his accounts suspended when his monthly
4491 subscription fees bounced. Half his wealth, wiped out. And the
4492 other card wasn't far behind.</p>
4493 <p>He thought he could probably call his parents and grovel a bit
4494 and get a bus ticket to Petaluma, hole up in his folks' basement
4495 and lick his wounds and be yet another small-town failure who came
4496 home with his tail between his legs. He'd need a roll of quarters
4497 and a payphone, of course, because his cellphone was now an inert,
4498 unpaid, debt-haunted brick. Lucky for him, East Palo Alto was the
4499 kind of place where you got lots of people who were too poor even
4500 to go into debt with a cell-phone, people who also needed to use
4501 payphones.</p>
4502 <p>He tucked himself into his grimy bed on a Wednesday morning and
4504 <p>But tomorrow he didn't. And Friday he didn't, though he was now
4505 out of government cheese and wasn't eligible for more until Monday.
4506 He could eat potato sandwiches. He couldn't buy assets anymore, but
4507 he was still tracking them, watching them trade and identifying the
4509 liquidity, a little more cashish.</p>
4510 <p>Saturday, he brushed his teeth, because he remembered to do that
4511 sometimes, and his gums bled and there were sores on the insides of
4513 was 11PM somehow, how did the day shoot past, and they went to bed
4515 <p>And on Sunday -- on Sunday -- on that magical, wonderful Sunday,
4516 on Sunday --</p>
4518 <p>There he was, pricing assets, recording their values in his
4519 spreadsheet, and he realized that the asset he was booking -- a
4520 steampunk leather gasmask adorned with a cluster of huge leathery
4521 ear-trumpets and brass cogs and rivets (no better than a standard
4522 gasmask in the blighted ecotastrophe world that was Rising Seas,
4523 but infinitely cooler) -- had already been entered onto his sheet,
4524 weeks before. Indeed, he'd booked the mask when its real world cash
4529 <p>There was a strange sound. He realized after a moment that it
4530 was his stomach, growling for food. He could flip his gasmasks now,
4531 take the $795 onto one of his PayPal debit cards, and eat like a
4532 king. He might even be able to buy back some of his lost accounts
4533 and recover his assets.</p>
4534 <p>But Connor did not consider doing this, even for a second. He
4535 dashed to the sink and filled up three cooking pots with water and
4536 brought them back to his desk, along with a cup. He filled the cup
4537 and drank it, filled it and drank it, filling his stomach with
4538 water until it stopped demanding to be filled. This was California,
4539 after all, where people paid good money to go to "retreats" for
4541 or two... After all, his Equations predicted that these things
4543 <p>And now the gasmasks were rising. He'd get up, go to the
4544 bathroom -- his kidneys were certainly getting a workout! -- and
4545 return to check the listings on the official exchange sites and the
4546 black-market ones where the gold-farmers hung out. He had a little
4547 formula for calculating the real price, using these two prices as a
4548 kind of beacon. No matter how he calculated it, his gasmasks were
4549 rising.</p>
4550 <p>And yes, some of his other assets were rising, too. A robot dog,
4552 predicted, but he owned a thousand of the things, which meant that
4554 <p>Up and up the prices went, as asset after asset attained
4555 liftoff, and he began to suspect that his asset-buying spree had
4556 coincided with an inter-world depression across all virtual
4557 economies, which accounted for the huge quantities of undervalued
4558 assets he'd found lying around. There was probably an interesting
4559 cause for all those virtual economies slumping at once, but that
4560 was something to study another day. As it was, he was more
4561 interested in the fact that the economies were bouncing back while
4562 he was sitting on mountains of dirt-cheap imaginary gewgaws,
4563 knickknacks, tchotchkes and white-elephants, and that their values
4564 were taking off like crazy.</p>
4565 <p>And now it was time to convert some of those assets to money and
4566 some of that money to food, rent, and paid-off bills. His
4567 collection of articulated tentacles from Nemo's Adventures on the
4568 Ocean Floor were maturing nicely -- he'd bought them at $0.22,
4570 dumped them, and regretted that he'd only bought 400 of them.
4571 Still, he managed to dump them for a handy $1150 profit (by the
4572 time he'd sold 300 of them, the price had started to tip down
4573 again, as the supply of tentacles increased and the demand
4574 diminished).</p>
4575 <p>The money dribbled into his PayPal account and he used that to
4576 order three pizzas, a gallon of orange juice and ten boxes of
4577 salad, paid off his suspended accounts, and sent $400 to his
4578 landlord against the $3500 he owed for two months' rent, along with
4579 a begging letter promising to pay the rest off within a day or
4580 two.</p>
4581 <p>While he waited for the pizzas to arrive, he decided he'd better
4582 shower and shave and try to do something about his hair, which had
4583 started to go into dreadlocks from a month without seeing a
4584 hairbrush. In the end, he just cut the tangles out, and got dressed
4585 in something other than his filthy housecoat for the first time in
4586 a week -- marvelling at how his jeans hungoff his prominent hips,
4587 how his t-shirt clung to his wasted chest, his ribs like a
4588 xylophone through the pale skin. He opened all the windows, aware
4589 of the funk of body-odor and stale computer-filtered air in his
4590 apartment, and realized as he did that it was morning, and thanked
4591 his lucky stars that he lived in a college town, where you could
4593 <p>He barfed after eating the first pizza, getting most of it into
4594 the big pot he'd used to hold his drinking water, big chunks of
4595 crust and pepperoni, reeking of sour stomach-acid. He didn't let
4596 that put him off. His PayPal account was now bulging, up to
4598 juice, figuring it would take a little while to get used to food
4599 again, and not having the time just now to take a long bio-break.
4600 His body would have to wait. He ordered an urn of coffee from a
4601 place that catered corporate meetings, the kind of thing that held
4602 80 cups' worth, and threw in a plate of sliced veggie and some
4603 pastries.</p>
4604 <p>Selling was getting easier now. The economies were bouncing
4605 back, and from the tone of the thank-you messages he got from his
4606 buyers, he understood that there was a kind of reverse-panic in the
4607 air, a sense that players all over the world were starting to worry
4608 that if they didn't buy this junk now, they'd never be able to buy
4609 it, because the prices would go up and up and up forever.</p>
4610 <p>And it was then that he had his second great flash, the second
4611 time that the finger of God reached down and touched his mind, with
4612 a force that shook him out of his chair and set him to pacing his
4613 living room like a tiger, muttering to himself.</p>
4614 <p>Once, when he'd been working on his Masters, he'd participated
4615 in a study for a pal in the economics department. They'd locked
4616 twenty five grad students into a room and given each of them a
4617 poker chip. "You can do whatever you want with those chips," the
4618 experimenter had said. "But you might want to hang onto them. Every
4619 hour, on the hour, I'm going to unlock this door and give you
4620 twenty dollars for each poker chip you're holding. I'll do this
4621 eight times, for the next eight hours. Then I'll unlock the door
4622 for a final time and you can go home and your poker chips will be
4623 worthless -- though you'll be able to keep all the money you've
4625 <p>He'd snorted and rolled his eyes at the other grad students, who
4626 were mostly doing the same. It was going to be a loooong eight
4627 hours. After all, everyone knew what the value of the poker chips
4629 and so on. What would be the point of trading a poker chip to
4630 anyone else for anything less than it was worth?</p>
4631 <p>For the first hour, they all sat around and griped about how
4632 boring it all was. Then, the experimenter walked back into the room
4634 he said, and they dutifully held out their chips, and one by one,
4637 left. The sandwiches were largely untouched. They waited. They
4638 flirted in a bored way, or made small talk. The hour ticked
4639 past.</p>
4641 red hair and mischievous freckles, got out of the beat-up old
4642 orange sofa turned to the prettiest girl in the room, a lovely
4643 Chinese girl with short hair and homemade clothes that reminded
4644 Connor of Jenny's fashion, and said, "Rent me your poker chip for
4646 <p>That cracked the entire room up. It was the perfect
4647 demonstration of the absurdity of sitting around, waiting for the
4648 $20 hour. The Chinese girl laughed, too, and they solemnly traded.
4649 In came the grad student, five minutes later, with another wad of
4650 twenties and a cooler filled with smoothies in tetrapaks. "Poker
4651 chips, please," he said, and the joker held up his two chips. They
4652 all grinned at one another, like they'd gotten one over on the
4653 student, and he grinned a little too and handed two twenties to the
4654 redhead. The Chinese girl held up her extra twenty, showing that
4655 she had the same as everyone else. Once he'd gone, Red gave her
4656 back her chip. She pocketed it and went back to sitting in one of
4657 the dusty old armchairs.</p>
4658 <p>They drank their smoothies. There were murmured conversations,
4659 and it seemed like a lot of people were trading their chips back
4660 and forth. Connor laughed to see this, and he wasn't the only one,
4661 but it was all in fun. Twenty dollars was the going rate for an
4662 hour's rental, after all -- the exactly and perfectly rational
4663 sum.</p>
4665 at the young end of the room, about 22, with a soft, cultured
4666 southern accent. She was also very pretty. He checked the clock on
4669 <p>A five dollar bill was produced and the poker-chip left his
4670 custody. The pretty southern girl talked with another girl, and
4672 began, but the southern girl tipped him a wink, and he fell
4673 silent.</p>
4675 tick past. "I need the chip back," he said, to the southern
4676 girl.</p>
4678 thumb over her shoulder, then she ostentatiously pulled a paperback
4680 buried her nose in it. He felt a complicated emotion: he wanted to
4681 laugh, and he wanted to shout at the girl. He chose laughter,
4682 conscious of all the people watching him, and approached the other
4683 girl, who was tall and solidly built, with a no-nonsense look that
4684 went perfectly with her no-nonsense clothes and haircut.</p>
4690 said.</p>
4692 didn't want to say, <em>I'm also pretty intimidated by anyone who
4693 has the gall to pull a stunt like that.</em> Was it his
4694 imagination, or was the southern girl smiling to herself, a smug
4695 little smile?</p>
4698 himself blushing, losing his cool. He swallowed and tried to put on
4699 a convincing smile. "Yeah, I guess I really should be more careful
4702 try and grab it out of the air, but that might have led to a
4703 wrestling match right here, in front of everyone. How
4704 embarrassing!</p>
4713 <p>She raised one eyebrow at him, hoisting it so high it seemed
4714 like it'd touch her hairline. "Oh really? I think that this chip is
4721 <p>He heard the room chuckle, felt it preparing to holler out a new
4723 wallet.</p>
4724 <p>The girl took his money -- how did he know she would give him
4725 the chip? He felt like an idiot as soon as it had left his hand --
4726 and then the experimenter came in. "Lunch!" he called out, wheeling
4727 in a cart laden with boxed salads, vegetarian sushi, and a couple
4728 buckets of fried chicken. "Poker chips!" The twenties were handed
4729 around.</p>
4730 <p>The girl with his money spent an inordinate amount of time
4731 picking out her lunch, then, finally, turned to him with a look of
4732 fakey surprise, and said, "Oh right, here," and handed him his
4733 chip. The guy with the red hair snickered.</p>
4734 <p>Well, that was the beginning of the game, the thing that turned
4735 the next five hours into one of the most intense, emotional
4736 experiences he'd ever taken part in. Players formed buying
4737 factions, bought out other players, pooled their wealth. Someone
4738 changed the wall clock, sneakily, and then they all spent 30
4739 minutes arguing about who's watch or phone was more accurate, until
4740 the researcher came back in with a handful of twenties.</p>
4741 <p>In the sixth hour of the experiment, Connor suddenly realized
4742 that he was in the minority, an outlier among two great factions:
4743 one of which controlled nearly all the poker chips, the other of
4744 which controlled nearly all the cash. And there was only two hours
4746 <p>And something began to gnaw at his belly. Fear. Envy. Panic. The
4747 certainty that, when the experiment ended, he'd be the only poor
4748 one, the only one without a huge wad of cash. The savvy traders
4749 around them had somehow worked themselves into positions of power
4750 and wealth, while he'd been made tentative by his bad early
4751 experience and had stood pat while everyone else created the
4752 market.</p>
4753 <p>So he set out to buy more chips. Or to sell his chip. He didn't
4754 care which -- he just wanted to be rich.</p>
4755 <p>He wasn't the only one: after the seventh hour, the entire
4756 marketplace erupted in a fury of buying and selling, which made
4758 all worth exactly $20 each, and in just a few minutes, they'd be
4759 absolutely worthless. He kept telling himself this, but he also
4760 found himself bidding, harder and harder, for chips. Luckily, he
4761 wasn't the most frightened person in the room. That turned out to
4762 be the redhead, who went after chips like a crackhead chasing a
4763 rock, losing all the casual cool he'd started with and chasing
4764 chips with money, IOUs.</p>
4766 would still be worth something in an hour. The poker chips were
4767 like soap bubbles, about to pop. But those holding the chips were
4768 the kings and queens of the game, of the market. In seven short
4769 hours, they'd been conditioned to think of the chips as ATMs that
4770 spat out twenties, and even though their rational minds knew
4771 better, their hearts were all telling them to corner the chip.</p>
4773 payout, he sold it to the Fountainhead lady for $35, smirking at
4774 her until she turned around and sold it to the redhead for $50. The
4775 researcher came into the room, handed out his twenties, thanked
4776 them for their time, and sent them on their way.</p>
4777 <p>No one met anyone else's eye as they departed. No one offered
4778 anyone else a phone number or email address or IM. It was as if
4779 they'd all just done something they were ashamed of, like they'd
4780 all taken part in a mob beating or a witch-burning, and now they
4781 just wanted to get away. Far away.</p>
4782 <p>For years, Connor had puzzled over the mania that had seized
4783 that room full of otherwise sane people, that had found a home in
4784 his own heart, had driven him like an addiction. What had brought
4785 him to that shameful place?</p>
4786 <p>Now, as he watched the value of his virtual assets climb and
4787 climb and climb, climb higher than his Equations predicted, higher
4788 than any sane person should be willing to spend on them, he
4790 <p>The emotion that had driven them in that experimenter's lab,
4791 that was driving the unseen bidders around the world: it wasn't
4792 greed.</p>
4794 <p>Greed was predictable: if one slice of pizza is good, it makes
4795 sense that your intuition will tell you that five or ten slices
4796 would be even better.</p>
4797 <p>But envy wasn't about what was good: it was about what someone
4798 else thought was good. It was the devil who whispered in your ear
4799 about your neighbor's car, his salary, his clothes, his girlfriend
4800 -- better than yours, more expensive than yours, more beautiful
4801 than yours. It was the dagger through your heart that could drive
4802 you from happiness to misery in a second without changing a single
4803 thing about your circumstances. It could turn your perfect life
4804 into a perfect mess, just by comparing it to someone who had
4805 more/better/prettier.</p>
4806 <p>Envy is what drove that flurry of buying and selling in the lab.
4807 The redhead, writing IOUs and emptying his wallet: he'd been driven
4808 by the fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were
4809 getting. Connor had sold his chip in the last hour because everyone
4810 else seemed to have gotten rich selling theirs. He could have kept
4811 his chip to himself for eight hours and walked out $160 richer, and
4812 used the time to study, or snooze, or do yoga in the back. But he'd
4813 felt that siren call: <em>Someone else is getting rich, why aren't
4814 you?</em></p>
4816 shooting up in value: his collection of red oxtails (useful in the
4817 preparation of the Revelations spell in Endtimes) should have been
4822 <p>Connor knew it couldn't last. Eventually, there would be a
4823 marketwide realization that these were overpriced -- just as the
4824 market had recently realized that they had been underpriced.
4825 Bidding would cease. The last, most scared person who bought an
4826 overpriced game asset would be unable to flip it, would have to pay
4827 for it.</p>
4828 <p>Rationally, he supposed he should sell at his Equation-predicted
4829 number. Anything higher was just a bet on someone else's
4830 irrationality. But still -- would he really be better off flipping
4832 them for $700? It didn't have to be all or nothing. He divided his
4833 assets up into two groups; the ones he'd bought most cheaply, he
4834 set aside to allow to rise as far as they could. They represented
4835 his lowest-risk inventory, the cheapest losses to absorb. The
4836 remaining assets, he flipped at the second they reached the value
4837 predicted by his Equations.</p>
4838 <p>He quickly sold out of the second group, leaving him to watch
4839 the speculative assets climb higher and higher. He had a dozen
4840 games open on his computer, flipping from one to the next,
4841 monitoring the chatter and their associated websites and
4842 marketplaces, getting a sense for where they were going. Filtering
4843 the tweets and the status messages on the social networks, he felt
4844 a curious sense of familiarity: they were going nuts out there in a
4845 way that was almost identical to the craziness that had swept over
4846 the group in the poker-chip experiment. In their hearts, everyone
4847 knew that peacock plumes and purple armor were vastly overvalued,
4848 but they also knew that some people were getting rich off of them,
4849 and that if the prices kept climbing that they'd never be able to
4850 own one themselves.</p>
4852 course! The important thing wasn't what they needed or loved, it
4853 was the idea that someone else would have something that they
4854 couldn't have.</p>
4855 <p>Connor had made his second great discovery: Envy, not greed, was
4856 the most powerful force in any economy.</p>
4857 <p>(Later, when Connor was writing articles about this for glossy
4858 magazines and travelling all over the world to talk about it,
4859 plenty of people from marketing departments would point out that
4860 they'd known this for generations had spent centuries producing ads
4861 that were aimed squarely at envy's solar plexus. It was true, he
4862 had to admit -- but it was also true that practically every
4863 economist he'd ever met had considered marketing people to be a
4864 bunch of shallow, foolish court jesters with poor math skills and
4865 had therefore largely ignored them)</p>
4866 <p>He watched the envy mount, and tried to get a feel for it all,
4867 to track the sentiments as they bubbled up. It was hard --
4868 practically impossible, honestly -- because it was all spread out
4869 and no one had written the chat programs and the games and the
4870 social networks and the twitsites to track this kind of thing. He
4871 ended up with a dozen browsers open, each with dozens of tabs,
4872 flipping through them in a high speed blur, not reading exactly,
4874 going. He could feel the money and the thoughts and the goods all
4875 balanced on his fingertips, feel their weight shifting back and
4876 forth.</p>
4877 <p>And so he felt it when things started to go wrong. It was a
4878 bunch of subtle indicators, a blip in prices in this market, a
4879 joyous tweet from a player who'd just discovered an easy-to-kill
4880 miniboss with a huge storehouse stuffed with peacock feathers. The
4881 envy bubble was collapsing. Someone had popped it and the air was
4882 whooshing out.</p>
4884 <p>At that moment, his speculative assets were theoretically worth
4887 fear -- fear that everyone else got out while the getting was good,
4888 that the musical chairs had all been filled, that you were the most
4889 scared person in a chain of terrorized people who bought overpriced
4890 junk because someone even more scared would buy it off of you.</p>
4891 <p>But Connor could rise above the fear, fly over it, flip his
4892 assets in a methodical, rapidfire way. He got out with over
4894 priced" assets, and now his PayPal accounts were bulging with
4895 profits and it was all over.</p>
4897 <p>One by one, his game accounts began to shut down, his characters
4898 kicked out, his passwords changed. He was limp with exhaustion, his
4899 hands trembling as he typed and re-typed his passwords. And then he
4900 noticed the new email, from the four companies that controlled the
4901 twelve games he'd been playing: they'd all cut him off for
4902 violating their Terms of Service. Specifically, he'd "Interfered
4903 with the game economy by engaging in play that was apt to cause
4906 resisting the urge to hurl his mouse at the wall. He'd been awake
4907 for over 48 hours now, had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in
4908 a mere weekend, and had been graced with a thunderbolt of
4909 realization about the way that the world's economy ran. Oh, and
4910 he'd validated his Equations.</p>
4912 <p>He didn't even make it into bed. He curled up on the floor, in a
4913 nest of pizza boxes and blankets, and slept for 18 hours, until he
4914 was awoken by the bailiff who came to evict him for being three
4915 months behind on the rent.</p>
4917 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith,
4918 ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few
4919 doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight
4920 and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author
4921 event -- when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the
4922 time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was
4923 unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style
4924 trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own appearances
4925 there.</i></p>
4928 <p>Yasmin didn't see Mala anymore. If you weren't in the gang,
4931 <p>She, too, had had a visit from Big Sister Nor. The woman had
4932 made sense. They did all the work, they made almost none of the
4933 money. Not just in games, either -- her parents had spent their
4934 whole lives toiling for others, and those others had gotten
4935 wealthier and wealthier, and they'd stayed in Dharavi.</p>
4936 <p>Mr Banerjee had paid Mala's army more than any other slum-child
4937 could earn, it was true, and they were getting paid for playing
4938 their game, which had felt like a miracle -- at first. But the more
4939 Yasmin thought about it, the less miraculous it became. Big Sister
4940 Nor showed her pictures, in-game, of the workers whose jobs they'd
4941 been disrupting. Some had been in Indonesia, some had been in
4942 Thailand, some had been in Malaysia, some had been in China. And
4943 lots of them had been in India, in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan, and in
4944 Bangladesh, where her parents had come from. They looked like her.
4945 They looked like her friends.</p>
4947 just trying to help their families, the way Mala's army had. "You
4948 don't have to hurt other workers to survive," Big Sister Nor told
4950 <p>Day after day, Yasmin had snuck into Mrs Dibyendu's Internet
4951 cafe before the Army met -- not at Mrs Dibyendu's, but at a new
4952 Internet shop a little further down the road, near the women's
4953 papadam collective -- and chatted with Big Sister Nor and listened
4954 to her stories of how it could be.</p>
4955 <p>She'd never talked about it with anyone else in the army. As far
4956 as they knew, she was Mala's loyal lieutenant, sturdy and
4957 dependable. She had to enforce discipline in the ranks, which meant
4958 keeping the boys from fighting too much and keeping the girls from
4959 ganging up on one another with hissing, whispered rumors. To them,
4960 she was a stern, formidable fighter, someone to obey
4961 unconditionally in battle. She couldn't approach them to say, "Have
4962 you ever thought about fighting for workers instead of fighting
4966 you. You say it yourself." Her Hindi was strangely accented and
4967 peppered with English and Chinese words. But there were lots of
4968 funny accents in Dharavi, dialects and languages from across Mother
4969 India.</p>
4970 <p>Finally, she agreed to do it. Not to talk to the soldiers, but
4971 to talk to Mala, who had been her friend since Yasmin had found her
4972 carrying a huge sack of rice home from Mr Bhatt's shop with her
4973 little brother, looking lost and scared in the alleys of Dharavi.
4974 She and Mala had been inseparable since then, and Yasmin had always
4975 been able to tell her anything.</p>
4977 as she trekked to the community tap with a water-can in each hand.
4978 She took one can from Mala and took her now free hand and gave it a
4979 sisterly squeeze.</p>
4980 <p>Mala grinned at her and squeezed back, and the smile was like
4981 the old Mala, the Mala from before General Robotwallah had come
4982 into being. "Good morning, Lieutenant." Mala was pretty when she
4983 smiled, her serious eyes filled with mischief, her square small
4984 teeth all on display. When she smiled like this, Yasmin felt like
4985 she had a sister.</p>
4986 <p>They talked in low voices as they waited for the tap, passing
4987 gupshup about their families. Mala's mother had met a man at Mr
4988 Bhatt's factory, a man whose parents had come to Mumbai a
4989 generation before, but from the same village. He'd grown up on
4990 stories about life in the village, and he could listen to Mala's
4991 mamaji tell stories of that promised land all day long. He was
4992 gentle and had a big laugh, and Mala approved. Yasmin's Nani, her
4993 grandmother, had been in touch with a matchmaker in London, and she
4994 was threatening to find Yasmin a husband there, though her parents
4995 were having none of it.</p>
4996 <p>Once they had the water, Yasmin helped Mala carry it back to her
4997 building, but stopped her before they got there, in the lee of an
4998 overhanging chute that workers used to dump bundled cardboard from
4999 a second-story factory down to carriers on the ground. The factory
5000 hadn't started up yet, so it was quiet now.</p>
5002 <p>Mala stiffened and her smile faded. They weren't talking as
5003 sisters anymore. The hard look, the General Robotwallah look, was
5006 against are also workers, like us. Children, like us. That we can
5007 live without hurting others. That we can work with them, with
5009 <p>Mala held up her hand, the General's command for silence in the
5010 war-room. "I've heard it, I've heard it. And what, you think she's
5011 right? You want to give it all up and go back to how we were
5012 before? Back to school, back to work, back to no money and no food
5014 <p>Yasmin didn't remember being afraid all the time, and school
5016 just wanted to talk about this with you. You've saved us, all of us
5017 in the Army, brought us out of misery and into riches and work. But
5018 we work and work for Mr Banerjee, for his bosses, and our parents
5019 work for bosses, and the children we fight in the game work for
5021 more in common with the workers than I do with the bosses. That
5022 maybe, if we all come together, we can demand a better deal from
5025 want to take us on this mission of yours to make <em>friends</em>
5026 with everyone, to join with them to fight Mr Banerjee and the
5027 bosses, Mr Bhatt who owns the factory and the people who own the
5028 game? And how will you fight, little Yasmin? Are you going to upset
5029 the entire world so that it's finally <em>fair</em> and
5031 <p>Yasmin shrank back, but she took a deep breath and looked into
5032 the General's terrible eyes. "What's so wrong with kindness, Mala?
5033 What's so terrible about surviving without harming other
5036 by now, Yasmin? Haven't you figured it out yet? Look around us!"
5037 She waved her water can wildly, nearly clubbing an old woman who
5038 was inching past, bearing her own water cans. "Look around! You
5039 know that there are people all over the world who have fine cars
5040 and fine meals, servants and maids? There are people all over the
5041 world who have <em>toilets</em>, Yasmin, and <em>running
5042 water</em>, and who get to each have their own bedroom with a fine
5043 bed to sleep in! Do you think those people are going to give up
5044 their fine beds and their fine houses and cars for <em>you</em>?
5045 And if they don't give it up, where will it come from? How many
5046 beds and cars are there? Are there enough for all of us? In this
5047 world, Yasmin, there just isn't enough. That means that there are
5048 going to be losers and winners, just like in any game, and you get
5054 people and that they will be kind to us. I think that we can stick
5055 together, like a team, like the army, and we can all work together
5057 <p>Mala laughed, but it sounded forced, and Yasmin thought she saw
5058 tears starting in her friend's eyes. "You know what happens when
5059 you act like that, Yasmin? They find a way to destroy you. To force
5060 you to become an animal. Because <em>they're</em> animals. They
5061 want to win, and if you offer them your hand, they'll slice off
5064 Mala! Our neighbors here, they're not animals. They're people.
5065 They're good people. We have nothing and yet we all cooperate. We
5068 people who would have to look you in the eye if they did you a
5069 dirty trick. But it's a big world. Do you think that Big Sister
5070 Nor's friends in Singapore, in China, in America, in Russia -- do
5071 you think <em>they'll</em> think twice before they destroy you? In
5072 Africa, in --" She waved her arm, taking in all the countries she
5073 didn't know the names of, filled with teeming masses of predatory
5074 workers, ready to take their jobs from them. "Listen: do you really
5075 care so much for Chinese and Russians and all those other people?
5076 Will you take bread out of your mouth to give it to them? For a
5077 bunch of <em>foreigners</em> who wouldn't spit on you if you were
5079 <p>Yasmin thought she knew her friend, but this was like nothing
5080 she'd ever heard from Mala before. Where had all this Indian
5081 patriotism come from? "Mala, it's foreigners who own all the games
5082 we're playing. Who cares if they're foreigners? Isn't the fact that
5083 they're people enough? Didn't you used to rage about the stupid
5086 you deserve, if you don't get it. Fill your belly with deserve.
5091 army, Yasmin. My army! And you're not a part of it anymore. Don't
5094 said. "I understand, General Mala Robotwallah. But your army won't
5095 last forever and our sisterhood might have, if you'd only valued it
5096 more. I'm sorry you are making this decision, General Robotwallah,
5097 but it's yours to make. Your karma." She set down the water-can and
5098 turned on her heel and started away, back stiff, waiting for Mala
5099 to jump on her back and wrestle her into the mud, waiting for her
5100 to run up and hug her and beg her for forgiveness. She got to the
5101 next corner, a narrow laneway between more plastic recycling
5102 factories, and contrived to look back over her shoulder as she
5103 turned, pretending to be dodging to avoid a pair of goats being led
5104 by an old Tamil man.</p>
5105 <p>Mala was standing tall as a soldier, eyes burning into her, and
5106 they transfixed her for a moment, froze her in her tracks, so that
5108 looked back again, the General had departed, her skinny arms
5109 straining with her water-cans.</p>
5112 from the gigantic robot that stood guard over a group of Webbly
5113 gold-farmers who were methodically raiding an old armory, clearing
5114 out the zombies and picking up the cash and weapon-drops that
5115 appeared every time they ran the dungeon. "She may not know it, but
5116 she's on the side of workers. The other side -- the boss's side --
5117 they'll use her services, but they'll never let her into their
5118 camp. The best she can hope for is to be a cherished pet, a
5119 valuable bit of hired muscle. I don't think she'll stay put for
5121 <p>But it wasn't much comfort. In one morning, Yasmin had lost her
5122 best friend and her occupation. She started going to school again,
5123 but she'd fallen behind in the work in the six months she'd been
5124 away and now the master wanted her to stay back a year and sit with
5125 the grade four students, which was embarrassing. She'd always been
5126 a good student and it galled her to sit with the younger kids --
5127 and to make things worse, she was tall for her age and towered over
5128 them. Gradually, she stopped attending the school.</p>
5129 <p>Her parents were outraged, of course. But they'd been outraged
5130 when Yasmin had joined the army, too, and her father had beaten her
5131 for ten days running, while she refused to cry, refused to have her
5132 will broken. In the end, they'd been won over by her stubbornness.
5133 And, of course, by the money she brought home.</p>
5135 <p>Mrs Dibyendu's Internet Cafe was a sad place now that the Army
5136 had moved on. Mala had forced that on Mr Banerjee, and had counted
5137 it as a great show of her strength when she prevailed. But Yasmin
5138 thought she never would have won the argument if Mrs Dibyendu
5139 hadn't been so eager to get rid of the Army.</p>
5140 <p>Yasmin doubted that Mrs Dibyendu had anticipated the effect that
5141 the Army's departure would have on her little shop, though. Once
5142 the Army had gone, every kid in Dharavi had moved with them -- no
5143 one under the age of 30 would set foot in the cafe. No one except
5144 Yasmin, who now sat there all day long, fighting for the
5145 workers.</p>
5147 Sister Nor's lieutenant, and her Hindi was terrible, so they got by
5148 in a broken English that each could barely understand.
5149 Nevertheless, Justbob's play was aggressive and just this side of
5150 reckless, utterly fearless, and she screamed out fearsome
5151 battle-cries in Tamil and Chinese when she played, which made
5152 Yasmin laugh even as the hairs on her arms stood up. Justbob liked
5153 to put Yasmin in charge of strategy while she led the armies of
5154 defenders from around the world who played on their side, defending
5155 workers from people like Mala.</p>
5157 the left flank of a twenty-cruiser unit of rusting battle-cars that
5158 bristled with bolted-on machine-guns and grenade launchers. She
5159 mostly played Mad Max: Autoduel and Civilization these days,
5160 avoiding Zombie Mecha and the other games that Mala and her Army
5161 ruled in. Autoduel was huge now, linked to a reality TV show in
5162 which crazy white people fought each other in the deserts in
5163 Australia with killer cars just like the ones in the game.</p>
5164 <p>The opposing army bought the feint, turning in a wide arc to
5165 present their forward guns to her zippy little motorcycle scouts
5166 who must have looked like easy pickings -- the fast dirt-bikes
5167 couldn't support any real arms or armor, so each driver was limited
5168 to hand-weapons, mostly Uzis on full auto, spraying steel-jacketed
5169 rounds toward the heavily armored snouts of the enemy, who returned
5170 withering fire with tripod-mounted machine-guns and grenades.</p>
5171 <p>But as they turned, they rolled into a double-row of mines
5172 Yasmin had laid by stealth at the start of the battle, and then, as
5173 the cars rocked and slammed into each other and spun out of
5174 control, Justbob's dragoons swept in from the left, and their
5175 splendid battle-wagon came in from the right -- a lumbering
5176 two-storey RV plated with triple-thick armor, pierced with
5177 gun-slits for a battery of flame-throwers and automatic ballistic
5178 weapons, mostly firing depleted uranium rounds that cut through the
5179 enemy cars like butter. It wasn't hard to outrun the battle-wagon,
5180 but there was nowhere for the enemy to go, and a few minutes later,
5181 all that was left of the enemy were oily petrol fires and horribly
5182 mutilated bodies.</p>
5183 <p>Yasmin zoomed out and booted her command-trike around a dune to
5184 where the work-party continued to labor, doing their job,
5185 excavating a buried city full of feral mutants and harvesting its
5186 rich ammo-dumps and art-treasures for the tenth time that day.
5187 Yasmin couldn't really talk to them -- they were from somewhere in
5188 China called Fujian, and besides, they were busy. They'd left their
5189 boss and formed a worker's co-op that split the earnings evenly,
5190 but they'd had to go heavily into debt to buy the computers to do
5191 it, and from what Yasmin understood, their families could be hurt
5192 or even killed if they missed a payment, since they'd had to borrow
5193 the money from gangsters.</p>
5194 <p>It would have been nice if they'd had access to a better source
5195 of money, but it certainly wouldn't be Yasmin. Her Army money had
5196 run out a few weeks after she'd left Mala, and though the IWWWW
5197 paid her a little money to guard union shops, it didn't come to
5198 much, especially compared to the money Mr Banerjee had to throw
5199 around.</p>
5200 <p>At least she wasn't hurting other poor people to survive. The
5201 goons she'd just wiped out would get paid even though they'd lost.
5203 thrill in playing the game, playing it well, getting this army of
5204 people to follow her lead to cooperate and become an unstoppable
5205 weapon.</p>
5207 wasn't on the end of her mic. And there were crashing sounds,
5208 shouts in a language Yasmin didn't speak. Distant screaming.</p>
5209 <p>Yasmin flipped over to Minerva, the social networking site that
5210 the Webblies favored, as she did a thousand times a day. Minerva
5211 had been developed for gamers, and it had all kinds of nice
5212 dashboards that showed you what worlds all your friends were in,
5213 what kind of battles they were fighting and so on. It was easy to
5214 get lost in Minerva, falling into a clicktrance of screencaps of
5215 famous battles, trash-talking between guilds, furious arguments
5216 about the best way to run a level -- and the endless rounds of
5217 gold-farmer bashing. One thing she loved about Minerva was the
5218 auto-translate feature, whose database included all kinds of
5219 international gamer shorthands and slangs, knowing that Kekekekeke
5220 was Korean for LOL and a million other bits of vital dialects. This
5221 made Minerva especially useful for the Webblies' global network of
5222 guilds, worker co-ops, locals and clans.</p>
5224 the world were tweeting about something happening in China, a big
5225 strike from a group of gold-farmers who'd walked out on their boss,
5226 and were now picketing outside of their factories. Players from all
5227 over the world were rushing to a site in Mushroom Kingdom to
5228 blockade some sploit that they'd been mining before they walked
5229 out. Yasmin hadn't ever played Mushroom Kingdom and she wouldn't be
5230 any use there -- you had to know a lot about a world's weapons and
5231 physics and player-types before you could do any damage. But
5232 judging from the status ticker zipping past, there were plenty of
5233 Webblies available on every shard to fill the gap.</p>
5234 <p>She followed the messages as they went by, watched the rallies
5235 and the retreats, the victories and defeats, and waited on
5236 tenterhooks for the battle to end when the GMs discovered what they
5237 were up to and banned everyones' accounts. That was the secret
5238 weapon in all these battles: anyone who snitched to the employees
5239 of the companies that ran the worlds could destroy both teams,
5240 wiping out their accounts and loot in an instant. No one could
5241 afford that -- and no one could afford to fight in battles that
5242 were so massive that they caught the eye of the GMs, either.</p>
5243 <p>And yet, here were the Webblies, hundreds of them, all risking
5244 their accounts and their livelihoods to beat back goons who were
5245 trying to break a strike. Yasmin's blood sang -- this was it, this
5246 was what Big Sister Nor was always talking about: Solidarity! An
5247 injury to one is an injury to all! We're all on the same team --
5248 and we stay together.</p>
5249 <p>There were videos and pictures streaming from the strike, too --
5250 skinny Chinese boys blinking owlishly in the daylight, on busy
5251 streets in a distant land, standing with arms linked in front of
5252 glass doorways, chanting slogans in Chinese. Passers-by goggled at
5253 them, or pointed, or laughed. Mostly they were girls, older than
5254 Yasmin, in their late teens and early twenties, very well-dressed,
5255 with fashionable haircuts and short skirts and ironed blouses and
5256 shining hair. They stared and some of them talked with the boys,
5257 who basked in the attention. Yasmin knew about boys and girls and
5258 the way they made each other act -- hadn't she seen and used that
5259 knowledge when she was Mala's lieutenant?</p>
5260 <p>And now more and more of the girls were joining the boys -- not
5261 exactly joining, but crowding around them, standing in clumps,
5262 talking amongst themselves. And there were police coming in too,
5263 lots of pictures of the police filling in and Yasmin's heart sank.
5264 She could see, with her strategist's eye, how the police positions
5265 would work in planning a rush at the strikers, shutting off their
5266 escape routes, boxing them in and trapping them when the police
5267 swept in.</p>
5268 <p>Now the photos slowed, now the videos stopped. Gloved hands
5269 reached up and snatched away cameras, covering lenses. The last
5270 audiofeed was shouts, angry, scared, hurt --</p>
5271 <p>And now the ticker at the bottom of her screen was going even
5272 crazier, messages from the pickets in China about the police rush,
5273 and there was a moment of unreality as Yasmin felt that she was
5274 reading about an in-game battle again, set in some gameworld
5275 modelled on industrial China, a place that seemed as foreign to her
5276 as Zombie Mecha or Mad Max. But these were real people, skirmishing
5277 with real police, being clubbed with real truncheons. Yasmin's
5278 imagination supplied images of people screaming, writhing,
5279 trampling each other with all the vividness of one of her games. It
5280 was a familiar scene, but instead of zombies, it was young, pale
5281 Chinese boys and beautiful, fashionable Chinese girls caught in the
5282 crush, falling beneath the truncheons.</p>
5283 <p>And then the messages died away, as everyone on the scene fell
5284 silent. The ticker still crawled with other Webblies around the
5285 world, someone saying that the Chinese police could shut down all
5286 the mobile devices in a city or a local area if they wanted. So
5287 maybe the people were still there, still recording and writing it
5288 down. Maybe they hadn't all been arrested and taken away.</p>
5289 <p>Yasmin buried her face in her hands and breathed heavily. Mrs
5290 Dibyendu shouted something at her, maybe concerned. It was
5291 impossible to tell over the song of the blood in her ears and the
5292 hammer of the blood in her chest.</p>
5293 <p>Out there, Webblies all over the world were fighting for a
5294 better deal for poor people, and what did it matter? How could her
5295 solidarity help those people in China? How could they help
5297 Justbob and The Mighty Krang now that she needed them?</p>
5298 <p>She stumbled out into the light, blinking, thinking of those
5299 skinny Chinese boys and the police in their strategic positions
5300 around them. Suddenly, the familiar alleys and lanes of Dharavi
5301 felt sinister and claustrophobic, as though people were watching
5302 her from every angle, getting ready to attack her. And after all,
5303 she was just a girl, a little girl, and not a mighty warrior or a
5304 general.</p>
5305 <p>Her treacherous feet had led her down the road, around a corner,
5306 behind the yard where the women's baking co-op set out their
5307 papadams in the sun, and past the new cafe where Mala and her army
5308 fought. They were in there now, the sound of their boisterous play
5309 floating out on the air like smoke, like the mouthwatering
5310 temptation smells of cooking food.</p>
5311 <p>What were they shouting about? Some battle they'd fought -- a
5312 battle in Mushroom Kingdom. A battle against the Webblies. Of
5313 course. They were the best. Who else would you hire to fight the
5314 armies of the Webblies? She felt a sick lurch in her gut, a feeling
5315 of the earth dropping away from beneath her feet. She was alone
5316 now, truly alone, the enemy of her former friends. There was no one
5317 on her side except for some distant people in a distant land whom
5318 she'd never met -- whom she'd probably never meet.</p>
5319 <p>Dispirited, she turned away and headed for home. Her father was
5320 away for a few days, travelling to Pune to install a floor for
5321 work. He worked in an adhesive tile plant where they printed out
5322 fake stone designs on adhesive-backed squares of durable vinyl that
5323 could be easily laid in the office towers of Pune's industrial
5324 parks. There were always tiles around their home, and Yasmin had
5325 never paid them much attention until she started to game with Mala,
5326 and then she'd noticed with a shock one day that the strange,
5327 angular blurring around the edges of the fine "marble" veins in the
5328 tiles were the same compression smears you got when the game's
5329 graphics started to choke, "JPEG artifacts," they called them in
5330 the message boards. It was as though the little imperfections that
5331 make the games slightly unreal were creeping into the real
5332 world.</p>
5333 <p>That feeling was with her now as she ghosted away from the cafe,
5334 but she was brought back to reality by a tap on her shoulder. She
5335 whirled around, startled, feeling, for some reason, like she was
5336 about to be punched.</p>
5337 <p>But it was Sushant, the tallest boy in Mala's army, who had
5338 never blustered and fought like the other boys, but had stared
5339 intently at his screen as though he wished he could escape into it.
5340 Yasmin found herself staring straight down his eyes, and he waggled
5341 his chin apologetically and smiled shyly at her.</p>
5343 dropped his eyes.</p>
5345 hadn't known she'd been feeling.</p>
5348 from side to side now, and she leaned her face down toward his,
5349 noses just barely apart. She could smell his lunch of spinach bahji
5350 on his breath.</p>
5351 <p>He shrank back, winced. Yasmin realized that he was terrified.
5352 Realized that he had probably risked quite a lot just by coming out
5353 to talk to her. Discipline was everything in Mala's army. Hadn't
5354 Yasmin been in charge of enforcing discipline?</p>
5356 again, Sushant. Have you eaten?" It was a formality, because she
5357 knew he had, but it was what one friend said to another in Dharavi,
5358 in Mumbai -- maybe in all of India, for all Yasmin knew.</p>
5359 <p>He smiled again, a faltering little shy smile. It was
5360 heartbreaking to see. Yasmin realized that she'd never said much to
5361 him when she was Mala's lieutenant. He'd never needed cajoling or
5362 harsh words to get down to work, so she'd practically ignored him.
5363 "I thought I'd come out and say hello because we've all missed you.
5364 I hoped that maybe you and Mala could --" Again he faltered, and
5365 Yasmin felt her own chin jutting out involuntarily in a stubborn,
5366 angry way.</p>
5368 conscious effort to sound calm. "That's final. Does it go well for
5373 <p>She waited for him to say more. The moment stretched. Grownups
5374 bumped past them and she realized that they probably thought they
5375 were courting, being a boy and a girl together. If news of that got
5376 back to her father --</p>
5377 <p>But it didn't matter to her anymore. Her father was off
5378 installing JPEG artifacts in an IT park in Pune. She was out of the
5379 army and out of friends and out of school. What could anything
5380 matter.</p>
5384 send me private messages. At first I ignored them, but lately I've
5385 been on drogue, and I have a lot of time to think. And they sent me
5386 pictures -- the people I was hurting. Kids like you and me, all
5387 over the world. And it made me think." He paused, licked his lips.
5388 "About karma. About hurting people to live. About all the things
5389 that they say. I don't think I want to do this forever. Or that I
5391 <p>Yasmin was at a loss for words. Were there really other people,
5392 right here in Dharavi, right here in Mala's army, who felt as she
5393 did? She'd never imagined such a thing, somehow. But here he
5394 was.</p>
5398 now, we can raise the wages of everyone who works for a living
5402 <p>His shyness receded. He was clearly enjoying having someone to
5403 talk to about this. "It all comes down to owning versus working.
5404 Someone has to do the organizing, I guess -- there wouldn't be a
5405 Zombie Mecha if someone didn't get a lot of people together,
5406 working to make all that code. Someone has to pay the game-masters
5407 and do all of that. I understand that part. It makes sense to me.
5408 My mother works in Mrs Dotta's fabric-dyeing shop. Someone has to
5409 buy the dyes, get the cloth, buy the vats and the tools, arrange to
5410 sell it once it's done, otherwise, my mother wouldn't have a job. I
5411 always stopped there, thinking, all right, if Mrs Dotta does all
5412 that work, and makes a job for my mother, why shouldn't she get
5413 paid for it?</p>
5414 <p>"But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs Dotta's job is
5415 more important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job
5416 without Mrs Dotta's factory, but Mrs Dotta wouldn't have a factory
5417 without mamaji's work, right?" He waggled his chin defiantly.</p>
5419 public with this boy, but she had to admit that it was exciting to
5420 hear this all from him.</p>
5421 <p>"So why should Mrs Dotta have the right to fire my mother, but
5422 my mother not have the right to fire Mrs Dotta? If they depend on
5423 each other, why should one of them always have the power to demand
5424 and the other one always have to ask for favors?"</p>
5425 <p>Yasmin felt his excitement, but she knew that there had to be
5426 more to it than this. "Isn't Mrs Dotta taking all the risk? Doesn't
5427 she have to find the money to start the factory, and doesn't she
5428 lose it if the factory closes?"</p>
5429 <p>"Doesn't mamaji risk losing her job? Doesn't Mamaji risk growing
5430 sick from the fumes and the chemicals in the dyes? There's nothing
5431 eternal or perfect or natural about it! It's just something we all
5432 agreed to -- bosses get to be in charge, instead of just being
5433 another kind of worker who contributes a different kind of
5434 work!"</p>
5435 <p>"And that's what you think you'll get from the Webblies? An end
5436 to bosses?"</p>
5438 I think that it's too much to ask for. But maybe the workers can
5439 get a better deal. That's what Big Sister Nor talks about, isn't
5440 it? Good pay, good places to work, fairness? Not being fired just
5441 because you disagree with the boss?"</p>
5442 <p><em>Or the general</em>, Yasmin thought. Aloud, she said, "So
5443 you'll leave the army? You want to be a Webbly?"</p>
5445 "Eventually. It all keeps going around and around in my mind. I
5446 don't know if I'm ready yet." He risked a look up at her. "I don't
5447 know if I'm as brave as you."</p>
5448 <p>Anger surged through her, hot and irrational. How <em>dare</em>
5450 go on getting rich in Mala's army. He understood <em>so well</em>
5451 what was wrong and what needed to be done. Understood it better
5452 than Yasmin! But he didn't want to give up his comfort and
5453 friendships. That wasn't cowardice, it was <em>greed</em>. He was
5454 too greedy to give it up.</p>
5455 <p>He must have seen this in her face, because he took a step back
5456 and held up his hands. "It's not that I won't do it someday -- but
5457 I don't know what good it would do for me to do this today, on my
5458 own. What would change if I stopped fighting for Mala's army? She's
5459 just one general with one army among hundreds all over the world,
5460 and I'm just one fighter in the army. I --" He faltered. "What's
5461 the sense in giving up so much if it won't make a difference?"</p>
5462 <p>Yasmin's anger boiled in her, ate at her like acid, but she bit
5463 her tongue, because that little voice inside her was saying,
5464 "You're mostly angry because you thought you had a comrade, someone
5465 who'd keep you company, and it turned out that all he wanted to do
5466 was confess to you and have you forgive him. And it was true. She
5467 was far more upset by her loneliness than by his cowardice, or
5468 greed, or whatever it was.</p>
5470 the anger out of her voice by sheer force of will.</p>
5471 <p>She didn't wait for him to raise his eyes, just turned on her
5472 heel and walked and walked and walked, through the familiar alleys
5473 of Dharavi, not going anywhere but trying to escape anyway, like a
5474 chained animal pacing off its patch. She was chained -- chained by
5475 birth and by circumstance. Her family might have been rich. They
5476 might have been high-caste. She might be in another country -- in
5477 America, in China, in Singapore, all the distant lands. But she was
5478 here, and she had no control over that. There was a whole world out
5479 there and this was where fate had put her.</p>
5480 <p>She wouldn't be changing the world. She wouldn't be going to any
5481 of those places. She hadn't even left Dharavi, except once with her
5482 mother, when she took Yasmin and her brothers on a train to see a
5483 beach where it had been hot and sandy and the water had been too
5484 dangerous to swim in, so they'd stood on the shore and then walked
5485 down a road of smart shops where they couldn't afford to shop, and
5486 then they'd waited for the bus again and gone home. Yasmin had seen
5487 the multiverses of the games, but she hadn't even seen Mumbai.</p>
5488 <p>Now where? She was tired and hungry, angry and exhausted. Home?
5489 It was still afternoon, so her mother and brothers were all out
5490 working or in school. That emptiness... It scared her. She wasn't
5491 used to being alone. It wasn't a natural state in Dharavi. She was
5492 very thirsty, the wind was blowing plastic smoke into her eyes and
5493 face, making her nostrils and sinuses and throat raw. Mrs
5494 Dibyendu's cafe would have chai, and Mrs Dibyendu would give her a
5495 cup of it and some computer time on credit, because Mrs Dibyendu
5496 was desperate to save her cafe from bankruptcy now that the army
5497 had abandoned it.</p>
5498 <p>Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew doled her out a cup of chai
5499 grudgingly. He hadn't learned a thing from the savage beating that
5500 Mala had laid on him. He still stood too close, still went out Eve
5501 teasing with his gang of badmashes. Yasmin knew that he would have
5502 loved to take revenge on Mala, and that Mala never went out after
5503 dark without three or four of the biggest boys from the army. It
5504 made her furious. No matter how much Mala had hurt her, she had the
5505 right to go around her home without fearing this idiot. His upper
5506 lip was curled in a permanent sneer, thanks to the scar Mala's feet
5507 had left behind.</p>
5508 <p>She sat down to a computer, logged in. She was sure that the
5509 idiot nephew used all kinds of badware to spy on what they did on
5510 the computers, but she'd bought a login fob from one of the shops
5511 at the edge of Dharavi, and it did magic, logging her in with a
5512 different password every time she sat down, so that her PayPal and
5513 game accounts were all safe.</p>
5514 <p>Mindlessly, she plunged back into her usual routine. Login to
5515 Minerva, check for Webbly protection missions in the worlds she
5516 played. But there were no missions waiting. The Webbly feeds were
5517 all afire with chatter about the strike in Shenzhen, rumors of the
5518 numbers arrested, rumors of shootings. She watched it tick past
5519 helplessly, wondering where all these rumors came from. Everyone
5520 seemed to know something that she didn't know. How did they
5521 know?</p>
5522 <p>A direct message popped up on her screen. It was from a
5523 stranger, but it was someone in the inner Webbly affinity group,
5524 which meant that Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, or Justbob had
5525 manually approved her. Anyone could join the outer Webblies, but
5526 there were very few inner Webblies.</p>
5528 <p>It was a full sentence, with punctuation, and the question was
5529 as daft as you could imagine. It was the kind of message her father
5530 might send. She knew immediately that she was communicating with an
5531 adult, and one who didn't game.</p>
5534 are in Mumbai, correct?</p>
5535 <p>She had a moment's hesitation. This was a very grownup, very
5536 non-gamer way to type. Maybe this was someone working for the other
5537 side? But Mumbai was as huge as the world. "In Mumbai" was only
5541 you.</p>
5544 business. B.S.N. specifically said I must make contact with
5545 you.</p>
5549 <p>She swallowed again. When they'd gone to the beach, her mother
5550 had been very clear on this: <em>Don't tell anyone you are from
5551 Dharavi. For Mumbaikars, Dharavi is like Hell, the place of eternal
5552 torment, and those who dwell here are monsters.</em> This grown up
5553 sounded very proper indeed. Perhaps he would think that Dharavi was
5554 Hell and would leave her be.</p>
5557 <p>There was a long pause. She wondered if he was trying to get in
5558 touch with Big Sister Nor, to tell her that her warrior was a
5559 slum-child, to find someone better to help.</p>
5561 <p>It was a picture of the Dharavi Mosque, tall and imposing,
5562 looming over the whole Muslim quarter.</p>
5565 <p>Another picture. It wasn't the middle-aged man in a suit she'd
5566 been expecting, but a young man, barely older than a teenager,
5567 short gelled hair and a leather jacket, stylish blue-jeans and
5568 black motorcycle boots.</p>
5570 close.</p>
5574 <p>She'd had a phone, when she was in Mala's army. They all had
5575 phones. But it was the first thing to go when she quit the army.
5576 She still had it in a drawer, couldn't bear to sell it, but it
5577 didn't work as a phone anymore, though she sometimes used it as a
5578 calculator (all the games had turned themselves off right after the
5579 service was disconnected, to her disappointment).</p>
5581 then.</p>
5582 <p>Her heart thudded in her chest. Meeting a strange man, going on
5583 a secret errand -- it was the sort of thing that always ended in
5584 terrible tragedy, defilement and murder, in the stories. And an
5585 hour from now would be --</p>
5587 <p>It would be right in the middle of 'Asr, afternoon prayers, and
5588 the Mosque would be mobbed by her father's friends. All it would
5589 take would be for one of them to see her with a strange man, with
5590 gelled hair, a Hindu judging from the rakhi on his wrist, poking
5591 free of the leather jacket. Her father would go
5594 barriers</p>
5595 <p>It would take her an hour to walk there, but it would be
5596 safe.</p>
5597 <p>There was a pause. Then another picture: two boys straddling one
5598 of the huge cement barriers in front of the station. It was where
5599 she and her brothers had waited while their mother queued up for
5600 the tickets.</p>
5604 <p>Another picture of a lovingly polished little bike, a proud
5605 purple gas-tank on its skeletal chromed frame. There were thousands
5606 of these in Dharavi, driven by would-be badmashes who'd saved up a
5607 little money for a pair of wheels.</p>
5609 <p>She handed her cup to idiot nephew, not even seeing the grimace
5610 on his face as she dashed past him, out into the roadway, back home
5611 to change and put some few things in a bag before her mother or
5612 brothers came home. She didn't know where she was going or how long
5613 she'd be away, and the last thing she wanted was to have to explain
5614 this to her mother. She would leave a note, one of her brothers
5615 would read it to her mother. She'd just say, "Away on union
5616 business. Back soon. Love you." And that would have to be enough --
5617 because, after all, it was all she knew.</p>
5618 <p>On the long walk to Mahim Junction station, she alternated
5619 between nervous excitement and nervous dread. This was foolish, to
5620 be sure, but it was also all she had left. If Big Sister Nor
5621 vouched for this man -- chee! she didn't even know his name! --
5622 then who was Yasmin to doubt him?</p>
5623 <p>As she got closer to the edge of Dharavi, the laneways widened
5624 to streets, wide enough for skinny, shoeless boys to play
5625 ditch-cricket in. They shouted things at her, "offending decency,"
5626 as the schoolteacher, Mr Hossain, had always said when the
5627 badmashes gathered outside the school to call things to the girls
5628 as they left the classroom. But she knew how to ignore them, and
5629 besides, she had picked up her brother Abdur's lathi, using it as a
5630 walking stick, having tied a spare hijab underscarf to the top to
5631 make it seem more innocuous. They'd played gymnastics games in the
5632 schoolyard with sticks like lathis, but without the iron binding on
5633 the tip. Still, she felt sure she could swing it fearsomely enough
5634 to scare off any badmash who got in her way on this fateful day. It
5635 was only at the station that she realized she had no idea how they
5636 would carry it on the little scooter.</p>
5637 <p>She'd brought her phone along, just to tell the time with, and
5638 now an hour had gone by and there was no sign of the man with the
5639 short gelled hair. Another twenty minutes ticked past. She was used
5640 to this: nothing in Dharavi ran on precise time except for the
5641 calls to prayer from the mosque, the rooster crows in the morning,
5642 and the calls to muster in Mala's army, which were always precisely
5643 timed, with fierce discipline for stragglers who showed up late for
5644 battle.</p>
5645 <p>Trains came in and trains came out. She saw some men she
5646 recognized: friends of her father who worked in Mumbai proper, who
5647 would have recognized her if she hadn't been wearing her hijab
5648 pulled up to her nose and pinned there. She was acutely aware of
5649 the Hindu boys' stare. Hindus and Muslims didn't get along,
5650 officially. Unofficially, of course, she knew as many Hindus as
5651 Muslims in Dharavi, in the army, in school. But on the impersonal,
5653 -- "real" people from Mumbai. Her parents insisted on calling the
5654 city "Bombay," the old name of the city from before the fierce
5655 Hindu nationalists had changed it, proclaiming that India was for
5656 Hindus and Hindus alone. She and her people could go back to
5657 Bangladesh, to Pakistan, to one of the Muslim strongholds where
5658 they were in the majority, and leave India to the real Indians.</p>
5659 <p>Mostly, it didn't touch her, because mostly, she only met people
5660 who knew her and whom she knew -- or people who were entirely
5661 virtual and who cared more about whether she was an Orc or a Fire
5662 Elf than if she was a Muslim. But here, on the edge of the known
5663 world, she was a girl in a hijab, an eye-slit and a long, modest
5665 her.</p>
5666 <p>She kept herself amused by thinking about how she would attack
5667 or defend the station using a variety of games' weapons-systems. If
5668 they were all zombies, she'd array the mechas here, here and here,
5669 using the railway bed as a channel to lure combatants into
5670 flamethrower range. If they were fighting on motorcycles, she'd
5671 circle that way with her cars, this way with her motorcycles, and
5672 pull the death-lorry in there. It brought a smile to her face,
5673 safely hidden behind the hijab.</p>
5674 <p>And here was the man, pulling into the lot on his green
5675 motorcycle, wiping the road dust off his glasses with his
5676 shirt-tail before tucking it back into his jacket. He looked around
5677 nervously at the people outside the station -- working people
5678 streaming back and forth, badmashes and beggars loitering and
5679 sauntering and getting in everyone's way. Several beggars were
5680 headed toward him now, children with their hands outstretched, some
5681 of them carrying smaller children on their hips. Even over the
5682 crowd noises, Yasmin could hear their sad, practiced cries.</p>
5683 <p>She reached under her chin and checked the pin holding her hijab
5684 in place, then approached the rider, moving through the beggars as
5685 though they weren't there. They shied away from her lathi like
5686 flies dodging a raised hand. He was so disconcerted by the beggars
5687 that it took him a minute to notice the veiled young girl standing
5688 in front of him, clutching a meter-and-a-half long stick bound in
5689 iron.</p>
5691 very handsome, with straight teeth and a neatly trimmed little
5692 mustache and a strong nose and chin.</p>
5695 think we can attach that to the side of the bike. And I brought you
5697 <p>She nodded again. She didn't know what to say. He moved to the
5698 locked carrier-box on the back of his bike, pushing away a little
5699 beggar-boy who'd been fingering the lock, and pushed his thumb into
5700 the locking mechanism's print-reader. It sprang open and he fished
5701 inside, coming up with a helmet that looked like something out of a
5702 manga cartoon, streamlined, with intricate designs etched into its
5703 surface in hot yellow and pink. On the front of the helmet was a
5704 sticker depicting Sai Baba, the saint that both Muslims and Hindus
5705 agreed upon. Yasmin thought this was a good omen -- even if he was
5706 a Hindu boy, he'd brought her a helmet that she could wear without
5707 defiling Islam.</p>
5708 <p>She took the manga Sai Baba helmet from him, noting that the
5709 sticker was holographic and that Sai Baba turned to look her
5710 straight in the eye as she hefted it. It was heavier than it
5711 looked, with thick padding inside. No one in Dharavi wore
5712 crash-helmets on motorcycles -- and the boy wasn't wearing one,
5713 either. But as she contemplated the narrow saddle, she thought
5714 about falling off at 70 kilometers per hour on some Mumbai road and
5715 decided that she was glad he'd brought it. So she nodded a third
5716 time and lifted it over her head. It went on slowly, her head
5717 pushing its way in like a hand caught in a tangled sleeve, pushing
5718 to displace the fabric, which slowly gave way. Then she was inside
5719 it, and the sounds around her were dead and distant, the sights all
5720 tinted yellow through the one-way mirrored eye-visor. She felt
5721 tentatively at her head -- which felt like it would loll forward
5722 under the helmet's weight if she turned her face too quickly -- and
5723 found the visor's catch and lifted it up. The sound got a little
5724 brighter and sharper.</p>
5725 <p>Meanwhile, the boy had been affixing the lathi along the bike's
5726 length, to the amusement of the beggar children, who offered
5727 laughing advice and mockery. He had a handful of bungee cords that
5728 he'd extracted from the bike's box, and he wrapped them again and
5729 again around the pole, finding places on the bike's skeletal chrome
5730 to fix the hooks, testing the handlebars to ensure that he could
5731 still steer. At last he grunted, stood, dusted his hands off on his
5732 jeans and turned to her.</p>
5737 <p>She nodded as though she knew where that was. In a way, of
5738 course, she did: there were plenty of movies about, well, the
5740 place to be, glamorous and bustling. But most of those movies had
5741 been about how Andheri's sun had set, with all the big filmi
5742 production places moving away. What would it be like today?</p>
5745 sure of that. And some union people can come back with us and make
5748 <p>He stared at her for a moment, his jaw hanging open in surprise.
5749 "OK, I didn't think of everything! I'm Ashok. Do you know how to
5751 <p>She shook her head. She'd seen plenty of people riding on
5752 motorcycles and scooters, in twos and even in threes and fours --
5753 sometimes a whole family, with children on mothers' laps on the
5754 back -- but she'd never gotten on one. Standing next to it now, it
5756 that was easier to fall off of than to stay on.</p>
5759 side-saddle." He climbed up on the bike's saddle and demonstrated,
5760 keeping his knees together and pressed against the bike's side,
5761 twisting his body around. "You'll have to hold onto me very tight."
5762 He grinned his movie-star grin.</p>
5763 <p>Yasmin realized what a mistake this had all been. This strange
5764 man. His motorcycle. Going off to Mumbai, away from Dharavi, to a
5765 strange place, for a strange reason. And he had her lathi, which
5766 wasn't even hers, and if she turned on her heel and went back into
5767 Dharavi, she'd still have to explain the missing lathi to her
5768 brother, and the note to her mother. And now she was going to get
5769 killed in Mumbai traffic with a total stranger on the way to
5770 Bollywood's favorite ghost-town.</p>
5771 <p>But as hopeless as it was, it wasn't as hopeless as being alone,
5772 not in the army, not in school, not in the Webblies. Not as
5773 hopeless as being poor Yasmin, the Dharavi girl, born in Dharavi,
5774 bred in Dharavi.</p>
5775 <p>She levered herself sidesaddle onto the bike and Ashok climbed
5776 over the saddle and sat down, his leather jacket pressed up against
5777 her side. She tried to square her hips to face forward, and found
5778 herself in such a precarious position that she nearly tipped over
5779 backwards.</p>
5781 jeered and made rude gestures. Shutting her eyes, she put her arms
5782 around his waist, feeling how skinny he was under that fancy
5783 jacket, and interlaced her fingers around his stomach. It was less
5784 precarious now, but she still felt as though she would fall at any
5785 second -- and they weren't even moving yet!</p>
5786 <p>Ashok kicked back the bike's stand and revved the engine. A
5787 cloud of biodiesel exhaust escaped from the tailpipe, smelling like
5788 old cooking oil -- it probably started out as old cooking oil, of
5789 course -- spicy and stale. Yasmin's stomach gurgled and she blushed
5790 beneath her hijab, sure he could feel the churning of her empty
5794 Stop!" in his ear. She had never been more afraid in all her life.
5795 She forced her fingers to unlace themselves and drew her trembling
5796 hands back into her lap.</p>
5802 <p>Yasmin patted her thighs miserably, then she hiked up her dress,
5803 revealing the salwar -- loose trousers -- she wore beneath it.
5805 legs, so they don't get caught in the wheel. He flipped open his
5806 cargo box again and passed her two plastic zip-strips which she
5807 used to tie up each ankle.</p>
5809 her arms around his waist again. He smelled of his hair gel and of
5810 leather, and of sweat from the road. She felt like she'd gone to
5811 another planet now, even though she could still see Mahim Junction
5812 behind her. She squeezed his waist for dear life as he revved the
5813 engine and maneuvered the bike back into traffic.</p>
5814 <p>She realized that he'd been taking it easy for her sake before,
5815 driving relatively slowly and evenly in deference to her precarious
5816 position. Now that she was more secure, he drove like the baddest
5817 badmash she'd ever seen in any action film. He gunned the little
5818 bike up the edge of the ditch, beside the jerky, slow traffic,
5819 always on the brink of tipping into the stinking ditch, being
5820 killed by a swerving driver or a door opening suddenly so the
5821 driver could spit out a stream of betel; or running over one of the
5822 beggars who lined the road's edge, tapping on the windows and
5823 making sad faces at the trapped motorists.</p>
5824 <p>She'd piloted a million virtual vehicles in her career as a
5825 gamer, at high speeds, through dangerous terrain. It wasn't
5826 remotely the same, even with the helmet's reality-filtering padding
5827 and visor. She could hear her own whimpering in her head. Every
5828 nerve in her body was screaming <em>Get off this thing while you
5829 can</em>! But her rational mind kept on insisting that this boy
5830 clearly rode his bike through Mumbai every day and managed to
5831 survive.</p>
5832 <p>And besides, there was so much Mumbai to see as they sped down
5833 the road, and that was much more interesting than worrying about
5834 imminent death. As they sped down the causeway, they neared a huge
5835 suspension bridge, eight lanes wide, all white concrete and steel
5836 cables, proudly proclaimed to be the Bandra-Worli Sea Link by an
5837 intricate sign in Hindi and English. They sped up the ramp to it,
5838 riding close to the steel girders that lined the bridge's edge, and
5839 beneath them, the sea sparkled blue and seemed so close that she
5840 could reach down and skim her fingertips in the waves. The air
5841 smelled of salt and the sea, the choking traffic fumes whipped away
5842 by a wind that ruffled her dress and trousers, pasting them to her
5843 body. Her fear ebbed away as they crossed the bridge, and did not
5844 come back as they rolled off of it, back into Mumbai, back into the
5845 streets all choked with traffic and people. They swerved around
5846 saddhus, naked holy men covered in paint. They swerved around
5847 dabbahwallahs, men who delivered home-cooked lunches from wives to
5848 husbands all over the city, in tiffin pails arranged in huge wooden
5849 frames, balanced upon their heads.</p>
5850 <p>She knew they were almost at Andheri when they passed the
5851 gigantic Infinity Mall, and then turned alongside a high, ancient
5852 brick wall that ran for hundreds of meters, fencing in a huge
5853 estate that had to be one of the film studios. Outside the wall,
5854 along the drainage ditch, was a bustling market of hawkers,
5855 open-air restaurants, beggars, craftsmen, and, among them,
5856 film-makers in smart suits with dark glasses, clutching mobile
5857 phones as they picked their way along. The bike swerved through all
5858 this, avoiding a long line of expensive, spotless dark cars that
5859 ran the length of the wall in an endless queue to pass through the
5860 security checkpoint at the gatehouse.</p>
5861 <p>She took all this in as they sped down the length of the wall,
5862 cornering sharply at the end, following it along to a much narrower
5863 gate. Two guards with rifles attached to their belts by chains
5864 stood before it, and they hefted their guns as Ashok drew nearer.
5865 Then he drew closer still and the guards recognized him and stepped
5866 away, revealing the narrow gap in the wall that was barely wide
5867 enough for the bike to pass through, though Ashok took it at speed,
5868 and Yasmin gasped when her billowing sleeves rasped against the
5869 ancient, pitted brick.</p>
5870 <p>Passing through the gate was like passing into another world.
5871 Before them, the studios spread forever, the farthest edge lost in
5872 the pollution haze. Roads and pathways mazed the grounds, detouring
5873 around the biggest buildings Yasmin had ever seen, huge buildings
5874 that looked like train stations or airplane hangars from war films.
