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\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\textbf{\huge\textsf{{Anda's Game}}}
\end{center}

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\section{Forematter:}

This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection
“Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by
Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license,
about which you’ll find more at the end of this file.

This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:

\texttt{http://craphound.com/overclocked}

You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including
\href{http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20}{Amazon.}

In the words of Woody Guthrie:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright
\#154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it
without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause
we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it.
Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.


\section{Introduction to Anda’s Game}

The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction
is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day.

Anda’s Game is a sterling example of this approach. I ripped a
story from the headlines\dash{}reports on blogs about a stunning
presentation at a video-games conference about “gold farmers” in
latinamerica who were being paid a pittance “grind” (undertake
boring, repetitive wealth-creating tasks in a game) with the
product of their labor sold on to rich northern gamers who wanted
to level-up without all the hard work.

The practice of gold farming became more and more mainstream,
growing with the online role-playing game industry and spreading
around the world (legend has it that the Chinese rice harvest was
endangered because so many real farmers had quit the field to
pursue a more lucrative harvest in virtual online gold). Every time
one of these stories broke, I was lionized for my spectacular
prescience in so accurately predicting the gold-farming
phenomenon\dash{}I had successfully predicted the present.

Anda’s Game tries to square up the age-old fight for rights for
oppressed minorities in the rich world with the fight for the
rights of the squalid, miserable majority in the developing world.
This tension arises again and again, and it affords a juicy
opportunity to play different underclasses off against one another.
Think of how handily Detroit’s auto-workers were distracted from
GM’s greed when they were given Mexican free-trade-zone labor to
treat as a scapegoat; the American worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican
worker, it’s the auto manufacturer who screws both of them. They
fought NAFTA instead of GM, and GM won\erratum{}{.}

This was the first of several stories I’ve written with titles from
famous sf stories and novels (Anda’s Game sounds a lot like
“Ender’s Game” when pronounced in a British accent). I came to this
curious practice as a response to Ray Bradbury describing Michael
Moore as a crook for repurposing the title “Fahrenheit 451” as
“Fahrenheit 9/11.” Bradbury doesn’t like Moore’s politics, and
didn’t want his seminal work on free speech being used to promote
opposing political ideology.

Well, this is just too much irony to bear. Titles have no
copyright, and science fiction is a field that avidly repurposes
titles\dash{}it seems like writing a story called “Nightfall” is
practically a rite of passage for some writers. What’s more, the
idea that political speech (the comparison of the Bush regime to
the totalitarian state of Fahrenheit 451) should be suppressed
because the author disagrees is antithetical to the inspiring free
speech message that shoots through Fahrenheit 451.

So I decided to start writing stories with the same titles as
famous sf, and to make each one a commentary, criticism, or parody
of the cherished ideas of the field. Anda’s Game was the first of
these, but it’s not the last\dash{}I, Robot appears elsewhere in this
volume, and I’m almost finished a story called True Names that Ben
Rosenbaum and I have been tossing back and forth for a while. After
that, I think it’ll be The Man Who Sold the Moon, and then maybe
Jeffty is Five.

I sold this story to Salon, and it was later reprinted in Michael
Chabon’s Best American Short Stories (a story written by a Canadian
about Brits, no less!), and it was later podcasted by retired pro
Quake player Alice Taylor for my podcast.

\section{Anda’s Game}

\textsf{(Originally published on Salon, November 2004)}

Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a
girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up until then, she’d played a
boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you
played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at
Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a
girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game
were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped
like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and
long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather
bikini-armor. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was 12, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was
female, but had sensible tits and sensible armor and a bloody great
sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school
after PE, when Anda was sitting and massaging her abused podge and
hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE
kit was at the bottom of her school-bag and her face was that
stupid red color that she \emph{hated} and now it was stinking
maths which was hardly better than PE but at least she didn’t have
to sweat.

But instead of maths, all the girls were called to assembly, and
Liza the Organiza stood on the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks
the principal and Mrs Danzig, the useless counsellor.

“Hullo chickens,” Liza said. She had an Australian accent. “Well,
aren’t you lot just precious and bright and expectant with your
pink upturned faces like a load of flowers staring up at the sky?

“Warms me fecking heart it does.”

That made her laugh, and she wasn’t the only one. Miss Cruickshanks
and Mrs Danzig didn’t look amused, but they tried to hide it.

“I am Liza the Organiza, and I kick arse. Seriously.” She tapped a
key on her laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a
game\dash{}not the one that Anda played, but something space-themed, a
space-station with a rocketship in the background. “This is my
avatar.” Sensible boobs, sensible armor, and a sword the size of
the world. “In-game, they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the
Spacelanes, El Presidente of the Clan Fahrenheit.” The Fahrenheits
had chapters in every game. They were amazing and deadly and cool,
and to her knowledge, Anda had never met one in the flesh. They had
their own \emph{island} in her game. Crikey.

On screen, The Lizanator was fighting an army of wookie-men, sword
in one hand, laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning,
strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for
power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.

“The \emph{whole} Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular
election, but they voted me in cos of my prowess in \emph{combat}.
I’m a world-champion in six different games, from first-person
shooters to strategy games. I’ve commanded armies and I’ve sent
armies to their respawn gates by the thousands. Thousands,
chickens: my battle record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I
have taken home cash prizes from competitions totaling more than
400,000 pounds. I game for four to six hours nearly every day, and
the rest of the time, I do what I like.

“One of the things I like to do is come to girls’ schools like
yours and let you in on a secret: girls kick arse. We’re faster,
smarter and better than boys. We play harder. We spend too much
time thinking that we’re freaks for gaming and when we do game, we
never play as girls because we catch so much shite for it. Time to
turn that around. I am the best gamer in the world and I’m a girl.
I started playing at 10, and there were no women in games\dash{}you
couldn’t even buy a game in any of the shops I went to. It’s
different now, but it’s still not perfect. We’re going to change
that, chickens, you lot and me.

“How many of you game?”

Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.

“And how many of you play girls?”

All the hands went down.

“See, that’s a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace smells
like a boy’s \emph{armpit}. It’s time we girled it up a little. So
here’s my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be
given probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you
measure up, in six months, you’ll be full-fledged members.”

In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda
herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a
brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders. She dressed
in a black jumper over loose dungarees with giant, goth boots with
steel toes that looked like something you’d see in an in-game shop,
though Anda was pretty sure they’d come from a real-world goth shop
in Camden Town.

She stomped her boots, one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the
stage. “Who’s in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and
in?”

Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her
head was so full of it that she didn’t notice that she was the only
one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and
whispering.

“That’s all right, love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t
let those staring faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to
look at the sky. Pink scrubbed shining expectant faces. They’re
looking at you because \emph{you} had the sense to get to your feet
when opportunity came\dash{}and that means that someday, girl, you are
going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse.
Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit.”

She began to clap, and the other girls clapped too, and even though
Anda’s face was the color of a lollipop-lady’s sign, she felt like
she might burst with pride and good feeling and she smiled until
her face hurt.

\tb

\edialog{Anda,}
her sergeant said to her,

\edialog{how would you like to make some money?}
\edialog{Money, Sarge?}
Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more
missions, but they paid \emph{gold}\dash{}money wasn’t really something
you talked about in-game.

The Sarge\dash{}sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously
orcish ugly phiz\dash{}moved her avatar impatiently.

\edialog{Something wrong with my typing, Anda?}
\edialog{No, Sarge,}
she typed.

\edialog{You mean gold?}
\edialog{If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go
voice?}
Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her
parents in the sitting-room watching something loud on telly. She
turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her
headset. They said it could noise-cancel a Blackhawk helicopter\dash{}it
had better be able to overcome the little inductive speakers
suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to
voice.

“Hey, Lucy,” she said.

“Call me Sarge!” Lucy’s accent was American, like an old TV show,
and she lived somewhere in the middle of the country where it was
all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda’s best friend in-game but
she was so hardcore it was boring sometimes.

“Hi Sarge,” she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her
voice. She’d never smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was
harder to remember to keep to the game norms.

“I have a mission that pays real cash. Whichever paypal you’re
using, they’ll deposit money into it. Looks fun, too.”

“That’s a bit weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?” There were
a lot of Clan rules about what kind of mission you could accept and
they were always changing. There were curb-crawlers in gamespace
and the way that the Clan leadership kept all the mummies and
daddies from going ape-poo about it was by enforcing a long, boring
code of conduct that was meant to ensure that none of the
Fahrenheit girlies ended up being virtual prozzies for hairy old
men in raincoats on the other side of the world.

“What?” Anda loved how Lucy quacked \emph{What?} It sounded
especially American. She had to force herself from parroting it
back. “No, geez. All the executives in the Clan pay the rent doing
missions for money. Some of them are even rich from it, I hear! You
can make a lot of money gaming, you know.”

“Is it really true?” She’d heard about this but she’d assumed it
was just stories, like the kids who gamed so much that they
couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much
that they stopped eating and got all anorexic. She wouldn’t mind
getting a little anorexic, to be honest. Bloody podge.

“Yup! And this is our chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you
in?”

“It’s not\dash{}you know, \emph{pervy}, is it?”

“Gag me. No. Jeez, Anda! Are you nuts? No\dash{}they want us to go kill
some guys.”

“Oh, we’re good at that!”

\tb

The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on
the far side of the largest continent on the gameworld, which was
called Dandelionwine. The travel was tedious, and twice they were
ambushed on the trail, something that had hardly happened to Anda
since she joined the Fahrenheits: attacking a Fahrenheit was bad
for your health, because even if you won the battle, they’d bring a
war to you.

But now they were far from the Fahrenheits’ power-base, and two
different packs of brigands waylaid them on the road. Lucy spotted
the first group before they got into sword-range and killed four of
the six with her bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda’s
sword\dash{}gigantic and fast\dash{}was out then, and her fingers danced over
the keyboard as she fought off the player who was attacking her,
her body jerking from side to side as she hammered on the
multibutton controller beside her. She won\dash{}of course! She was a
Fahrenheit! Lucy had already slaughtered her attacker. They
desultorily searched the bodies and came up with some gold and a
couple scrolls, but nothing to write home about. Even the gold
didn’t seem like much, given the cash waiting at the end of the
mission.

The second group of brigands was even less daunting, though there
were 20 of them. They were total noobs, and fought like statues.
They’d clearly clubbed together to protect themselves from harder
players, but they were no match for Anda and Lucy. One of them even
begged for his life before she ran him through,

\edialog{please sorry u cn have my gold sorry!!!11!}
Anda laughed and sent him to the respawn gate.

\edialog{You’re a nasty person, Anda,}
Lucy typed.

\edialog{I’m a Fahrenheit!!!!!!!!!!}
she typed back.

\tb

The brigands on the road were punters, but the cottage that was
their target was guarded by an altogether more sophisticated sort.
They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of
the cottage, and they saw the warning spell travel up from the
sentries’ hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away toward the
cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her
bow, but that didn’t stop the sentries from subjecting Anda to a
hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up
her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, assuming that the sentries
were non-player characters\dash{}who wanted to \emph{pay} to sit around
in gamespace watching a boring road all day?\dash{}and to her surprise,
the spears followed her. She took one in the chest and only some
fast work with her shield and all her healing scrolls saved her. As
it was, her constitution was knocked down by half and she had to
retreat back down the hillside.

“Get down,” Lucy said in her headset. “I’m gonna use the BFG.”

Every game had one\dash{}the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the
baddest-arse weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the
Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and
called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked
the gamegods for her foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming
crossbow that fired five-meter bolts that exploded on impact. It
was a beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in
position of their own at the bottom of the hill and it was there
that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed and ranged.

“Fire!” Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool
animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from
the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as
though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it
arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game
played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt
hit home with a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an
earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it
she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.

“Nuke ‘em till they glow and shoot ‘em in the dark! Yee-haw!” Lucy
called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets
of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping
hyper-red blood and ichor.

In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar
punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the
All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won
the World Cup.

Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would
be alerted to their presence and waiting for them. They spread out
into a wide flanking manoeuvre around the cottage’s sides, staying
just outside of bow-range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the
cottage and make the foliage around them fade to translucency.

There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows
and two with whirling slings. One had a scroll out and was
surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spellcasting.

“GO GO GO!” Lucy called.

Anda went! She had two scrolls left in her inventory, and one was a
shield spell. They cost a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever
that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the
spell as she charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because
there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of boiling oil
on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds
if not for the spell.

She power-climbed the tree and nearly lost her grip when whatever
the nasty spell was bounced off her shield. She reached the fifth
man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his
bloody head off in one motion, then backflipped off the high
branch, trusting to her shield to stay intact for her impact on the
cottage roof.

The strategy worked\dash{}now she had the drop (literally!) on the
remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her
headphones, the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she
pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her
arrows found homes in the chests of two more of the guards.

