For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  But denial only works for so long. The magnet is crumbling. No one wants your swords. Your swords are worthless. Even the people who need a sword to kill some elves or orcs or random wildlife critters are faintly embarrassed by the fact, because worthless swords are now the subject of numerous jokes about idiotic investment schemes and corrupt brokerages and loony investors who got swept up in the heat of the moment. These people go and kill monsters with bows and clubs for a while, because everyone knows how much swords suck.

  How low can the value of a sword go? Subzero, as it turns out. Not only can a sword become worthless, it can actually cost you money to get rid of it. Oh, not the sword itself, of course, but the derivatives of the swords. The bets on swords. Where someone else has made a bet on whether your sword will go up or down in value, and then packaged it up with a bunch of other bets, just figuring out which bets are in which packages can cost so much money that you end up losing money, even on winning bets.

  Confidence is great, but it isn’t everything. Reality catches up with everyone, eventually. All cartoon characters eventually plummet to the bottom of the canyon. And every sword is eventually worthless.

  Command Central was bedlam. The gamerunners snarled at each other like bad-tempered, huge-bellied dinosaurs, and ate like dinosaurs, too, sending out for burgers, pizza, buckets of chicken, huge thick shakes. Anything they could scarf down one-handed while they labored over their screens and shouted insults at one another.

  Connor hardly noticed. He was deep in his feeds. Bill’s new security subroutines let him run every player’s actions backwards and forwards like a video, branching off into other players’ timelines every time they crossed paths in a party, a PvP combat session, a trade, or a conversation. It was an ocean of information, containing every secret of every player in every game that Coke ran.

  It was too much information. He was looking for something very precise—the identities of gold farmers—but what he had was every damned thing ever uttered or done in-game. It was a wondrous toy and an infinite distraction, and practically every spare moment Connor could muster was spent writing scripts and filters to help him make sense of it.

  Just now he was watching a feed of every player who had PvP killed another player, where the dead player’s toon had earned more than 1000 Mario coins in the previous hour. This was turning out to be a rich vein of potential gold farmers and Webblies. He was just trying to figure out how to write a script that would also grab the player IDs of anyone who was nearby during one of these fights, when he realized that Command Central had gotten even noisier than usual, devolving into raw chaos.

  He looked up. “What’s wrong?” he said, even as his fingers moved to call up general feeds showing the overall health of the game and its systems. And even before anyone answered he saw what was wrong. Server load had spiked across every game-shard, redlining the server-clusters seated in air-conditioned freight containers all over the world. It seemed as though every single metric for server-load was at peak—calculations per second, memory usage, disk churn. But on closer examination, he saw that this wasn’t quite true: network load was down. Way down. Somehow, these vast arrays of computing power were all being made to work so hard they were in danger of collapsing, but it was all happening without anyone talking very much to the servers.

  Indeed, network load was so low that it seemed that hardly anyone could be logged in to these servers—and yes, there it was, the number of players logged in was low and falling—a million players, then 800,000, then 500,000, then 300,000, and finally the games stabilized at about 40,000 sessions. Another click revealed why: the system was kicking off players as the load increased, trying to made room in memory and on the CPUs for what ever monster process was tearing through the frigid shipping containers.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said, shouting into the general din. Kaden was on the phone with ops, shouting at the systems administrators to get on it, trace every process on the boxes, identify what ever species of strangler vine was loose in the machines, choking them to death.

  Bill, meanwhile, had set loose his special team of grey-hat hackers to try and figure out if there were any of their black-hat brethren loose on the systems, crackers who’d broken in to steal corporate secrets, amass virtual wealth, or simply crash the thing, either to benefit a competitor, seek ransom or simply destroy for the pleasure of destruction.

  Connor’s money was on hackers. Each cluster was built and tested at Coke Games HQ in Austin, burned in for three solid weeks after it was all bolted into place in the shipping container. Once it had been green-lighted, it was loaded onto a flatbed truck and shipped to a data-center somewhere cold, preferably near a geothermal vent, tide-farm, or wind-farm. There were plenty of sites in Newfoundland and Alaska, and some very good ones in Iceland and Norway, a few in Belgium and some in Siberia. The beauty of using standard shipping containers for their systems is that they were easy to ship (duh). The beauty of sticking the containers somewhere cold was that the main cost of running the systems was cooling off the machines as they relentlessly rubbed electrons against each other, bouncing them through the pinball-machine guts of the chips within them. On a cold day when the wind was blowing, they could knock the cost of running one of those containers in half.

  Coke bought their data-center slots in threes, keeping one empty. When a new container arrived, it was slotted into the empty bay, run for a week to make sure nothing had been hurt in transit, and then the oldest container in a Coke-slot was yanked, loaded back onto a train, or ship, or flatbed truck, and sent back to Austin, detouring at Mumbai or Shenzhen or Lagos to drop off the computers within, stripped by work crews who sent them off to the used-server markets to be torn to pieces and salvaged.

  The containers were all specialized, only handling local traffic, to keep down network lag. But if one was overwhelmed, it could start offloading on its brothers around the planet—better to face a laggy play experience than to be knocked off altogether. It was inconceivable that every server on the planet would suddenly get a spike in players and hit capacity and not be able to offer some support to the others. Inconceivable, unless someone had sabotaged them.