5875 The grounds were all manicured grass, orderly fruit trees, and
5876 workmen going back and forth on mysterious errands with toolbelts
5877 jangling around their waists, carrying huge bundles of pipe and
5878 lumber and cloth.</p>
5879 <p>Ashok drove them past the hangars -- those must be the
5880 sound-stages where they shot the movies, there was a good
5881 studio-map in Zombie Mecha where you could fight zombies through a
5882 series of wood-backed film scenery -- and toward a series of
5883 low-slung trailers that hugged the wall to their left. Each one had
5884 a miniature fence in front of it, and a small flower-garden, so
5885 neat and tidy that at first she thought the flowers must be
5886 fake.</p>
5887 <p>Finally, Ashok slowed the bike and then coasted to a stop,
5888 killing the engine. The engine noise still hummed in her ears,
5889 though, and she continued to feel the thrum of the bike in her legs
5890 and bum. She unlocked her hands from around Ashok's waist, prying
5891 her fingers apart, and stepped off the bike, catching her toe on
5892 the lathi and falling to the grass. Blushing, she got to her feet,
5893 unsteady but upright.</p>
5895 <p>She wanted to say something sharp and cutting in response, but
5896 nothing came. The words had been beaten out of her by the ride.
5897 Suddenly, she felt as though she could hardly breathe, and the
5898 fabric of her hijab seemed filled with road dust that it released
5899 into her nose and mouth with every inhalation. She carefully undid
5900 the pin and moved her hijab so that it no longer covered her
5901 face.</p>
5902 <p>Ashok stared at her in horror. "You -- you're just a little
5903 girl!"</p>
5905 -- there were girls my age with husbands and babies in Dharavi! I'm
5906 a skilled fighter and commander. I'm no little girl!"</p>
5907 <p>He blushed a purple color and clasped his hands at his chest
5910 you're, well, you're a child! Your parents will be mad with
5911 worry!"</p>
5912 <p>She gave him her best steely glare, the one she used to make the
5913 boys in the Army behave when they were getting too, well,
5914 <em>boyish</em>. "I left them a note. And I'll be back tonight. And
5915 I'm old enough to worry about this sort of thing on my own account,
5916 thank you very much. Now, you've dragged me halfway across India
5917 for some mysterious purpose, and I'm sure that it wasn't just to
5918 have me stand around here talking about my family life."</p>
5919 <p>He recovered himself and grinned again. "Sorry, sorry. Right,
5920 we're here for a meeting. It's important. The Webblies have never
5921 had much contact with real unions, but now that Nor is in trouble,
5922 she's asked me to take up her cause with the unions here. There's
5923 meetings like this happening all over the world today -- in China
5924 and Indonesia, in Pakistan and Mexico and Guatemala. The people
5925 waiting for us inside -- they're labor leaders, representatives of
5926 the garment-workers' union, the steelworkers' union, even the
5927 Transport and Dock Workers' union -- the biggest unions in Mumbai.
5928 With their support, the Webblies can have access to money, warm
5929 bodies for picket lines, influence and power. But they don't know
5930 anything about what you do -- they've never played a game. They
5931 think that the Internet is for email and pornography. So you're
5933 <p>She swallowed a few times. There was so much in all that she
5934 didn't understand -- and what she <em>did</em> understand, she
5935 wasn't very happy about. For example, this <em>real</em> union
5936 business -- the Webblies were a real union! But there was more
5937 pressing business than her irritation, for example: "What do you
5939 <p>He shook his head ruefully. "Haven't got the patience for it.
5940 I'm an economist. Labor economist. I've spent a lot of time with
5941 BSN, working out strategy with her."</p>
5942 <p>She wasn't exactly certain what an economist was, but she also
5943 felt that admitting this might further undermine her credibility
5945 said.</p>
5947 attack us."</p>
5950 <p>That did it. She could talk about the problems in Dharavi.
5951 <em>She</em> was a Dharavi girl. But this stranger had no business
5952 saying bad things about her home. "I need my lathi in case I have
5953 to beat your brains out with it for rubbishing my home," she said,
5954 between gritted teeth.</p>
5956 unravel the bungee cords from around the lathi. She also went down
5957 on one knee and began to worry at the zipstraps that tied up her
5958 trouser legs at the ankles, but they only went in one direction,
5959 and once they'd locked tight, they wouldn't loosen. Ashok looked up
5960 from the bungee cords.</p>
5962 fished in his trouser-pocket and came up with a wicked flick-knife
5963 that he snapped open. He took gentle hold of the strap on her right
5964 ankle and slid the blade between it and her leg. She held her
5965 breath as he sliced through the strap, then flicked the knife
5966 closed, turned to her other leg, and, grasping her ankle, cut away
5967 the other strap. He looked up at her. Their eyes met, then she
5968 looked away.</p>
5970 lathi. She gripped it with numb fingers, nearly dropped it, gripped
5971 it.</p>
5973 don't know anything about you or what you do. They are a little,
5974 you know, old fashioned." He smiled and seemed to be remembering
5975 something. "Very old fashioned, in some cases. And they're not very
5976 good with children. Young people, I mean." He held up his hands as
5979 <p>Yasmin considered this for a moment. Of course, she didn't want
5980 to cover her face. She wanted to just go in as herself. Why
5981 shouldn't she be able to? But wearing the hijab had some
5982 advantages, and one was that no one would ask you why you were
5983 covering your face. Ashok had clearly believed she was much older
5984 until she'd undraped it.</p>
5985 <p>Wordlessly, she unpinned the fabric, brought it across her face,
5986 and repinned it. He gave her a happy thumbs up and said, "All
5987 right! They're good people, you know. Very good people. They want
5988 to be on our side." He swallowed, thought some, rocked his chin
5990 <p>He marched to the door, which was made of heavy metal screen
5991 over glass, and opened it, then gestured inside with a grand sweep
5992 of his arm. Trying to look as dignified as possible, she stepped
5993 into the gloom of the trailer, where it was cool and smelled of
5994 betel and chai and bleach, and where a lazy ceiling fan beat the
5995 air, trailing long snot-trails of dust.</p>
5996 <p>This was what she noticed first, and not the people sitting
5997 around the room on sofas and easy-chairs. Those people were sunk
5998 deep into their chairs and sitting silently, their eyes lost in
5999 shadow. But after a moment, they began to shift minutely, staring
6000 at her. Ashok entered behind her and said, "Hello! Hello! I'm glad
6001 you could all make it!"</p>
6002 <p>And then they stood, and they were all much older than her, much
6003 older than Ashok. The youngest was her mother's age, and he was fat
6004 and sleek and had great jowls and short hair in a fringe around his
6005 ears. There were three others, another man in kurta pyjamas with a
6006 Muslim skull cap and two very old women in sarees that showed the
6007 wrinkled skin on their bellies.</p>
6008 <p>Ashok introduced them around, Mr Phadkar of the steelworkers'
6009 union, Mr Honnenahalli of the transport and dock workers' union,
6010 and Mrs Rukmini and Mrs Muthappa, both from the garment workers'
6011 union. "These good people are interested in Big Sister Nor's work
6012 and so she asked me to bring you round to talk to them. Ladies and
6013 gentlemen, this is Yasmin, a trusted activist within the IWWWW
6014 organization. She is here to answer your questions."</p>
6015 <p>They all greeted her politely, but their smiles never reached
6016 their eyes. Ashok busied himself in a corner where there was a chai
6017 pot and cups, pouring out masala chai for everyone and bringing it
6019 all talk."</p>
6020 <p>Yasmin's throat was terribly dry, but she was veiled, and so she
6021 passed on the chai, but quickly regretted it as the talk began.</p>
6022 <p>"I understand that your 'work' is just playing games, is that
6023 right?" said Mr Honnenahalli, the fat man who worked with the
6024 Transport and Dock Workers' union.</p>
6026 <p>"And so you organize people who play games. How are they
6027 workers? They sound like players to me. In the transport trade, we
6028 work."</p>
6029 <p>Yasmin rocked her chin from side to side and was glad of her
6030 veil. She remembered her talk with Sushant. "We work the way anyone
6031 works, I suppose. We have a boss who asks us to do work, and he
6032 gets rich from our work."</p>
6033 <p>That made the two old aunties smile, and though it was dark in
6034 the room, she thought it was a genuine one.</p>
6036 these games. How are they played?"</p>
6037 <p>So she told them, starting with Zombie Mecha, aided by the fact
6038 that Mr Phadkar had actually seen one of the many films based on
6039 the game. But as she delved into character classes, leveling up,
6040 unlocking achievements, and so on, she saw that she was losing
6041 them.</p>
6043 she had spoken for a good thirty minutes, and her throat was so dry
6044 it felt like she had eaten a mouthful of sand and salt. "Who plays
6045 these games? Who has time?"</p>
6046 <p>This was something she often heard from her father, and so she
6047 told Mr Honnenahalli what she always told him. "Millions of people,
6048 rich and poor, men and women, boys and girls, all over the world.
6049 They spend crores and crores of rupees, and thousands of hours.
6050 It's a game, yes, but it's also as complicated as life in some
6051 ways."</p>
6052 <p>Mr Honnenahalli twisted his face up into a sour lemon
6054 don't just --" He flapped a hand, miming some kind of pointless
6056 <p>She felt her cheeks coloring and was glad again of the veil.
6058 Mr Honnenahalli gave him a hostile look, but he nodded. "'Pressing
6059 buttons and playing make believe' describes several important
6060 sectors of the economy, not least the entire financial industry.
6061 What is banking, if not pressing buttons and asking everyone to
6062 make believe that the outcomes have value?"</p>
6063 <p>The old aunties smiled and Mr Honnenahalli grunted. "You're a
6064 clever bugger, Ashok. You can always be clever, but clever doesn't
6065 feed people or get them a fair deal from their employers."</p>
6066 <p>Ashok nodded as though this point had never occurred to him,
6067 though Yasmin was pretty certain from his smile that he'd expected
6069 working in this industry, and it turns over 500 crore rupees every
6070 year. It's averaging six percent quarterly growth. And eight of the
6071 20 largest economies in the world are not countries, they're games,
6072 issuing their own currency, running their own fiscal policies, and
6073 setting their own labor laws."</p>
6074 <p>Mr Honnenahalli scowled, making his jowls wobble, and raised his
6077 their worlds without their permission, that they have absolute
6078 power to set wages, hire and fire, that they can exile you if they
6079 don't like you or for any other reason, and that anyone caught
6080 violating the rules can be stripped of all virtual property and
6081 expelled without access to a trial, a judge, or elected
6082 officials."</p>
6083 <p>That got their attention. Yasmin filed away that description.
6084 She'd heard Big Sister Nor say similar things, but this was better
6085 put than any previous rendition. And there was no denying its
6086 effect on the room -- they jolted as if they'd been shocked and all
6087 opened their mouths to say something, then closed them.</p>
6088 <p>Finally, one of the aunties said, "Tell me, you say that nine
6089 million people work in these places: where? Bangalore? Pune?
6090 Kolkata?" These were the old IT cities, where the phone banks and
6091 the technology companies were.</p>
6093 He looked at Yasmin, clearly waiting for her to say something.</p>
6095 their noses all wrinkle up a little, did they all subtly shift
6096 their weight away from her, as though to escape the shit-smell of a
6097 Dharavi girl?</p>
6099 work here in India. The majority are in China, or Indonesia, or
6100 Vietnam. Some are in South America, some are in the United States.
6101 Wherever there is IT, there are people who work in the games."</p>
6103 interesting, Ashok, but what do we have to do with China? We're not
6104 in China."</p>
6106 though explaining something to a child. "The game is everywhere.
6107 The players are all in the same place."</p>
6108 <p>Mr Phadkar said, "You don't understand, sister. Workers in these
6109 places compete with our workers. The big companies go wherever the
6110 work is cheapest and most unorganized. Our members lose jobs to
6111 these people, because they don't have the self-respect to stand up
6112 for a fair wage. We can't compete with the Chinese or the
6113 Indonesians or the Vietnamese -- even the beggars here expect
6114 better wages than they command!"</p>
6115 <p>Mr Honnenahalli patted his belly and nodded. "We are Indian
6116 workers. We represent them. These workers, what happens to them --
6117 it's none of our affair."</p>
6118 <p>Ashok nodded. "Well, that's fine for your unions and your
6119 members. But the union that Yasmin works for --"</p>
6120 <p>Mr Honnenahalli snorted, and his jowls shook. "It's not a
6122 <p>"It's tens of thousands of organized workers in solidarity with
6123 one another," Ashok said, mildly, as though he was a teacher
6125 they're already organized in guilds. That's practically unions
6126 already. You worry that union jobs in India might become non-union
6127 jobs in Vietnam -- well, here's how you can organize the workers in
6128 Vietnam, too! The companies are multinational -- why should labor
6129 still stick to borders? What does a border mean, anyway?"</p>
6131 borders, sonny. You can sit there, with your college education, and
6132 talk about how borders don't matter, but all that means is that
6133 you're totally out of touch with the average Indian worker. Indian
6134 workers want Indian jobs, not jobs for Chinese or what-have-you.
6135 Let the Chinese organize the Chinese."</p>
6137 right now! A whole factory walked out, and the police beat them
6138 down. And I helped them with their picket line!"</p>
6139 <p>Mr Honnenahalli prepared to bluster some more, but one of the
6140 old aunties laid a frail hand on his forearm. "How did you help
6141 with a picket-line in China from Dharavi, daughter?"</p>
6142 <p>And so Yasmin told them the story of the battle of Mushroom
6143 Kingdom, and the story of the battle of Shenzhen, and what she'd
6144 seen and heard.</p>
6146 strategy, no organization. Doomed. Those workers may never see the
6147 light of day again."</p>
6149 like Yasmin and her group. You want to see something workers are
6150 prepared to fight for? You need to get to an internet cafe and see.
6151 See who is out of touch with workers. You can talk all you want
6152 about 'Indian workers,' but until you find solidarity with
6155 schoolmasterish cool. "Those workers got bad treatment from their
6156 employer so they went out. Their jobs can just be moved -- to
6157 Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Dharavi -- and their strike broken. Can't
6159 bosses</em>! For a factory owner, all places are the same, and it's
6160 no difference whether the shirts are sewn here or there, so long as
6161 they can be loaded onto a shipping container when it's done. But
6162 now, for us, all places are the same too! We can go anywhere just
6163 by sitting down at a computer. For forty years, things have gotten
6164 harder and harder for workers -- now it's time to change that."</p>
6165 <p>Yasmin felt herself grinning beneath the veil. That's it, Ashok,
6166 give it to him! But then she saw the faces of the old people in the
6167 room: stony and heartless.</p>
6169 a beautiful vision. But my workers don't have computers. They don't
6170 go to Internet cafes. They dye clothing all day. When their jobs go
6171 abroad, they can't chase them with your computers."</p>
6173 beauty of it. The ones who work in games, we can go anywhere,
6174 organize anywhere, and wherever your workers are, we are too! We
6175 can go anywhere, no one can keep us out. We can organize dyers
6176 anywhere, through the gamers."</p>
6177 <p>Mr Honnenahalli nodded. "I thought so. And when this is all
6178 done, the Webblies organize all the workers in the world, and our
6179 unions, what happens to them? They melt away? Or they're absorbed
6180 by you? Oh yes, I understand very well. A very neat deal all
6181 around. You certainly do play games over there at the
6182 Webblies."</p>
6183 <p>Ashok and Yasmin both started to speak at once, then both
6186 <p>Mr Honnenahalli said, "Perhaps you don't, but perhaps someone
6187 else does. Can you speak for everyone? You say you've never met
6188 this Big Sister Nor of yours, nor her lieutenants, the Mighty
6189 Whatever and Justbob."</p>
6191 <p>"Oh, certainly. In the game. What is the old joke from America?
6192 On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Perhaps these friends
6193 of yours are old men or little children. Perhaps they're in the
6194 next Internet cafe in Dharavi. The Internet is full of lies and
6195 tricks and filth, little sister --" Her back stiffened. It was one
6196 thing to be called 'sister,' but 'little sister' wasn't friendly.
6197 It was a dismissal. "And who's to say you haven't fallen for one of
6198 these tricks?"</p>
6199 <p>Ashok held up a hand. "Perhaps this is all a dream, then.
6200 Perhaps you are all figments of my imagination. Why should we
6201 believe in anything, if this is the standard all must rise to? I've
6202 spoken to Big Sister Nor many times, and to many other members of
6203 the IWWWW around the world. You represent two million construction
6207 were very kind to come and visit with us, Ashok, and you, too,
6208 Yasmin. It was very courteous for you to tell us what you were up
6209 to. Thank you."</p>
6212 strike, and our executive cell is offline and missing --" Yasmin
6213 turned her head at this. What did that mean? "And we need help: a
6214 strike fund, administrative support, legal assistance --"</p>
6217 charter doesn't allow us to intervene with other unions --
6218 especially not the sort of organization you represent."</p>
6221 <p>Ashok went to the kettle and set about making more chai. "Well,
6222 I'm sorry to have wasted your time," he said. "I'm sure we'll
6223 figure something out."</p>
6224 <p>They all stared at one another, then Mr Honnenahalli stood with
6225 a wheeze, picking up an overstuffed briefcase at his feet and
6226 leaving the little building. Mr Phadkar followed, smiling softly at
6227 the aunties and waving tentatively at Yasmin. She didn't meet his
6228 eye. One of the aunties got up and tried to say something to Ashok,
6229 but he shrugged her off. She went back to her partner and helped
6230 her to her old, uncertain feet. The pair of them squeezed Yasmin's
6231 shoulders before departing.</p>
6232 <p>Once the door had banged shut behind them, Ashok turned and
6233 hissed <em>bainchoad</em> at the room. Yasmin had heard worse words
6234 than this every day in the alleys of Dharavi and in the game-room
6235 when the army was fighting, and hearing it from this soft boy
6236 almost made her giggle. But she heard the choke in his voice, like
6237 he was holding back tears, and she didn't want to smile anymore.
6238 She reached up and unhooked her hijab, repinning it around her
6239 neck, freeing her face to cool in the sultry air the fan whipped
6240 around them. She crossed to Ashok and took a cup of tea from him
6241 and sipped it as quickly as she could, relishing the warm wet
6242 against her dry, scratchy throat. Now that her face was clear of
6243 hijab, she could smell the strong reek of old betel spit, and saw
6244 that the baseboards of the scuffed walls were stained pink with old
6245 spittle.</p>
6247 discipline in the army. "Ashok, look at me. What was that -- that
6249 <p>He sat down in the chair that Mr Phadkar had just vacated and
6250 sipped at his chai.</p>
6253 later. Talk now. What did you just drag me halfway across Mumbai
6254 for?"</p>
6255 <p>"I've been working on this meeting for months, ever since Big
6256 Sister Nor asked me to. I told her that I thought the trade unions
6257 here would embrace the Webblies, would see the power of a global
6258 labor movement that could organize everywhere all at once. She
6259 loved the idea, and ever since then, I've been sweet-talking the
6260 union execs here, trying to get them to see the potential. With
6261 their members helping us -- and with our members helping them -- we
6262 could change the world. Change it like that!" He snapped his
6263 fingers. "But then the strike broke out, and Big Sister Nor told me
6265 end up in jail forever, or worse. She said she thought you'd be
6266 able to help, and we were all going to talk about it before we came
6267 down, but then, when I was riding to get you --" He broke off,
6268 drank chai, stared out the grimy, screened in windows at the
6269 manicured grounds of the film studio. "I got a call from The Mighty
6270 Krang. They were beaten. Badly. All three of them, though Krang
6271 managed to escape. Big Sister Nor is in hospital, unconscious. The
6272 Mighty Krang said he thought it was one of the Chinese factory
6273 owners -- they've been getting meaner, sending in threats. And
6274 they've got lots of contacts in Singapore."</p>
6275 <p>Yasmin finished her chai. Her hair itched with dust and sweat,
6276 and she slid a finger up underneath it and scratched at a bead of
6280 their members demanded justice for the workers in Shenzhen, rallied
6281 at the Chinese consulates all around India..." He waved his hands.
6282 "I'm not sure, to be honest. It was supposed to happen weeks from
6283 now, after I'd done a lot more whispering in their ears, finding
6284 out what they wanted, what they could give, what we could give
6285 them. It wasn't supposed to happen in the middle of a strike." He
6286 stared miserably at the floor.</p>
6287 <p>Yasmin thought about Sushant, about his fear of leaving Mala's
6288 army. As long as soldiers like him fought for the other side, the
6289 Webblies wouldn't be able to blockade the strikes in-game. So. So
6290 she'd have to stop Mala's army. Stop all the armies. The soldiers
6291 who fought for the bosses were on the wrong side. They'd see
6292 that.</p>
6294 that the unions had to join us?"</p>
6295 <p>"Yes, what if, what if. It's so easy to play what if. But I
6296 can't see how this will happen."</p>
6297 <p>"I think I can get more fighters in the games. We can protect
6298 any strike."</p>
6299 <p>"Well, that's fine for the games, but it doesn't help the
6300 players. Big Sister Nor is still in hospital. The Webblies in
6301 Shenzhen are still in jail."</p>
6303 What do economists do?"</p>
6304 <p>He looked rueful. "We go to university and learn a lot of maths.
6305 We use the maths to try to predict what large numbers of people
6306 will do with their money and labor. Then we try to come up with
6307 recommendations for influencing it."</p>
6309 <p>"Yes, I suppose it all sounds bloody pointless, doesn't it?
6310 Maybe that's why I'm willing to take the games so seriously --
6311 they're no less imaginary than anything else I do. But I became an
6312 economist because nothing made sense without it. Why were my
6313 parents poor? Why were our cousins in America so rich? Why would
6314 America send its garbage to India? Why would India send its wood to
6315 America? Why does anyone care about gold?</p>
6317 you know? It's heavy, it's not much good for making things out of
6318 -- too soft for really long-wearing jewelry. Stainless steel is
6319 much better for rings." He tapped an intricate ring on his right
6320 hand on the arm of the chair. "There's not much of it, of course.
6321 All the gold we've ever dug out of the ground would form a cube
6322 with sides the length of a tennis court." Yasmin had seen pictures
6323 of tennis courts, but she wasn't clear how big this actually was.
6324 Not very large, she supposed. "We dig it out of one hole in the
6325 ground and then put it in another hole in the ground, some vault
6326 somewhere, and call it money. It seemed ridiculous.</p>
6328 agree on this? That's where I started to get really fascinated.
6329 Because gold and money are really closely related. It used to be
6330 that money was just an easy way of carrying around gold. The
6331 government would fill a hole in the ground with gold, and then
6332 print notes saying, 'This note is worth so many grams of gold.' So
6333 rather than carrying heavy gold around to buy things, we could
6334 carry around easy paper money.</p>
6336 weigh it, and then put it in another hole in the ground! What good
6337 is gold? Well, it puts a limit on how much money a government can
6338 make. If they want to make more money, they have to get more gold
6345 <p>He waggled his chin. He was sounding like a schoolteacher again.
6347 everything more expensive. If inflation happened evenly, it
6348 wouldn't be so bad. Say your pay doubled overnight, and so did all
6349 the prices -- you'd be all right, because you could just buy as
6350 much as you could the day before, though it 'cost' twice as much.
6353 nodding at her, and she felt like it was something obvious, almost
6357 saved, it wouldn't double along with wages, right?" She shook her
6358 head. "I don't see why that's such a problem, though. We've got
6359 some money saved, but it's just a few thousand rupees. If wages
6360 doubled, we'd get that back quickly from the new money coming
6363 course. But there are some people and companies and governments
6364 that have a <em>lot</em> of savings. Rich people might save crores
6365 of rupees -- those savings would be cut in half overnight. Or a
6366 hospital might have many crores saved for a new wing. Or the
6367 government or a union might have crores in savings for pensions.
6368 What if you work all your life for a pension of two thousand rupees
6369 a month, and then, a year before you're supposed to start
6371 <p>Yasmin didn't know anyone who had a pension, though she'd heard
6374 way: there are a lot of powerful, rich people who would be very
6375 upset if inflation wiped out their savings. But governments are
6376 very tempted by inflation. Say you're fighting an expensive war,
6377 and you need to buy tanks and pay the soldiers and put airplanes in
6378 the sky and keep the missiles rolling out of the factories. That's
6379 expensive stuff. You have to pay for it somehow. You could borrow
6383 governments, from companies -- even from their own people. But if
6384 you're not likely to win the war -- or if victory will wipe you out
6385 -- then it's unlikely anyone will voluntarily lend you the money to
6386 fight it. But governments don't have to rely on voluntary payments,
6391 girl, I'd suggest you try a career as an economist, Yasmin! OK, so
6392 governments can just raise taxes. But people who have to pay too
6393 much tax are unlikely to vote for you the next time around. And if
6394 you're a dictator, nothing gets the revolutionaries out in the
6395 street faster than runaway taxation. So taxes are only of limited
6399 they can use to buy missiles and tanks and so on, all the while
6400 borrowing even more, as fast as they can. Then, when prices and
6401 wages all go up and up -- say, a hundred times -- then suddenly
6402 it's very easy to repay all that money they borrowed. Maybe it took
6403 a thousand workers' tax to add up to a crore of rupees before
6404 inflation, and now it just takes one. Of course, the person who
6405 loaned you the money is in trouble, but by that time, you've won
6406 the war, gotten reelected, and all without crippling your country
6408 <p>Yasmin turned this over. She found it surprisingly easy to
6409 follow -- all she had to do was think of what happened to the price
6410 of goods in the different games she played, going up and down, and
6411 she could easily see how inflation would work to some players'
6412 benefit and not others. "But governments don't have to use
6413 inflation just to win wars, do they?" She thought of the
6414 politicians who came through Dharavi, grubbing for the votes the
6415 people there might deliver. She thought of their promises. "You
6416 could use inflation to build schools, hospitals, that sort of
6417 thing. Then, when the debt caught up with you, you could just use
6418 inflation to wipe it out. You'd get a lot of votes that way, I'm
6421 always trying to get re-elected with guns or butter -- or both. You
6422 can certainly get a lot of votes by buying a lot of inflationary
6423 hospitals and schools, but inflation is like fatty food -- you
6424 always pay the price for it eventually. Once hyperinflation sets
6425 in, no one can pay the teachers or nurses or doctors, so the next
6426 election is likely to end your career.</p>
6427 <p>"But the temptation is powerful, very powerful. And that's where
6428 gold comes in. Can you think of how?"</p>
6429 <p>Yasmin thought some more. Gold, inflation; inflation, gold. They
6430 danced in her head. Then she had it. "You can't make more money
6431 unless you have more gold, right?"</p>
6433 That's what rich people like about gold. It is a disciplinarian, a
6434 policeman in the treasury, and it stops government from being
6435 tempted into funding their folly with fake money. If you have a lot
6436 of savings, you want to discipline the government's money-printing
6437 habits, because every rupee they print devalues your own wealth.
6438 But no government has enough gold to cover the money they've
6439 printed. Some governments fill their vaults with other valuable
6440 things, like other dollars or euros."</p>
6443 little bits of metal, and by dreams and boasts. So at the end of
6447 of the time, if you buy gold in the real world, you just buy a
6448 certificate saying that you own some bar of gold in some vault
6449 somewhere in the world. The postman doesn't deliver a gold-brick
6450 through your mail-slot. And here's the dirty secret about gold:
6451 there is more gold available through certificates of deposit than
6458 a vault full of gold in Hong Kong. Call it a thousand bars. You
6459 sell the thousand bars' worth of gold through the certificate
6460 market, and lock the door. Now, some time later, someone -- a
6461 security guard, an executive at the bank -- walks into the vault
6462 and walks out again with ten gold bars from the middle of the pile.
6463 These ten bars of gold are sold at a metals market, and they end up
6464 in a vault in Switzerland, which prints certificates for
6465 <em>its</em> gold holdings and sells them on. Then, one day, an
6466 executive at the Swiss bank helps himself to ten bars from
6467 <em>that</em> vault and they get sold on the metals market. Before
6468 you know it, your ten bars of gold have been sold to a hundred
6472 'It's turtles all the way down.' Do you know it? It comes from a
6473 story about a British physicist, Bertrand Russell, who gave a
6474 lecture about the universe, how the Earth goes around the Sun and
6475 so on. And a little old granny in the audience says, 'It's all
6476 rubbish! The world is flat and rests on the back of a turtle!' And
6477 Russell says, 'If that's so, what does the turtle stand on?' And
6478 the granny says, 'You can't fool me, sonny, it's turtles all the
6479 way down!'" In other words, what lives under the illusion is yet
6480 another illusion, and under that one is another illusion again.
6481 Supposedly good currency is backed by gold, but the gold itself
6482 doesn't exist. Bad currency isn't backed by gold, it's backed by
6484 day, all that any of this is based on is, what, can you tell
6485 me?"</p>
6487 believing in the money, you won't be able to buy anything. It
6489 Mecha started charging for buffs that used to be free and
6490 overnight, all the players left. The people who were left behind
6491 were so desperate, walking around, trying to hawk their gold and
6492 weapons, offering prices that were tiny compared to just a few days
6493 before. It was like everyone had stopped believing in Zombie Mecha
6494 and then it stopped existing! And then the game dropped its prices
6495 and people came back and the prices shot back up again."</p>
6497 in the economy, you can use its money. If you don't have confidence
6498 in the economy, you want to get away from it and get it away from
6499 you. And it's turtles all the way down. There's almost nothing
6501 steel foundry here in Mumbai and you'll find men risking their
6502 lives, working in the fires of hell in their bare feet without
6503 helmets or gloves, casting steel to make huge round metal plates to
6504 cover the sewer entrances in America. Why do they do it? Because
6505 they are given rupees -- which are worth nothing unless you have
6506 confidence in them. And why are they given rupees? Because someone
6507 -- the boss -- thinks that he'll get dollars for his steel discs.
6508 What are dollars worth?"</p>
6511 the discs -- what good are they? They're the wrong size for the
6512 sewer openings in Mumbai. You could melt them down and do something
6513 else with them, but apart from that, they're just bloody heavy
6514 biscuits that serve no useful purpose. So why does any of this
6515 happen?"</p>
6517 <p>"It's easy? Please, tell me. It's not easy for me and I've been
6518 studying it all my life."</p>
6520 <p>He looked offended. "Maybe it's a game for the rich and powerful
6521 -- but it's not any fun for the poor and the workers and the savers
6522 who get the wrong end of it."</p>
6525 are so many times when I find myself playing and playing and
6526 playing, and I can't stop even though it's all gotten very boring
6527 and repetitive. 'One more quest,' I tell myself. 'One more kill.'
6528 And then again, 'One more, one more, one more.' The important thing
6529 about a game isn't how fun it is, it's how easy it is to start
6530 playing and how hard it is to stop."</p>
6531 <p>"Aha. OK, that makes sense. What, specifically, makes it hard to
6532 stop?"</p>
6533 <p>"Oh, many little things. For example, in Zombie Mecha, if you
6534 stop playing without going to a mecha-base, you get 'fatigued.' So
6535 when you come back to the game, you play worse and earn fewer
6536 points for making the same kills and running the same dungeons. So
6537 you think, 'OK, I'm done for today, time to go back to a base.' And
6538 you run for a base, which is never very close to the quests, and on
6539 the way, you get a new quest, a short one that has a lot of good
6540 rewards. You do the quest. Now you head for the base again, but
6541 again, you find yourself on a quest, but this one is a little
6542 longer than it seemed, and now even more time has gone by. Finally,
6543 you reach the base, but you've played so much that you've almost
6544 levelled up, and it would be a pity to stop playing now when just a
6545 few random kills would get you to the next level and then you can
6546 buy some very good new weapons and training at the base, so you
6547 hunt down some of the biters around the base-entrance, and now you
6548 level up, and you get some good new weapons, and you've also just
6549 unlocked many new quests. These quests are given to you when you
6550 reach the base, and some of them look very interesting, and now
6551 some of your friends have joined you, so you can group with them
6552 and run the quests together, which will be much quicker and a lot
6553 more fun. And by the time you stop, it's been three, sometimes four
6554 hours more play than you thought you'd do."</p>
6556 <p>"Oh yes. Many times a week for me. And I don't even play for
6557 points -- I play to help the union! The more play you do, the more
6558 sense it makes to keep on playing. All this business with gold and
6559 rupees and dollars and steel plates -- we play that game all the
6560 time, don't we? So of course it works. Everyone plays it because
6561 everyone has played it all their lives."</p>
6564 <p>She looked down.</p>
6566 <p>"She thinks we need to find money and support for the strikers.
6568 she's fine, but she's in hospital and it sounds like she was badly
6569 beaten."</p>
6571 Thinking: <em>Mumbai's opposite corner is far away for me -- China
6572 might as well be the moon or the Mushroom Kingdom.</em> "And how do
6573 we know that Big Sister Nor will be safe where she is?"</p>
6575 close when we're all online, but so far when we need to do
6576 something that involves the physical world." He began to pace.
6577 "This is Big Sister Nor's department. She sees a way to tie up the
6578 virtual world and the real world, to move work and ideas and money
6579 from one to the other."</p>
6580 <p>"Maybe we should just concentrate on the games, then? They're
6581 the part we know how to use."</p>
6583 balling his hands into fists.</p>
6584 <p>And Yasmin found herself giggling, and then laughing, really
6585 laughing. It was so obvious!</p>
6587 <p>And she knew just what to do about it.</p>
6588 <p>#</p>
6589 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK
6590 bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one
6591 has the feel of a great independent store, with tons of
6592 personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and
6593 knowledgeable staff. Of particular note is the Manchester Deansgate
6594 store, which has an <b>outstanding</b> sf section.</i></p>
6596 <p>Lu didn't know where to go. Boss Wing's dormitories were out of
6597 the question, of course. And while he knew a dozen Internet cafes
6598 in Shenzhen where he could sit and log on to the game, he didn't
6599 really want to be playing just then. Not with everyone else in
6600 jail.</p>
6601 <p>But he had to sit down. He'd been hit hard in the head and on
6602 the shoulder and he was very dizzy. He'd thrown up once already,
6603 holding onto a bus-stop pole and leaning over the gutter, earning a
6604 disapproving cluck from an old woman who walked past hauling a huge
6605 barrow full of electronic waste.</p>
6606 <p>He had thought of texting Matthew and the others, to find out if
6607 the police had them in custody, but he was afraid that the police
6608 would track him back if he did, using the phone network to locate
6609 him and pick him up.</p>
6610 <p>It had all felt so <em>wonderful</em>. They'd stood up from
6611 their computers, chanting angrily, the war-chants from the games,
6612 which Boss Wing and his goons never played, and so it had all been
6613 totally perplexing to them. Their faces had gone from puzzlement to
6614 anger to fear as all the boys in the room stood together and
6615 marched out of the cafe, blocking the doorways so that no one could
6616 come in.</p>
6617 <p>And there had been girls, and old grannies, and young men
6618 stopping to admire them as they stood, shoulder to shoulder,
6619 chanting bravely at the cowardly goons from Boss Wing's factory,
6620 goons who'd been so tough just a few minutes before, willing to
6621 slap you in the head if you talked too much, ready to dock your
6622 pay, too. Ever since they'd tried to go out on their own, life had
6623 gotten steadily worse. Boss Wing had a huge operation, with plenty
6624 of in-game muscle to stand guard against rich players who hunted
6625 the gold farmers for sport, but he was cruel and cheap and you were
6626 lucky if you saw half the wages you'd earned after all the fines
6628 <p>Their phones rang and buzzed with photos from other Boss Wing
6629 factories where the workers had gone out too, and there were wars
6630 in Mushroom Kingdom as the Webblies kept anyone else from working
6631 their zone. And the police came and they'd stayed brave, Matthew
6632 and Ping and all his friends. They were workers, they were
6633 warriors, they were an army and their cause was just. They would
6634 not be intimidated.</p>
6635 <p>And then the gas came. And then the clubs started swinging. And
6636 then the screams had started. And then Lu had run, run through the
6637 stinging clouds of gas and the chaos of battle -- so like and so
6638 unlike the million battles he'd fought in the games -- and he'd
6639 thrown up and now --</p>
6640 <p>Now he had no idea where to go.</p>
6641 <p>And then his phone rang. The number was blanked out, which made
6642 his pulse hammer in his throat. Did the secret police blank out the
6643 number when they called you? But if the secret police knew he
6644 existed and had his phone number, they could just pick him up where
6645 he stood, using the phone's damned tracking function.</p>
6646 <p>It wasn't the police. With trepidation, he slid his finger over
6647 the talk button on the screen.</p>
6650 cheap net-calling service, the digital fuzz of packets that
6651 travelled third class on the global network. The accent was
6652 difficult, too, thick-tongued and off-kilter. He knew the sound and
6653 he knew the voice.</p>
6657 gweilo since they'd gone to Boss Wing and Ping had had to kick him
6658 out of the guild. Boss Wing didn't allow them to raid with outside
6659 people, or even talk to them in game. He had spyware on all his PCs
6660 that told him when you broke those rules, and you lost a day's
6661 wages for the first offense, a week's wages for the second.</p>
6662 <p>"Lu, it's me! Look, did I just see you and Ping getting beaten
6663 up by the cops?"</p>
6665 was fierce, and he wondered if he was really having this
6666 conversation. It was very strange.</p>
6667 <p>"I -- I just saw you getting beaten up on a video from Shenzhen.
6668 I think I did. Was it you?"</p>
6672 <p>Lu was still grappling with the idea that the gweilo had just
6673 called him from thousands of kilometers away. "You saw me on the
6674 Internet in America?"</p>
6675 <p>"Every gamer in the world saw you, Lu! You couldn't have timed
6676 it better! After dinner is the busiest time on the servers, and the
6677 word went around like nothing I've ever seen before. Everyone in
6678 every game was chatting about it, passing around links to the video
6679 streams and the photos. It was even on the real news! My neighbor
6680 banged on my wall and asked me if I knew anything about it. It was
6681 incredible!"</p>
6684 Internet."</p>
6687 <p>A dam broke, Lu laughed and laughed and laughed, as all the
6688 tension flooded out of him. He finally stopped, knowing that if he
6689 didn't he'd throw up again. He was by the train station now, in the
6690 heavy foot-traffic, all kinds of people moving purposefully around
6691 him as he stood still, a woozy island in the rushing stream. He
6692 backed up to a stairwell in front of a beauty parlor and sank to
6693 his haunches, squatting and holding the phone to his head.</p>
6697 <p>There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, broken by soft
6699 the Webblies."</p>
6701 had made them up, a fantasy army of thousands of imaginary friends
6702 who would fight for them.</p>
6703 <p>"Know about them? Lu, they're the ass-kickingest guild in the
6704 world! No one can beat them! Coca-Cola Games is sending us three
6705 memos a day about them!"</p>
6708 now. I'm a Turk."</p>
6710 thought about what kind of people would work in ten second
6711 increments making up dialog for non-player characters or figuring
6712 out what happened when you shot an office chair with a blunderbuss.
6715 four different sessions at once, and I'm barely earning enough to
6716 pay the rent. And they make so much money off of us! Last month,
6717 they announced quarterly profits and games with Turks are earning
6718 30 percent more than the ones without. They're hiring more Turks as
6719 fast as they can -- it's all over the board here. But our wages
6720 aren't going up. So I've been thinking of the Webblies, you
6721 know..." He trailed off. "Like maybe you guys can help us if we
6722 help you? We all play for our money, right? So why shouldn't we be
6723 on the same side."</p>
6725 the fact that the Webblies were apparently famous with American
6729 I have a crappy room in a, not sure what you call it, a hotel, kind
6730 of. But for people who don't have any money. But I can get wireless
6731 here and I've got four machines and there's plenty of stuff I can
6732 walk to, at least compared to home --" He began to babble about his
6733 favorite restaurants and the clubs that had all-ages nights and a
6734 million tiny irrelevant details about Los Angeles, which might as
6735 well have been the Mushroom Kingdom for all that it mattered to Lu.
6736 He let it wash over him and tried to think of places he could go to
6737 recuperate. He fleetingly wished for his mother, who always knew
6738 some kind of traditional Chinese remedy for his ailments. They
6739 often didn't work, but sometimes they did, and his mother's gentle
6740 application of them worked their own magic.</p>
6741 <p>He was suddenly, nauseously, overwhelmingly homesick.
6743 "I need to think now. I don't know what to do. I'm hurt, I'm on the
6744 street, and I can't call anyone in case the police trace the call.
6745 What do I do?"</p>
6746 <p>"Oh. Well. I don't know exactly. I was hoping that you'd know
6748 involved!"</p>
6750 was turning to anger. Who was this <em>boy</em> to call him from
6752 have enough problems of his own? "What can you do for me from
6754 everyone going to jail make my life better? How will having my head
6755 beaten in help make things better? How?"</p>
6757 struggled to control his anger. The gweilo wanted to help. It
6758 wasn't his fault he didn't know how to help. Lu didn't know how to
6759 help, either.</p>
6761 to help and call me back. I need to find somewhere to rest, maybe a
6762 nurse or a doctor. OK?"</p>
6764 soon, don't worry."</p>
6765 <p>Every time a Hong Kong train came into the Shenzhen Railway
6766 Station, it disgorged a massive crowd of people: Hong Kong people
6767 in sharp business styles, rich kids, foreigners, and workers from
6768 Shenzhen returning from contracts abroad, clutching backpacks. The
6769 dense group got broken up by the taxi-rank and the shopping mall,
6770 and emerged as a diffuse cloud onto the street where Lu had been
6771 talking. Now he worked his way back through this crowd, listening
6772 to snatches of hundreds of conversations about business,
6773 manufacturing -- and gold farming.</p>
6774 <p>It was on everyone's lips, talk about the strike, about the
6775 police action, about the farmers. Of course most people in China
6776 had heard of gold farming and all the stories about the money you
6777 could make by just playing video games, but you never heard this
6778 kind of business-person talking about it. Not smart, fancy people
6779 with obvious wealth and power, the kind of people who skipped back
6780 and forth between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, talking rapidly into
6781 their earwigs, telling other people what to do.</p>
6782 <p>What had the gweilo said? <em>Everyone saw you getting beaten up
6783 on the Internet!</em> Were these people looking closely at him? Now
6784 it seemed they were. Of course, he was bloody, staring, red-eyed.
6785 Why wouldn't they stare at him? But maybe --</p>
6787 fingernails on the hand she rested on his arm, coming on him from
6788 behind. He gave an involuntary squeak and jump, and she giggled a
6790 the video five times on the train. You should see the commentary.
6791 So ugly!"</p>
6792 <p>He knew about this. Any time something that made the government
6793 look bad managed to find its way online, there was an army of
6794 commenters who'd tweet and post and comment about how the
6795 government was in the right, how the story was all wrong, how the
6796 people in it were guilty of all kinds of terrible things. Lu knew
6797 he shouldn't believe any of it, but it was impossible to read it
6798 all without feeling a little niggle of doubt, then a little more,
6799 and then, like an ice-cube on a bruise, the outrage he'd felt at
6800 first would go numb.</p>
6801 <p>The thought that he, himself, was at the center of one of these
6802 smear-storms made him feel like he was going to throw up again. The
6803 girl must have seen this, for she gave his arm a little squeeze.
6804 "Oh, don't look so serious. You looked great on the video. I'm sure
6805 no one believes all that rubbish!" She pursed her lips. "Well, of
6806 course, that's not true. I'm sure lots of people believe it. But
6807 they're fools. And so many more were inspired, I'm sure. I'm
6808 Jie."</p>
6810 alias. He was not cut out to be a fugitive. "It was nice to meet
6811 you," he said, and shrugged her hand off and set off deeper into
6812 the crowd.</p>
6813 <p>She grabbed his arm again. "Oh, please stop. We need to talk.
6814 Please?"</p>
6815 <p>He stopped. He didn't have much experience with girls, but
6816 something about her voice made him want to stay. "Why do we need to
6817 talk?"</p>
6820 <p>She leaned in close -- so close he could smell her perfume --
6822 <p>He looked at her blankly.</p>
6824 Factory Girl Show!"</p>
6827 listen to me! They phone me with their problems. We go out over the
6828 net, audio, through the, uh," she dropped her voice, "the Falun
6829 Gong proxies."</p>
6833 how we get the show into the factories. They try to block me
6834 because we tell the truth about the work conditions -- the girls
6835 who are sexually pressured by their bosses, the marketing rip-offs,
6836 the wage rip offs, lock-ins --"</p>
6839 were dark and lined with thin, precise green eye-pencil, and her
6840 eyebrows were shaped into surprised, sophisticated arches. "You
6841 look like you need a place to clean up, and maybe a meal. I can get
6842 that for you."</p>
6846 over Shenzhen, even in Guangzhou and Dongguan. Even in Shanghai and
6847 Beijing! I'm a hero to them, Lu. I can put your story into the ears
6849 snapped her fingers in front of his nose, making him blink and
6851 it'll be wonderful."</p>
6854 <p>She grabbed his hand -- her fingers were dry and cool, and
6855 touched with cold spots where the rings she wore met his skin. She
6856 led him away through the crowd, which seemed to part magically
6857 before her. It had all become like a dream now, with the pain
6858 crowding Lu's vision into a hazy-edged tunnel. He wondered if she'd
6859 have something for the pain. He wondered if she knew any
6860 traditional medicine, if she'd mix him up a bitter tea with
6861 complicated scents and small bits of hard things floating in it.
6862 All this he wondered, and the streets and sidewalks slipped past
6863 beneath their feet like magic. You could automatically follow your
6864 guildies in game, just click on them and select follow, and the
6865 whole guild could do that when there was a lot of distance to
6866 cover, so that only one player had to pay attention on the long
6867 march across the world, while the others relaxed and smoked and ate
6868 and used the toilet, while their characters trailed like a string
6869 of pack-animals behind the leader.</p>
6870 <p>That's what this felt like, like he was a character whose player
6871 had stepped out for a cigarette and a piss-break and the character
6872 bumped along mindlessly behind the leader.</p>
6875 building next to it that the tenants could lean out their windows
6876 and shake hands with their neighbors across the lane. The lobby
6877 smelled of cooking and sweat, but it was clean and there was a
6878 working intercom and lock at the door.</p>
6880 or three of them, to confuse the jingcha." He thought it was funny
6881 to hear her use the gamer clan term for police. She saw it, and
6882 said, "Oh yes, the zengfu think I'm very biantai and they'd PK me
6883 if they could." He laughed at this, because it was nearly
6884 impenetrable slang -- the government think I'm a pervert so they
6886 thing to hear a boy with his shirt rolled up over his belly and a
6887 cigarette hanging out of his face saying this, another to hear this
6888 delicate, preciously made-up girl.</p>
6889 <p>The elevator was broken, so she led him up five flights of
6890 stairs, the walls decorated with lavish graffiti: murals of
6891 curse-words, scenes of factory life, phone numbers you could call
6892 to buy fake identity papers, degrees, certificates. Lu's own dorm
6893 room was in a building that Boss Wing rented, and he climbed twice
6894 this many stairs every day, but this climb felt like it was going
6895 to kill him. On Jie's floor, there was an old lady squatting by the
6896 stairway door, in the hall. She nodded at the two of them.</p>
6898 mechanic who has come to repair my air-conditioner." The old lady
6899 nodded curtly and looked away.</p>
6900 <p>Jie attacked one of the apartment doors with a key ring, opening
6901 four different locks with large, elaborate, thick keys and then
6902 putting her shoulder into the door, which swung heavily back,
6903 clanging against a door-stop with a metallic sound. She motioned
6904 him inside and closed the door, shooting the four bolts from the
6905 inside and slapping at several light-switches.</p>
6906 <p>The apartment had two big rooms, the living room in which they
6907 stood, and a connecting bedroom that he could see from the doorway.
6908 There was a little kitchen area against the wall beside them, and
6909 the rest of the room was taken up with a sofa and a large desk with
6910 chairs on either side of it, covered in a litter of recording gear:
6911 a mixer, several large sets of headphones, and a couple of skinny
6912 mics on stands. Every centimeter of wall-space was <em>covered</em>
6913 in paper: newspaper clippings, letters, drawings -- all liberally
6914 sprinkled with stickers, hearts, cute animal doodles.</p>
6917 over a wall. Peering more closely at it, Lu saw that every letter
6919 hands. "I have a post-box in Macau. My friends send the letters
6920 there and they scan them and email them to me. All right under the
6921 zengfu's nose!"</p>
6923 <p>She flopped down on the sofa, her skirt riding up around her
6924 thighs, and kicked her shoes in expert arcs to the mat by the door.
6925 "Our building's answer to the bound-foot grannies' detective
6926 squad," she said, and he laughed again at the slang. Back in
6927 Nanjing, they'd used this term to talk about the little old ladies
6928 who were always snooping around, gossiping about who was doing
6929 something evil or wicked. They didn't really have bound feet -- the
6930 practice of binding little girls' feet to the point where they grew
6931 up unable to walk properly was dead, and he'd never seen a real
6932 bound foot outside of a museum, though the grannies would always
6933 exclaim over the girls' feet, passing evil remarks if a girl had
6934 large feet, cooing if she had small ones -- but they acted all
6935 pinched anyway.</p>
6936 <p>"And she'll believe that I'm a repairman? I don't have any
6937 tools!"</p>
6939 how she'd be a very popular netshow host. That laugh was
6942 <p>Now she was howling with laughter, head flung back, hair fanned
6943 out over the sofa-cushions. "You should see your face! Look, so
6944 long as Grandma Mao out there thinks I'm just a garden-variety
6945 slut, she won't suspect that I'm really Jiandi, Scourge of the
6946 Politburo and Voice of the Pearl River Delta, all right? Now, get
6947 your shoes off and let's have a look at that head-wound."</p>
6948 <p>He did as he was bade, neatly lining his shoes up by the doorway
6949 and stepping gingerly onto the dusty wooden floor. Jia stood and
6950 led him by the shoulders to one of the rolling chairs by the desk
6951 and pushed him down on it, then leaned over him and stared intently
6953 shampoo, you have very greasy hair, it's shameful. Second of all,
6954 you appear to have a pigeon's egg growing out of your head, which
6955 has got to sting a little. I'll tell you what, I'll get you
6956 something cold to hold on it for a few moments, then I want you to
6957 go have a shower and clean it out well. It looks like it bled a
6958 little, but not much, which is lucky for you, since scalp wounds
6959 usually bleed like crazy. Then, once we've got you into a more
6960 civilized state, I'll put you on the Internet and make you even
6961 more famous. Sound good?"</p>
6962 <p>He opened his mouth to object, but she was already spinning away
6963 and digging through the small fridge, crouching, hair falling over
6964 her shoulders in a way that Lu couldn't stop staring it. Now she
6965 had a bag of frozen Hahaomai chicken dumplings -- he recognized the
6966 packaging, it was what they ate for dinner most nights in Boss
6967 Wing's dormitory -- and was wrapping it in a tea-towel, and
6968 pressing it to his head. It felt like it weighed 500 kilos and had
6969 been cooled to absolute zero, but it also made his head stop
6970 throbbing almost immediately. He slumped in the chair and closed
6971 his eyes and held the dumplings to the spot where the zengfu -- the
6972 slang was infectious -- had given him a love-tap. He tracked Jia's
6973 movements around him by the sounds she made and the puffs of
6974 perfume and hair stuff whenever she passed close. This was not bad,
6975 he thought -- a lot better than things had been an hour ago when
6976 he'd been crouching in front of the station talking to the
6977 gweilo.</p>
6979 she was holding out two chalky pills and a glass of water for
6980 him.</p>
6982 sunset light streaming in the window. He'd been nearly asleep.</p>
6984 Take them."</p>
6985 <p>He took them.</p>
6987 bedroom. "There's a towel on the toilet-seat, and I found some
6988 pajamas that should fit you. We'll rinse out your clothes and put
6989 them on the heater to dry while we talk. No offense, Mr Labor Hero,
6990 but you smell like something long dead."</p>
6991 <p>He was blushing again, he could tell, and there was nothing for
6992 it but to duck and scurry through the bedroom -- he had a jumbled
6993 impression of a narrow bed with a thin blanket crumbled at the
6994 bottom, a litter of stuffed animals, and mounds of fake handbags
6995 overflowing with clothing and toiletries. Then he was in the
6996 bathroom, the sink-lip covered in mysterious pots and potions, all
6997 the oddments of a girl which a million billboards hinted at, but
6998 which he'd never seen in place, lids askew, powder spilling out. It
6999 was all so much less glamorous than it appeared on the billboards,
7000 where everything looked like it was slightly wet and glistening,
7001 but it was much more exciting.</p>
7002 <p>Every horizontal space in the shower seemed to support some kind
7003 of bottle. Lu bought big two liter jugs of shower gel that he could
7004 use as shampoo, too, but after squinting at the labels, he found
7005 one that appeared to be for bodies and another for hair, and made
7006 use of both. The water on his head felt like little sharp stones
7007 beating against it, and his shoulder began to throb as he rubbed
7008 the shampoo in. After the shower, he cleared the steam off the
7009 mirror and craned around to get a look at it, and could just make
7010 out the huge, raised bruise there, a club-shaped purple bruised
7011 line surrounded by a halo of greeny-yellow swelling.</p>
7013 other side of the door. He cautiously turned the knob and found
7014 that she'd drawn a curtain across the door to the bedroom, leaving
7015 him alone in naked semi-darkness. On the bed, neatly folded, a pair
7016 of track pants and a t-shirt for an employment bureau, the kind of
7017 thing they gave out to the people who stood in front of them all
7018 day long, paid for every person they brought in to apply for a job.
7019 It was a tight fit, but he got it on, and balled up his clothes,
7020 which really did stink, and peeked around the curtain.</p>
7023 bare feet on the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with
7024 a delicate little sniffle. "Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo.
7025 Very good. Very good for ladies' reproductive issues." She patted
7027 <p>He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally,
7028 the room spinning around him.</p>
7029 <p>She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and
7031 teasing. Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have
7032 given it to you." And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew
7033 that smell from -- he remembered wishing that his mother was there
7034 to give him some herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand
7035 among the many bottles in her shower.</p>
7038 studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes
7039 life harder for the zengfu."</p>
7041 <p>"Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My
7042 show can go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I
7043 have." She smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn't ever noticed a
7044 girl's dimples before. The head injury was making him feel woozy.
7045 Or maybe it was love.</p>
7049 minutes. Just enough time for you to have a drink and get
7050 comfortable." She fished in her fridge and brought out a water
7051 filter jug and filled a glass from a small rack next to the tiny
7052 sink. He took it and drank it greedily and she fetched him the
7053 filter, setting it down on one side of the desk before settling
7054 into the chair on the other side.</p>
7055 <p>She began to click and type and furrow her brow in an adorable
7056 way, slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She
7057 waved to him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his
7058 glass.</p>
7061 screen, fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks
7062 from her manicured fingernails.</p>
7064 <p>"What I mean is, if you were a girl, you'd know all about this.
7065 Every factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting
7066 after dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone
7067 and tell me all their troubles and I tell them what they need to
7068 hear. Mostly, it comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw
7069 you, find another job, or be prepared to be screwed in more ways
7070 than one. If your boyfriend is a deadbeat who won't work and
7071 borrows money from you, get a new boyfriend, even if he is the
7072 'love of your life.' If your girlfriends are talking trash about
7073 you, confront them, have a good cry, and start over. If your
7074 girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of them. If
7075 you are screwing your girlfriend's boyfriend, stop -- dump him,
7076 confess to her, and don't do it again." She was ticking these off
7077 on her fingers like a shopping list.</p>
7079 making it up, or possibly delusional. Could there really be a show
7080 that every factory girl listened to that he'd never heard of? He
7081 thought of how little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had
7082 talked to him when he worked as a security guard and decided that
7083 yes, it was totally possible.</p>
7084 <p>"It's very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and
7085 me. Some problems are universal. Some things you just can't say too
7086 often. Anyway, that's not all there is to it. We have variety! We
7087 have you!"</p>
7089 girls on it? Why? Won't that make the police want to get me even
7090 more?"</p>
7091 <p>"Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your
7092 face is everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be
7093 for them to arrest you. Trust me."</p>
7096 police have been after me for two years now, and I've stayed out of
7097 their clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!"</p>
7099 <p>She looked at the face of her phone. "We've only got a minute.
7100 Here, quickly, I'll explain: if you're a fugitive, being poor is
7101 hard. Even harder than for non-fugitives. It's expensive being on
7102 the run. You need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones
7103 that you can abandon. You need to be able to pay li --" bribes --
7104 "and you need to be able to move fast. Being famous means that you
7105 have access to money and favors from a lot of different people. My
7106 listeners keep me going, either through direct donations or through
7107 my advertisers."</p>
7108 <p>"You have ads? Who would buy an ad on a fugitive's radio
7109 show?"</p>
7111 had considered itself separate from China since 1949 but China had
7112 never stopped laying claim to it -- without much success. "Falun
7113 Gong, sometimes." She saw the look of shock on his face. "Don't
7115 don't care if I make fun of them on the show, so long as I run
7116 their ads, too."</p>
7118 <p>She held up her hand for silence and swung down a little mic
7120 into the mic, clicking her mouse. "It's your best friend here,
7121 Sister Jiandi, the friend you can always rely on, the friend who
7122 will never let you down, the friend you can confide all your
7123 secrets in -- provided you don't mind eight million factory girls
7124 finding out about it!" She giggled at her own joke. "Oh, sisters,
7125 it's going to be a good night, I can tell! I have a special
7126 surprise for you a little later, but first, let's talk! Tonight I'm
7127 using Amazon France chat, chat.amazon.fr, so go and sign up now.
7128 You'll get me at jiandi88888. Remember to use a couple of the
7129 latest FLG proxies before you make the call -- and it looks like
7130 the translation services at Yahoo.ru and 123india.in are both
7131 unblocked at the moment, which should make it easier to sign up.
7132 Well, what are you waiting for? Get signed up!"</p>
7133 <p>She clicked something and he heard a blaring ad for Falun Gong
7134 start in his headphone and he slipped one off the side of his head.
7135 Jie swung her mic away and pointed a finger at him. "Feeling the
7136 magic yet?"</p>
7139 or four times tonight, as they update the firewall. It's fun! Wait,
7140 you'll see." In his ear, the ad was wrapping up and he slipped the
7141 other headphone back into place.</p>
7143 moment to realize she was talking into her mic, to her audience,
7144 not to him. Her fingers were working the keyboard and mouse.</p>
7146 <p>"Yes, darling, hello. You're live. Talk, talk! We've only got
7147 all night!"</p>
7149 and it was scared.</p>
7151 a coo, a purr, a seduction. Her eyes were moist, her lips pursed in
7152 a gesture of pure caring. Lu wanted to tell her <em>his</em>
7153 secrets.</p>
7155 background, the sounds of a busy factory dorm, girlish calls and
7156 laughter and conversation. Jie made soothing shhh shhh sounds.
7158 first. He said he was taking an interest in me because we are both
7159 from Henan. He said that he would protect me. Show me around the
7160 city. We went to nice places. A restaurant in the stock exchange.
7161 He took me to the Windows on the World park and we dressed up like
7162 ancient warriors."</p>
7164 <p>"I knew he would. I listen to your show. But I thought it would
7165 be different for me. I thought he was different. But he --" She
7166 broke off. "After he kissed me, he told me he wanted to do more.
7167 Everything. He told me I owed it to him. That I'd understood that
7168 when I accepted his invitation, and that I would be cheating him if
7169 I didn't --" She began to cry.</p>
7170 <p>Jie made a face, twirled her finger in an impatient gesture. Lu
7171 was horrified by her callousness. But when the crying stopped, her
7172 voice was again full of compassion and understanding.</p>
7173 <p>"Oh, sweet child, you've been done badly, haven't you? Well, of
7174 course you knew it would happen, but the heart and the head don't
7175 always agree with each other, do they? The question isn't whether
7176 you acted like a fool -- because you did, you acted like a perfect
7177 fool -- the question is what you can do about it now. Am I
7178 right?"</p>
7180 He pictured a girl shrunk to the size of a mouse, trembling in
7181 fear.</p>
7182 <p>"Well, that's simple. Not easy, but simple. Forfeit your last
7183 eight weeks' wages and walk out of the factory first thing tomorrow
7184 morning. Go down to a job-broker on Xi Li street and find something
7185 -- anything -- that can get you started again. Then you call your
7186 boss's wife -- is he married?"</p>
7188 <p>"Call his wife and tell her everything. Tell her what he did,
7189 what he said, what you said back. Tell her you're sorry, and tell
7190 her you're sorry her husband is such a sack of rotten, stinking
7191 garbage. Tell her you walked away on the pay he was holding back,
7192 and that you've left your job. And then you start to work again.
7193 And no matter what your new boss says or does, don't go out with
7194 him. Do you understand?"</p>
7196 <p>"Call his wife, walk away from your pay, and start over. There's
7197 nothing else that will work. You can't talk to this man. He has
7198 raped you -- that's what it is, you know, when someone in power
7199 coerces you into sex, it's rape, just rape -- and he'll do it again
7200 and again and again. He'll do it to the other girls in the factory.
7201 You tell as many as you can why you're leaving. In fact, you tell
7202 me what factory you work in and the name of your boss, right now,
7203 and then millions and millions of girls will know about it, too.
7204 They'll steer clear of this dog, and maybe you'll save a few souls
7205 with your bravery. What do you say?"</p>
7206 <p>"You want me to name my boss? Now? But I thought this was
7207 confidential --"</p>
7209 through what you just went through? What do you think would have
7210 happened if you had heard another girl speak his name on this show,
7211 last month, before you went out with him. What will you do? Will
7212 you save your sisters from the pain you're in? Or will you protect
7213 your bruised ego and let the next girl suffer, and the next?" She
7214 waited a moment. The girl on the phone said nothing, though the
7215 sounds of people moving around the dorm could still be faintly
7216 heard. Lu imagined her under her blanket on her bunk, hand over the
7217 mouthpiece of her phone, whispering her secrets to millions of
7222 laugh was echoed by the girlish voices near her, as the girls in
7223 her dorm realized that the confession they'd been listening into on
7224 their computers and phones and radios had been emanating from a
7225 bunk in their midst. There was a squeal of feedback as one of the
7226 radios got too close to the phone, and Jie's fingers clicked at the
7227 keyboard, squelching the feedback but somehow leaving the other
7228 squeals, the girlish squeals. They were cheering her, the girls in
7229 the dorm, cheering her and chanting her name, her real name, now on
7230 the radio, but it didn't matter, because the girl was laughing
7231 harder than ever.</p>
7233 HuaXia sports factory." She laughed, a liberated sound.</p>
7235 The voices quieted. "Now, your sister has just made a sacrifice for
7236 all of you, so you need to help her. She needs money -- your pig of
7237 a boss won't give her the eight weeks' pay he's holding onto,
7238 especially not after she calls his wife. She needs help packing,
7239 help finding a job. Someone there is thinking of changing jobs,
7240 someone there knows where there's a job for this girl. Tell her.
7241 Help her move out. Help her find the new job. This is your duty to
7242 your sister. Promise me!"</p>
7243 <p>From the phone, a babble of girls saying, "I promise! I
7244 promise!"</p>
7246 be unveiling a wonderful surprise!" A mouseclick and then there was
7247 another ad, this time for a company that provided fake credentials
7248 for people looking for work, guaranteed to pass database lookups.
7249 Both of them slipped their headphones off and Jie drained her
7250 water-glass, a little trickle sliding down her chin and throat. Lu
7251 suppressed a groan. She was <em>so</em> beautiful, and all that
7252 power and confidence --</p>
7254 her eyebrows at him.</p>
7256 <p>"Oh, that was a particularly good one. But yes, most nights it
7257 goes like that. Six or seven hours' worth of it. You still think
7258 it'd get repetitious?"</p>
7260 <p>"After all, you kill the same monsters over and over again all
7261 night long, don't you? That must be pretty dull."</p>
7263 guess. All of us working together, and it's not really the same
7264 every time -- the games vary the monster-spawning a lot. Sometimes
7265 you get really good drops, too -- that can be very exciting! You're
7266 going down a corridor you've cleared a dozen times, and you
7267 discover that this time it's filled with 200 vampires and then one
7268 of them drops an epic sword, and it's not boring at all anymore."
7269 He shrugged. "My guildie Matthew says it's intermittent
7270 reinforcement."</p>
7272 and started talking into her mic again, taking a call from another
7273 factory girl, this one more angry than sad. "I had a friend who was
7274 selling franchises for a line of herbal remedies," she said, and
7275 Jie rolled her eyes.</p>
7277 sarcasm in her voice was unmistakable.</p>
7279 wanted to punch something. "At first I thought it was about selling
7280 the herbal remedies, and I liked that, because my mother always
7281 gave me herbs when I was sick as a girl, and I thought that a lot
7282 of the girls here would want to buy the remedies too because they
7283 missed home."</p>
7285 <p>"Exactly! Just what I thought. And my friend told me about how
7286 much money I could make, but not from selling the herbs! She said
7287 that selling the herbs would be my 'downliners' job, and that I
7288 would manage them. I would be a boss!"</p>
7290 <p>"Right! She said that she was recruiting me to be in the top
7291 layer of the organization, and that I would then go and recruit two
7292 of my friends to be my salespeople. They'd each pay me for the
7293 right to sign up more downliners, and that all the downliners would
7294 buy herbs from me and then I would get a share of all their
7295 profits. She showed me how if my two downliners signed up two more,
7297 would have hundreds of downliners working for me in just a few
7298 days! And if I only got a few RMB from each one, I'd be making
7299 thousands every month, just for signing up two people."</p>
7301 she was joking, she wasn't smiling.</p>
7302 <p>"Yes, yes! That's what I thought. And all I needed to do was pay
7303 her one small fee for the right to sell downline, and she would
7304 supply me with herbs and sales kits and everything else I needed.
7305 She said that she was signing me up because I was Fujianese, like
7306 her, and she wanted to take care of me. She said I should find
7307 girls who were still back in the village, girls I'd gone to school
7308 with, and call them and sign them up, because they needed to make
7309 money."</p>
7310 <p>"Why would girls in the village need herbal remedies? Wouldn't
7311 they have their mothers?"</p>
7312 <p>That stopped the angry, fast-talking girl. "I didn't think of
7313 that," she said, at last. "It seemed like I was going to be a hero
7314 for everyone, and like I would escape from the factory and get
7315 rich. My friend said she was going to quit in a few weeks and get
7316 her own apartment. I thought about moving out of the dorm, having
7317 money to send home --"</p>
7318 <p>"You dreamed about money and all that it could buy you, but you
7319 didn't devote the same attention to figuring out whether this thing
7320 could possibly work, right?"</p>
7322 true."</p>
7324 <p>"It started OK. I sold a few downlines, but they were having
7325 trouble making their downline commitments. And then my friend, she
7326 started to ask me for her percentage of my income. When I told her
7327 I wasn't receiving the income my downliners owed me, she
7328 changed."</p>
7330 was in another world, it seemed, picturing the girl and her
7331 problem.</p>
7332 <p>"She got angry. She said that I had made a commitment to her,
7333 and that she had made commitments to her uplines based on this, and
7334 that I would have to pay her so that she could pay the people she
7335 owed. She made me feel like I'd betrayed her, betrayed the
7336 incredible opportunity. She said I was just a simple girl from a
7337 village, not fit to be a business-woman. She called me all day,
7338 over and over, screaming, 'Where's my money?'"</p>
7340 <p>"I finally went to her. I cried. I told her I didn't know what
7341 to do. And she told me that I knew, but that I didn't have the
7342 courage to do it. She told me I had to go to my downliners, get
7343 tough on them, get the money out of them. And if they wouldn't pay,
7344 I'd have to get the money some other way: from my parents, my
7345 friends, my savings. I could get new downliners next month."</p>
7348 and kind to them, but my friend called me over and over again, and
7349 I got angry. Angry at them, not at her. It was their fault that I
7350 was having to spend all this time and energy, that I couldn't sleep
7351 or eat. And so I got meaner. I threatened them, begged them,
7352 shouted at them. These two girls, they were my old friends. I'd
7353 known them since we were little babies. I knew their secrets. I
7354 threatened to call my friend's father and tell him that she had let
7355 a boy take naked pictures of her when she was 15. I threatened to
7356 tell my other friend's sister that she had kissed her
7357 boyfriend."</p>
7359 <p>"At first. The first month, they paid. The next month, though, I
7360 had to call them and shout at them some more. It was like I was
7361 sitting above myself, watching a crazy stranger say these terrible
7362 things to my old, old friends. But they paid again. And then, in
7363 the third month --" She stopped abruptly. The silence swelled. Lu
7364 felt it getting thicker, staticky.</p>
7367 whisper. More silence. "I had told her that I would go to her
7368 father and -- and --" Silence. "It was how her mother had committed
7369 suicide when we were both small. The same kind of poison. Her
7370 father was a hard man, an Old One Hundred Names who had lived
7371 through the Cultural Revolution. He has no mercy on him. When she
7372 couldn't get the money, she stole it. Got caught. He was going to
7373 find out. And if he didn't, I would tell him about the photos she'd
7374 taken. And she couldn't face that. I drove her to kill herself. It
7375 was me. I killed her."</p>
7377 "It's the women's disease in China. We're the only country in the
7378 world where more women commit suicide than men. You can't take the
7381 voice now, nothing left behind but distilled despair.</p>
7383 next month, and the month after."</p>
7384 <p>"My friend, the one who brought me into this, she knows...