Shrieking a berzerker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and
landed on one of the two remaining guards, plunging her sword into
his chest and pinning him in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the
ground, and she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the
remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard,
but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She’d blown
a small fortune on spells and rations for this project with the
expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and now it was all
lost.

She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled
motion and began to run, waiting for the guard’s sword to find her
avatar’s back and knock her into the dirt.

“Got ‘im!” It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar
about so quickly it was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her
erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something
was wrong, though: despite Lucy’s avatar’s awesome stats and
despite Lucy’s own skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to
the cleaners. The guard was kicking her ass. Anda went back to her
stuck sword and recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as
Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another
to her knee.

“Shit!” Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel
over. Anda yanked her sword free\dash{}finally\dash{}and charged at the guard,
screaming a ululating war cry. He managed to get his avatar swung
around and his sword up before she reached him, but it didn’t
matter: she got in a lucky swing that took off one leg, then danced
back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully,
nicking at his sword-hand until he dropped his weapon, then moving
in for a fast kill.

“Lucy?”

“Call me Sarge!”

“Sorry, Sarge. Where’d you respawn?”

“I’m all the way over at Body Electric\dash{}it’ll take me hours to get
there. Do you think you can complete the mission on your own?”

“Uh, sure.” Thinking,
\emph{Crikey, if that’s what the guards}outside\emph{were like, how’m I gonna get past the}inside\emph{guards?}

“You’re the best, girl. OK, enter the cottage and kill everyone
there.”

“Uh, sure.”

She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could
get a look inside the cottage before she beat its door in, but she
was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.

She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She’d killed four of
her adversaries before she even noticed that they weren’t fighting
back.

In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even non-player
characters. They moved like total noobs, milling around in the
little cottage. Around them were heaps of shirts, thousands and
thousands of them. A couple of the noobs were sitting in the back,
incredibly, still crafting more shirts, ignoring the swordswoman
who’d just butchered four of their companions.

She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of
them were armed. Tentatively, she walked up to one of the players
and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one
side and she followed him.

“Are you a player or a bot?” she typed.

The avatar did nothing. She killed it.

“Lucy, they’re not fighting back.”

“Good, kill them all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah\dash{}that’s the orders. Kill them all and then I’ll make a phone
call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul ass
back to the island. I’m coming out there to meet you, but it’s a
long haul from the respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, OK?”

“Sure,” Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten.
\emph{One two one two and through and through,} she thought,
lopping their heads off. \emph{Her vorpal blade went}
snicker-snack. One left. He stood off in the back.

\edialog{no porfa necesito mi plata}
Italian? No, Spanish. She’d had a term of it in Third Form, though
she couldn’t understand what this twit was saying. She could always
paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels,
but who cared? She cut his head off.

“They’re all dead,” she said into her headset.

“Good job!” Lucy said. “OK, I’m gonna make a call. Sit tight.”

Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and shirts. She picked
some of them up. They were totally generic: the shirts you crafted
when you were down at Level 0 and trying to get enough skillz to
actually make something of yourself. Each one would fetch just a
few coppers. Add it all together and you barely had two thousand
gold.

Just to pass the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.

\edialog{no [colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial]
[money\textbar{}silver]}
Pathetic. A few thousand golds\dash{}he could make that much by playing a
couple of the beginner missions. More fun. More rewarding. Crafting
shirts!

She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later,
two more avatars showed up. More generics.

\edialog{are you players or bots?}
she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved
better.

\edialog{any trouble?}
Well all right then.

\edialog{no trouble}
\edialog{good}
One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other
player spoke.

\edialog{you can go now}
“Lucy?”

“What’s up?”

“Two blokes just showed up and told me to piss off. They’re noobs,
though. Should I kill them?”

“No! Jeez, Anda, those are the contacts. They’re just making sure
the job was done. Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern,
OK?”

Anda went over to Lucy’s corpse and looted it, then set out down
the road, dragging the BFG behind her. She stopped at the bend in
the road and snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames,
the two noobs standing amid them, burning slowly along with the
cottage and a few thousand golds’ worth of badly crafted shirts.

\tb

That was the first of Anda and Lucy’s missions, but it wasn’t the
last. That month, she fought her way through six more, and the
paypal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, Pounds
Sterling that she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated
exactly 501 meters away from the schoolgate, next to the candy shop
that was likewise 501 meters away.

“Anda, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to spend so much time
with your game,” her da said, prodding her bulging podge with a
finger. “It’s not healthy.”

“Daaaa!” she said, pushing his finger aside. “I go to PE every
stinking day. It’s good enough for the Ministry of Education.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. He was no movie star himself, with a
little pot belly that he wore his belted trousers high upon, a
wobbly extra chin and two bat wings of flab hanging off his upper
arms. She pinched his chin and wiggled it.

“I get loads more exercise than you, Mr Kettle.”

“But I pay the bills around here, little Miss Pot.”

“You’re not seriously complaining about the cost of the game?” she
said, infusing her voice with as much incredulity and disgust as
she could muster. “Ten quid a week and I get unlimited calls, texts
and messages! Plus play of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and
spellchecker and translator bots!” (this was all from rote\dash{}every
member of the Fahrenheits memorized this or something very like it
for dealing with recalcitrant, ignorant parental units) “Fine then.
If the game is too dear for you, Da, let’s set it aside and I’ll
just start using a normal phone, is that what you want?”

Her Da held up his hands. “I surrender, Miss Pot. But \emph{do} try
to get a little more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?”

“Getting my head trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like,” she
said, darkly.

“Zackly!” he said, prodding her podge anew. “That’s the stuff!
Getting my head trodden on was what made me the man I are today!”

Her Da could bluster all he liked about paying the bills, but she
had pocket-money for the first time in her life: not book-tokens
and fruit-tokens and milk-tokens that could be exchanged for
“healthy” snacks and literature. She had real money, cash money
that she could spend outside of the 500 meter sugar-free zone that
surrounded her school.

She wasn’t just kicking arse in the game, now\dash{}she was the richest
kid she knew, and suddenly she was everybody’s best pal, with
handsful of Curly Wurlies and Dairy Milks and Mars Bars that she
could selectively distribute to her schoolmates.

\tb

“Go get a BFG,” Lucy said. “We’re going on a mission.”

Lucy’s voice in her ear was a constant companion in her life now.
When she wasn’t on Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running
missions into the wee hours of the night. The Fahrenheit armorers,
non-player-characters, had learned to recognise her and they had
the Clan’s BFGs oiled and ready for her when she showed up.

