For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  She held up a finger and said, “Hold on to that,” and clicked and started talking into her mic again, taking a call from another factory girl, this one more angry than sad. “I had a friend who was selling franchises for a line of herbal remedies,” she said, and Jie rolled her eyes.

  “Go on,” she said. “Sounds like a great opportunity.” The sarcasm in her voice was unmistakable.

  “That’s what I thought,” the girl said. She sounded like she wanted to punch something. “At first I thought it was about selling the herbal remedies, and I liked that, because my mother always gave me herbs when I was sick as a girl, and I thought that a lot of the girls here would want to buy the remedies, too, because they missed home.”

  “Yes,” Jie said. “Who wouldn’t want to remember her mommy?”

  “Exactly! Just what I thought. And my friend told me about how much money I could make, but not from selling the herbs! She said that selling the herbs would be my downliners’ job, and that I would manage them. I would be a boss!”

  “Who wouldn’t want to be a boss?”

  “Right! She said that she was recruiting me to be in the top layer of the organization, and that I would then go and recruit two of my friends to be my salespeople. They’d each pay me for the right to sign up more downliners, and that all the downliners would buy herbs from me and then I would get a share of all their profits. She showed me how if my two downliners signed up two more, and each of them signed up two more, and so on, that I would have hundreds of downliners working for me in just a few days! And if I only got a few RMB from each one, I’d be making thousands every month, just for signing up two people.”

  “A very generous friend,” Jie said, and though she sounded like she was joking, she wasn’t smiling.

  “Yes, yes! That’s what I thought. And all I needed to do was pay her one small fee for the right to sell downline, and she would supply me with herbs and sales kits and everything else I needed. She said that she was signing me up because I was Fujianese, like her, and she wanted to take care of me. She said I should find girls who were still back in the village, girls I’d gone to school with, and call them and sign them up, because they needed to make money.”

  “Why would girls in the village need herbal remedies? Wouldn’t they have their mothers?”

  That stopped the angry, fast-talking girl. “I didn’t think of that,” she said, at last. “It seemed like I was going to be a hero for everyone, and like I would escape from the factory and get rich. My friend said she was going to quit in a few weeks and get her own apartment. I thought about moving out of the dorm, having money to send home—”

  “You dreamed about money and all that it could buy you, but you didn’t devote the same attention to figuring out whether this thing could possibly work, right?”

  Another silence. “Yes,” she said. “I have to say that this is true.”

  “And then?”

  “It started okay. I sold a few downlines, but they were having trouble making their downline commitments. And then my friend, she started to ask me for her percentage of my income. When I told her I wasn’t receiving the income my downliners owed me, she changed.”

  “Go on.” Jie’s eyes were fixed on the wall behind Lu’s head. She was in another world, it seemed, picturing the girl and her problem.

  “She got angry. She said that I had made a commitment to her, and that she had made commitments to her uplines based on this, and that I would have to pay her so that she could pay the people she owed. She made me feel like I’d betrayed her, betrayed the incredible opportunity. She said I was just a simple girl from a village, not fit to be a businesswoman. She called me all day, over and over, screaming, ‘Where’s my money?’”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I finally went to her. I cried. I told her I didn’t know what to do. And she told me that I knew, but that I didn’t have the courage to do it. She told me I had to go to my downliners, get tough on them, get the money out of them. And if they wouldn’t pay, I’d have to get the money some other way: from my parents, my friends, my savings. I could get new downliners next month.”

  “And so you called up your downliners?”

  “I did.” She drew in a heaving breath. “At first, I was gentle and kind to them, but my friend called me over and over again, and I got angry. Angry at them, not at her. It was their fault that I was having to spend all this time and energy, that I couldn’t sleep or eat. And so I got meaner. I threatened them, begged them, shouted at them. These two girls, they were my old friends. I’d known them since we were little babies. I knew their secrets. I threatened to call my friend’s father and tell him that she had let a boy take naked pictures of her when she was fifteen. I threatened to tell my other friend’s sister that she had kissed her boyfriend.”

  “Did they pay what they owed you?”

  “At first. The first month, they paid. The next month, though, I had to call them and shout at them some more. It was like I was sitting above myself, watching a crazy stranger say these terrible things to my old, old friends. But they paid again. And then, in the third month—” She stopped abruptly. The silence swelled. Lu felt it getting thicker, staticky.

  “What happened?”

  “Then one friend ate rat poison.” Her voice was a tiny, far-away whisper. More silence. “I had told her that I would go to her father and—and—” Silence. “It was how her mother had committed suicide when we were both small. The same kind of poison. Her father was a hard man, an Old One Hundred Names who had lived through the Cultural Revolution. He has no mercy in him. When she couldn’t get the money, she stole it. Got caught. He was going to find out. And if he didn’t, I would tell him about the photos she’d taken. And she couldn’t face that. I drove her to kill herself. It was me. I killed her.”

  “She killed herself,” Jie said, her voice full of compassion. “It’s the women’s disease in China. We’re the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men. You can’t take the blame for this.” She paused. “Not all of it.”