7386 friends. Things that could cost me my job, my home, my
7387 boyfriend..."</p>
7390 trying to sell you something as part of a cuanxiao scheme. He used
7391 to laugh at it. Now it seemed a lot more serious. "And somewhere,
7392 upline from here, there's someone else in the cuanxiao, who has
7393 something on her. And there are preachers who can convince you that
7394 you'll make a fortune with cuanxiao, and that you just need to
7395 inspire your family and friends."</p>
7396 <p>"You know him? Mr Lee. My friend took me to a meeting. Mr Lee
7397 seemed like he was on fire, and he made me so sure that I would
7398 become rich if only --"</p>
7399 <p>"I don't know Mr Lee. But there are hundreds of Mr Lees in
7400 Guandong province. You know what we call them? Pharoahs, like the
7401 Egyptian kings they buried in pyramids. That's because they sit on
7402 top of a pyramid of fools like you. Beneath the pharoah, there's a
7403 pair of downliners, and beneath them, two pairs, and beneath them,
7404 two more pairs, and so on, all passing money up the power to some
7405 feudal idiot from the countryside who knows how to talk a good line
7406 and has never worked a day in his life. Did you ever study
7407 math?"</p>
7409 <p>"That's very good! Math is useful in this world. Let's do a
7410 little math. If each level of the pyramid has double the number of
7411 members of the previous level, how many members are there on the
7417 <p>Lu pulled out his phone, used the calculator, did some
7418 figuring.</p>
7421 <p>"It's big. A hundred thousand? No! About five hundred
7422 thousand."</p>
7425 precise. There's 1.6 billion people in China. Your herb salespeople
7426 were supposed to recruit new downliners every two weeks. At that
7427 rate --" She typed some more. "It would be just over a year before
7428 every person in China was working in your pyramid, even the tiny
7429 babies and the oldest grannies."</p>
7431 <p>"You know about network selling, you must have. What year are
7432 you?" Meaning, how many years since you left the village?</p>
7434 thought this was different. I thought because there was a real
7435 product and because it was only two people at a time --"</p>
7436 <p>"I don't think you thought about any of that, sister. I think
7437 you thought about having a big apartment and a lot of money. Isn't
7438 that right?"</p>
7439 <p>"There was money, though! It was working for weeks! My friend
7440 had made so much --"</p>
7442 stealing from the new people to pay the old people, it's a good
7443 deal for the old people. Not so good for the new people. People
7444 like you or your downliners."</p>
7446 friends' lives!" She was sobbing now, screaming out the confession
7447 for millions of people to hear.</p>
7449 just like thousands of other people. Now what are you going to do
7450 about it?"</p>
7452 <p>"You can stop snivelling and pull yourself together. Your
7453 friend, the one who recruited you? Someone's holding something over
7454 her, the way that she was holding something over you. Sit down with
7455 her, and do whatever it takes to get her out. The most evil thing
7456 about these pyramids is that they turn friend against friend, make
7457 us betray the people we love to keep from being betrayed ourselves.
7458 Even if you're one of the lucky few at the top who makes some money
7459 from it, you pay the price of your integrity, your friendships and
7460 your soul. The only way to win is not to play."</p>
7462 <p>"But, but, but! Listen, foolish girl! You called me tonight
7463 because your soul is stained with the evil that you did. Did you
7464 think I would just tell you that it's all right, you did what you
7465 had to do, no blame on you? No! You know me, I'm Jiandi. I don't
7466 grant absolution. I tell you what you must do to pay for your
7467 crimes. You don't get to confess, feel better and walk away. You
7468 have to do the hard work now -- you have to set things to right,
7469 help your friends, restore your integrity and conscience. Do you
7470 hear me?"</p>
7473 order.</p>
7478 you in Macau! Good girl. Go and do right now!"</p>
7479 <p>And she clicked something and another ad rolled in Lu's
7480 headphones. He took them off, found that his eyes were moist with
7483 like gambling. It comes from not understanding numbers. They all
7484 win their little math medals, but they don't believe in the
7485 numbers. Now, you were about to tell me about some kind of
7486 reinforcement."</p>
7488 leads our guild, he told me about it. It comes from experiments
7489 with rats. Imagine that you have a rat who gets some food every
7490 time he pushes a lever. How often do you think he pushes the
7491 lever?"</p>
7492 <p>"As often as he's hungry, I suppose. I kept mice once -- they
7493 knew when it was time for food and they'd rush over to the corner
7494 of the cage that I dropped their seeds and cheese into."</p>
7495 <p>"Right. Now, what about a lever that gives food every fifth time
7496 they press the lever?"</p>
7498 <p>"About the same, actually, After a while, the rats figure out
7499 that they need five presses for a food pellet and every time they
7500 want feeding, they wander over and hit it five times. Now, what
7501 about a lever that gives food out at random? Sometimes one press,
7502 sometimes one hundred presses?"</p>
7504 <p>"Wrong! They press it like crazy, All day and all night. It's
7505 like someone who wins a little money in the lottery one week and
7506 then plays every week afterward, forever. The uncertainty drives
7507 them crazy, it's the most addictive system of all. Matthew says
7508 it's the most important part of game design -- one day you manage
7509 to kill a really hard NPC with a lucky swing, and it drops some
7510 incredibly epic item, and you make more money in ten seconds than
7511 you made all week, and you have to keep going back to that spot,
7512 looking for a monster like it, thinking it'll happen again."</p>
7515 that the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when
7516 you're just about to quit, you get another jackpot." He shrugged.
7518 <p>"If it's random, it shouldn't make any difference what you do
7519 and where you play. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up
7520 heads ten times in a row, you've got exactly the same chance of it
7521 coming up heads an eleventh time than if it had come up all tails,
7522 or half and half."</p>
7523 <p>"Matthew says stuff like that all the time. He says that
7524 although it may be unlikely that you'll get ten heads in a row,
7525 each flip has exactly the same chance."</p>
7528 ever gets out of jail, that is."</p>
7530 <p>She handled six more calls, running the show for another two
7531 hours, breaking for commercials and promising all her listeners the
7532 most exciting event of their lifetime if they just hung in. At
7533 first, Lu listened attentively, but his head hurt and he was so
7534 tired, and eventually he slumped in his seat and dozed, drifting in
7535 and out of dreams as he listened to Jie berating the foolish
7536 factory girls of South China.</p>
7537 <p>He woke to a sprinkle of ice-water on his face, gasped and sat
7538 up, opening his eyes just in time to see Jie dancing back away from
7541 <p>He looked at his phone and realized that he'd dozed for an hour
7542 more, and that it was well past supper time. His stomach rumbled.
7543 Jie had taken off her shoes and socks and unbuttoned the top two
7544 buttons on her red blouse. Her hair was down and her makeup was
7545 smudged. She looked like she was having the time of her life.</p>
7547 his mouth for a toilet.</p>
7550 listenership peaks. They're back from dinner, they're finished
7551 gossiping, and they're all sitting on their beds, tuning in on
7552 their computers and phones and radios. And I've been hyping you for
7554 waiting to meet you, are you ready?"</p>
7556 managed.</p>
7559 <p>He fumbled with his headset, swung the mic down, reached for the
7560 water glass and gulped down too much, choked, tried to keep it in,
7561 choked more, spilled water all down his front. Jie laughed aloud,
7562 gulping it down as she spoke into her mic.</p>
7563 <p>"We're back, we're back, we're back, and now sisters, I have the
7564 special surprise I've been promising you all night! A knight of the
7565 people, a hero of the factory, a killer who has hunted pirates in
7566 space and dragons in the hills, a professional gold-farmer named
7569 of player I am, the tank."</p>
7571 only you could see this big, muscled tank I have sitting here in my
7572 studio. Let me tell you about Tank. I was watching a little video
7573 this afternoon, and like many of you, I found myself watching
7574 something amazing: dozens of boys, lined up outside an Internet
7575 cafe, blinking and pale as newborn mice in the daylight. It seemed
7576 that they were a different kind of factory boy, the legendary gold
7577 farmers of Shenzhen, and they were demanding a better job, better
7578 pay, better conditions, and an end to their vicious, greedy bosses.
7579 Does that sound familiar, sisters?</p>
7581 clubs and gas, cowards with their faces hidden and their brutal
7582 weapons in hand to fight these boys who only wanted justice. But
7583 did the boys flee? No! Did they go back to their jobs and apologize
7584 to their bosses? No! The mouse army stood its ground, claimed their
7585 workplace as their rightful home, the place their work paid for.
7587 <p>Lu looked at her like she was crazy. She made urgent
7588 hand-gestures at him as the silence stretched. "I, that is, they
7591 Watch as the jingcha charge the boys of Shenzhen, breaking their
7592 heads, gassing them, clubbing them. And now, focus on one brave lad
7593 off to the left, right at the 14:22 mark. Strong chin, wide eyes, a
7594 little freckles over his nose, hair in disarray. See him stand his
7595 ground through the charge with his comrades by his side? See the
7596 jingcha with his club who comes upon the boy from behind and hits
7597 him in the shoulder, knocking him down? See the club come up again
7598 and land on the poor boy's head, the blood that flies from the
7599 wound?</p>
7600 <p>"That, sisters, is Tank, the boy sitting across from me,
7601 bloodied but unbowed, brave and strong, standing up for the rights
7602 of workers --" She dissolved into giggles. Lu giggled too, he
7603 couldn't help it. "Oh, sorry, sorry. Look, he's a very nice boy,
7604 and not bad to look at, and the jingcha laid into his head and
7605 shoulder like they were tenderizing a steak, and all he was doing
7606 was insisting that he had the right to work like a person and not
7607 an animal. And he's not alone. They call it 'The People's Republic
7608 of China,' but the people don't get any say in the way it's run.
7609 It's all corruption and exploitation.</p>
7611 saw him, our Tank, wandering dazed and bloody through --" she broke
7612 off. "Through a location I will not disclose, so that the jingcha
7613 won't know which video footage they need to review. I saw him and I
7614 told him I wanted to introduce him to you, my friends, and then he
7615 told me the most amazing story I've heard, and you <em>know</em> I
7616 hear a lot of amazing stories here every night. A story about a
7617 global movement to improve the lot of workers everywhere, and I
7618 hope that's the story he'll tell us tonight. So, Tank, darling,
7619 start with your injuries. Could you describe them to our friends
7621 <p>And Lu did, and then he found himself going from there into the
7622 story of how he came to be a gold farmer, what life was like for
7623 him, the stories Matthew had told him about how Boss Wing had
7624 forced him and his friends to go back to work in his factory,
7625 talking and talking until the water was gone and his mouth was dry,
7626 and mercifully, she called for another commercial.</p>
7629 you, 'Tank'. The way you rescued those girls' belongings in Shilong
7630 New Town! You're their hero. There are dozens of them who claim
7631 that they were there on that day, that they saw you climbing the
7632 fence. Listen to this, 'His muscles rippled like iron bands as he
7633 clambered up the fence like a mighty jungle creature...'" He
7634 snorted water up his sinuses, and Jie gave his bicep a squeeze.
7635 "You need to work out some more, Jungle Creature, your muscles have
7639 there on the net, usually one that no one has posted to in a year
7640 or two, and we take over the comment board on one of its posts.
7641 Once they block it -- or the server crashes -- we switch to another
7643 <p>He laughed and shook his head, which set his headache going
7644 again. He winced and squeezed his head between his hands. "Sheer
7646 <p>Now the commercial was ending, and they both sat down quickly in
7647 their chairs and swung their mics into place. Lu was getting good
7648 at this now, the talk coming to him the way it did when he was
7649 chatting with his guildies. He'd always been the storyteller of the
7650 bunch.</p>
7651 <p>And the story went on -- he told of how the Webblies had come to
7652 him and his guildies in game, had talked to them about the need for
7653 solidarity and mutual aid to protect themselves from bosses, from
7654 players who hunted gold-farmers, from the game company.</p>
7656 sagely.</p>
7658 workers would be useless. With gold farming, the work can just move
7659 to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India -- anywhere workers aren't
7660 organized. It's the same with all work now -- your job can move in
7661 no time at all to anywhere you can build a factory and dock a
7662 container ship. There's no such thing as 'Chinese' workers anymore.
7663 Just workers! And so the Webblies organize all of us,
7668 counter, and we all cheer when it goes up by a few hundred, but
7671 of people! That's fantastic -- and I'm sure we can get a few
7674 need to get at least 50 percent of your co-workers to agree to sign
7679 up small game-factories, there's not many bigger than 200 workers.
7680 It has to be possible, though. Trade unions all over the world have
7681 organized factories of every size." He swallowed, understanding how
7682 lame he sounded. "Look, this is usually Matthew's side of things.
7683 He understands all of it. I'm just the tank, you understand? I
7684 stand in the front and soak up all the damage. And you can't talk
7687 <p>So he told them the story of the battle, all those millions of
7688 girls out there in the towns of Guangdong, and he found
7689 himself...transported. Taken away back to the cafe, the shouting,
7690 the police and the screams, his voice drifting to his ears from a
7691 long way off through the remembered shouts in his ears. When he
7692 stopped, he snapped back to reality and found Jie staring at him
7693 with wet eyes and parted lips. He looked at his phone. It was
7694 nearly midnight.</p>
7699 he said. He shifted his butt in his chair and winced. "And my
7703 <p>He didn't feel tough. Truth be told, he felt pretty terrible
7704 about the fact that he'd gotten away while his guildies had all
7705 been locked up. Logically he knew that they wouldn't benefit from
7706 him being jailed alongside of them, but that was logic, not
7707 feelings.</p>
7709 didn't I tell you I had something special tonight? Alas, it's
7710 nearly time to go -- we all need some sleep before we go back to
7711 work in the morning, don't we? Just one more thing: <em>what are we
7713 <p>Suddenly, she wasn't sleepy and soothing. Her eyes were wide,
7714 and she was gripping the edge of her desk tightly. "We come here
7715 from our villages looking to do an honest job for decent pay so
7716 that we can help our families, so that we can live and survive.
7717 What do we get? Slimy perverts who screw us on the job and off!
7718 Bastard criminals who destroy anyone who challenges their rackets!
7719 Cops who beat us and put us in jail if we dare to challenge the
7722 such thing as a Chinese worker anymore, just a worker. I hadn't
7723 heard of these Webblies of his before tonight, and I don't know if
7724 they're any better than your boss or the thief running the network
7725 sales rip-off next door, and I don't care. If there are workers
7726 around the world organizing for a better deal, I want to be a part
7727 of it, and so do you!</p>
7728 <p>"I'll tell you what's going to happen next. Tank and I are going
7729 to find the Webblies and we're going to plan something big.
7734 confess. I do this show because it makes me money. A lot of money.
7735 I have to spend a lot to stay ahead of the zengfu, but there's
7736 plenty left over. More than you make, I have to confess. It's been
7737 a long time since I was as poor as a factory girl. I'm practically
7738 rich. Not boss-rich, but rich, you understand?</p>
7739 <p>"But I'm with you. I didn't start this show to get rich. I
7740 started it because I was a factory girl and I cared about my
7741 sisters. We've been coming to Guangdong Province since Deng
7742 Xiaoping changed the rules and made the factories here grow. It's
7743 been generations, sisters, and we come, we poor mice from the
7744 country, and we are ground up by the factories we slave in. For
7745 every Yuan we send home, our bosses put a hundred in their pockets.
7746 And when we're done, then what? We become one of the old grannies
7747 begging by the road.</p>
7749 Webblies, we're going to make a plan, and we're going to bring it
7750 to you. In the meantime, don't take any crap off your bosses. Don't
7751 let the cops push you or your sisters and brothers around. And be
7753 <p>She clicked her mouse and flipped the lid down on her
7754 laptop.</p>
7760 tomorrow about the next show? Maybe we could meet in the morning
7761 and try to reach the Webblies or find a way to try to call my
7766 first arrived in Shenzhen, he'd spent a couple nights sleeping in
7767 parks. He could do that again. It wasn't so bad, if it didn't rain
7768 in the night. Had there been clouds that day? He couldn't
7769 remember.</p>
7771 She pointed to the bedroom.</p>
7774 you've just given me hours of great radio show. So you need it and
7776 <p>He was too tired to argue. He stumbled a little on the way to
7777 bed, and she swept the clothes and toys and handbags from the bed
7778 onto the floor just ahead of him. She pulled the sheet over him and
7779 kissed him on the forehead as he settled in. "Sleep, Tank," she
7780 whispered in his ear.</p>
7781 <p>He wondered dimly where she would sleep, as she left the room
7782 and he heard her typing on her computer again. He fell asleep with
7783 the sound of the keys in his ears.</p>
7784 <p>He barely woke when she slid under the covers with him, snuggled
7785 up to him and began to snore softly in his ear.</p>
7786 <p>But he was wide awake an hour later when ten police cars pulled
7787 up out front of Houhai's buildings, sirens blaring, and a
7788 helicopter spotlight bathed the entire building in light as white
7789 as daylight. She went rigid beside him under the covers and then
7790 practically levitated out of the bed.</p>
7793 <p>Lu felt obscurely proud of how calm he felt as he stood up and,
7794 in an unhurried, calm fashion, picked up his shoes -- factory
7795 workers' tennis shoes, cheap and ubiquitous -- and laced them up,
7796 then pulled on his jacket, then moved efficiently into the living
7797 room, where Jie was hosing solvent over all the flat surfaces in
7798 the room. The smell was as sharp as his headache, and intensified
7799 it.</p>
7800 <p>She nodded once at him, and then nodded at another
7801 pressure-bottle of solvent and said, "You do the bathroom and the
7802 bedroom." He did, working quickly. He guessed that this would wipe
7803 away anything like a fingerprint or a distinctive kind of dirt. He
7804 was done in a minute, or maybe, less, and she was at his elbow with
7805 a ziploc baggie full of dust. "Vacuumed out of the seas of the Hong
7808 <p>The dust got up his nose and made him sneeze, and sunk into the
7809 creases of his palms, and it was all a little icky, but his head
7810 was clear and full of the sirens and the helicopter's thunder. As
7811 he scattered the genetic material throughout, he watched Jie
7812 popping the drive out of her computer and dropping the slender
7814 his cool. Suddenly, he realized that he'd spent the night sleeping
7816 her, much less touched those mysterious and intriguing breasts that
7817 now warmly embraced an extremely compromising piece of storage
7818 media, a sliver of magnetic media that could put them both in jail
7819 forever.</p>
7820 <p>She looked around and ticked off a mental checklist on her
7821 finger. Then she snapped a decisive nod and said, "All right, let's
7822 go." She led him out into the corridor, which was brightly lit and
7823 empty, leaving him feeling very exposed. She pulled a short prybar
7824 out of her purse and expertly pried open the steel door on a
7825 fuse-panel by the elevators, revealing neat rows of black plastic
7826 breaker switches. She fished in her handbag again and came out with
7827 a disposable butane lighter, which she lit, applying the flame to a
7828 little twist of white vinyl or shiny paper protruding like a
7829 pull-tab from an unobtrusive seam in the panel. It sizzled and
7830 flashed and a twist of black smoke rose from it and then the paper
7831 burned away, the spark disappearing into the panel.</p>
7832 <p>A second later, the entire panel-face erupted in a shower of
7833 sparks, smoke and flame. Jie regarded it with satisfaction as black
7834 smoke poured out of the plate. Then all the lights went out and the
7835 smoke alarms began to toll, a bone-deep dee-dah dee-dah that
7836 drowned out the helicopter, the sirens.</p>
7837 <p>She clicked a little red LED light to life and it bathed her
7838 face in demonic light. She looked very satisfied with herself. It
7839 made Lu feel calm.</p>
7843 <p>All through the building, doors were opening, bleary families
7844 were emerging, and smoke was billowing, black and acrid. They
7845 headed for the staircase, just behind the Bound-Foot Granny who
7846 they'd met the day before. In the stairwell, they met hundreds,
7847 then thousands more refugees from the building, all carrying
7848 armloads of precious possessions, babies, elderly family
7849 members.</p>
7850 <p>At the bottom, the police tried to corral them into an orderly
7851 group in front of the building, but there were too many people, too
7852 much confusion. In the end, it was simple to slip through the
7853 police lines and mingle with the crowd of gawkers from nearby
7854 buildings who'd turned out to watch.</p>
7856 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia
7857 Books, a diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the
7858 strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was
7859 around the corner from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk
7860 at Simon Fraser University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in
7861 advance to ask me to drop in and sign their stock while I was in
7862 the neighborhood. When I got there, I discovered a treasure-trove
7863 of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of languages, from
7864 graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by
7865 good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their
7866 jobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the
7867 door.</i></p>
7869 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684
7871 <p>Whether you're a revolutionary, a factory owner, or a
7872 little-league hockey organizer, there's one factor you can't afford
7873 to ignore: the CoaseCost.</p>
7874 <p>Ronald Coase was an American economist who changed everything
7877 organization was getting people organized. A religion is a system
7878 for organizing people to pray and give money to build churches and
7879 pay priests or ministers or rabbis; a shoe factory is a system for
7880 organizing people to make shoes. A revolutionary conspiracy is a
7881 system for organizing people to overthrow the government.</p>
7882 <p>Organizing is a kind of tax on human activity. For every minute
7884 making sure that you're not getting ahead or behind or to one side
7885 of the other people you're doing stuff with. The seconds you tithe
7886 to an organization is the CoaseCost, the tax on your work that you
7887 pay for the fact that we're human beings and not ants or bees or
7888 some other species that manages to all march in unison by sheer
7889 instinct.</p>
7890 <p>Oh, you can beat the CoaseCost: just stick to doing projects
7891 that you don't need anyone else's help with. Like, um...Tying your
7892 shoes? (Nope, not unless you're braiding your own shoelaces).
7893 Toasting your own sandwich (not unless you gathered the wood for
7894 the fire and the wheat for the bread and the milk for the cheese on
7895 your own).</p>
7896 <p>The fact is, everything you do is collaborative -- somewhere out
7897 there, someone else had a hand in it. And part of the cost of what
7898 you're doing is spent on making sure that you're coordinating
7899 right, that the cheese gets to your fridge and that the electricity
7900 hums through its wires.</p>
7901 <p>You can't eliminate Coase costs, but you can lower it. There's
7902 two ways of doing this: get better organizational techniques (say,
7904 invention that is at the heart of every money-making organization
7905 in the world, from churches to corporations to governments), or get
7906 better technology.</p>
7907 <p>Take going out to the movies. It's Friday night, and you're
7908 thinking of seeing a movie, but you don't want to go alone. Imagine
7910 <p>Well, you'd have to find a newspaper and see what's playing.
7911 Then you'd have to call all your friends' houses (no cellular
7912 phones, remember!) and leave messages for them. Then you'd have to
7913 wait for some or all of them to call you back and report on their
7914 movie preferences. Then you'd have to call them back in ones and
7915 twos and see if you could convince a critical mass of them to see
7916 the same movie. Then you'd have to get to the theater and locate
7917 each other and hope that the show wasn't sold out.</p>
7918 <p>How much does this cost? Well, first, let's see how much the
7919 movie is worth: one way to do that is to look at how much someone
7920 would have to pay you to convince you to give up on going to the
7921 movies. Another is to raise the price of the tickets steadily until
7922 you decide not to see a movie after all.</p>
7923 <p>Once you have that number, you can calculate your CoaseCost: you
7924 could ask how much it would cost you to pay someone else to make
7925 the arrangements for you, or how much you could earn at an
7926 after-school job if you weren't playing phone tag with your
7927 friends.</p>
7929 <p>[Value of the movie] - [Cost of getting your friends together to
7930 see it] = [Net value of an evening out]</p>
7931 <p>That's why you'll do something less fun (stay in and watch TV)
7932 but simple, rather than going out and doing something more fun but
7933 more complicated. It's not that movies aren't fun -- but if it's
7934 too much of a pain in the ass to get your friends out to see them,
7935 then the number of movies you go to see goes way down.</p>
7936 <p>Now think of an evening out at the movies these days. It's
7939 listings, sorted by proximity to you. Then you send out a broadcast
7940 text-message to your friends -- if your phone's very smart, you can
7941 send it to just those friends who are in the neighborhood --
7942 listing the movies and the films. They reply-all to one another,
7943 and after a couple volleys, you've found a bunch of people to see a
7944 flick with. You buy your tickets on the phone.</p>
7945 <p>But then you get there and discover that the crowds are so huge
7946 you can't find each other. So you call one another and arrange to
7947 meet by the snack bar and moments later, you're in your seats,
7948 eating popcorn.</p>
7949 <p>So what? Why should anyone care how much it costs to get stuff
7950 done? Because the CoaseCost is the price of being
7952 <p>Back in the old days -- the very, very old days -- your
7953 ancestors were solitary monkeys. They worked in singles or couples
7954 to do everything a monkey needed, from gathering food to taking
7955 care of kids to watching for predators to building nests. This had
7956 its limitations: if you're babysitting the kids, you can't gather
7957 food. If you're gathering food, you might miss the tiger -- and
7958 lose the kids.</p>
7959 <p>Enter the tribe: a group of monkeys that work together, dividing
7960 up the labor. Now they're not just solitary monkeys, they're groups
7961 of monkeys, and they can do more than a single monkey could do.
7962 They have transcended monkeyness. They are
7964 <p>Being a supermonkey isn't easy. If you're an individual
7965 supermonkey, there are two ways to prosper: you can play along with
7966 all your monkey pals to get the kids fed and keep an eye out for
7967 tigers, or you can hide in the bushes and nap, pretending to work,
7968 only showing up at mealtimes.</p>
7969 <p>From an individual perspective, it makes sense to be the
7970 lazy-jerk-monkey. In a big tribe of monkeys, one or two goof-offs
7971 aren't going to bankrupt the group. If you can get away with
7972 napping instead of working, and still get fed, why not do it?</p>
7974 no one's getting the fruit, no one's taking care of the kids, and
7976 many lazy monkeys plus tigers equals lunch.</p>
7977 <p>So monkeys -- and their hairless descendants like you -- need
7978 some specialized hardware to detect cheaters and punish them before
7979 the idea catches on and the tigers show up. That specialized
7980 hardware is a layer of tissue wrapped around the top of your brain
7981 called the neo-cortex -- the "new bark." The neo-cortex is in
7982 charge of keeping track of the monkeys. It's the part of your brain
7983 that organizes people, checks in on them, falls in love with them,
7984 establishes enmity with them. It's the part of your brain that gets
7985 thoroughly lit up when you play with Facebook or other social
7986 networking sites, and it's the part of your brain that houses the
7987 local copies of the people in your life. It's where the voice of
7988 your mother telling you to brush your teeth emanates from.</p>
7989 <p>The neocortex is the CoaseCost as applied to the brain. Every
7990 sip of air you breathe, every calorie you ingest, every lubdub of
7991 your heart goes to feed this new bark that keeps track of the other
7992 people in your group and what they're doing, whether they're in
7993 line or off the reservation.</p>
7994 <p>The CoaseCost is the limit of your ability to be superhuman. If
7995 the CoaseCost of some activity is lower than the value that you'd
7996 get out of it, you can get some friends together and <em>do
7997 it</em>, transcend the limitations that nature has set on lone
7999 <p>So it follows that high Coase costs make you less powerful and
8000 low Coase costs make you more powerful. What's more, big
8001 institutions with a lot of money and power can overcome high Coase
8003 with tanks and food and medics; you and your buddies cannot. So
8005 while leaving the rich and powerful in possession of super-powers
8006 that you could never attain.</p>
8007 <p>And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and
8008 networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in
8009 the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same
8010 ease that's standard for the high and mighty. If anyone can create
8011 and sell virtual wealth in a game, then we're all in the same
8012 economic shoes as the multinational megacorps that start the
8013 games.</p>
8014 <p>And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other
8015 worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss's
8016 permission, then, brother, look out, because the CoaseCost of
8017 demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the
8019 power aren't going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it
8020 away from them.</p>
8022 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store
8023 I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten
8024 years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for
8025 global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the
8026 incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In
8027 addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the
8028 bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications
8029 in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic
8030 anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where
8031 I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit
8032 in my suitcase.</i></p>
8036 <p>Coca Cola Games Command Central had been designed by one of the
8037 world's leading film-set designers. The brief had called for a room
8038 that looked like you could use it to run an evil empire, launch an
8039 intergalactic explorer vessel, or command a high-tech mercenary
8040 army. Everything was curved and brushed steel and spotlit and what
8041 wasn't chrome was black, except for accents of cracked, worn-out
8042 black leather harvested from vintage motorcycle jackets. There were
8043 screens everywhere, built into the tables, rolled up in the ceiling
8044 or floor, even one on the back of the door. Any wall could be drawn
8045 on with special pens that used RFIDs and accelerometers to track
8046 their motions and transmit them to a computer that recorded it all
8047 and splashed it across wireless multitouch screens that were
8048 velcroed up all around the room.</p>
8049 <p>Slick photos of Command Central graced the Coca Cola Games
8050 recruiting site and featured in a series of vanity documentaries
8051 CCG had commissioned about itself, looking designer-fresh, filled
8052 with fit, intense, laughing young people in smart clothes doing
8053 intelligent things.</p>
8055 <p>Ten seconds after the game-runners moved into Command Central,
8056 every multitouch had been broken or stolen. The recessed terminals
8057 set into the tables were obsolete before they were installed and
8058 now they suffered an ignominious fate: serving as stands for
8059 cutting-edge laptops equipped with graphics cards that ran so hot,
8060 their fans sounded like jet-engines.</p>
8061 <p>Fifteen seconds later, every flat surface had been covered with
8062 junk-food wrappers, pizza boxes, energy-drink cans, vintage sci-fi
8063 novels, used kleenexes, origami orc-helmets folded out of post-it
8064 notes, snappy hats, and the infinitely varied junky licensed crap
8065 that CCG made from the game, from Pez dispensers to bicycle
8066 valve-caps to trading cards to flick-knives.</p>
8067 <p>Twenty seconds after that, the room acquired the game-runner
8068 funk, a heady mix of pizza-grease strained through armpit pores,
8069 cheap cologne, unwashed hair, vintage Japanese denim, and motor
8070 oil.</p>
8071 <p>And now the sleek supergenius lair had become the exclusive
8072 meeting-cave for a tribe of savage, hyper-competitive, extremely
8073 well-paid game-runners, who holed up in there, gnashing their teeth
8074 and shouting at each other for every hour that God sent. No cleaner
8075 would enter the room, and even the personal assistants would only
8076 go so far as the doorway, where they plaintively called out their
8077 bosses' names and dodged the disgusting food-wrappers that were
8078 hurled at their heads by the game-runners, who did not take kindly
8079 to having their work interrupted.</p>
8080 <p>Connor Prikkel had found His People. Technically he was a
8081 vice-president, but no one reported to him, except for a PA whose
8082 job it was to fish him out of Command Central a couple times a
8083 month, steam-clean him in the corporate gym, stick him in the
8084 corporate jet, and fire him into crowds of players and press around
8085 the world to explain -- with a superior smirk -- just how Coca Cola
8086 Games managed to oversee three of the twenty largest economies in
8087 the world.</p>
8088 <p>The rest of the time, Connor's job was to work on his
8089 fingerspitzengefuhl. That was a useful word. It was a German word,
8091 by the simple expedient of bashing as many smaller words as you
8092 needed together until you got one monster mouth-murderer like
8093 fingerspitzengefuhl that exactly and precisely conveyed something
8094 no other language could even get close to.</p>
8096 get when you've got the world resting against the thick cushion of
8097 nerve-endings on the tips of your fingers. That feeling when you've
8098 got a basketball held lightly in your hands, and you know precisely
8099 where the next bounce will take it when you let it go. That feeling
8100 you get when you're holding onto a baby and you can feel whether
8101 she's falling asleep now, or waking up. That feeling you get when
8102 your hands are resting lightly on the handlebars of your bike,
8103 bouncing down a steep hillside, gentle pressure on the brakes,
8104 riding the razor-edged line between doing an end-over and reaching
8105 the bottom safely.</p>
8106 <p>Proprioception is your ability to sense where your body is in
8107 space relative to everything else. It's a sixth sense, and you
8108 don't even know you have it until you lose it -- like when you
8109 intertwine your fingers and thread your hands through your arms and
8110 find that you wiggle your left finger when you mean to move your
8111 right; or when you step on a ghost step at the top of a staircase
8112 and your foot lands on nothing.</p>
8113 <p>Fingerspitzengefuhl is proprioception for the world, an
8114 extension of your sixth sense into everything around you. You have
8115 fingerspitzengefuhl when you can tell, just by the way the air
8116 feels, that your class is in a bad mood, or that your teammate is
8117 upcourt and waiting for you to pass the ball.</p>
8118 <p>Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl meant that he could feel
8120 could tell when there was a run on gold in Svartalfaheim Warriors,
8121 or when Zombie Mecha's credits take a dive. He could tell when
8122 there was a huge raiding guild making a run at Odin's Fortress, six
8123 hundred humans embodied in six hundred avs, coordinated by generals
8124 and captains and lieutenants. He could tell when there was a
8125 traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge in Zombie Mecha as too many
8126 ronin tried to enter Manhattan to clear out the Flatiron Building
8127 and complete the Publishing Quest.</p>
8128 <p>All this knowledge came to him through his ever-rotating,
8129 ever-changing feeds -- charts, chat-transcripts, server logs, bars
8130 representing load and memory and failover and rate of subscriber
8131 churn and every other bit of changing information from in the game.
8132 They flickered past in a colorful roll, on the display of his
8133 monster widescreen laptop, opacity dialled down to 10 percent in
8134 the windows that sat over his playscreens in which he ran four avs
8135 in both games.</p>
8136 <p>Every gamerunner had a different way of attaining
8137 fingerspitzengefuhl, as personal as the thought you follow to go to
8139 screens -- four or five. Some listened to a lot of read-aloud text
8140 and eavesdropped gamechat. Some only watched charts, some only
8141 logs, some only game-screens. Coca Cola Games had hired some
8142 industrial psychologists to try to come and unpick the
8143 game-runners' methods, try to create a system for reproducing and
8144 refining it. They'd lasted a day before being tossed out of Command
8145 Central amid a torrent of abuse and profanities.</p>
8146 <p>The game-runners didn't want to be systematized. They didn't
8147 want to be studied. To be a game-runner was to attain
8148 fingerspitzengefuhl and vice-versa. Game-runners didn't need
8149 shrinks to tell them when they had fingerspitzengefuhl. When you
8150 had fingerspitzengefuhl, you fell into a warm bath, a kind of
8151 hyper-alert coma, in which knowledge flowed in and out of every
8152 orifice at maximum speed. Fingerspitzengefuhl needed coffee and
8153 energy drinks, junk food and loud goddamned music, grunts of your
8154 co-workers. Fingerspitzengefuhl didn't need industrial
8155 psychology.</p>
8156 <p>Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was the best. It guided the
8157 unconscious dance of his fingers on his laptop, guided him to
8158 eavesdrop on the right conversations, to monitor the right action,
8159 to spot the Webblies' fight with the Pinkertons as it began. He
8160 grunted that special grunt that alerted the rest of his tribe to
8161 danger, and stabbed at his screen with a fat finger greased with
8162 pizza-oil. The knowledge rippled through the room like a wave,
8163 bellies and chins wobbling as the whole tribe tuned into the
8164 fight.</p>
8166 who'd worked her way up to Command Central.</p>
8170 earned his PhD but hadn't invented the Prikkel Equations.</p>
8175 government," Connor snapped, noting the stiffened spines of Kaden
8176 and Bill, both recruited out of the Pentagon's anti-terror Delta
8177 Force command to help analyze the big guilds' command-structures
8178 and figure out how to get more money out of them.</p>
8180 her, even though they often disagreed. She'd run big teams of
8181 level-designers, graphic artists, AI specialists, programmers, the
8182 whole thing, and she had a good top-down and bottom-up view of
8183 things.</p>
8185 each of the avs with a national flag representing the country the
8186 IP address of the player was registered to. "And it's a goddamned
8187 United Nations of players, look at that. What language are they
8188 speaking?" He clicked some more and took over the room's speakers,
8189 cleverly recessed into walls and floors, now buried under mountains
8190 of pizza-cardboard. The room filled with a gabble of heavily
8191 accented English mixed with Mandarin. His ear picked out Indian
8192 accents, Chinese, something else -- Malay? Indonesian? There were
8193 players from the whole Malay Peninsula in that mob.</p>
8195 in programming artificial intelligences, a trade that had changed
8196 an awful lot since the Mechanical Turks stepped in to backstop the
8197 AIs in game. But she had invented the idea of giving the game's
8198 soundtrack its own AI, capable of upping the drama-quotient in the
8199 music when momentous things were afoot, and that holistic view of
8200 gameplay had landed her a seat in Command Central. She was the one
8201 who ordered out for health food and giant salads instead of burgers
8202 by the sack and pints of icecream. "They're nearly in the same
8203 distribution as the Webblies! Look at this --" she zoomed in on a
8204 scrolling list of IP addresses, then pulled up another table,
8205 fiddled with their sort order. "Look! These Pinkertons are fighting
8206 from a netblock that's within 200 meters of these Webblies! They're
8208 <p>It was true. Connor banged out a quick script to find and pair
8209 any players who were physically proximate to one another and to try
8210 for maps where they were available. Mostly they weren't -- he'd
8211 tried tracking down these rats before, tried to see where they
8212 lived, but ended up with a dead end. They didn't live on roads --
8213 they lived in illegal squats, shantytowns in the world's slumzones.
8214 The best he could do was month-old sat photos of these mazes,
8215 revealing mountains of smoldering garbage, toxic open sewers,
8216 livestock pens... Connor felt like he should visit one of these
8217 places, fly a team of rats out to Command Central in the company
8218 jet, stick them in a lab and study them and learn how to
8219 exterminate them.</p>
8220 <p>Because there was one chart Connor didn't need to load, the
8221 chart showing overall stability of the game economy: his
8222 fingerspitzengefuhl was filling him in just fine. The game economy
8225 that shard. Create a new instance for the Caverns so any real
8226 players who hit them don't have to wade through that mess. Get
8227 every one of those accounts and freeze their assets." Esteban, who
8228 headed up customer service, groaned.</p>
8230 hundreds of them! We're going to be untangling the assets for
8232 <p>Connor knew it. The legit players whose accounts had been stolen
8233 by the warring clans of third-world rip-off artists didn't deserve
8234 to have their assets frozen. What's more, there'd be plenty of them
8235 whose assets were part of a larger guild bank that might have the
8236 wealth of dozens or hundreds of players. Of course the Bad Guys
8237 knew this and depended on it, knew it would make the game-runners
8238 cautious and slow when it came time to shut down the accounts they
8239 were using to smuggle around their illicit wealth.</p>
8240 <p>He made eye-contact with Bill, head of security. They'd been
8241 going back and forth over whether it would be worth sucking some of
8242 Connor's budget into the security department to develop some
8243 forensic software that would ferret out the transaction histories
8244 of stolen accounts and figure out what assets the original player
8245 legitimately owned and where the dirty money ended up after it left
8246 his account. Connor hated to part with budget, especially when it
8247 involved Bill, who was a pompous ass who liked to act like he was
8248 some kind of super-cybercop rather than a glorified systems
8249 administrator.</p>
8251 said. "Right, Bill?" The head of security nodded, and began to
8252 pound at his keyboard, no doubt hiring a bunch of his old hacker
8253 buddies to come on board for top dollar and write the code.</p>
8256 <p>One by one, the combatants vanished as their accounts were shut
8257 down and frozen out. Some of the soldiers reappeared in the new
8258 instance -- a parallel universe containing an identical dungeon,
8259 but none of the same players -- using new avs, but they could tell
8260 who they were because they originated from the same IP addresses as
8262 this up, we'll have all their accounts nuked by the end of the
8264 <p>But the Pinkertons and Webblies must have had the same thought,
8265 because the logins dropped off to near-zero, then zero. The screens
8266 shifted, the eating sounds began anew, and Connor went back to his
8267 economic charts. As he'd felt, the price of assets, currency and
8268 derivatives had gone bonkers. The market somehow knew when there
8269 was trouble in Gold Farmer Land, and began to see-saw with the
8270 expectation that the price of goods was about to change.</p>
8277 throw him out of the game</p>
8280 fingerprint in play-style and spending that'll let us auto-detect
8281 farmers and toss them out. We're going to have a perfect,
8282 controlled, farmer-free economy. The first of its kind</p>
8288 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's
8289 legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover
8290 quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in
8291 from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We
8292 drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it,
8293 the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my
8294 hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a
8295 coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood,
8296 homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.</i></p>
8300 <p>Ashok wove his pretty bike through the narrow alleys of Dharavi,
8301 his headlamp slicing through the night. Yasmin's mother would be
8302 rigid with worry and anger, and would probably beat her, but it was
8303 OK. She and Ashok had sat in that studio shed for hours, talking it
8304 through, getting meat on the bones of her idea, and he had left
8305 long, detailed messages for Big Sister Nor before getting them back
8306 on his bike.</p>
8307 <p>Yasmin tapped him on the shoulder at each junction, showing him
8308 which way to turn. Soon they were nearly at her family's house and
8309 shouted at him to stop, hollering through the helmet. He killed the
8310 engine and the headlight and her bum finally stopped vibrating, her
8311 legs complaining about the hours she'd spent gripping the bike with
8312 the insides of her thighs. She swung unsteadily off her bike and
8313 brought her hands up to her helmet.</p>
8317 <p>They were whispering loudly, and a trick of the grilles over the
8318 helmet's ear-coverings let her hear the sound as though it was
8319 originating from right beside her. She put a firm hand on Ashok's
8320 shoulder and squeezed.</p>
8322 <p>Yasmin let go of Ashok's shoulder and brought her hand down to
8323 the cables tying the lathi to the bike, while her free hand moved
8324 to the helmet's visor, swinging it up. She'd repinned her hijab
8325 around her neck and now she was glad she had, as she had pretty
8326 good visibility. It had been a long time since she'd been in a
8327 physical fight, but she understood the principles of it well, knew
8328 her tactics.</p>
8329 <p>The lathi was really well anchored -- Ashok hadn't wanted it to
8330 go flying off while they were running down the motorway -- and now
8331 she brought her other hand down to work at it blind, keeping her
8332 eyes on the shadows around her, listening for the footsteps.</p>
8335 <p>And then they charged, an army of them, coming from the shadows
8336 all around them. "GO!" she said to Ashok, trying to keep him from
8337 dismounting the bike, but he got to his feet, squared his
8338 shoulders, and faced away from her, to the soldiers who were
8339 charging him. A rock or lump of cement clanged off her helmet,
8340 making a sound like a cooking pot falling to the floor, and now she
8341 tugged as hard as she could at the lathi and at last it sprang
8342 free, the steel hooks on the tips of the bunjee cables whipping
8343 around and smacking painfully into her hands. She barely noticed,
8344 whirling with the two-meter stick held overhead like a
8345 cricket-bat.</p>
8347 <p>The boy closest to her was Sushant. Sushant, who, that
8348 afternoon, had spoken of how he'd longed to join her cause. His
8349 face was a mask of terror in the weak light leaking out of the
8350 homes around them. The steel tip trembled over her shoulder as her
8351 wrists twitched. All she would need to do is unwind the swing, let
8352 the long pole and its steel end whistle through the air with all
8353 the whip-crack force penned up at the lathi's end and she would
8354 bash poor Sushant's head in.</p>
8355 <p>And why not? After all, that's what Mala's army was here
8356 for.</p>
8357 <p>All this thought in the blink of an eye, so fast she didn't even
8358 register that she'd thought it, but she did not swing the lathi
8359 through the air at Sushant's head. Instead, she swept it at his
8360 feet, pulling the swing so that it just knocked him backwards,
8361 flying into two more soldiers behind him, boys who had once taken
8362 orders from her.</p>
8364 lathi back, sweeping it toward the army's feet like a broom. They
8365 took a giant step back in unison, eyes crazed and rolling in the
8366 weak light. Sushant was weeping. She'd heard bone break when the
8367 lathi's tip met his ankle. He was holding onto the shoulders of the
8368 two soldiers he'd knocked over, and they were struggling to keep
8369 him upright.</p>
8370 <p>No one said anything and there was just the collective breath of
8371 Dharavi, thousands and thousands of chests rising and falling in
8372 unison, breathing in each others' air, breathing in the stink of
8373 the tanners and the burning reek from the dye factories and the
8374 sting of the plastic smoke.</p>
8375 <p>Then Mala stepped forward. In her hand, she held -- what? A
8376 bottle?</p>
8377 <p>A bottle. With an oily rag hanging out of the end. A petrol
8378 bomb.</p>
8380 "You'll burn the whole of Dharavi down!" It was the tone of voice
8381 you use when shouting into your headset at a guildie who was about
8382 to get the party killed by accidentally aggroing some giant boss.
8384 <p>It was the wrong tone to use with Mala. She stiffened up and her
8385 other hand worked at the wheel of a disposable lighter --
8387 <p>Again, she moved before she thought, two running steps while she
8388 brought the lathi up over her shoulder, feeling it thunk against
8389 something behind her as it sliced up, then slicing it back down
8390 again, in that savage, cutting arc, down at Mala's skinny legs,
8391 sweeping them with the whole force of her body, and Mala skipped
8392 backwards, away from the lathi, stumbled, went over backwards
8393 --</p>
8395 sound like the butcher's knife parting a goat's head from its neck,
8396 and Mala's scream was so terrible that it actually brought people
8397 to their windows (normally a scream in the night would make them
8398 stay back from it). There was bone sticking out of her leg,
8399 glinting amid the blood that fountained from the wound.</p>
8400 <p>And still she had the petrol bomb, and still she had the
8401 lighter, and now the lighter was lit. Yasmin drew back her foot for
8402 a footballer's kick, knowing as she wound up that she could cripple
8403 Mala's hand with a good kick, ending her career as General
8404 Robotwallah.</p>
8405 <p>Afterwards, she remembered the voice that had chased itself
8406 around her head as she drew back for that kick:</p>
8407 <p><em>Do it, do it and end your troubles. Do it because she would
8408 do it to you. Do it because it will scare her army out of fighting
8409 you and the Webblies. Do it because she betrayed you. Do it because
8410 it will keep you safe.</em></p>
8412 pinning her arms with her body. The lighter's flame licked at her
8413 arm, burning her, and she ground it out. She could feel Mala's
8414 breath, snorting and pained, on her throat. She grabbed Mala's left
8415 wrist, shook the hand that held the bomb, smashed it against the
8416 ground until it broke and spilled out the stinking petrol into the
8417 ditch that ran alongside the shacks. She stood up.</p>
8418 <p>Mala's face was ashen, even in the bad light. The blood smell
8419 and the petrol smell were everywhere.</p>
8421 she said.</p>
8427 back for her swing.</p>
8437 <p>Yasmin went into the flat, climbed the stairs. Her mother sat up
8438 as she entered the room and opened her mouth to say something, but
8439 Yasmin raised on hand to her and, miraculously, she shut up. Yasmin
8440 looked around the room, took the chair that sat in one corner, an
8441 armload of rags from the bundle they used to keep the room clean,
8442 and left, without saying a word.</p>
8443 <p>Ashok broke the chair into splints by smashing it against a
8444 nearby wall. It was a cheap thing and went to pieces quickly.
8445 Yasmin knelt by Mala and took her hand. Her breathing was shallow,
8446 labored.</p>
8447 <p>Mala squeezed her hand weakly. Then she opened her eyes and
8448 looked around, confused. Her eyes settled on Yasmin. They looked at
8449 each other. Mala tried to pull her hand away. Yasmin didn't let go.
8450 The hand was strong, nimble. It had dispatched innumerable zombies
8451 and monsters.</p>
8452 <p>Mala stopped struggling, closed her eyes. Ashok brought over the
8453 splints and rags and hunkered down beside them.</p>
8454 <p>Just before he began to work on her, Mala said something. Yasmin
8455 couldn't quite make it out, but she thought it might be,
8458 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers, the
8459 booksellers that are in practically every airport in the USA. Most
8460 of the Hudson stands have just a few titles (though those are often
8461 surprisingly diverse), but the big ones, like the one in the AA
8462 terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as good as any neighborhood
8463 store. It takes something special to bring a personal touch to an
8464 airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long
8465 Chicago layover.</i></p>
8466 <p><i><a href=
8468 Booksellers</a></i></p>
8469 <p>Wei-Dong couldn't get Lu off his mind. A barbarian stabbed a
8470 pumpkin and he decided that the sword would be stuck for three
8471 seconds and then play a standard squashing sound from his
8472 soundboard. He couldn't get Lu off his mind. A pickpocket tried to
8473 steal a phoenix's tailfeather, and he made the phoenix turn around
8474 and curse the player out, spitting flames, shouting at him in
8475 Mandarin, his voice filtered through a gobble-phaser so that it
8476 sounded birdy. He couldn't get Lu off his mind. A zombie
8477 horde-leader tried to batter his way into a barricaded mini-mall,
8478 attempting to go through a "Going out of business" signboard that
8479 was only a texture mapped onto an exterior surface that had no
8480 interior. Wei-Dong liked the guy's ingenuity, so he decided that it
8482 it would map to the interior of the sporting-goods store where
8483 there were some nice clubs, crossbows and machetes.</p>
8485 <p>He'd always liked Lu. Of all the guys, Lu was the one who really
8488 to take down the big bosses on a huge raid, to unlock new lands and
8489 achievements for his avs. Sometimes, as Wei-Dong worked his long
8490 shifts making tiny decisions for the game, he thought about how
8491 much better it would be to play, thanks to the work he was doing,
8492 and imagined the Lu would approve of the artistry. It was nice to
8493 be on the other side of the game, making the fun instead of just
8494 consuming it. The job was long, it was hard, it didn't pay well,
8497 <p>His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He took it out,
8498 looked at the face, put it on his desk. It was his mom. He'd
8499 relented and given her his new number once he turned 18, justifying
8500 it to himself on the ground that he was an adult now and she
8501 couldn't have him tracked down and dragged back. But really, it was
8502 because he couldn't face spending his 18th birthday alone. But he
8503 didn't want to talk to her now. He bumped her to voicemail.</p>
8504 <p>She called back. The phone buzzed. He bumped it to voicemail. A
8505 second later, the phone buzzed again. He reached to turn it off and
8506 then he stopped and answered it.</p>
8512 him to the Hoag Center. He's in the ICU. They say it's the best --"
8514 <p>Wei-Dong's stomach dropped away from him, sinking to a spot
8515 somewhere beneath his chair. His head felt like it might fly away.
8520 and no one had told him?</p>
8527 day. He isn't conscious very much. I... They don't let you use your
8529 <p>For months, Wei-Dong had been living as an adult, living a life
8530 he would have described as ideal, before the phone rang. He knew
8531 interesting people, went to exciting places. He <em>played games
8533 <p>Now he understood that a feeling of intense loneliness had been
8534 lurking beneath his satisfaction all along, a bubbling pit of
8535 despair that stank of failure and misery. Wei-Dong loved his
8536 parents. He wanted their approval. He trusted their judgment. That
8537 was why he'd been so freaked out when he discovered that they'd
8538 been plotting to send him away. If he hadn't cared about them, none
8539 of it would have mattered. Somewhere in his mind, he'd had a
8540 cut-scene for his reunion with his parents, inviting them to a
8541 fancy, urban restaurant, maybe one of those raw food places in Echo
8542 Park that he read about all the time in Metroblogs. They'd have a
8543 cultured, sophisticated conversation about the many amazing things
8544 he'd learned on his own, and his father would have to scrape his
8545 jaw off his plate to keep up his end of the conversation.
8546 Afterwards, he'd get on his slick Tata scooter, all tricked out
8547 with about a thousand coats of lacquer over thin bamboo strips, and
8548 cruise away while his parents looked at each other, marvelling at
8549 the amazing son they'd spawned.</p>
8550 <p>It was stupid, he knew it. But the point was, he'd always
8551 treated this time as a holiday, a little interlude in his family
8552 life. His vision quest, when he went off to become a man. A real
8553 Bar-Mitzvah, one that meant something.</p>
8554 <p>The thought that he might never see his father again, never make
8555 up with him -- it hit him like a a blow, like he'd swung a hammer
8556 at a nail and smashed his hand instead.</p>
8558 "Mom, I'm going to come down tomorrow and see you both. I'll get a
8561 <p>He wanted her to say something about how selfish he'd been to
8562 leave them behind, what a bad son he'd been. He wanted her to say
8564 feeling this terrible, awful guilt.</p>
8567 <p>And so he went to bed with a million self-hating thoughts
8568 chanting in unison in his mind, and he lay there in his bed in the
8569 flophouse hotel for hours, listening to the thoughts and the
8570 shouting bums and clubgoers and the people having sex in other
8571 rooms and the music floating up from car windows, for hours and
8572 hours, and he'd barely fallen asleep when his alarm woke him up. He
8573 showered and scraped off his little butt-fluff mustache with a
8574 disposable razor and ate a peanut butter sandwich and made himself
8575 a quadruple espresso using the nitrous-powered hand-press he'd
8576 bought with his first paycheck and called a cab and brushed his
8577 teeth while he waited for it.</p>
8578 <p>The cabbie was Chinese, and Wei-Dong asked him, in his best
8579 Mandarin, to take him down to Orange County, to his parents' place.
8580 The man was clearly amused by the young white boy who spoke
8581 Chinese, and they talked a little about the weather and the traffic
8582 and then Wei-Dong slept, dozing with his rolled-up jacket for a
8583 pillow, sleeping through the caffeine jitter of the quad-shot as
8585 <p>And he paid the cabbie nearly a day's wages and took his keys
8586 out of his jacket pocket and walked up the walk to his house and
8587 let himself in and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table in
8588 her housecoat, eyes red and puffy, just staring into space.</p>
8589 <p>He stood in the doorway and looked at her and she looked back at
8590 him, then stood uncertainly and crossed to him and gave him a hug
8591 that was tight and trembling and there was wetness on his neck
8592 where her tears streaked it.</p>
8594 Another heart attack. Very fast. They said it was practically
8598 <p>The hospital discharged Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and
8599 Justbob two days early, just to be rid of them. For one thing, they
8600 wouldn't stay in their rooms -- instead, they kept sneaking down to
8601 the hospital's cafeteria where they'd commandeer three or four
8602 tables, laboriously pushing them together, moving on crutches and
8603 wheelchairs, then spreading out computers, phones, notepads,
8604 macrame projects, tiny lead miniatures that The Mighty Krang was
8605 always painting with fine camel-hair brushes, cards, flowers,
8606 chocolates and shortbread sent by Webbly supporters.</p>
8607 <p>To top it off, Big Sister Nor had discovered that three of the
8608 women on her ward were Filipina maids who'd been beaten by their
8609 employers, and was holding consciousness-raising meetings where she
8610 taught them how to write official letters of complaint to the
8611 Ministry of Manpower. The nurses loved them -- they'd voted in a
8612 union the year before -- and the hospital administration
8614 <p>So less than two weeks after being beaten within an inch of
8615 their lives, Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, and Justbob stepped,
8616 blinking, into the choking heat of mid-day in Singapore, wrapped in
8617 bandages, splints and casts. Their bodies were broken, but their
8619 After years of living in fear of being jumped and kicked
8620 half-to-death by goons working for the bosses, they'd been through
8621 it and survived. They'd thrived. Their fear had been burned
8622 out.</p>
8623 <p>As they looked at one another, hair sticky and faces flushed
8624 from the steaming heat, they began to smile. Then to giggle. Then
8625 to laugh, as loud and as deep as their injuries would allow.</p>
8626 <p>Justbob swept her hair away from the eyepatch that covered the
8627 ruin of her left eye, scratched under the cast on her arm, and
8631 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to the Harvard Bookstore, a wonderful
8632 and eclectic bookshop in the heart of one of the all-time kick-ass
8633 world-class bookshopping neighborhoods, the stretch of Mass Ave
8634 that runs between Harvard and MIT. The last time I visited the
8635 store, they'd just gotten in an Espresso print-on-demand book
8636 machine that was hooked up to Google's astonishing library of
8637 scanned public-domain books and they could print and bind
8638 practically any out of print book from the whole of human history
8639 for a few dollars in a few minutes. To plumb the unimaginable
8640 depths of human creativity this represented, the store had someone
8641 whose job it was to just mouse around and find wild titles from out
8642 of history to print and stick on the shelves around the machine. I
8643 have rarely felt the presence of the future so strongly as I did
8644 that night.</i></p>
8648 <p>The inside of the shipping container was a lot worse than
8649 Wei-Dong had anticipated. When he'd decided to smuggle himself into
8650 China, he'd done a lot of reading on the subject, starting with
8651 searches on human trafficking -- which was all horror stories about
8652 130 degree noontimes in a roasting box, crammed in with thirty
8653 others -- and then into the sustainable housing movement, where
8654 architects were vying to outdo one another in their simple and
8655 elegant retrofits of containers into cute little apartments.</p>
8656 <p>Why no one had thought to merge the two disciplines was beyond
8657 him. If you're going to smuggle people across the ocean, why not
8658 avail yourself of a cute little kit to transform their steel box
8659 into a cozy little camper? Was he missing something?</p>
8660 <p>Nope. Other than the fact that people-smugglers were all
8661 criminal dirtbags, he couldn't find any reason why a smuggle-ee
8662 couldn't enjoy the ten days at sea in high style. Especially if the
8663 smuggle-ee was now co-owner of a huge shipping and logistics
8664 company based in Los Angeles, with the run of the warehouse and a
8665 Homeland Security all-access pass for the port.</p>
8666 <p>It had taken Wei-Dong three weeks to do the work on the
8667 container. The mail-order conversion kit said that it could be
8668 field-assembled by two unskilled laborers in a disaster area with
8669 hand tools in two days. It took him two weeks, which was a little
8670 embarrassing, as he'd always classed himself as "skilled" (but
8671 there you go).</p>
8672 <p>And he had special needs, after all. He'd read up on port
8673 security and knew that there'd be sensors looking for the telltale
8674 cocktail of gasses given off by humans: acetone, isoprene, alpha
8675 pinene and lots of other exotic exhaust given off with every breath
8676 in a specific ratio. So he built a little container inside the
8677 container, an airtight box that would hold his gasses in until they
8678 were at sea -- he figured he could survive in it for a good ten
8679 hours before he used up all the air, provided he didn't exercise
8680 too much. The port cops could probe his container all they wanted,
8681 and they'd get the normal mix of volatiles boiling off of the paint
8682 on the inside of the shipping container, untainted by human
8683 exhaust. Provided they didn't actually open his container and then
8684 get too curious about the hermetically sealed box inside, he'd be
8685 golden.</p>
8686 <p>Anyway, by the time he was done, he had a genuinely kick-ass
8687 little nest. He'd loaded up his Dad's Huawei with an entire
8688 apartment's worth of IKEA furniture and then he'd hacked it and
8689 nailed it and screwed it and glued it into the container's
8690 interior, making a cozy ship's cabin with a king-sized bed, a
8691 chemical toilet, a microwave, a desk, and a play area. Once they
8692 were at sea, he could open his little hatch and string out his WiFi
8693 receiver -- tapping into the on-board WiFi used by the crew would
8694 be simple, as they didn't devote a lot of energy to keeping out
8695 freeloaders while they were in the middle of the ocean -- and his
8696 solar panel. He had some very long wires for both, because he'd
8697 fixed the waybills so that his container would be deep in the
8698 middle of the stack alongside one of the gaps that ran between
8699 them, rather than on the outside edge: one percent of shipping
8700 containers ended up at the bottom of the sea, tossed overboard in
8701 rough waters, and he wanted to minimize the chance of dying when
8702 his container imploded from the pressure of hundreds of
8703 atmospheres' worth of deep ocean.</p>
8704 <p>Inheritances were handier than he'd suspected. He was able to
8705 click onto Huawei's website and order ten power-packs for their
8706 all-electric runabouts, each one rated for 80 miles' drive. They
8707 were delivered directly to the pier his shipping container was
8708 waiting on (he considered the possibility that the power-packs had
8709 been shipped to America in the same container he was installing
8710 them in, but he knew the odds against it were astronomical -- there
8712 shores every second). They stacked neatly at one end of the
8713 container, with a barcoded waybill pasted to them that said they
8714 were being returned as defective. They arrived charged, and he was
8715 pretty sure that he'd be able to keep them charged between the Port
8716 of Los Angeles and Shenzhen, using the solar sheets he was going to
8717 deploy on the top of the container stack. He'd tested the
8718 photovoltaic sheets on his father's Huawei and found that he could
8719 fully charge it in six hours, and he'd calculated that he should be
8720 able to run his laptop, air conditioner, and water pumps for four
8721 days on each stack. 16 days' power would be more than enough to
8722 complete the crossing, even if they got hit by bad weather, but it
8723 was good to know that recharging was an option.</p>
8725 water, and while there was plenty of room in his space capsule --
8726 as he'd come to think of the container -- he thought there had to
8727 be a better way to manage his liquid needs on the voyage than
8728 simply moving three or four tons of water into the box. He was deep
8729 in thought when he realized that the solar sheets were all
8730 water-proof and could be easily turned into a funnel that would
8731 feed a length of PVC pipe that he could snake from the top of the
8732 container stack into the space-capsule, where a couple of sterile
8733 hollow drums would hold the water until he was ready to drink it or
8734 shower in it. Afterwards, his waste water could just be pumped out
8735 onto the ship's deck, where it would wash overboard with all the
8736 other water that fell on the ship. If he packed enough water to
8737 keep him going on minimal showers and cooking for a week, the odds
8738 were good that they'd hit a rainstorm and he'd be topped up -- and
8739 if they didn't he could ration his remaining water and arrive in
8740 China a little smellier than he'd started.</p>
8741 <p>He loved this stuff. The planning was exquisite fun, a real
8742 googlefest of interesting HOWTOs and advice. Lots of parts of the
8743 problem of self-sufficiency at sea had been considered before this,
8744 though no one had given much thought to the problem of travelling
8745 in style and secrecy in a container. He was a pioneer. He was
8746 making notes and planning to publish them when the adventure was
8747 over.</p>
8749 smuggle himself into China, rather than just applying for a tourist
8750 visa.</p>
8751 <p>Wei-Dong's mother didn't know what to make of her son. His
8752 father's death had shattered her, and half the time she seemed to
8753 be speaking to him from behind a curtain of gauze. He found the
8754 anti-depressants her doctor had prescribed and looked up the
8755 side-effects and decided that his mother probably wouldn't be in
8756 any shape to notice that he was up to something weird. Mostly she
8757 just seemed relieved to have him home, and industriously involved
8758 in the family business. She hadn't even blinked when he told her he
8759 was going to take a road trip up the coast, a nice long drive up to
8760 Alaska with minimal net-access, phone activity and so on.</p>
8761 <p>The last cargo to go into the space-capsule was three cardboard
8762 boxes, small enough to load into the trunk of the Huawei, which he
8763 put in long-term parking and double-locked after he'd loaded them
8764 up. Each one was triple-wrapped in water-proof plastic, and inside
8765 them were twenty-five thousand-odd prepaid game-cards for various
8767 though no money changed hands when he collected them, in lots of a
8768 few hundred, from Chinese convenience stores all over Los Angeles
8769 and Orange County. It had taken three days to get the whole load,
8770 and it had been the hairiest part of the gig so far. The cards were
8771 part of a regular deal whereby the big gold-farmers used networks
8772 of overseas retailers to snaffle up US playtime and ship it back to
8773 China, so that their employees could get online using the US
8774 servers.</p>
8775 <p>Technically, that meant that all the convenience store clerks he
8776 visited were part of a vast criminal underground, but none of them
8777 seemed all that dangerous. Still, if any one of them had been
8778 suspicious about the white kid with the bad Mandarin accent who was
8779 doing the regular pickup, who knew what might happen?</p>
8780 <p>It hadn't, though. Now he had the precious cargo, the boxes of
8781 untraceable, non-sequential game-credit that would let him earn
8782 game-gold. It was all so weird, now that he sat there on his red
8783 leather Ikea sofa, sipping an iced tea and munching a power bar and
8784 contemplating his booty.</p>
8785 <p>Under their scratch-off strips, these cards contained unique
8786 numbers produced by a big random-number generator on a server in
8787 America, then printed in China, then shipped back to America, now
8788 destined for China again. He thought about how much simpler it
8789 would have been to come up with the random numbers in China in the
8790 first place, and chuckled and put his feet up on the boxes.</p>
8791 <p>Of course, if they'd done that, he wouldn't have had any excuse
8792 to build the space-capsule and smuggle himself into China.</p>
8794 <p><i>This scene is dedicated to London's Clerkenwell Tales,
8795 located around the corner from my office in Clerkenwell, a
8796 wonderful and eclectic neighborhood in central London. Peter Ho,
8797 the owner, is a veteran of Waterstone's, and has opened up exactly
8798 the kind of small, expertly curated neighborhood store that every
8799 bookish person yearns to have in the vicinity. Peter makes a point
8800 of stocking small handmade editions from local printers, and as a
8801 result, I'm forever dropping in to say hello over my lunch break
8802 and leaving with an armload of exquisite and gorgeous books. It's
8803 lethal. In a good way.</i></p>
8807 <p>Ashok did his best thinking on paper, big sheets of it. He knew
8808 that it was ridiculous. The smart thing to do would be to keep all
8809 the files digital, encrypted on a shared drive on the net where all
8810 the Webblies could get at it. But the numbers made so much more
8811 sense when they were written neatly on flip-chart paper and tacked
8812 up all around the walls of his "war-room" -- the back room at Mrs
8813 Dibyendu's cafe, rented by Mala out of the army's wages from Mr
8814 Bannerjee.</p>
8815 <p>Oh yes, Mala was still drawing wages from Mr Bannerjee and her
8816 soldiers were still fighting the missions he sent them on. But
8817 afterwards, in their own time, they fought their own missions, in
8818 Mrs Dibyendu's shop. Mrs Dibyendu was lavishly welcoming to them,
8819 grateful for the business in her shop, which had been in danger of
8820 drying up and blowing away. Idiot nephew had been sent back to
8821 Uttar Pradesh to live with his parents, limping home with his tail
8822 between his legs and leaving Mrs Dibyendu to tend her increasingly
8823 empty shop on her own.</p>
8824 <p>Mrs Dibyendu didn't mind the big sheets of paper. She
8826 clearly thought that he and Yasmin had something going on. Ashok
8827 tried gently to disabuse her of this, but she wasn't having any of
8828 it. She brought him sweet chai all day and all night, as he labored
8829 over his sheets.</p>
8831 leaning on the trestle-tables that supported the long rows of
8832 gasping PCs.</p>
8833 <p>He stood up from the table, wiping the chai from his chin with
8834 his hand, wiping his hand on his trousers. Mala made him nervous.