Today’s mission was close to home, which was good: the road-trips
were getting tedious. Sometimes, non-player-characters or Game
Masters would try to get them involved in an official in-game
mission, impressed by their stats and weapons, and it sometimes
broke her heart to pass them up, but cash always beat gold and
experience beat experience points:
\emph{Money talks and bullshit walks}, as Lucy liked to say.

They caught the first round of sniper/lookouts before they had a
chance to attack or send off a message. Anda used the scrying spell
to spot them. Lucy had kept both BFGs armed and she loosed rounds
at the hilltops flanking the roadway as soon as Anda gave her the
signal, long before they got into bow range.

As they picked their way through the ruined chunks of the dead
player-character snipers, Anda still on the lookout, she broke the
silence over their voicelink.

“Hey, Lucy?”

“Anda, if you’re not going to call me Sarge, at least don’t call me
‘Hey, Lucy!’ My dad loved that old TV show and he makes that joke
every visitation day.”

“Sorry, Sarge. Sarge?”

“Yes, Anda?”

“I just can’t understand why anyone would pay us cash for these
missions.”

“You complaining?”

“No, but\dash{}”

“Anyone asking you to cyber some old pervert?”

“No!”

“OK then. I don’t know either. But the money’s good. I don’t care.
Hell, probably it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft
for them all day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”

“You really think that?”

Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it
this way. Most of the world is living on like a dollar a day. I
spend five dollars every day on a frappuccino. Some days, I get
two! Dad sends mom three thousand a month in child-support\dash{}that’s a
hundred bucks a day. So if a day’s money here is a hundred dollars,
then to a African or whatever my frappuccino is worth like
\emph{five hundred dollars}. And I buy two or three every day.

“And we’re not rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t
think twice about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee\dash{}how much
do you think a hotdog and a Coke go for on the space station? A
thousand bucks!

“So that’s what I think is going on. There’s someone out there,
some Saudi or Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that
this is just chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess
around with some other rich person. To them, we’re like the
Africans making a dollar a day to craft\dash{}I mean, sew\dash{}t-shirts.
What’s a couple hundred bucks to them? A cup of coffee.”

Anda thought about it. It made a kind of sense. She’d been on hols
in Bratislava where they got a posh hotel room for ten quid\dash{}less
than she was spending every day on sweeties and fizzy drinks.

“Three o’clock,” she said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers
pat-patted in bits around the forest floor.

“Nice one, Anda.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

\tb

They smashed half a dozen more sniper outposts and fought their way
through a couple packs of suspiciously bad-ass brigands before
coming upon the cottage.

“Bloody hell,” Anda breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards,
forty or fifty of them, with bows and spells and spears, in
entrenched positions.

“This is nuts,” Lucy agreed. “I’m calling them. This is nuts.”

There was a muting click as Lucy rang off and Anda used up a
scrying scroll to examine the inventories of the guards around the
corner. The more she looked, the more scared she got. They were
loaded down with spells, a couple of them were guarding BFGs and
what looked like an even \emph{bigger} BFG, maybe the fabled
BFG10K, something that was removed from the game economy not long
after gameday one, as too disruptive to the balance of power.
Supposedly, one or two existed, but that was just a rumor. Wasn’t
it?

“OK,” Lucy said. “OK, this is how this goes. We’ve got to do this.
I just called in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob
prentices for backup.” Anda summed that up in her head to a hundred
player characters and maybe three hundred nonplayer characters:
familiars, servants, demons;

“That’s a lot of shares to split the pay into,” Anda said.

“Oh ye of little tits,” Lucy said. “I’ve negotiated a bonus for us
if we make it\dash{}a million gold and three missions’ worth of cash. The
Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold\dash{}they’ll be here in an
hour.”

This wasn’t a mission anymore, Anda realized. It was war. Gamewar.
Hundreds of players converging on this shard, squaring off against
the ranked mercenaries guarding the huge cottage over the hill.

\tb

Lucy wasn’t the ranking Fahrenheit on the scene, but she was the
designated general. One of the gamers up from Fahrenheit Island
brought a team flag for her to carry, a long spear with the magical
standard snapping proudly from it as the troops formed up behind
her.

“On my signal,” Lucy said. The voice chat was like a wind-tunnel
from all the unmuted breathing voices, hundreds of girls in
hundreds of bedrooms like Anda’s, all over the world, some sitting
down before breakfast, some just coming home from school, some
roused from sleep by their ringing game-sponsored mobiles. “GO GO
GO!”

They went, roaring, and Anda roared too, heedless of her parents
downstairs in front of the blaring telly, heedless of her
throat-lining, a Fahrenheit in berzerker rage, sword swinging. She
made straight for the BFG10K\dash{}a siege engine that could level a town
wall, and it would be hers, captured by her for the Fahrenheits if
she could do it. She spelled the merc who was cranking it into
insensibility, rolled and rolled again to dodge arrows and spells,
healed herself when an arrow found her leg and sent her tumbling,
springing to her feet before another arrow could strike home,
watching her hit points and experience points move in opposite
directions.

HERS! She vaulted the BFG10K and snicker-snacked her sword through
two mercs’ heads. Two more appeared\dash{}they had the thing primed and
aimed at the main body of Fahrenheit fighters, and they could turn
the battle’s tide just by firing it\dash{}and she killed them, slamming
her keypad, howling, barely conscious of the answering howls in her
headset.

Now \emph{she} had the BFG10K, though more mercs were closing on
her. She disarmed it quickly and spelled at the nearest bunch of
mercs, then had to take evasive action against the hail of incoming
arrows and spells. It was all she could do to cast healing spells
fast enough to avoid losing consciousness.

“LUCY!” she called into her headset. \textuppercase{“LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!”}

Lucy snapped out orders and the opposition before Anda began to
thin as Fahrenheits fell on them from behind. The flood was
stemmed, and now the Fahrenheits’ greater numbers and discipline
showed. In short order, every merc was butchered or run off.

Anda waited by the BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahrenheits and
saw them on their way. “Now we take the cottage,” Lucy said.

“Right,” Anda said. She set her character off for the doorway. Lucy
brushed past her.

“I’ll be glad when we’re done with this\dash{}that was bugfuck nutso.”
She opened the door and her character disappeared in a fireball
that erupted from directly overhead. A door-curse, a serious one,
one that cooked her in her armor in seconds.

“SHIT!” Lucy said in her headset.