  In the meantime, Connor had his feeds, his forensics, his gigantic haystacks and their hidden needles. Let the others worry about the downtime. He had bigger fish to fry.

  He plunged back in, writing ever-more-refined scripts to try to catch the bad guys. He had a growing file of suspects to look into in more depth, using another set of scripts and filters he’d been drafting in the back of his mind. He already knew how he’d do it: he’d build his files of bad guys, make it big and deep, follow them around the game, see who else they knew, get thousands and thousands of accounts and then:

  Destroy them.

  In one second, one instant, he’d delete every single one of their accounts, make their gold and elite items vanish, toss every single one out for terms-of-service violations. That part would be easy. The terms of service were so ridiculously strict and yet maddeningly vague that simply playing the game necessarily involved violating them. He’d obliterate them from gamespace and send them all back to their mommies crying. Thinking this kind of thing made him feel dirty and good at the same time.

  He was deep in meditation when a fat, hairy hand reached over his shoulder and slammed his laptop lid down so hard he heard the screen crack, and then the hand reversed its course and slapped him so hard in the back of the head that his face bounced off the table in front of him.

  Command Central fell perfectly silent as Connor straightened up, feeling blood thundering in his ears. He turned his head slowly. Standing over him, snorting like freight engine, stood Kaden, the head of ops, wearing a two-day beard and smelling of rancid sweat.

  “What—”

  The man drew back his beefy fist again, cocking it for another blow to Connor’s head and Connor flinched away involuntarily. He hadn’t been in a fight since his schoolyard days, and he couldn’t believe that this actual
adult man had actually hit him with his actual fists. Something was growing in his chest, bubbling over, headed into his arms and legs. His breath came in short pants, every inhalation bringing blood into his mouth. His heart thudded. He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards and—

  Leapt!

  He pushed off with both legs, throwing his own considerable bulk into Kaden’s huge, protruding midsection. Big hands grabbed his arms, waist, legs, pulled him away. Across from him, four gamerunners had Kaden pinned as well, shouting at him to calm down, just calm the hell down, all right?

  He did, a little. Someone handed Connor an ice-cold can of Coke from the huge cooler at the side of the room to press against his aching neck.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he choked, glaring at Kaden, still held fast by four beefy gamerunners.

  “You goddamned idiot! You brought down the whole goddamned network. You and your stupid scripts! Do you have any idea how much you’ve cost us with your little fishing-expedition?”

  Connor’s anger and shock morphed into fear.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Whoever wrote those damned forensics programs didn’t have a clue. They clobbered the servers so hard, taking priority over every other job, until the system had to kick all the players off the games so that it could tell you what they were doing. I’ll tell you what they were doing, Connor: they were trying to connect to the server.”

  Connor shot a look at Bill, who had written the scripts, and saw that the head of security had gone pale. Connor dimly remembered him saying that the scripts were experimental and to use them sparingly, but they had been so rewarding, it had given him such a thrill to sit like a recording angel over the worlds, like Santa Claus detecting everyone who was naughty and everyone who’d been nice—

  The enormity of what he’d done hit him almost as hard as Kaden’s fist had. He had shut down three of the twenty largest economies in the world for a period of hours. Coke ran games that turned over more money that Portugal, Poland or Peru. That was just the P’s. If Coke’s games had been real countries, it would have been an act of war, or treason.

  It was easily the biggest screwup of his career. Of his life. Possibly the biggest screwup in the entire history of the Coca-Cola corporation.

  Command Central seemed to recede, as if the room was rushing away from him. Distantly, he heard the gamerunners hiss explanations to one another, explaining the magnitude of his all-encompassing legendary world-beating FAIL.

  Connor had never had a failure like this before. He’d screwed up here and there on the way. But he’d never, ever, never, never—

  He shook his head. The hands restraining him loosened. Stiffly, he bent to pick up his laptop. Slivers of plastic and glass rained down as he lifted it. He couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he let himself out of the room.

  He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten home. His car was in the driveway, so that implied that he’d driven himself, but he had no recollection of doing so. And here he was, sitting at his dining-room table—grand and dusty, he ate his meals over the sink when he bothered to eat at home at all—and his phone was ringing from a long way off.

  Absently, he patted himself down, noticing as he did that he was holding his car keys, which bolstered his hypothesis that he had driven himself home. He found his phone and answered it.

  “Connor,” Ira said, “Connor, I don’t know how to tell you this—”

  Connor grunted. These were words you never wanted to hear from your broker.

  “Connor are you there?”

  He grunted again. Somewhere, his brain was finding some space in which to be even more alarmed.

  “Connor, listen. Are you listening? Connor, it’s like this. Mushroom Kingdom gold is collapsing, falling through the floor. There’s no bottom in sight.”

  “Oh,” Connor said. It came out in a breathless squeak.

  The broker sighed. He sounded half-hysterical. “It’s worse than that, though. That Prince in Dubai? Turns out he was writing paper that he couldn’t honor. He’s broke, too.”