8835 He'd visited her in the hospital, with Yasmin, and sat by her bed
8836 while she refused to look at either of them. He'd picked her up
8837 when she was discharged, and she'd fixed him with that burning
8838 look, like a holy woman, and she'd nodded once at him, and asked
8839 him how her Army could help.</p>
8842 Webblies is like fighting children. Badly organized children. We
8843 knocked over twenty jobsites before lunch and I had to call a
8844 break. The Army was getting bored. I've got them on training
8848 <p>She had a very pretty smile, Mala did, though you rarely got to
8849 see it. Mostly you saw her ugly smiles, smiles that seemed to have
8850 too many sharp teeth in them. But her pretty smile was like the
8851 sun. It changed the whole room, made your heart glow. He understood
8852 how a girl like this could command an Army. He stared at the pretty
8853 smile for a minute and his tongue went dry and thick in his
8854 mouth.</p>
8856 paper and your figures, and you keep telling us to wait, wait a
8857 little, and you'll explain everything. It's been months, Ashok, and
8858 still you say wait, explain. I'm tired of waiting. The Army is
8859 tired of waiting. Being double agents was amusing for a little
8860 while, and it's fun to fight real Pinkertons at night, but they're
8862 <p>Ashok held his hands out in a placating gesture that often
8863 worked on Mala. She needed to know that she was the boss. "Look,
8864 it's not a simple matter. If we're going to take on four virtual
8865 worlds at once, everything has to run like clockwork, each piece
8868 more and more suspicious. The man is an idiot, not a moron. He will
8869 eventually figure out that something is going wrong. Or his masters
8872 this is a confidence game, a scam, running on four virtual worlds
8873 and twenty real nations, with hundreds of confederates. Confidence
8874 games require planning and cunning. It's not enough to go in, guns
8877 understand <em>cunning</em>? Ashok, you have never fought. You
8878 should fight. It would help you understand this business you've
8879 gotten into. You think that we're thugs, idiot muscle. Running a
8880 battle requires as much skill as anything you do -- I don't have a
8881 fine education, I am just a girl from the village, I am just a
8882 Dharavi rat, but I am <em>smart</em> Ashok, and don't you ever
8885 of her as a thug. "Mala, I want to play, but playing would take me
8888 ordering it. You'll join the junior platoon on maneuvers tomorrow
8889 at 10AM. There's skirmishing, then theory, then a couple of battles
8890 overseen by the senior platoon when they arrive. It will be good
8891 for you. They will rag you some, because you are new, but that will
8893 <p>That look in her eyes, the fiery one, told him that he didn't
8899 taking too long and now I insist that you take longer." She gave
8900 him that smile. She wasn't pretty -- her features were too sharp
8901 for pretty -- but she was beautiful when she smiled. She was going
8903 up.</p>
8906 quickly, averting her eyes from Mala.</p>
8911 been taken advantage of. The easiest person to trick is a
8912 successful person, the more successful the better. Why is
8918 <p>Mala scraped a chair over the floor and sat down and made a face
8921 apt to assume that he'll be successful at anything. He believes
8922 he's a Brahmin, divinely gifted with the wisdom and strength of
8923 character to succeed. He can't bear the thought that he just got
8924 lucky, or that his parents just got lucky and left him a pile of
8925 Rupees. He can't stand the thought that understanding physics or
8926 computers or cameras doesn't make him an expert on economics or
8927 beekeeping or cookery.</p>
8928 <p>"And his intelligence and his pride work together to make him
8930 intelligence, too: he's smart enough to understand that there are
8931 lots of ways to get rich. If you tell him a complex tale about how
8932 some market works and can be tricked, he can follow along over
8933 rough territory that would lose a dumber man.</p>
8935 trick than fools: they dread being shown up as a fool. When you
8936 trick them, you can trick them again, make them believe that the
8937 scheme fell through. They don't want to go to the police or tell
8938 their friends, because if word gets out that some mighty and
8939 powerful man was tricked, he stands to lose his reputation, without
8944 cat-slits.</p>
8949 don't cut yourself. Yes, it's possible that all of this is a giant
8950 triple-twist bluff, aimed at fooling you. But what would I want to
8951 fool you for? As rich as your Army has made you, you must know that
8952 I could be just as rich by working as a junior lecturer in
8953 economics at IIT. But General, at the end of the day, you either
8954 trust me or you don't. I can't prove to you that you're inside the
8955 scheme rather than its target. If you want out, that's fine. It
8956 will hurt the plan, but it won't be its death. There's a lot of
8965 <p>She made a go-on gesture and sipped her chai, her back very
8966 erect, her bearing regal.</p>
8968 Big Store.' They were little stage plays in which there was only
8969 one audience-member, the 'mark' or victim. <em>Everyone else</em>
8970 was in the play. The mark would meet a 'roper' on a train, who
8971 would feel him out to see if he had any money. He'd sometimes give
8972 him a little taste of the money to be made -- maybe they'd share
8973 some mysterious 'found' money that he'd planted. That sort of thing
8974 makes the mark trust you more, and also puts him in your power,
8975 because now you know that he's willing to cheat a little.</p>
8976 <p>"Once the train pulled into the strange city and the mark got
8977 off, every single person he met or talked with would be part of the
8978 trick. If the mark was good at finance, the roper would hand him
8979 off to a partner, the 'inside man' who would tell him about a scam
8980 he had for winning horse races; if the mark was good at horse
8981 races, the scam would be about fixing the stock market -- in other
8982 words, whatever the mark knew the least about, that was the center
8983 of the game.</p>
8985 office filled with bustling, active people -- so many people that
8986 it was impossible to believe that they could <em>all</em> be part
8987 of a scam. Then he'd have the deal explained to him: the brokerage
8988 house or betting parlor got its figures from a telegraph office --
8989 this was before computers -- that would phone in the results. The
8990 mark would then be shown the 'telegraph office' -- another totally
8991 fake business -- and meet a 'friend' of the inside man who was
8992 willing to delay the results by a few minutes, giving them to the
8993 roper and the market just quick enough to let them get their bets
8994 or buys down. They'd know the winners before the office did, so
8995 they'd be betting on a sure thing.</p>
8996 <p>"And they'd try it -- and it would work! The mark could put a
8997 few dollars down and walk away with a few hundred. It was an
8998 eye-popping experience, a real thrill. The mark's imagination would
8999 start to work on him. If he could turn a few dollars into hundreds,
9001 money, along with whatever money he could steal from his business,
9002 his family, his friends -- everyone. It wouldn't even be stealing,
9003 because he'd be able to pay everyone back once he won big. And he'd
9004 go and get all the money he could lay hands on, and he'd lay his
9005 bet and he'd lose!</p>
9007 believe it, he'd said, 'Bet on this horse in the first race,' not
9008 'Bet on this horse for first place' or some similar
9009 misunderstanding. The mark's bad hearing had cost them everything,
9010 all of them. There is a giant scene, and before you know it, the
9011 police are there, ready to arrest everyone. Someone shoots the
9012 policeman, there's blood and screaming, the place empties out, and
9013 the mark counts himself lucky to have escaped with his life. Of
9014 course, all the blood and shooting are fakes, too -- so is the
9015 policeman. He's got a little blood in a bag in his mouth; they
9016 called it a 'cackle-bladder': a fine word, no?</p>
9017 <p>"Now, at this stage, it may be that the mark is completely,
9018 totally broke, not one paisa to his name. If that's the case, he
9019 gets away and never hears from the roper or the inside man again.
9020 He spends the rest of his life broke and broken, hating himself for
9021 having misheard the instruction at the critical moment. And he
9022 never, ever tells anyone, because if he did, it would expose this
9023 great man for a fool.</p>
9025 hasn't cleaned out, a company bank account he can access -- they
9026 may contact him <em>again</em> and offer him the chance to 'get
9027 even'. You can bet he will -- after all, he's a king among men,
9028 destined to rule, who made his fortune because he's better than
9029 everyone else. Why wouldn't he play again, since the only reason he
9030 lost last time was that he misheard an instruction. Surely that
9039 skeleton, you can hang a lot of different bodies off of it. It can
9040 look like a plan to sell soap, or a plan to sell vitamins, or
9041 something else altogether. But the important thing is, whatever
9042 it's selling, it has to seem like a good deal. Think back on the
9044 <p>Mala thought carefully. Ashok could practically see the gears
9046 girl!</p>
9050 accomplished, she'll assume that she knows everything about
9051 everything. Dangle some bait for her that she doesn't really
9052 understand and she'll come along. But there's a way to make even
9053 familiar subjects unfamiliar. Here, look at this." He typed at the
9054 disused computer on a corner of his desk, googled an image of a
9055 craps table at a casino.</p>
9062 this way, triple if it comes up that way. The bets can get very,
9063 very complicated.</p>
9065 a roll can come up: one-one, one-two, one-three, and so on, all
9066 that way up to six-six. It should be easy to tell whether a bet is
9067 any good: take the chance of rolling two sixes, twice in a row: the
9069 then you will eventually lose money. If the bet pays more than
9070 those odds, then you will eventually win money."</p>
9073 flap and pulled out an old brass Chinese coin, pierced in the
9074 center with a square. "One side is heads, one side is tails.
9075 Assuming the coin is 'fair' -- that is, assuming that both sides of
9076 the coin weigh the same and have the same wind resistance, then the
9080 side you think it'll land on. If you guess right, you double your
9081 bet; if not, I take your money. If we play this game long enough,
9082 we'll both have the same amount of money as we started with -- it's
9083 a boring game.</p>
9084 <p>"But what if instead I paid you triple if it landed on heads,
9085 provided you took the heads-bet? All you need to do is keep putting
9086 money on heads, and eventually you'll end up with all my money:
9087 when it comes up tails, I win a little; when it comes up heads, you
9088 win a lot. Over time, you'll take it all. So if I offered you this
9089 proposition, you should take it."</p>
9091 <p>"But what if it was a very complicated bet? What if there were
9092 two coins, and the payout depended on a long list of factors; I'll
9093 pay you triple for any double-head or double-tails, provided that
9094 it isn't the same outcome as the last time, unless it is the
9096 one?"</p>
9097 <p>Mala shrugged.</p>
9098 <p>"I don't know either -- I'd have to calculate the odds with pen
9100 one</em> if you win according to the rules I just set up. You lay
9103 <p>"Most people would. It's a fantastic cocktail: mix one part
9104 confusing rules and one part high odds, and people will lay down
9105 their money all day. Now, tell me this: would you bet ten rupees on
9106 rolling the dice double-sixes, thirty times in a row?"</p>
9108 <p>Ashok spread his hands. "And now you have the second lesson:
9109 everyone has some intuition about odds, even if they are, excuse
9110 me, a girl who has never studied statistics." Mala colored, but she
9111 held her tongue. It was true, after all. "Most people won't bet on
9112 nearly impossible things, not even if you give brilliant odds. But
9113 you can disguise the nearly impossible by making it do a lot of
9114 acrobatics -- making the rules of the game very complicated -- and
9115 then lots of people, even smart people, will place bets on
9116 propositions that are every bit as unlikely as thirty double-sixes
9118 place those bets --"</p>
9119 <p>Mala held up her hand. "Because they're so smart they think they
9120 know everything."</p>
9121 <p>Ashok clapped. "Star pupil! You should have been a con-artist or
9122 an economist, if only you weren't such a fine General, General."
9123 She grinned. Ashok knew that she loved to hear how good a general
9124 she was. He didn't blame her: if he was a Dharavi girl who'd
9125 outsmarted the slum and made a life, he'd be a little insecure too.
9126 It was just one more thing to like about Mala and her scowling,
9127 hard brilliance. "Now, my star pupil, put it all together for
9128 me."</p>
9129 <p>She began to recite, counting off on her fingers, like a
9130 schoolgirl recounting a lesson. "To make a Ponzi scheme that works,
9131 that really works, you need to have</p>
9136 <p>Ashok clapped and Mala gave a small, ironic bow from her
9137 seat.</p>
9138 <p>"So that is what I am doing back here. Devising the scheme that
9139 will take the economies of four entire worlds hostage, make them
9140 ours to smash as we see fit. In order to do that, I need to do some
9141 very fine work."</p>
9142 <p>Mala pointed at a chart that was dense with scribbled equations
9145 a different day. Or perhaps a year."</p>
9146 <p>Mala's eyes narrowed.</p>
9148 both knew he was doing it, and he saw the corners of Mala's lips
9149 tremble as they tried to hold back her smile, "If I asked you to
9150 explain the order of battle to me, you could do two things: either
9151 you could confer some useful, philosophical principles for
9152 commanding a force; or you could vomit up a lifetime's statistics
9153 and specifics about every weapon, every character class, every
9154 technique and tip. The chances are that I'd never memorize a tenth
9155 of what you had to tell me. I don't have the background for it.
9156 And, having memorized it, I would never be able to put it to use
9157 because I wouldn't have had the hard labor that you've put in --
9158 jai ho! -- and so I won't have the skeleton in my mind on which I
9159 might lay the flesh of your teaching, my guru." He checked to see
9160 if he'd laid it on too thickly, decided he hadn't, grinned and
9161 namasted to her, just to ice the biscuit.</p>
9162 <p>Mala nodded regally, keeping her straight face on for as long as
9163 she could, but as she left the room, hobbling on her cane, he was
9164 sure he heard a girlish peal of giggles from her.</p>
9165 <p>#</p>
9166 <p>Matthew's first plate of dumplings tasted so good he almost
9167 choked on the saliva that flooded his mouth. After two months in
9168 the labor camp, eating chicken's feet and rice and never enough of
9169 either, freezing at night and broiling during the day, he thought
9170 that he had perfectly reconstructed the taste of dumplings in his
9171 mind. On days when he was digging, each bite of the shovel's tip
9172 into the earth was like the moment that his teeth pierced a
9173 dumpling's skin, letting the steam and oil escape, the meat inside
9174 releasing an aroma that wafted up into his nostrils. On days when
9175 he was hammering, the round stones were the tender dumplings in a
9176 mountain, the worn ground was the squeaking styrofoam tray.
9177 Dumplings danced in his thoughts as he lay on the floor between two
9178 other prisoners; they were in his mind when he rose in the morning.
9179 The only time he didn't think about dumplings was when he was
9180 eating chicken's feet and rice, because they were so awful that
9181 they alone had the power to drive the ghost of dumplings from his
9182 imagination.</p>
9183 <p>Those were the times he thought about what he was going to do
9184 when he got out of jail. What he was going to do in the game. What
9185 the Webblies were planning, and how he would play his part in that
9186 plan.</p>
9187 <p>The prison official that released him assumed that he was one of
9188 the millions of illegal workers with forged papers who'd gone to
9189 Canton, to the Pearl River Delta, to seek his fortune. He was
9190 half-way through a stern, barked lecture about staying out of
9191 trouble and going back to his village in Gui-Zhou or Sichuan or
9192 whatever impoverished backwater he hailed from, before the man
9193 actually looked down at his records and saw that Matthew was,
9194 indeed, Cantonese -- and that he would shortly be transported, at
9195 government expense, back to Shenzhen. The man had fallen silent,
9196 and Matthew, overcome with the comedy of the moment, couldn't help
9197 but thank him profusely -- in Cantonese.</p>
9198 <p>There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women
9199 with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger
9200 and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the
9201 mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton
9202 to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all
9203 their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language,
9204 but he was Cantonese, and this was not his people.</p>
9205 <p>Those were not his dumplings.</p>
9206 <p>It wasn't until he debarked at the outskirts of Shenzhen and
9207 transferred to a metro subway that he started to feel at home. It
9208 wasn't until then that he started to think about dumplings. The
9209 girls on the metro were as he remembered them, beautiful and
9210 polished and laughing and well fed. Skulking in the doorway of the
9211 train, watching his reflection in the dark glass, he saw what an
9212 awful skeleton-person he'd become. He had been a young man when he
9213 went in, a boy, really. Now he looked five years older, and he was
9214 shifty and sunken, and there was a scrub of wispy beard on his
9215 cheeks, accentuating their hollowness. He looked like one of the
9216 mass of criminals and grifters and scumbags who hung around the
9217 train station and the street corners -- tough and desperate as a
9218 sewer rat. Unpredictable.</p>
9219 <p>Why not? Sewer rats got lots of dumplings. They had sharp teeth
9220 and sharp wits. They were <em>fast</em>. Matthew grinned at his
9221 reflection and the girls on the train gave him a wide berth when
9222 they pulled into the next station.</p>
9223 <p>Lu met him at Guo Mao station, up on the street level, where the
9224 men and women in brisk suits with brisk walks came and went from
9225 the stock exchange, a perfect crowd of people to get lost in. Lu
9226 took both of his hands in a long, soulful, silent shake and led
9227 them away toward the stock exchange, where the identity
9228 counterfeiters were.</p>
9229 <p>These people kept Shenzhen and all of Guandong province running.
9230 They could make you any papers you needed: working permits allowing
9231 a farm girl to move from Xi'an to Shenzhen and make iPods; papers
9232 saying you were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; driver's licenses,
9233 vendor's licenses -- even pilot's licenses, according to the card
9234 one of them gave him. They were old ladies, the friendly face of
9235 criminal empires run by hard men with perpetual cigarettes and
9236 dandruff on the shoulders of their dark suits.</p>
9237 <p>They walked in silence through the shouting grabbing crowds, the
9238 flurries of cards advertising fake documents shoved in their hands
9239 by grannies on all sides of them. Lu stopped in front of one granny
9240 and bent and whispered in her ear. She nodded once and went back to
9241 waving her cards, but she must have signalled a confederate
9242 somehow, because a moment later, a young man got up off a bench and
9243 wandered into a gigantic electronics mall and they followed him,
9244 threading their way through stall after stall of parts for mobile
9245 phones -- keyboards, screens, dialpads, diodes -- up an escalator
9246 to another floor of parts, up another escalator and another floor,
9247 and one more to a floor that was completely deserted. Even the
9248 electrical outlets were empty, bare wires dangling from the
9249 receptacles, waiting to be hooked up to plugs.</p>
9250 <p>The boy was 100 meters ahead of them, and they trailed after
9251 him, slipping into a hallway that led toward the emergency stairs.
9252 A little side door was slightly ajar and Lu pushed it open. The boy
9253 wasn't there -- he must have taken the stairs -- but there was
9254 another boy, younger than Lu or Matthew, sitting in front of a
9255 computer, intently playing Mushroom Kingdom. Matthew smiled -- it
9256 was always so strange to see a Chinese person playing a game just
9257 for the fun of it, rather than as a job. He looked up and nodded at
9258 the two of them. Wordlessly, Lu passed him a bundle that the boy
9259 counted carefully, mixed Hong Kong dollars and Chinese renminbi. He
9260 made the money disappear with a nimble-fingered gesture, then
9261 pointed at a stool in a corner of the room with a white screen
9262 behind it. Matthew sat -- still without a word -- and saw that
9263 there was a little webcam positioned on the boy's desk, pointing at
9264 him. He composed his features in an expression of embarrassed
9265 seriousness, the kind of horrible facial expression that all ID
9266 carried, and the boy clicked his mouse and gestured at the door.
9268 <p>Lu held the door for Matthew and led him down the fire-stairs,
9269 back into the mall, back onto the street, back among the
9270 counterfeiters, and a short way to a noodle stall that was thronged
9271 with people, and that's when Matthew's mouth began to generate so
9272 much saliva that he had to surreptitiously blot the corners of his
9273 lips on the sleeve of his cheap cotton jacket.</p>
9274 <p>Moment later, he was eating. And eating. And eating. The first
9275 bowl was pork. Then beef. Then prawn. Then some Shanghai dumplings,
9276 filled with pork. And still he ate. His stomach stretched and the
9277 waistband of his jeans pinched him, and he undid the top button and
9278 ate some more. Lu goggled at him all the while, fetching more bowls
9279 of dumplings as needed, bringing back chili sauce and napkins. He
9280 sent and received some texts, and Matthew looked up from his work
9281 of eating at those moments to watch Lu's fierce concentration as he
9282 tapped on his phone's keypad.</p>
9284 latest layer of dumplings to settle in his stomach.</p>
9285 <p>Lu ducked his head and blushed. "A friend. She's great. She
9286 organized, you know --" He waved his chopsticks in the direction of
9287 the counterfeiters' market. "She's -- I don't know what I would
9288 have done without her. She's why I'm not in jail."</p>
9291 <p>Lu showed Matthew a picture of a South China girl on his phone.
9292 She looked like the perfect model of South China womanhood --
9293 fashionable clothes and hair, a carefully made up double-eyelid, an
9294 expression of mischief and, what, power? That sense of being on top
9295 of her world and the world in general. Matthew nodded
9298 papers, cancelled my phone, let the number go dead, then scooped it
9299 up again with a different identity, then forwarded it through a --"
9300 he looked around dramatically and pitched his voice even lower --
9301 "Falun Gong switchboard in Macau, then back to this phone. That's
9302 why you were able to call me. It's incredible -- I'm still in touch
9303 with everyone, but it's all through so many blinds that the zengfu
9304 have no idea where I am or how to trace me."</p>
9306 dumplings settling like rocks in his stomach. He was a dead man.
9309 her. This much I'm sure of."</p>
9310 <p>But Matthew couldn't shake the knowledge that this girl would be
9311 taking him back to prison. In prison, everyone had been an
9312 informant. If you informed on your fellow prisoners, you got more
9313 food, more sleep, lighter duty. The best informants were like
9314 little bosses, and the other prisoners courted their favor like
9316 -- golf, girls and gambling -- with whatever they could scrape up
9317 from the prison's walls. Matthew had never informed and had never
9318 been informed upon. He always chose the games he played, and he
9319 never played a game he couldn't win.</p>
9320 <p>And so he was numb when he met Jie, who smelled wonderful and
9321 had fantastic manners and a twinkling smile. She had his new
9322 identity papers, with the right picture, but a different name and
9323 identity number, and a fingerprint that he was sure wasn't his own
9324 on the back. She chatted amiably as they walked, about
9325 inconsequentialities, the weather and the food, football scores and
9326 gossip about celebrities, a too-perfect empty-head that made him
9327 even more suspicious of this girl and her impeccable acting.</p>
9328 <p>She led them to a small, run-down handshake building in the old
9329 Cantonese part of town. This was where Matthew had grown up, the
9331 South China ceased to be merely a place and had become a symbol for
9332 the New China, the world's factory. Being back in these familiar
9333 streets made him even more prickly, giving him the creeping
9334 certainty that he would be recognized any second, that some poor
9335 boyhood friend of his would be marked by this secret policewoman
9336 and sent to prison with him. He steeled himself to keep walking,
9337 though with each step he wanted to turn and bolt.</p>
9338 <p>The flat she led them to had once been half of a tiny apartment;
9339 now it was reduced to a single, tiny room with piles of girly
9340 clothes and shoes, several computers perched on cheap desks, a sink
9341 whose rim was covered in cosmetics, and a screened-off area that
9342 presumably hid the toilet. The shower was next to the stove and
9343 sink, a tiled square in the corner with a drain set into the floor,
9344 a shower-head anchored to the wall, a curtain rail bolted to the
9345 ceiling.</p>
9346 <p>Once the door was closed, Lu's girlfriend changed demeanour so
9347 abruptly, it was as though she had removed a mask. Her face was now
9348 animated with keen intelligence, her bearing aggressive and keen.
9350 some money --"</p>
9351 <p>One thing Matthew had learned in prison was the importance of
9352 not getting carried along by other people's scripts. A forceful
9353 person could do that: write a script, spin it out for you, put you
9354 in a role, and before you knew it, you were smuggling sealed
9355 packages from one part of the prison to another. Once someone else
9356 was writing the script, you were all but helpless.</p>
9358 less calm -- Matthew could tell at a glance that he was completely
9359 in this woman's power. "Madame, I don't mean to be rude, but who
9360 the hell are you, and why should I trust you?"</p>
9362 looked scandalized, but she was taking it well. "Of course you do.
9363 I've got money, apartments, I know where to get good ID papers
9364 --"</p>
9367 Jiandi?"</p>
9368 <p>He <em>had</em> heard that name. He thought about it for a
9369 moment, casting his mind back to the distant, dreamlike time before
9371 the factory girls?"</p>
9375 <p>Matthew thought about this for a moment, staring into the girl's
9376 carefully made-up eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. Finally he
9377 said, "No offense, but anyone can claim to be someone who no one
9378 has ever seen."</p>
9379 <p>Lu started to speak, but she held her hand up and silenced him.
9381 free, still broadcasting, is that I am a very paranoid lady. Your
9382 friend's paranoia is just good sense. Have you ever considered that
9384 been here plenty for the broadcasts, but you've never tuned in. For
9386 giant, elaborate counterfeit that has other cops calling in,
9387 pretending to be listeners to a show that never goes any farther
9388 than the room I'm sitting in." Lu's mouth opened and shut, opened
9389 and shut. She laughed at him. "Don't worry, I'm no cop. I'm just
9390 pointing out that you're a very trusting sort of boy. Maybe too
9391 trusting. Your friend here is a little more cautious, that's all. I
9392 thoroughly approve."</p>
9393 <p>Matthew found himself hoping that this girl wasn't a cop for the
9394 simple reason that he was starting to like her. Not to mention that
9395 if she was a cop, he'd go straight back to jail, but now that his
9396 panic was receding, he was able to consider what she would be like
9397 as a comrade. He liked the idea.</p>
9399 you to prove it. Just do a show, and I'll tune in and listen to
9400 it."</p>
9402 eye.</p>
9404 stand to have all those Falun Gong ads and all that seditious talk
9405 about the party -- it wouldn't last a week, let alone years and
9406 years."</p>
9408 <p>Lu, still miserable looking, nodded glumly.</p>
9410 your friend!"</p>
9411 <p>They ended up at a new game cafe, far off on the metro line, by
9412 the Windows on the World theme-park. Matthew's father had taken him
9413 there once, and he'd gotten to dress up in ancient battle-armor,
9414 fire arrows at targets while a man with a Cantonese accent dressed
9415 like an American Indian gave him pointers. It had been fun, but
9416 nothing so nice as the games that Matthew was already playing.</p>
9417 <p>The metro let them off just around the corner from it, in front
9418 of a giant, run-down hotel that had been closed the last time
9419 Matthew came through here. The game cafe was in the former
9420 restaurant, something pirate themed with a huge fake pirate ship on
9421 the roof. Inside, it was choked with smoke and the tables had been
9422 formed into the usual long stretches with a PC every meter or so.
9423 About half of them were occupied, and in one corner of the
9424 restaurant there were fifty or sixty gamers who were clearly
9425 gold-farmers, working under the watchful eye of an older goon with
9426 a hard face and a cigarette in one corner of his mouth. It was
9427 incredibly hot inside the cafe, twenty degrees hotter than outside,
9428 and it was as dark and dank as a cave. Matthew felt instantly at
9429 home.</p>
9430 <p>Lu shoved some folded up bills at the old man behind the
9431 counter, an evil-looking, toothless grandfather with a pronounced
9432 hump and two missing fingers on one hand. Lu looked back at
9433 Matthew, then ordered a plate of dumplings as well. The man drew a
9434 styrofoam tray out of a chest freezer, punctured the film on top,
9437 <p>Matthew and Lu sat down at adjacent PCs far from the rest of the
9438 crowd, next to a picture window that had been covered over with
9439 newspapers. Matthew put his eye up to a rip in the paper and peeked
9440 out at the ruins of an elaborate, nautical-themed swimming pool
9441 outside, complete with twisting water-slides and fountains, now
9443 <p>Lu was mousing his way over to Jiandi's web-page, weaving the
9444 connection through a series of proxies, looking up the latest
9445 addresses for her stream mirrors, finding one that worked. "I think
9446 we'll have 45 minutes at least before anyone notices that this PC
9447 is doing something out-of-bounds. I trust that will be plenty of
9448 time for you to satisfy your suspicious mind."</p>
9449 <p>Matthew saw that Lu was really angry, and he swallowed his own
9450 anger -- something else he'd had plenty of practice at in prison.
9453 real life. It has consequences." He plucked at the shirt that hung
9454 loose on his skinny body. "It wouldn't hurt you to be more
9455 careful."</p>
9456 <p>Lu said nothing, but his lips were pursed and white. The old man
9457 brought them their dumplings and they ate them in silence. They
9458 were miserable dumplings, filled with something that tasted like
9459 shredded paper, but they were still better than prison chicken's
9460 feet.</p>
9461 <p>Matthew looked at the boy. He was always thoughtful -- a strange
9462 thing for a tank to be -- and considerate, and brave. He hadn't
9463 been in Matthew's original guild, but when Boss Wing had put him in
9464 charge of the whole elite squad, they'd come willingly, seeing in
9465 Matthew a strategist who could lead them to victory. And when
9466 Matthrew had started whispering to them about the Webblies, Lu had
9467 been as excited as anyone. All that seemed so long ago, a different
9468 life and different time, before a policeman's baton had knocked him
9469 down, before he had gone to prison, before he'd turned into the man
9470 he was now. But Matthew was back in the world now, and Lu had been
9471 living on his wits for months, and --</p>
9473 still don't know if I can trust your friend, but I could have been
9474 a little smarter about how I said it. It's been a strange day -- 36
9475 hours ago, I was wearing a prison uniform."</p>
9476 <p>Lu stared at him, and then a little smile snuck into the corners
9478 popped out his earwig, already paired with the computer's
9479 sound-system, wiped it on his sleeve, and handed it to Matthew.
9480 Matthew screwed it into his ear.</p>
9482 I know, but this is a short and special broadcast for you lucky
9483 ladies who have the day off, are sick in the infirmary, or happen
9484 to have snuck headphones into the factory. Hello, hello, hello.
9485 Shall we take a phone call or two?"</p>
9486 <p>Lu grinned at Matthew and stood and walked out of the cafe.
9487 Matthew touched the earwig, thought about going after him, decided
9488 not to. A moment later, Jiandi said, "There we go, hello,
9489 hello."</p>
9491 in the newspaper-covered glass and found himself staring at a
9492 grinning Lu, standing behind the building, phone to his head.</p>
9494 It's been ages since you came on my show! Tell me, Tank, what's on
9495 your mind today?"</p>
9497 and he ducked his head so as not to draw attention. "Justice for
9498 working people. We come to Guanddong Province because they say that
9499 we will be rich. But when we get here, we have bad working
9500 conditions, bad pay, and everything is stacked against us. No one
9501 can get real papers to live here, so we all buy fakes, and the
9502 police know they can stop us at any time and put us in jail or send
9503 us away because we don't have real documents. Our bosses know it,
9504 so they lock us in, or beat us, or steal our pay. I have been here
9505 for five years now, and I see how it works: the rich get richer,
9506 the poor get used up and sent back to the village, ruined. The
9507 corrupt government runs on bribes, not justice, and any attempt by
9508 working people to organize for a better deal is met with violence
9509 and war. The corrupt businessmen buy corrupt policemen who work for
9510 corrupt government.</p>
9512 one of us is nothing. Together, we can't be stopped. China's
9513 revolutions have come and gone, and still, the few are rich and the
9514 many are poor. It's time for a worldwide revolution: workers in
9515 China, India, America -- all over -- have to fight together. We
9516 will use the Internet because we are better at the Internet than
9517 our bosses are. The Internet is shaped like a worker's
9518 organization: chaotic, spread out, without a few leaders making all
9519 the decisions. We know how to interface with it. Our bosses only
9520 understand the Internet when they can make it shaped like them,
9521 forcing all our clicks through a few bottlenecks that they can own
9522 and control. We can't be controlled. We can't be stopped. We will
9525 So serious! You make us all feel like silly children with your
9526 talk!</p>
9527 <p>"But he's right sisters, you know he is. We worry about our
9528 little problems, our bosses trying to screw us or cheat us; police
9529 chasing us, our networks infected and spied on, but we never ask
9532 <p>A long silence. Matthew clicked on the computer, verified that
9533 he was indeed tuned into the Factory Girl Show. He felt an
9534 unnameable emotion inside his chest, in his belly. She was what she
9535 said she was. Not a cop. Not a spy.</p>
9536 <p>Well, either that or the whole thing was a huge setup, and the
9537 police had been running this woman's operation for years now,
9538 deceiving millions, just to have this insider. That was an
9539 incredibly weird idea. But sometimes the politburo was incredibly
9540 weird.</p>
9541 <p>"We'll know what to do. Soon enough, sisters, have no fear. Keep
9542 listening -- tune in tonight for our regular show -- and someday
9544 wait.</p>
9547 <p>Her voice clicked off, and a cheerful lunatic started saying
9548 crazy things about how great Falun Gong was, the traditional junk
9549 advertising he'd heard on Jiandi's show before.</p>
9550 <p>He thoughtfully chewed another newspaper dumpling and waited for
9551 Lu to make his way back into the cafe. He'd been out of prison for
9552 less than two days and his life was a million times more
9553 interesting than it had been just a few hours before. And he had
9554 dumplings. Things were happening -- big things.</p>
9555 <p>Lu shook his hand again, and the two of them left quickly,
9556 heading for the metro entrance. As they ran down the stairs, Lu
9557 leaned over and said, quietly, "Wait until you hear what we've got
9560 bubbling up inside him now. When was the last time he'd felt
9561 hopeful? Oh yes. It was when he quit Boss Wing's gold farm, taking
9562 his guildies with him, and set up his own business. That hadn't
9564 was delicious now.</p>
9566 <p>Justbob had her whole network online. These were the best
9567 fighters in the IWWWW, passionate and committed. They'd been
9568 fighting off Pinkertons and dodging game-security for a year, and
9569 it had made them hard. Some of them had been beaten in real life,
9570 just like Justbob and Krang and BSN, and it was quite a badge of
9571 honor to replace your user-icon with a picture of your injuries --
9572 an x-ray full of shattered bones, a close up of a grisly row of
9573 stitches.</p>
9576 icepack she'd wedged between her tailbone and the chair. They were
9577 operating out of a new cafe now, still in the Geylang, which was
9578 the best place to be in Singapore if you wanted to be a little out
9579 of bounds without attracting too much police attention. "Ready for
9581 <p>There was a chorus of cheers from all around the world. Justbob
9582 spoke Malay, Indonesian, English, Tamil, and a little Mandarin and
9583 Hindi, but they tended to do things in English, which everyone
9584 spoke a little of. There was a back-channel, of course, a text-chat
9585 where people helped out with translations. They had to speak slow,
9586 but it worked.</p>
9588 Mushroom Kingdom, Zombie Mecha, Svartalfaheim Warriors, and Magic
9589 of Hogwarts." She watched the backchannel, waited until the
9590 translations were all sorted out. "What do I mean by 'take on?' I
9591 mean <em>take over</em>. We're going to seize control of the
9592 economies of all four worlds: the majority of the gold, prestige
9593 items, and power. We're going to do it fast. We're going to be
9594 unstoppable: whenever an operation is disrupted, we will have three
9595 more standing by. We're going to control the destiny of every boss
9596 whose workers toil in those worlds. We're going to rock their
9597 corporate masters. We're going to fight off every Pinkerton, either
9598 converting them to our cause or beating them so badly that they
9599 change careers.</p>
9600 <p>"To do this, we're going to need many thousands of players
9601 working in coordination. Mostly that means doing what they do best:
9602 making gold. But we also expect heavy resistance once word gets out
9603 about what we're up to. We'll need fighters to defend our lines
9604 from Pinkertons, of course, but we also need a lot of distraction
9607 management thoroughly confused until its too late. You will need
9609 up. That's your number one task right now -- level as many avs as
9610 you can, so that you can switch accounts and jump into a new
9611 fighter the second an old one gets disconnected." She watched the
9612 backchatter for a second, then added, "Yes, of course, we're
9613 working on that now. In a day or so, we'll have prepaid account
9614 cards for all of you. They'll need US proxies to run, so make sure
9615 you've got a good list of them."</p>
9616 <p>She watched the chatter for another moment. "Of course, yes,
9617 they will try to shut down the proxies, but if they do, there will
9619 Americans sneak out of their work networks to play during the day
9620 using those proxies? If they start blocking proxies, they'll be
9621 blocking some of their best customers. And of course, many
9622 Mechanical Turks are on school networks, using proxies to log in to
9623 their jobs. They can't afford to block all those proxies -- not for
9624 long!"</p>
9625 <p>The back-channel erupted. They liked that. It was good strategy,
9626 like when you aggroed a boss and then found a shelter that put some
9627 low-level baddies between you and it, and provoked a fight where
9628 they all fought each other instead of you. Justbob wished she could
9629 say more about this, because the deviousness of it all had given
9630 her an all-day, all-week, all-month smile when they'd worked it out
9631 in one of the high-level cell meetings. But she understood the need
9632 for secrecy. It was a sure bet that some of the fighters on this
9633 conference were working for the other side; after all, some of
9634 <em>their</em> spies were inside the companies, weren't they?</p>
9636 something." Her headphone erupted in ragged cheering and she
9637 skirmished with her commanders for a happy hour until The Mighty
9638 Krang came and dragged her away so that she could eat dinner.</p>
9639 <p>Big Sister Nor waited until she was seated, with food on her
9640 plate -- sizzling cha kway teow and fried Hokkien noodles, smelling
9642 "Our man's landing in Shenzhen tomorrow. We've got people who'll
9643 help get him out of the port safely, and he says he's got our
9644 cargo, no problems there. He's been logging in on the voyage, he
9645 says he can get us hundreds of Turks."</p>
9646 <p>The Mighty Krang waved his chopsticks at her. "Do you believe
9647 him?"</p>
9648 <p>Big Sister Nor chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. "I think I
9649 do," she said. "He's all enthusiasm, that one. He's one of those
9651 the 'magic,' but discovered that he was working every hour God
9652 sent, and there were always hidden rules that ended up docking his
9653 pay." The other two nodded vigorously -- they recognized the
9654 pattern, it was the template for sweatshops all over the world.
9655 "His employers told him to be grateful to have such a wonderful
9656 opportunity and didn't he know that there were plenty more who'd
9657 have his job if he didn't want it?"</p>
9658 <p>"OK, so he's upset -- what makes you think he can deliver lots
9659 of other upset people?"</p>
9660 <p>She shrugged and speared a prawn. "He's a natural networker, a
9661 real do-er. You should hear him talk about that shipping container
9662 of his! It's a real hotel on the high seas. Very ingenious. And his
9663 guildies say he's bloody sociable. A nice guy. The kind of guy you
9664 listen to."</p>
9666 scarred eye-socket. She could forget about the itch and the ache
9667 from the side of her face when she was in conference with her
9668 warriors, but she lost that precious distraction the rest of the
9669 time. And her dreams were full of phantom aches from the ruined
9670 socket, and she sometimes woke with tears on her face.</p>
9672 <p>The Mighty Krang drank some watermelon juice and drew glyphs in
9673 the table with the condensation. The waitress -- a pretty Tamil
9674 girl -- scowled at him with mock theatricality and wiped it away.
9675 All the waitresses had crushes on The Mighty Krang. Even Justbob
9678 <p>Big Sister Nor fixed him with a level stare. "You mean 'he's
9679 white, I don't trust him.' He's a worker, too -- even though he
9681 the Webblies. All workers in one big union -- solidarity. Start
9682 making differences between workers who deserve the union and
9683 workers who don't and the next thing you know, your job will be
9684 handed over to the workers you left out of your little private
9685 clubhouse. Krang, if you're not clear on this, you're in the wrong
9686 place. Absolutely the wrong place. Do I make myself clear?"</p>
9687 <p>This was a different Big Sister Nor than the one they usually
9688 knew, the motherly, patient, understanding one. Her voice was
9689 brittle and stern, her stare piercing. Krang visibly wilted under
9691 Justbob felt embarrassed for him, but not sympathetic. He knew
9692 better.</p>
9693 <p>They finished the meal in silence. Big Sister Nor's phone buzzed
9694 at her. She looked at the face, saw the number, put it back down
9696 between the three of them. But BSN was visibly anxious to get to
9697 this one. She began to eat faster, as fast as she could with her
9698 twisted hand.</p>
9701 <p>#</p>
9702 <p>Ping didn't like the port. Too many cops. He had good papers,
9703 but not even the best papers would stand up long to a cop who
9704 actually radioed in the ID and asked about it. The counterfeiters
9705 claimed that they used good identities for the fakes, real people
9706 who weren't in any kind of trouble, but who knew whether to believe
9707 them?</p>
9708 <p>Anyway, it was just crazy. The gweilo was supposed to wait until
9709 the ship came into dock, change into a set of clean clothes, pin on
9710 ID from his father's company, and just <em>walk out</em> of the
9711 port, flashing his identification at anyone who bothered to ask the
9712 skinny white kid what he was doing, carrying two heavy cardboard
9713 boxes out of the secure region. Once he made it clear of the port,
9714 Ping could take him away, make him disappear into the mix of
9715 foreigners, merchants, and business-people thronging the
9716 region.</p>
9717 <p>Ping had asked around, found a Webbly who's brother had worked
9718 as a hauler the year before, gotten information about where Leonard
9719 would most likely emerge, and had emailed all that info to Leonard
9720 as he trundled across the ocean.</p>
9721 <p>But there weren't supposed to be <em>this many</em> cops, were
9722 there? There were hundreds of them, it seemed like, and not just
9723 uniforms. There were plenty of especially tall men with brush-cuts
9724 and earpieces, dressed like civilians, but moving with far too much
9725 coordination and purpose. Ping walked past the entrance twice, the
9726 first time conducting an imaginary argument with someone over his
9727 phone, trying to exude an aura of distraction that would make him
9728 seem harmless. The second time he walked past while staring
9729 intently at a tourist map, trying to maintain the show of
9730 helplessness. In between, he checked his watch, saw that Leonard
9731 was an hour late, sent a message back to Lu and asked him to see if
9732 he could email Big Sister Nor and find out what was going on. This
9733 was the trickiest moment, since the ship's satellite link was down
9734 while it was in dock, and so Leonard's stolen network connection
9735 was down with it. Once he was clear of the port, they'd give him a
9736 prepaid phone, get him back on the grid, but until then...</p>
9737 <p>He nearly dropped the tourist map when his phone went off. A
9738 nearby cop, the tallest man he'd ever seen, looked hard at him and
9739 he smiled sheepishly and withdrew his phone and tried to control
9740 the shaking in his hands as he touched it to life, hoping the noise
9741 hadn't aggroed him.</p>
9743 accented, but good. He recognized the voice instantly from many
9744 late-night chat sessions and raids.</p>
9746 he was talking to a girlfriend or sister. "It's great to hear from
9747 you!"</p>
9750 benefit of the security man.</p>
9752 "OK, here's the thing. Whatever happened to him, we need those
9753 boxes." She cursed in some other language. "I should have just had
9754 him put the boxes in the container. He wanted to come see you all
9755 so badly, though --" She broke off.</p>
9757 cop. There was a spot, a doorway in front of a closed grocery store
9758 down the road. He could go there, sit down, talk this through.</p>
9759 <p>"A lot of cops where you are, huh? Don't answer. Listen, Ping, I
9760 need to know -- can you get into the port? If he doesn't make it
9761 out?"</p>
9763 his doorway now.</p>
9765 <p>He was a raid leader, a master strategist. He was no Matthew,
9766 but still, he understood how to get in and out of tight places. And
9767 he'd been a pretty good climber a few years ago, before he'd found
9768 gold-farming. Maybe he could go over the fence? He felt like
9769 throwing up at the thought. There were so many cameras, so many
9770 cops, the fence was <em>so high</em>.</p>
9772 He'd been held for three days in the local lockup along with most
9773 of the strikers and then released. It had been bad enough -- not as
9774 bad as Matthew's stories -- and he never wanted to go back. "You
9775 have to see this place, Nor, it's like a fortress."</p>
9777 you what -- you wait another hour, see if you can find him. I'll
9778 work on something else here, and call you."</p>
9780 <p>Casually, he drifted back along the length of the high fence
9781 that guarded the port, keenly aware of the cameras drilling into
9782 the back of his neck. How many times could he pass by before
9783 someone decided to figure out what he was doing there? They should
9784 have brought a whole party, half a dozen of the gang who could
9785 trade off looking for the stupid gweilo. Ping shook his head in
9786 disgust. It had been fun to know Leonard when he was a kid in
9787 California and they were five kids in China -- exotic, even. No one
9788 else partied with exotic foreigners with bad accents.</p>
9789 <p>It was even exciting when the gweilo had turned into a smuggler
9790 for the cause, crossing the ocean with his booty of hard-earned
9791 prepaid game-cards that would let them all fly under the game
9792 companies' radar.</p>
9793 <p>But it was no longer exciting now that he was about to go to
9794 jail because some dumb kid from across the ocean couldn't figure
9795 out how to get his ass out of the port of Shenzhen.</p>
9796 <p>#</p>
9797 <p>It had gone better than Wei-Dong had any right to expect. After
9798 they took to the sea, he'd cut the freighter's WiFi like butter and
9799 hopped onto their satellite link. It was slow -- too slow for
9800 gaming -- but it was OK for messaging and staying in touch with
9801 both the Webblies and the cell of Turks he'd pieced together from
9802 the best people he knew. He'd let himself out of the container on
9803 the first night and climbed up to the top of the stack, trailing
9804 his solar rig and water collector behind him, and affixed both to
9805 an inconspicuous spot on the outside face of the topmost
9806 containers, where no crewmember could spot them. Again, the
9807 operation went off without a hitch.</p>
9808 <p>By day three, he was wishing for some trouble. There was only so
9809 much time he could spend watching the planning emerge on the Webbly
9810 boards, especially since so many of the pieces of the plan were
9811 closely guarded secrets, visible only as blank spots in his
9812 understanding of where he was going and why he was going there. A
9813 thousand times a day, he was struck with the absolute madness of
9814 his position -- a smuggler on the high seas, going to make
9815 revolution in Asia, at the tender age of 18! It was fabulous and
9816 terrifying, depending on what mood he was in.</p>
9817 <p>Mostly that mood was <em>bored</em>.</p>
9818 <p>There was nothing to do, and by day five, he was snaffling up
9819 all the traffic on the boat, watching the lovesick crew of six
9820 Filipino sailors sending long-distance romantic notes to their
9821 pining girlfriends. It was entertaining enough downloading a
9822 Tagalog dictionary so he could look up some of the phrases they
9823 dropped into the letters, but after a while, that paled too.</p>
9824 <p>And there were still <em>days</em> to go, and the rains had come
9825 and filled up his reservoirs, and so he had water to drink and cook
9826 with, and so he didn't even have itchy skin or malnutrition to keep
9827 him distracted, and so he'd started to do stupid things.</p>
9828 <p>He'd started to sneak around.</p>
9829 <p>Oh, only at night, of course, and at first, only among the
9830 containers, where the crew rarely ventured. But there wasn't much
9831 to see in the container spaces, just the unbroken, ribbed expanses
9832 of containers, radio tagged and painted with huge numbers,
9833 stickered over and locked tight.</p>
9834 <p>So then he started to sneak over to the crew's quarters.</p>
9835 <p>He knew what they'd look like. You can book passage on a
9836 freighter, take a long, weird holiday drifting from port to port
9837 around the world. The travel agents who sell these lonely,
9838 no-frills cruises had plenty of online photos and videos and
9839 panoramas of the accommodations and common rooms. They looked like
9840 institutional rooms everywhere, with big scratched flat-panel
9841 displays, worn and stained carpet, sagging sofas, scuffed tables
9842 and chairs. The difference being that shipside, all that stuff was
9843 bolted down.</p>
9844 <p>But after days stuck inside his little secret fortress of
9845 solitude, any change of scenery sounded like a trip to Disneyland
9846 and a half. And so that's how he found himself strolling into the
9847 ship's kitchen at 2AM ship's time -- they were living on Pacific
9848 time, and he'd shifted to Chinese time after they put to sea, so
9849 this wasn't much of a hardship. In the fridge, sandwich fixings,
9850 Filipino single-serving ice cream cones, pre-made boba tea with
9851 huge pearls of tapioca in it, and cans of Starbucks frappucino. He
9852 helped himself, snitching it all into a shoulder-bag he'd brought
9853 along, scurrying back to his den to scarf it down.</p>
9854 <p>That was the first night. The second night, he ate his snack in
9855 the TV room, watching a bootleg DVD of a current-release comedy
9856 movie that opened the day he left LA. He kept the sound low, and
9857 even used the bathroom outside the common room on the corridor that
9858 led to the crew's quarters. He crept around on tiptoe, and muted
9859 the TV every time the ship creaked, his heart thundered as his eyes
9860 darted to each corner of the room, seeking out a nonexistent hiding
9861 spot among the bolted-down furniture.</p>
9862 <p>It was the best night of the trip so far.</p>
9863 <p>So the next night, he had to go further. After having a third
9864 pig out and watching a Bollywood science fiction comedy movie about
9865 a turbanned robot that attacked Bangalore, only to be vanquished by
9866 IT nerds, he snuck down into the engine rooms.</p>
9867 <p>Now <em>this</em> was a change of scenery. The door to the
9868 engine room was bolted but not locked, just like all the other
9869 doors on the ship that he'd tried. After all, they were in the
9870 middle of the damned ocean -- it wasn't like they had to worry
9871 about cat-burglars, right? (Present company excepted, of
9872 course!).</p>
9873 <p>The big diesel engines were as loud as jets. He found a pair of
9874 greasy soundproof earmuffs and slipped them over his ears, cutting
9875 the noise down somewhat, but it still vibrated up through the soles
9876 of his sneakers, making his bones shake. Everything down here was
9877 fresh and gleaming, polished, oiled and painted. He trailed his
9878 fingers over the control panels, gauges, shut-off valves, raised
9879 his arms to tickle the flexi-hoses that coiled overhead. He'd gamed
9880 a couple of maps set in rooms like this, but the experience in real
9881 life was something else. He was actually <em>inside</em> the
9882 machine, inside an engine so powerful it could move thousands of
9883 tons of steel and cargo halfway around the world.</p>
9884 <p>Cool.</p>
9885 <p>As he slipped his muffs off and carefully re-hung them, he
9886 noticed something he really should have spotted on the way in: a
9887 little optical sensor by the engine-room door at the top of the
9888 steel crinkle-cut nonskid stairs, and beside it, a pin-sized camera
9889 ringed with infrared LEDs. Which meant...</p>
9890 <p>Which meant that he had tripped an invisible alarm when he
9891 entered the room and broke the beam, and that he'd been recorded
9892 ever since he arrived. Which meant...</p>
9893 <p>Which meant he was <em>doomed</em>.</p>
9894 <p>His fingers trembled as he worked the catch on the door and
9895 slipped out into the steel shed that guarded the engine-room
9896 entrance at the crew end of the deck. He looked left and right,
9897 waiting for a spotlight to slice through the pitchy night, waiting
9898 for a siren to cut through the roar of the ocean as they sliced it
9899 in two with the boat's mighty prow.</p>
9900 <p>It was quiet. It was dark. For now. The ship only had one night
9901 watch-officer and one night-pilot, and from his network spying, he
9902 knew the duty was an excuse to send email and download pornography,
9903 so it may have been that neither of them had noticed the alert --
9904 yet.</p>
9905 <p>He crept back among the containers, moving as fast as he dared,
9906 painfully aware of how vividly he would stand out to anyone who
9907 even casually glanced down from the ship's bridge atop the
9908 superstructure. Once he reached the containers, he slipped onto the
9909 narrow walkway that ringed the outside of the ship and took off
9910 running, racing for his nest. As he went, he made a mental
9911 checklist of the things he would have to do once he got there,
9912 reeling in his solar panels and antennas, his water collectors.
9913 He'd button down his container as tight as a frog's ass, and they
9914 could search for months before they'd get to his -- meanwhile, he'd
9915 be in Shenzhen in a couple days. Then it would just be a matter of
9916 evading the port security -- who'd be on high alert, once the crew
9917 alerted them to the stowaway. Argh. He was <em>such</em> an idiot.
9918 It was all going to crash and burn, just because he got
9919 <em>bored</em>.</p>
9920 <p>Cursing himself, hyperventilating, running, he skidded out on
9921 the deck and faceplanted into the painted, bird-streaked steel. The
9922 pain was insane. Blood poured from his nose, which he was sure he'd
9923 broken. And now the ship was rocking and pitching hard, and holy
9924 crap, look at those clouds streaking across the sky!</p>
9925 <p>This was not going well. He cornered wobbily around the
9926 container stack, had a hairy, one-foot-in-the-sky moment as the
9927 huge ship rolled beneath him and his hand flailed wildly for the
9928 guardrail, then he caught himself and finished the turn, racing to
9929 his container. Once there, he scrambled along the runs that marked
9930 the course of the life-support tentacles trailing from his box, and
9931 he disconnected each one, working with shaking hands. Hugging the
9932 flexi-hose, cabling, solar cells and antenna to his chest, he
9933 spidered down the container-faces and slipped inside just as
9934 another roll sent him sprawling on his ass.</p>
9935 <p>He undogged the hatches on his airtight inner sanctum and let
9936 himself in. The ship was rocking hard now, and his kitchen stuff,
9937 carelessly left lying around, was rattling back and forth. He
9938 ignored it at first, diving for his laptop and punching up the
9939 traffic-logs from the ship's network, but after a can of tuna
9940 beaned him in the cheek, raising a welt, he set the computer down
9941 and velcroed it into place, then gathered up everything that was
9942 loose and dumped it into his bolted-down chests. Then he went back
9943 to his traffic dumps, looking for anything that sounded like an
9944 official notice of his discovery.</p>
9945 <p>The night-time traffic was always light, some telemetry, the
9946 flirty emails from the skeleton crew. Tonight was no exception. The
9947 file stopped dead at the point that he'd reeled in his antenna, but
9948 it probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. The rain was
9949 pounding down now, a real frog-strangler, sounding like a barrage
9950 of gravel on the steel containers all around him. After a few
9951 minutes of this, he found himself wishing he'd taken the earmuffs.
9952 A few minutes later and he'd forgotten all about the earmuffs, and
9953 he was grabbing for a bag to heave up his stolen food into. The
9954 barfing and the rolling didn't stop, just kept going on and on, his
9955 stomach empty, trying to turn itself inside-out, slimy puke-smears
9956 everywhere in the tiny cabin. He tried to remember what you were
9957 supposed to do for sea-sickness. Watch the horizon, right? No
9958 horizon in the container, just pitching walls and floor and
9959 unsteady light from the battery-powered LED fixtures he'd glued to
9960 the ceiling. The shadows jumped and loomed, increasing the
9961 disorientation.</p>
9962 <p>It was the most miserable he'd ever been. It seemed like it
9963 would never end. At a certain point, he found himself thinking of
9964 what it would be like to be crammed in with 10 or 20 other people,
9965 in the pitch dark, with no chemical toilet, just a bucket that
9966 might overturn on the first pitch and roll. Crammed in and locked
9967 in, the door not due to be opened for days yet, and no way to know
9968 what might greet you at the other side --</p>
9969 <p>Suddenly, he didn't feel nearly so miserable. He roused himself
9970 to look at his computer a little more, but staring at the screen
9971 instantly brought back his sea-sickness. He remembered packing some
9972 ginger tablets that were supposed to be good for calming the
9973 stomach -- he'd read about them on a FAQ page for people going on
9974 their first ocean cruise -- and searching for them in the rocking
9975 box distracted him for a while. He gobbled two of them with water,
9976 noting that the tank was only half full and resolving to save every
9977 drop now that his collector was shut down.</p>
9978 <p>He wasn't sure, but it seemed like the storm was letting up. He
9979 drank a little more water, checked in with his nausea -- a little
9980 better -- and got back to the screen. It was a minor miracle, but
9981 there was no report at all of him being spotted, no urgent
9982 communique back to corporate HQ about the stowaway. Maybe they
9983 hadn't noticed? Maybe they had been focused on the storm?</p>
9984 <p>And there the storm was again, back and even more fierce than it
9985 had been. The rocking built, and built, and built. It wasn't
9986 sickening anymore -- it was <em>violent</em>. At one point,
9987 Wei-Dong found himself hanging on to his bed with both hands and
9988 feet, his laptop clamped between his chest and the mattress, as the
9989 entire ship rolled to port and hung there, teetering at an angle
9990 that felt nearly horizontal, before crashing back and rocking in
9991 the <em>other</em> direction. Once, twice more the ship rolled, and
9992 Wei-Dong clenched his teeth and fists and eyes and prayed to a
9993 nameless god that they wouldn't tip right over and sink to the
9994 bottom of the ocean. Container ships didn't go down very often, but
9995 they <em>did</em> go down. And not only that -- about half a
9996 percent of containers were lost at sea, gone over the side in rough
9997 water. His father always took that personally. One percent didn't
9998 sound like a lot, but, as Wei-Dong's father liked to remind him,
9999 that was 20,000 containers, enough to build a high-rise out of. And
10000 the number went up every year, as the seas got rougher and the
10001 weather got harder to predict.</p>
10002 <p>All this went through Wei-Dong's head as he clung for dear life
10003 to his bolted-down bed, battered from head to toe by loose items
10004 that he'd missed when he'd packed everything into his chest. The
10005 ship groaned and strained and then there was a deep metallic
10006 grating noise that he felt all the way to his balls, and then
10007 --</p>
10008 <p>-- the container <em>moved</em>.</p>
10009 <p>It was a long moment and it seemed like everything had gone
10010 silent, as the sensation of sliding across the massive deck
10011 tunneled through his inner ear and straight into the fear center of
10012 his brain. In that moment, he knew that he was about to die. About
10013 to sink and sink and sink in a weightless eternity as the pressure
10014 of the ocean all around him mounted, until the container imploded
10015 and smeared him across its crumpled walls, dissipating in red
10016 streamers as the container fell to the bottom of the sea.</p>
10017 <p>And then, the ship righted itself. There were tears in his eyes,
10018 and a dampness from his crotch. He'd pissed himself. The rocking
10019 slowed, slowed. Stopped. Now the ship was bobbing as normal, and
10020 Wei-Dong knew that he would live.</p>
10021 <p>His hidey-hole was a wreck. His clothes, his toys, his survival
10022 gear -- all tossed to the four corners. Thankfully, the chemical
10023 toilet had stayed put, with its lid dogged down tight. That would
10024 have been <em>messy</em>. Puke, water, other spills slicked every
10025 available surface. According to his watch, it was 4AM on his
10026 personal clock. That made it, uh, 11AM ship's time, which was set
10027 to Los Angeles. If he'd done the math right, it was about 6AM in
10028 their latitude, which should be just about directly in line with
10029 New Zealand. Which meant the sun would be up, and the crew would no
10030 doubt be swarming on deck, surveying the damage and securing the
10031 remaining containers as best as they could with the ship's little
10032 crane and tractors. And <em>that</em> meant that he'd have to stay
10033 put, amid the sick and the bad air and the mess, wait until that
10034 ship's night or maybe even the next night. And he had no WiFi,
10035 either.</p>
10036 <p>Shit.</p>
10037 <p>He'd brought along some sleeping pills, just in case, as part of
10038 his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink first-aid box. He found the
10039 sealed plastic chest still bungied to one of the wire shelving
10040 units, beside the precious two boxes of prepaid cards, still
10041 securely lashed to the frame. As he broke the blisterpack and
10042 poured a stingy sip of water into his tin cup, he had a moment's
10043 pause: what if they discovered his container while he was drugged
10044 senseless?</p>
10045 <p>Well, what if they discovered it while he was wide awake? It's
10046 not like he could <em>run away</em>.</p>
10047 <p>What an idiot he was.</p>
10048 <p>He ate the pills, then set about cleaning up his place as best
10049 as he could, using old t-shirts as rags. He flipped over the
10050 mattress to expose the unpissed-upon side, and wondered when the
10051 pills would take effect. And then he found that he was too tired to
10052 do another thing except for lying down with his cheek on the bare
10053 mattress and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.</p>
10055 woke feeling like his head was wrapped in foam rubber. Maybe that
10056 was the near-death experience. It was now the middle of ship's
10057 night, and real night. Theoretically, it would be dark outside, and
10058 he could sneak out, survey the damage, maybe rig up his WiFi
10059 antenna and find out whether he was about to be arrested when they
10060 made port. But when he climbed gingerly out of his inner box and
10061 tried to open the door of his container, he discovered that it had
10062 been wedged shut. Not just sticky, or bent at the hinge, but
10063 properly jammed up against the next container, with several tons of
10064 cargo on the other side of the door for him to muscle out of the
10065 way. Or not.</p>
10066 <p>He sat down. He had his headlamp on, as the inside of the
10067 container was dark as the inside of a can of Coke. It splashed
10068 crazy shadows on the walls, the stack of batteries, (he praised his
10069 own foresight at using triple layers of steel strapping to keep
10070 them in place) the hatch leading to his inner sanctum.</p>
10071 <p>By his reckoning, they were only three days out of Shenzhen,
10072 plus or minus whatever course-corrections they'd have to make now
10073 that the storm had passed. Theoretically, he could make it. He had
10074 the water, the food, the electricity, provided that he rationed all
10075 three. But the Webblies would be expecting him to check in before
10076 then, and the boredom would drive him loopy.</p>
10077 <p>He thought about trying to saw through the steel container. It
10078 was possible -- the container-converter message boards were full of
10079 talk about what it took to cut up a container and use it for other
10080 purposes. But nothing in his toolkit could manage it. The closest
10081 he could come would be to drill a hole in the skin with his
10082 cordless drill. He'd used it to assemble his nest, he had a couple
10083 spare boxes of high-speed bits in his toolchest. His biggest bit, a
10084 small circular saw, would punch a hole as big as his thumb, but
10085 only after he'd drilled a guide-hole through the steel. 14 gauge
10086 steel, several times thicker than the support-struts he'd drilled
10087 out when doing his interior work.</p>
10088 <p>It would make an unholy racket, but he was on the cargo deck,
10089 well away from the deckhouse. Assuming no one was patrolling the
10090 deck, there was no way he'd be heard over the sound of the sea and
10091 the rumble of the diesels. He told himself that it was worth the
10092 risk of discovery, since getting a hole would mean getting an
10093 antenna out, and therefore getting onto the network and finding out
10094 whether he'd be safe once they got to China.</p>
10095 <p>No time like the present. He found the toolchest, inside a
10096 bigger, bolted-down box, and recovered the drill. He had a spare
10097 charger for it, with an inverter that would run off the battery
10098 stack, and he plugged it in and got it charging. He'd need a lot of
10099 batteries to get through the ceiling.</p>
10100 <p>Several hours later, he realized that the ceiling might have
10101 been a mistake. His shoulders, arms, and chest all burned and
10102 ached. He found himself taking more and more frequent breaks,
10103 windmilling his arms, but the ache wouldn't subside. His ears hurt
10104 too, from the echoey whining racket of the drill, a hundred
10105 nightmares of the dentist's chair. He kept an eye on his watch,
10106 telling himself he'd just work until the morning shift came on
10107 duty, to reduce the risk that the sound would be heard. But it was
10108 still an hour away from shift change when the battery on his drill
10109 died, and he discovered that the last time he'd switched batteries,
10110 he'd neglected to push the dead one all the way into the charger,
10111 and now both his batteries were dead.</p>
10112 <p>That was as good an excuse as any to stop. He fingered the dent
10113 he'd made in the sheet steel through all his hours of drilling. His
10114 fingertip probed it, but barely seemed to sink in at all. He
10115 detached a chair from its anchors and dragged it over, stood on it,
10116 and put an eye to it, and saw a pinprick of dirty grey light, the
10117 first light of dawn, glimmering at the bottom of his
10118 drill-hole.</p>
10119 <p>Sleep did not help his arms. If anything, it just made them
10120 worse. It took him five minutes just to get to the point where he
10121 could lift his arms over his face, working them back and forth. He
10122 had a little pot of Tiger Balm, the red, smelly Chinese muscle rub,
10123 in his first-aid box, and he worked it into his arms, shoulders,
10124 chest and neck, thinking, as he did, <em>This stuff isn't doing
10125 anything</em>. A few minutes later, a new burning spread across his
10126 skin, a fiery, minty feeling, hot and cold at the same time. It was
10127 alarming at first, but a few seconds later, it was
10128 <em>incredible</em>, like his muscles were all letting go of their
10129 tension at once. He took up his drill, checked his watch -- middle
10130 of the first shift, but screw it, the engines were groaning, no one
10131 would hear it -- and went to work.</p>
10132 <p>He punched through five minutes later. Five minutes! He'd been
10133 so close! He put his eye to the hole again, saw sky, clouds, the
10134 shadows of other containers nearby. His wireless antenna awaited.
10135 It had a big heavy magnetic base, powerful rare-earth magnets that
10136 he'd used to attach it to its earlier spot. They'd worked so well
10137 that he'd had to plant both feet on either side of it and heave,
10138 like he was pulling up a stubborn carrot. Now he didn't need the
10139 base, just the willowy wand of the antenna itself. He disassembled
10140 the antenna, reattached it to the bare wire-ends, and then gently,
10141 gingerly, fed it through his dime-sized hole.</p>
10142 <p>He had a moment's pause as he fed it up, picturing it sticking
10143 up among the even, smooth surfaces of the container-tops, as
10144 obvious as a boner at the chalkboard, but he'd been drilling for so
10145 long, it seemed crazy to stop now. A voice in his head told him
10146 that getting caught was even crazier, but he shut that voice up by
10147 telling it to shut up, since getting information on the ship's
10148 status would be vital to completing his mission. And then the
10149 antenna was up.</p>
10150 <p>He grabbed his laptop and logged into the network and began
10151 snaffling up traffic. He could watch it in realtime -- his sniffer
10152 would helpfully group intercepted emails, clicks, pages, search
10153 terms and IMs into their own reporting panels -- but that was just
10154 frustrating, like watching a progress bar creep across the
10155 screen.</p>
10156 <p>Instead he went inside his sanctum and made himself a cup of
10157 instant ramen noodles, using a little more of his precious
10158 electricity and water, and then opened up a can of green tea with
10159 soymilk to wash it down. He ate as slowly as he could, trying to
10160 savor every bite and tell his stomach that food was OK, despite the
10161 rock and roll of the past day. During the meal, he heard footsteps
10162 near his container, the grumble of heavy machinery working at the
10163 containers, and his mouth went dry at the thought of his antenna
10164 sticking up there.</p>
10165 <p>Why had he put it there? Because he couldn't bear the thought of
10166 sitting, bored and restless, in his box for days more. Why was he
10167 doing any of it? Why was he on his way to China? Why had he left
10168 home to be a gamer? Why had he learned Chinese in the first place?
10169 Trapped with his own thoughts, he found himself confronting some
10170 pretty ugly answers. He hadn't wanted to be like all the other
10171 kids. He'd wanted to stand out, be special. Different. To know and
10172 understand and be skilled at things that his father didn't know
10173 anything about. To triumph. To be a part of something bigger than
10174 himself, but to be an <em>important</em> part. To be romantic and
10175 special. To care about a justice that his friends didn't even know
10176 existed.</p>
10177 <p>It made him all feel sad and pathetic and needy. It made him
10178 want to go plug into his laptop and get away from his thoughts.</p>
10179 <p>It worked. What he found on his laptop was nothing short of
10180 amazing. First there was a haul of photos emailed from the captain
10181 back to the shipping company, showing the cargo deck of the ship
10182 looking like a tumbled Jenga tower, containers scattered
10183 everywhere, on their sides, on their backs, at crazy angles. It
10184 looked as if the entire top layer of boxes had slipped into the
10185 ocean, and then several more layers' worth on the port side. He
10186 looked more closely. His container was on the starboard side, and
10187 the container from the corresponding position on the other side
10188 appeared to be gone. He looked up the ship's manifest, found the
10189 serial number of the container, matched it to a list of overboard
10190 boxes, swallowed. It had been pure random chance that put his box
10191 on the starboard side. If he'd gone the other way, he'd be
10192 raspberry jam in a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.</p>
10193 <p>He scanned the email traffic for information about the
10194 mysterious stowaway, but it looked as though the storm had
10195 literally blown any concern over him overboard. The manifest he had
10196 listed the value for customs of all the containers on the ship.
10197 Most of them were empty, or at least partially empty, as there
10198 wasn't much that America had that China needed, except empty
10199 containers to fill with more goods to ship to America. Still, the
10200 total value of the missing containers went into the hundreds of
10201 thousands of dollars. He winced. That was going to be a huge
10202 insurance bill.</p>
10203 <p>Now it was time to get <em>his</em> email, something that he'd
10204 been putting off, because that was even riskier; if the ship's own
10205 administrators were wiretapping their own network, they'd see his
10206 traffic. Oh, it wouldn't look like email from him to Big Sister Nor
10207 and his guildies and the Turks back in America. It'd look like
10208 gigantic amounts of random junk, originating on an internal address
10209 that didn't correspond to any known machine on the ship. Its
10210 destination was unclear -- it hopped immediately into TOR, The
10211 Onion Router, which bounced it like a pea in a maraca around the
10212 globe's open relays. He was counting on the ship's lax IT security
10213 and the fact that the crew were always connecting up new devices
10214 like phones and handheld games they picked up in port to help him
10215 slide past the eyes of the network. Still, if they were looking for
10216 a stowaway, they might think of looking at the network traffic.</p>
10217 <p>He sat at his keyboard, fingers poised, and debated with
10218 himself. Deep down, he knew how this debate would end. He could no
10219 more stay off the network and away from his friends than he could
10220 stay cooped up in the tin can without poking his antenna off the
10221 ship.</p>
10222 <p>So he did it. Sent emails, watched the network traffic, held his
10223 breath. So far, so good. Then: a rumble and a clatter and a pair of
10224 thunderous <em>clangs</em> from above. His heart thudded in his
10225 ears and more metallic sounds crashed through the confined space.