Anda giggled. “Teach \emph{you} to go rushing into things,” she
said. She used up a couple scrying scrolls making sure that there
was nothing else in the cottage save for millions of shirts and
thousands of unarmed noob avatars that she’d have to mow down like
grass to finish out the mission.

She descended upon them like a reaper, swinging her sword
heedlessly, taking five or six out with each swing. When she’d been
a noob in the game, she’d had to endure endless fighting practice,
“grappling” with piles of leaves and other nonlethal targets, just
to get enough experience points to have a chance of hitting
anything. This was every bit as dull.

Her wrists were getting tired, and her chest heaved and her hated
podge wobbled as she worked the keypad.

\edialog{Wait, please, don’t\dash{}I’d like to speak with you}
It was a noob avatar, just like the others, but not just like it
after all, for it moved with purpose, backing away from her sword.
And it spoke English.

\edialog{nothing personal}
she typed

\edialog{just a job}
\edialog{There are many here to kill\dash{}take me last at least. I
need to talk to you.}
\edialog{talk, then}
she typed. Meeting players who moved well and spoke English was
hardly unusual in gamespace, but here in the cleanup phase, it felt
out of place. It felt \emph{wrong}.

\edialog{My name is Raymond, and I live in Tijuana. I am a
labour organizer in the factories here. What is your name?}
\edialog{i don’t give out my name in-game}
\edialog{What can I call you?}
\edialog{kali}
It was a name she liked to use in-game: Kali, Destroyer of Worlds,
like the Hindu goddess.

\edialog{Are you in India?}
\edialog{london}
\edialog{You are Indian?}
\edialog{naw im a whitey}
She was halfway through the room, mowing down the noobs in twos and
threes. She was hungry and bored and this Raymond was weirding her
out.

\edialog{Do you know who these people are that you’re
killing?}

She didn’t answer, but she had an idea. She killed four more and
shook out her wrists.

\edialog{They’re working for less than a dollar a day. The
shirts they make are traded for gold and the gold is sold on eBay.
Once their avatars have leveled up, they too are sold off on eBay.
They’re mostly young girls supporting their families. They’re the
lucky ones: the unlucky ones work as prostitutes.}
Her wrists \emph{really} ached. She slaughtered half a dozen more.

\edialog{The bosses used to use bots, but the game has
countermeasures against them. Hiring children to click the mouse is
cheaper than hiring programmers to circumvent the rules. I’ve been
trying to unionize them because they’ve got a very high rate of
injury. They have to play for 18-hour shifts with only one short
toilet break. Some of them can’t hold it in and they soil
themselves where they sit.}
\edialog{look}
she typed, exasperated.

\edialog{it’s none of my lookout, is it. the world’s like
that. lots of people with no money. im just a kid, theres nothing i
can do about it.}
\edialog{When you kill them, they don’t get paid.}
\emph{no porfa necesito mi plata}

\edialog{When you kill them, they lose their day’s wages. Do
you know who is paying you to do these killings?}
She thought of Saudis, rich Japanese, Russian mobsters.

\edialog{not a clue}
\edialog{I’ve been trying to find that out myself, Kali.}
They were all dead now. Raymond stood alone amongst the piled
corpses.

\edialog{Go ahead}
he typed

\edialog{I will see you again, I’m sure.}
She cut his head off. Her wrists hurt. She was hungry. She was
alone there in the enormous woodland cottage, and she still had to
haul the BFG10K back to Fahrenheit Island.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m almost back there, hang on. I respawned in the ass
end of nowhere.”

“Lucy, do you know who’s in the cottage? Those noobs that we
kill?”

“What? Hell no. Noobs. Someone’s butler. I dunno. Jesus, that spawn
gate\dash{}”

“Girls. Little girls in Mexico. Getting paid a dollar a day to
craft shirts. Except they don’t get their dollar when we kill them.
They don’t get anything.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, is that what one of them told you? Do you
believe everything someone tells you in-game? Christ. English girls
are so naive.”

“You don’t think it’s true?”

“Naw, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t, OK? I’m almost there, keep your panties on.”

“I’ve got to go, Lucy,” she said. Her wrists hurt, and her podge
overlapped the waistband of her trousers, making her feel a bit
like she was drowning.

“What, now? Shit, just hang on.”

“My mom’s calling me to supper. You’re almost here, right?”

“Yeah, but\dash{}”

She reached down and shut off her PC.

\tb

Anda’s Da and Mum were watching the telly again with a bowl of
crisps between them. She walked past them like she was dreaming and
stepped out the door onto the terrace. It was nighttime, 11
o’clock, and the chavs in front of the council flats across the
square were kicking a football around and swilling lager and making
rude noises. They were skinny and rawboned, wearing shorts and
string vests with strong, muscular limbs flashing in the
streetlights.

“Anda?”

“Yes, Mum?”

“Are you all right?” Her mum’s fat fingers caressed the back of her
neck.

“Yes, Mum. Just needed some air is all.”

“You’re very clammy,” her mum said. She licked a finger and
scrubbed it across Anda’s neck. “Gosh, you’re dirty\dash{}how did you get
to be such a mucky puppy?”

“Owww!” she said. Her mum was scrubbing so hard it felt like she’d
take her skin off.

“No whingeing,” her mum said sternly. “Behind your ears, too! You
are \emph{filthy}.”

“Mum, \emph{owwww!}”

Her mum dragged her up to the bathroom and went at her with a
flannel and a bar of soap and hot water until she felt boiled and
raw.

“What \emph{is} this mess?” her mum said.

“Lilian, leave off,” her dad said, quietly. “Come out into the hall
for a moment, please.”

The conversation was too quiet to hear and Anda didn’t want to,
anyway: she was concentrating too hard on not crying\dash{}her ears
\emph{hurt}.

Her mum enfolded her shoulders in her soft hands again. “Oh,
darling, I’m sorry. It’s a skin condition, your father tells me,
Acanthosis Nigricans\dash{}he saw it in a TV special. We’ll see the
doctor about it tomorrow after school. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, twisting to see if she could see the “dirt”
on the back of her neck in the mirror. It was hard because it was
an awkward placement\dash{}but also because she didn’t like to look at
her face and her soft extra chin, and she kept catching sight of
it.

She went back to her room to google Acanthosis Nigricans.