  “He is,” Connor said. A million miles away, a furious gorilla was bearing its teeth and beating its hairy fists against the insides of his skull, screeching something that sounded like You said it was risk-free!

  “He isn’t saying so, of course.” Now the broker sounded more than half-hysterical. He giggled, a laugh that ran up and down several octaves like a drunk sliding his fingers up and down a piano’s keyboard. “He’s saying things like, ‘We are experiencing temporary cash-flow difficulties that have caused us to defer on some of our financial obligations, due to overall instability in the market.’ But Connor—” He giggled again. “I’ve been around the block. I know what financial BS sounds like. The prince is b-ro-k-e.”

  “He is,” Connor said. You said it was risk-free! You said it was risk-free!

  “And there’s something else.”

  Connor made a tiny sound like a whimper. The broker plunged on. “This is my last day at Paglia & Kennedy. Actually, this may be Paglia & Kennedy’s last day. We just got our notices. Paglia & Kennedy sank a lot of money into these bonds and their derivatives.

  “Everyone else ran off to steal some office supplies but I thought I would stand here on the deck of the Titanic and make some phone calls to my best clients. I put nearly everything into Mushroom Kingdom gold. Not at first, you understand. But over time, bit by bit, the returns were just so good—”

  “It was risk-free,” Connor said, louder than he’d planned to.

  “Yeah,” Ira said. “Okay, Connor, buddy, okay. I have other calls to make.” Connor could tell the poor guy expected him to be grateful. He thought he was making up for costing Connor—how much? A hundred and eighty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Connor didn’t even know anymore.

  “Thanks for calling,” he said. “Thanks, Ira. Take care of yourself.” He could barely choke the words out, but once he had, he actually felt a little better.

  He hung up the phone and dropped it on the table, letting it clatter. Somewhere out there, Coke’s gameworlds were flickering back to life, players logging in again, along with gold farmers, Webblies, Pinkertons, the whole crew. Not Connor, though. Connor had lived in a game-world of one kind or another since he was seven years old, and now he was willing to believe that he’d never visit one again.

  Any second now, he would be fired, he was quite sure. And maybe arrested. And he was broke. Worse than broke—he’d bought the last round of securities from Paglia & Kennedy on margin, on borrowed money, and he owed it back. Though with the brokerage going under they might never come and ask for it.

  He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. Some smell—the sweat that soaked his shirt, the blood that caked his face, the musty smell of the house—triggered a strong memory of his place in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, and the long, long time he’d spent there, buying virtual assets, teetering on the brink of financial ruin and even starvation. And just like that, he was free.

  Free of the terror of losing his job. Free of the terror of being broke. Free of the rage at the gold farmers. Free of the shouting, roiling anger that was Command Central, and free, finally free of his fingerspitzengefühl. The world was tumbling free and uncontrolled and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it and wasn’t that fine?

  There was an old song that went Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and Connor suddenly understood what it all meant.

  When he was eight years old, he’d thought it would be cool to work on video games. It was one of those ridiculous kid-things, like deciding to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a cowboy or a deep-sea diver. Most kids outgrow their dreams, go on to do something normal and boring. But Connor had come back to it, finding his way into gamespace through the most curious of means, and he had trapped himself there. Until today.

  Now the eight-year-old who’d sent him on a quest had finally released him from it.

  He took a shower
and iced his nose some more and put on a t-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts he’d bought on vacation in the Bahamas the year before (he’d spent most of the trip in his room, online, logged in to gamespace, keeping the fingerspitzengefühl alive) and opened his door.

  Outside it was Atlanta. He’d lived in the city for seven years, gone to its movie theaters and eaten at its restaurants, taken his parents around to its tourist sites when they visited, but he had never really lived there. It was like he’d been on an extended, seven-year visit. He kicked on a pair of flip-flops he normally wore when he had to go outside to get the mail and stepped out his door.

  He walked into the baking afternoon sun of Atlanta, breathing in the humid air that was so wet it seemed like it might condense on the roof of his mouth and drip onto his tongue. He got to the end of his driveway and looked up and down the street he’d lived on for all these years, with its giant houses and spreading trees and disused basketball hoops, and he started walking. No one except maids and gardeners walked anywhere in this neighborhood. Connor couldn’t understand why. The spreading trees smelled great, there were birds singing, even a snail inching its way across the sidewalk. In half an hour, Connor saw more interesting new things than he had in a month.

  Oh, the feeling of it all! A lightness in his head, an openness in his chest. Old pains in his back and shoulders that had been there so long he’d forgotten about them disappeared, leaving behind a comfortable feeling as striking as the quiet after a refrigerator’s compressor shuts off, leaving behind unexpected silence.

  He was sweating freely, but he didn’t mind. It just made the occasional breath of wind feel that much better.

  Eventually, his bladder demanded that he head home, so he ambled back, waving at the suspicious neighbors who peered at him from between the curtains of their vast living-room windows. As he opened his door, he heard his phone ringing. A momentary feeling of worry arced from his throat to his balls, like a streak of lightning, but he forced himself to relax again and headed for the bathroom. Whoever was calling would leave a message. There, the voicemail had picked it up. He had to pee.