10226 What was it? He placed the noises, connected them to the pictures
10227 he'd seen earlier. The crew had the forklift and tractor out, and
10228 the crane swinging, and they were rearranging the containers for
10229 stability and trim. He yanked his antenna in and dove for the inner
10230 sanctum, dogging his hatch and throwing all loose objects into the
10231 lockers before flinging himself over the bed and grabbing hold of
10232 the post and clinging to it with fingers and toes as the container
10233 rocked and rolled for the second time in 24 hours.</p>
10234 <p>#</p>
10236 parcel of longzai rice and chicken folded in a lotus leaf. Ping had
10237 wanted to go to the Pizza Hut, but Wei-Dong had looked so hurt and
10238 offended at the suggestion, and had been so insistent on eating
10240 Cantonese quarter, near the handshake buildings. Wei-Dong had loved
10241 it from the moment they'd sat down, and had ordered confidently,
10242 impressing both Ping and the waiter with his knowledge of South
10243 Chinese food.</p>
10244 <p>Wei-Dong chewed, made a face. "On the bloody top of the stack,
10245 three high!" he said. "With more containers sandwiched in on every
10246 side of me, except the door side, thankfully! But I couldn't climb
10247 down the stack with these." He thumped the dirty, beat up cardboard
10248 boxes beside the table. "So I had to transfer the cards to my
10249 backpack and then climb up and down that stack, over and over
10250 again, until I had it all on the ground. Then I threw down the
10251 collapsed cardboard boxes, climbed to the bottom, and boxed
10252 everything up again."</p>
10254 thought of all the guards he'd seen, all the cameras.</p>
10256 chance. I did it at night, in relays, the night before we got in.
10257 And I covered it all in some plastic sheeting I had, which is a
10258 good thing because it rained yesterday. There was a lot of water on
10259 the deck and some of it leaked through the plastic, but the boxes
10260 seem OK. Let's hope the cards are still readable. I figure they
10261 must be -- they're in plastic-wrapped boxes inside."</p>
10263 <p>Wei-Dong laughed. "Oh, I was shitting bricks the whole time over
10264 that, I promise! I was in full sight of the wheelhouse most of the
10265 time, though thankfully there wasn't any moon out. But yeah, that
10266 was pretty freaky."</p>
10267 <p>Ping looked at the gweilo, his skinny arms, the fuzz of
10268 pubescent moustache, the shaggy hair, the bad smell. When the boy
10269 had finally emerged from the gate, confidently flashing some kind
10270 of badge at the guard, Ping had wanted to strangle him for being so
10271 late and for looking so <em>relaxed</em> about it. Now, though, he
10272 couldn't help but admire his old guildie. He said so.</p>
10273 <p>Wei-Dong actually blushed, and his chest inflated, and he looked
10277 unconvincing, nonchalant shrug. His Mandarin was better than Ping
10278 remembered it. Maybe it was just being face to face rather than
10279 over a fuzzy, unreliable net-link, the ability to see the whole
10280 body, the whole face.</p>
10281 <p>All of Ping's earlier worry and irritation melted away. He was
10282 overcome by a wave of affection for this kid who had travelled
10283 thousands of kilometers to be part of the same big guild. "Don't
10284 take this the wrong way," he said, "but I have to tell you this. A
10285 few hours ago, I was very upset with you. I thought it was just ego
10286 or stupidity, your coming all this way with the boxes. I wanted to
10287 strangle you. I thought you were a stupid, spoiled --" He saw the
10288 look on Wei-Dong's face, pure heartbreak and stopped, held up his
10289 hands. "Wait! What I'm trying to say is, I thought all this, but
10290 then I met you and heard your story, and I realized that you want
10291 this just as much as I do, and have as much at stake now. That
10293 communist word that had been leached of color and meaning by ten
10294 million hours of revolutionary song-singing in school. But it
10295 fit.</p>
10296 <p>And it worked. Wei-Dong's chest swelled up even bigger, like a
10297 balloon about to sail away, and his cheeks glowed like red coals.
10298 He fumbled for words, but his Chinese seemed to have fled him, so
10299 Ping laughed and handed him another lotus leaf, this one filled
10300 with seafood.</p>
10303 minutes to finish and then we have to get to the guild-house for
10304 the big call!"</p>
10305 <p>#</p>
10306 <p>You're in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little
10307 disoriented already, that's key. Maybe it's just a strange time to
10308 be out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or
10309 very late at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the
10310 suburbs, and no one else is around.</p>
10311 <p>A stranger approaches you. He's well-dressed, smiling. His
10312 body-language says, <em>I am a friend, and I'm slightly out of
10313 place, too.</em> He's holding something. It's a pane of glass,
10314 large, fragile, the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He's
10315 struggling with it. It's heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he
10316 says, with a note of self-awareness at the absurdity of this all,
10318 desperate too, like he's about to drop it.</p>
10319 <p>You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.</p>
10320 <p>And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly
10321 plunges his hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your
10322 keys, wallet and cash into his own pockets. He never breaks
10323 eye-contact in the ten or 15 seconds it takes him to accomplish the
10324 task, and then he turns on his heel and walks away (he doesn't run,
10325 that's important) very quickly, for a dozen steps, and
10326 <em>then</em> he breaks into a wind-sprint of a run, powering up
10327 like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.</p>
10328 <p>You're still holding onto the pane of glass.</p>
10329 <p>Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?</p>
10330 <p>What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break
10331 on the strange pavement? Set it down carefully?</p>
10332 <p>Tell you one thing you're not going to do. You're not going to
10333 run with it. Running with a ten kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in
10334 your hands is even dumber than taking hold of it in the first
10335 place.</p>
10336 <p>#</p>
10338 video-conference window, with The Mighty Krang and Justbob to
10339 either side of her, heads down on their screens, keeping the
10340 back-channel text-chat running while Big Sister Nor lectured. She
10341 was speaking Mandarin, then Hindi. The text-chat was alive in three
10342 alphabets and five languages, and machine-translations appeared
10343 beneath the words. English for Wei-Dong, Chinese for his guildies.
10344 There were a couple thousand people logged in direct, and tens of
10345 thousands due to check in later when they finished their
10346 shifts.</p>
10348 said, without looking up.</p>
10351 Singapore."</p>
10352 <p>BSN showed her teeth in a hard grin. "Singapore, where they know
10353 all about the social contract! Yes, yes! That's just it. A person
10354 comes up to you and asks you for help, you help; it's in our
10355 instincts, it's in our upbringing. It's what keeps us all
10356 civilized."</p>
10357 <p>And then she told them a story of a group of workers in Phenom
10358 Penh, gold farmers who worked for someone who was supposed to be
10359 very kindly and good to them, took them out for lunch once a week,
10360 brought in good dinners and movies to show when they worked late,
10361 but who always seemed to make small... <em>mistakes</em>... in
10362 their pay-packets. Not much, and he was always embarrassed when it
10363 happened and paid up, and he was even more embarrassed when he
10365 late paying them. But he was their friend, their good friend, and
10366 they had an unwritten contract with him that said that they were
10367 all good friends and you don't call your good friend a thief.</p>
10368 <p>And then he disappeared.</p>
10369 <p>They came to work one day -- three days after pay-day, and they
10370 hadn't been paid yet, of course -- and the man who ran the Internet
10371 cafe had simply shrugged and said he had no idea where this boss
10372 had gone. A few of the workers had even worked through the day, and
10373 even the next, because their good friend must be about to show up
10374 someday soon! And then their accounts stopped working; all the
10375 accounts, all the characters they'd been levelling, the personal
10376 characters they used for the big rare-drop raids, everything.</p>
10377 <p>Some of them went home, some of them found other jobs. And
10378 eventually, some of them ran into their old boss again. He was
10379 running a new gold farm, with new young men working for him. The
10380 boss was so apologetic, he even cried and begged their forgiveness;
10381 his creditors had called in their loans and he'd had to flee to
10382 escape them, but he wanted to make it up to the workers, his
10383 friends, whom he'd loved as sons. He'd put them to work as senior
10384 members of his new farm, at double their old wages, just give him
10385 another chance.</p>
10386 <p>The first pay-day was late. One day. Two days. Three days. Then,
10387 the boss didn't come to work at all. Some of the younger, newer
10388 workers wanted to work some more, because, after all, the boss was
10389 their dear friend. And the old hands, the ones who'd just been
10390 taken for a second time, they finally admitted to their fellow
10391 workers what they'd known all along: the boss was a crook, and he'd
10392 just robbed them all.</p>
10393 <p>"That's how it works. You violate the social contract, the other
10394 person doesn't know what to do about it. There's no script for it.
10395 There's a moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you
10396 can empty out his pockets."</p>
10397 <p>There were more stories like this, and they made everyone laugh,
10399 Wei-Dong felt his first tremor of doubt.</p>
10401 what he could understand, she was a very famous radio person, some
10402 kind of local hero for the factory girls. It was clear that Lu was
10403 head-over-heels in love with her, and everyone else deferred to her
10404 as well. When she turned her attention on him, the whole room
10405 turned with her. The room -- a flat in a strange old part of town
10406 -- was crowded with people, hot and loud with the fans from the
10407 computers.</p>
10409 tired. He hadn't had a nap or even a shower since sneaking out of
10410 the port, and meeting all these people, having the videoconference
10411 with Big Sister Nor, it was all so much. His Chinese fled him and
10412 he found himself fumbling for the words. He swallowed, thought it
10414 better deal, the Turks, the farmers, the factory girls." They all
10415 nodded cautiously. "But is that what we're doing here? Are we going
10416 to win any rights by, you know, by being crooks? By ripping people
10417 off?"</p>
10418 <p>The group erupted into speech. Apparently he'd opened up an old
10419 debate, and the room was breaking into its traditional sides. The
10420 Chinese was fast and slangy, and he lost track of it very quickly,
10421 and then the magnitude of what he'd done finally, really <em>hit
10422 him</em>. Here he was, thousands of miles from home, an illegal
10423 immigrant in a country where he stood out like a sore thumb. He was
10424 about to get involved in a criminal enterprise -- hell he was
10425 <em>already</em> involved in it -- that was supposed to rock the
10426 world to its foundations. And he was only 18. He felt two inches
10427 tall and as flat as a pancake.</p>
10429 who had a funny, leathery, worn look to him, but whose eyes
10430 twinkled with intelligence. "Come on, let's get you out of here.
10431 They'll be at this for hours."</p>
10432 <p>He looked Matthew up and down. Technically, they were guildies,
10433 but who knew what that meant anymore? What sort of social contract
10434 did they <em>really</em> have, these strangers and him?</p>
10437 <p>That offer was too good to pass up. Matthew led him out of the
10438 apartment, out of the building, and out in the streets. The sun had
10439 set while they were conferenced in, and the heat had gone out of
10440 the air. Matthew led him up and down several maze-like alleys,
10441 through some giant housing blocks, and then into another building,
10442 this one even more run-down than the last one. They went up nine
10443 flights of stairs, and by the time they reached the right floor,
10444 Wei-Dong felt like he would collapse. His thighs burned, his chest
10445 heaved and ached, and the sweat was coursing down his face and neck
10446 and back and butt and thighs.</p>
10448 of jail."</p>
10449 <p>Wei-Dong willed himself not to edge away from Matthew. The
10450 apartment was filled with thin mattresses, covering nearly the
10451 entire floor like some kind of crazy, thick carpet. They sat on
10452 adjacent beds, shoes off. Wei-Dong must have made some sign of his
10453 surprise, because Matthew smiled a sad smile. "I went to jail for
10454 going on strike with other Webblies. I'm not a murderer,
10455 Wei-Dong."</p>
10456 <p>Wei-Dong felt himself blushing. He mumbled and apology.</p>
10457 <p>"I had a long talk with Big Sister Nor. Here's what she told me:
10458 she said that a traditional strike, where you take your labor away
10459 from the bosses and demand a better deal, that it wouldn't work
10460 here. That we needed to do that, but that we also needed to be able
10461 to show everyone who has us at their mercy that they've overrated
10462 their power. When the bosses say, 'We'll beat you up,' or when the
10463 police say, 'We'll put you in jail,' or when the game companies
10464 say, 'We'll throw you out," we need to be able to say, 'Oh no you
10466 <p>The sheer delight he put into this last phrase made Wei-Dong
10467 smile, even though he was so tired he could barely move his
10468 face.</p>
10469 <p>He scrubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands and said,
10470 "Look, I think my emotions are on trampolines today. It's been a
10473 just about being a crook. It's about changing the power dynamics in
10474 the battle. You're a fighter, you understand that, don't you? I
10475 hear you play healers. You know what a raid is like with and
10480 found a research paper on it. It's fascinating. I'll email you a
10481 copy. What we're doing here, we're changing the dynamic, the
10485 <p>Wei-Dong woke once in the night, and every mattress was filled,
10486 and everyone was snoring and breathing and snuffling and
10487 scratching. There must have been twenty guys in the room with him,
10488 a human carpet of restless energy, cigarette-and-garlic breath,
10489 foot-odor, body-odor, and muffled grumbles. It was so utterly
10490 unlike the ship, unlike his room in the Cecil Hotel in LA, unlike
10491 his parents' home in Orange County... The ground actually felt like
10492 it was sloping away for a minute, like the storm-tossed deck of a
10493 container ship, and he thought for a wild, disoriented minute that
10494 there was an earthquake, and pictured the highrise buildings he'd
10495 seen clustered together on the way over crashing into one another
10496 like dominoes. Then the land righted itself again and the panic
10497 dissipated.</p>
10498 <p>He thought of his mother and knew that he'd have to find a PC
10499 and give her a call the next day. They'd exchanged a lot of email
10500 while he was on the ship, a lot of reminisces about his dad, and
10501 he'd felt closer to her than he had in years.</p>
10502 <p>Thinking of his mother gave him an odd feeling of peace, not the
10503 homesick he'd half-expected, and he drifted off again amid the
10504 farts and the grunts and the human sounds of the human people he'd
10505 put himself among.</p>
10507 <p>Connor's fingerspitzengefuhl was going crazy. Like all the
10508 game-runners, he had a sizeable portfolio of game assets and
10509 derivatives. It wasn't exactly fair -- betting on the future of
10510 game-gold when you got a say in that future put you at a sizeable
10511 advantage over the people on the other side of the bets. But screw
10512 'em if they can't take a joke.</p>
10513 <p>Besides, his portfolio was so big and complex that he couldn't
10514 manage it himself. Like everyone else, he had a broker, a guy who
10515 worked for one of the big houses, a company that had once been an
10516 auto-manufacturer before it went bankrupt, got bailed out, wrung
10517 out, twisted and financialized until the only thing left of any
10518 value in it was the part of the company that had packaged up and
10519 sold off the car-loans suckers had taken out on its
10520 clunkermobiles.</p>
10522 phoned in an order for a certain complex derivative -- say, a
10524 gatling gun futures from Zombie Mecha -- then it was a good bet
10525 that there were going to be a lot fewer gatling guns in Zombie
10526 Mecha in six months (or that the gatling gun would get a power-up,
10527 maybe depleted uranium ammo that could rip through ten zombies
10528 before stopping), driving the price of the guns way, way up. The
10529 broker, in turn, could make money on that prediction by letting his
10530 best clients in on the deal, buying gatling gun insurance policies,
10531 or even gatling gun futures, or futures on gatling gun insurance,
10532 raking in fat commissions and getting everyone else rich at the
10533 same time.</p>
10534 <p>So Connor had an advantage. So who was complaining? Who did it
10535 hurt?</p>
10536 <p>And in turn, Connor's broker liked to call him up with hot tips
10537 on other financial instruments he might want to consider, financial
10538 instruments that came to him from his other clients, a diverse
10539 group of highly placed people who were privy to all sorts of
10540 secrets and insider knowledge. Every day this week, the broker,
10541 Ira, had called up Connor and had a conversation that went like
10542 this:</p>
10544 <p>Connor (distractedly, locked in battle with his many screens and
10545 their many feeds): "I've always got time for you, buddy. You've got
10548 new product we're getting behind this week, something that kinda
10549 took us by surprise. It's from Mushroom Kingdom, which is weird for
10550 us, because Nintendo tends to play all that stuff very close and
10551 tight, leaving nothing on the table for the rest of us. But we've
10552 got a line on a fully hedged, no-risk package that I wanted to give
10554 <p>And from there it descended into an indecipherable babble of
10555 banker-ese, like a bunch of automated text generated by searching
10556 the web for "fully hedged" (meaning, we've got a bet that pays out
10557 if you win and another that pays out if you lose, so no matter
10558 what, you come out ahead, something that everyone promised and no
10559 one ever delivered) and blowing around the text that came up in the
10560 search-result snippets, like a verbal whirlwind with "fully hedged"
10561 in the middle of it.</p>
10563 banker-ese, and this just didn't add up. The payoff was gigantic,
10565 scenario, and that was in a tight market where most people were
10566 happy to be taking in one or two percent. This was the kind of
10567 promise he associated with crazy, high-risk ventures, not anything
10569 <p>He stopped Ira's enthusiastically sputtering explanation, said,
10576 <p>Connor couldn't help himself, he snorted. Ira had many things
10577 going for him, but he was a pushy son of a bitch.</p>
10579 you. I didn't believe it myself, either. None of us did. You know
10580 what bond salesmen are like, we've seen it all. But there were kids
10581 in the office, straight out of school. These kids, they have a lot
10582 more time to play than we do --" Connor repressed the snort, but
10583 just barely. The last time Ira played a game, it had been World of
10584 Warcraft, in the dawn of time. He was a competent, if unimaginative
10585 broker, but he was no gamer. That's OK, he also wasn't a
10586 pork-farmer, but he could still buy pork-futures. "-- and they were
10587 hearing about this stuff from other players. They'd started buying
10588 in for themselves, using their monthly bonuses, you know, it's kind
10589 of a tradition to treat that bonus money as pennies from heaven and
10590 spend it on long-shot bets. Anyway, they started to clean up, and
10594 you know, they started to clean up too. And then I got in on it
10598 coupon of 16 percent on average. I've started to move my long-term
10601 on this deal?" He felt a curious mixture of anger and elation --
10602 how dare Ira keep this to himself, and how fine that he was about
10603 to share it!</p>
10605 cards on the table now. You're the best customer I got. Without
10606 you, hell, my take home pay'd probably be cut in half. The only
10607 reason I haven't brought this to you before now is, you know, there
10608 wasn't any more to go around! Any time there was an offer on these
10612 something takes off like these vouchers, there's a lot of people
10613 trying to figure out how to make more of them. Turns out there's a
10614 bank, one of these offshore ones that's some Dubai prince's private
10615 fortune, and the Prince is a doubter. The bank's selling very long
10616 bets against these bonds on great terms. They're one-year coupons
10617 and they pay off <em>big</em> if the bonds don't crash. So now
10618 there's some uncertainty in the pool and some people are flipping,
10619 betting that the Prince knows something they don't, buying his
10620 paper and selling their bonds. We've gone one better: we've got a
10621 floating pool of hedged-off packages that balance out the Prince's
10622 bets and these bonds, so no matter what happens, you're in the
10623 green. We buy or sell every day based on the rates on each. It's
10627 <p>Connor's mouth was dry. There was something going on here,
10628 something big. His mind was at war with itself. Finance was a game,
10629 the biggest game, and the rules were set by the players, not by a
10630 designer. Sometimes the rules went crazy and you got a little
10631 pocket of insanity, where a small bet could give you unimaginable
10632 wins. He knew how this worked. Of course he did. Hadn't he been
10633 chasing gold farmers up and down nine worlds, trying to find their
10634 own little high-return pockets and turn them inside out? At the
10635 same time, there was just no such thing as a free lunch. Something
10636 that looked too good to be true probably was too good to be true.
10637 All that and all the other sayings he'd grown up with, all that
10638 commonsense that his simple parents had gifted him with, them with
10639 their small-town house and no mortgage and sensible retirement
10640 funds that would have them clipping coupons and going to
10641 two-for-one sales for the rest of their lives.</p>
10643 it. He'd made more than that on his investments in the past 90
10646 kind of thing comes along once in a lifetime! I came to you
10647 <em>first</em>, buddy, so you could get in big. Shit, buddy, I'll
10648 sell you twenty grand's worth of these things, but I tell you what
10650 <p>It made him feel small, even though he knew it was
10652 two Connors, a cool, rational one and an emotional one, bitterly
10653 fighting over control of his body. Rational won, though it was a
10654 hard-fought thing.</p>
10656 Connor winning this small concession. "If I could afford more
10659 voice. "Connor, pal, I don't do this very often, and I'd appreciate
10660 it if you'd keep this to yourself, but how about if I promise you
10661 that your normal trades for today will pick up an extra, uh, make
10662 it 20 more, for a total of 40 thousand. Would you want to plow that
10664 <p>Connor's mouth went dry. He knew how this worked, but he'd long
10665 ago given up on being a part of it. It was the oldest broker-scam
10666 in the world: every day, brokers made a number of "off-book"
10667 trades, buying stocks and bonds and derivatives on the hunch that
10668 they'd go up. Being "off-book" meant that these trades weren't
10669 assigned to any particular client's account; the money to buy them
10670 came out of the general account for the brokerage house.</p>
10671 <p>At the end of the day, some -- maybe all -- of those trades
10672 would have come out ahead. Some -- maybe all -- would have come out
10673 behind. And that's when the magic began. By back-dating the books,
10674 the broker could assign the shitty trades to shitty customers,
10675 cheapskates, or big, locked-in, slow-moving customers, like
10676 loosely-managed estates for long-dead people whose wealth was held
10677 in trust. The gains could be written to the broker's best
10678 customers, like some billionaire that the broker was hoping to do
10679 more business with. In this way, every broker got a certain amount
10680 of discretion every day in choosing who would make money and who
10681 would lose it. It was just a larger version of the barista at the
10682 coffee shop slipping her regulars a large instead of a medium every
10683 now and again, without charging for the upgrade. The partners who
10684 ran the brokerages knew that this was going on, and so did many of
10685 the customers. It was impossible to prove that you'd lost money or
10689 <p>Ira had just taken a big risk in telling Connor what he was
10690 going to do for him. Now that he had this admission, he could,
10691 theoretically, have Ira arrested for securities fraud. That is,
10692 until and unless he gave Ira the go-ahead, at which point they'd
10694 <p>And there rational and emotional Connor wrestled, on the
10695 knife-edge between wealth and conspiracy and pointless, gainless
10696 honesty. They tumbled onto the conspiracy side. After all, Connor
10697 and the broker bent the rules every time Connor ordered a trade on
10698 one of Coca Cola Games's futures. This was just the same thing,
10699 only moreso.</p>
10701 <p>Ira's breath whooshed out over the phone, and Connor realized
10702 that the broker had been holding his breath and waiting on his
10703 reply, waiting to find out if he'd gone too far. The salesman
10704 really wanted to sell him this package.</p>
10705 <p>Later, in Command Central, Connor watched his feeds and thought
10707 eager? Because Connor was such a great customer and Ira thought if
10708 he made Connor a ton of money, Connor would give it back to him to
10709 continue investing, making more and more money for him, and more
10710 and more commissions for the broker?</p>
10711 <p>And now that his antennae were up, he started to see all kinds
10712 of ghosts in his feeds, little hints of gold and elite items
10713 changing hands in funny ways, valued too high or not high enough,
10714 all out of whack with the actual value in-game. Of course, who knew
10715 what the in-game value of anything could really be? Say the
10716 game-runners decided to make the Zombie Mecha gatling guns fire
10717 depleted uranium ammo, starting six months from now. The easy
10718 calculation had gatling guns shooting up in value in six months,
10719 because it would make it possible for the Mechas to wade through
10720 giant hordes of zombies without being overpowered. But what if that
10722 your buddies went over to Anthills and Hives and started
10723 team-playing huge, warring hive-intelligences, would you want to
10724 hang around Zombie Mecha, alone and forlorn, firing your gatling
10725 gun at the zombies? Would the zombies stop being fun objectives and
10726 start being mere collections of growling pixels?</p>
10727 <p>It took the subtle fingerspitzengefuhl of a fortune-teller to
10728 really predict what would happen to the game when you nerfed or
10729 buffed one character class or weapon or monster. Every change like
10730 this was watched closely by game-runners for weeks, around the
10731 clock, and they'd tweak the characteristics of the change from
10732 minute to minute, trying to get the game into balance.</p>
10733 <p>The feeds told the story. Out there in gameland, there was a
10734 hell of a lot of activity, trades back and forth, and it worried
10735 him. He started to ask the other game-runners if they noticed
10736 anything out of the ordinary but then something else leapt out of
10737 his feeds: there! Gold-farmers!</p>
10738 <p>He'd been looking for them everywhere, and finding them. Gold
10739 farming had a number of signatures that you could spot with the
10740 right feed. Any time someone logged in from a mysterious Asian IP
10741 address, walked to the nearest trading post, stripped off every
10742 scrap of armor and bling and sold it, then took all the resulting
10743 cash and the entire contents of her guild bank and turned it over
10744 to some level one noob on a free trial account that had only
10745 started an hour before, who, in turn, turned the money over to a
10746 series of several hundred more noobs who quickly scattered and
10747 deposited it in their own guild banks, well, that was a sure bet
10748 you'd found some gold farmer who was hacking accounts. Hell, half
10749 the time you could tell who the farmers were just by looking at the
10750 names they gave their guilds: real players either went for the
10752 eponymous ("Jim's Raiders") but they rarely went by
10753 "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf2329" or, God help him,
10755 <p>But as soon as he tweaked his feeds to catch them, the farmers
10756 figured out how to dodge them. The guilds got good names, the
10757 hacked players started behaving more plausibly -- having half-assed
10758 dialogue with the toons they were buffing with all their goods --
10759 and the gangs that converged on any accidental motherlode in the
10760 game did a lot of realistic milling about and chatting in broken
10761 English. Increasingly, the players were logging in with prepaid
10762 cards diverted from the US over American proxies, making them
10763 indistinguishable from the lucrative American kid trade, who were
10764 apt to start playing by buying some prepaid cards along with their
10765 Cokes and gum at the convenience store. Those kids had the
10766 attention spans of gnats, and if you knocked them offline after
10767 mistaking them for a gold farmer, they left and went straight to a
10768 competing world and never again showed up in your game or on your
10769 balance sheet.</p>
10770 <p>It was amazing how fast information spread among these creeps.
10771 Well, not amazing. After all, information spread among normal
10772 players faster than you'd believe too -- it was great, you hardly
10773 had to lift a finger or spend a penny on marketing when you
10774 released some new elite items or unveiled a new world. The players
10775 would talk it up for you, spreading the word at the speed of
10776 gossip. And the same jungle telegraph ran through the farmers'
10777 underground, he could see it at work.</p>
10778 <p>And there were more of them, a little guild of twenty, all
10779 grinding and grinding the same campaign. They were fresh
10780 characters, created two days before, and they'd been created by
10781 players who knew what they were doing -- it was just the perfect
10782 balance between rezzers and tanks and casters, a good mix of AOE
10783 and melee weapons. They'd levelled damned fast -- he pulled up some
10784 forensics on some of the toons, felt his fingerspitzengefuhl tingle
10785 as the game guttered like a flame in a breeze. He'd installed the
10786 forensics packages over the howls of protest from the admin team
10787 who'd shown him chart after chart about what running the kind of
10788 history he wanted to see would do to server performance. He'd
10789 gotten his forensics, but only after promising to use them
10790 sparingly.</p>
10791 <p>And there it was: the players had levelled each other by going
10792 into a PvP -- Player versus Player -- tournament area and
10793 repeatedly killing one another. As soon as one of them dinged up a
10794 level, he would stand undefended and let the other player kill him
10795 quickly. The game gave megapoints for killing a higher level
10796 player. Once player two dinged, they switched places, and laddered,
10797 one after the other, up to heights that normal players would take
10798 forever to attain.</p>
10799 <p>The campaign they were running was simple: scrounging a mix of
10800 earth-fairy wings and certain mushroom caps, giving them over to a
10801 potion-master who would pay them in gold. It wasn't anything
10802 special and it was a little below their levels, but when he charted
10803 out the returns in gold and experience per hour, he saw that
10804 someone had carelessly created a mission that would pay out nearly
10805 triple what the regular campaign was supposed to deliver. He shook
10807 You'd need to chart every single little finicky mission in the game
10809 designers who used software algorithms to spin a basic scenario
10810 into hundreds of variants.</p>
10811 <p>And there they were, happily collecting their mushroom caps and
10812 killing the brown fairies and plucking their wings. Every now and
10813 again they'd happen on a bigger monster that wandered into their
10814 aggro zone and they'd dispatch it with cool ease.</p>
10815 <p>His finger trembled over the macro that would suspend their
10816 accounts and boot them off the server. It didn't move.</p>
10817 <p>He admired them, that was the problem. They were doing something
10818 efficiently, quietly and well, with a minimum of fuss. They
10819 understood the game nearly as well as he did, without the benefit
10820 of Command Central and its many feeds. He --</p>
10823 ladder to the maximum, which was 90. Regulus was an elf healer,
10824 tall and whip-thin, with a huge rucksack bulging with herbs and
10825 potions. He was a nominal member of one of the mid-sized player
10826 guilds, one of the ones that would accept even any player for a
10827 small fee, which offered training courses, guild-banking, scheduled
10828 events, all with the glad sanction of Coca Cola. The right sort of
10829 people.</p>
10831 <p>Two months before, the players would have kept on running their
10832 mission, blithely ignoring him. But that was one of the tell-tales
10833 his feeds looked for to pick out the farmers. Instead, these toons
10834 all waved at him and did little emotes, some of which were quite
10835 good custom jobs including dance-moves, elaborate mime and other
10836 gestures. If his feeds hadn't picked these jokers out as farmers,
10837 he'd have pegged them as hardcore players. But they hadn't actually
10838 spoken or chatted him anything. They were almost certainly Chinese
10839 and English would be hard for them.</p>
10841 <p>He offered them a really plum quest, one that had a crazy-high
10842 gold and experience reward for a relatively nearby objective:
10843 retrieving Dvalinn's runes from a deep cave that they'd have to
10844 fight their way into, killing a bunch of gimpy dwarves and a couple
10845 of decent bosses on the way. The quest was chained to one that led
10846 to a fight with Fenrisulfr, one of the biggest bosses in
10847 Svartalfaheim Warriors, a megaboss that you needed a huge party to
10848 take down, but which rewarded you with enormous treasure. The whole
10849 thing was farmer-bait he'd cooked up specifically for this kind of
10850 mission.</p>
10851 <p>After a decent interval -- short, but long enough for the
10852 players to be puzzling through a machine-translation of the
10853 quest-text -- they gladly joined, sending simple thanks over
10854 text.</p>
10855 <p>He pretended he saw nothing weird about their silence as they
10856 progressed toward the objective, but in the meantime, he
10857 concentrated on observing them closely, trying to picture them
10858 around a table in a smoky cafe in China or Vietnam or Cambodia or
10859 Malaysia, twenty skinny boys with oily hair and zits, cigarettes in
10860 the corners of their mouths, squinting around the curl of smoke.
10861 Maybe they were in more than one place, two or even three groups.
10862 They almost certainly had some kind of back-channel, be it voice,
10863 text, or simply shouting at each other over the table, because they
10864 moved with good coordination, but with enough individualism that it
10865 seemed unlikely that this was all one guy running twenty bots.</p>
10867 <p>He had to be aware that they were probably trying to figure out
10868 if he was from the game, and if he made things too easy for them,
10869 he might tip them off.</p>
10870 <p>One player, an ogre caster with a huge club and a bandoleer of
10871 mystic skulls etched with runes, replied</p>
10873 <p>This was more frank than he'd expected. Other groups he'd
10874 approached with the same gimmick had been much more close-lipped,
10875 claiming to come from unlikely places in the midwest like Sioux
10876 Falls, places that seemed to have been chosen by randomly clicking
10877 on a map of the USA.</p>
10881 <p>The ogre -- Prince Simon, according to his stats -- emoted a
10882 little bow.</p>
10884 <p>Connor thought about who he was pretending to be: a young player
10885 in a big American city like LA. What would he say to these
10886 people?</p>
10890 friends who were free after dinner. It's always homework homework
10891 homework</p>
10892 <p>Connor's fictional persona was sharpening up for him now, a
10893 lonely high-school kid in La Jolla or San Deigo, somewhere on the
10894 ocean, somewhere white and middle class and isolated. Somewhere
10895 without sidewalks. The kind of kid who might come across a plum
10896 quest live Dvalinn's runes and have to go and round up a group of
10897 strangers to run it with him.</p>
10903 at a couple of schools. Hope I get in!</p>
10906 bridges, five bridges. For a high-speed train system.</p>
10907 <p>Connor mentally revised his image of the boys into young men,
10908 adults.</p>
10912 <p>The ogre messaged him an image. A grinning Chinese boy in a
10913 sailor suit, toothy, holding a drippy ice cream cone like a baton,
10914 waving it like a conductor.</p>
10916 picture, but his 36-year-old self did. A father leaving his son
10917 behind, plunging off to find work. Connor hadn't ever had to
10918 support someone, but he'd thought about it a lot. In Connor's
10919 world, where people's motives were governed by envy and fear, the
10920 picture of this baby was seismic, an earthquake shaking things up
10921 and making the furnishings fall to the floor and shatter. He
10922 struggled to find his character.</p>
10925 few years, then go home.</p>
10926 <p>What a world! Here was this civil engineer, accomplished, in
10927 love, a father, living far away, working all day to amass virtual
10928 treasures, playing cat-and-mouse with Connor and his people.</p>
10930 engineering?</p>
10933 <p>Connor emoted a big laugh too -- and led the party to Dvalinn's
10934 runes, losing himself in the play even as he struggled to remain
10935 clinical and observant. Some of his fellow gamerunners looked over
10936 his shoulder now and again, watched them run the mission, made
10937 little cutting remarks. Among the gamerunners, the actual game
10938 itself was slightly looked down upon, something for the marks to
10939 play. The real game, the big game was the game of designing the
10940 game, the game of tweaking all the variables in the giant hamster
10941 cage that all the suckers were paying to run through.</p>
10942 <p>But Connor never forgot how he came to the game, where his
10944 the worlds, absorbing their physics and reality through his fingers
10945 and ears and eyes. As far as he was concerned, you couldn't do your
10946 job in the game unless you played it too. He marked the snotty
10947 words, noticed who delivered them, and took down his mental
10948 estimation of each one by a few pegs.</p>
10949 <p>Now they were in the dungeon, which he'd just slapped together,
10950 but which he nevertheless found himself really enjoying. As a
10951 raiding guild, the Chinese were superb: coordinated, slick, smart.
10952 He had a tendency to think of gold farmers as mindless droids,
10953 repeating a task set for them by some boss who showed them how to
10954 use the mouse and walked away. But of course the gold farmers
10955 played all day, every day, even more than the most hardcore
10957 sworn to eliminate, but he couldn't let himself forget that they
10959 <p>They fought their way through to the big boss, and the team were
10960 so good that Connor couldn't help himself -- he reached into the
10961 game's guts and buffed the hell out of the boss, upping his level
10962 substantially and equipping him with a bunch of special attacks
10963 from the library of Nasties that he kept in his private workspace.
10964 Now the boss was incredibly intimidating, a challenge that would
10965 require flawless play from the whole team.</p>
10969 <p>And the ogre sprang into action, and the players formed two
10970 ranks, those with melee attacks in the vanguard, spellcasters,
10971 healers, ranged attackers and AOE attackers in the back, seeking
10972 out ledges and other high places out of range of the boss, a huge
10973 dire wolf with many ranged spells as well as a vicious bite and
10974 powerful paws that could lash out and pin a player until the wolf
10975 could bring its jaws to bear on him.</p>
10976 <p>The boss had a bunch of smaller fighters, dwarves, who streamed
10977 out of the caves leading to the central cavern in great profusion,
10978 harassing the back rank and intercepting the major attacks the
10979 forward guard assembled. As a healer and rezzer, Connor ran to and
10980 fro, looking for safe spots to sit down, meditate, and cast healing
10981 energy at the fighters in the fore who were soaking up incredible
10982 damage from the big boss and his minions. He lost concentration for
10983 a second and two of the dwarves hit him with thrown axes, high and
10984 low, and he found himself incapped, sprawled on the cave floor,
10985 with more bad guys on the way.</p>
10986 <p>His heart was thundering, that old feeling that reminded him
10987 that his body couldn't tell the difference between excitement on
10988 screen and danger in the real world, and when another player, one
10989 of the Chinese whom he had not spoken with at all, rescued him, he
10990 felt a surge of gratitude that was totally genuine, originating in
10991 his spine and stomach, not his head.</p>
10993 battle, respawned at some distant point too far away to reach them
10994 before the battle ended. The boss finally howled, a mighty sound
10995 that made stalactites thunder down from the ceiling and shatter
10996 into sprays of sharp rock that dealt minor damage to the survivors
10997 of their party, damage that they flinched away from anyway, as they
10998 were all running in the red. The experience points were incredible
10999 -- he dinged up a full level -- and there were several very good
11000 drops. He almost reached for his workspace to add a few more to
11001 reward his comrades for their skill and bravery, forcibly reminding
11003 research and infiltration.</p>
11005 <p>The ogre emoted a bow and a little victory dance, another custom
11006 number that was graceful and funny at once.</p>
11010 <p>The ogre emoted a quick hug, and it made Connor feel momentarily
11011 ashamed of what he did next. But he did it. He added the entire
11012 guild to his watchlist, so that every message and move would be
11013 logged, machine-translated into English. Every transaction they
11014 made -- all the gold they sold or gave away -- would be traced and
11015 traced again as part of Connor's efforts to unravel the complex,
11016 multi-thousand-party networks that were used to warehouse, convert
11017 and distribute game-goods. He had hundreds of accounts in the
11018 database already, and at the rate he was going, he'd have thousands
11019 by the end of the week -- and it was already Wednesday.</p>
11021 <p>The police raided Jie's studio while she and Lu were out eating
11022 dumplings and staring into each others' eyes. It was one of her
11023 backup studios, but they'd worked out of it two days in a row, and
11024 had been about to work out of it for a third. This was a violation
11025 of basic security, but Jie's many apartments were fast filling up
11026 with Webblies who had quit their farming jobs in frustration and
11027 joined the full-time effort to amass gold and treasure for the
11028 plan.</p>
11029 <p>The dumpling shop was run by a young woman who looked after her
11030 two year old son and her sister's four year old daughter, but she
11031 was nevertheless always cheerful when they came in, if prone to
11032 making suggestive remarks about young love and the dangers of early
11033 parenthood.</p>
11034 <p>She was just handing them the bill -- Lu once again made a show
11035 of reaching for it, though not so fast that Jie coudn't snatch it
11036 from him and pay it herself, as she was the one with all the money
11037 in the relationship -- when his phone went crazy.</p>
11038 <p>He pulled it out, looked at its face, saw that it was Big Sister
11039 Nor, calling from a number that she wasn't supposed to be using for
11040 another 24 hours according to protocol. That means that she worried
11041 her old number had been compromised, which meant that things were
11042 bad. Turning to the wall and covering the receiver with his hand,
11043 he answered.</p>
11046 accent was instantly recognizable. "We're watching the webcams in
11049 laughter and dumpling lady scowled at him. Jie slid close to him
11050 and put her cheek next to his -- he instantly felt a little better
11053 <p>He thought about it for a second. All their disks were
11054 encrypted, and they self-locked after ten minutes of idle time. The
11055 police wouldn't be able to read anything off any of the machines.
11056 He had two sets of IDs on him, the current one, which was due to be
11057 flushed later that day according to normal procedure, and the next
11058 set, hidden in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants-leg.
11059 Ditto for his current and next SIMs, one loaded in his current
11060 phone and a pouch of new ones in order of planned usage inserted
11061 into a slit in his belt. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to
11065 this for a lot longer than you." She began to methodically curse
11066 under her breath, digging through her purse and switching out IDs
11067 and cracking open her phone to swap the SIM. "I had really nice
11069 are such idiots. Never should have recorded there twice in a
11074 said.</p>
11076 Sister Nor that we're going on air at the usual time tonight.
11078 <p>Lu didn't hear the reply, but he could see from Jie's grimly
11079 satisfied expression that The Mighty Krang had praised her. It had
11080 been Big Sister Nor's idea to rig all the studios with webcams all
11081 the Webblies could access, just in the front rooms. It was a little
11082 weird, trying to ignore the all-seeing eye of the webcam screwed in
11083 over the door. But when you're sleeping 20 to a room, it's easy to
11084 let go of your ideas about privacy -- but all the same, Lu and Jie
11085 now sat far apart when broadcasting, and snuck into the bathroom to
11086 make out afterward.</p>
11087 <p>And now the webcams had paid off. He took the phone back and
11088 listened as The Mighty Krang narrated a play-back of the video,
11089 cops breaking the door down, securing the space. Then an evidence
11090 team that spliced batteries into the computers' power cables so
11091 they could be unplugged without shutting down (Lu was grateful that
11092 Big Sister Nor had decreed that all their hardware had to be
11093 configured to unmount and re-encrypt the drives when they were
11094 idle), took prints and DNA. They already had Lu's DNA, of course,
11095 because they'd sniffed out one of Jie's other apartments. But Jie
11096 had been way ahead of this: she had a little pocket vacuum cleaner,
11097 intended for clearing crumbs and gunk out of keyboards, and she
11098 surreptitiously vacuumed out the seats whenever she took a train or
11099 a bus, sucking up the random DNA of thousands of people, which she
11100 carefully scattered around her apartments when she got in. He'd
11101 laughed at the ingenuity of this, and she told him she'd read about
11102 it in a novel.</p>
11103 <p>The evidence team brought in a panoramic camera and set it in
11104 the middle of the room and the police cleared out momentarily as it
11105 swept around in a tight, precise mechanical circle, producing a
11106 wraparound high-resolution image of the room. Then the cops swept
11107 back in, minus their paper overshoes, and put every scrap of paper
11108 and every piece of optical and magnetic media into more bags, and
11109 then they destroyed the place.</p>
11110 <p>Working with wrecking bars and wicked little knifes, and
11111 starting from the corner under the front door, they methodically
11112 smashed every single stick of furniture, every floor tile, every
11113 gyprock wall, turning it all into pieces no bigger than
11114 playing-cards, heaping it behind them as they went. They worked in
11115 near silence, without rushing, and didn't appear to relish the
11116 task. This wasn't vandalism, it was absolute annihilation. The
11117 policemen had the regulation brushcut short hair, identical blue
11118 uniforms, paper face-masks, kevlar gloves. One drew closer and
11119 closer to the webcam, spotted it -- a little pinhead with a
11120 peel-away adhesive backing stuck up in a dusty corner -- and peeled
11121 it away. His face loomed large in it for a moment, his pores, a
11122 stray hair poking out of his nostrils, his eyes dead and predatory.
11123 Then chaos, and nothing.</p>
11125 for the webcams. It'll be the first thing they look for next time.
11127 <p>The description had momentarily taken away Lu's breath. All his
11128 things, his spare clothes, the comics he'd been reading, a
11129 half-chewed pack of energy gum he'd bought the day before,
11130 disappeared into the bowels of the implacable authoritarian state.
11131 It could have been him.</p>
11135 <p>They gave the old building a wide berth as they made their way
11136 down into the Metro, and consciously forced themselves not to
11137 flinch every time a police siren wailed past them. When they came
11138 back up to street level, Jie took Lu's hand and said, out of the
11144 him, her face white. Before they'd ever kissed, he always felt a
11145 void between them, an invisible force-field he had to push his way
11146 through in order to tell her how he felt. Once they'd become a
11147 couple, the force-field had thinned, but not vanished, and every
11148 time he said or did something stupid, he felt it pushing him away.
11149 It was back in force now. He spoke quickly, hoping his words would
11150 batter their way through it: "I mean, this is <em>crazy</em>. We're
11151 probably all going to go to jail or get killed." She was still
11153 <em>good</em> at this stuff, is what I'm trying to say. You could
11154 probably broadcast your show for ten more years without getting
11155 caught and retire a rich woman. You don't need to throw it away on
11160 here." They walked. Her fingers were limp in his hand, and then
11161 slipped out. The force-field grew stronger. He felt more afraid
11162 than he had when The Mighty Krang had described the action from the
11163 studio camera. "You think I'm doing this all for money? I could
11164 have more money if I wanted to. I could take dirtier advertisers. I
11165 could start a marketing scheme for my girls and ask them to send me
11166 money -- there's millions of them, if each one only sent me a few
11168 <p>The handshake buildings loomed around them, and she broke off as
11169 they found themselves walking single file down a narrow alley
11170 between two buildings. She caught up with him and leaned in close,
11171 speaking so softly it was almost a whisper. "I could just be
11172 another dirty con-artist who comes to South China, steals all she
11173 can, and goes back home to the countryside. I'm <em>not</em> doing
11175 <p>He fumbled for the words and she dug her fingernails into his
11176 palm. He fell silent.</p>
11178 <em>I believe in this</em>. I was telling my girls to fight back
11179 against their bosses before you ever played your first game. With
11180 or without you, I'll be telling them to fight back. I like your
11181 group, I like the way they cross borders so easily, even more
11182 easily than I get back and forth from Hong Kong. So I'm supporting
11183 your friends, and telling my girls to support them too. The problem
11184 you have is a <em>worker's</em> problem, not a Chinese problem, not
11185 a gamer's problem. The factory girls are workers and they want a
11187 <p>She was breathing heavily, Lu noticed, angry little snorts
11188 through her nose.</p>
11189 <p>He tried to say something, but all that came out was a
11190 mumble.</p>
11194 protector. I've been taking care of myself since I left home and
11195 came to South China. It may come as a huge surprise to you, but
11197 <p>He was silent for a moment. They were almost at the entrance of
11198 the safe house. "Can I just admit that I'm an idiot and we'll leave
11201 me," she said. And she kissed him, a warm, soft kiss that made his
11202 feet sweaty and the hairs on his neck stand up. She chewed his
11203 lower lip for a moment before letting go, then made a rude gesture
11204 at the boys who were calling down at them from a high balcony
11205 overhead.</p>
11208 <p>It had all been so neatly planned. They would wait until after
11209 monsoon season with its torrential rains; after Diwali with its
11210 religious observances and firecrackers; after Mid-Autumn Festival
11211 when so many workers would be back in their villages, where the
11212 surveillance was so much less intense. They would wait until the
11213 big orders came in for the US Thanksgiving season, when
11214 sweaty-palmed retailers hoped to make their years profitable with
11215 huge sales on goods made and shipped from the whole Pacific
11216 Rim.</p>
11217 <p>That had been a good plan. Everyone liked it. Wei-Dong, the boy
11218 who'd crossed the ocean with their prepaid game-cards, had just
11219 about wet his pants at the brilliance of it. "You'll have them over
11222 <p>The in-game project was running very well. That Ashok fellow in
11223 Mumbai had worked out a very clever plan for signalling the vigor
11224 of their various "investment vehicles" and the analysts who watched
11225 this were eating it up. They were selling more bad paper than they
11226 could print. It had surprised everyone, even Ashok, and they'd
11227 actually had to pull some Webblies off sales-duty: it turned out
11228 that a surprising number of people would believe any rumor they
11229 heard on an investment board or in-game canteen.</p>
11230 <p>The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor were likewise very happy
11231 with the date and had stuck a metaphorical pin in it, and began to
11232 plan. Justbob was fine with this, but she was a warrior and so she
11233 understood that <em>the first casualty of any battle is the plan of
11234 attack.</em> So while Big Sister Nor and Krang and the other
11235 lieutenants in China and Indonesia and Singapore and Vietnam and
11236 Cambodia were beavering away making plans for the future, Justbob
11237 was leading skirmishers in exercises, huge, world-spanning battles
11238 where her warriors ran their armies up against one another by the
11239 thousand.</p>
11240 <p>Big Sister Nor hated it, said it was too high-profile, that it
11241 would tip off the game-runners that there were armies massing in
11242 gamespace, and then they would naturally wonder what the players
11244 it was a lot more likely that the gold-farmers and the elaborate
11245 cons would tip them off, seeing as how armies were about as common
11246 in gamespace as onions were in a stir-fry. She didn't try to tell
11247 this to Big Sister Nor, who hardly played games at all any more.
11248 Instead, she obediently agreed to take it easy, to be careful, and
11249 so on.</p>
11251 <p>It wasn't like any other game anyone had ever played. The armies
11252 were vast, running to the thousands and growing every day. She
11253 drilled them for hours, and the generals and leaders and
11254 commandants and whatever they called themselves dreamt up their
11255 best strategy and tactics, devised nightmare ambushes and sneaky
11256 guerilla wars, and they sharpened their antlers against one
11257 another.</p>
11258 <p>As Big Sister Nor's complaints grew more serious, Justbob
11259 presented her with statistics on the number of high-level
11260 characters the Webblies now had at their disposal, as the
11261 skirmishing was a fast way to level up. She had players who
11262 controlled five or six absolute top-level toons, each associated
11263 with its own prepaid account, each accessed via a different proxy
11264 and untraceable to the others. Big Sister Nor warned her again to
11265 be careful, and The Mighty Krang took her aside and told her how
11266 irresponsible she was to endanger the whole effort with her
11267 warring. She took off her eyepatch and scratched at the oozing
11268 scars over the ruined socket, a disconcerting trick that never
11269 failed to send The Mighty Krang packing with a greenish face.</p>
11270 <p>Justbob tried to keep the smile off her face when Big Sister Nor
11271 woke her in the middle of the night to tell her that the plan was
11272 dead, and the action had started, right then, in the middle of
11273 monsoon season, in the middle of Diwali, with only weeks to go
11274 before Mid-Autumn Festival.</p>
11276 her hijab around her head. She'd spent most of her life in western
11277 dress, dressing to shock and for easy getaways, but since she'd
11278 gone straight, she'd opted for the more traditional dress. What it
11279 lacked in mobility it made up for in coolness, anonymity, and the
11280 disorienting effect it had on the men who had once threatened her
11281 (though it hadn't stopped the thugs who'd cost her her eye).</p>
11285 <p>The room was stuffy. These rooms always were. But the September
11286 heat had pushed the temperature up to stratospheric heights, so
11287 that the cafe smouldered like the caldera of a dyspeptic volcano.
11288 The cafe's owner, a scarred old man whom everyone knew to be a
11289 front for some heavy gangsters, had sent a technician around with a
11290 screwdriver to remove all the cases from the PCs so that the heat
11291 could dissipate more readily from the sweating motherboards and
11292 those monster-huge graphics cards that bristled with additional
11293 fans and glinted with copper heatsinks. This might have been better
11294 for the computers, but it made the room even hotter and filled it
11295 with a jet-engine roar that was so loud the players couldn't even
11296 use noise-cancelling headsets to chat: they had to confine all
11297 their communications to text.</p>
11298 <p>The cafe had once catered to gamers from off the street, along
11299 with love-sick factory girls who spent long nights chatting with
11300 their virtual boyfriends, homesick workers who logged in to spin
11301 lies about their wonderful lives in South China for the people back
11302 home, as well as the occasional lost tourist who was hoping to get
11303 a little online time to keep up with friends and find cheap hotel
11304 rooms. But for the past two years, it had exclusively housed an
11305 ever-growing cadre of gold-farmers sent there by their bosses, who
11306 oversaw a dozen shifting, interlocked businesses that formed and
11307 dissolved overnight, every time a little trouble blew their way and
11308 it became convenient to roll up the store and disappear like a
11309 genie.</p>
11310 <p>The boys in the cafe that night were all young, not a one over
11311 17. All the older boys had been purged the month before, when
11312 they'd demanded a break after a 22-hour lock-in to meet a huge
11313 order from an upstream supplier. Getting rid of those troublemakers
11314 had two nice effects for their bosses: it let them move in a
11315 cheaper workforce and it let them avoid paying for all those
11316 locked-in hours. There were always more boys who'd play games for a
11317 living.</p>
11319 they'd hang around and do four or five more hours' worth of raiding
11321 noise, dumplings and network connections were combined to make a
11322 neverending supply of stew of wealth for some mostly invisible
11323 older men.</p>
11324 <p>Ruiling knew that there had been some other boys working there
11325 before, older boys who'd had some kind of dispute with the bosses.
11326 He didn't think about them much but when he did, he pictured slow,
11327 greedy fools who didn't want to really work for a living. Lamers
11328 whose asses he could kick back to Sichuan province or whatever
11329 distant place they'd snuck to the Pearl River Delta from.</p>
11330 <p>Ruiling was a hell of a player. His speciality was PvP -- player
11331 versus player -- because he had the knack of watching another
11332 player's movements for a few seconds and then building up a
11333 near-complete view of that player's idiosyncracies and weak spots.
11334 He couldn't explain it -- the knowledge simply shone through at
11335 him, like an arrow in the eye-socket. The upshot of this was that
11336 no one could level a character faster than Ruiling. He'd simply
11337 wander around a game with a Chinese name, talking in Chinese to the
11338 players he met. Eventually, one of them -- some rich, fat, stupid
11339 westerner who wanted to play vigilante -- would start calling him
11340 names and challenge him to a fight. He'd accept. He would kick ass.
11341 He'd gain points.</p>
11343 <p>Ruiling had just finished twelve hours of this and had ordered
11344 in a tray of pork dumplings and doused them in hot Vietnamese
11345 rooster red sauce and chopsticked them into his mouth as fast as he
11346 could chew, and now he was ready to relax with some after-work
11347 play. For this, he always used his own toon, a char he'd started
11348 playing with when he was a boy in Gansu. In some ways, this toon
11350 it, training it, dressing it in the rarest of treasures. He had
11351 trained up innumerable toons and seen them sold off, but Ruiling
11353 <p>Tonight, Ruiling partied with some other farmers he knew from
11354 other parts of China, some of whom he'd known back in his village,
11355 some of whom he'd never met. They were a ferocious nightly raiding
11356 guild that pulled off the hardest missions in the worlds, the cream
11357 of the crop. Word had gotten round and now every night he had an
11358 audience of players who'd just been hired on, watching in awe as he
11359 kicked fantastic quantities of ass. He loved that, loved answering
11360 their questions after he was done playing, helping the whole team
11361 get better. And you know, they loved him too, and that was just as
11362 great.</p>
11363 <p>They ran Buri's fortress, the palace of a long-departed god, the
11364 father of gods, the powerful, elemental force that had birthed
11365 Svartalfaheim and the universe in which it lay. It had fearsome
11366 guardians, required powerful spells just to reach, and had never
11367 been fully run in the history of Svartalfaheim. Just the kind of
11368 mission Ruiling loved to try. This would be his sixth crack at it,
11369 and he was prepared to raid for six hours straight if that's what
11370 it took, and so was the rest of his party.</p>
11371 <p>And then he got Fenrir's Tooth. It was the rarest and most
11372 legendary drop in all of Svartalfaheim Warriors, a powerful
11373 talisman that would turn any wolf-pack or enthral them to the
11374 Tooth's holder. The message boards had been full of talk about it,
11375 and several times there'd been fraudulent auctions for it, but no
11376 one had ever seen it before.</p>
11377 <p>After Ruiling picked it up -- it had come from an epic battle
11378 with an army of Sky Giants, in which the entire raiding party had
11379 been killed -- he was so stunned by it that he couldn't speak for a
11380 moment. He just pointed at the screen while his mouth opened and
11381 shut for a moment.</p>
11382 <p>The players watching him fell silent, too, following his gaze
11383 and his finger, slowly realizing what had just happened. A murmur
11384 built through the crowd, picking up steam, picking up volume,
11386 entire cafe over to see. Over the fans' noise they buzzed
11387 excitedly, a hormone-drenched triumphant tribal chest-beating
11388 exercise that swept them all up. Every boy imagined what it would
11389 be like to go questing with Fenrir's Tooth, able to defeat any
11390 force with a flick of the mouse that would send the wolf packs
11391 against your enemies. Every boy's heart thudded in his chest.</p>
11392 <p>But there was another sound, getting louder and more insistent.
11393 An older voice, raspy with a million cigarettes, a hard voice. "Sit
11395 <p>It was Huang the foreman, shouting with a fearsome Fujianese
11396 accent. He was rumored to be an ex-Snakehead, thrown out of the
11397 human smuggling gang for killing too many migrants with rough
11398 treatment. Usually, he sat lizardlike and motionless in the corner,
11399 smoking a succession of cheap Chinese Class-D fake Marlboros, harsh
11400 and unfiltered, a lazy curl of smoke giving him a permanent squint
11401 on one side of his face. Sometimes players would forget he was
11402 there and their shouting and horseplay would get a little out of
11403 control and then he would steal up behind them on cat-silent feet
11404 and deliver a hard blow to the ear that would send them reeling. It
11405 was enough of an object lesson -- "Don't make the Snakehead mad or
11406 he'll lay a beating on you that you won't forget" -- that he hardly
11407 ever had to repeat it.</p>
11408 <p>Now, though, he was clouting boys left and right, bellowing
11409 orders in a loud, hoarse voice. The boys retreated to their
11410 computers in a shoving rush, leaving Ruiling alone in his seat, an
11411 uncertain smile on his face.</p>
11413 screen.</p>
11414 <p>Huang's face was as impassive as ever. He put a hard, heavy hand
11415 on Ruiling's shoulder and leaned in to read the screen, his head
11416 wreathed in smoke. Finally, he straightened. "Fenrir's Tooth," he
11419 loudly to be heard over the computer fans. "Boss, that is my
11421 <p>Huang turned to look at him, his eyes hard and his expression
11424 loudly. "No bonus. It's <em>mine</em>! <em>I</em> earned it,
11426 <p>He didn't even see the blow, it was that fast. One minute he was
11427 hotly declaring that Fenrir's Tooth was his, the next he was
11428 sprawled on his ass on the floor, his head ringing like a gong. The
11429 foreman put one foot on his throat.</p>
11431 everyone around could hear. Then he hawked up a huge mouthful of
11432 poisonous green spit from the tar-soaked depths of his blackened
11433 lungs and carefully spat in Ruiling's face.</p>
11434 <p>From the age of four, Ruiling had practised wushu, training with
11435 a man in the village whom all the adults deferred to. The man had
11436 been sent north during the Cultural Revolution, denounced and
11437 beaten and starved, but he never broke. He was as gentle and
11438 patient as a grandmother, and he was as old as the hills, and he
11439 could send an attacker flying through the air with a flick of the
11440 wrist; break a board with his old hands, kick you into the next
11441 life with one old, gnarled foot. For 12 years, Ruiling had gone
11442 three times a week to train with the old man. All the boys had. It
11443 was just part of life in the village. He hadn't practised since he
11444 came to South China, had all but forgotten that relic of a
11445 different China.</p>
11446 <p>But now he remembered every lesson, remembered it deep in his
11447 muscles. He gripped the ankle of the foot that was on his throat,
11450 foreman into the air, sending him sailing in a perfect, graceful
11452 of one of the long trestle-tables, knocking it over and sending a
11453 dozen flatscreens tumbling to the ground, the crash audible over
11454 the computer fans.</p>
11455 <p>Ruiling stood, carefully, and faced the foreman. The man was
11456 groaning on the ground, and Ruiling couldn't keep the small grin
11458 standing in a ready stance, weight balanced evenly on each foot,
11459 feet spread for stability, body side-on to the man on the ground,
11460 presenting a smaller target. His hands were loosely held up, one
11461 before the other, ready to catch a punch and lock the arm and throw
11462 the attacker, ready to counterstrike high or low. The boys around
11463 him were cheering, chanting his name, and Ruiling smiled more
11464 broadly.</p>
11465 <p>The foreman picked himself up off the floor, no expression at
11466 all on his face, a terrible blankness, and Ruiling felt his first
11467 inkling of fear. Something about how the man held himself as he
11468 stood, not anything like the stance in the martial arts games he'd
11469 played in the village. Something altogether more serious. Ruiling
11470 heard a high whining noise and realized it was coming from his own
11471 throat.</p>
11472 <p>He lowered his hands slightly, extended one in a friendly, palm
11474 <p>And that's when the foreman reached under the shoulder of his
11475 ill-fitting, rumpled, dandruff-speckled suit-jacket and pulled out
11476 a cheap little pistol, pointed it at Ruiling, and shot him square
11477 in the forehead.</p>
11478 <p>Even before Ruiling hit the ground, one eye open, the other
11479 shut, the boys around him began to roar. The foreman had one second
11480 to register the sound of a hundred voices rising in anger before
11481 the boys boiled over, clambering over one another to reach him. Too
11482 late, he tried to tighten his finger on the trigger of the gun he'd
11483 carried ever since leaving behind Fujian province all those years
11484 before. By then, three boys had fastened themselves to his arm and
11485 forced it down so that the gun was aiming into the meat of his old
11486 thigh, and the .22 slug he squeezed off drilled itself into the big
11487 femur before flattening on the shattered bone, spreading out like a
11488 lead coin.</p>
11489 <p>When he opened his mouth to scream, fingers found their way into
11490 his cheeks, viciously tearing at them even as other hands twined
11491 themselves in his hair, fastened themselves to his feet and his
11492 arms, even yanked at his ears. Someone punched him hard in the
11493 balls, twice, and he couldn't breathe around the hands in his
11494 mouth, couldn't scream as he tumbled down. The gun was wrenched
11495 from his hand at the same instant that two fists drilled into his
11496 eyes, and then it was dark and painful and infinite, a moment that
11497 stretched off into his unconsciousness and then into --
11498 annihilation.</p>
11501 out for, along with strong coffee and a plate of fresh rolls. At
11502 3AM in the Geylang, food choices were slightly limited, but they
11503 never went away altogether.</p>
11504 <p>The Mighty Krang pulled up a video, waited for it to buffer,
11505 then scrolled it past, fast. "Three of the boys caught the shooting
11506 -- the <em>execution</em> -- on their phones. The goon who went
11507 down, well, he doesn't look so good." A shot from inside the dark
11508 room, now abandoned, the foreman on his back amid a wreck of broken
11509 computers and monitors, motionless, both arms broken at the elbows,
11510 face a ruin of jelly and blood. "We assume he's dead, but the
11513 video. This one took longer to load, some server somewhere groaning
11514 under the weight of all the people trying to access it at once.
11515 That never happened any more, it had been years since it had
11516 happened, and it made Justbob realize how fast this thing must be
11517 spreading. The realization scythed through her grogginess, made her
11518 eye spring open, the other ruin work behind its patch.</p>
11519 <p>The video loaded. Hundreds of boys, gathered in front of an
11520 anonymous multi-story building, the kind of place you pass by the
11521 thousand. They'd tied their shirts around their faces, and they
11522 were pumping their fists in the air and more people were coming out
11523 to join them. Boys, old people, girls --</p>
11526 nearly got caught, chased out of another safe house. She's running
11530 course not. If we'd known, we would have told her not to do it.
11534 video. A trestle table, set up beside the boys, with the dead boy
11535 draped on it. Looking closely, she could see the bullet hole in his
11536 forehead, the streak of blood running down the side of his
11537 face.</p>
11543 screen. "There are <em>thousands</em> of them out there. What's
11546 in chaos. Webblies are attacking them by the thousands. And it gets
11547 worse as the day goes by. They're just waking up in China, so fresh
11550 battle. And they'll win. And they'll keep on winning. From this
11551 moment forward, I'd be surprised to see if <em>any</em> new gold
11552 comes onto the markets, in any game. We can change logins as fast
11553 as the gamerunners shut down accounts, and what's more, there are
11554 plenty of regular players who've been skirmishing with us for the
11555 fun of it who'll shout bloody murder if they lose their accounts.
11556 We've got the games sewn up." She kept her face impassive, reached
11557 for a cup of tea, sipped it, set it down.</p>
11558 <p>Big Sister Nor stared at her for a long time. They had been
11559 friends for a long time, but unlike Krang, Justbob wasn't in
11560 worshipful love with Nor. She knew just how human Big Sister Nor
11561 could be, had seen her screw up in small and big ways. Big Sister
11562 Nor knew it, too and had the strength of character to listen to
11563 Justbob even when she was saying things that Nor didn't want to
11564 hear.</p>
11565 <p>Krang looked back and forth between the two young women, feeling
11566 shut out as always, trying not to let it show, failing. He got up
11567 from the table, muttering something about going out for more
11568 coffee, and neither woman took any notice.</p>
11570 safe-house door clicked shut.</p>
11575 <p>When The Mighty Krang came back, he saw immediately how things
11576 had gone. He distributed the coffee and got to work.</p>
11578 <p>Mrs Dibyendu's cafe was locked up tight, shutters drawn over the
11579 windows and doors.</p>
11583 the workers who had jobs outside of Dharavi walked to their
11584 bus-stops or the train station. It was unheard of for her to be
11585 this late. "Hey!" he called again and used his key-ring to rap on
11586 the metal shutter, the sound echoing through the tin frame of the
11587 building.</p>
11589 from one of the two rooms above the cafe, where Mrs Dibyendu rented
11590 to a dozen boarders -- two big families crammed into the small
11591 spaces. He craned his neck up, but the windows there were shuttered
11592 too.</p>
11594 street.</p>
11595 <p>Someone threw the bolts on the other side of the door and pushed
11596 it open so hard it bounced off his toe and the tip of his nose,
11597 making both sting. He jumped back out of the way and the door
11599 machete the length of his forearm. The boy was skinny to the point
11600 of starvation, bare-chested with ribs that stood out like a
11601 xylophone. He stared at Ashok from red-rimmed, stoned eyes, pushed
11602 lanky, greasy hair off his forehead with the back of the hand that
11603 wasn't holding the machete. He brandished it in Ashok's face.</p>
11605 machete wobbled in his hand, dancing in the air before his face, so
11606 close it made him cross his eyes.</p>
11607 <p>He stepped back and the boy held his arm out further, keeping
11608 the machete close to his face.</p>
11610 he could, which wasn't very. It cracked.</p>
11614 wave of alcohol and sweat-smell came with him, a strong smell even
11615 amid Dharavi's stew of smells. "I have papers in there," Ashok
11617 <p>There were other stirring sounds from the cafe now, more skinny
11618 boys showing up in the doorway. More machetes. "You go now," the
11619 lead boy said, and he spat a stream of pink betel-stained saliva at
11620 Ashok's feet, staining the cuffs of his jeans. "You go while you
11623 I want to speak to the owner!" he said, mustering all the courage
11624 he could not to turn on his heel and run. The boys were filing out
11625 into the little sheltered area in front of the doorway now. They
11626 were smiling.</p>
11631 <p>The other boys were chuckling now, hyena sounds. Predator
11632 sounds. All those machetes. Every nerve in Ashok's body screaming
11635 <p>The bravado was unconvincing even to him and to these street
11636 hoods it must have sounded like a fart in a windstorm. They laughed
11637 louder, and louder still when the boy took another rushing step
11638 toward him, swinging the machete, just missing him, blade whistling
11639 past him with a terrifying whoosh as he backpedaled another step,
11640 bumped into a man carrying a home-made sledgehammer on his way to
11642 <p>Mala's mother answered his knock after a long delay, eyeing him
11643 suspiciously. She'd met him on two other occasions, when he'd
11644 walked "the General" home from a late battle, and she hadn't liked
11645 him either time. Now she glared openly and blocked the doorway.
