The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  “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—a million gold and three missions’ worth of cash. The Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold—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.

  “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, a Fahrenheit in ber-zerker rage, sword swinging. She made straight for the BFG10K. She spelled the merc who was cranking it, 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—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—and she killed them, slamming her keypad, howling, barely conscious of the answering howls in her headset.

  Now 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. “LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!”

  Lucy snapped out orders, and the opposition before Anda thinned as Fahrenheits fell on them from behind. In short order, every merc was butchered or run off.

  Anda waited by the BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahren-heits 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—that was nutso.” She opened the door and her character disappeared in a fireball that erupted from directly overhead. A door-curse.

  “SHIT!” Lucy said in her headset.

  Anda giggled. “Teach you to go rushing into things,” she said. She used a scrying scroll, 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 “grappling” with piles of leaves, 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.

  > Wait, please, don’t—I’d like to speak with you

  It was a noob avatar, just like the others, but not just like them after all, for it moved with purpose, backing away from her sword. And it spoke English.

  > nothing personal

  she typed.

  > just a job

  > There are many here to kill—take me last at least. I need to talk to you.

  > 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 wrong.

  > My name is Raymond, and I live in Tijuana. I am a labor organizer in the factories here. What is your name?

  > i don’t give out my name in-game

  > What can I call you?

  > kali

  It was a name she liked to use in-game: Kali, Destroyer of Worlds, like the Hindu goddess.

  > Are you in India?

  > london

  > You are Indian?

  > 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.

  > 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.

  > 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 really ached. She slaughtered half a dozen more.

  > The bosses used to use bots, but the game has counter-measures 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.

  > look

  she typed, exasperated.

  > 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.

  > When you kill them, they don’t get paid.

  no porfa necesito mi plata

  > 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.

  > not a clue

  > I’ve been trying to find that out myself, Kali.

  They were all dead now. Raymond stood alone amongst the piled corpses.

  > Go ahead

  he typed,

  > 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—”

  “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 nai’ve.”

  “You don’t think it’s true?”

  “Naw, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, okay? 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 mum’s calling me to supper. You’re almost here, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  She reached down and shut off her PC.

  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, eleven 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, 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.”

  Anda’s mum licked a finger and scrubbed it across Anda’s neck. “Gosh, you’re dirty—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 filthy.”

  “Mum, 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 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—her ears 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, acantho-sis nigricans—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—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.

  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.

  Obesity-related diabetes. They had lectures on this every term in health class—the fastest-growing ailment among British teens— accompanied by photos of orca-fat sacks of lard sitting 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 squeezed it as hard as she could, until she had to 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—

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

  “Sorry, Sarge,” she said. “My PC’s been broken. . . .” 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.

  “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—literally stinky, it smelled like a train-station toilet—being obnoxious. The headphones provided were as greasy as a slice of pizza, and the mouthpiece was sticky with excited boy-saliva from past games.

  “Well, 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.

  The BFG10K simplified things quite a lot. Find the cottage, aim the BFG10K, fire it, whim-wham, no more cottage.

  “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 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 badass, you and me, as badass as they come, and we got that way through discipline and hard work and really caring about the game, right?”

  “Yes, right, but—”

  “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. Yeah. She’s amazing, and she cares about the game too—that’s what makes us all Fahrenheits: we’re committed to each other, to teamwork, and to fair play.”

  Anda had heard these words—lifted from the Fahrenheit mission statement—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. We would never trade cash for gold or buy a weapon—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. That’s how rich noobs can buy their way into the game that we had to play hard to get into.

  “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, the game will get less and less fun.

  “These people 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? Or are you so worried about these leeches on the other side of the world?”

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

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

  > Hello, Kali

  “Oh, Christ, he’s back,” Lucy said. Raymond’s avatar had snuck up behind them.

  > 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 photos. She examined them. The first showed ranked little girls 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, tin shacks made of corrugated aluminum and trash, muddy trails between them, spray-painted graffiti, rude boys loitering, rubbish and carrier bags blowing.

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

  > That’s who you’re about to deprive of a day’s wages

  “Oh, hell, no,” Lucy said. “Not again. I killed him last time and I said I’d do it again. That’s it, he’s dead.” Her character turned toward 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.”

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

  > what do you want from me raymond?

  > Don’t kill them—let th
em have their wages. Go play somewhere else.

  > They’re leeches

  Lucy typed,

  > 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

  > If they don’t play the game, they don’t eat. 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 a little the same.

  > go screw yourself

  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 one-handed while she drew her own sword.

  > dont lucy come on talk2me

  Lucy slashed at her twice and she needed both hands to defend herself. 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 toward 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 high into the air, and the shield spell wore off before she hit ground, scattering her inventory.