\edialog{A condition involving darkened, thickened skin.
Found in the folds of skin at the base of the back of the neck,
under the arms, inside the elbow and at the waistline. Often
precedes a diagnosis of type-2 diabetes, especially in children. If
found in children, immediate steps must be taken to prevent
diabetes, including exercise and nutrition as a means of lowering
insulin levels and increasing insulin-sensitivity.}
Obesity-related diabetes. They had lectures on this every term in
health class\dash{}the fastest-growing ailment among British teens,
accompanied by photos of orca-fat sacks of lard sat up in bed
surrounded by an ocean of rubbery, flowing podge. Anda prodded her
belly and watched it jiggle.

It jiggled. Her thighs jiggled. Her chins wobbled. Her arms
sagged.

She grabbed a handful of her belly and \emph{squeezed it}, pinched
it hard as she could, until she had to let go or cry out. She’d
left livid red fingerprints in the rolls of fat and she was crying
now, from the pain and the shame and oh, God, she was a fat girl
with diabetes\dash{}

\tb

“Jesus, Anda, where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry, Sarge,” she said. “My PC’s been broken\dash{}” Well, out of
service, anyway. Under lock-and-key in her dad’s study. Almost a
month now of medications and no telly and no gaming and double PE
periods at school with the other whales. She was miserable all day,
every day now, with nothing to look forward to except the trips
after school to the newsagents at the 501-meter mark and the
fistsful of sweeties and bottles of fizzy drink she ate in the park
while she watched the chavs play footy.

“Well, you should have found a way to let me know. I was getting
worried about you, girl.”

“Sorry, Sarge,” she said again. The PC Baang was filled with stinky
spotty boys\dash{}literally stinky, it smelt like goats, like a
train-station toilet\dash{}being loud and obnoxious. The dinky headphones
provided were greasy as a slice of pizza, and the mouthpiece was
sticky with excited boy-saliva from games gone past.

But it didn’t matter. Anda was back in the game, and just in time,
too: her money was running short.

“Well, I’ve got a backlog of missions here. I tried going out with
a couple other of the girls\dash{}” A pang of regret shot through Anda at
the thought that her position might have been usurped while she was
locked off the game “\dash{}but you’re too good to replace, OK? I’ve got
four missions we can do today if you’re game.”

“Four missions! How on earth will we do four missions? That’ll take
days!”

“We’ll take the BFG10K.” Anda could hear the savage grin in her
voice.

\tb

The BFG10K simplified things quite a lot. Find the cottage, aim the
BFG10K, fire it, whim-wham, no more cottage. They started with five
bolts for it\dash{}one BFG10K bolt was made up of 20 regular BFG bolts,
each costing a small fortune in gold\dash{}and used them all up on the
first three targets. After returning it to the armory and grabbing
a couple of BFGs (amazing how puny the BFG seemed after just a
couple hours’ campaigning with a really \emph{big} gun!) they set
out for number four.

“I met a guy after the last campaign,” Anda said. “One of the noobs
in the cottage. He said he was a union organizer.”

“Oh, you met Raymond, huh?”

“You knew about him?”

“I met him too. He’s been turning up everywhere. What a creep.”

“So you knew about the noobs in the cottages?”

“Um. Well, yeah, I figured it out mostly on my own and then Raymond
told me a little more.”

“And you’re fine with depriving little kids of their wages?”

“Anda,” Lucy said, her voice brittle. “You like gaming, right, it’s
important to you?”

“Yeah, ‘course it is.”

“How important? Is it something you do for fun, just a hobby you
waste a little time on? Are you just into it casually, or are you
\emph{committed} to it?”

“I’m committed to it, Lucy, you know that.” God, without the game,
what was there? PE class? Stupid Acanthosis Nigricans and, someday,
insulin jabs every morning? “I love the game, Lucy. It’s where my
friends are.”

“I know that. That’s why you’re my right-hand woman, why I want you
at my side when I go on a mission. We’re bad-ass, you and me, as
bad-ass as they come, and we got that way through discipline and
hard work and really \emph{caring} about the game, right?”

“Yes, right, but\dash{}”

“You’ve met Liza the Organiza, right?”

“Yes, she came by my school.”

“Mine too. She asked me to look out for you because of what she saw
in you that day.”

“Liza the Organiza goes to Ohio?”

“Idaho. Yes\dash{}all across the US. They put her on the tube and
everything. She’s amazing, and she cares about the game, too\dash{}that’s
what makes us all Fahrenheits: we’re committed to each other, to
teamwork, and to fair play.”

Anda had heard these words\dash{}lifted from the Fahrenheit mission
statement\dash{}many times, but now they made her swell a little with
pride.

“So these people in Mexico or wherever, what are they doing?
They’re earning their living by exploiting the game. You and me, we
would never trade cash for gold, or buy a character or a weapon on
eBay\dash{}it’s cheating. You get gold and weapons through hard work and
hard play. But those Mexicans spend all day, every day, crafting
stuff to turn into gold to sell off on the exchange.
\emph{That’s where it comes from}\dash{}that’s where the crappy players
get their gold from! That’s how rich noobs can buy their way into
the game that we had to play hard to get into.

“So we burn them out. If we keep burning the factories down,
they’ll shut them down and those kids’ll find something else to do
for a living and the game will be better. If no one does that, our
work will just get cheaper and cheaper: the game will get less and
less fun, too.

“These people \emph{don’t} care about the game. To them, it’s just
a place to suck a buck out of. They’re not players, they’re
leeches, here to suck all the fun out.”

They had come upon the cottage now, the fourth one, having
exterminated four different sniper-nests on the way.

“Are you in, Anda? Are you here to play, or are you so worried
about these leeches on the other side of the world that you want
out?”

“I’m in, Sarge,” Anda said. She armed the BFGs and pointed them at
the cottage.

“Boo-yah!” Lucy said. Her character notched an arrow.

\edialog{Hello, Kali}
“Oh, Christ, he’s back,” Lucy said. Raymond’s avatar had snuck up
behind them.

\edialog{Look at these}
he said, and his character set something down on the ground and
backed away. Anda edged up on them.

“Come on, it’s probably a booby-trap, we’ve got work to do,” Lucy
said.

They were photo-objects. She picked them up and then examined them.
The first showed ranked little girls, fifty or more, in clean and
simple t-shirts, skinny as anything, sitting at generic white-box
PCs, hands on the keyboards. They were hollow-eyed and grim, and
none of them older than she.

The next showed a shantytown, shacks made of corrugated aluminum
and trash, muddy trails between them, spraypainted graffiti, rude
boys loitering, rubbish and carrier bags blowing.

The next showed the inside of a shanty, three little girls and a
little boy sitting together on a battered sofa, their mother
serving them something white and indistinct on plastic plates.
Their smiles were heartbreaking and brave.

