For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  The Jabberwock did one of those whipping, rippling barrel rolls that were its trademark. The currents buffeted him, sending him rocking from side to side. He corrected, overcorrected, corrected again, hit the re-arm button, the fire button, the re-arm button, the fire button—

  The Jabberwock was facing him now. It reared back, flexing its claws, clicking its jaws together. In a second it would be on him, it would open him from crotch to throat and eat his guts, any second now—

  Crash! The sound of the blunderbuss was like an explosion in a pots-and-pans drawer, a million metallic clangs and bangs as the sea was sliced by a rapidly expanding cone of lethal, screaming metal tableware.

  The Jabberwock dissolved, ripped into a slowly rising mushroom of meat and claws and leathery scales. The left side of its head ripped toward him and bounced off him, settling in the sand. The water turned pink, then red, and the death-screech of the Jabberwock seemed to carom off the water and lap back over him again and again. It was a fantastic sound.

  His guildies were going nuts, seven thousand miles away, screaming his name, and not Leonard, but Wei-Dong, chanting it in their internet off Jiabin Road in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong was grinning ferociously in his bedroom, basking in it.

  And when the water cleared, there again were the vorpal blade and helmet in their crust of barnacles, sitting innocently on the ocean floor. The gweilo—the gweilo, he’d forgotten all about the gweilo!—moved clumsily toward it.

  “I don’t think so,” said Ping, in pretty good English. His toon moved so fast that the gweilo probably didn’t even see him coming. Ping’s sword went snicker-snack, and the gweilo’s head fell to the sand, a dumb, betrayed expression on its face.

  “What the—”

  Wei-Dong dropped him from the chat.

  “That’s your treasure, brother,” Ping said. “You earned it.”

  “But the money—”

  “We can make the money tomorrow night. That was killer, dude!” It was one of Ping’s favorite English phrases, and it was the highest praise in their guild. And now he had a vorpal blade and helmet. It was a good night.

  They surfaced and paddled to shore and conjured up their mounts again and rode back to the guildhall, chatting all the way, dispatching the occasional minor beast without much fuss. The guys weren’t too put out at being 75 bucks poorer than they’d expected. They were players first, business people second. And that had been fun.

  And now it was 2:30 and he’d have to be up for school in four hours, and at this rate, he was going to be lying awake for a long time. “Okay, I’m going to go, guys,” he said, in his best Chinese. They bade him farewell, and the chat channel went dead. In the sudden silence of his room, he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. And another sound—a tread on the floor outside his door. A hand on the doorknob—

  Crapcrapcrap

  He managed to get the lid of the laptop down and his covers pulled up before the door opened, but he was still holding the machine under the sheets, and his father’s glare from the doorway told him that he wasn’t fooling anyone. Wordlessly, still glaring, his father crossed the room and delicately removed the earwig from Wei-Dong’s ear. It glowed telltale blue, blinking, looking for the laptop that was now sleeping under Wei-Dong’s artistically redecorated SpongeBob sheets.

  “Dad—” he began.

  “Leonard, it’s 2:30 in the morning. I’m not going to discuss this with you right now. But we’re going to talk about it in the morning. And you’re going to have a long, long time to think about it afterward.” He yanked back the sheet and took the laptop out of Wei-Dong’s now-limp hand.

  “Dad!” he said, as his father turned and left the room, but his father gave no indication he’d heard before he pulled the bedroom door firmly and authoritatively shut.

  Mala missed the birdcalls. When they’d lived in the village, there’d been birdsong every morning, breaking the perfect peace of the night to let them know that the sun was rising and the day was beginning. That was when she’d been a little girl. Here in Mumbai, she was fourteen and there were some sickly rooster calls at dawn, but they were nearly drowned out by the never-ending traffic song: the horns, the engines revving, the calls late in the night.

  In the village, there’d been the birdcalls, the silence, and peace, times when everyone wasn’t always watching. In Mumbai, there was nothing but the people, the people everywhere, so that every breath you breathed tasted of the mouth that had exhaled it before you got it.