11647 <p>Mala pushed past her, hair caught in a loose ponytail, her gait
11648 an assertive, angry limp. She aimed a perfunctory kiss at her
11649 mother's cheek, missing by several centimeters, and gestured
11650 brusquely down the stairs. Ashok hurried down, through the lower
11651 room with its own family, bustling about and getting ready for
11652 work, then down another flight to the factory floor, and then out
11653 into the stinging Dharavi air. Someone was burning plastic nearby,
11654 the stench stronger than usual, an instant headache of a smell.</p>
11658 out her phone and began sending out texts. Ashok stood beside her,
11659 a head taller than her, but feeling somehow smaller than this girl,
11660 this ball of talent and anger in girl form. Dharavi was waking now,
11661 and the muzzein's call to prayer from the big mosque wafted over
11662 the shacks and factories. Livestock sounds -- roosters, goats, a
11663 cowbell and a big bovine sneeze. Babies crying. Women struggled
11664 past with their water jugs.</p>
11665 <p>He thought about how unreal all this was for most of the people
11666 he knew, the union leaders he'd grown up with, his own family. When
11667 he talked with them about Webbly business, they mocked the
11668 unreality of life in games, but what about the unreality of life in
11669 Dharavi? Here were a million people living a life that many others
11670 couldn't even conceive of.</p>
11673 Kumbharwada neighborhood had puzzled him, until he found out that
11674 "hotel" was just another word for restaurant. The Webblies liked
11675 the Hotel U.P., a workers' co-op staffed entirely by women who'd
11676 come from villages in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh. It was
11677 mutual, the women enjoying the chance to mother these serious
11678 children while they spoke in their impenetrable jargon, a blend of
11679 Indian English, gamerspeak, Chinese curses, and Hindi, the curious
11682 <p>The Webblies, roused from their beds early in the morning,
11683 crowded in sleepily, demanding chai and masala Cokes and dhosas and
11684 aloo poories. The ladies who owned the restaurant shuttled pancakes
11685 and fried potato popovers to them in great heaps, Mala paying for
11686 them from a wad of greasy rupees she kept in a small purse she kept
11687 before her. Ashok sat beside her on her left hand, and Yasmin sat
11688 on her right, eyes half-lidded. The army had been out late the
11689 night before, on a group trip to a little filmi palace in the heart
11690 of Dharavi, to see three movies in a row as a reward for a run of
11691 genuinely excellent play. Ashok had begged off, even though he'd
11692 been training with the army on Mala's orders. He liked the
11693 Webblies, but he wasn't quite like them. He wasn't a gamer, and it
11694 would ever be thus, no matter how much fighting he did.</p>
11696 the 1000 Palms, where we used to fight --" she nodded at Yasmin,
11697 leaving the rest unsaid, <em>when we were still Pinkertons, still
11701 said. He had been very adventurous in scouting around for other
11702 places for them to play, on Yasmin's orders. Everyone in the army
11703 knew that he had a crush on Yasmin, except Yasmin, who was
11704 seemingly oblivious to it.</p>
11708 Perhaps they scared her, or took her phone off of her. Or..."
11710 stakes were high, Ashok knew. Very high. "And there's something
11713 too early! There was still so much planning to do! He pulled out
11714 his phone, realized that he'd left it switched off, powered it up,
11715 stared impatiently at the boot-screen, listening to the hubub of
11717 for him, from Big Sister Nor and her lieutenants, from the special
11718 operatives who'd been working on the scam with him, from the
11719 American boy who'd been coordinating with the Mechanical Turks.
11720 There had been fighting online and off, through the night, and the
11721 Chinese were thronging the streets, running from cops, regrouping.
11722 Gamespace was in chaos. And he'd been arguing with drunken
11723 thug-boys at the cafe, eating aloo poories and guzzling chai as
11724 though it was just another day. His heart began to race.</p>
11726 <p>Mala broke off an intense discussion of the possibility of
11727 getting PCs into a flat somewhere and bringing in a network link to
11731 was nothing we could do until we found a place to work. It is bad,
11735 Mrs Dibyendu's place again. Bannerjee doesn't own it. Everyone in
11738 eyes flat, the sharp machete trembling.</p>
11739 <p>The gaze Mala turned on him was every bit as flat. She could
11741 go from pretty young girl, charismatic, open, clever and laughing
11742 to stone-faced General Robotwallah, ferocious and uncompromising.
11743 Her flat eyes glittered.</p>
11745 that they go away and don't come back. Hit them hard, scare them
11746 back to their holes." Around the table, thirty-some Webblies stared
11747 at her, their expressions mirrors of hers. She was their general,
11748 and before she came into their lives, they had been Dharavi rats,
11749 working in factories sorting plastic, going to school for a few
11750 hours every day to share books with four other students. Now they
11751 were royalty, with more money than their parents earned, jobs and
11752 respect. They'd follow her off a cliff. They'd follow her <em>into
11755 "But surely no more than is necessary, and not even that if we can
11757 <p>Mala turned to her, back rigid, neck corded, jaw set. Yasmin met
11760 <p>And Mala melted, the tension going out of her, and she returned
11761 Yasmin's smile. Something had changed between them since the night
11762 Mala had attacked them, something had changed for the better. Now
11763 Yasmin could defuse Mala with a look, a smile, a touch, and the
11764 army respected it, treating Yasmin with reverence, sometimes going
11765 to her with their grievances.</p>
11767 necessary." She picked up her cane -- topped with a silver skull, a
11768 gift from her troops -- and made a few vicious swipes in the air,
11769 executed with the grace of a fencer. He knew that there was a lead
11770 weight in the foot of the cane, and he'd seen her knock holes in
11771 brick with a swing. Her densely muscled forearms hardly trembled as
11772 she wielded the cane. Behind her, one of the ladies who ran the
11773 restaurant looked on with heartbreaking sorrow, and Ashok wondered
11774 how many young people she'd seen ruined in her village and here in
11775 the city.</p>
11777 beside her and the army marched down the main road three abreast,
11778 causing scooters and motorcycles and goats and three-wheeled
11779 auto-rickshaws to part around them. Many times Ashok had seen
11780 swaggering gangs of badmashes on the street, had gotten out of
11781 their way. Now he was in one, a collection of kids, just kids, the
11783 with a long neck and hair in a loose ponytail, and around them,
11784 people reacted with just the same fear. It swelled Ashok's heart,
11785 the power and the fear, and he felt ashamed and exhilarated.</p>
11786 <p>Before the door of Mrs Dibyendu, Mala stooped and pried a rock
11787 from the crumbling pavement with her fingers, unmindful of the
11788 filth that slimed it. She threw it with incredible accuracy,
11790 door of the cafe. Immediately, she bent to pick up another rock,
11791 prying it loose before the echoes of the first one had died down.
11792 Around them, in the narrow street, heads appeared from windows and
11793 doorways, and curious pedestrians stopped to look on.</p>
11794 <p>The door banged open and there was the boy who had threatened
11795 Ashok earlier, eyes bloodshot and pink even from a safe distance.
11796 He held his machete up like a sword, a snarl on his lips. It died
11797 as he contemplated the 30 soldiers arrayed before him. Many had
11798 produced lengths of wood or iron, or picked up rocks of their own.
11799 They stared, unwavering, at the boy.</p>
11801 squeak at the end. The machete trembled.</p>
11803 would listen. A scared bully was even less predictable than a
11804 confident one.</p>
11806 said, gesturing with her phone, held in her free hand. "You can go
11809 said, and everyone on the street heard both lies, Mala's and the
11811 Young, dumb, drunk and angry and armed.</p>
11813 <p>Mala pocketed her phone and hefted her rock, eyes never leaving
11814 the boy.</p>
11816 <p>He grinned at her and spat a stream of pink, betel saliva toward
11817 her feet. She didn't move. No one moved.</p>
11819 <p>He raised the machete, point aimed straight at her. She didn't
11820 seem to notice.</p>
11822 <p>Silence rang over the alley. Someone on a motorbike tried to
11823 push through the crowd, then stopped, cutting the engine.</p>
11825 <p>The boy's eyes cut left, right, left again. He whistled then,
11826 hard and loud, and there was a scrabble of bare feet from the cafe
11827 behind him.</p>
11829 bowler again, whole body coiled, and Ashok thought, <em>I have to
11830 do something. Have to stop them. It's insane.</em> But his mouth
11831 and his hands and his feet had other ideas. He remained frozen in
11832 place.</p>
11833 <p>The boy raised his machete across his chest, and the hand that
11834 held it trembled even more. Abruptly, Mala threw. The rock flew so
11835 fast it made a sizzling sound in the hot, wet morning air, but it
11836 didn't smash the boy's head in, but rather dashed itself to pieces
11837 against the door-frame behind him, visibly denting it. The boy
11838 flinched as shattered rock bounced off his bare face and chest and
11839 arm and back, a few stray pieces pinging off the machete.</p>
11841 of the doorway, each with his machete. They raised their arms.</p>
11843 something wrong with his head, a web of scar and patchy hair
11844 running down the left side as though he'd had his head bashed in or
11845 been dragged. Ashok couldn't look away from this little boy. He had
11846 a cousin that size, a little boy who liked to play games in the
11847 living room and run around with his friends. A little boy with
11848 shoes and clear eyes and three meals a day and a mother who would
11849 tuck him up every night with a kiss on the forehead.</p>
11851 you fight, you lose. Get hurt. Run." The army raised their weapons,
11852 made a low rumbling sound that raised to a growl. One of the boys
11853 was on his phone, whispering urgently into it. Ashok saw their fear
11854 and felt a featherweight of relief, these ones would go, not fight.
11856 <p>And some of the army snickered at them, a hateful sound that
11857 he'd heard a thousand times while in-game, a taunting sound that
11858 spread through the ranks like a snake slithering around their feet,
11859 and the fear in the boys' faces changed. Became anger.</p>
11860 <p>The moment balanced on a thread as fine as spider's silk, the
11861 snickering soldiers, the boiling boys, the machetes, the clubs and
11862 sticks, the rocks --</p>
11863 <p>The moment broke. The smallest boy held his machete over his
11864 head and charged them, screaming something wordless, howling,
11865 really, a sound Ashok had never heard a boy make. He got three
11866 steps before two rocks caught him, one in the arm and the second in
11867 the face, a spray of blood and a crunch of bone and a tooth that
11868 flew high in the air as the boy fell backwards as if poleaxed.</p>
11869 <p>And the moment shattered. Machetes raised, the remaining five
11870 boys ran for the army, a crazy look in their faces. Ashok had time
11871 to wonder if the little boy lying motionless on the ground was the
11872 smaller brother of one of the remaining badmashes and then the
11873 fight was joined. The tallest boy, the one who'd answered the door
11874 that morning and spat at him, hacked his way through two soldiers,
11875 dealing out deep cuts to their chests and arms -- Ashok's face
11876 coated with a fine mist of geysering arterial blood -- face
11877 contorted with rage. He was coming for Mala, standing centimeters
11878 from Ashok, and the blood ran off his machete and down his arm.</p>
11879 <p>Mala seemed frozen in place, and Ashok thought that he was about
11880 to die, to watch her die first, and he tensed, blood roaring in his
11881 ears so loudly it drowned out the terrible screams of the fighters
11882 around him, desperate and about to grab for the boy. But as he
11883 shifted his weight, Mala barked "NO!" at him, never shifting her
11884 eyes from the leader, and he checked himself, stumbling a half-step
11885 forward. The boy with the machete looked at him for the briefest of
11887 weighted skull-tipped cane to push herself off, then whipping out
11888 the arm, the gesture he'd seen her mime countless times in battle
11889 lessons, and the weighted tip crashed into the boy's forearm with a
11890 crack he heard over the battle-sounds, a crack that he'd last heard
11891 that night so many months before, when Mala and her army had come
11892 for him and Yasmin in the night. Ashok the doctor's son knew
11893 exactly what that crack meant.</p>
11894 <p>A blur of fabric as Yasmin danced before him, stooping
11895 gracefully to take the machete up, and the boy just watched, eyes
11896 glazed, shock setting in already. Yasmin delicately and
11897 deliberately kicked him in the kneecap, a well-aimed kick with the
11898 toe of her sandal, coming in from the side, and the boy went down,
11899 crying in a little boy's voice, calling out for his mother with a
11900 sound as plaintive as a baby bird that's fallen from the nest.</p>
11901 <p>It had been mere seconds, but it was already over. Two of the
11902 boys were running away, one was sobbing through a bloody mouth, two
11903 were unconscious. Ashok looked for wounded soldiers. Three had been
11904 cut with machetes, including the two he'd seen hurt by the leader
11905 as he ran for Mala. Remembering the arterial blood, red and rich,
11906 Ashok found its owner first, lying on the ground, eyes half open,
11907 breath labored. He pushed his hands over the injury, a deep cut on
11908 the left arm that spurted with each of the hammering beats of the
11909 boy's chest and he shouted, "A shirt, anything, a bandage," and
11910 someone pressed a shirt into his bloody hands and he applied hard
11911 pressure, staunching the blood. "Someone call for a doctor," he
11912 said, making eye-contact with Anam, a soldier he had hardly spoken
11913 to before. "You have a phone?" The girl was shivering slightly, but
11914 she nodded and patted a handbag at her side, absentmindedly
11915 swinging the length of iron in her hand. She dropped it. "You call
11918 turned and grabbed the hand that had passed him the shirt, and he
11919 saw that it was attached to Mala, who had stripped it off of
11920 another boy in her army. Her chest was heaving, but her gaze was
11921 calm.</p>
11923 dictating to the general. This was first aid, it was what he had
11924 been trained for by his father, long before he studied economics,
11925 and it brooked no argument. He pressed her hand against the bloody
11926 rag and stood, not hearing the crackle of his joints. He turned and
11927 found the next injured person, and the next.</p>
11928 <p>And then he came to the boy, the little boy whose misshapen head
11929 had caught his attention. The boy who'd been hit high and low with
11930 two hard-flung rocks. The whole front of his jaw was crushed, a
11931 nightmare of whitish bone and tooth fragments swimming in a jelly
11932 of semi-clotted blood. When Ashok peeled back each eyelid, he saw
11933 that the left pupil was as wide as a sewer entrance, and did not
11934 contract when he moved away and let the sun shine full on it.
11938 will die." He said it simply, as if reading from a textbook. The
11939 boy smelled terrible, and there were sores on his arms and chest
11940 and ankles, swollen, overscratched and infected insect-bites and
11941 boils. "He has to see a doctor." He looked back to the bleeding
11944 doctor?" He had no idea how much time had passed since he'd told
11945 her to call. It could have been ten minutes or two hours.</p>
11948 <p>And now that he listened for it, he heard it, a distant dee-dah,
11949 dee-dah. The narrow lane that housed Mrs Dibyendu's cafe would
11950 never admit an ambulance. Without speaking, Yasmin ran for the main
11951 road, to hail it. And now that Ashok was listening, he could hear:
11952 neighbors with their heads stuck out of their windows and doorways,
11953 passing furious opinion and gupshup. They cheered on Mala's army,
11954 rained curses down on the badmashes with their machetes, lamented
11955 Mrs Dibyendu's departure, chattered like tropical birds about how
11956 she had been forced out, weeping, and chased down the road in the
11957 dark of night.</p>
11958 <p>Ashok was covered in blood. It covered his hands, his arms, his
11959 chest, his face. His lips were covered in dried blood, and there
11960 was a coppery taste in his mouth. His shirt and trousers -- soaked.
11961 He straightened and looked around the crowded lane, up at the
11962 chatterers, blinking owlishly. Around him, the soldiers and the
11963 wounded.</p>
11964 <p>Mala was whispering urgently in Sushant's ear, the boy listening
11965 intently. Then he began to move among the soldiers, urging them
11966 inside. The Webblies had work to do. The police would come soon,
11967 and the people inside the building would have the moral authority
11968 to claim it was theirs. The boys with their machetes, injured or
11969 gone, would have no claim. Ashok wondered if he would be arrested,
11970 and, if he was, whether he'd be able to get out. Maybe his father
11971 could take care of it. An important man, a doctor, he could take
11972 care --</p>
11973 <p>Two ambulance technicians arrived, bearing heavy bags and
11974 collapsed stretchers. They were locals, with Dharavi accents, sent
11975 from the Lokmanya Tilak hospital, a huge pile with a good
11976 reputation. Quickly, he described the injuries to the men, and they
11977 split up to look at the most serious cases, the deep arterial cut
11978 and the concussion. Ashok stayed near the small boy, feeling
11979 somehow responsible for him, more responsible than for his own
11980 teammate, watched as the technician fitted the boy with a
11981 neck-brace and then triggered the air-cannister that filled it,
11982 immobilizing his head. Carefully, the technician seated a plastic
11983 ring in the donut-hole center of the brace, over the boy's ruined
11984 jaw and nose, so that the plastic wouldn't interfere with his
11985 breathing. He unfurled his stretcher, snapped its braces to
11986 rigidity and looked at Ashok.</p>
11988 <p>Instead of answering, Ashok positioned himself at the boy's
11989 skinny hips, putting a hand on each, ready to roll him up at the
11990 same time as the medic, keeping his whole body in line to avoid
11991 worsening any spinal injuries. The medic slid the stretcher in
11992 place, and Ashok rolled the boy back. For one brief moment, he was
11993 supporting nearly all the boy's weight in his hands and the child
11994 seemed to weigh nothing, nothing at all, as though he was hollow.
11995 Ashok found that he was crying, silent tears that slid down his
11996 face, collecting blood, slipping into his mouth, doubly salty blood
11997 and tear mixture.</p>
11998 <p>Mala silently slipped her arm in his. She was very warm in the
11999 oppressive heat of the morning. There would be a rain soon, the
12000 humidity couldn't stay this high all day, the water would come
12001 together soon and then the blood would wash away into the rough
12002 gutters that ran the laneway's length.</p>
12008 to them, slip her fingers into Mala's.</p>
12018 had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better,
12019 because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he
12020 was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind,
12021 every day." He looked down at the top of Mala's head, startled for
12022 a moment to realize that she was shorter than him. He had a
12023 tendency to think of her as towering, larger than life.</p>
12024 <p>Mala looked up at him and it seemed that her dark eyes were
12025 glowing in the hot, steamy air, staring out from under her long
12028 <p>There were so many eyes on them, so many people watching from
12029 every corner of the road, and Ashok felt suddenly very
12030 self-conscious.</p>
12031 <p>Inside, the cafe was hardly recognizable. It stank like the den
12032 of some sick animal that had gone to ground, and one corner had
12033 been used as a toilet. Many of the computers had been carelessly
12034 moved, disconnecting their wires, and one screen was in fragments
12035 on the floor. There were betel-spit streaks around the floor, and
12036 empty bottles of cheap, fiery booze so awful even the old drunks in
12037 the streets wouldn't drink it.</p>
12038 <p>But there was also a photo, much-creased and folded, of a worn
12039 but still pretty woman, formally posed, holding a baby and a
12040 slightly larger boy, whom Ashok remembered from the melee. The
12041 baby, he thought, must have been that younger boy, and he wondered
12042 what had become of the woman, and how she was separated from the
12043 sons she held with so much love. And the more he wondered, the more
12044 numb and sorrowful he felt, until the sorrow welled over him in
12045 black waves, like a tide coming in, until he buckled at the knees
12046 and went down to the floor, and if any of the soldiers saw him hold
12047 himself and cry, no one said a word.</p>
12048 <p>His papers were intact, mostly, in the back room where he'd
12049 worked, and the network connection was still up, and the garbage
12050 was all swept out the door and the windows were flung open and soon
12051 the sound of joyous combat and soldierly high spirits filled Mrs
12052 Dibyendu's, as it had for so many days before. Ashok fell into the
12053 numbers and the sheets, seeing how he could work them with the new
12054 dates, and he was so engrossed that he didn't even notice the
12055 sudden silence in the cafe that marked the arrival of a
12056 policeman.</p>
12057 <p>The policeman -- fat, corrupt, an old Dharavi rat himself, and
12058 more a creature of the slum than the children -- had already gotten
12059 an account from the neighbors, heard that the machete-wielding
12060 badmashes had been the invaders here, and he wasn't about to get
12061 exercised on behalf of six little nobodies like them. But when
12062 there was a death, there had to be paperwork...</p>
12065 <p>Ashok felt as though the floor was dropping away from him and
12066 the only thing that distracted him and kept him from falling with
12067 it was the gasp of dismay from Yasmin behind him, a sound that
12068 started off as an exhalation of breath but turned into a drawn out
12069 whimper. He turned and saw that she had gone so pale that she was
12070 actually green, and the doctor's son in him noticed that her pupils
12071 had shrunk to pinpricks.</p>
12072 <p>The fat policeman looked at her, and his lips twisted into a
12075 policeman than was strictly necessary, too short to stare him in
12076 the eye, but still she seemed to be looking down. Unconsciously,
12077 the policeman shifted his weight back, then took a step back, then
12078 turned.</p>
12080 Ashok's identity card number; all the soldiers had claimed that
12081 they were never registered for the card, which Ashok really
12082 doubted, but which the policeman didn't question, as the air
12083 whistled out of his nostrils and he sweated in his uniform. The
12084 rains had finally come, the skies opening like floodgates, the rain
12085 falling in sheets the color of the pollution they absorbed on their
12086 fall from the heavens. The clatter on the tin walls and roof was
12087 like a firefight in some cheap game where the guns all made
12089 <p>Ashok watched as Yasmin drifted away into Mrs Dibyendu's little
12090 "office," the room where she made the chai over a small gas burner;
12091 watched as Mala followed her. He tried to work on his calculations,
12092 but he couldn't concentrate until he saw Mala emerge, face slammed
12093 shut into her General Robotwallah expression, but there were still
12094 tracks from the tears on her cheeks. She looked straight through
12095 him and started to bark orders to her soldiers, who had been
12096 setting the cafe to rights and getting all the systems running
12097 again. A moment later, they were all clicking, shouting, headsets
12098 on, shoulders tight, in another world, and the battle was
12099 joined.</p>
12100 <p>Ashok found his way into Mrs Dibyendu's office, found Yasmin
12101 squatting by the wall, heels flat on the ground, hands before her.
12102 She stared silently into those hands, twining them around each
12103 other like snakes.</p>
12105 <p>She looked at him. There were no tears in her eyes, only an
12107 rock that hit that little boy. I threw it. The one that hit him in
12111 <p>She chopped her hand through the air, a gesture full of
12112 uncharacteristic violence. "We <em>put ourselves in that
12113 position</em>, in the position where we'd have to kill him! It was
12114 Mala. Mala, she always wants to win before the battle is fought,
12115 win by <em>annihilating the enemy.</em> And then to talk of
12116 <em>Gandhi</em>?" She looked like she was going to punch something,
12117 small hands balled in fists and then, abruptly, she pitched forward
12118 and threw up, copiously, a complete ejection of the entire contents
12119 of her stomach, more vomit than Ashok had ever seen emerge from a
12120 human throat. In between convulsions, he half-led, half-carried her
12121 out of the cafe, into the all-pounding rain, and let her throw up
12122 into the laneway, which had become a rushing river, the rain
12123 overflowing the narrow ditches on either side of it. The water ran
12124 right up to the cracked slab of cement that served as Mrs
12125 Dibyendu's doorstep, and Yasmin's hijab was instantly soaked as she
12126 leaned out to spatter the water's turbulent surface with poories
12127 and chai and bile. Her long dress clung to her narrow back and
12128 shoulders, and it heaved with them as she labored for breath. Ashok
12129 was soaked too, the blood-taste in his mouth again as the water
12130 washed the dried blood down his face. The rain made talking
12131 impossible so he didn't have to worry about soothing words.</p>
12132 <p>At last Yasmin straightened and then sagged against him. He put
12133 his arm around her, grateful for the feeling of another human
12134 being, that contact that penetrated his numbness. Something passed
12135 between them, carried on the thudding of their hearts, transmitted
12136 by their skin, and for a moment, he felt as though here, here at
12137 last, was someone who understood everything about him and here was
12138 someone he understood. The moment ended, ebbing away, until they
12139 were standing in an embarrassed, awkward half-hug, and they
12140 wordlessly disentangled and went back in. Someone had mopped up the
12141 vomit, using the rags that the badmashes had left behind and then
12142 kicking them in a reeking ball in the corner. Yasmin sat down at a
12143 computer and logged in, listening intently to the chatter around
12144 her, catching the order of battle, while Ashok went to his computer
12145 and got ready to talk to Big Sister Nor.</p>
12147 <p>The day the strike started, Wei-Dong was in the midst of his
12148 second special assignment -- the first one had been to bring over
12149 the box of prepaid cards, which had been handed off into the Webbly
12150 network to be scratched off and then keyed in and sent to Big
12151 Sister Nor so she could portion them out to the fighters.</p>
12152 <p>The second assignment was harder in some ways: he was charged
12153 with finding other Mechanical Turks who might be sympathetic to the
12154 strikers' cause and recruit them. Wei-Dong had never thought of
12155 himself as much of a leader -- he'd always been a loner in school
12156 -- but Big Sister Nor had talked to him at length about all the
12157 ways in which he might convince his fellow Turks to consider
12158 joining this strange enterprise.</p>
12159 <p>Technically, it was simple enough to accomplish. As a Turk, he
12160 had access to the leaderboards of Turk activity, which Coca-Cola
12161 Online made a big deal out of, updating them every ten minutes. The
12162 leaderboards listed each Turk by name and showed which parts of the
12163 game he or she hung out in, how many queries she or he handled per
12164 hour, how highly rated the Turk's rulings and role-play were rated
12165 by the players who were randomly surveyed by a satisfaction-bot
12166 that gave out rare badges to any player who would fill in an
12167 in-game questionnaire. The idea was to inspire the Turks by showing
12168 them how much better their peers were doing. It worked, too --
12169 Wei-Dong had spent many a night trying to pump his stats so that he
12170 could get ahead of the other Turks, scaling to the highest heights
12171 before being knocked down by someone else's all-night run. And, of
12172 course, when you pulled ahead of another Turk, you got to leave a
12174 characters so that it could be tweeted and texted straight to them,
12175 and these messages had pushed the boundaries of extremely terse
12176 profanity and boasting.</p>
12177 <p>Wei-Dong had a new use for the boards: he was using them to
12178 figure out which players were likely to switch sides. The
12179 game-runners had created a facility for bulk-downloading historical
12180 data from them, and Turks were encouraged to make crazy mash-ups
12181 and visualizations showing whose play was the best. Wei-Dong had a
12182 different idea.</p>
12183 <p>For weeks now, he'd been downloading gigantic amounts of data
12184 from the boards, piping it all into a database that Matthew had
12185 helped him build and now he could run some very specialized queries
12186 on it, queries like, "Show me Turks who used to lead the pack but
12188 use a lot of profanity when they're filling in the dialog for
12190 below-average level of ratting out gold-farmers to the bosses."
12191 This last one was a major enterprise among Turks, who got a big
12192 bonus every time they busted a farmer. Most of the Turks went
12193 "de-lousing" pretty often, looking to rack up the extra cash. But a
12194 significant minority never, ever hunted the farmers, and these were
12195 Wei-Dong's natural starting point.</p>
12196 <p>He had a long list of leads, and for each one, he had a
12197 timetable of the Turk's habitual login hours and the parts of the
12198 world that the Turk worked most often. Then it was only a matter of
12199 logging in using one of the Webblies many, many toons, heading to
12200 that part of the world, and invoking the Turk and hoping the right
12201 person showed up. It would be easier to just use the Turk message
12202 boards, but if he did, he'd be busted and fired in seconds. This
12203 way was less efficient but it was a lot safer.</p>
12204 <p>Now he was in the Goomba's Star-Fields, a cloudscape in Mushroom
12205 Kingdom where the power-up stars were cultivated in endless rows.
12206 Players could quest here, taking jobs with comical farmers who'd
12207 put them to work weeding the star patches and pulling up the ripe
12208 ones. It was good for training up your abilities; a highly ranked
12209 Star Farmer could get more power-up out of his stars.</p>
12210 <p>And here was the farmer, chewing a corn-stalk and puttering
12211 around his barn, which was also made from clouds. He offered
12212 Wei-Dong a quest -- low-level, just pulling up weeds from some of
12213 the easier-to-reach clouds, the ones that weren't patrolled by
12214 hostile Lakitus. Wei-Dong accepted the quest, and then opened a
12217 boy -- and my pappy worked it before me and his pappy before him.
12218 Yep, I guess you could say that we're a farming family, hee
12220 <p>This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring
12221 himself to type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole
12222 range of snappy answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking
12223 a Turk was to get outside the box.</p>
12230 <p>Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself,
12231 a Turk would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.</p>
12234 complaints. Many and many a day I have toiled in these fields and
12235 my hands are tired. Let's speak of more pleasant things, if you
12236 please." That was more like it. The dialog was the kind of thing an
12237 enthusiastic role-playing Turk would come up with, and that fit the
12238 profile of the Turk he was after.</p>
12243 you're not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You're pulling down
12244 more hours than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose
12245 that is? Did you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best
12246 quarter, ever? And that the entire executive group got a 20 percent
12247 raise? Did you know that Coke systematically rotates Turks who make
12248 too much money out of duty, replacing them with newbies who don't
12250 <p>The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder.
12251 Wei-Dong followed.</p>
12253 way</em>! Workers can organize and demand a better deal from their
12254 bosses. Workers <em>are</em> organizing. You give it two more
12255 months and you'll be out on the street. Isn't your pay and your
12256 dignity worth fighting for?</p>
12257 <p>The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a
12258 second that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had
12259 logged out. But no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer's
12260 movements, a little hesitation. There was still someone home. "I
12261 know you can't talk to me in-game. Here's an email address --
12262 D9FA754516116E89833A5B92CE055E19BCD2FA7@gmail.com. Send me a
12263 message and we'll talk in private."</p>
12264 <p>He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to
12265 game management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter
12266 of minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one
12267 more prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing
12268 happened. Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a
12269 few minutes later, when his email pinged.</p>
12270 <p>> Tell me more</p>
12271 <p>It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.</p>
12272 <p>#</p>
12274 tightly and staring into her eyes. "You can do the show from there.
12275 It's safer."</p>
12276 <p>Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed
12277 his hand. "I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won't do it
12278 and I want you to stop talking about it. I'm a Webbly, just like
12279 you, just like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong,
12281 I'm a journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what's going on,
12282 to report on it. I can't do that from HK."</p>
12284 <p>She cut him off with a chopping gesture. "Of course it's not
12285 safe! I haven't been interested in safety since the day I went on
12286 the air. You're not safe. My factory girls aren't safe. The
12287 Webblies on the picket lines aren't safe. Why should I be
12288 safe?"</p>
12289 <p>Lu bit down on the words: <em>because I love you</em>. Secretly,
12290 he was relieved. He didn't know what he'd do if Jie was in Hong
12291 Kong and he was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another
12292 flat in a handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys
12293 all studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in.
12294 They slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went
12295 out to work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more
12296 than two or three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to
12297 themselves. Just the day before, two boys had been followed out of
12298 a cafe by a couple of anonymous hard men who methodically kicked
12299 the everloving crap out of them, right on the public street,
12300 sending one to the hospital.</p>
12302 is what Lu said. "Someone will get careless and be followed home,
12303 or one of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who
12304 trek in and out of the flat at all hours, and then --"</p>
12306 renting and blowing off apartments for longer than you've been
12307 killing trolls. So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I'll
12308 keep on earning, and if I keep on earning, I can keep on
12309 renting."</p>
12310 <p>"How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours
12311 every night telling factory girls to fight back against their
12312 bosses?"</p>
12313 <p>A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that
12315 don't care what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are
12317 <p>She patted his hands. "Now, I want you to go and find me a
12318 Webbly to interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it's all
12319 going. Any more protests?"</p>
12321 were over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over south China. "But
12322 you heard about Dongguan?"</p>
12323 <p>She shook her head.</p>
12324 <p>"The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of
12325 making a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very
12326 slowly around the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating
12327 ice cream."</p>
12329 <p>He grinned. "Ice-cream. After the jingcha started to arrest
12331 started posting these very public notices: 'show up at
12332 such-and-such a place and buy an ice-cream.' Dozens, then hundreds
12333 of them, eating ice-cream, grinning like maniacs, and the police
12334 were there, staring at each other like mannequins, like, <em>Are we
12335 going to arrest these boys for eating ice-cream?</em> And then
12337 giving one away to someone random passing by. It's the easiest
12338 recruitment tool you can imagine!"</p>
12339 <p>She laughed so long and hard that tears ran down her face. "I
12341 on tonight's show."</p>
12342 <p>"If they get arrested for eating ice-cream, they're going to
12344 you imagine? <em>Are we going to arrest these boys for
12346 <p>Her laughter broke through the invisible wall that separated
12347 them from the lounging, off-shift Webblies, who demanded to know
12348 what was so funny. Not all of them knew about the ice-cream -- they
12349 were too busy patrolling the worlds, keeping the gold-farms from
12350 being run with replacement workers -- but everyone agreed that it
12351 was pure genius.</p>
12352 <p>Soon they were downloading videos of the ice-cream eating, and
12353 then another shift of boys trickled in and wanted to be let in on
12354 the joke, and before they knew it, they were planning their own
12355 ice-cream eating festival, and the general hilarity continued until
12356 Jie and Lu slipped away to 'cast her show for the night, grabbing a
12357 couple of hysterical Webblies to interview in between the calls
12358 from the factory girls.</p>
12359 <p>As Lu put his head down on his pillow and draped his arm around
12360 Jie's narrow shoulders and put his face in her thick, fragrant
12361 hair, he had a moment's peace and joy, real joy, knowing that they
12362 couldn't possibly lose.</p>
12363 <p>#</p>
12364 <p>The strike was entering its second week when the empire struck
12365 back. Connor had known about the strike for days, but he hadn't
12366 taken action right away. At first he wasn't sure he <em>wanted</em>
12367 to take action. The parasites were keeping each other busy, after
12368 all, and the strikers were doing a better job of shutting down the
12369 gold markets than he ever had (much as it hurt to admit it). Plus
12370 there was something <em>fascinating</em> about the organization of
12371 these characters -- they all came in through proxies, but by
12372 watching their sleep schedules and sniffing their chatter he knew
12373 that they were scattered all across the Pacific Rim and the
12374 subcontinent. Sitting there in his god's eye, in Command Central,
12375 he felt like he had a front-row seat to an amazing and savage flea
12376 circus in which exotic, armored insects fought each other
12377 endlessly, moving in precise regimented lines that spoke of
12378 military discipline.</p>
12379 <p>But he couldn't leave them to do this forever. He wasn't the
12380 only one in Command Central who'd noticed that this was going on,
12381 and the derivative markets were starting to pick up on the news,
12382 yo-yo-ing so crazily that even the mainstream press had begun to
12383 sniff around. Game-gold markets had been an exotic, silly-season
12384 news-story a couple years back but these days the only people who
12385 paid attention to them were players: high-volume traders
12386 controlling huge fortunes that bought and sold game gold and its
12387 many sub-species in a too-fast-to-follow blur. Until, of course,
12388 word started to leak out about these Webblies and their pitched
12389 battles, their ice-cream socials, their global span -- and now
12390 corporate PR was calling Command Central five times a day, trying
12391 to get a meeting so they could agree on what to tell the press.</p>
12392 <p>So first thing on Monday morning, he gathered all of Command
12393 Central, along with some of the cooler -- that is, less
12394 neurotically paranoid -- lawyers and a couple of the senior PR
12395 people in one of Coke's secure board-rooms for a long session with
12396 the white-board.</p>
12398 can have the ten grand." Connor and Bill's bet had become a running
12399 joke in Command Central, but Connor and Bill knew that it was
12400 deadly serious. They were both part of the financial markets, and
12401 they knew that a bet was just another kind of financial
12402 transaction, and had to be honored.</p>
12403 <p>Connor's smile was grim. He hadn't known whether the security
12404 chief would come over to his side; he was such a pragmatist about
12405 these things. Maybe they'd get something done after all. "You know
12406 I'm with you, but the question is, how high a price are we prepared
12407 to pay to get rid of these people?"</p>
12409 the most macho guy in Command Central -- the kind of guy who won't
12410 shut up about his gun collection and his karate prowess. Kaden
12411 might have been a black belt 20 years ago, but five years in
12412 Command Central had made him lavishly, necklessly fat, and unable
12413 to go up a flight of stairs without losing his breath.</p>
12414 <p>Bill -- no lightweight himself -- craned his head around to
12415 stare fishily at Kaden. He made a dismissive grunt and said, "Oh,
12416 really?"</p>
12417 <p>Kaden -- called out in front of a room full of people --
12419 worlds. We can outspend and outmanoeuvre them. We just have to have
12420 the balls to do what it takes, instead of pussying out the way we
12421 always do."</p>
12422 <p>Bill grunted again, a sound like a cement-mixer with
12427 <p>"I don't think I'm the one being stupid. There's an upper limit
12428 on how much this company can afford to spend on these jerks. If
12429 removing them from the game costs us more than leaving them there,
12430 we're just shooting ourselves in the head. So let's stop talking
12431 about 'pussying out' and 'no cost is too high' and set some
12432 parameters that we can turn into action, all right?"</p>
12434 <p>Bill got out of his seat and turned all the way around to face
12436 You're a pretty good level designer, but I've seen better. And as a
12437 person, you're a total waste. You've got nothing useful to add to
12438 this discussion except for stupid slogans. We've heard the stupid
12439 slogans. Go buff your paladin or something and let the grownups get
12440 on with it."</p>
12441 <p>Silence descended on the meeting room. Connor, standing at the
12442 front of the room, thought about telling Bill to back off, but the
12443 thing was, he was right, Kaden was a total ass, and letting him
12444 talk would just distract them all from getting the job done.</p>
12445 <p>Kaden sat, mouth open and fishlike, for a moment, then looked
12446 around for support. He found none. Bill made a condescending little
12447 shooing gesture. Kaden's face went from red to purple.</p>
12449 out of the room like a whipped dog and they all turned back to
12450 Connor.</p>
12452 solving the problem, not posturing or thumping our chests. So let's
12453 stick to the problem." He nodded at Bill.</p>
12454 <p>Bill stood, turned around to face the audience. "Here's what
12455 doesn't work: IP addresses. They're coming in from proxies all over
12456 the US, and they can find proxies faster than we can blacklist
12457 them. Plus we've got tons of legit customers -- expats, mostly --
12458 who live in China and around Asia and use these proxies to escape
12459 their local network blocks. But even if we were willing to throw
12460 those customers under a bus to stop the gold-farmers, we
12461 couldn't.</p>
12463 on legit prepaid cards. The farmers are all paying customers, in
12464 other words. We could shut off the prepaid cards and insist on
12465 credit cards, but they'd just get prepaid credit cards. And every
12466 kid in America and Canada and Europe who pays for her account with
12467 prepaid cards from the corner store would be out of luck. That's a
12468 lot of customers to throw under the bus -- and they'll just move on
12469 to one of our competitors. Plus, those prepaid cards are
12470 <em>gold</em>. Kids buy them and half the time they don't use them
12471 -- they're free money for us.</p>
12472 <p>"Finally doesn't work: Behavioral profiling. Yes, these
12473 characters have some stereotypical behaviors, like running the same
12474 grinding tasks for hours, or engaging in these giant, epic battles.
12475 But this is also characteristic of a huge number of normal players
12476 -- again, these are people we don't want to throw under the
12477 bus.</p>
12480 out of the busts we make. Once we positively identify a farmer, we
12481 should be able to take out his whole network by backtracking the
12482 people he's chatted with, the ones he's partied with, his
12485 sound of your bus running over more legit players. These cats can
12486 easily blow that strategy just by recruiting normal players for
12487 their raids and fights. Hell, we <em>designed it</em> that
12490 them. She looked from one to the other. "I mean, these farmer types
12491 have to dispose of their gold, and if we take it back from any
12495 they're cheating. It'd be justice. On what basis could they
12498 required a law degree to understand. They prohibited every
12499 conceivable in-game activity, up to and including having fun.
12500 Technically, every player violated the terms every day, which meant
12501 that if they wanted to, they could kick off anyone at any time (of
12502 course, this too was allowed in the terms: "Coca-Cola Games, Ltd
12503 reserves the right to terminate your account at any time, for any
12505 gold is all right. We sell gold, after all, on our own exchanges,
12506 all the time. If you nuked every account involved in a gold-farming
12507 buy, we'd depopulate the world by something like 80 percent. We
12511 months. It's the first time we've ever tried to be systematic about
12512 them, instead of just slapping them down when the activity gets a
12513 little too intense. I can show you the numbers if you want, show
12514 you how I worked this out, but for now, let's just say that I'm the
12517 after the known associates of the farmers we bust, even though we
12522 idea how much transactional data we're going to have to store to
12523 keep a record of every person every player has ever talked to or
12524 fought with? And then someone will have to go over all those
12525 transactions, one by one, every time we bust a player, to make sure
12526 we're getting real confederates and not innocent by-standers. Where
12528 <p>Someone in the audience -- it was Baird, the lawyer Connor hated
12530 <p>Connor and Bill stared at each other, mouths open. The lawyer
12533 Just let the Turks keep any gold from the accounts of busted
12535 <p>One of the other economists was young Palmer, and he reminded
12536 Connor of himself a few years back. Connor hated him. His eager
12537 hand shot up. "I thought the point was to keep all that gold out of
12539 these goombas are allowed to flood the market with cheap
12542 outside our monetary planning, but even going flat out, they just
12543 don't move the market that much. And if they do, we can restrict
12544 the supply at our side, or adjust the basic in-game costs up or
12545 down... And it's not as if the Turks will turn around and spend the
12546 gold right away, or dump it through one of the official exchanges,
12547 especially if we keep the exchange rate low through that
12549 <p>Young Palmer opened his mouth again and Connor stopped him.
12550 "Look, this is all model-able. Let's stipulate that we can take
12551 care of the monetary supply and move on." In the back of his mind,
12552 he knew that he was dismissing a potentially explosive issue with a
12553 lot more cavalier abandon than was really warranted, but the fact
12554 was this was his chance to take care of the gold farmers once and
12555 for all, with the full weight of the company behind him, and if
12556 that screwed up the economy a little, well, they'd fix it later.
12557 They controlled the economy, after all.</p>
12558 <p>Later, at his desk in Command Central, he looked up from his
12559 feeds and saw a room full of the smartest, toughest people in the
12560 company -- in the world -- bent to the same task, ferreting out the
12561 parasites that he'd been chasing for months. And if he himself had
12562 once been a kind of gold-farmer, a speculator of in-game assets,
12563 well, so what? He graduated to something better.</p>
12564 <p>The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million
12565 gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact
12566 was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to
12567 everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through
12568 them. "When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits --
12569 especially not the apple." It was a quote one of his economics
12570 profs had kept written in the corner of his white-board, and any
12571 time a student started droning on about compassion for the poor,
12572 the old prof would just tap the board and say, "Are you willing to
12574 <p>And hell, there were at least three million gold-farmers in the
12575 world. Let them get their own goddamned apples.</p>
12578 the world's oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled
12579 halfway with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and
12580 induce some tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the
12581 water. You can tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the
12582 water to slosh around, making it higher at one end than another.
12583 But overall, there's a single level to that water, a surface height
12584 that you can easily discern.</p>
12585 <p>Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from
12586 one edge of the sea to the other -- and really, there's only one
12587 sea, a single, continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water
12588 that wraps around all the continents -- though the storms may blow
12589 up waves here and there, in the end, there's only so much water in
12590 the ocean, and it more or less comes to an easily agreed-upon
12591 height. Sea level.</p>
12592 <p>Same with money. There's only so much value in the world: only
12593 so much stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you
12594 could exchange it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the
12595 stuff there is for sale). It doesn't matter, really, whether the
12596 money is in dollars or gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or
12597 euros or yen. Add it all together and what you've got is the ocean.
12598 What you've got is sea level.</p>
12599 <p>So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What
12600 happens if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will
12601 the monetary seas rise, drowning the land?</p>
12603 <p>Printing more money doesn't make more money. Printing more money
12604 is like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons.
12606 liters (give or take) doesn't give you any more water. Gallons and
12607 liters are measurements of water, not water itself.</p>
12608 <p>And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you
12609 double the amount of currency in circulation, you double the price
12610 of everything on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of
12611 currency isn't. That's called inflation, and it can be savage.</p>
12612 <p>Say you're a dictator of a tin-pot republic. For decades, you've
12613 lined your pockets at the peoples' expenses, taxing the crap out of
12614 everyone and embezzling it into your secret off-shore bank-account
12615 in Honduras. Eventually, you've moved so much wealth out of the
12616 country that people are ready to eat their shoes. They start to get
12617 angry. At you.</p>
12618 <p>Normally, you'd just have your soldiers go and make examples of
12619 a few hundred dissidents and leave their grisly, carved up remains
12620 by the roadside in shallow graves as a means of informing your
12621 loyal subjects of what they can expect if they keep this kind of
12622 thing up.</p>
12623 <p>But soldiers -- even the real retarded sadists -- don't work for
12624 free. They want paying. And if you've taken all the money out of
12625 the country and put it in your bank account, you need something to
12626 pay them with.</p>
12627 <p>No problem. You're a dictator. Just call up the treasury
12628 department and order them to print up a couple trillion ducats or
12629 gold certificates or wahoonies or whatever you call your money, and
12630 you start paying the troops. It works -- for a while. The troops
12631 take their dough into town and use it to buy drinks and snazzy
12632 clothes and big meals. They send it home to their families, who use
12633 it to buy lumber and tile and steel and cement to improve their
12634 houses, or to buy farm implements and pay the hired hands to help
12635 them bring up the next crop.</p>
12636 <p>But as the amount of money in circulation grows, it gradually
12637 becomes worth less. The bar raises its drink prices because the
12638 landlord has raised the rent. The landlord has raised the rent
12639 because the cost of feeding his family has gone up, because the
12640 farmer isn't willing to sell his crops for the old prices, because
12641 she's paying double for diesel for the tractor and triple for
12642 water.</p>
12643 <p>And then the soldiers show up at the dictator's palace and
12644 explain, pointedly, with bayonets (if necessary), why their old
12645 wages are no longer sufficient.</p>
12646 <p>No problem. Just call up the treasury and order up another
12647 trillion wahoonies. And watch it all happen again.</p>
12648 <p>This is called inflation, and it's the cheap sugar high of
12649 governments. Like a cramming student sucking down energy beverages,
12650 a government can only print money for so long before they have to
12651 pay the price. It's not pretty, either. Families that carefully
12652 saved all their lives for their retirement suddenly find their tidy
12653 nest-egg is insufficient to cover the price of a dinner out. Every
12654 penny of savings is wiped out in the blink of an eye, and suddenly
12655 you need a lot more soldiers on the job to keep your loyal subject
12656 from gutting you like a fish and hanging you upside down from your
12657 own palace's tallest chimney.</p>
12659 further: take all the savings in the banks that are denominated in
12660 real money -- euros or dollars or yen -- and convert them into
12661 wahoonies at today's exchange rate. Use all that real money to pay
12662 the army for a day or two more, but you'd better save enough to pay
12663 for airfare to some place very, very far away.</p>
12665 people get poorer -- as less and less money is in circulation --
12666 the value of money goes up. This is good news for savers: the
12667 wahoonie you banked last year is worth twice as much this year. But
12668 it's bad news for everyone else: only an idiot borrows money in
12669 deflationary times, since the wahoonie you borrow today will be
12670 worth twice as much next year when you repay it. Deflation is
12671 uneven, too: the cost of food may crash because of some amazing new
12672 fertilizer, which means you can buy twice as much cassava per
12673 wahoonie. But this means that farmers are only earning half as
12674 much, and won't pay as much for cable TV. The cable company hasn't
12676 means less profits. Businesses start to fail, which means more
12677 people have less money, which drives prices down and down and down.
12678 Before long, no one can afford to make or buy
12680 <p>In other words, the amount of money in circulation is a big
12681 deal. Theoretically, this amount is watched carefully by clever,
12682 serious economists. In practice, all the world's money is in one
12683 big swirling, whirling pool. Dollars and ducats and wahoonies and
12684 euros, blended together willy nilly, and when one government goes
12685 to the press and starts to churn out bales of bank-notes, everyone
12686 gets the sugar high. And when things crash, and peoples' savings go
12687 up in smoke, the deflationary death-spiral kicks in, and prices
12688 sink, and more companies fail -- and governments go back to the
12689 printing press.</p>
12690 <p>So in practice, this big engine that determines how much food is
12691 grown, whether you'll have to sell your kidneys to feed your
12692 family, whether the factory down the road will make Zeppelins,
12693 whether the restaurant on the corner can afford the coffee beans,
12695 a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers
12696 clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the
12697 freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks
12698 threatens to take it off the rails altogether.</p>
12699 <p>There is a small number of people in the back of the train who
12700 fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the
12701 driver is really dead, and whether the train can be slowed down by
12702 everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all
12703 right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class
12704 passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether
12705 the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should
12706 lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next
12707 corner.</p>
12711 cheer transparently false.</p>
12714 twanged. "You're such a straight-shooter. It's why you're my
12717 a buzz of shouts and conversations and profanity.</p>
12726 tell me what the hell is going on, or I'm going to hang up this
12736 the coupon on this contract has been through the roof for more than
12737 a year. Ultimately, it can't lose, either, because of how we've
12738 packaged it with a credit-default swap. But right now, this
12740 <p>After the first month's interest had paid out, Connor had
12741 liquidated several other holdings and bought more of the bonds,
12742 bought big. So big that the brokerage had FedExxed him a bottle of
12743 Champagne. He'd lost track of how much he had tied up with Ira's
12745 had seemed like such a good bet --</p>
12748 policy lately. The star-farmers in Mushroom Kingdom are bringing up
12749 huge crops, and so Mario coins are dropping off in cost. But the
12750 word is that this is just a temporary gambit because they've had
12751 such a huge rush of new players who can't afford to keep up with
12752 the old-timers, so they're trying to lower commodity prices to keep
12753 those players onboard. But once those players catch up and start
12755 <p>It sounded plausible to Connor. After all, they'd done similar
12756 things in their own games. The experienced players howled as
12757 inflation lowered the value of their savings, but a player who'd
12758 been honing his toon for two years wasn't going to quit over
12759 something like that. The new blood was vital to keeping the game on
12760 track, replacements for the players who got old, or bored, or poor
12761 -- any of the reasons behind the churn that caused some players to
12762 resign every month.</p>
12763 <p>Churn was one of his biggest economic problems. You could
12764 minimize it in lots of sneaky ways: email a former player to tell
12765 him that you were about to delete the toon he hadn't touched in a
12766 year and there was a one-in-three chance that he'd sign up to play
12767 again, rather than doom this forgotten avatar to the bit-bucket.
12768 But ultimately some players would leave, and the only thing for it
12769 was to bring new players in.</p>
12771 huge surge in four to eight weeks, more than enough to make up for
12772 the drop. And if things go bad enough, there's always the prince
12776 this month. The underlying bonds are selling at a 20 percent
12778 percent off what you paid for them in this package. But if things
12780 <p>Connor tried to keep listening, but his breath was coming in
12781 tight little gasps. Sixty percent! He'd just had more than half his
12782 net worth vanish into thin air. The worst part was that he had
12783 other obligations -- a mortgage, payments due on some of the little
12784 startups he'd bought into, money to pay the contractors who were
12785 fixing up the holiday cottage he'd bought as a rental property in
12786 Bermuda. Without the cash he'd been expecting from these
12787 investments, he could lose it all.</p>
12791 him in Command Central looked up from their feeds to stare at him.
12792 He scowled at them until they looked away. "Did you say
12795 pictured him in his cubicle, a short-haired middle-aged guy in an
12796 old suit that had once been tailor made, a collection of bad habits
12797 glued to a phone, chewed-down fingernails and twitching knees, a
12798 trashcan beside him filled with empty coffee cups, screens
12799 everywhere around him flickering like old silent films. "Look, any
12800 idiot can buy when the market is up, but how much higher does the
12801 market go when it's already at the top? The only way to make real
12802 money, big money, is to bet against the herd. When everyone else is
12803 dumping their holdings, that's the time to buy, when it's all down
12805 <p>Connor knew that this made sense. It was the basis of his
12806 Prikkel equations, it was the basis of all the fortunes he'd
12807 amassed to date. Buying stuff that everyone else wanted was a safe,
12808 uninteresting bet that paid practically nothing. Buying into the
12809 things that everyone else was too dumb to want -- that was how you
12814 and he smiled himself, a reflex he couldn't tamp down even if he'd
12815 wanted to. "You're not tapped out. You've got a liquidity problem.
12816 You have a relationship with this brokerage. That's worth
12817 something. Hell, that's worth <em>everything</em>. We got you into
12818 this problem, and we'll get you out of it. If you need some credit,
12819 that's absolutely do-able. Let me talk to our credit department and
12821 <p>Connor was overcome by an eerie, schizophrenic sensation. It was
12822 as if his brain had split into two pieces. One piece was shaking
12823 its head vigorously, saying <em>Oh no, you're out of your mind,
12824 there's no way I'm putting more money into this thing. No, no, no,
12825 Christ, no!</em></p>
12827 right, the best time to buy is at the bottom of the market. These
12828 things have been paying out big-time. The explanation makes sense.
12829 Just think of how you'll feel when you don't buy in and the
12830 security bounces back, all that money you'll miss out on. Think of
12831 how you'll feel if you clean up and can buy a bigger house, another
12832 income property, a new car. Think of how all these jerks will drool
12834 <p>And his mouth opened and the words that came out of it were,
12835 "All right, that sounds great. I'll take as much as you can sell me
12836 on margin." On margin: that was when you bought securities with
12837 borrowed money, because you were sure that the bets would pay off
12838 before you had to pay the money back. It was a dangerous game: if
12839 the margin call came before the bets paid off -- or if they never
12840 paid off -- it could wipe you out.</p>
12841 <p>But these were not bets, really. The way that the brokerage had
12842 packaged them, they were fully hedged. The worse the underlying
12843 bonds did, the more the bets against them from the Prince paid off.
12844 There might be some minor monthly variations, but when it was all
12845 said and done, he just couldn't lose.</p>
12847 <p>Through the rest of the day, he was so preoccupied with worry
12848 over his precarious position that he didn't even notice when every
12849 other executive in Command Central had a nearly identical
12852 <p>Wei-Dong's mother was the perfect reality check when it came to
12853 games and the Webblies. He'd never appreciated it before he left
12854 home, but once he'd gone to work as a Turk, his mom had tried to
12855 re-establish contact by clipping stories about games and gamers and
12856 emailing them to him. It was always stuff he'd absorbed through his
12857 pores months before, being reported to outsiders with big screaming
12858 OMG WTF headlines that made him snicker.</p>
12859 <p>But he came to appreciate his mom's clippings as a glimpse into
12860 a parallel universe of non-gamers, people who just didn't get how
12861 important all this had become. The best ones were from the
12862 financial press, trying to explain to weirdos who invested in
12863 game-gold exactly what they had bought.</p>
12864 <p>And those clippings were even more important now that he'd come
12865 to China. Mom still thought he was in Alaska, and he made sure to
12866 pepper his occasional emails to her with references to the long
12867 nights and short days, the wilderness, the people -- a lot of it
12868 cut-and-pasted verbatim from the tweets of actual Alaska
12869 tourists.</p>
12872 <p>They call themselves the Industrial Workers of the World Wide
12875 in multiplayer video-games, toiling to extract wealth from the
12876 game-engines, violating the game companies' exclusive monopoly over
12877 game-value. The crops these "gold farmers" raise are sold on to
12878 rich players in America, Europe and the rest of the developed
12879 world, and the companies that control the games say that this has
12880 the potential to disrupt the carefully balanced internal economies
12881 --</p>
12882 <p>Wei-Dong spacebarred through the article, skimming down. It was
12883 interesting to see one of his mother's feeds talking about
12885 Explaining everything.</p>
12887 <p>...mysterious, influential pirate radio host who calls herself
12888 Jiandi, whose audience is rumored to be in the tens of millions,
12889 creating a rare and improbable alliance between traditional factory
12890 workers and the gamers. This phenomenon is reportedly repeating
12891 itself around the Pacific Rim, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and
12892 Vietnam, though it's unclear whether the "IWWWW" chapters in these
12893 countries are mere copycats or whether they're formally affiliated,
12894 under a single command.</p>
12895 <p>Wei-Dong looked up from his screen at the mattress where Lu and
12896 Jie had collapsed after staggering in from the latest broadcast,
12897 Jie's face so much younger in repose. Could she really be this
12899 Los Angeles -- was reading about?</p>
12900 <p>There was more, screens and screens more, but what really caught
12901 his attention was the mention of the "market turmoil" that was
12902 sending bond and stock prices skittering up and down. He didn't
12903 understand that stuff very well -- every time someone had attempted
12904 to explain it to him, his eyes had glazed over -- but it was clear
12905 that the things that they were doing here were having an effect, a
12907 <p>He almost laughed aloud, but caught himself. Matthew was
12908 sleeping all of six inches from where he sat, and he'd run the
12909 picket-skirmishes for 22 hours straight before keeling over.
12910 Wei-Dong had fought too, but he'd been mostly tasked to recruiting
12911 more Turks to his little list of friendly operatives, a much less
12912 intense kind of game. Still, he should be sleeping, not pecking at
12913 his laptop. In six hours, he'd be back on shift, with only a bowl
12914 of congee and a plate of dumplings to start the day.</p>
12915 <p>He folded down his laptop's lid and stretched his arms over his
12916 head, noting as he did the rank smell of his armpits. The single
12917 shower -- ringed with a scary-looking electrical heater that warmed
12918 up the water as it passed through the showerhead -- wasn't
12919 sufficient for all the Webblies who slept in the flat, and he'd
12920 skipped bathing for two days in a row. He wasn't the only one. The
12921 apartment smelled like the locker rooms at school or like the
12922 homeless shelter near Santee Alley that he used to pass when he
12923 went out for groceries.</p>
12924 <p>He heard a little chirp from somewhere nearby, the cricket-soft
12925 buzz of a mobile phone ringing. He watched as Jie sleepily pawed at
12926 the little purse by her pillow, its strap already looped around her
12928 <p>Her sleepy eyes sprang open with such force that he actually
12929 heard her eyelids crinkling. Her bloodshot eyes showed her whole
12930 iris, and she leapt up, shouting in slangy Chinese that came so
12931 fast he couldn't understand her at first.</p>
12934 instant they all shot out of their blankets, most of them already
12935 dressed, and jammed their toes into their shoes and grabbed little
12936 shoulder-bags containing their data and personal possessions and
12937 crowded into the doorway. They worked in near-silence, the only
12938 sound urgent whispers and curses as they stepped on each others'
12939 shoes. Some made for the window, leaping out to grab the balcony of
12940 the opposite handshake building, and now there was shouting from
12941 the street as the oncoming police spotted them.</p>
12942 <p>He joined the crush of bodies, pushing grimly into the narrow
12943 hallway, then sprinting in the opposite direction to most of the
12944 Webblies, for he had seen Jie running that way, holding tight to
12945 Lu's hand, and Jie seemed to have the survival instincts of a city
12946 rat. If she was running that way, he'd run that way too.</p>
12947 <p>But she'd gotten ahead of him, and when he skidded around the
12948 corner and found himself looking at a short length of corridor
12949 ending with an unmarked door, neither she nor Lu were anywhere to
12950 be seen. He paused for a second, then the unmistakable sound of a
12951 gunshot and a rising wave of panicked screams drove him forward,
12952 hurtling for the unmarked door, hand stretched out to turn the knob
12953 --</p>
12955 <p>He bounced off the door, stunned, and went on his ass, and
12956 shouted a single, panicked "Shit!" as he cracked his head on the
12957 dirty tile floor. As he struggled back into a seated position, he
12958 saw the door crack open. Jie's bloodshot eye peeked out at him, and
12959 she swore in imaginative, slangy Chinese. "Gweilo," she hissed,
12961 <p>He got to his feet quickly and reached the door in two quick
12962 steps. Her long fingernails dug into his arm as she dragged him
12963 inside the dimly lit space, which he saw now was a kind of supply
12964 closet that someone had converted into sleeping quarters, with a
12965 rolled up bed in one corner and a corner of one shelf cleared of
12966 cleaning products and disinfectant and piled with a meager stack of
12967 clothes and collection of toiletries and a small vanity mirror.</p>
12969 could barely hear her. "She gets to live in here for free. She and
12970 I have an arrangement." Lu was on his hands and knees behind her,
12971 silently rearranging the crowded space, working with a small LED
12972 flashlight clamped between his teeth. He was breathing heavily, his
12973 skinny arms trembling as he hefted the giant bottles of bleach and
12974 strained to set them down without making a sound.</p>
12977 she said. She was so close to him that he could see her individual
12978 eyelashes, the downy hair on her earlobes. If he took a deep
12979 breath, he'd probably crush her.</p>
12981 <p>Lu made a satisfied grunt and detached the entire bottom shelf
12982 from its bracket. Wei-Dong could see that he'd uncovered an
12983 access-hatch set into the wall, and it showered dust and
12984 paint-chips onto the floor in a cockroach-wing patter as he worked
12985 it loose. He passed it back and Jie tried to grab it, but there
12986 wasn't room to maneuver it in the small space.</p>
12987 <p>From the other side of the door, he heard the tromp, tromp,
12988 tromp of heavy boots, heard the thudding and pounding on the doors,
12989 the muffled and frightened conversations of people roused from
12990 their beds in the middle of the night.</p>
12991 <p>With a low, frustrated, frightened sound Jie grabbed the hatch
12992 cover and moved it out of the way, bashing him so hard in the nose
12993 that he had to stuff his fist in his mouth to stop from crying out.
12994 She gave him a contemptuous look and shoved the hatch into his
12995 hands. It was about 30 inches square, filthy, awkward, made from
12996 age-softened plywood.</p>
12997 <p>Lu had passed through the hatch already, and now Jie was
12998 following, her bare legs flashing in the half-light of the room,
12999 and then Wei-Dong was alone, and the tromp of the boots was louder.
13000 Someone was scuffling in the hallway, a man, shouting in outrage; a
13001 woman, screaming in terror; a baby, howling.</p>
13002 <p>Wei-Dong knelt down and peered into the tiny opening. It was
13003 pitch dark in there. He carefully leaned the cover up against the
13004 wall beside the opening and then climbed in. The floor on the other
13005 side was unfinished concrete, gritty and dusty. He couldn't see a
13006 thing as he pulled himself forward on his elbows, commando-style,
13007 his breath rasping in his ears. He inched forward, feeling
13008 cautiously ahead for obstructions and then discovered that he was
13009 holding something soft and pliant and warm. Jie's breast.</p>
13010 <p>She hissed like a snake and swiped his hand away with sudden
13011 violence. He began to stammer an apology, but she hissed again:
13015 around. The little space was a mere meter high and he repeatedly
13016 smashed his head into the ceiling, which had several unforgiving
13017 metal pipes running along it that bristled with vicious joints and
13018 tees. And he kicked both Jie and Lu several times.</p>
13019 <p>But he eventually found himself with his head and arms outside
13020 the hatch, and he desperately fitted his fingers to the inside of
13021 the grill and inched it into place. It was nearly impossible to
13022 manoeuvre it into the tight space, but he managed, his fingers
13023 white -- and all the while, the sounds from the corridor grew
13024 louder and louder.</p>
13026 just outside the door now, deep, impatient male voices and an
13027 angry, shrill woman's voice telling them that this was the stupid
13028 broom closet and to stop being so stupid. Someone shook the
13029 doorknob and then put a shoulder into the door, which
13030 shuddered.</p>
13031 <p>Wei-Dong bit his tongue to hold in the squeak and pushed back
13032 even more, the fear on him know, a live thing in his chest. Jie and
13033 Lu pushed at him as he collided with them, but he barely felt it.
13034 All he felt was the fear, fear of the armed men on the other side
13035 of the door, about to come through and see the closet and the
13036 obvious gap on the bottom shelf where things had been shoved aside.
13037 Wei-Dong was suddenly and painfully aware of how far he was from
13038 home, an illegal immigrant with no rights in a country where no one
13039 else had rights, either. He would have cried if he hadn't been
13040 scared to make a sound.</p>
13042 crash rocked the door. Someone had a key in the lock now, jiggling
13043 it. She clicked a tiny red LED to life and it showed him the shape
13044 of the space: a long, low plumbing maintenance area. The pipes
13045 above them gurgled and whooshed softly as the water sluiced through
13046 them.</p>
13047 <p>Lu was beside him, Jie ahead of them, and she was arm-crawling
13048 to the opposite side of the area. He followed as quickly as he
13049 could, ears straining for any sound from behind him.</p>
13054 <p>Wei-Dong understood now. The maintenance area occupied a
13055 dead-space between their building and the one behind it, and
13056 somewhere around here, there was a grating like the one they'd come
13057 through, a little wormhole into another level of the game. Jie's
13058 survival instincts were incredibly sharp, that much had been
13059 obvious, so he wasn't altogether surprised to discover that she had
13060 a back door prepared.</p>
13061 <p>He peered into the darkness, his whole body slicked with sweat
13062 and grimed with the ancient dust covering the floor.</p>
13064 to find," she said, her voice near panic. He heard the unmistakable
13065 sound of the police entering the utility closet behind them, then
13066 voices.</p>
13068 <p>So Wei-Dong found himself squirming over Jie's bare calves,
13069 tearing his jeans on one of the low pipes as he did so. He patted
13070 the wall blindly, feeling around. Away from the small red light, it
13071 was pitch black, disorienting, frightening. Nearby, he heard the
13072 sounds of Jie and Lu searching too.</p>
13073 <p>And then, he found it, his baby fingertip slipping into a
13074 grating hole, then he patted around it, felt its full extent.
13075 "Here, here!" he whispered loudly, and the other two began to
13076 struggle his way. He jiggled the grating, trying to find the trick
13077 that would make it come away, but it appeared to be screwed in.
13078 Increasingly desperate, he shook the grating, causing a rain of
13079 dust and dried paint to fall on his hands. He was gripping the
13080 metal so hard he could feel it cutting into one finger, a trickle
13081 of blood turning into mud as it mixed with the dirt.</p>
13083 <p>A hand patted the length of his leg, feeling its way up his
13084 body, to his arm, then pressed the little light into his hand.
13085 Jie's hand, slim and girlish. He clicked the red light to life and
13086 peered intently at the grating. It wasn't screwed in, but it needed
13087 to be pushed slightly forward before it would lift out. He stuck
13090 <p>Just as it did, a long cone of light sliced through the
13091 crawlspace, and then a martial voice demanded "Halt!" The light
13092 bathed him, making him squint, and Jie thumped him in the thigh and
13094 <p>He went, commando crawling again, Jie's slim hands pushing him
13095 to hurry him along. He emerged into a tiled space, dirty and dark,
13096 the floor wet and slimy. He stood up cautiously, worried about
13097 hitting his head again, then stooped to help Jie through. There
13098 were more shouts coming from the other side of the grating now, and
13099 the light spilled out of it and painted the greenish scum on the
13101 as Jie finished wriggling through and he bent to grab Lu, peering
13102 into the now-brilliantly-lit crawlspace. Lu had been searching for
13103 the grating at the other end of the crawlspace and he was going as
13104 fast as he could, his face a mask of determination and fear, lips
13105 skinned back from his teeth, blood flowing freely from a scalp
13106 wound.</p>
13108 unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. Lu's eyes grew wide and
13109 he flung his arms out before him and dug his hands into the ground
13110 and pulled himself along, scrambling with his toes.</p>
13113 <p>A gunshot, that flat sound he'd heard in the distance when he
13114 was living in downtown LA, but with an alarming set of whining
13115 aftertones as the bullet bounced from one pipe to another. Water
13116 began to gush onto the floor, and Lu was still too far away.
13117 Wei-Dong went down on his belly and crawled halfway into the space,
13118 holding his arms out: "Come on, come on," crooning it now, not sure
13119 if he was speaking English or Chinese.</p>
13121 and the water was everywhere, and the whining ricochets were
13122 everywhere and then --</p>
13124 heard. The closest he'd heard was the wail of a cat that he'd once
13125 seen hit by a car in front of his house, a cat that had lain in the
13126 street with its spine broken for an eternity, screaming almost like
13127 a human, a wail that made his skin prickle from his ankles to his
13129 his tongue so hard he felt blood fill his mouth. Lu's eyes
13130 narrowed, the pupils contracting. He opened his mouth as though he
13131 had just had the most profound insight of his life, and then blood
13132 sloshed out of his mouth, over his lips, and down his chin.</p>
13134 forward and get him and the impulse to back out and run as fast as
13135 he could, all the way to California if he could --</p>
13137 and the gun was cocked again. He smelled the blood from his own
13138 mouth and from Lu, and Lu slumped forward. Then a gunpowder smell.
13139 Then --</p>
13140 <p>-- another shot, which whined and bounced with a deadly sound
13141 that left his ears ringing.</p>
13143 backwards as fast as he could.</p>
13144 <p>Jie yanked him to his feet, her face grimed with dust and
13146 <p>He shook his head, all his Chinese gone for a moment, no words
13147 at all available to him.</p>
13148 <p>Then Jie did an extraordinary thing. She closed her eyes, drew
13149 in a deep breath, drew it in and in, squeezed her fists and her
13150 arms and her neck muscles so that they all stood out, corded and
13151 taut.</p>
13152 <p>And then she blew it all out, unclenched her fists, relaxed her
13153 neck, and opened her eyes.</p>
13155 to the door behind her and shot the bolt, turned the knob and
13156 opened it into another apartment-building corridor, smelling of
13157 cooking spices and ancient, ground-in body-odor and mold. The dim
13158 light from the hallway felt bright compared to the twilight he'd
13159 been in since diving through the bolt-hole, and he saw that he was
13160 in a disused communal shower, the walls green with old mold and
13161 slime.</p>
13162 <p>Jie dug a pair of strappy sandals out of her purse and calmly
13163 and efficiently slipped them on. She produced two sealed packets of
13164 wet-wipes, handed one to Wei-Dong and used the other's contents to
13165 wipe her face, her hands, her bare legs, working with brisk
13166 strokes. Though Wei-Dong's heart was hammering and the adrenalin
13167 was surging through his body, he forced himself to do the same,
13168 shoving the dirty wipes in his pocket until there were no more.