  “That’s not all,” the girl said, all the anger gone out of her voice now, nothing left behind but distilled despair.

  “Of course not,” Jie said. “You still owe for this month. And next month, and the month after.”

  “My friend, the one who brought me into this, she knows…things…about me. The kind of things I knew about my friends. Things that could cost me my job, my home, my boyfriend…”

  “Of course. That’s how cuanxiao works.” Lu had heard the term before. “Network sales,” is what it meant. There was always someone trying to sell you something as part of a cuanxiao scheme. He used to laugh at it. Now it seemed a lot more serious. “And somewhere, upline from here, there’s someone else in the cuanxiao, who has something on her. And there are preachers who can convince you that you’ll make a fortune with cuanxiao, and that you just need to inspire your family and friends.”

  “You know him? Mr. Lee. My friend took me to a meeting. Mr. Lee seemed like he was on fire, and he made me so sure that I would become rich if only—”

  “I don’t know Mr. Lee. But there are hundreds of Mr. Lees in Guangdong province. You know what we call them? Pharaohs, like the Egyptian kings they buried in pyramids. That’s because they sit on top of a pyramid of fools like you. Beneath the pharaoh, there’s a pair of downliners, and beneath them, two pairs, and beneath them, two more pairs, and so on, all passing money up the power to some feudal idiot from the countryside who knows how to talk a good line and has never worked a day in his life. Did you ever study math?”

  “I got a gold medal in our canton’s Math Olympiad!”

  “That’s very good! Math is useful in this world. Let’s do a little math. If each level of the pyramid has double the number of members of the previous level, how many members are there on the tenth level of the pyramid?”

  “What? Oh. Um. Two to the tenth. That’s—” 1024, Lu thought to himself. “One thousand twenty-four
, right?”

  “Exactly. How many on the thirtieth level?”

  “Um…”

  Lu pulled out his phone, used the calculator, did some figuring. “Um…”

  “Oh, just guess.”

  “It’s big. A hundred thousand? No! About five hundred thousand.”

  “You should give your medal back, sister. It’s over a billion.” Jie tapped some numbers into her keyboard. “1,073,741,824 to be precise. There’s 1.6 billion people in China. Your herb salespeople were supposed to recruit new downliners every two weeks. At that rate—” She typed some more. “It would be just over a year before every person in China was working in your pyramid, even the tiny babies and the oldest grannies.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know about network selling, you must have. What year are you?” Meaning, how many years since you left the village?

  “Four,” the girl admitted. “I did know it. Of course. But I thought this was different. I thought because there was a real product and because it was only two people at a time—”

  “I don’t think you thought about any of that, sister. I think you thought about having a big apartment and a lot of money. Isn’t that right?”

  “There was money, though! It was working for weeks! My friend had made so much—”

  “What level of the pyramid was she on? Ten? Twenty? When you’re stealing from the new people to pay the old people, it’s a good deal for the old people. Not so good for the new people. People like you or your downliners.”

  “I’m a fool,” the girl said. “I’m a monster! I destroyed my friends’ lives!” She was sobbing now, screaming out the confession for millions of people to hear.

  “It’s true,” Jie said, mildly. “You’re a fool and a monster, just like thousands of other people. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can stop sniveling and pull yourself together. Your friend, the one who recruited you? Someone’s holding something over her, the way that she was holding something over you. Sit down with her, and do what ever it takes to get her out. The most evil thing about these pyramids is that they turn friend against friend, make us betray the people we love to keep from being betrayed ourselves. Even if you’re one of the lucky few at the top who makes some money from it, you pay the price of your integrity, your friendships and your soul. The only way to win is not to play.”

  “But—”

  “But, but, but! Listen, foolish girl! You called me tonight because your soul is stained with the evil that you did. Did you think I would just tell you that it’s all right, you did what you had to do, no blame on you? No! You know me, I’m Jiandi. I don’t grant absolution. I tell you what you must do to pay for your crimes. You don’t get to confess, feel better and walk away. You have to do the hard work now—you have to set things to right, help your friends, restore your integrity and conscience. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.” Quiet, meek.

  “Say it louder.” She snapped it like a general giving an order.

  “I hear you!”

  “LOUDER!”

  “I HEAR YOU!”

  “Good!” She laughed and rubbed at one ear. “I think they heard you in Macau! Good girl. Go and do right now!”

  And she clicked something and another ad rolled in Lu’s headphones. He took them off, found that his eyes were moist with tears. “That poor girl,” he said.

  “There’s thousands more like her,” Jie said. “It’s a sickness, like gambling. It comes from not understanding numbers. They all win their little math medals, but they don’t believe in the numbers. Now, you were about to tell me about some kind of reinforcement.”

  “Intermittent reinforcement,” he said. “My friend Matthew, he leads our guild, he told me about it. It comes from experiments with rats. Imagine that you have a rat who gets some food every time he pushes a lever. How often do you think he pushes the lever?”

  “As often as he’s hungry, I suppose. I kept mice once—they knew when it was time for food and they’d rush over to the corner of the cage that I dropped their seeds into.”