  She and her mother and her brother slept together in a tiny room over Mr. Kunal’s plastic-recycling factory in Dharavi, the huge squatter’s slum at the north end of the city. During the day, the room was used to sort plastic into a dozen tubs—the plastic coming from an endless procession of huge rice-sacks that were filled at the shipyards. The ships went to America and Europe and Asia filled with goods made in India, and came back filled with garbage, plastic that the pickers of Dharavi sorted, cleaned, melted and reformed into pellets, and shipped to the factories so that they could be turned into manufactured goods and shipped back to America, Europe and Asia.

  When they’d arrived at Dharavi, Mala had found it terrifying: the narrow shacks growing up to blot out the sky, the dirt lanes between them with gutters running in iridescent blue and red from the dye-shops, the choking always-smell of burning plastic, the roar of motorbikes racing between the buildings. And the eyes, eyes from every window and roof, all watching them as Mamaji led her and her little brother to the factory of Mr. Kunal, where they were to live now and forevermore.

  But barely a year had gone by and the smell had disappeared. The eyes had become friendly. She could hop from one lane to another with perfect confidence, never getting lost on her way to do the marketing or to attend the afternoon classes at the little schoolroom over the restaurant. The sorting work had been boring, but never hard, and there was always food, and there were other girls to play with, and Mamaji had made friends who helped them out. Piece by piece, she’d become a Dharavi girl, and now she looked on the newcomers with a mixture of generosity and pity.

  And the work—well, the work had gotten a lot better, just lately.

  It started when she was in the games-cafe with Yasmin, stealing an hour after lessons to spend a few rupees of the money she’d saved from her pay packet. (Almost all of it went to the family, of course, but Mamaji sometimes let her keep some back and advised her to spend it on a treat at the corner shop.) Yasmin had never played Zombie Mecha, but of course they’d both seen the movies at the little filmi house on the road that separated the Muslim and the Hindu sections of Dharavi. Mala loved Zombie Mecha, and she was good at it, too. She preferred the PvP servers where players could hunt other players, trying to topple their giant mecha-suits so that the zombies around them could swarm over them, crack open their cockpit cowls, and feast on the avs within.

  Most of the girls at the games-cafe came in and played little games with cute animals and traded for hearts and jewels. But for Mala, the action was in the awesome carnage of the multiplayer war games. It only took a few minutes to get Yasmin through the basics of piloting her little squadron and then she could get down to tactics.

  That was it, that was what none of the other players seemed to understand: tactics were everything. They treated the game like it was a random chaos of screeching rockets and explosions, a confusion to be waded into and survived as best as you could.

  But for Mala, the confusion was something that happened to other people. For Mala, the explosions and camera-shake and the screech of the zombies were just minor details, to be noted as part of the Big Picture, the armies arrayed on the battlefield in her mind. On that battlefield, the massed forces took on a density and a color that showed where their strengths and weaknesses were, how they were joined to each other, and how pushing on this one, over here, would topple that one over there. You could face down your enemies head-on, rockets against rockets, guns against guns, and then the winner would be the luckier one, or the one w
ith the most ammo, or the one with the best shields.

  But if you were smart, you didn’t have to be lucky, or tougher. Mala liked to lob rockets and grenades over the opposing armies, to their left and right, creating box canyons of rubble and debris that blocked their escape. Meanwhile, a few of her harriers would be off in the weeds aggroing huge herds of zombies, getting them really mad, gathering them up until they were like locusts, blotting out the ground in all directions, leading them ever closer to that box canyon.

  Just before they’d come into view, her frontal force would peel off, running away in a seeming act of cowardice. Her enemies would be buoyed up by false confidence and give chase—until they saw the harriers coming straight for them, with an unstoppable, torrential pestilence of zombies hot on their heels. Most times, they were too shocked to do anything, not even fire at the harriers as they ran straight for their lines and through them, into the one escape left behind in the box canyon, blowing the crack shut as they left. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the zombies to overwhelm and devour your opponents, while you snickered and ate a sweet and drank a little tea from the urn by the cashier’s counter. The sounds of the zombies rending the armies of her enemies and gnawing their bones was particularly satisfying.

