For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  Wei-Dong actually blushed, and his chest inflated, and he looked so proud that Ping had to say it again. “I’m in awe,” he said. “What a story!”

  “I just did what I had to do,” Wei-Dong said with an unconvincing, nonchalant shrug. His Mandarin was better than Ping remembered it. Maybe it was just being face to face rather than over a fuzzy, unreliable net-link, the ability to see the whole body, the whole face.

  All of Ping’s earlier worry and irritation melted away. He was overcome by a wave of affection for this kid who had travelled thousands of kilometers to be part of the same big guild. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I have to tell you this. A few hours ago, I was very upset with you. I thought it was just ego or stupidity, your coming all this way with the boxes. I wanted to strangle you. I thought you were a stupid, spoiled—” He saw the look on Wei-Dong’s face, pure heartbreak and stopped, held up his hands. “Wait! What I’m trying to say is, I thought all this, but then I met you and heard your story, and I realized that you want this just as much as I do, and have as much at stake now. That you’re a real, a real comrade.” The word was funny, an old communist word that had been leached of color and meaning by ten million hours of revolutionary song-singing in school. But it fit.

  And it worked. Wei-Dong’s chest swelled up even bigger, like a balloon about to sail away, and his cheeks glowed like red coals. He fumbled for words, but his Chinese seemed to have fled him, so Ping laughed and handed him another lotus leaf, this one filled with seafood.

  “Eat!” he said. “Eat!” He checked the time on his phone, read the coded messages there from Big Sister Nor. “You’ve got ten minutes to finish and then we have to get to the guild-house for the big call!”

  You’re in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little disoriented already, that’s key. Maybe it’s just a strange time to be out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or very late at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the suburbs, and no one else is around.

  A stranger approaches you. He’s well-dressed, smiling. His body language says, I am a friend, and I’m slightly out of place, too. He’s holding something. It’s a pane of glass, large, fragile, the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He’s struggling with it. It’s heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he says, with a note of self-awareness at the absurdity of this all, “Can you please hold this for a second?” He sounds a little desperate, too, like he’s about to drop it.

  You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.

  And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly plunges his hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your keys, wallet and cash into his own pockets. He never breaks eye contact in the ten or fifteen seconds it takes him to accomplish the task, and then he turns on his heel and walks away (he doesn’t run, that’s important) very quickly, for a dozen steps, and then he breaks into a wind-sprint of a run, powering up like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.

  You’re still holding onto the pane of glass.

  Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?

  What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break on the strange pavement? Set it down carefully?

  Tell you one thing you’re not going to do. You’re not going to run with it. Running with a ten-kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in your hands is even dumber than taking hold of it in the first place.

  “What’s at work here?” Big Sister Nor was on the video conference window, with The Mighty Krang and Justbob to either side of her, heads down on their screens, keeping the back channel text-chat running while Big Sister Nor lectured. She was speaking Mandarin, then Hindi. The text-chat was alive in three alphabets and five languages, and machine translations appeared beneath the words. English for Wei-Dong, Chinese for his guildies. There were a couple thousand people logged in direct, and tens of thousands due to check in later when they finished their shifts.

  “Dingleberry in K-L says ‘disorientation,’” The Mighty Krang said, without looking up.

  Big Sister Nor nodded. “And?”

  “‘Social Contract,’” said Justbob. “That’s MrGreen in Singapore.”

  BSN showed her teeth in a hard grin. “Singapore, where they know all about the social contract! Yes, yes! That’s just it. A person comes up to you and asks you for help, you help; it’s in our instincts, it’s in our upbringing. It’s what keeps us all civilized.”

  And then she told them a story of a group of workers in Phnom Penh, gold farmers who worked for someone who was supposed to be very kindly and good to them, took them out for lunch once a week, brought in good dinners and movies to show when they worked late, but who always seemed to make small…mistakes…in their pay-packets. Not much, and he was always embarrassed when it happened and paid up, and he was even more embarrassed when he “forgot” that it was payday and was a day, two days, three days late paying them. But he was their friend, their good friend, and they had an unwritten contract with him that said that they were all good friends and you don’t call your good friend a thief.

  And then he disappeared.

  They came to work one day—three days after payday, and they hadn’t been paid yet, of course—and the man who ran the internet cafe had simply shrugged and said he had no idea where this boss had gone. A few of the workers had even worked through the day, and even the next, because their good friend must be about to show up someday soon! And then their accounts stopped working; all the accounts, all the characters they’d been leveling, the personal characters they used for the big rare-drop raids, everything.

  Some of them went home, some of them found other jobs. And eventually, some of them ran into their old boss again. He was running a new gold farm, with new young men working for him. The boss was so apologetic, he even cried and begged their forgiveness; his creditors had called in their loans and he’d had to flee to escape them, but he wanted to make it up to the workers, his friends, whom he’d loved as sons. He’d put them to work as senior members of his new farm, at double their old wages, just give him another chance.