  “Right. Now, what about a level that gives food every fifth time they press the lever?”

  “I don’t know—less?”

  “About the same, actually, After a while, the rats figure out that they need five presses for a food pellet and every time they want feeding, they wander over and hit it five times. Now, what about a lever that gives food out at random? Sometimes one press, sometimes one hundred presses?”

  “They’d give up, right?”

  “Wrong! They press it like crazy, all day and all night. It’s like someone who wins a little money in the lottery one week and then plays every week afterward, forever. The uncertainty drives them crazy, it’s the most addictive system of all. Matthew says it’s the most important part of game design—one day you manage to kill a really hard NPC with a lucky swing, and it drops some incredibly epic item, and you make more money in ten seconds than you made all week, and you have to keep going back to that spot, looking for a monster like it, thinking it’ll happen again.”

  “But it’s random, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Matthew says it is. I sometimes think that the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when you’re just about to quit, you get another jackpot.” He shrugged. “That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

  “If it’s random, it shouldn’t make any difference what you do and where you play. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads ten times in a row, you’ve got exactly the same chance of it coming up heads an eleventh time than if had come up all tails, or half and half.”

  “Matthew says stuff like that all the time. He says that although it may be unlikely that you’ll get ten heads in a row, each flip has exactly the same chance.”

  “Matthew sounds like he knows his math.”

  “He does. You should meet him sometime.” He swallowed. “If he ever gets out of jail, that is.”

  “Oh, we’ll have to do something about that.”

  She handled six more calls, running the show for another two hours, breaking for commercials and promising all her listeners the most exciting event of their lifetime if they just hung in. At first, Lu listened attentively, but his head hurt and he was so tired, and eventually he slumped in his seat and dozed, drifting in and out of dreams as he listened to Jie berating the foolish factory girls of South China.

  He woke to a sprinkle of ice-water on his face, gasped and sat up, opening his eyes just in time to see Jie dancing back away from him, laughing, her face glowing with excitement. “I love doing this show!” she said. “You’re up next, handsome!”

  He looked at his phone and realized that he’d dozed for an hour more, and that it was well past supper time. His stomach rumbled. Jie had taken off her shoes and socks and unbuttoned the top two buttons on her red blouse. Her hair was down and her makeup was smudged. She looked like she was having the time of her life.

  “Wha?” his head throbbed and it tasted like something had used his mouth for a toilet.

  “Come on,” she said, and moved close again, snapping his headphones on. “It’s coming up on 8PM. This is when my listenership peaks. They’re back from dinner, they’re finished gossiping, and they’re all sitting on their beds, tuning in on their computers and phones and radios. And I’ve been hyping you for hours. Every pretty girl in the Pearl River Delta is waiting to meet you, are you ready?”

  “I—I—” He suddenly couldn’t find his tongue. “Yes!” he managed.

  “Get your headset on,” she called, dashing around to her side of the desk and pouncing on her seat. “We’re live in ten, nine, eight…”

  He fumbled with his headset, swung the mic down, reached for the water glass and gulped down too much, choked, tried to keep it in, choked more, spilled water all down his front. Jie laughed aloud, gulping it down as she spoke into her mic.

  “We’re back, we’re back, we’
re back, and now sisters, I have the special surprise I’ve been promising you all night! A knight of the people, a hero of the factory, a killer who has hunted pirates in space and dragons in the hills, a professional gold-farmer named—” She broke off. “What name shall I call you by, hero?”

  “Oh!” He thought for a second. “Tank,” he said. “It’s the kind of player I am, the tank.”

  “A tank!” She giggled. “That’s just perfect. Oh, sisters, if only you could see this big, muscled tank I have sitting here in my studio. Let me tell you about Tank. I was watching a little video this afternoon, and like many of you, I found myself watching something amazing: dozens of boys, lined up outside an internet cafe, blinking and pale as newborn mice in the daylight. It seemed that they were a different kind of factory boy, the legendary gold farmers of Shenzhen, and they were demanding a better job, better pay, better conditions, and an end to their vicious, greedy bosses. Does that sound familiar, sisters?

  “The police arrived, the dirty jingcha, with their helmets and clubs and gas, cowards with their faces hidden and their brutal weapons in hand to fight these boys who only wanted justice. But did the boys flee? No! Did they go back to their jobs and apologize to their bosses? No! The mouse army stood its ground, claimed their workplace as their rightful home, the place their work paid for. And what did the jingcha do? Tell me, Tank, what did they do?”

  Lu looked at her like she was crazy. She made urgent hand-gestures at him as the silence stretched. “I, that is, they beat us up!”

  “They certainly did! Sisters, download this video now, please! Watch as the jingcha charge the boys of Shenzhen, breaking their heads, gassing them, clubbing them. And now, focus on one brave lad off to the left, right at the 14:22 mark. Strong chin, wide eyes, a little freckles over his nose, hair in disarray. See him stand his ground through the charge with his comrades by his side? See the jingcha with his club who comes upon the boy from behind and hits him in the shoulder, knocking him down? See the club come up again and land on the poor boy’s head, the blood that flies from the wound?