13169 There were more shouts from the grating behind them, and distant
13170 sounds from the street below, and Wei-Dong knew it was hopeless,
13171 knew that they were cornered.</p>
13172 <p>But if Jie was going to march on, he would too. Lu was behind
13173 him, with the coppery blood smell, the bonfire smell of the
13174 gunpowder. Ahead of him was China, all of China, the country he'd
13175 dreamed of for years, not a dream anymore, but a brutal
13176 reality.</p>
13177 <p>Jie began to walk briskly, her arm waving back and forth like a
13178 metronome as she crossed the length of the building and opened the
13179 door to the stairway without breaking stride. Wei-Dong struggled to
13180 keep up. They pelted down three flights of stairs, the grimy,
13181 barred windows allowing only a grey wash of light. It was dawn
13182 outside.</p>
13183 <p>Only one flight remained, and Jie pulled up abruptly, wheeled on
13184 her heel and looked him in the eye. Her eyes were limned with red,
13185 but her face was composed. "Why do you have to be white?" she said.
13186 "You stand out so much. Walk five paces behind me, three paces to
13188 <p>He swallowed. Tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Lu was
13189 dead upstairs. The police were outside the door -- he heard calls,
13190 radio-chatter, engines, sirens, shouts -- and they were
13191 murderous.</p>
13193 hide here.</em> But he didn't say it. They were doomed in here. The
13194 police knew which building they'd entered. The longer they waited,
13195 the sooner it would be before they sealed the exits and searched
13196 every corner and nook.</p>
13198 mask.</p>
13200 <p>Jie cracked the door and the dawn light was rosy on her face.
13201 She put her eye to the crack for a moment, then opened it a little
13202 wider and slipped out. Wei-Dong counted to three, slowly, making
13203 his breath as slow as the count, then went out the door
13204 himself.</p>
13206 <p>The street was a little wider than most of the lanes near the
13207 handshake buildings, a main road that was just big enough to admit
13208 a car. A car idled at one end of it, two policemen outside it.
13209 Three more police were just entering the building he'd come out of,
13210 using a glass door a few yards away. The blue police-car
13211 bubble-lights painted the walls around them with repeating patterns
13212 of blue and black. Somewhere nearby, shouting. Lots of shouting.
13213 Boyish yells of terror and agony, the thud of clubs, screaming from
13214 the balconies, no words, just the wordless slaughterhouse
13215 soundtrack of dozens of Webblies being beaten. Beaten, while Lu lay
13216 dead or dying in the crawlspace.</p>
13217 <p>He turned left, the direction that Jie had gone, just in time to
13218 see her disappearing down a narrow laneway, turning sideways to
13219 pass into it. He wasn't sure how he could follow her injunction to
13220 stay to one side of her in a space that narrow, but he decided he
13221 didn't care. He wasn't going to try to make his own way out of the
13222 labyrinth of Cantonese-town.</p>
13223 <p>As soon as he entered the alley, though, he regretted it. A
13224 policeman who happened to look down the alley would see him
13225 instantly and he'd be a sitting target, impossible to miss. He
13226 looked over his shoulder so much as he inched along that he tripped
13227 and nearly went over, only stopping himself from falling to the
13228 wet, stinking concrete between the buildings by digging his hands
13229 into the walls on either side of him. Ahead of him, Jie cleared the
13230 other end of the alley and cut right. He hurried to catch her.</p>
13231 <p>Just as he cleared the alley-mouth himself, he heard three more
13232 gunshots, then a barrage of shots, so many he couldn't count them.
13233 He froze, but the sounds had been further away, back where the
13234 Webblies had emerged from their safe house. It could only mean one
13235 thing. He bit his cheek and swallowed the sick feeling rising in
13236 his throat and scrambled to keep up with Jie.</p>
13237 <p>Jie walked quickly -- too quickly; he almost lost her more than
13238 once. But eventually she turned into a metro station and he
13239 followed her down. He'd used the ticket-buying machines before --
13240 they were labelled in Chinese and English -- and he bought a fare
13241 to take him to the end of the line, feeding in some RMB notes from
13242 his wallet. The machine dropped a plastic coin like a poker chip
13243 into its hopper and he took it and rubbed it on the turnstile's
13244 contact-point and clattered down the stairs with the sparse crowd
13245 of workers headed for early shifts.</p>
13246 <p>He positioned himself by one of the doors and reached into his
13247 pocket for a worn tourist guide to Shenzhen, taken from the free
13248 stack at the info-booth at the train-station. It was perfect
13249 camouflage, a kind of invisibility. There was always a gweilo or
13250 two puzzling over a tourist map on the metro, being studiously
13251 ignored by the flocks of perfectly turned-out factory girls who
13252 avoided them as probable perverts and definite sources of
13253 embarrassment.</p>
13254 <p>Jie got off four stops later, and he jumped off at the last
13255 minute. As he did, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the
13256 glass of the car-doors and saw that one side of his hair was matted
13257 with dried blood which had also run down his neck and dried there.
13258 He cursed himself for his smugness. Invisible! He was probably the
13259 most memorable thing the metro riders saw all that day, a grimy,
13260 bloody gweilo on the train.</p>
13261 <p>He followed Jie up the escalator and saw her pointedly nod
13262 toward a toilet door. He went and jiggled the handle, but it was
13263 locked. He turned to go, and the door opened. Behind it was an
13264 ancient grandmother, with a terrible hump that bent her nearly
13265 double.</p>
13266 <p>She gave him a milky stare, pursed her lips and began to close
13267 the door.</p>
13272 official bathroom-minder, but he wasn't going to argue with her. He
13273 dug in his pocket and found two crumpled fives and passed them to
13274 her. It came to $1.25 and he was pretty sure it was an insane
13275 amount of money to pay for the use of the bathroom, but he didn't
13276 care at this point.</p>
13277 <p>The bathroom was tiny and cramped with the old woman's
13278 possessions bundled into huge vinyl shopping bags. He positioned
13279 himself by the sink and stared at his reflection in the scratched
13280 mirror. He looked like he'd been through a blender, head-first. He
13281 ran the water and used his cupped hands to splash it ineffectually
13282 on his hair and neck, soaking his t-shirt in the process.</p>
13284 She twisted off the faucet with her arthritic hand. He looked
13285 silently at her. He didn't want to get into an argument with this
13286 weird old crone.</p>
13290 <p>He did as he was bade, bending deeply at the waist to get his
13291 hair under the faucet in the small, dirty sink. She cranked the tap
13292 full open and used her trembling hands to wash out his hair and
13293 scrub at his bloody neck. When he made to stand up, she slapped his
13295 <p>He stayed. Eventually, she let him up, and dug through her bags
13296 until she found a tattered old men's shirt that she handed to him.
13298 <p>The shirt smelled of must and city, but was cleaner than
13299 anything he was wearing. He towelled at his hair, careful of the
13300 tender cut on his scalp.</p>
13305 He gave her two more fives and put his t-shirt on. It smelled
13306 terrible, a thick reek of BO and blood, but it was a black tee with
13307 a picture of a charging orc and it didn't show the blood.</p>
13309 <p>He left, dazed, and found his way into the station, looking for
13310 Jie. She was waiting by the escalator to the surface, fixing her
13311 makeup in a small mirror that just happened to give her a view of
13312 the bathroom door. She snapped the compact shut and ascended to the
13313 surface. He followed.</p>
13319 them had ever heard from him before. He saw their looks, balled his
13326 sorrow.</p>
13329 down.</p>
13332 <p>Sushant stood up and held up a machete that the boys had left
13333 behind. "We took this place. We'll hold it," he said, all teen
13334 bravado. Ashok felt like he would be sick.</p>
13335 <p>Yasmin and the General looked intensely at one another, a silent
13336 conversation taking place.</p>
13338 command.</p>
13343 <p>Ashok stood and went to his little back room and began to place
13344 phone calls.</p>
13347 fists. She'd been calm enough as she sat down in the basement of
13348 the Internet cafe, a private room the owner rented out discreetly
13349 to porno freelancers who needed a network connection away from the
13350 public eye. But now it seemed as if all the sorrow and pain she had
13351 shoved down into herself when Lu was shot was pouring out.</p>
13353 horrible as the noise Lu had made, as horrible as the noise that
13354 half-dead cat had made in the street in front of Wei-Dong's
13355 house.</p>
13356 <p>The cafe was in the shuttered Intercontinental hotel, in the
13357 theme-restaurant that sported a full-size pirate ship sticking out
13358 of the roof, its sails in tatters. The man behind the desk had
13359 negotiated briskly with Jie for the space, studiously ignoring
13360 Wei-Dong lurking a few steps behind her. She'd motioned him along
13361 with a jerk of her head and led him to the private room, which had
13362 once been a restaurant store-room.</p>
13363 <p>Once the door clicked shut behind them, she produced a bootable
13364 USB stick and restarted the computer from it, fitted an elegant,
13365 slender earwig to her ear and passed one to Wei-Dong, which he
13366 screwed into his own ear. After some futzing with the computer she
13367 signalled to him that they were live and commenced to howl like a
13368 wounded thing.</p>
13370 her face. "They killed him tonight. Poor Tank, my Tank. His name,
13371 his real name was Zha Yue Lu, and I loved him and he never harmed
13372 another human being and the only thing he was guilty of was
13373 demanding decent pay, decent working conditions, vacation time, job
13374 security -- the things we all want from our jobs. The things our
13375 <em>bosses</em> take for granted.</p>
13376 <p>"They raided us last night, the vicious jingcha, working for the
13377 bosses as they always have and always will. They beat down the door
13378 and the boys ran like the wind, but they caught them and they
13379 caught them and they caught them. Lu and I tried to escape through
13380 the back way and they --" She broke then, tears coursing down her
13381 face, a sob bigger than the room itself escaping her chest. The
13382 mixer-readouts on the computer screen spiked red from the burst of
13384 <p>She sobbed again, and the sobs didn't stop coming. She beat her
13385 fists on the table, tore at her hair, screamed like she was being
13386 cut with knives, screamed until Wei-Dong was sure that someone
13387 would burst the door down expecting to find a murder in
13388 progress.</p>
13389 <p>Tentatively, he uncrossed his legs and got to his feet and
13390 crossed to her and caught her beating fists in his hands. She
13391 looked at him, unseeing, and stuck her face into his chest, the hot
13392 tears soaking through his t-shirt, the cries coming and coming. She
13393 pulled away for a moment, gasped, "I'm sorry, I'll be back in a few
13394 minutes," and clicked something, and the mixer levels on the screen
13395 flatlined.</p>
13396 <p>On and on she cried, and soon Wei-Dong was crying too -- crying
13397 for his father, crying for Lu, crying for all the gunshots he'd
13398 heard on the way out of the handshake buildings. They rocked and
13399 cried together like that for what seemed like an eternity, and then
13400 Jie gently disengaged herself and turned back to her computer and
13401 clicked some more.</p>
13403 talking to you about love and family and dreams and work. So many
13404 of us came here looking to get away from poverty, looking to find a
13405 decent wage for a decent day's work, and instead found ourselves
13406 beating off perverted bosses, being robbed by marketing schemes,
13407 losing our wages and being tossed out into the street when the
13408 market shifts.</p>
13411 shouted and stood up and began to pace, gesturing as she did.</p>
13413 our pay because we get sick! No more lock-ins when the big orders
13414 come in. No more overtime without pay. No more burns on our arms
13415 and hands from working the rubber-molding machinery -- how many of
13416 you have the idiotic logo of some stupid company branded into your
13417 flesh from an accident that could have been prevented with decent
13418 safety clothes?</p>
13419 <p>"No more missing eyes. No more lost fingers. No more scalps torn
13420 away from a screaming girl's head as her hair is sucked into some
13421 giant machine with the strength of an ox and the brains of an ant.
13422 NO MORE!"</p>
13423 <p>"Tomorrow, no one works. No one. Sisters, it's time. If one of
13424 you refuses to work, they just fire you and the machines grind on.
13427 again, soldiers with guns and clubs and gas. If <em>all the
13428 factories</em> shut down, there aren't enough police in the world
13430 <p>She looked at her screen. It was going crazy. She clicked in a
13431 call. Wei-Dong heard it in his earpiece.</p>
13434 smile.</p>
13437 <p>Wei-Dong felt like he was falling. The girl was still
13438 speaking.</p>
13440 phone to phone. Google for 'the fallen 42' and you'll find them.
13441 The police said it was lies, and just now, they said that they were
13442 a criminal gang, but I recognized some of those boys from the
13444 <p>Wei-Dong dug out his phone and began to google, typing so
13445 quickly he mashed the keys and had to retype the query three times,
13446 a process made all the more cumbersome by the need to use proxies
13447 to get around the blocks on his phone's network connections. But
13448 then he got it, and the photos dribbled into his phone's browser as
13449 slow as glaciers, and soon he was looking at shot after shot of
13450 fallen boys, lying in the narrow lanes, arms thrown out or held up
13451 around their faces, legs limp. The cam-phone photos were a little
13452 out of focus, and the phone's small screen made them even less
13453 distinct, but the sight still hit him like a hammerblow.</p>
13455 in my dorm are scared, and now you're telling us to walk out of our
13457 <p>Jie's mouth was opening and closing like a fish. She held her
13458 hand out and snapped her fingers at Wei-Dong, who passed her his
13459 phone. Her face was terrible, her lips pulled away from her teeth,
13460 which clicked rhythmically as she looked at the photos.</p>
13462 "Oh," she said, as if she'd just realized some deep truth that had
13463 evaded her all her life.</p>
13466 something to a child. "I might be shot. But they can't shoot us
13468 <p>She paused, considering. Tears rolled off her chin, stained the
13469 collar of her shirt.</p>
13477 back. There's a little money left. I could go home and my parents
13478 could find some boy for me to marry and I could be just another
13479 girl in the village, growing old. Have my one baby and pray it's a
13480 boy. Swallow pesticide when it gets to be too much." She looked
13481 into his eyes and he had to steel himself to keep from flinching
13482 away. "Do you know that China is the only country where more women
13485 know what your life is like, Jie, but I can't believe that you want
13486 to do that. There are 42 dead. I don't think we can stop here."
13487 Thinking <em>I am so far from home and don't know how I'll get
13490 something until the thoughts stopped.</p>
13491 <p>She reached for the keyboard and he knew enough about her work
13492 environment to see that she was getting ready to shut down.</p>
13494 the weeks since he'd arrived in China, he'd begun to think in
13495 Chinese, even dream in it sometimes, but now it failed him. "I --"
13496 He beat his fists on his thighs in frustration. "It won't stop
13498 but it won't have you. It won't have Jiandi, the big sister to all
13499 the factory girls. When Lu told me about you, I thought he was
13500 crazy, thought there was no way you could possibly have that many
13501 listeners. He thought you were some kind of god, or a queen, a
13502 leader of an army of millions. He told me he thought you didn't
13503 understand how important you are. How you --" He paused, gathered
13504 the words. "You're shiny. That's what he said. You shine, you're
13505 like this bright, shiny thing that people just want to chase after,
13506 to follow. Everyone who meets you, everyone who hears you, they
13507 trust you, they want you to be their friend.</p>
13508 <p>"If you go, the Webblies will still fight, but without you, I
13509 think they'll lose."</p>
13510 <p>She glared at him. "They'll probably lose with me, too. Do you
13511 have any idea what a terrible burden you put on me? You
13513 I'm not your queen. I'm a broadcaster!"</p>
13514 <p>The heat rose in Wei-Dong. "That's right! You're a broadcaster.
13515 You don't work for some government channel like CCTV, though, do
13516 you? You're underground, criminal. You spent years telling factory
13517 girls to stand up for their rights, years living in safe-houses and
13518 carrying fake IDs. You set yourself up to be where you are now. I
13519 can't believe that you didn't dream about this. Look me in the eye
13521 millions, about having them all follow you and look up to you! Tell
13522 me!"</p>
13523 <p>She did something absolutely unexpected. She laughed. A little
13524 laugh, a broken laugh, a laugh with jagged shards of glass in it,
13526 hairbrush for a microphone, in front of my parents' mirror,
13527 pretending to be the DJ that they all listened to. Of course. What
13528 else?"</p>
13529 <p>Her smile was so sad and radiant it made Wei-Dong weak in the
13530 knees. "I never thought I'd end up here, though. I thought I'd be a
13531 pretty girl on television, recognized in the street. Not a
13532 fugitive."</p>
13533 <p>Wei-Dong shrugged, back on familiar territory. "The future's a
13534 weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.
13535 Look at gold-farming, how weird is that?"</p>
13536 <p>She grinned. "No weirder than making rubber bananas for Swedish
13537 department-store displays. That was my first job when I came here,
13538 you know?" She rolled up her sleeves and showed him her arms. They
13539 were crisscrossed with old burn-scars. "Then making cheap beads for
13540 something called 'Mardi Gras.' Boss Chan liked me, liked how I
13541 worked with the hot plastic. No complaining, even though we didn't
13542 have masks, even though I was burned over and over again." She
13543 twisted her forearm and he saw that she had the Nike logo branded
13544 backwards, in bubbled, wrinkled scar there. "Afterwards, I worked
13545 on the same kind of machine, in a shoe factory. You see the logo?
13546 Many of us have it. It's like we were cattle, and the factory
13547 branded us one at a time."</p>
13549 <p>She slumped. Slipped in her earwig. Began to prod at the
13551 I must."</p>
13552 <p>#</p>
13553 <p>Matthew wept as he walked, pacing the streets without seeing.
13554 He'd been one of the first ones out of the building when the police
13555 raided, and he'd slipped through the cordon before they'd tightened
13556 it, slipping into another handshake building, one he'd played in as
13557 a boy, and running up the stairs to the roof, where he'd lain on
13558 his belly amid the broken glass and pebbles, staring down at the
13559 street below as the police chased down and caught his friends, one
13560 after the other, a line of Webblies face-down on the ground,
13561 groaning from the occasional kick or punch when they violated the
13562 silence and tried to speak with one another.</p>
13563 <p>The police began to methodically cuff and hood them, starting at
13564 one end, working in threes -- one to cuff, one to hood, and one to
13565 stand guard with his rifle. It seemed to go on forever, and Matthew
13566 saw that he was far from the only person observing the sick
13567 spectacle: the laundry-hung balconies of the handshake buildings
13568 shivered as people piled out onto them, their mobile phones aimed
13569 at the laneway below. Matthew got out his own phone, zooming in
13570 methodically on each face, trying to get a picture of each Webbly
13571 before he was hooded, thinking vaguely of putting the images on the
13572 big Webbly boards, sending them to the foreign press, the dissident
13573 bloggers who used their offshore servers.</p>
13574 <p>Then, sudden movement. Ping was thrashing on the ground, limbs
13575 flailing, head cracking against the pavement hard enough to be
13576 heard from Matthew's perch six stories up. Matthew knew with
13577 hopeless certainty that it was one of his friend's epileptic
13578 seizures, which didn't come on very often, but which were violent
13579 and terrifying for those around him. The cops tried to grab his
13580 arms and legs, and one of them got a hard kick in the knee for his
13581 trouble, and then Ping's arm cracked the hooded prisoner beside
13582 him, who rolled away, stumbled to his feet, and the cops waded in,
13583 rifle-butts raised and ready.</p>
13584 <p>What happened next seemed to take forever, an eternity during
13585 which Matthew struggled not to scream, struggled on the edge of
13586 indecision, of impotence, of being driven to run to the street
13587 below for his comrades and of being too scared to move from the
13588 spot.</p>
13589 <p>A policeman cracked the hooded Webbly who was on his feet across
13590 the kidneys, and the boy screeched and staggered and happened to
13591 catch hold of the rifle-butt. The two grappled for the gun while
13592 the boys on the pavement shouted, other policemen closing in, and
13593 then one of them unholstered his revolver and calmly shot the
13594 hooded boy in the head, the hood spattered and red as the boy
13595 fell.</p>
13596 <p>That was it. The boys leapt to their feet and <em>charged</em>,
13597 warriors screaming their battle-cries, unarmed children scared and
13598 brave and stupid, and the police guns fired, and fired, and
13599 fired.</p>
13600 <p>The cordite smell overpowered his senses, a smell like the
13601 fireworks he and his friends used to set off on New Year's. Mingled
13602 with it, the blood smell, the shit smell of boys whose bowels had
13603 let go. Matthew cried silently as he aimed his phone at the
13604 carnage, shooting and shooting, and then a policeman looked up at
13605 the crowd observing the massacre and shouted something indistinct,
13606 the camera lens on his helmet glinting in the dawn light, and
13607 Matthew ducked back as the rest of the policemen looked up, and
13608 then he heard the screaming, screaming from all around, from all
13609 the balconies.</p>
13610 <p>He pelted across the roof, headed for the next building,
13611 vaulting the narrow gap between the two with ease. Twice more he
13612 leapt from building to building, running on sheer survival
13613 instinct, his mind a blank. Then he found himself on the street,
13614 with no memory of having descended any stairs, walking briskly,
13615 headed for the center of town, the streets with the fancy shops and
13616 the pimps, the businessmen and the Internet cafes filled with
13617 screaming boys killing orcs and blowing space-pirates out of the
13618 sky and vanquishing evil super-villains.</p>
13619 <p>The tears coursed down his cheeks, and the early morning rush of
13620 people on their way to work gave him a wide berth. He wasn't the
13621 first boy to walk the streets of Shenzhen in tears, and he wouldn't
13622 be the last. He randomly boarded a bus and paid the fare and sat
13623 down, burying his face in his hands, choking back the sobs. He'd
13624 ridden the bus for a full hour before he bothered to look up and
13625 see where he was headed.</p>
13626 <p>Then he had to smile. Somehow, he'd boarded a bus headed for
13628 working in small factories turned out millions of paintings. He'd
13629 gone there once with Ping and the boys, on a rare day off, to
13630 wander the narrow streets and marvel at the canvasses hung
13631 everywhere, in outdoor stalls and in open shops and in huge
13632 galleries. The paintings were mostly in European style, old
13633 fashioned, depicting life in ancient European cities, or the
13634 tortured Jesus (these made Matthew squirm and remember his father's
13635 stories of persecution) or perfect fruit sitting on tables. Some of
13636 the shops and stalls had painters working at them, copying
13637 paintings out of books, executing deft little brushstrokes and
13638 closing out the rest of the world. The books themselves were
13639 printed in Dongguan -- Matthew knew a factory girl who worked at
13640 the printer -- and something about the whole scene had filled
13641 Matthew with an unnameable emotion at the thought of all these
13642 painters creating work with their artist's eyes and hands for use
13643 by foreigners who'd never come to China, never imagine the faces
13644 and hands of the painters who made the work.</p>
13645 <p>And here they were, pulling up at the five-meter-tall sculpture
13646 of a hand holding a brush, disgorging dozens of passengers by the
13647 side of the road. All around him rose the tall housing blocks and
13648 long factory buildings, the air scented with breakfast and oil
13649 paint and turpentine.</p>
13650 <p>Matthew came out of his funk enough to notice that many of his
13651 fellow passengers wore paint-stained work-clothes and carried
13652 wooden paint-boxes, and he joined the general throng that snaked
13653 into Dafen, amid the murmur of conversation as workers greeted
13654 friends and passed the gossip.</p>
13655 <p>The time he'd visited Dafen, he'd wandered into a gallery that
13656 sold contemporary paintings by Chinese painters, showing Chinese
13657 settings. He'd never had much use for art, but he'd been poleaxed
13658 by these ones. One showed four factory girls, beautiful and young,
13659 holding mobile phones and designer bags, walking down a rural
13660 village street at Mid-Autumn Festival, the house-fronts and
13661 shop-windows hung with lanterns. The village was old and poor, the
13662 street broken, the people watching from the doorways with seamed
13663 peasant faces, pinched and dried up. The four girls were glamorous
13664 aliens from another world, children who'd been sent away to find
13665 their fortunes, who'd come back changed into a different species
13666 altogether.</p>
13667 <p>And there'd been a picture of an old grandmother sleeping in a
13668 Dongguan bus-shelter, toothless mouth thrown open, huddled under a
13669 fake designer coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a
13670 picture of a Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake
13671 buildings, hanging up an illegal cable-wire. The images had been
13672 poignant and painful and beautiful, and he'd stood there looking at
13673 them until the gallery owner chased him out. These were for people
13674 with money, not people like him.</p>
13675 <p>Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as
13676 he saw the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each
13677 others' shoulders, in the shop's windows. It hadn't sold -- or
13678 maybe the painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was
13679 a factory full of painters devoted to making copies of this
13680 painting.</p>
13681 <p>He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of
13682 angry voices. He thought he'd been hearing it for some time now,
13683 but it had been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now
13684 it was growing louder, and he wasn't the only one who'd noticed it.
13685 It was a chant, thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic
13686 feet. The crowd craned their necks around to locate the
13687 disturbance, and he joined them.</p>
13688 <p>Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of
13689 young men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with
13690 beautifully calligraphed slogans: "NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY
13692 decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end
13693 of the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of
13694 paper, brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: "REMEMBER THE
13696 script, and Matthew felt a surge of elation.</p>
13698 woman with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair
13702 in Cantonese town. They say that the boys were criminals, but the
13703 neighbors say they were just gold-farmers." She showed him the
13704 pictures. His friends, on the ground, heads in hoods, being shot by
13705 policemen, reeling back under the fire. The policemen anonymous
13706 behind their masks. The girl saw the expression on his face and
13707 nodded. "Terrible, isn't it? Just terrible. And the things the
13708 fifty-cent army have been saying about them --" The fifty-cent army
13709 was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents -- 4 RMB -- to
13710 write patriotic comments and posts about the government.</p>
13711 <p>He found that he was sitting on the dirty sidewalk, holding the
13712 girl's phone. She knelt down with him and said, "Hey, mister, are
13713 you all right?"</p>
13714 <p>He nodded his head automatically, then shook it. Because he
13716 <p>The girl looked at the sign she'd been painting and then at him.
13717 She turned her back on the painting and took his chin, tilted his
13720 phone. Drew out his own. Brought up the photos he'd taken while
13721 trembling on the roof.</p>
13723 photos. Where'd you get them?"</p>
13725 friends."</p>
13726 <p>She jolted as if shocked, then bit her lip and paged through the
13727 photos. She smelled of turpentine and her fingers were very long
13730 said, handing him back the phone and giving him a strong, sisterly
13732 <p>"We heard about it an hour ago, while we were settling in to
13733 work. We gathered to discuss it, leaving our canvasses, and our
13734 boss, Boss Siu, came by and demanded that we all get back to work.
13735 He wouldn't let us tell him why we were gathered. He never does.
13736 It's like Jiandi says on her radio show -- he controls our bathroom
13737 breaks, docks our wages for talking or sometimes just for looking
13738 up for too long. And when he told us we were all being docked, one
13739 of the girls stood up and shouted a slogan, something like 'Boss
13740 Siu is unfair!' and though it was funny, it was also so
13742 then --" She gestured at the line.</p>
13743 <p>Matthew remembered the day they'd walked out, a million years
13744 ago, remembered the police arriving and taking them to jail,
13745 remembered his vow never to go to jail again. And then he picked up
13746 the sign she'd been making and gripped it by the corners and joined
13747 the line. He wasn't the only one. He shouted the slogans, and his
13748 voice wasn't hoarse anymore, it was strong and loud.</p>
13749 <p>And when the police finally did come, something miraculous
13750 happened: the huge crowd of painters and other workers who'd
13751 gathered at the factory joined ranks with the picketers and picked
13752 up their slogans. They held their phones aloft and photographed the
13753 police as they advanced, with masks and helmets and shields and
13754 batons.</p>
13755 <p>They held their ground.</p>
13756 <p>The police fired gas cannisters.</p>
13757 <p>Painters with big filter masks from the factories seized the
13758 cannisters and calmly threw them through the factory windows,
13759 smoking out the bosses and security men who'd been cowering there,
13760 and they came coughing and weeping and wheezing.</p>
13761 <p>The crowd expanded, moved <em>toward</em> the police instead of
13762 <em>away</em> from it, and a policeman darted forward out of his
13763 line, club raised, mouth and eyes open very wide behind his
13764 facemask, and three factory girls sidestepped him, tripped him, and
13765 the crowd closed over him. The police line trembled as the man
13766 disappeared from view, and just as it seemed like they would
13767 charge, the mob backed away, and the man was there, moving a little
13768 but painfully, lying on the ground. His helmet, truncheon and
13769 shield were gone, as was his utility belt with its gun and its gas
13770 and its bundle of plastic cuffs.</p>
13771 <p><em>Now we have a gun</em>, Matthew thought, and from a far
13772 distance observed that he was thinking like a tactician again, not
13773 like a terrorized boy, and he knew which way the police should come
13774 from next, that alley over there, if they took it they'd control
13775 all the entrances to the square, trapping the picketers.</p>
13777 whose name was Mei, and who had stood by his side, her fine slender
13778 arm upraised as she called the slogans with him. "There and there.
13779 Lots of them. If the police seal those areas off --"</p>
13780 <p>She nodded and pushed off through the crowd, tapping people on
13781 the shoulder and shouting in their ears over the roar of the mob
13782 and the police sirens and the oncoming chopper. That chopper made
13783 Matthew's hands sweaty. If it dropped something on them -- <em>gas,
13784 surely, not bombs, surely not bombs</em> he thought like a prayer
13785 -- there'd be nowhere to hide. Protesters moved off to defend the
13786 alleyways he'd pointed to, armed with bricks and rocks and
13787 cameraphones. The same funnel-shaped alley-mouths that would make
13788 those alleys so deadly in the hands of their enemies would make
13789 them easier to defend.</p>
13790 <p>The chopper was coming on now, and the cameraphones pointed at
13791 the sky, and then the helicopter veered off and headed in a
13792 different direction altogether. As Matthew raised his own phone to
13793 photograph it, he saw that he'd missed several calls. A number he
13794 didn't recognize, overseas. He dialled it back, crouching down low
13795 in the forest of stamping feet to get out of the noise.</p>
13798 <p>There was a pause, then the phone was handed off to someone
13804 genuinely elated.</p>
13807 Nor. We are so happy to hear from you, boy! Are you OK, are you
13808 safe?"</p>
13810 in Dafen. That's a village in Shenzhen, where they paint --"</p>
13811 <p>"You're in Dafen? We've been seeing pictures out of there, it
13812 looks insane. Tell me what's going on."</p>
13813 <p>Without thinking, just acting, Matthew scaled a park bench and
13814 stood up very tall and dictated a compact, competent situation
13815 report to the The Mighty Krang, whom he'd seen on plenty of
13816 video-conferences with Big Sister Nor and Justbob, snickering and
13817 clowning in the background. Now he sounded absolutely serious and
13818 intent, asking Matthew to repeat some details to ensure he had them
13819 clear.</p>
13823 Gongyequ. There's a factory on fire in Jianying Gongyequ. That's
13824 bad business. Wildcatters -- if they'd talked to us first, we would
13825 have told them not to. Still." He paused. "Those photos were
13831 <p>A long pause.</p>
13833 <p>Matthew stood up again. The police line had fallen back, the
13834 demonstration had taken on something of a carnival air, the artists
13835 laughing and talking intensely. Some had instruments and were
13836 improvising music.</p>
13839 <p>Two more helicopters now, not headed for them. Headed, he
13840 guessed, for the burning factory in Jianying Gongyequ. He hoped no
13841 one was in it.</p>
13842 <p>#</p>
13843 <p>Mr Bannerjee came for them that night, with another group of
13844 thugs, but these weren't skinny badmashes, but grown adults, dirty
13845 men with knives and clubs, men who smelled of betel and sweat and
13846 smoke and fiery liquor, a smell that preceded them like a messenger
13848 Dharavi, a mob that the Webblies heard from a long way off. Mrs
13849 Dibyendu's neighbors came to their windows and clucked worriedly
13850 and sent their children to lie down on the floor.</p>
13851 <p>Mr Bannerjee led the procession, in his pretty suit, the mud
13852 sucking at his fine shoes. He stood in the laneway before the door
13853 to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe and put his hands on his hips and lit a
13854 cigarette, making a show of it, all nonchalance as he puffed it to
13855 life and blew a stream into the hot, wet air.</p>
13856 <p>He waited.</p>
13857 <p>Mala limped to the door and opened it. Behind her, the cafe was
13858 dark and not a thing moved.</p>
13859 <p>Neither said a word. The neighbors looked on in worried
13860 silence.</p>
13862 reasonable."</p>
13863 <p>Mala stepped onto the porch of the cafe and sat down, awkwardly
13864 folding her legs beneath her. In a clear, loud voice, she said, "I
13865 work here. This is my job. I demand the right to safe working
13866 conditions, decent wages, and a just and fair workplace."</p>
13867 <p>Mr Bannerjee snorted. The men behind him laughed. He took a step
13868 forward, then stopped.</p>
13869 <p>One by one, Mala's army filed out of the cafe, in a disciplined,
13870 military rank. Each one sat down, until the little porch was
13871 crowded with children, sitting down.</p>
13872 <p>Mr Bannerjee snorted again, then laughed. "You can't be
13873 serious," he said. "You want, you want, you want. When I found you,
13874 you were a Dharavi rat, no money, no job, no hope. I gave you a
13875 good job, good wages, and now you want and want and want?" He made
13876 a dismissive noise and waved his hand at her. "You will remove
13877 yourself from my cafe and take your schoolchums with you, or you
13878 will be hurt. Very badly."</p>
13879 <p>The neighbors made scandalized clucking noises at that and Mr
13880 Bannerjee ignored them.</p>
13882 house and your fine friends and you will leave us alone to control
13883 our destiny."</p>
13884 <p>Mr Bannerjee said nothing, only smoked his cigarette in the
13885 night and stared at them, considering them like a scientist who's
13886 discovered a new species of insects.</p>
13887 <p>"You are making mischief, Mala. I know what you are up to. You
13888 are disrupting things that are bigger than you. I tell you one more
13889 time. Remove yourself from my cafe."</p>
13890 <p>Mala made a very soft spitting sound, full of contempt.</p>
13891 <p>Mr Bannerjee raised his hand and his mob fell silent, prepared
13892 themselves.</p>
13893 <p>And then there was a sound. A sound of footsteps, hundreds of
13894 them. Thousands of them. An army marching down the laneway from
13895 both sides, and then they were upon them. Ashok leading the column
13896 from the left, old Mrs Rukmini and Mr Phadkar leading the column
13897 from the right.</p>
13898 <p>The columns themselves were composed of union workers -- textile
13899 workers, steel workers, train workers. Ashok's phonecalls and
13900 photos and stories had paid off. Hundreds of text messages were
13901 sent and workers were roused from their beds and they hastily
13902 dressed and gathered to be picked up by union busses and driven all
13903 across Mumbai to Dharavi, guided in to Mrs Dibyendu's shop by
13904 Ashok, who had whispered his thanks to the leaders who had given
13905 him their support.</p>
13906 <p>The workers halted, just a few paces from the gangsters and
13907 their evil smells. Ashok looked at the two groups, the sitting army
13908 and the standing mob, and he deliberately and slowly sat down.</p>
13909 <p>The exquisitely elderly ladies leading the other column did the
13910 same. The sitting spread, moving back through the group, and if any
13911 worker thought of his trousers or her sari before sitting in the
13912 grime of the Dharavi lane, none said a word and none hesitated.</p>
13913 <p>Bannerjee swallowed audibly. One of the neighbors leaning out of
13914 a window snickered. Bannerjee glared up at the windows. "Houses in
13915 slums like this burn down all the time," he said, but his voice
13916 quavered. The neighbor who'd snickered -- a young shirtless man
13917 with burns up and and down his bare chest from some old accident --
13918 closed his shutters. A moment later, he was on the street. He
13919 walked up to Bannerjee, looked him in the eye, and then,
13920 deliberately, folded his legs and sat down before him. Bannerjee
13921 raised his leg as if to kick and the crowd <em>growled</em>, a low,
13922 savage sound that made the hair on the back of Mala's neck stand
13923 up, even as she made it herself. It sounded as though all of
13924 Dharavi was an angry dog, straining at its leash, threatening to
13925 lunge.</p>
13926 <p>More neighbors drifted into the street -- old and young, men and
13927 women. They'd known Mrs Dibyendu for years. They'd seen her driven
13928 from her home and business. They were making the same noise. They
13929 sat too.</p>
13930 <p>Mr Bannerjee looked at Mala and opened his mouth as if to say
13931 something, then stopped. She stared at him with utter calm, and
13933 back.</p>
13934 <p>His own men laughed at this and he went purple in the dim light
13935 of the street. Mala bit her tongue to keep from laughing. He looked
13936 so comical!</p>
13937 <p>He turned with great dignity to look at his men, who were so
13938 tense they practically vibrated. Mala watched in stupefied awe as
13939 he grabbed one at random and slapped him, hard, across the face, a
13940 sound that rang through the narrow laneway. It was the single
13941 dumbest act of leadership she'd ever seen, so perfectly stupid you
13942 could have put it in a jar and displayed it for people to come and
13943 marvel at.</p>
13944 <p>The man regarded Bannerjee for a moment, his eyes furious, his
13945 fists bunched. He was shorter than Bannerjee, but he was carrying a
13946 length of wood and the muscles in his bare forearms jerked and
13947 bunched like a basketful of snakes. Deliberately, the man spat a
13948 glob of evil, pink, betel-stained saliva into Bannerjee's face,
13949 turned on his heel and walked away, delicately picking his way
13950 through the sitting Webblies and workers and neighbors. After a
13951 moment, the rest of Bannerjee's mob followed.</p>
13952 <p>Bannerjee stood alone. The saliva slid down his face. Mala
13953 thought <em>If he takes out a gun and starts blazing away, it
13954 wouldn't surprise me in the least.</em> He was totally beaten,
13955 humiliated before children and the poor of Dharavi, and there were
13956 so many cameraphone flashes dancing in the night it was like a
13957 disco in a movie.</p>
13958 <p>But perhaps Bannerjee didn't have a gun, or perhaps he had more
13959 self-control than Mala believed. In any case, he, too, turned on
13960 his heel and walked away. At the end of the alley, he turned back
13961 and said, in a voice that could be heard above the buzz of
13962 conversation that sprang up in his wake, "I know where your parents
13963 live, Mala," and then he walked away altogether into the night.</p>
13964 <p>The crowd roared with triumph as he disappeared. Ashok helped
13965 her stand, his hand lingering in hers for longer than was strictly
13966 necessary. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for hugging
13967 Yasmin, who was crying, happy tears like the ones they'd shared so
13968 many times before. Yasmin was as thin as a piece of paper but her
13969 arms were strong, and oh, it did feel good to be held for a moment,
13970 instead of holding everyone else up.</p>
13972 said.</p>
13973 <p>Instead of answering, he led her to two tiny old ladies, and a
13974 man with a skullcap and a beard. "Mr Phadkar, Mrs Rukmini and Mrs
13975 Muthappa," he said. "This is Mala. They call her General
13976 Robotwallah. Her workers have been defending the strike. They are
13977 unbeatable, so long as they have a place to work."</p>
13978 <p>Mr Phadkar looked fierce. "You will always have a place to work,
13979 General," he said, in a voice that was pitched to carry to the
13980 workers who gathered around them, excitedly passing whispered
13981 accounts of the historic meeting back through their ranks.</p>
13982 <p>The old ladies rolled their eyes at one another, which made Mala
13983 smile. They each took one of her hands in their calloused, dry old
13985 introduce us to your comrades."</p>
13986 <p>They chatted all night, and the women's papadam collective
13987 brought them food, and there was chai, and as there were far too
13988 many people to fit in the little cafe, the party occupied the whole
13989 of the laneway and then out into the street. Mala and her fighters
13990 fought on through the night in shifts, stepping out on their breaks
13991 to mingle, making friends, bringing them into the cafe to explain
13992 what they did and how they did it.</p>
13993 <p>And there were reporters asking questions, and the gupshup flew
13994 up and down the streets and lanes of Dharavi, picking up steam as
13995 the roosters began to call and the first of the early risers walked
13996 to the toilets and the taps and had their ears bent. The bravery of
13997 the children, the valor of the workers, the evil of the sinister
13998 Bannerjee in his suit and the thugs he'd brought with him -- it was
13999 a story straight off the movie screen, and every new ear it entered
14000 was attached to a mouth that was anxious to spread it.</p>
14001 <p>Mala and Yasmin's parents came to see them the next morning, as
14002 they sat groggy after a night like no other night, on the porch of
14003 Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. The parents didn't know what to make of their
14004 strange daughters, but they were visibly proud of them, even
14005 Yasmin's father, which clearly surprised Yasmin, who'd looked like
14006 she expected a beating.</p>
14007 <p>As their mothers gathered them into their bosoms, Mala looked at
14008 Yasmin, and saw the haunted look in Yasmin's eye and knew, just
14009 <em>knew</em> that she was thinking of the little boy who'd
14010 died.</p>
14011 <p>How did she know? Because Mala herself had never stopped
14012 thinking of him, and thinking of how she'd taken the actions that
14013 led to his death. And because Mala herself knew that no amount of
14014 sitting down peacefully and braving thugs with her moral force
14015 instead of her army would ever wipe the stain of that boy's death
14016 off her karma.</p>
14017 <p>And then Mamaji kissed Mala's forehead and murmured many things
14018 in her ear, and her little brother emerged from behind her skirts
14019 and demanded to be shown how it all worked and stared at her with
14020 so much admiration that she thought he'd burst and for a moment, it
14021 was all golden.</p>
14022 <p>Ashok looked on from his little office, meeting with the union
14023 leaders, talking to Big Sister Nor. Something big was brewing with
14024 him, she knew, something even bigger than this miracle that he'd
14025 pulled off. She fobbed her brother off on a group of boys who were
14026 eager to teach him some of the basics and bask in the pure
14027 hero-worship radiating off of him, then slipped back into Ashok's
14028 room and perched at his side on a stool, moving a pile of papers
14029 away first.</p>
14032 <p>He snorted through his nose, then scrubbed at his eyes with his
14033 fists. "Mala, my general, you do a hundred incredible things every
14034 day. The only reason all those people came out is because I could
14035 show them what you'd done, explain how you had organized these
14036 children, these slum-rats, into a disciplined force that was
14037 committed to justice."</p>
14040 again of the boy, the dead boy. His blood was still under Ashok's
14041 fingernails.</p>
14042 <p>He turned and, just for an instant, touched her arm. The gesture
14043 was gentle, tender. No one had ever touched her quite like that. It
14044 broke something in her, some flood-dam that had safely contained
14045 all the pain and fear and shame, and she had to turn and run
14046 blindly out into the lane and around a corner to weep and weep
14047 biting her lip to keep from screaming out her grief. Though she
14048 heard some of the others looking for her, she kept silent and did
14049 not let them find her. Then she realized she was hiding in the same
14050 place in which she'd hidden from Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew, and
14051 that broke another dam and it was quite some time before she could
14052 get herself under control and head back into the laneway again.</p>
14053 <p>She didn't get very far. Out front of dozens of businesses,
14054 there were small groups of people boisterously shouting rhymed
14055 chants about working conditions and pay. Crowds gathered to talk to
14056 each other, and there were arguments, laughter, a fistfight. She
14057 stood in the middle of the road and thought, <em>How can this
14058 be?</em></p>
14059 <p>And at that moment, she realized that she was not alone. All
14060 over Dharavi, all over the world, there were people like her who
14061 wanted more, <em>demanded</em> more, with a yearning that was
14062 always just there, beneath the skin, and it only took the lightest
14063 scratch to let it out.</p>
14064 <p>She didn't go back to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe. Instead, she took her
14065 walking stick and limped all around Dharavi, up and down the
14066 streets where the tiny factories would normally have been hives of
14067 activity. Many of them were, but many were not -- many had workers
14068 and crowds out front, and it was like a virus that was spreading
14069 through the streets and lanes and alleys, and now it was as if all
14070 the crying had lightened her so that her feet barely touched the
14071 ground, as though she might fly away at any instant.</p>
14072 <p>She was just turning to go back to her army and maybe a few
14073 hours' sleep when they grabbed her, hit her very hard on the head,
14074 and dragged her into a tiny, stinking room.</p>
14075 <p>#</p>
14076 <p>Confidence is a funny thing. When lots of people believe
14077 something is valuable, it becomes valuable. So if you're selling
14078 game-gold and people think game-gold is valuable, they buy it.</p>
14079 <p>But it's better than that. If there's a wide-spread belief that
14080 Svartalfaheim Warriors swords are valuable, then even people who
14081 <em>don't</em> think they're valuable will buy them, because they
14082 believe they can sell them to people who <em>do</em> believe that
14083 they're valuable.</p>
14084 <p>And when people who buy to sell to others start to bid on
14085 Svartalfaheim swords, the price of the swords goes up. Of course it
14086 does: the more buyers there are for something, the higher the price
14087 goes. And the higher the price goes, the more buyers there are,
14088 because hey, if the price is high, there must be plenty of suckers
14089 who'll take the swords off your hands in a little while for an even
14090 higher price.</p>
14091 <p>Confidence makes value. Value makes more value, which makes more
14092 confidence. Which makes more value.</p>
14093 <p>But it's not infinite. Think of a cartoon character who runs off
14094 a cliff and keeps running madly in place, able to stay there until
14095 someone points out that he's dancing on air, at which point he
14096 plummets to the sharp rocks beneath him.</p>
14097 <p>For so long as everyone believes in the value of a Svartalfaheim
14098 sword, the sword will be valuable, and get more valuable. As the
14099 pool of people who might buy a Svartalfaheim sword grows -- say,
14100 because they're getting calls from their brokers offering to sell
14101 them elaborate, complex sword futures (a contract to buy a sword at
14102 a later date), or because their smart-ass nieces and nephews are
14103 talking them up -- the likelihood that someone will say, "Are you
14106 <p>Indeed, this doubter might have other choice observations, like
14108 that there's more swords than anyone could possibly use? Doesn't
14110 <p>Or if the doubter is impossibly old fashioned, he might even
14111 say: "What if the people who run this Fartenstein game decide to
14113 ton of them? Or by printing up a kazillion more? Or change the
14114 swords into toothpicks?"</p>
14115 <p>Oh, the sword-speculators will reply, they'll <em>never</em> do
14116 that, it would ruin the game, they can't afford to do that. And
14117 here's the thing: they're half-right. So long as the game-runners
14118 believe that messing around with the swords will piss off all these
14119 people who own, speculate on, buy and sell swords, they can't
14120 afford to do it.</p>
14121 <p>These cartoon characters run in place on air, shouting that the
14122 swords will always go up in value, shouting that the game-runners
14123 will never nerf or otherwise bork them, and they can stay there, up
14124 in the air, waving their swords, being joined by others who are
14125 convinced by their arguments and the incontrovertible fact that
14126 they are indeed not falling, until...</p>
14127 <p>Until...</p>
14128 <p>Until there's enough widespread confidence in the proposition
14129 that they will fall. Until the press starts to publish wide-eyed
14130 stories about the absurdity of ever believing in the value of these
14131 swords, pointing out that the fall is inevitable, that it was
14132 pre-ordained from the moment the first speculator bought his first
14133 sword.</p>
14134 <p>Think of the belief in infallible swords as a solar system. In
14135 the center, there's the sun, gigantic and white-hot, exerting
14136 gravity on the planets and asteroids that spin around and around
14137 it. At the outer edge is the dandruff of planetesimals and
14138 asteroids, weakly caught in the gravity, only halfway committed to
14139 being part of the system. As the sun begins to cool off, begins to
14140 shrink with the force of disbelief, these outer hangers-on fly
14141 away. These are the tasters, the people who bought one or two
14142 little swords or sword-futures or "fully hedged complex sword
14143 derived securities" because everyone else was doing it. They hear
14144 that this thing is too good to be true and see the prices start to
14145 drop and so they sell off what they've got, take a small loss, and
14146 tell their friends.</p>
14147 <p>Well, now there's a bunch of people saying that swords aren't
14148 really that valuable. Less confidence equals lower prices. And
14149 there's more swords on the market. More swords equals lower prices.
14150 The larger planets, closer in, the investors with a fair bit of
14151 money in imaginary cutlery, these folks see the prices dip and
14152 continue to fall. They hear the brokers and analysts scurrying
14153 around saying, "No, no, the sun will burn bright forever, the sun
14154 will never dim! Prices will come up again. This is temporary."</p>
14155 <p>Here's the thing: if the brokers and analysts can convince these
14156 bigger investors that they're right, <em>they will be right</em>.
14157 If these bigger investors hold on to their swords, the market will
14158 stay healthy for a while longer.</p>
14159 <p>But if they aren't convincing enough, if these bigger investors
14160 lose confidence and start selling, they'll never stop. That's
14161 because the <em>first</em> seller to get out of the sword-market
14162 will get the highest price for his goods. But once he gets out, his
14163 swords will be on the market (remember, more swords equals lower
14164 prices) and everyone else will get a lower price. And when
14165 <em>they</em> sell, the prices will go down further, panicking more
14166 investors, putting more swords on the market, forcing the prices
14167 down further.</p>
14168 <p>Somewhere in there, the game-runners are apt to have a minor
14169 freak-out and then a major one. They'll start to mess with the
14170 sword-supply. They'll take swords out of the market, or put swords
14171 in, or nerf swords, or buff the hell out of them, anything to keep
14172 the fun from collapsing out of the game.</p>
14173 <p>And that'll probably make things worse, because this isn't an
14174 exact science, it's a bunch of guesswork, and there are ten zillion
14175 ways to get this wrong and so few ways to get it right.</p>
14176 <p>The sun gets smaller, and dimmer, and the close-in planets are
14177 feeling the tug of oblivion now, the call of deep space that says,
14179 <p>They don't want to spin away. They want to hang on. They have so
14180 many swords in the bank, they're practically <em>made</em> of
14181 swords. They've made a fortune buying and selling swords. Of
14182 course, they spent the fortune on more swords. Or different swords.
14183 Or axes. But whatever they've spent it on, it's basically the same
14184 thing, because every broker knows that you won't get in trouble for
14185 recommending that people buy things that have always been
14186 profitable.</p>
14187 <p>If the sword market collapses, these planets -- these major,
14188 committed investors -- will die. They will be wiped out. They have
14189 pledged their lives and love and immortal souls to magic swords,
14190 and if the swords break their hearts, they will never recover. So
14191 as the market for swords gets crummier and crummier and crummier
14192 and crummier, they grow more and more insistent that everything is
14194 can't afford to lose confidence, because they aren't going to fly
14195 off into space. They're going to fall into the dying sun and will
14196 be incinerated in its glowing heart.</p>
14197 <p>But denial only works for so long. The sun is dying. No one
14198 wants your swords. Your swords are worthless. Even the people who
14199 need a sword to kill some elves or orcs or random wildlife critters
14200 are faintly embarrassed by the fact, because worthless swords are
14201 now the subject of numerous jokes about idiotic investment schemes
14202 and corrupt brokerages and loony investors who got swept up in the
14203 heat of the moment. These people go and kill monsters with bows and
14204 clubs for a while, because everyone knows how much swords suck.</p>
14205 <p>How low can the value of a sword go? Subzero, as it turns out.
14206 Not only can a sword become worthless, it can actually cost you
14207 money to get rid of it. Oh, not the sword itself, of course, but
14208 the <em>derivatives</em> of the swords. The bets on swords. Where
14209 someone else has made a bet on whether your sword will go up or
14210 down in value, and then packaged it up with a bunch of other bets,
14211 just figuring out which bets are in which packages can cost so much
14212 money that you end up losing money, even on winning bets.</p>
14213 <p>Confidence is great, but it isn't everything. Reality catches up
14214 with everyone, eventually. All suns extinguish themselves. All
14215 cartoon characters eventually plummet to the bottom of the canyon.
14216 And every sword is eventually worthless.</p>
14217 <p>#</p>
14218 <p>Command Central was bedlam. The game-runners snarled at each
14219 other like bad-tempered, huge-bellied dinosaurs, and ate like
14220 dinosaurs, too, sending out for burgers, pizza, buckets of chicken,
14221 huge thick shakes Anything they could scarf down one-handed while
14222 they labored over their screens and shouted insults at one
14223 another.</p>
14224 <p>Connor hardly noticed. He was deep in his feeds. Bill's new
14225 security subroutines let him run every player's actions backwards
14226 and forwards like a video, branching off into other players'
14227 timelines every time they crossed paths in a party, a PvP combat
14228 session, a trade, or a conversation. It was an ocean of
14229 information, containing every secret of every player in every game
14230 that Coke ran.</p>
14231 <p>It was too much information. He was looking for something very
14232 precise -- the identities of gold-farmers -- but what he had was
14233 every damned thing ever uttered or done in-game. It was a wondrous
14234 toy and an infinite distraction, and practically every spare moment
14235 Connor could muster was spent writing scripts and filters to help
14236 him make sense of it.</p>
14237 <p>Just now he was watching a feed of every player who had PvP
14238 killed another player, where the dead player's toon had earned more
14239 than 1000 Mario coins in the previous hour. This was turning out to
14240 be a rich vein of potential gold-farmers and Webblies. He was just
14241 trying to figure out how to write a script that would also grab the
14242 player IDs of anyone who was <em>nearby</em> during one of these
14243 fights, when he realized that Command Central had gotten even
14244 noisier than usual, devolving into raw chaos.</p>
14246 to call up general feeds showing the overall health of the game and
14247 its systems. And even before anyone answered he saw what was wrong.
14248 Server load had spiked across every game-shard, redlining the
14249 server-clusters seated in air-conditioned freight containers all
14250 over the world. It seemed as though every single metric for
14251 server-load was at peak -- calculations per second, memory usage,
14252 disk churn. But on closer examination, he saw that this wasn't
14253 quite true: network load was down. Way down. Somehow, these vast
14254 arrays of computing power were all being made to work so hard they
14255 were in danger of collapsing, but it was all happening without
14256 anyone talking very much to the servers.</p>
14257 <p>Indeed, network load was <em>so</em> low that it seemed that
14258 hardly anyone could be logged into these servers -- and yes, there
14259 it was, the number of players logged in was low and falling -- a
14260 million players, then 800,000, then 500,000, then 300,000, and
14261 finally the games stabilized at about 40,000 sessions. Another
14262 click revealed why: the system was kicking off players as the load
14263 increased, trying to make room in memory and on the CPUs for
14264 whatever monster process was tearing through the frigid shipping
14265 containers.</p>
14267 din. Kaden was on the phone with ops, shouting at the systems
14268 administrators to get on it, trace every process on the boxes,
14269 identify whatever species of strangler vine was loose in the
14270 machines, choking them to death.</p>
14271 <p>Bill, meanwhile, had set loose <em>his</em> special team of
14272 grey-hat hackers to try and figure out if there were any of their
14273 black-hat brethren loose on the systems, crackers who'd broken in
14274 to steal corporate secrets, amass virtual wealth, or simply crash
14275 the thing, either to benefit a competitor, seek ransom or simply
14276 destroy for the pleasure of destruction.</p>
14277 <p>Connor's money was on hackers. Each cluster was built and tested
14278 at Coke Games HQ in Austin, burned in for three solid weeks after
14279 it was all bolted into place in the shipping container. Once it had
14280 been green-lighted, it was loaded onto a flatbed truck and shipped
14281 to a data-center somewhere cold, preferably near a geothermal vent,
14282 tide-farm or wind-farm. There were plenty of sites in Newfoundland
14283 and Alaska, and some very good ones in Iceland and Norway, a few in
14284 Belgium and some in Siberia. The beauty of using standard shipping
14285 containers for their systems is that they were easy to ship (duh).
14286 The beauty of sticking the containers somewhere cold was that the
14287 main cost of running the systems was cooling off the machines as
14288 they relentlessly rubbed electrons against each other, bouncing
14289 them through the pinball-machine guts of the chips within them. On
14290 a cold day when the wind was blowing, they could knock the cost of
14291 running one of those containers in half.</p>
14292 <p>Coke bought their data-center slots in threes, keeping one
14293 empty. When a new container arrived, it was slotted into the empty
14294 bay, run for a week to make sure nothing had been hurt in transit,
14295 and then the oldest container in a Coke-slot was yanked, loaded
14296 back onto a train, or ship, or flatbed truck, and sent back to
14297 Austin, detouring at Mumbai or Shenzhen or Lagos to drop off the
14298 computers within, stripped by work crews who sent them off to the
14299 used server markets to be torn to pieces and salvaged.</p>
14300 <p>The containers were all specialized, only handling local
14301 traffic, to keep down network lag. But if one was overwhelmed, it
14302 could start offloading on its brothers around the planet -- better
14303 to face a laggy play experience than to be knocked off altogether.
14304 It was inconceivable that every server on the planet would suddenly
14305 get a spike in players and hit capacity and not be able to offer
14306 some support to the others. Inconceivable, unless someone had
14307 sabotaged them.</p>
14308 <p>In the meantime, Connor had his feeds, his forensics, his
14309 gigantic haystacks and their hidden needles. Let the others worry
14310 about the downtime. He had bigger fish to fry.</p>
14311 <p>He plunged back in, writing ever-more-refined scripts to try to
14312 catch the bad guys. He had a growing file of suspects to look into
14313 in more depth, using another set of scripts and filters he'd been
14314 drafting in the back of his mind. He already knew how he'd do it:
14315 he'd build his files of bad guys, make it big and deep, follow them
14316 around the game, see who else they knew, get thousands and
14317 thousands of accounts and then:</p>
14318 <p>Destroy them.</p>
14319 <p>In one second, one <em>instant</em>, he'd delete every single
14320 one of their accounts, make their gold and elite items vanish, toss
14321 every single one out for terms-of-service violations. That part
14322 would be <em>easy</em>. The terms of service were so ridiculously
14323 strict and yet maddeningly vague that simply playing the game
14324 necessarily involved violating them. He'd obliterate them from
14325 gamespace and send them all back to their mommies crying. Thinking
14326 this kind of thing made him feel dirty and good at the same
14327 time.</p>
14328 <p>He was deep in meditation when a fat, hairy hand reached over
14329 his shoulder and slammed his laptop lid down so hard he heard the
14330 screen crack, and then the hand reversed its course and slapped him
14331 so hard in the back of the head that his face bounced off the table
14332 in front of him.</p>
14333 <p>Command Central fell perfectly silent as Connor straightened up,
14334 feeling and then tasting the blood pouring out of his nose. His
14335 ears were ringing. He turned his head slowly, because his eyes
14336 wouldn't focus properly and his head felt like it was barely
14337 attached to his neck. Standing over him, snorting like freight
14338 engine, stood Kaden, the head of ops, wearing a two-day beard and
14339 smelling of rancid sweat.</p>
14341 <p>The man drew back his beefy fist again, cocking it for another
14342 blow to Connor's head and Connor flinched away involuntarily. He
14343 hadn't been in a fight since his schoolyard days, and he couldn't
14344 believe that this actual adult man had actually hit him with his
14345 actual fists. Something was growing in his chest, bubbling over,
14346 headed into his arms and legs. His breath came in short pants,
14347 every inhale bringing blood into his mouth. His heart thudded. He
14348 stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards and --</p>
14349 <p>Leapt!</p>
14350 <p>He pushed off with both legs, throwing his own considerable bulk
14351 into Kaden's huge, protruding midsection. It was like a medicine
14352 ball, hard and unyielding, and he rebounded off it, just as Kaden's
14353 fist clobbered him again, getting him with a hard hammerblow in the
14354 back of the neck that knocked him to the ground.</p>
14355 <p>He hit the ground with a thud that he felt in every bone in his
14356 body, his head caroming off a table-leg. He got his palms
14357 underneath him and shot to his feet again, coming all the way up,
14358 bringing his knee up into Kaden's balls as he did, doubling the fat
14359 man over. His hands were already in awkward fists and it was
14360 natural as anything to begin to beat the man's head with them,
14361 hitting so hard the skin over his knuckles split.</p>
14362 <p>It had only taken a few seconds, and now the rest of Command
14363 Central reacted. Big hands grabbed his arms, waist, legs, pulled
14364 him away. Across from him, four game-runners had Kaden pinned as
14365 well, shouting at him to calm down, just calm the hell down, all
14366 right?</p>
14367 <p>He did, a little. Someone handed Connor a wad of pizza-parlor
14368 napkins to press against his nose and someone else handed him an
14369 ice-cold can of Coke from the huge cooler at the side of the room
14370 to press against his aching neck.</p>
14372 still held fast by four beefy game-runners.</p>
14374 goddamned network. You and your stupid scripts! Do you have any
14376 fishing-expedition?"</p>
14377 <p>Connor's anger and shock morphed into fear.</p>
14379 <p>"Who ever wrote those damned forensics programs didn't have a
14381 over every other job, until the system had to kick all the players
14383 doing. I'll tell you what they were doing, Connor: <em>they were
14385 <p>Connor shot a look at Bill, who had written the scripts, and saw
14386 that the head of security had gone pale. Connor dimly remembered
14387 him saying that the scripts were experimental and to use them
14388 sparingly, but they had been so <em>rewarding</em>, it had given
14389 him such a thrill to sit like a recording angel over the worlds,
14390 like Santa Claus detecting everyone who was naughty and everyone
14391 who'd been nice --</p>
14392 <p>The enormity of what he'd done hit him almost as hard as Kaden's
14393 fist had. He had shut down three of the twenty largest economies in
14394 the world for a period of hours. Coke ran games that turned over
14395 more money than Portugal, Poland or Peru. That was just the P's. If
14396 Coke's games had been real countries, it would have been an act of
14397 war, or treason.</p>
14398 <p>It was easily the biggest screwup of his career. Of his life.
14399 Possibly the biggest screwup <em>in the entire history of the Coca
14400 Cola corporation</em>.</p>
14401 <p>Command Central seemed to recede, as if the room was rushing
14402 away from him. Distantly, he heard the game runners hiss
14403 explanations to one another, explaining the magnitude of his
14404 all-encompassing legendary world-beating FAIL.</p>
14405 <p>Connor had never had a failure like this before. He'd screwed up
14406 here and there on the way. But he'd never, ever, never, never
14407 --</p>
14408 <p>He shook his head. The hands restraining him loosened. Stiffly,
14409 he bent to pick up his laptop. Slivers of plastic and glass rained
14410 down as he lifted it. He couldn't meet anyone's eyes as he let
14411 himself out of the room.</p>
14412 <p>He wasn't sure how he'd gotten home. His car was in the
14413 driveway, so that implied that he'd driven himself, but he had no
14414 recollection of doing so. And here he was, sitting at his
14415 dining-room table -- grand and dusty, he ate his meals over the
14416 sink when he bothered to eat at home at all -- and his phone was
14417 ringing from a long way off.</p>
14418 <p>Absently, he patted himself down, noticing as he did that he was
14419 holding his car keys, which bolstered his hypothesis that he had
14420 driven himself home. He found his phone and answered it.</p>
14422 --"</p>
14423 <p>Connor grunted. These were words you never wanted to hear from
14424 your broker.</p>
14426 <p>He grunted again. Somewhere, his brain was finding some space in
14427 which to be even more alarmed.</p>
14428 <p>"Connor, listen. Are you listening? Connor, it's like this.
14430 floor. There's no bottom in sight."</p>
14432 <p>The broker sighed. He sounded half-hysterical. "It's worse than
14433 that, though. That Prince in Dubai? Turns out he was writing paper
14434 that he couldn't honor. He's broke, too."</p>
14436 was bearing its teeth and beating its hairy fists against the
14437 insides of his skull, screeching something that sounded like
14438 <em>You said it was risk-free!</em></p>
14440 than half-hysterical. He giggled, a laugh that ran up and down
14441 several octaves like a drunk sliding his fingers up and down a
14442 piano's keyboard."He's saying things like, 'We are experiencing
14443 temporary cash-flow difficulties that have caused us to defer on
14444 some of our financial obligations, due to overall instability in
14445 the market.' But Connor --" He giggled again. "I've been around the
14446 block. I know what financial BS sounds like. The prince is
14447 b-r-o-k-e."</p>
14449 was risk-free!</em></p>
14451 <p>Connor made a tiny sound like a whimper. The broker plunged on.
14453 Paglia & Kennedy's last day. We just got our notices. Paglia
14455 their derivatives.</p>
14457 thought I would stand here on the deck of the Titanic and make some
14458 phone calls to my best clients. I put nearly everything into
14459 Mushroom Kingdom gold. Not at first, you understand. But over time,
14462 to.</p>
14464 make." Connor could tell the poor guy expected him to be grateful.
14465 He thought he was making up for costing Connor -- how much? A
14466 hundred and eighty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Connor didn't
14467 even know anymore.</p>
14469 yourself." He could barely choke the words out, but once he had, he
14470 actually felt a little better.</p>
14471 <p>He hung up the phone and dropped it on the table, letting it
14472 clatter. Somewhere out there, Coke's gameworlds were flickering
14473 back to life, players logging in again, along with gold-farmers,
14474 Webblies, Pinkertons, the whole crew. Not Connor, though. Connor
14475 had lived in a game-world of one kind or another since he was seven
14476 years old, and now he was willing to believe that he'd never visit
14477 one again.</p>
14478 <p>Any second now, he would be fired, he was quite sure. And maybe
14479 arrested. And he was broke. Worse than broke -- he'd bought the
14480 last round of securities from Paglia & Kennedy on margin, on
14481 borrowed money, and he owed it back. Though with the brokerage
14482 going under they may never come and ask for it.</p>
14483 <p>He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. Some smell -- the
14484 sweat that soaked his shirt, the blood that caked his face, the
14485 musty smell of the house -- triggered a strong memory of his place
14486 in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, and the long, long time
14487 he'd spent there, buying virtual assets, teetering on the brink of
14488 financial ruin and even starvation. And just like that, he was
14489 free.</p>
14490 <p>Free of the terror of losing his job. Free of the terror of
14491 being broke. Free of the rage at the gold-farmers. Free of the
14492 shouting, roiling anger that was Command Central and free, finally
14493 free of his fingerspitzengefuhl. The world was tumbling free and
14494 uncontrolled and there wasn't a single thing he could do about it
14497 for nothing left to lose</em> and Connor suddenly understood what
14498 it all meant.</p>
14499 <p>When he was eight years old, he'd decided to work on video
14500 games. It was one of those ridiculous kid-things, like deciding to
14501 be an astronaut or a ballerina or a cowboy or a deep-sea diver.