  Yasmin had been distracted by the zombies, the disgusting entrails, the shining rockets. But she’d seen, oh yes, she’d seen how Mala’s strategies were able to demolish much larger opposing armies, and she got over her squeamishness.

  And so on they played, drawing an audience: first the hooting derisive boys (who fell silent when they watched the armies fall before her, and who started to call her “General Robotwallah” without even a hint of mockery), and then the girls, shy at first, peeking over the boys’ shoulders, then shoving forward and cheering and beating their fists on the walls and stamping their feet for each dramatic victory.

  It wasn’t cheap, though. Mala’s carefully hoarded store of rupees shrank, buffered somewhat by a few coins from other players who paid her a little here and there to teach them how to really play. She knew she could have borrowed the money, or let some boy spend it on her—there was already fierce competition for the right to go over the road to the drinkswallah and buy her a masala Coke, a fizzing, foaming spicy explosion of Coke and masala spice and crushed ice that soothed the rawness at the back of her throat that had been her constant companion since they’d come to Dharavi.

  But nice girls from the village didn’t let boys buy them things. Boys wanted something in return. She knew that, knew it from the movies and from the life around her. She knew what happened to girls who let boys take care of their needs. There was always a reckoning.

  When the strange man first approached her, she thought about nice girls and boys and what they expected, and she wouldn’t talk to him or meet his eye. She didn’t know what he wanted, but he wasn’t going to get it from her. So when he got up from his chair by the cashier as she came into the cafe, rose and crossed to intercept her with his smart linen suit, good shoes, short, neatly oiled hair, and small moustache, she’d stepped around him, stepped past him, pretended she didn’t hear him say, “Excuse me, miss,” and “Miss? Miss? Please, just a moment of your time.”

  But Mrs. Dotta, the owner of the cafe, shouted at her, “Mala, you listen to this man, you listen to what he has to say to you. You don’t be rude in my shop, no you don’t!” And because Mrs. Dotta was also from a village, and because her mother had said that Mala could play games but only in Mrs. Dotta’s cafe, Mrs. Dotta being the sort of person you could trust not to allow improper doings, or drugs, or violence, or criminality, Mala stopped and turned to the man, silent, expecting.

  “Ah,” he said. “Thank you.” He nodded to Mrs. Dotta. “Thank you.” He turned back to her, and to the army of boys and girls who’d gathered around her, her army, the ones who called her General Robotwallah and meant it.

  “I hear that you are a very good player,” he said. Mala waggled her chin back and forth, half-closing her eyes, letting her chin say, Yes, I’m a good player, and I’m good enough that I don’t need to boast about it.

  “Is she a good player?”

  Mala turned to her army, which had the discipline to remain silent until she gave them the nod. She waggled her chin at them: go on.

  And they erupted in an enthused babble, extolling the virtues of their General Robotwallah, the epic battles they’d fought and won against impossible odds.

  “I have some work for good players.”

  Mala had heard rumors of this. “You represent a league?”

  The man smiled a little smile and shook his head. He smelled of citrusy cologne and betel, a sweet combination of smells she’d never smelled before. “No, not a league. You know that in the game, there are players who don’t play for fun? Players who play to make money?”

  “The kind of money you’re offering to us?”

  His chin waggled and he chuckled. “No, not exactly. There are players who play to build up game-money, which they sell on to other players who are too lazy to do the playing for themselves.”

  Mala thought about this for a moment. The containers went out of India filled with goods, and came back filled with garbage for Dharavi. Somewhere out there, in the America of the filmi shows, there was a world of people with unimaginable wealth. “We’ll do it,” she said. “I’ve already got more credits than I can spend. How much do they pay for them?”

  Again, the chuckle. “Actually,” he said, then stopped. Her army was absolutely silent now, hanging on his every word. From the machines came the soft crashing of the wars, taking place in the world inside the network, all day and all night long. “Actually, that’s not exactly it. We want you and your friends to destroy them, kill their avs, take their fortunes.”