  The first payday was late. One day. Two days. Three days. Then, the boss didn’t come to work at all. Some of the younger, newer workers wanted to work some more, because, after all, the boss was their dear friend. And the old hands, the ones who’d just been taken for a second time, they finally admitted to their fellow workers what they’d known all along: the boss was a crook, and he’d just robbed them all.

  “That’s how it works. You violate the social contract, the other person doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s no script for it. There’s a moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you can empty out his pockets.”

  There were more stories like this, and they made everyone laugh, sprinkles of “kekekekeke” in the chat, but when it was over, Wei-Dong felt his first tremor of doubt.

  “What is it?” Jie asked him. She was very beautiful, and from what he could understand, she was a very famous radio person, some kind of local hero for the factory girls. It was clear that Lu was head-over-heels in love with her, and everyone else deferred to her as well. When she turned her attention on him, the whole room turned with her. The room—a flat in a strange old part of town—was crowded with people, hot and loud with the fans from the computers.

  “It’s just,” he said, waved his hands. He was suddenly very tired. He hadn’t had a nap or even a shower since sneaking out of the port, and meeting all these people, having the videoconference with Big Sister Nor, it was all so much. His Chinese fled him and he found himself fumbling for the words. He swallowed, thought it through. “Look,” he said. “I want to help all the workers get a better deal, the Turks, the farmers, the factory girls.” They all nodded cautiously. “But is that what we’re doing here? Are we going to win any rights by, you know, by being crooks? By ripping people off?”

  The group erupted into speech. Apparently he’d opened up an old debate, and the room was breaking into its traditional
sides. The Chinese was fast and slangy, and he lost track of it very quickly, and then the magnitude of what he’d done finally, really hit him. Here he was, thousands of miles from home, an illegal immigrant in a country where he stood out like a sore thumb. He was about to get involved in a criminal enterprise—hell he was already involved in it—that was supposed to rock the world to its foundations. And he was only seventeen. He felt two inches tall and as smashed thin as a pancake.

  “Wei-Dong,” one of the boys said, in his ear. It was Matthew, who had a funny, leathery, worn look to him, but whose eyes twinkled with intelligence. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. They’ll be at this for hours.”

  He looked Matthew up and down. Technically, they were guildies, but who knew what that meant anymore? What sort of social contract did they really have, these strangers and him?

  “Come on,” Matthew said, and his face was kind and caring. “We’ll get you somewhere to sleep, find you some clothes.”

  That offer was too good to pass up. Matthew led him out of the apartment, out of the building, and out in the streets. The sun had set while they were conferenced in, and the heat had gone out of the air. Matthew led him up and down several maze-like alleys, through some giant housing blocks, and then into another building, this one even more run-down than the last one. They went up nine flights of stairs, and by the time they reached the right floor, Wei-Dong felt like he would collapse. His thighs burned, his chest heaved and ached, and the sweat was coursing down his face and neck and back and butt and thighs.

  “I had the same question as you,” Matthew said. “When I got out of jail.”

  Wei-Dong willed himself not to edge away from Matthew. The apartment was filled with thin mattresses, covering nearly the entire floor like some kind of crazy, thick carpet. They sat on adjacent beds, shoes off. Wei-Dong must have made some sign of his surprise, because Matthew smiled a sad smile. “I went to jail for going on strike with other Webblies. I’m not a murderer, Wei-Dong.”

  Wei-Dong felt himself blushing. He mumbled and apology.

  “I had a long talk with Big Sister Nor. Here’s what she told me: she said that a traditional strike, where you take your labor away from the bosses and demand a better deal, that it wouldn’t work here. That we needed to do that, but that we also needed to be able to show everyone who has us at their mercy that they’ve overrated their power. When the bosses say, ‘We’ll beat you up,’ or when the police say, ‘We’ll put you in jail,’ or when the game companies say, ‘We’ll throw you out,’ we need to be able to say, ‘Oh no you won’t!’”

  The sheer delight he put into this last phrase made Wei-Dong smile, even though he was so tired he could barely move his face.

  He scrubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands and said, “Look, I think my emotions are on trampolines today. It’s been a very big day.” Wei-Dong chuckled. “You understand.”

  “I understand. I just wanted to let you know that this isn’t just about being a crook. It’s about changing the power dynamics in the battle. You’re a fighter, you understand that, don’t you? I hear you play healers. You know what a raid is like with and without a healer?”

  Wei-Dong nodded. “It’s a very different fight,” he said. “Different tactics, different feel.”

  “A different dynamic. There’s math to describe it, you know? I found a research paper on it. It’s fascinating. I’ll email you a copy. What we’re doing here, we’re changing the dynamic, the balance of power, for workers everywhere. You’ll see.”

  Wei-Dong yawned and waved his fist over his mouth weakly.

  “You need to sleep,” Matthew said. “Good night, comrade.”