\edialog{That’s who you’re about to deprive of a day’s wages}
“Oh, hell, \emph{no},” Lucy said. “Not again. I killed him last
time and I said I’d do it again if he ever tried to show me photos.
That’s it, he’s dead.” Her character turned towards him, putting
away her bow and drawing a short sword. Raymond’s character backed
away quickly.

“Lucy, don’t,” Anda said. She interposed her avatar between Lucy’s
and Raymond. “Don’t do it. He deserves to have a say.” She thought
of old American TV shows, the kinds you saw between the Bollywood
movies on telly. “It’s a free country, right?”

“God \emph{damn} it, Anda, what is \emph{wrong} with you? Did you
come here to play the game, or to screw around with this pervert
dork?”

\edialog{what do you want from me raymond?}
\edialog{Don’t kill them\dash{}let them have their wages. Go play
somewhere else}
\edialog{They’re leeches}
Lucy typed,

\edialog{they’re wrecking the game economy and they’re
providing a gold-for-cash supply that lets rich assholes buy their
way in. They don’t care about the game and neither do you}
\edialog{If they don’t play the game, they don’t eat. I think
that means that they care about the game as much as you do. You’re
being paid cash to kill them, yes? So you need to play for your
money, too. I think that makes you and them the same, a little the
same.}
\edialog{go screw yourself}
Lucy typed. Anda edged her character away from Lucy’s. Raymond’s
character was so far away now that his texting came out in tiny
type, almost too small to read. Lucy drew her bow again and nocked
an arrow.

“Lucy, DON’T!” Anda cried. Her hands moved of their own volition
and her character followed, clobbering Lucy barehanded so that her
avatar reeled and dropped its bow.

“You BITCH!” Lucy said. She drew her sword.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” Anda said, stepping back out of range. “But I
don’t want you to hurt him. I want to hear him out.”

Lucy’s avatar came on fast, and there was a click as the voicelink
dropped. Anda typed onehanded while she drew her own sword.

\edialog{dont lucy come on talk2me}
Lucy slashed at her twice and she needed both hands to defend
herself or she would have been beheaded. Anda blew out through her
nose and counterattacked, fingers pounding the keyboard. Lucy had
more experience points than she did, but she was a better player,
and she knew it. She hacked away at Lucy driving her back and back,
back down the road they’d marched together.

Abruptly, Lucy broke and ran, and Anda thought she was going away
and decided to let her go, no harm no foul, but then she saw that
Lucy wasn’t running away, she was running \emph{towards} the BFGs,
armed and primed.

“Bloody hell,” she breathed, as a BFG swung around to point at her.
Her fingers flew. She cast the fireball at Lucy in the same instant
that she cast her shield spell. Lucy loosed the bolt at her a
moment before the fireball engulfed her, cooking her down to ash,
and the bolt collided with the shield and drove Anda back, high
into the air, and the shield spell wore off before she hit ground,
costing her half her health and inventory, which scattered around
her. She tested her voicelink.

“Lucy?”

There was no reply.

\edialog{I’m very sorry you and your friend quarreled.}

She felt numb and unreal. There were rules for Fahrenheits, lots of
rules, and the penalties for breaking them varied, but the penalty
for attacking a fellow Fahrenheit was\dash{}she couldn’t think the word,
she closed her eyes, but there it was in big glowing letters:
EXPULSION.

But Lucy had started it, right? It wasn’t her fault.

But who would believe her?

She opened her eyes. Her vision swam through incipient tears. Her
heart was thudding in her ears.

\edialog{The enemy isn’t your fellow player. It’s not the
players guarding the fabrica, it’s not the girls working there. The
people who are working to destroy the game are the people who pay
you and the people who pay the girls in the fabrica, who are the
same people. You’re being paid by rival factory owners, you know
that? THEY are the ones who care nothing for the game. My girls
care about the game. You care about the game. Your common enemy is
the people who want to destroy the game and who destroy the lives
of these girls.}
“Whassamatter, you fat little cow? Is your game making you cwy?”
She jerked as if slapped. The chav who was speaking to her hadn’t
been in the Baang when she arrived, and he had mean, close-set eyes
and a football jersey and though he wasn’t any older than she, he
looked mean, and angry, and his smile was sadistic and crazy.

“Piss off,” she said, mustering her braveness.

“You wobbling tub of guts, don’t you DARE speak to me that way,” he
said, shouting right in her ear. The Baang fell silent and everyone
looked at her. The Pakistani who ran the Baang was on his phone, no
doubt calling the coppers, and that meant that her parents would
discover where she’d been and then\dash{}

“I’m talking to you, girl,” he said. “You disgusting lump of
suet\dash{}Christ, it makes me wanta puke to look at you. You ever had a
boyfriend? How’d he shag you\dash{}did he roll yer in flour and look for
the wet spot?”

She reeled back, then stood. She drew her arm back and slapped him,
as hard as she could. The boys in the Baang laughed and went
whoooooo! He purpled and balled his fists and she backed away from
him. The imprint of her fingers stood out on his cheek.

He bridged the distance between them with a quick step and
\emph{punched her}, in the belly, and the air whooshed out of her
and she fell into another player, who pushed her away, so she ended
up slumped against the wall, crying.

The mean boy was there, right in front of her, and she could smell
the chili crisps on his breath. “You disgusting whore\dash{}” he began
and she kneed him square in the nadgers, hard as she could, and he
screamed like a little girl and fell backwards. She picked up her
schoolbag and ran for the door, her chest heaving, her face
streaked with tears.

\tb

“Anda, dear, there’s a phone call for you.”

Her eyes stung. She’d been lying in her darkened bedroom for hours
now, snuffling and trying not to cry, trying not to look at the
empty desk where her PC used to live.

Her da’s voice was soft and caring, but after the silence of her
room, it sounded like a rusting hinge.

“Anda?”

She opened her eyes. He was holding a cordless phone, sillhouetted
against the open doorway.

“Who is it?”

“Someone from your game, I think,” he said. He handed her the
phone.

“Hullo?”

“Hullo chicken.” It had been a year since she’d heard that voice,
but she recognised it instantly.

“Liza?”

“Yes.”

Anda’s skin seemed to shrink over her bones. This was it: expelled.
Her heart felt like it was beating once per second, time slowed to
a crawl.

“Hullo, Liza.”

“Can you tell me what happened today?”