  Mala thought for another instant, puzzled. Who would want to kill these other players? “You’re a rival?”

  The man waggled his chin. Maybe yes, maybe no.

  She thought some more. “You work for the game!” she said. “You work for the game and you don’t want—”

  “Who I work for isn’t important,” the man said, holding up his fingers. He wore a wedding ring on one hand, and two gold rings on the other. He was missing the top joints on three of his fingers, she saw. That was common in the village, where farmers were always getting caught in the machines. Here was a man from a village, a man who’d come to Mumbai and become a man in a neat suit with a neat mustache and gold rings glinting on what remained of his fingers. Here was the reason her mother had brought them to Dharavi, the reason for the sore throat and the burning eyes and the endless work over the plastic-sorting tubs.

  “What’s important is that we would pay you and your friends—”

  “My army,” she said, interrupting him without thinking. For a moment his eyes flashed dangerously and she sensed that he was about to slap her, but she stood her ground. She’d been slapped plenty before. He snorted once through his nose, then went on.

  “Yes, Mala, your army. We would pay you to destroy these players. You’d be told what sort of mecha they were piloting, what their player-names were, and you’d have to root them out and destroy them. You’d keep all their wealth, and you’d get rupees, too.”

  “How much?”

  He made a pained expression, like he had a little gas. “Perhaps we should discuss that in private, later? With your mother present?”

  Mala noticed that he didn’t say, “your parents,” but rather, “your mother.” Mrs. Dotta and he had been talking, then. He knew about Mala, and she didn’t know about him. She was just a girl from the village, after all, and this was the world, where she was still trying to understand it all. She was a general, but she was also a girl from the village. General Girl from the Village.

  So he’d come that night to Mr. Kunal’s factory, and Mala’s mother had fed him thali and papadams from the women’s papadam collective, and they’d boiled water for chai in the electric kettle and the man had pretended that his fine clothes
and gold belonged here, and had squatted back on his heels like a man in the village, his hairy ankles peeking out over his socks. No one Mala knew wore socks.

  “Mr. Banerjee,” Mamaji said, “I don’t understand this, but I know Mrs. Dotta. If she says you can be trusted…” She trailed off, because really, she didn’t know Mrs. Dotta. In Dharavi, there were many hazards for a young girl. Mamaji would fret over them endlessly while she brushed out Mala’s hair at night, all the ways a girl could find herself ruined or hurt here. But the money.

  “A lakh of rupees every month,” he said. “Plus a bonus. Of course, she’ll have to pay her ‘army’—” he’d given Mala a little chin waggle at that, see, I remember “—out of that. But how much would be up to her.”

  “These children wouldn’t have any money if it wasn’t for my Mala!” Mamaji said, affronted at their imaginary grasping hands. “They’re only playing a game! They should be glad just to play with her!” Mamaji had been furious when she discovered that Mala had been playing at the cafe all these afternoons. She thought that Mala only played once in a while, not with every rupee and moment she had to spare. But when the man—Mr. Banerjee—had mentioned her talent and the money it could earn for the family, suddenly Mamaji had become her daughter’s business manager.

  Mala saw that Mr. Banerjee had known this would happen and wondered what else Mrs. Dotta had told him about their family.

  “Mamaji,” she said, quietly, keeping her eyes down in the way they did in the village. “They’re my army, and they need paying if they play well. Otherwise, they won’t be my army for long.”

  Mamaji looked hard at her. Beside them, Mala’s little brother, Gopal, took advantage of their distraction to sneak the last bit of eggplant off Mala’s plate. Mala noticed, but pretended she hadn’t, and concentrated on keeping her eyes down.

  Mamaji said, “Now, Mala, I know you want to be good to your friends, but you have to think of your family first. We will find a fair way to compensate them—maybe we could prepare a weekly feast for them here, using some of the money. I’m sure they could all use a good meal.”