  Wei-Dong woke once in the night, and every mattress was filled, and everyone was snoring and breathing and snuffling and scratching. There must have been twenty guys in the room with him, a human carpet of restless energy, cigarette-and-garlic breath, foot-odor, body-odor, and muffled grumbles. It was so utterly unlike the ship, unlike his room in the Cecil Hotel in LA, unlike his parents’ home in Orange County…The ground actually felt like it was sloping away for a minute, like the storm-tossed deck of a container ship, and he thought for a wild, disoriented minute that there was an earthquake, and pictured the highrise buildings he’d seen clustered together on the way over crashing into one another like dominoes. Then the land righted itself again and the panic dissipated.

  He thought of his mother and knew that he’d have to find a PC and give her a call the next day. They’d exchanged a lot of email while he was on the ship, a lot of reminisces about his dad, and he’d felt closer to her than he had in years.

  Thinking of his mother gave him an odd feeling of peace, not the homesickness he’d half-expected, and he drifted off again amid the farts and the grunts and the human sounds of the human people he’d put himself among.

  Connor’s fingerspitzengefühl was going crazy. Like all the gamerunners, he had a sizeable portfolio of game assets and derivatives. It wasn’t exactly fair—betting on the future of game gold when you got a say in that future put you at a sizeable advantage over the people on the other side of the bets. But screw ’em if they can’t take a joke.

  Besides, his portfolio was so big and complex that he couldn’t manage it himself. Like everyone else he had a broker, a guy who worked for one of the big houses, a company that had once been an auto manufacturer before it went bankrupt, got bailed out, wrung out, twisted and financialized until the only thing left of any value in it was the part of the company that had packaged up and sold off the car-loans suckers had taken out on its clunkermobiles.

  And his broker loved him, because whenever Connor phoned in an order for a certain complex derivative—say, a buy-order for $300,000 worth of insurance policies on six-month gatling gun futures from Zombie Mecha—then it was a good bet that there were going to be a lot fewer gatling guns in Zombie Mecha in six months (or that the gatling gun would get a power-up, maybe depleted uranium ammo that could rip through ten zombies before stopping), driving the price of the guns way, way up. The broker, in turn, could make money on that prediction by letting his best clients in on the deal, buying gatling gun insurance policies, or even gatling gun futures, or futures on gatling gun insurance, raking in fat commissions and getting everyone else rich at the same time.

  So Connor had an advantage. So who was complaining? Who did it hurt?

  And in turn, Connor’s broker liked to call him up with hot tips on other financial instruments he might want to consider, financial instruments that came to him from his other clients, a diverse group of highly placed people who were privy to all sorts of secrets and insider knowledge. Every day this week, the broker, Ira, had called up Connor and had a conversation that went like this:

  Ira: “Hey, man, is this a good time?”

  Connor (distractedly, locked in battle with his many screens and their many feeds): “I’ve always got time for you, buddy. You’ve got my money.”

  Ira: “Well, I appreciate it. I’ll try to be quick. We’ve got a new product we’re getting behind this week, something that kinda took us by surprise. It’s from Mushroom Kingdom, which is weird for us, because Nintendo tends to play all that stuff very close and tight, leaving nothing on the table for the rest of us. But we’ve got a line on a fully hedged, no-risk package that I wanted to give you first crack at, because we’re in limited supply…”

  And from there it descended into an indecipherable babble of banker-ese, like a bunch of automated text generated by searching the web for “fully hedged” (meaning, we’ve got a bet that pays out if you win and another that pays out if you lose, so no matter what, you come out ahead, something that everyone promised and no one ever delivered) and blowing around the text that came up in the search-result snippets, like a verbal whirlwind with “fully hedged” in the middle of it.

  The thing was, Connor was really good at speaking banker-ese, and this just didn’t add up. The payoff was gigantic, 15% in a single quarter, up to 45% in the ideal sce
nario, and that was in a tight market where most people were happy to be taking in one or two percent. This was the kind of promise he associated with crazy, high-risk ventures, not anything “fully hedged.”

  He stopped Ira’s enthusiastically sputtering explanation, said, “You said no-risk there, buddy?”

  Ira drew in a breath. “Did I say that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, you know, everything’s got a risk. But yeah, I’m putting my own money into this.” He swallowed. “I don’t want to pressure you—”

  Connor couldn’t help himself, he snorted. Ira had many things going for him, but he was a pushy son of a bitch.

  “Really!” But he sounded contrite. “Okay, let me be straight with you. I didn’t believe it myself, either. None of us did. You know what bond salesmen are like, we’ve seen it all. But there were kids in the office, straight out of school. These kids, they have a lot more time to play than we do—” Connor repressed the snort, but just barely. The last time Ira played a game, it had been World of Warcraft, in the dawn of time. He was a competent if unimaginative broker, but he was no gamer. That’s okay, he also wasn’t a pork-farmer, but he could still buy pork futures. “—and they were hearing about this stuff from other players. They’d started buying in for themselves, using their monthly bonuses, you know, it’s kind of a tradition to treat that bonus money as pennies from heaven and spend it on long-shot bets. Anyway, they started to clean up, and clean up, and clean up.”

  “So how do you know it’s not tapped out?”

  “That’s the thing. A couple of the old timers bought into it and you know, they started to clean up too. And then I got in on it—”