She did, stumbling over the details, back-tracking and stuttering.
She couldn’t remember, exactly\dash{}did Lucy move on Raymond and Anda
asked her to stop and then Lucy attacked her? Had Anda attacked
Lucy first? It was all a jumble. She should have saved a
screenmovie and taken it with her, but she couldn’t have taken
anything with her, she’d run out\dash{}

“I see. Well it sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into quite a
pile of poo, haven’t you, my girl?”

“I guess so,” Anda said. Then, because she knew that she was as
good as expelled, she said, “I don’t think it’s right to kill them,
those girls. All right?”

“Ah,” Liza said. “Well, funny you should mention that. I happen to
agree. Those girls need our help more than any of the girls
anywhere in the game. The Fahrenheits’ strength is that we are
cooperative\dash{}it’s another way that we’re better than the boys. We
care. I’m proud that you took a stand when you did\dash{}glad I found out
about this business.”

“You’re not going to expel me?”

“No, chicken, I’m not going to expel you. I think you did the right
thing\dash{}”

That meant that Lucy would be expelled. Fahrenheit had killed
Fahrenheit\dash{}something had to be done. The rules had to be enforced.
Anda swallowed hard.

“If you expel Lucy, I’ll quit,” she said, quickly, before she lost
her nerve.

Liza laughed. “Oh, chicken, you’re a brave thing, aren’t you? No
one’s being expelled, fear not. But I wanta talk to this Raymond of
yours.”

\tb

Anda came home from remedial hockey sweaty and exhausted, but not
as exhausted as the last time, nor the time before that. She could
run the whole length of the pitch twice now without collapsing\dash{}when
she’d started out, she could barely make it halfway without having
to stop and hold her side, kneading her loathsome podge to make it
stop aching. Now there was noticeably less podge, and she found
that with the ability to run the pitch came the freedom to actually
pay attention to the game, to aim her shots, to build up a degree
of accuracy that was nearly as satisfying as being really good
in-game.

Her dad knocked at the door of her bedroom after she’d showered and
changed. “How’s my girl?”

“Revising,” she said, and hefted her maths book at him.

“Did you have a fun afternoon on the pitch?”

“You mean ‘did my head get trod on’?”

“Did it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I did more treading than getting trodden on.”
The other girls were \emph{really} fat, and they didn’t have a lot
of team skills. Anda had been to war: she knew how to depend on
someone and how to be depended upon.

“That’s my girl.” He pretended to inspect the paint-work around the
light switch. “Been on the scales this week?”

She had, of course: the school nutritionist saw to that, a morning
humiliation undertaken in full sight of all the other fatties.

“Yes, Dad.”

“And\dash{}?”

“I’ve lost a stone,” she said. A little more than a stone,
actually. She had been able to fit into last year’s jeans the other
day.

She hadn’t been the sweets-shop in a month. When she thought about
sweets, it made her think of the little girls in the sweatshop.
Sweatshop, sweetshop. The sweets shop man sold his wares close to
the school because little girls who didn’t know better would be
tempted by them. No one forced them, but they were \emph{kids} and
grownups were supposed to look out for kids.

Her da beamed at her. “I’ve lost three pounds myself,” he said,
holding his tum. “I’ve been trying to follow your diet, you know.”

“I know, Da,” she said. It embarrassed her to discuss it with him.

The kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grownups, too.
It was why their situation was so impossible: the adults who were
supposed to be taking care of them were exploiting them.

“Well, I just wanted to say that I’m proud of you. We both are,
your Mum and me. And I wanted to let you know that I’ll be moving
your PC back into your room tomorrow. You’ve earned it.”

Anda blushed pink. She hadn’t really expected this. Her fingers
twitched over a phantom game-controller.

“Oh, Da,” she said. He held up his hand.

“It’s all right, girl. We’re just proud of you.”

\tb

She didn’t touch the PC the first day, nor the second. The kids in
the game\dash{}she didn’t know what to do about them. On the third day,
after hockey, she showered and changed and sat down and slipped the
headset on.

“Hello, Anda.”

“Hi, Sarge.”

Lucy had known the minute she entered the game, which meant that
she was still on Lucy’s buddy-list. Well, that was a hopeful sign.

“You don’t have to call me that. We’re the same rank now, after
all.”

Anda pulled down a menu and confirmed it: she’d been promoted to
Sergeant during her absence. She smiled.

“Gosh,” she said.

“Yes, well, you earned it,” Lucy said. “I’ve been talking to
Raymond a lot about the working conditions in the factory, and,
well\dash{}” She broke off. “I’m sorry, Anda.”

“Me too, Lucy.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” she said.

They went adventuring, running some of the game’s standard missions
together. It was fun, but after the kind of campaigning they’d done
before, it was also kind of pale and flat.

“It’s horrible, I know,” Anda said. “But I miss it.”

“Oh thank God,” Lucy said. “I thought I was the only one. It was
fun, wasn’t it? Big fights, big stakes.”

“Well, poo,” Anda said. “I don’t wanna be bored for the rest of my
life. What’re we gonna do?”

“I was hoping you knew.”

She thought about it. The part she’d loved had been going up
against grownups who were not playing the game, but \emph{gaming}
it, breaking it for money. They’d been worthy adversaries, and
there was no guilt in beating them, either.

“We’ll ask Raymond how we can help,” she said.

\tb

“I want them to walk out\dash{}to go on strike,” he said. “It’s the only
way to get results: band together and withdraw your labour.”
Raymond’s voice had a thick Mexican accent that took some getting
used to, but his English was very good\dash{}better, in fact, than
Lucy’s.

“Walk out in-game?” Lucy said.

“No,” Raymond said. “That wouldn’t be very effective. I want them
to walk out in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. I’ll call the press in,
we’ll make a big deal out of it. We can win\dash{}I know we can.”

“So what’s the problem?” Anda said.

“The same problem as always. Getting them organized. I thought that
the game would make it easier: we’ve been trying to get these girls
organized for years: in the sewing shops, and the toy factories,
but they lock the doors and keep us out and the girls go home and
their parents won’t let us talk to them. But in the game, I thought
I’d be able to reach them\dash{}”

“But the bosses keep you away?”

“I keep getting killed. I’ve been practicing my swordfighting, but
it’s so hard\dash{}”

“This will be fun,” Anda said. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Lucy said.

“To an in-game factory. We’re your new bodyguards.” The bosses
hired some pretty mean mercs, Anda knew. She’d been one. They’d be
\emph{fun} to wipe out.

Raymond’s character spun around on the screen, then planted a kiss
on Anda’s cheek. Anda made her character give him a playful shove
that sent him sprawling.

“Hey, Lucy, go get us a couple BFGs, OK?”

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