14502 Most kids outgrow their dreams, go on to do something normal and
14503 boring. But Connor had held onto it, finding his way into gamespace
14504 through the most curious of means, and he had trapped himself
14505 there. Until today.</p>
14506 <p>Now the eight-year-old who'd sent him on a quest had finally
14507 released him from it.</p>
14508 <p>He took a shower and iced his nose some more and put on a
14509 t-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts he'd bought on holiday in the
14510 Bahamas the year before (he'd spent most of the trip in his room,
14511 online, logged into gamespace, keeping the fingerspitzengefuhl
14512 alive) and opened his door.</p>
14513 <p>Outside it was Atlanta. He'd lived in the city for seven years,
14514 gone to its movie theaters and eaten at its restaurants, taken his
14515 parents around to its tourist sites when they visited, but he had
14517 extended, seven-year visit. He kicked on a pair of flip-flops he
14518 normally wore when he had to go outside to get the mail and stepped
14519 out his door.</p>
14520 <p>He walked into the baking afternoon sun of Atlanta, breathing in
14521 the humid air that was so wet it seemed like it might condense on
14522 the roof of his mouth and drip onto his tongue. He got to the end
14523 of his walk and looked up and down the street he'd lived on for all
14524 these years, with its giant houses and spreading trees and disused
14525 basketball hoops and he started walking. No one except maids and
14526 gardeners walked anywhere in this neighborhood. Connor couldn't
14527 understand why. The spreading trees smelled great, there were birds
14528 singing, even a snail inching its way across the sidewalk. In half
14529 an hour, Connor saw more interesting new things than he had in a
14530 month.</p>
14531 <p>Oh, the feeling of it all! A lightness in his head, an openness
14532 in his chest. Old pains in his back and shoulders that had been
14533 there so long he'd forgotten about them disappeared, leaving behind
14534 a comfortable feeling as striking as the quiet after a
14535 refrigerator's compressor shuts off, leaving behind unexpected
14536 silence.</p>
14537 <p>He was sweating freely, but he didn't mind. It just made the
14538 occasional breath of wind feel that much better.</p>
14539 <p>Eventually, his bladder demanded that he head home, so he ambled
14540 back, waving at the suspicious neighbors who peered at him from
14541 between the curtains of their vast living-room windows. As he
14542 opened his door, he heard his phone ringing. A momentary feeling of
14543 worry arced from his throat to his balls, like a streak of
14544 lightning, but he forced himself to relax again and headed for the
14545 bathroom. Whomever was calling would leave a message. There, the
14546 voicemail had picked it up. He had to pee.</p>
14549 <p>He went into the kitchen and rummaged in his freezer. There was
14550 a loaf of brown bread there -- he never could get through a whole
14551 loaf before it went moldy, so now he bought a dozen loaves at a
14552 time and froze them. He chipped off two slices and put them in the
14553 toaster. There was peanut butter from the health-food store,
14554 crunchy-style, with nothing added. While the bread was toasting, he
14555 stirred the peanut butter with a knife, mixing the oil that was
14556 floating on top with the ground peanuts below. He had honey, but it
14557 had crystallized. No problem -- twenty seconds in the microwave and
14558 it was liquid again. What he really wanted was bananas, but there
14559 weren't any (the phone was ringing again) and he was hungry and
14560 wanted a sandwich now. He'd get bananas later.</p>
14561 <p>The sandwich was (the phone was ringing again) delicious. He
14562 needed fresh bread though, he'd get some of that when he picked up
14563 the bananas. Throw out the frozen (there it was again) bread. He'd
14564 eat fresh from now on, and relish (and again) every bite.</p>
14565 <p>Up until the moment that his finger pressed the green button, he
14566 believed that he was going to switch his phone off. But his finger
14567 came down on the green button and the anxiety sizzled up his arm
14568 and spread out from his shoulder to his whole body as the distant
14570 <p>Connor watched as his hand wrapped itself around his phone and
14571 lifted it to his ear.</p>
14576 up my desk and ship it back. If you want to sue me, you'll have to
14580 <p>Connor swallowed. This was the one thing he hadn't anticipated:
14581 that his life might come back and suck him into it again. "What the
14585 <p>Connor changed into his work clothes like a condemned man
14586 dressing for his own hanging. He prayed that his car wouldn't
14587 start, but it was a new car -- he bought a new one every year, just
14588 like everyone else in Command Central -- and its electric motor
14589 hummed to life as he eyeballed the retina-scanner in the
14590 sun-visor.</p>
14591 <p>He drove down his street again, seeing it all through the smoked
14592 glass of his car, the rolled up windows and air-conditioning
14593 drowning out the birdsong and shutting out the smells of the trees
14594 and the nodding flowers. Too fast to spot a snail or a bird.</p>
14597 <p>They came for Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob in
14598 the dead of night, and this time they brought the police. The three
14599 of them watched the police break down the door, accompanied by a
14600 pair of sour Chinese men with the look of mainland gangsters, the
14601 kind who came to Singapore on easy two-week tourist visas. Nor and
14602 her friends watched the door be broken down from two Lorongs --
14603 side-streets -- down, using a webcam and streaming the video live
14604 to the Webblies' network and a bunch of journalists they'd woken up
14605 as soon as they'd bugged out of the old place, warned by a
14606 sympathetic grocer at the top of Geylang Road.</p>
14607 <p>The fallback house wasn't nearly as nice as the one they'd
14608 vacated, naturally, but the two quickly came into balance as the
14609 police methodically smashed every piece of furniture in the place
14610 to splinters. The Mighty Krang drew real-time annotations on the
14611 screen as the police worked, sometimes writing in the dollar value
14612 of the furniture being smashed, sometimes just drawing mustaches
14613 and eye-patches on the police in the video. When the Chinese men
14614 took out their dicks and began to piss on the wreckage, he leapt to
14615 his trackpad, circled the members in question, drew arrows pointing
14616 to them, and wrote "TINY!" in three languages before they'd
14617 finished.</p>
14618 <p>They watched as one of the policemen answered his phone,
14621 ceiling, until he found the video camera. The look on his face -- a
14622 mixture of horror and fury -- as he disconnected it was
14623 priceless.</p>
14625 companions, who were far less amused than he was.</p>
14627 strikers are striking. Mumbai and Guandong are going crazy. The New
14628 York Times is sending us about ten emails a minute. The Financial
14629 Times, too. And the Times of London. That's just the English
14630 papers. Germans, French... And the Times of India, of course,
14631 they've got a reporter in Dharavi, and so do the Mumbai tabloids.
14632 We're six of the top twenty YouTube videos. I've got --" he looked
14633 down, moused some -- "82,361 emails from people to the membership
14636 in Dafen. 42 are dead. We don't know where Jie and the white boy,
14638 <p>Big Sister Nor reached out her hands and they each took one of
14640 we planned for. We've been hurt. Our friends have been hurt. More
14641 will be hurt when this is over.</p>
14643 caught in machines, we inhale poison vapors, we are beaten or
14644 drugged or raped. Don't forget that. Don't forget what we go
14645 through, what we've been through. We're going to fight this battle
14646 with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we
14647 will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this
14648 battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose
14650 as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by
14651 doing nothing."</p>
14652 <p>An alert popped up on Krang's screen, reminding him to switch a
14653 new prepaid SIM card into his mobile phone. A second later, the
14654 same alert came up on Big Sister Nor and Justbob's screens.</p>
14656 <p>They swapped SIMs, pulling new ones out of dated envelopes they
14657 carried in money-belts under their clothes. They powered up their
14658 phones. Both Justbob and The Mighty Krang's phones rang as soon as
14659 they powered up.</p>
14663 <p>They both answered their phones.</p>
14664 <p>#</p>
14665 <p>Ashok knew that this time would come. For months, he'd slaved
14666 over models of economic destruction: how much investment in junk
14667 game-securities would it take to put the game-runners into a
14668 position of total vulnerability? He'd modelled it a thousand ways,
14669 tried many variables in his equations, sweated over it, woken in
14670 the night to pace or ride his motorcycle around until the doubts
14671 left his mind.</p>
14672 <p>Somewhere out there, some distant follower of Big Sister Nor's
14673 had convinced the Mechanical Turks to go to work selling his funny
14674 securities. It had been easy enough to package them -- there were
14675 so many companies that would let you roll your own custom security
14676 packages together and market them, and all it took was to figure
14677 out which one was most lax with its verification procedures and
14678 create an account there and invent a ton of virtual wealth through
14679 it. Then he logged into less-sloppy competitors and repackaged the
14680 junk he'd created, making something that seemed a little more
14681 legit. Working his way up the food chain, he'd gone from packager
14682 to packager, steadily accumulating a shellac of respectability
14683 overtop of his financial turds.</p>
14684 <p>Once they had acquired this sheen, brokers came hunting for his
14685 funny money. And since the Webblies were diverting a sizeable chunk
14686 of game-wealth into the underlying pool, he was able to make
14687 everything seem as though it was growing at breakneck speed -- and
14688 it was. After all, all those traders swapping the derivatives were
14689 driving up the prices every time they completed a sale.</p>
14690 <p>Once, at about two in the morning, as Ashok watched the trading
14691 proceed, he realized that he could simply quit the Webblies, sell
14692 the latest batch of funny money, and retire. But he was never
14693 tempted. He'd always known that it was possible to get rich by
14694 trampling on the people around you, by treating them as suckers to
14695 be ripped off. He couldn't do it.</p>
14696 <p>Of course, here he was, <em>doing it</em>, but this was
14697 different. His little financial game could end well if all went
14698 according to plan, and now it was time to see if the plan would go
14699 the way it was supposed to.</p>
14700 <p>Justbob took his call in her fractured English, which was better
14701 than her Hindi, limited as it was to orders of battle and military
14702 cursing. He told her that he needed to speak to Big Sister Nor, and
14703 she asked him to wait a moment, as BSN was on the phone with
14704 someone else at the time.</p>
14705 <p>In the background, he heard Big Sister Nor conversing in a mix
14706 of Chinese and English, flipping back and forth in a way that
14707 reminded him of his buddies at university and the way they'd have
14708 fun mixing up English and Hindi words, turning out puns and
14709 obscurely dirty phrases that nevertheless sounded innocent.</p>
14710 <p>He looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. It was 5AM
14711 and outside, he could hear the birds singing. In the next room,
14712 Mala's army fought on in tireless shifts, defending the strike.
14713 They slept in shifts on the floor now, and there were fifty or
14714 sixty steel and garment workers prowling the street out front,
14715 visiting other striking sites around Dharavi with sign-up sheets,
14716 trying to organize the workers of little five- or ten-person shops
14717 into their unions.</p>
14718 <p>He realized he was falling asleep. How long had it been since
14719 he'd last slept for more than an hour or so? Days. He jerked his
14720 head up and forced his eyes open and there was Yasmin before him,
14721 raccoon-eyed beneath the hijab across her forehead. She was
14722 frowning, her mouth bracketed by deep worry lines, another one
14723 above the bridge of her nose. She was holding her lathi.</p>
14726 for hours. Twelve, maybe fourteen."</p>
14727 <p>He started to say something but then Big Sister Nor spoke on the
14730 said to the phone.</p>
14732 <p>Yasmin shook her head once, emphatically. He felt a jolt of
14733 fear.</p>
14736 <p>He stood up and held his chair out to Yasmin and dropped into a
14737 squat beside her, heels on the ground. He pressed the speaker
14738 button on the phone.</p>
14741 same way they loved saying <em>General Robotwallah</em>. "I have
14742 Yasmin with me here. She tells me that Mala is missing, has been
14743 missing for some hours."</p>
14745 news. But I thought you were calling about the other thing --"</p>
14746 <p>He looked at Yasmin, whose eyes were steady on him. He never
14747 talked about the work he did for Big Sister Nor, but everyone knew
14748 he was up to something back here.</p>
14750 that. But Yasmin is here and she tells me that Mala is
14751 missing."</p>
14752 <p>Big Sister Nor seemed to hear the gravity in his voice. She took
14753 a deep breath, spoke in a patient voice: "You know Dharavi better
14754 than I do. What do you think has happened?"</p>
14757 <p>From the phone, The Mighty Krang's voice broke in. "I have
14758 Bannerjee's phone number," he said. "From one of our people in
14759 Guzhen. He emailed us a list of everyone in his boss's address
14760 book."</p>
14761 <p>Ashok found his hands were in fists. He'd only met Bannerjee
14762 once, but that was enough. The man looked like he was capable of
14763 anything, one of those aliens who could look at a fellow human
14764 being as nothing more than an opportunity to make money. Yasmin's
14765 eyes were wide.</p>
14768 did in the inspirational videos he posted to the Webbly boards and
14771 <p>The light tone left his voice. "No, Yasmin, I'm not joking.
14772 Look, the Webblies are powerful. Men like Bannerjee understand
14773 that. Once I got Bannerjee's number, I used it to get a full workup
14774 on him. We have some leverage over him. It's possible that we can
14775 make him see reason. And if we can't --" He trailed off.</p>
14778 <p>"Oh, now would be good. Negotiations are always best in the
14779 small hours. Hang on, I'll get the number." The Mighty Krang typed
14783 <p>"I'll keep you two muted for him, but live for me. Remember that
14784 -- if you talk over him, I'll hear both, which might confuse
14785 me."</p>
14787 low and fished around on his desk for a power-cable and plugged it
14788 in. Then he muted the phone. He and Yasmin unconsciously leaned
14789 their heads together over it, so that he could smell his sour
14790 breath and hers, which smelled of vomit. She had been sick. He
14791 closed his eyes and it felt as though there was sandpaper on the
14792 insides of his eyelids.</p>
14794 Hindi, the traditional phone salutation. It made Ashok snort
14795 derisively. A man like Bannerjee was about as pious as a turnip. As
14796 a jackal.</p>
14798 morning."</p>
14802 "you sound an awful lot like an underage Chinese whore. Where are
14803 you calling from, China-Doll? A brothel in Hong Kong?"</p>
14806 you?"</p>
14809 <p>Yasmin hissed at the phone and Ashok double-checked that the
14810 mute was on. It was.</p>
14814 Big Sister Nor spoke quickly. "And I'm sure if you think about it
14815 for just a moment, you'll realize that there's plenty I can offer
14816 you for her safe return."</p>
14818 a medal in the unconvincing Olympics.</p>
14819 <p>"Stop playing games, please. You know that we're not the police.
14820 We're not going to have you arrested. We just want her back."</p>
14822 <p>Yasmin was grasping her opposite elbows so hard her knuckles
14823 were white. Ashok had his fists bunched in the fabric of his
14824 trouser-legs. He made himself loosen them. But Big Sister Nor just
14825 continued on, as though she hadn't heard.</p>
14826 <p>"I'm sure you've seen what's happened to the gold markets.
14827 Prices are on fire. No one can get any gold out of the gold farms,
14828 thanks to my Webblies. If you could promise a farmer access to one
14829 spot, without harassment, just think of what you could charge."</p>
14830 <p>Bannerjee chuckled. "And all I have to do is find Mala for you
14831 and give her to you and you will guarantee this to me, is that
14832 right?"</p>
14834 <p>"You will, of course, honor your end of the bargain once I've
14835 found her for you."</p>
14837 <p>There was a long silence. Finally, Big Sister Nor spoke
14838 again.</p>
14839 <p>"I understand your scepticism. I can give you my word of
14840 honor."</p>
14841 <p>Bannerjee made a rude sound, like a wet fart. "How about this: I
14842 get the gold out of the game, then I find Mala for you."</p>
14843 <p>Ashok hated this game he was playing, pretending that he didn't
14844 have Mala, but he could somehow find her. He wanted to crawl
14845 through the phone and strangle the man.</p>
14847 Krang speaking.</p>
14849 kilometers from Hong Kong, or are you dialled in from some other
14850 exotic locale?"</p>
14851 <p>"We can get the gold out of the game faster than anyone you
14852 could hire. All the best gold farmers are in the union. The scabs
14853 they've got working in the shops right now are so crap they'll
14854 probably screw up and get themselves banned." Ashok loved that
14855 Krang wasn't playing Bannerjee's taunting game either.</p>
14858 gold-markets ran on escrow services, trustworthy parties that would
14859 hold gold and cash while a deal was closing, working for a small
14860 percentage.</p>
14862 <p>"I would do everything I could to find the poor girl and get her
14863 into your hands." Gold, silver and bronze medals in the 100-yard
14864 slime.</p>
14865 <p>They dickered over price and timing -- Mala ended up promising
14866 him a 300,000 Svartalfaheim runestones -- and Krang disconnected
14867 Bannerjee.</p>
14869 his voice, while inside he was quavering at the thought of Mala in
14870 the hands of Bannerjee.</p>
14873 runestones for us, and I'm sure you'll do it quickly and well
14874 because she is your general. All our problems should be that easy
14875 to solve. Now, Ashok, how have you done with your complicated
14876 problem?"</p>
14877 <p>Ashok looked at Yasmin, who showed no signs of leaving.</p>
14878 <p>"I think we're there. The trick was to create a situation where
14880 accounts control the gold underneath so many of these securities
14881 that if they kick us all off, they'll create a massive crash, both
14882 in-game and out-of-game. At the same time, they can't afford to
14883 leave us running around freely, because there's a hundred ways we
14884 could crash the system, too, from resigning in a huge group all at
14885 once to repeating the Mushroom Kingdom job." Crashing the Mushroom
14886 Kingdom securities had been easy -- Mushroom Kingdom was already
14887 riddled with scams that had been flying under the radar of
14888 Nintendo's incompetent economist and security teams. Ashok had used
14889 Webblies and some of the Mechanical Turks that Big Sister Nor had
14890 supplied through her mysterious contact on the inside, building up
14891 a catalog of all the other scams and then giving them a nudge here
14892 and a shove there, using Webblies to produce gold on demand when
14893 necessary.</p>
14894 <p>He'd gone into it thinking that he'd never manage to take on the
14895 Mushroom Kingdom economy, believing that the security would be
14896 all-knowing and all-powerful. But in truth, it had all been held
14897 together with twine and wishful thinking, straining at the seams,
14898 and it had only taken a little pushing and pulling to first make it
14899 swell to unheard-of heights, and then to explode gloriously.</p>
14900 <p>"But we couldn't afford to repeat the Mushroom Kingdom job.
14901 There was no way we could have pulled that one out of the nosedive,
14902 once it started. It was doomed from the start. With Coca-Cola's
14903 games, we have to be able to promise to put it all back together
14904 again if they play cricket with us." Talking about his work made
14905 him forget momentarily about Mala, let the iron bands around his
14906 chest loosen, just a little.</p>
14907 <p>"If we had kept things on schedule, it would have been much
14908 easier. But you know, with things all chaotic, I had to rush
14909 things. I've been dumping our gold reserves on the market for hours
14910 now, which has sent the market absolutely crazy, especially after
14911 they had that crash. How on Earth did you manage that?"</p>
14912 <p>Big Sister Nor snorted. "It wasn't me. We're not sure if they
14914 though."</p>
14916 <p>Yasmin looked faintly shocked.</p>
14918 anything I think they need to know, and I usually tell them
14920 secrets business around here."</p>
14921 <p>That made Ashok pause. He'd always thought of the operation as
14922 being shrouded in secrecy. Certainly Big Sister Nor had never
14923 volunteered any details about her contact with the Mechanical Turks
14924 -- but then, he'd never asked, had he? Nor had he ever asked if he
14925 could discuss his project with Mala's army. He shook his head. What
14926 if the secrecy had been all in his mind?</p>
14928 -- if I had the time we'd planned on -- I'd be in a position to
14929 take Svartalfaheim right up to the brink of collapse and then
14930 either save it or let it collapse. It all comes down to how much
14931 gold we had in our reserves, and how much of the trading we
14932 controlled.</p>
14934 give you both. I can bring the economy to the brink of ruin, but
14935 when I do, I need to know in advance whether we're going to let it
14936 blow up, or whether we're going to let it recover. I can't decide
14938 still have Zombie Mecha and Clankers underway. We can show them our
14939 force by taking out Svartalfaheim and then threaten to take out the
14943 they're not going to give in to you. You're going to go in there
14944 and start giving them orders and they're going to assume you're
14945 some ridiculous third-world crook. They're going to tell you to get
14946 lost. If you make a threat and you can't make good on it, that'll
14947 be the last time you hear from them. They'll never take you
14957 point out. So yes, maybe they'll assume we're weak and maybe
14958 they'll assume we're strong. But one thing I know is, if they give
14959 us what we want and <em>then</em> we destroy their game, they'll
14966 sure that whatever happens, we don't need to carry out our
14972 get to talk to us. I'll be on the call, too, of course. But you
14973 need to talk to them, to explain to them what we've done and what
14977 talked the steelworkers and the garment-workers into coming to
14980 listened before. But once I explained what kind of situation you
14981 were all in, the thugs, the violence, told them that all of Dharavi
14984 the difference. I've heard you talk about the things you love,
14985 Ashok. You are very convincing when it comes to that. The
14986 difference between all the conversations you had with them before
14987 and the last one is that you came to them as a Webbly last time,
14988 not as someone who was playing a game to make himself feel like he
14989 was doing something important." The criticism took him off guard
14991 taken with his own cleverness at the vision of kids all over the
14992 world running circles around the tired old unions he'd hung around
14993 with all his life. But now, it wasn't a game anymore. Or rather, it
14995 serious.</p>
14998 <p>Now it was Jie's turn to watch Wei-Dong, as he typed furiously
14999 at his keyboard, reaching out to hundreds of Mechanical Turks who'd
15000 said, "Yes, yes, we're on your side; yes, we're tired of the crummy
15001 pay and of always having the threat of being fired over our heads."
15002 He reached out to them and what he told them all was:</p>
15004 <p>Now it begins, now we are ready, now we move. He sent them links
15005 to the YouTube videos of the protests in China, the picket lines in
15006 India, the workers who'd begun to walk off the job in Indonesia and
15007 Vietnam and Cambodia, saying, "Us too, us all together, us
15009 <p>Only it wasn't working the way it was supposed to. The
15010 Mechanical Turks had been happy enough to seed a little
15011 disinformation, to pass on some weird-sounding stock-tips or to
15012 look the other way when the Webblies were fighting the Pinkertons,
15013 but they balked at going to Coke and saying, "We demand, we want,
15014 we are all one." Just from their typing, he could feel their fear,
15015 the terror that they might find themselves without a job next
15016 month, that they might be the only ones who stood up.</p>
15017 <p>But not all of them. First one, then five, then fifty, and
15018 finally over a hundred of his Turks were with him, ready to put
15019 their names to a list of dues-paying Webblies who wanted to bargain
15020 as a group with Coke for a better deal. That was only 20 percent of
15021 what he'd bargained for, but they still accounted for 35 of the top
15022 fifty performers on the Webbly leaderboards.</p>
15023 <p>He kept up a running account for Jie, muttering in Chinese to
15024 her between messages and quick voice calls.</p>
15026 resting on her sweater, which she'd spread out over the filthy
15027 mattress, eyes barely open.</p>
15029 Sister Nor a dozen times, iterating through the plan, even
15030 role-playing it with The Mighty Krang playing the management on the
15031 other end. But that didn't mean that he was calm -- anything but,
15032 he felt like he might throw up at any instant.</p>
15034 <p>He closed his eyes, which were burning with exhaustion and dried
15039 <p>She got up and walked unsteadily to the door. She pulled a
15040 compact out of her purse and looked at herself, made a face, then
15042 <p>He'd drunk tea for years, but right now he needed coffee, no
15047 <p>But he was already back at his computer, screwing in his
15048 borrowed earwig, dialling in on the employee-only emergency
15049 number.</p>
15051 the voice was flat, American, bored, female, Hispanic.</p>
15056 <p>He had to think hard for a moment. Like the name Leonard
15057 Goldberg, like his entire American life, the security code he used
15058 to communicate with his employers seemed like it was in a distant
15066 could hear her clicking away at her screen, looking up the
15067 escalation procedures. Technically it wasn't supposed to be
15068 possible to go from level two support to level four without going
15069 through level three. But the entire escalations manual was
15070 available in the private discussion forums on the unofficial Turk
15071 groups if you knew where to look for them.</p>
15073 Like he might have been trying to get some kids to give him their
15074 RL addresses?" Kid-diddlers, mafia, terrorists or pirates, the four
15075 express tickets to level four support. Anything that meant calling
15076 in the federal cops or the international ones. He figured that a
15077 potential pedophile would have just the right amount of ick to get
15078 him escalated without the call being sent straight to the cops.</p>
15081 him on hold.</p>
15082 <p>Jie came back with a styrofoam clamshell brimming over with
15083 steaming dumplings and a bottle of nuclear-hot Vietnamese rooster
15084 sauce and a pair of chopsticks. She picked one up, blew on it,
15085 dipped it in the sauce and held it out to him. He popped it into
15086 his mouth and chewed it, blowing out at the same time to try to
15087 cool off the scalding pork inside. They shared a smile, then the
15088 call started up again.</p>
15091 <p>Leonard went through the authentication routine with Gordon
15092 again, his password coming more easily to him this time.</p>
15101 <p>Wei-Dong waited. This Gordon character was supposed to get angry
15102 or sarcastic, not quiet. The pause stretched until he felt he
15107 just a kid and you probably think I'm full of crap, but I <em>need
15108 to speak to Command Central right now.</em> I promise you, if you
15111 your interaction history and you certainly seem like an efficient
15112 worker, so I'm going to go easy on you. <em>You</em> can't talk to
15113 Command Central. Period. Tell me what you want, and I'll see that
15116 please relay the following to Command Central. Do you have a
15119 he'd been waiting for. He was getting under his skin. Right.</p>
15121 Wide Web, Local 56, and that we need to speak with Coca Cola
15122 Games's Chief Economist immediately in order to avert a collapse on
15123 the scale of the Mushroom Kingdom disaster. Tell them that we have
15124 two hours to act before the collapse takes place. Did you get
15128 connection and immediately dialled back to Singapore and told
15129 Justbob what had happened. She assured him that they'd get their
15130 economist on the line as quickly as possible and put him on hold.
15131 He bridged both calls into his earpiece but isolated them so that
15132 they wouldn't be able to hear him, then told Jie what had just
15133 happened.</p>
15143 from there. You don't need to know where. How's it coming with
15144 Command Central, Gordon? Time's a-wastin'." Keep the pressure up,
15145 that was a critical part of the plan. Don't give them time to
15146 think. Get them to run around like headless chickens.</p>
15152 wrongdoing personally.</p>
15156 <p>A new line cut in, different background noise, chaotic, lots of
15157 chatter. Gordon had probably been a teleworker sitting in his
15158 underwear in his living room. This was different. This was a room
15159 filled with angry, arguing people who were typing on keyboards like
15160 machineguns.</p>
15164 the plan, too. Real operators were grownups, polite, businesslike.
15165 "May I speak with Connor Prikkel, please?" Prikkel's name had been
15166 easy enough to google. Wei-Dong had spent some time watching videos
15167 of the man at conferences. He seemed like an awkward, super-brainy
15168 academic type run to fat. He typed a quick one-handed message to
15175 holding onto his temper.</p>
15177 for weeks. It was weird. He'd started to think in Chinese, to dream
15181 I'm not qualified to understand it. And no offense, I don't think
15186 call me back. I'll leave you a voice-chat ID. You can listen in on
15189 and we call the police? Leonard, kid, you are working on my last
15193 minutes, you're going to see total chaos in your gold markets. All
15194 those contracts that Coke Games has written for gold futures are
15195 going to start to slide into oblivion. You can spend the next ten
15196 minutes trying to trace me, but you're not going to find me, and
15197 even if you do, you're not going to be able to do anything about
15198 it, because I am an ocean away from the nearest police force that
15199 will give you the time of day." The security man started to choke
15200 out a response, but Wei-Dong kept talking. "I'd prefer <em>not</em>
15201 to destroy the game. I love it. I love playing all these games. You
15202 have my record there, you know it. We all feel that way, all the
15203 Webblies. It's where we go to work every day. We <em>want</em> it
15204 to succeed. But we want that to happen on terms that are fair to
15205 us. So believe me when I tell you that I am calling to strike a
15206 bargain that you can afford, that we can live with and that will
15207 save the game and get everything back on track by the end of the
15210 <p>He could almost hear the gears turning in Vaughan's head.
15218 thousand Mechanical Turks, you can do some pretty impressive
15219 things." The numbers were all inflated. But Vaughan would assume
15220 they were. If Wei-Dong had given him the real numbers, he'd have
15221 underestimated their strength. He liked how this was going.</p>
15224 than later." He named the ID and the service, one that was run out
15225 of the Mangalore Special Economic Zone. It was pretty reliable and
15226 easy to sign up for, and they supported strong crypto and didn't
15227 log connections. He'd heard that it was a favorite with diplomats
15228 from poor countries that couldn't run their own servers.</p>
15232 wasn't there.</em></p>
15233 <p>Justbob called him right away, and he heard The Mighty Krang and
15234 Big Sister Nor holding another conversation in the background. "You
15237 or something. They'll get him on the phone. no worries." But
15238 Justbob sounded worried, and he didn't like that. He shrugged
15239 mentally. He'd done the best he could, using his best judgement.
15240 He'd been shot at, seen his friend killed. He'd smuggled himself
15241 halfway around the world. He'd earned some autonomy.</p>
15242 <p>He ate some of the now-cold dumplings and tried not to worry as
15243 the time stretched out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Justbob sent
15244 more and more impatient notes. Jie fell asleep on the disgusting
15245 mattress, her sweater spread out beneath her head, her face girlish
15246 and sad in repose.</p>
15252 Justbob and her economist onto the call.</p>
15254 <p>No one in Command Central would meet Connor's eye when he came
15255 back into the office, his nose swollen and his eyes red and puffy.
15256 He grabbed a spare computer from the shelves by the door -- smashed
15257 laptops weren't exactly unheard-of in the high-tension environment
15258 of Command Central -- and plugged it in and powered it up.</p>
15260 around them, Command Central's denizens -- minus Kaden, who seemed
15261 to have been removed for his own good -- made a show of pretending
15262 not to listen in. "Huge amounts of gold have hit the market in the
15265 assume that a certain amount of gold would be entering the system
15266 from these characters. When they stopped the flow a couple weeks
15267 ago, we had to pick up production to keep inflation down. I had
15268 assumed that they were too busy fighting to mine any more gold, but
15269 it looks like they spent that time building up their reserves. Now
15272 <p>Connor thought. All the peace and serenity he'd attained just an
15273 hour ago, when he was a man with nothing to lose, was melting away.
15274 He had the curious sensation of his muscles returning to their
15275 habitual, knotted states. But a new clarity descended on him. He'd
15276 been thinking of the Webblies as a pack of gang-kids, fighting a
15277 gang-war with their former bosses. This business, though, was
15278 sophisticated beyond anything that some gangsters would kick up. It
15279 was an act of sophisticated economic sabotage.</p>
15281 the data, setting up feeds, feeling the return of his
15282 fingerspitzengefuhl.</p>
15285 someone else's. He recognized it: the voice of a company man doing
15286 the company's business.</p>
15290 heavy Indian accent, and the background was flavored with the
15291 unmistakable sound of gamers at their games, shooting,
15292 shouting.</p>
15293 <p>Bill, listening in with his own earpiece, shook his head.
15296 When it cut in, the background changed, no gamers, no shouting.
15297 These two were in different rooms. He had an intuition that they
15299 battles he'd spied upon in which the sides were from all over Asia
15300 and even Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.</p>
15302 PhD was purely honorary, and he never used it. "My name is Ashok
15303 Balgangadhar Tilak. Allow me to begin by saying that, having read
15304 your publications and watched dozens of your presentations, I
15305 consider you to be one of the great economics thinkers of our
15309 Nevertheless, I will say it: We own your games. We control the
15310 underlying assets against which a critical mass of securities have
15311 been written; further, we control the substantial number of those
15312 securities and can sell them as we see fit, through a very large
15313 number of dummy accounts. Finally, we have orders in ourselves for
15314 many of the sureties that you have used to hedge this deal, orders
15315 that will automatically execute should you try to float more to
15320 Kingdom. And to the turmoil in Svartalfaheim Warriors. Then I'd
15321 suggest that you cautiously audit the books for Zombie Mecha and
15324 feeds were confirming it, though, the trading volume was insane,
15326 as though someone were making it all happen.</p>
15334 together again, stop the bleeding by unwinding the trades very
15335 carefully and very gently, working with you to make a soft landing
15336 for everyone. The markets will dip, but they'll recover, especially
15340 can run your economy like a toy train set, on neat rails. But we
15341 know better. Gold-farming is an inevitable consequence of your
15342 marketplace, and that pushes the train off the rails. But imagine
15343 this: what if your employer were to recognize the legitimacy of
15344 gold farming as a practice, allowing our workers to participate as
15345 legitimate actors in a large and complex economy. Our exchanges
15346 would move above-ground, where you could monitor them, and we would
15347 meet regularly with you to discuss our membership's concerns and
15348 you would tell us about your employers' concerns. There would still
15349 be underground traders, of course, but they would be pushed off
15350 into the margins. Every decent farmer in the world wants to join
15351 the Webblies, for we represent the best players and everyone knows
15352 it. And we'll be at every non-union farm-site in every game,
15353 talking to the workers about the deal they will get if they band
15357 legitimate and freely usable. We'll have a cooperative that buys
15358 and sells, just like today's exchange markets, but it will all be
15359 above-board, transparently governed by elected managers who will be
15363 course not. We don't object to other unionized operations in the
15364 space. I have colleagues here from the Transport and Dock Workers'
15365 Union who are interested in organizing some of these workers. Let
15366 there be as many gold exchanges as the market can bear, all
15375 principle</em>. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Coca Cola
15376 Games's board of directors will have to approve. However, we are of
15377 the impression that the board is likely to pay close attention to
15378 any recommendations brought to it by its chief economist,
15380 <p>Connor found himself grinning. These kids -- not just kids, he
15381 reminded himself -- were gutsy. And what's more, they were
15383 of CCG's board, who were as boring a bunch of mighty captains of
15386 Leonard Goldberg. In LA. Except Bill was pretty sure this kid was
15387 in Asia somewhere. He suspected there was a story in there.</p>
15391 that was usually filtered by an intern before he saw it. He grabbed
15392 it, saw that it had been encrypted to his public key, decrypted it.
15393 It was a list of names, with numbers beside them. "OK, go
15402 labor law? Have you considered the fact that you are all
15411 likewise true of IWWWW members around the world in all their
15412 respective countries. Many countries prohibit <em>all</em> unions.
15416 boy, with a maddening note of triumph in his voice. "Remember?
15420 regardless of nationality or employment, and it will work for all
15421 those workers' rights, in solidarity. Our gold farmers will stand
15425 demands: modest benefits, job security, a pension plan. All the
15426 same things that we plan on asking our farmers' employers for.
15440 <p>He muted them, and he and Bill stared at each other for a long
15441 time.</p>
15444 Impossible, but not crazy. We already let lots of third parties
15445 play with our economies -- independent brokers, the people who buy
15446 and sell their instruments. There's no technical reason these
15447 characters can't be a part of our planning. Hell, if they can do
15448 what they say, we'll be way more profitable than we are now.</p>
15449 <p>"For one thing, we won't need to crash the servers tracking them
15450 all down."</p>
15451 <p>Connor grimaced. "Right. But then there's the impossible part.
15452 Leaving out the whole thing about the Turks, which is just
15454 never, never --"</p>
15455 <p>Bill held a hand up. "Now, that's where I disagree with you.
15456 When you meet with the board, you're always trying to sell them on
15457 some weird-ass egghead financial idea that makes them worry that
15458 they're going to lose their life's savings. When I go to them, it's
15459 to ask them for some leeway to fight scammers and hackers. They
15460 understand scammers and hackers, and they say yes. If we were to
15461 ask them together --"</p>
15463 <p>"It's a better idea than chasing these kids around gamespace
15464 like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale. The formal definition of
15465 insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a
15466 different outcome. It's time we tried something different."</p>
15470 <p>"They're looking to take about half a percent out of the
15471 company's bottom line, if that. We spend more on your first-class
15472 plane tickets to economics conferences every year than they want.
15473 Big freakin' deal."</p>
15475 <p>"And if we don't give in on this, we're going to spend the next
15476 hundred years chasing Chinese and Indian kids around gamespace
15478 and hacker creeps. Security is always about choosing your battles.
15479 Every complex ecosystem has parasites. You've got ten times more
15480 bacteria cells than blood cells in your body. The trick with
15481 parasites is to figure out how to co-exist with them."</p>
15483 <p>"That's because I'm not a gamer. I don't care who wins. I don't
15484 care who loses. I'm a security expert. I care about what the costs
15485 are to secure the systems that I'm in charge of. We can let these
15486 kids 'win' some little battles, pay the cost for that, and save ten
15487 times as much by not having to chase 'em."</p>
15489 eyes around the room to encompass the rest of Command Central, most
15490 of whom were openly eavesdropping now.</p>
15491 <p>Bill turned to them. "Hands up: who wants to make and run
15492 totally kick-ass games that make us richer than hell?" Every hand
15493 shot up. "Who wants to spend their time chasing a bunch of skinny
15494 poor kids around instead of just finding a way to neutralize them?"
15495 A few hands stayed defiantly in the air, among them Kaden, who had
15496 come back into the room while Connor was on the phone and was now
15497 glaring at both of them. Bill turned back to Connor. "I think we'll
15498 be OK," he said. He jerked his head over his shoulder and said,
15499 loudly, "Those goons are so ornery they'd say no if you asked them
15500 whether they wanted a lifetime's supply of free ice-cream."</p>
15501 <p>#</p>
15502 <p>300,000 runestones hadn't seemed like much when Yasmin started.
15503 After all, the gold was for Mala, and Mala was all she could think
15504 of. And she had Mala's army on her side, all of them working
15505 together.</p>
15506 <p>But it had been days since she'd slept properly, and there were
15507 reporters every few minutes, pushing into Mrs Dibyendu's cafe with
15508 their cameras and recorders and pads and asking her all sorts of
15509 mad questions and she had to keep her temper and speak modestly and
15510 calmly with them when every nerve in her body was shrieking
15511 <em>Can't you see how busy I am? Can't you see what I have to
15512 do?</em> But the army covered itself with glory and not one soldier
15513 lost his or her temper, and the press all marvelled at them and
15514 their curious work.</p>
15515 <p>At least the steelworkers and garment workers had the sense not
15516 to interrupt them, and they were mostly busy with their organizing
15517 adventures in Dharavi to bother them anyway. The story of how
15518 they'd saved this gang of Dharavi children from bad men with
15519 weapons had spread to every corner, and the workers they'd inspired
15520 to walk off the job were half in awe of them.</p>
15521 <p>Piece by piece, though, they were able to build the fortune.
15522 Yasmin found them an instanced mission with a decent payoff, one
15523 that three or four players could run at a time, and she directed
15524 them all into it, sending them down the caverns after the dwarves
15525 and ogres below in gangs, prowling up and down the narrow,
15526 blisteringly hot aisles between the machines, pointing out ways of
15527 getting the work done faster, noting each player's total, until,
15528 after a seeming eternity, they had it all.</p>
15530 bent over his keyboard, earwig screwed in, muttering in English to
15531 his Dr Prikkel in America. He held up a hand and asked the man to
15532 excuse him -- she hated how subservient he sounded, but had to
15533 admit that he'd been very cool when the negotiations had been
15534 underway -- and put him on mute.</p>
15538 central cell in Singapore and got Bannerjee's number, then quickly
15539 dialled it on speaker. Bannerjee answered, this time in a much less
15540 fuzzy and sleep-addled voice.</p>
15543 the escrow's hut now. You can check for yourself."</p>
15544 <p>"So serious, so businesslike. It's only a game, friend --
15545 relax!"</p>
15546 <p>Yasmin felt like she might throw up. The man was
15547 so...<em>evil</em>. What made a man that bad? She understood,
15548 really understood, how Mala must feel all the time. A feeling like
15549 there were people who <em>needed</em> to be <em>punished</em> and
15550 she was the person who must do it. She pushed the feeling down.</p>
15551 <p>"All right, good. I see that it is there. I will tell you where
15552 to find your friend when you tell the escrow agent to release the
15553 money, yes?"</p>
15554 <p>Ashok waggled his chin at the phone, thinking hard. Yasmin
15555 suddenly realized something she should have understood from the
15556 beginning: escrow agent or no, either they were going to have to
15557 trust Bannerjee to let Mala go after they released the money, or
15558 Bannerjee would have to trust them to release the money after he
15559 gave them Mala. Escrow services worked for cash trades, not for
15560 ransoms. She felt even sicker.</p>
15562 <p>"Oh, come on. Why on Earth would I do that? You hold me in so
15563 much contempt, there's no way you'll give me what you've promised.
15565 hand, have no particular use for a disrespectful little girl. Why
15566 wouldn't I tell you where to find her?"</p>
15567 <p>Ashok and Yasmin locked eyes. She remembered the last time she'd
15568 seen Mala, how tired she had been, how thin, how pained her limp.
15571 said, his tone wooden.</p>
15572 <p>Bannerjee laughed loudly, then put them on hold, cutting them
15573 off. After a moment, Ashok looked at his screen, watching the
15577 away, Yasmin knew that he wouldn't give them Mala.</p>
15588 <p>Bannerjee began to laugh again, and Ashok cut him off again,
15589 then transferred back to his American at Coca Cola.</p>
15591 from ruin, but I have a small but important favor to ask of
15594 <p>Ashok gave him the name of the toon that Bannerjee had sent to
15595 the escrow house. "He has kidnapped a friend of ours and won't give
15603 <p>Yasmin stopped listening. Ashok clearly thought he was the
15604 cleverest man who ever walked God's Earth, but she'd had enough of
15605 games. She sank down on her heels and regarded the dirty floor, her
15606 eyes going in and out of focus from lack of sleep and food.</p>
15607 <p>Gradually, she became aware that Ashok was talking to Bannerjee
15608 again.</p>
15610 the casualty ward earlier today, without any name. She should still
15615 <p>It took Yasmin a moment to understand how Bannerjee could be so
15616 sure that Mala hadn't left the hospital -- she must have been so
15617 badly injured that she couldn't leave. She found that she was
15618 wailing, making a sound like a cat in the night, a terrible sound
15619 that she couldn't contain. Mala's army came running and she tried
15620 to stop so that she could explain it to them, but she couldn't.</p>
15621 <p>In the end, they all walked to LT hospital together, a solemn
15622 procession through the streets of Dharavi. A few people scurried
15623 forward to ask what was going on, and once they were told, they
15624 joined. More and more people joined until they arrived at the
15625 hospital in a huge mob of hundreds of silent people. Ashok and
15626 Yasmin and Sushant went to the counter and told the shocked ward
15627 sister why they were there. She paged through her record-book for
15628 an eternity before saying, "It must be this one." She looked at
15630 <p>Ashok and Yasmin looked back at the crowd. Neither of them had
15631 thought to fetch Mala's mother. They were Mala's family. She was
15634 <p>The sister looked like she would not let them pass, but Ashok
15635 jerked his head over his shoulder. "They won't leave until we see
15636 her, you know." He waggled his chin good-naturedly and smiled and
15637 for a moment Yasmin remembered how handsome he'd been when she'd
15638 first met him on his motorcycle.</p>
15640 said.</p>
15641 <p>They wouldn't have recognized Mala if she hadn't told them which
15642 bed was hers. Her head had been shaved and bandaged, and one side
15643 of her face was a mass of bruises. Her left arm was in a sling.</p>
15644 <p>Yasmin let out an involuntary groan when she saw her, and the
15645 ward sister beside her squeezed her arm. "She wasn't raped," the
15646 woman whispered in her ear. "And the doctor says there was no
15648 <p>Yasmin cried now, really cried, the way she hadn't let herself
15649 cry before, the cry from her soul and her stomach, the cry that
15650 wouldn't let go, the cry that drove her to her knees as though she
15651 were being beaten with a lathi. She curled up into a ball and cried
15652 and cried, and the ward sister led her to a seat and tried to put a
15653 pill between her lips but she wouldn't let it in. She needed to be
15654 alert and awake, needed to stop crying, needed --</p>
15655 <p>Ashok squatted against the wall beside her, clenching and
15656 unclenching his fists. "I'll ruin him," he muttered over and over
15657 again, ignoring the stares of the other patients on the ward with
15665 He is powerful and strong and ruthless, but we are smart and fast
15668 <p>Dafen was full of choking smoke. Matthew pushed his way through
15669 the crowds. He'd tried to bring the painter girl, Mei, with him,
15670 but she had run into a group of her friends and had gone off with
15671 them, stopping to kiss him hard on the lips, then laughing at his
15672 surprised expression and kissing him again. The second time, he had
15673 the presence of mind to kiss her back and for a second he actually
15674 managed to forget he was in the middle of a riot. Mei's friends
15675 hooted and called at them and she gave his bottom a squeeze and
15676 took his phone out of his fingers and typed her number into it, hit
15677 SAVE. The phone network had died an hour before, when the police
15678 retreated from Dafen and fell back to a defensive cordon around the
15679 whole area.</p>
15680 <p>And then he was alone, making his way back toward the huge
15681 statue of the hand holding the brush, the entrance to Dafen.
15682 Painters thronged the streets, carrying beautifully made signs,
15683 singing songs, drinking fiery, cheap baijiu whose smells mixed with
15684 the smoke and the oil paint and the turpentine.</p>
15685 <p>The police line bristled as he peered around the corner of a
15686 cafe at the edge of Dafen. He wasn't the only one eyeing them
15687 nervously -- there was a little group of white tourists cowering in
15688 the cafe, clutching their cameras and staring incredulously at
15689 their dead phones. Matthew listened in on their conversation,
15690 straining to understand the rapid English, and gathered that they'd
15691 been brought here by a driver from their hotel, a Hilton in Jiabin
15692 Road.</p>
15694 gweilo, Wei-Dong, had let him practice more. "You need help?" He
15695 was intensely self-conscious about how bad he must sound, his
15696 accent and grammar terrible. Matthew prided himself on how
15697 well-spoken he was in Chinese.</p>
15698 <p>The eldest tourist, a woman with wrinkled arms and neck showing
15699 beneath a top with thin straps, looked hard at him. She removed her
15700 oversized sunglasses and assayed a little Chinese. "We are fine,"
15701 she said, her accent no better than Matthew's, which he found oddly
15702 comforting. She was with three others, a man he took to be her
15703 husband and two young men, about Matthew's age, who looked like a
15704 cross between her and the husband: sons.</p>
15706 tried to find the word for policemen, couldn't remember it, found
15707 himself searching through his game-vocabulary. "Knights? Paladins?
15709 <p>The boys grinned at him and he thought they must be gamers,
15711 grinning back at them, though truth be told he didn't feel like
15712 doing anything. They conferred in hushed voices.</p>
15714 <p>He squeezed his eyes shut. He had to get somewhere that his
15715 phone would work, had to check in with Big Sister Nor and find out
15716 where the others were, what the plan was. He'd have to get new
15717 papers, maybe go to one of the provinces or try to sneak into Hong
15721 <p>The older man's eyes widened in comprehension. They spoke again
15724 like they must know it too. He was a criminal and a former
15725 prisoner, and he would never be anything but, for his whole life;
15726 just like his grandfather.</p>
15731 need to get out of here anyway. It will be good to have a
15735 Clankers, Big Smoke, Toon," he said, ticking them off on his
15736 fingers.</p>
15739 <p>They laughed and he laughed too, small sounds in the roar of the
15740 crowds and the thunder of the choppers overhead.</p>
15742 Chinese. He nodded twice.</p>
15744 out toward the police lines.</p>
15746 <p>Wei-Dong didn't want to wake Jie, but he needed to sleep. He
15747 finally curled up on the floor next to the mattress, using his
15748 shoulderbag as a pillow to get his face off of the filthy carpet.
15749 At first he lay rigid in the brightly lit room, his mind swirling
15750 with all he'd seen and done, but then he must have fallen asleep
15751 and fallen hard, because the next thing he knew, he was swimming up
15752 from the depths of total oblivion as Jie shook his shoulder and
15753 called his name. He opened his eyes to slits and peered at her.</p>
15758 <p>He sat up. His mouth was full of evil-tasting salty paste, a
15759 stale residue of dumplings and sleep. Self consciously, he breathed
15760 through his nose.</p>
15763 Somewhere we can tell the story of the dead without being arrested.
15768 <p>It was as good a plan as any. Wei-Dong had watched the Webblies
15769 change papers again and again. Shenzhen was full of counterfeiters.
15770 He rode the Metro apart from her again, staring at his stupid guide
15771 map and trying to look like a stupid tourist, invisible. It was
15772 easier this time around, because there was so much else going on --
15773 factory girls talking about Jie's radio show and "the 42,"
15774 policemen prowling the cars and demanding the papers of any group
15775 of three or more people, searching bags and, once, confiscating a
15776 banner painted on a bedsheet. Wei-Dong didn't see what it said, but
15777 the police took four screaming, kicking girls off the train at the
15778 next station. Shenzhen was in chaos.</p>
15779 <p>They got off the train at the stock market station, and he
15780 followed Jie, leaving a hundred yards between them. But he came up
15781 against her when they got to the surface. The last time he'd been
15782 here, it had been thronged with counterfeiters and touts handing
15783 out fliers advertising their services, scrap-buyers with scales
15784 lining the sidewalks, hawkers selling fruit and ices. Now it was
15785 wall-to-wall police, a cordon formed around the entrance to the
15786 stock-market. Officers were stationed every few yards on the
15787 street, too, checking papers.</p>
15788 <p>Jie picked up her phone and pretended to talk into it, but
15789 Wei-Dong could see she just didn't want to look suspicious. He got
15790 out his tourist-map and pretended to study it. Gradually, they both
15791 made their way back into the station. She joined him at a large map
15792 of the surrounding area.</p>
15796 he said.</p>
15799 <p>He hadn't told anyone the details of his transoceanic voyage. It
15800 would have felt weird to admit that he was part owner of a giant
15802 was his. It was his father's.</p>
15803 <p>Two policemen passed by, grim-faced, moving quickly, an urgent,
15804 insectile buzz coming from their earpieces.</p>
15808 <p>She smiled, and it was the first real smile he'd seen on her
15809 face since -- since before the shooting had started.</p>
15812 <p>The policemen that questioned Matthew were so tense they
15813 practically vibrated, but the tourist lady put on a big show of
15814 being offended that they were being stopped and demanded that they
15815 be allowed to go, practically shouting in English. Matthew
15816 translated every word, speaking over the policemen as they tried to
15817 ask him more questions about how he'd come to be there and what had
15818 happened to get his clothes so dirty with paint and mud.</p>
15819 <p>The tourist lady took out her camera and aimed it at the
15820 policemen, and that ended the friendly discussion. Before she could
15821 bring the screen up to her face, a policeman's gloved hand had
15822 closed around the lens. The two boys moved forward and it looked
15823 like someone would start shoving soon, and the man was shouting in
15824 English, and all the noise was enough to attract the attention of
15825 an officer who gave the cops a blistering tongue lashing for
15826 wasting everyone's time and waved them on with a stern gesture.</p>
15827 <p>Matthew could hardly believe he was free. The tourists seemed to
15828 think it was all a game as he urged them down the road a way, out
15829 of range of the police cordon and away from the shouting. They
15830 walked up the shoulder of the Shenhui Highway, staying right on the
15831 edge as huge trucks blew past them so fast it sucked the breath out
15832 of their lungs.</p>
15836 <p>She seemed to understand. He began to wave at every car that
15837 passed them by, and eventually one stopped, a Chang'an sedan that
15838 had seen better days, its trunk held shut with a bungee cord that
15839 allowed the lid to bang as the car rolled to a stop. It was driven
15840 by a man in a dirty chauffeur's uniform. Matthew leaned in and
15841 said, "100 RMB to take us to Jiabin Road." It was high, but he was
15842 sure the tourists could afford it.</p>
15847 <p>They were on the road for a mere five minutes before his phone
15848 chirped to let him know that he had voicemail waiting for him. It
15849 was Justbob, from Big Sister Nor.</p>
15854 expression of mingled hilarity and awe. She had an encyclopedic
15855 knowledge of gamer cafes with private rooms, and had brought them
15856 to this one in the ground floor of a youth hostel that catered to
15857 foreigners and had a room set off for karaoke and net-access.</p>
15862 Portland? San Francisco?</p>
15864 was what, 8PM back in LA, and she was crying and alone. He felt so
15865 homesick at that moment he thought he would split in two and he
15866 felt the tears running down his own cheeks.</p>
15868 <p>And they both cried for a long time, and when he risked a look
15869 at Jie, she was crying too.</p>
15889 Big Sister Nor had suggested it, and Jie had shrugged and said that
15890 it was fine with her, one place was as good as any other. "I'll
15891 give you the container number. And you have to have Mr Alford call
15892 the port authority here and tell them that I'm authorized to access
15900 There are people here, friends, whose lives are at stake. You can
15901 call the embassy all you want but I won't go there. If you don't
15902 help me, I'll have to do this on my own, and I have to be honest
15903 with you, Mom, I don't think I'll be able to do it. But I can't
15907 phone -- "in three hours. I've got my passport with me, that'll get
15908 me inside, <em>if</em> you've got it squared away with the port
15909 authority. The container number is WENU432134. It's at the western
15914 <p>There were five of them in all. Matthew, Jie, Wing, Shirong, and
15916 and bought as much food as they could carry, asking the bemused
15917 clerk to pack it in boxes and seal them with packing tape.</p>
15918 <p>As they approached the port, they stopped talking, walking
15919 slowly and deliberately. Wei-Dong steeled himself and walked to the
15920 guard's booth. He hadn't called his mother back. There hadn't been
15921 time. Shenzhen was in chaos, police-checks and demonstrations
15922 everywhere, some riots, spirals of black smoke heading into the
15923 sky.</p>
15924 <p>He motioned for Wing to join him. They had agreed that he would
15925 play interpreter, to make Wei-Dong seem like more of a hopeless
15926 gweilo, above suspicion. They'd found him some cheap fake Chinese
15927 Nike gear to wear, a ridiculous track suit that reminded him of the
15928 Russian gangsters he'd see around Santee Alley.</p>
15929 <p>Wordlessly, he handed his passport -- his real passport, held
15930 safely all this time -- to the young man on the gate. "WENU432134,"
15932 <p>He waited for Wing to translate, watched him sketch out the
15933 English letters on his palm.</p>
15934 <p>The security guard looked over his shoulder at the two policemen
15935 in the booth with him. He picked up a scratched tablet and prodded
15936 at it with a blunt finger, squinting at Wei-Dong's passport.
15937 Wei-Dong hoped that he wouldn't try something clever, like riffling
15938 its pages looking for a Chinese visa.</p>
15940 <p>Wei-Dong felt sweat run down his butt-crack and over his thighs.
15941 He craned his neck to see the screen. There it was, but the number
15942 had been entered wrong, WENU432144. He pointed to it and said,
15943 "Tell him that this is the one." He sent a silent thanks to his
15944 mother. The guard compared the number to the one he'd entered and
15945 then seemed about to let them pass. Then one of the policeman said,
15947 <p>The cop shouldered the security guard out of the way, took the
15948 passport from him, examined it closely, holding a page up to the
15952 <p>He opened up the box at his feet and pulled out a folded
15953 tee-shirt emblazoned with some Chinese characters that said "I'm
15954 stupid enough to think that this shirt looks cool." Jie had found
15955 them from one of the few stubborn peddlers left on the street
15956 outside of the Metro entrance near the train station. The cop
15959 won't. If they like it, they will order twenty thousand from us!"
15960 He laughed, and after a moment, the cop and the security guard
15961 joined in. The cop slapped Wei-Dong on the shoulder and Wei-Dong
15962 forced a laugh out as well.</p>
15964 gave them directions. "But you'll have to use the north gate to
15966 <p>Wing made a show of translating for Wei-Dong, who had the
15967 presence of mind to pretend to listen, but he was rocking on his
15968 heels, almost at the point of collapse from lack of sleep and
15969 food.</p>
15970 <p>They walked in total silence to the container, and Wei-Dong
15971 managed to only look over his shoulder once. Jie caught his eye
15972 when he did and waggled a finger at him. He smiled wryly and looked
15973 ahead, following the directions.</p>
15974 <p>The container was just as he'd left it, and his key fit the
15975 padlock. The four marvelled at the cleverness of his work inside as
15976 they efficiently unpacked their food.</p>
15978 them.</p>
15982 his phone and Jie handed him her last SIM and a calling card.</p>
15984 <p>Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang and Justbob had no warning this
15985 time. Three men, small-time crooks working on contract for a man in
15986 Dongguan who owned one of the big gold-exchanges, worked silently
15987 and efficiently. They followed Justbob back from a Malaysian satay
15988 restaurant that they were known to frequent, back to the latest
15989 safe-house, a room over a massage-parlor on Changi Road, where the
15990 Webblies could tap into the wireless from a nearby office building.
15991 They waited patiently outside for all the windows to go dark.</p>
15992 <p>Then they methodically attached bicycle locks to each doorway.
15993 It was nearly 5AM and the few passers-by paid them no particular
15994 attention. Once they had locked each door, they hurled petrol bombs
15995 through windows on the ground floor. They stayed just long enough
15996 to make sure that the fires were burning cheerily before they got
15997 into two cars parked around the corner and sped off. The next
15998 morning, they crossed into Kuala Lumpur and did not return to
15999 Singapore for eight months, drawing a small salary from the man in
16000 Dongguan while they laid low.</p>
16001 <p>Big Sister Nor was the first one awake, roused by the sound of
16002 three windows smashing in close succession. She smelled the greasy
16003 smoke a moment later and began to shout, in her loudest voice,
16005 <p>Justbob and The Mighty Krang were up an instant later. Justbob
16006 went to the stairs and ventured halfway down toward the
16007 massage-parlor before the flames forced her up again. The Mighty
16008 Krang broke out the window with a chair -- it had been painted shut
16009 -- and leaned way out, far enough to see the lock that had been
16010 added to the door. He breathlessly but calmly reported this to Big
16011 Sister Nor, who had already popped the drives out of their control
16012 machines. She handed them to him, listened to Justbob's assessment
16013 of the staircase and nodded.</p>
16014 <p>They could hear the screams from the floor below them as the
16015 girls from the massage parlor broke out their own windows and
16016 called for help. A girl emerged, legs first, from one of the
16017 massage parlor's small, high windows. She was screaming, on fire,
16018 rolling on the ground. A few people were in the street below,
16019 talking into their phones -- the fire department would be here
16020 soon. It wouldn't be soon enough. Choking smoke was already filling
16021 the room, and they were forced to their knees.</p>
16028 <p>Justbob grabbed The Mighty Krang's arm and pulled him toward the
16029 window. He got as far as the sill, then balked. "Too far!" he said,
16030 dropping back to his belly. Justbob gave him a withering look, then
16031 hauled herself over the sill, dropped so she was hanging by her
16032 arms, then allowed herself to drop the rest of the way. If she made
16033 a sound, it was lost in the roar of the flames that were just
16034 outside the door now. The floor was too hot to touch.</p>
16037 her arm. "We're all nothing without you!" She shook his hand
16038 off.</p>
16040 switchboard. You all lead yourselves. Remember that!" She grabbed
16041 the waistband of his jeans, just over his butt, and practically
16042 threw him out the window. The air whistled past him for an instant,
16043 and then there was a tremendous, jarring impact, and then
16044 blackness.</p>
16045 <p>Big Sister Nor was on fire, her loose Indian cotton trousers,
16046 her long black hair. The room was all smoke now, and every breath
16047 was fire, too. She smelled her own nose-hairs singe as a breath of
16048 scalding air passed into her lungs, which froze and refused to work
16049 anymore. She stood and took one step to the window, standing for a
16050 moment like a flaming avatar of some tragic god in the window
16051 before she faltered, went down on one knee, then the flames
16052 engulfed her.</p>
16053 <p>And below, the crowd on the street began to cry. Justbob cried
16054 too, from the pavement where she was being tended by a passerby who
16055 knew some first aid and was applying pressure to the ruin of her
16056 left leg. The Mighty Krang was unconscious, with a broken arm and
16057 three broken ribs.</p>
16058 <p>But he remembered what Big Sister Nor told him, and he wrote
16059 those words down, typing them with his left hand in English, Malay,
16060 Hindi and Chinese, recording them with his smoke-ruined voice from
16061 his hospital bed.</p>
16062 <p>His words -- Big Sister Nor's words -- went out all over the
16063 world, spreading from phone to message board to site to site. You
16064 lead yourselves.</p>
16065 <p>The words were heard by factory girls all over South China, back
16066 on the job after a few short days of energetic chaos, mass firings
16067 and mass arrests. They were heard by factory boys all over Cambodia
16068 and Vietnam. They were heard in the alleys of Dharavi and in the
16069 living rooms of Mechanical Turks all over Europe, the US and
16070 Canada. They were published in many languages on the cover of many
16071 newspapers and aired on many broadcasts.</p>
16072 <p>These last treated the words as a report from a distant world --
16073 "Did you know that these strange games and the people who played
16074 them took it all so seriously?" But for the people who needed to
16075 hear them, the words were heard.</p>
16076 <p>They were heard by five friends who downloaded them over the
16077 achingly slow network connection on the container ship, a day out
16078 of Shenzhen port. Five friends who wept to hear them. Five friends
16079 who took strength from them.</p>
16081 <p>They hid in the inner container when the ship entered the Mumbai
16082 Harbor, heading for the Mumbai Port Trust. Wei-Dong had googled the
16083 security procedures at Mumbai Port, and he didn't think they were
16084 using gas chromatograph to detect smuggled people, but they didn't
16085 want to take any chances. It was crowded, and the toilet had
16086 stopped working, and they had only managed to gather enough water
16087 for one brief shower each on the three day passage.</p>
16088 <p>They fell against one-another, then clung to the floor as the
16089 container was lifted on a crane and set down again. They heard the
16090 outer door open, then shut, and muffled conversations. Then they
16091 were rolling.</p>
16092 <p>Cautiously, they opened the inner door. The smell of Mumbai --
16093 spicy, dusty, hot and wet -- filled the container. Light streamed
16094 in from the little holes Wei-Dong had drilled an eternity ago on
16095 the passage to Shenzhen.</p>
16096 <p>Now they heard the sound of horns, many, many horns. Lots of
16097 motorcycle engines, loud. Diesel exhaust. The huge, bellowing
16098 air-horn of the truck their container had been placed upon. The
16099 truck stopped and started many times, made a few slow, lumbering
16100 turns, then stopped. A moment later, the engines stopped too.</p>
16101 <p>The five of them held their breaths, listened to the footsteps
16102 outside, listened to a conversation in Hindi, adult male voices.
16103 Listened to the scrape of the catch on the container's big rear
16104 doors.</p>
16105 <p>And then sunlight -- dusty, hot, with swirling clouds of dust
16106 and the pong of human urine -- flooded into the container. They
16107 shielded their eyes and looked into the faces of two grinning
16108 Indian men, with fierce mustaches and neatly pressed shirts. The
16109 men held out their hands and helped them down, one at a time, into
16110 a narrow alley that was entirely filled by the truck, which neatly
16111 shielded them from view. Wei-Dong couldn't imagine backing a truck
16112 into a space this narrow.</p>
16113 <p>The men gestured at the interior of the container, miming,
16115 everyone was clear and then nodded. The men waggled their chins at
16116 them, shook Wei-Dong and Jie's hands, brief and dry, and edged
16117 their way back along the space between the truck and the alley's
16118 walls. The engine roared to life, a cloud of diesel blew into their
16119 face, and the truck pulled away, lights glowing over a handpainted
16120 sign on the bumper that read HORN PLEASE.</p>
16121 <p>The truck blew its horn once as it cleared the alley-mouth and
16122 turned an impossibly tight right turn. The alley was flooded with
16123 light and noise from the street, and then they saw a man and a girl
16124 walking down it, toward them.</p>
16125 <p>They drew close. The girl was wearing some kind of headscarf
16126 with a veil that covered most of her face. The man had short,
16127 gelled hair and was dressed in a pressed white shirt tucked into
16128 black slacks. The two groups stood and looked at one another for a
16129 long moment, then the man held his hand out.</p>
16132 short, dry handshake.</p>
16136 saying it, but it came out just the same, and Wing understood it
16137 and translated it into Chinese, and for a moment, no one needed to
16138 say anything more.</p>
16140 Leonard translated. "We all want to hear what you have to tell us.
16144 <p>They emerged beside a hotel. The street before them thronged
16145 with people, more than they could comprehend, and cars, and
16146 three-wheelers, and bicycles, and trucks of all sizes. It was a
16147 hive of activity that made even Shenzhen seem sedate. For a moment
16148 none of them said anything.</p>
16151 Ashok said, casually, setting off down the crowded pavement,
16152 ignoring the children who approached them, begging, holding their
16153 hands out, tugging at their sleeves. Leonard felt as though he was
16155 <p>The street ended at the ocean, a huge, shimmering harbor dotted
16156 with ferries and other craft. Ahead of them spread an enormous
16157 plaza, the size of several football fields stitched together,
16158 covered in gardens, and, where it met the ocean, an enormous
16159 archway topped with minarets and covered with intricate carvings,
16160 and all around them, thousands of people, talking, walking,
16161 selling, begging, sleeping, running, riding.</p>
16162 <p>The five of them stopped and gaped. Three days locked in a
16163 container with nothing to see that was more than a few yards away
16164 had robbed them of the ability to easily focus on large, far-away
16165 objects, and it took a long while to get it all into their heads.
16166 Yasmin and Ashok indulged them, smiling a little.</p>
16168 absently.</p>
16169 <p>To one side stood a hotel as big as the giant conference center
16170 hotels near Disneyland, done up like some kind of giant temple,
16171 vast and ungainly. Leonard looked at it for a moment, then shooed
16172 away the beggars that had approached them. Yasmin scolded them in
16173 Hindi and they smiled at her and backed off a few paces, saying
16174 something clearly insulting that Yasmin ignored.</p>
16177 we're going -- the other end of the Harbour Line, our humble home,
16183 translated.</p>
16185 Yasmin said.</p>
16186 <p>A man was approaching them. A white man, pale and obvious among
16187 the crowds, trailing a comet-tail of beggars. Leonard saw him
16188 first, then Ashok turned to follow his gaze and whispered "Oh, my,
16190 <p>The man drew up to them. He was fat, racoon-eyed, hair a wild
16191 mess around his head. He was wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with
16192 the Coca-Cola Games logo and a pair of blue-jeans that didn't fit
16193 him well, and Birkenstocks. He wouldn't have looked more American
16194 if he was holding up the Statue of Liberty's torch and singing
16199 <p>Leonard gulped and took the man's hand. He had a firm, American
16200 handshake. The four Chinese Webblies were talking among themselves.
16201 Leonard whispered to them, explaining who the man was, explaining
16202 that he had no idea what he was doing there.</p>
16204 said. "I knew that I would have to come to Mumbai to meet with you
16205 and your extraordinary friends, curiosity demanded it. But once we
16206 put our competitive intelligence people onto your organization, it
16207 wasn't hard to find a hole in your mail server, and from there we
16208 intercepted the details of this meeting. I thought it would make an
16211 English.</p>
16213 thousands of you Webbly bastards. No, I figure if Coca Cola Games
16214 is going to be doing business with you, it'd be worth sitting down
16215 and chatting. Besides, I had some vacation days I needed to use
16216 before the end of the year, which meant I didn't have to convince
16218 <p>They were blocking the sidewalk and getting jostled every few
16219 seconds as someone pushed past them. One of them nearly knocked
16220 Prikkel into a zippy three-wheeled cab and Ashok caught his arm and
16221 steadied him.</p>
16224 honest, I think that's probably a good bet. You and the other ones
16226 take money out of that bastard's account when your friend's life is
16227 at stake -- it's not like he's gonna complain, right? But how Coke
16231 holding a ten-foot-long tray filled with round tin lunchpails
16232 squeezed past him, knocking him into Jie. "One I think we could
16233 certainly have a good time discussing." He gestured toward the huge
16234 wedding-cake hotel. "I'm staying at the Taj. Care to join me for
16236 <p>Ashok looked at Yasmin, and something unspoken passed between
16238 guest. We know a wonderful place in Dharavi. It's only a short
16243 <em>wait</em> to broadcast this." Leonard grinned. He couldn't wait
16244 either.</p>
16247 <p>Thanks to Russell Galen, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and my
16248 beautiful and enormously patient wife Alice -- I couldn't have
16249 written this without you three.</p>
16250 <p>Thanks to the Silklisters, Rishab Ghosh, and Ashok Banker and
16251 Yoda, Keyan Bowes, Rajeev Suri, Sachin Janghel, Vishal Gondal,
16252 Sushant Bhalerao and Menyu Singhfor all your assistance in
16253 Mumbai.</p>
16254 <p>Thanks to LemonED, Andrew Lih, Paul Denlinger, Bunnie Huang,
16255 Kaiser Kuo, Anne Stevenson-Yang, Leslie Chang, Ethan Zuckerman,
16256 John Kennedy, Marilyn Terrell, Peter Hessler, Christine Lu, Jon
16257 Phillips, Henry Oh, for invaluable aid in China.</p>
16258 <p>Thanks to Julian Dibbell, Ge Jin, Matthew Chew, James Seng,
16259 Jonas Luster, Steven Davis, Dan Kelly and Victor Pineiro for help
16260 with the gold farmers.</p>
16261 <p>Thanks to Max Keiser, Alan Wexelblat and Mark Soderstrom for
16262 economics advice.</p>
16264 Canonical, Inc, and Ken Snider for tech support!</p>
16265 <p>Thanks to MrBrown and the Singapore bloggers for unforgettable
16266 street-dinners.</p>
16268 <p>Many thanks to Ken Macleod for letting me use IWWWW and
16274 <p><a href=
16276 of publicity photos</a></p>
16280 science fiction novels. Some are for adults, others are for young
16281 people and adults. He's also the author of a book of essays
16283 Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now</em>, IDW) and two
16284 collections of short stories, both currently in print from
16285 Thunder's Mouth Press.</p>
16287 with his wonderful wife, Alice, and his scrumptious two year old
16288 daughter, Poesy. He formerly served as European Director of the
16289 Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a fellow of that
16290 organization. He is also affiliated with the Open University
16291 Faculty of Computer Science (UK) and the University of Waterloo
16292 Independent Studies Program (Canada).</p>
16293 <p>He is the co-editor and co-owner of the widely read blog Boing
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