by John Shirley
Arendsen was surrounded by press, a microphone in her face, the lights of television cameras shining on her as she pulled off her batting helmet, pushed a hand through her hair. Someone ran out with an ice pack and wrapped it around her arm as she answered questions.
Grace paused. The Newsmaker, as if sensing her, looked up, past the clutch of reporters. Grace nodded to her and touched two fingers to her cap. She hoped Arendsen understood that it was a gesture of respect. And of farewell. Surely Ricky Arendsen understood that Grace’s moment had passed.
She made her leaden feet move then, down the steps, away from Arendsen’s triumph.
“So, Ricky, the season’s looking a lot better now, isn’t it?”
Ricky nodded to the reporter, though she couldn’t see him past the glare. “Yeah.”
“Nice hit you got. Did that surprise you?”
Ricky laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, kind of a surprise. Wasn’t very pretty.”
“Hey, Rick.” She turned her head, searching for the sportswriter. He grinned up at her, gestured toward the visitors’ dugout. “Did you see The Na—um, did you see Everett’s dive?”
“No. Was it good?”
“Fantastic. What did you think of them bringing her up to face you? Just a cheap trick?”
Ricky turned all the way around at that, putting her back to the television camera. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know, Ricky. Because you’re the only woman in the big leagues.”
Now Ricky recognized his face from the grainy photo at the head of his newspaper column. He had been the first to predict her own trip back to the minors. She squinted at him. “I’m not the only one,” she said flatly. “Not now.”
“Hey,” he said, with a scornful laugh. “No way Everett’s gonna stick after this loss. It was all about the novelty.”
Ricky stared at him for a long moment, her jaw tight. He stared back, unabashed. Slowly, she swiveled back to look directly into the television cameras. “The girl can play. Hit, field, run. Management’s nuts if they don’t keep her. They deserve to lose.”
She spun on her heel then, ducking her head as she moved down the dugout steps, on to her locker room. At the door she paused when she spotted the Skipper. “Hey, Skip. Anybody get Everett’s ball for her? The homer?”
“Nah, it’s gone,” he said. “It’ll show up on eBay tomorrow. We got the other one, though, the grounder.”
“Get it for me, will you?”
Grace leaned against the outer wall of the locker room, arms folded, waiting for the men to finish so she could use the showers. Family members and friends of the players lounged about the door, talking with each other, obviously trying not to stare at her. The other ballplayers emerged one by one, and the little crowd began to diminish. Grace slumped against the wall and closed her eyes.
“ ’Scuse me.”
Grace opened her eyes and shot upright.
It was Ricky Arendsen, still in her uniform, standing in front of her with a baseball in her left hand. She stuck out her right, and Grace could see those incredible fingers up close, the sculpted wrist, the powerful forearm. She said, “Ricky Arendsen.”
“Oh!” Grace said, inadequately. “Oh. Wow. Ricky. Hey, it’s great to meet you, really great.” She put out her own hand and shook Arendsen’s.
“This is yours,” Arendsen said, holding out the ball. “The homer’s gone, but this was your infield hit. I signed it. Hope that was okay.”
Grace took the ball and turned it in her hand. In blue ink, Arendsen had scrawled, “First hit in the bigs,” and signed her name and the date. Grace felt her cheeks burn. “This is—this is so nice of you.”
“Nah.” Arendsen shrugged. “No problem.”
A camera flashed, and they both looked up. Someone had snapped a picture of the two of them together.
“ ’Spose that’ll be on eBay tomorrow, too,” Arendsen said.
“Do you think so?”
Arendsen grinned. “Oh, yeah. First time we faced each other.”
Grace made herself smile. “Probably the last, Ricky.”
Arendsen shook her head. “Nah. You’ll be back, Gracie.” She raised an impressive forefinger. “And I’m gonna get you on the splitter next time.”
Grace’s heart lifted. She said, laughing, “We’ll just see about that.”
Ricky Arendsen clapped her on the shoulder and then turned and left, stopping once or twice to sign autographs. Grace went in for her shower, nodding to the security guys beside the door. Arendsen was right. She’d be back. She’d gotten her hits, made a good throw. If this team wouldn’t have her, she’d get her agent to put her someplace else. She’d face Arendsen again, one way or another.
But she was going to watch out for that splitter.
As Cory Doctorow wrote in an introduction to this story, “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—reports on blogs about . . . ‘gold farmers’ in Latin America who were being paid a pittance [to] undertake boring, repetitive wealth-creating tasks in a game, with the product of their labor sold to rich northern gamers who wanted to level-up without all the hard work.” Unfortunately, exploitation and oppression, just like competition, seems to be an eternal characteristic of humanity. (And, yes, the title is an intentional reference to “Ender’s Game” found elsewhere in this anthology.)
Anda’s Game
Cory Doctorow
Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, 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 twelve, 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 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 Anda 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—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 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 en
emies to ground.
“The whole Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular election, but they voted me in cos of my prowess in 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 ten, and there were no women in games—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 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 you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came—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.
> Anda
her sergeant said to her,
> how would you like to make some money?
> Money, Sarge?
Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they paid gold—money wasn’t really something you talked about in-game.
The Sarge—sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz—moved her avatar impatiently.
> Something wrong with my typing, Anda?
> No, Sarge
she typed.
> You mean gold?
> 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—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 kerb-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 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—you know, pervy, is it?”
“Gag me. No. Jeez, Anda! Are you nuts? No—they want us to go kill some guys.”
“Oh, we’re good at that!”
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—gigantic and fast—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—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 twenty 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,
> please sorry u cn have my gold sorry!!!!!!
Anda laughed and sent him to the respawn gate.
> You’re a nasty person, Anda,
Lucy typed.
> I’m a Fahrenheit!!!!!!!!!!
she typed back.
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 fro
m their fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, assuming that the sentries were non-player characters—who wanted to pay to sit around in gamespace watching a boring road all day?—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—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-metre 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.
