For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  “Brilliant,” Ashok said, trying to force some enthusiasm into his voice, while inside he was quavering at the thought of Mala in the hands of Banerjee.

  “Very good,” Yasmin said.

  “Yes, yes,” Big Sister Nor said. “And your team will get the runestones for us, and I’m sure you’ll do it quickly and well because she is your general. All our problems should be that easy to solve. Now, Ashok, how have you done with your complicated problem?”

  Ashok looked at Yasmin, who showed no signs of leaving.

  “I think we’re there. The trick was to create a situation where they can’t put things back together without our help. Our accounts control the gold underneath so many of these securities that if they kick us all off, they’ll create a massive crash, both in-game and out-of-game. At the same time, they can’t afford to leave us running around freely, because there’s a hundred ways we could crash the system, too, from resigning in a huge group all at once to repeating the Mushroom Kingdom job.” Crashing the Mushroom Kingdom securities had been easy—Mushroom Kingdom was already riddled with scams that had been flying under the radar of Nintendo’s incompetent economist and security teams. Ashok had used Webblies and some of the Mechanical Turks that Big Sister Nor had supplied through her mysterious contact on the inside, building up a catalog of all the other scams and then giving them a nudge here and a shove there, using Webblies to produce gold on demand when necessary.

  He’d gone into it thinking that he’d never manage to take on the Mushroom Kingdom economy, believing that the security would be all-knowing and all-powerful. But in truth, it had all been held together with twine and wishful thinking, straining at the seams, and it had only taken a little pushing and pulling to first make it swell to unheard-of heights, and then to explode gloriously.

  “But we couldn’t afford to repeat the Mushroom Kingdom job. There was no way we could have pulled that one out of the nosedive, once it started. It was doomed from the start. With Coca-Cola’s games, we have to be able to promise to put it all back together again if they play cricket with us.” Talking about his work made him forget momentarily about Mala, let the iron bands around his chest loosen, just a little.

  “If we had kept things on schedule, it would have been much easier. But you know, with things all chaotic, I had to rush things. I’ve been dumping our gold reserves on the market for hours now, which has sent the market absolutely crazy, especially after they had that crash. How on Earth did you manage that?”

  Big Sister Nor snorted. “It wasn’t me. We’re not sure if they got hacked, or some other kind of big crash. It was well-timed, though.”

  “Would you tell me if you had caused it?”

  Yasmin looked faintly shocked.

  “Ashok,” BSN said, with mock sternness, “I tell everyone anything I think they need to know, and I usually tell them anything they think they need to know. We’re not in the secrets business around here.”

  That made Ashok pause. He’d always thought of the operation as being shrouded in secrecy. Certainly Big Sister Nor had never volunteered any details about her contact with the Mechanical Turks—but then, he’d never asked, had he? Nor had he ever asked if he could discuss his project with Mala’s army. He shook his head. What if the secrecy had been all in his mind?

  “Okay,” he said. “Fine. The problem is this: if I had enough time—if I had the time we’d planned on—I’d be in a position to take Svartalfheim right up to the brink of collapse and then either save it or let it collapse. It all comes down to how much gold we had in our reserves, and how much of the trading we controlled.

  “But I’ve had to rush the schedule, which means that I can’t give you both. I can bring the economy to the brink of ruin, but when I do, I need to know in advance whether we’re going to let it blow up, or whether we’re going to let it recover. I can’t decide later.” He swallowed. “I think that means we have to destroy it. I still have Zombie Mecha and Clankers underway. We can show them our force by taking out Svartalfheim and then threaten to take out the other two.”

  “Why do you want to do it that way?”

  He shook his head, realized she couldn’t see him. “Listen, they’re not going to give in to you. You’re going to go in there and start giving them orders and they’re going to assume you’re some ridiculous third-world crook. They’re going to tell you to get lost. If you make a threat and you can’t make good on it, that’ll be the last time you hear from them. They’ll never take you seriously after that.”

  Big Sister Nor clucked her tongue. “Are we so easy to dismiss?”

  “Yes,” Ashok said. “I know what the Webblies can do. But they don’t. And they won’t, until we show them.”

  “We have Mushroom Kingdom for that.”

  That stopped him. “Yes, that’s true of course. But that was so easy—”

  “They don’t know that. They don’t know anything about us, as you point out. So yes, maybe they’ll assume we’re weak and maybe they’ll assume we’re strong. But one thing I know is, if they give us what we want and then we destroy their game, they’ll never trust us again.”

  “So you’re saying you want me to set this all up so that we can’t make good on our threat?”

  “If we have to choose—”

  “We do.”

  “Then yes, that’s just what I want, Ashok. I’ll just have to be sure that what ever happens, we don’t need to carry out our threat.”

  “Okay,” Ashok said. “I can do that.”

  “Good. And Ashok?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to speak with them,” she said. “With whoever they get to talk to us. I’ll be on the call, too, of course. But you need to talk to them, to explain to them what we’ve done and what we can do.”

  Ashok swallowed. “I’m not good at that sort of talk—”

  Yasmin made a rude noise. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “You talked the steelworkers and the garment workers into coming to Dharavi!”

  “I did,” he said. “I didn’t think it would work—they’d never listened before. But once I explained what kind of situation you were all in, the thugs, the violence, told them that all of Dharavi would know if they came down—”

  “Once you really believed in it,” Big Sister Nor said. “That’s the difference. I’ve heard you talk about the things you love, Ashok. You are very convincing when it comes to that. The difference between all the conversations you had with them before and the last one is that you came to them as a Webbly last time, not as someone who was playing a game to make himself feel like he was doing something important.” The criticism took him off guard and pierced him. He had been playing a game at first, taken with his own cleverness at the vision of kids all over the world running circles around the tired old unions he’d hung around with all his life. But now, it wasn’t a game anymore. Or rather, it was a game, but it was one that he took deadly serious.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to them.”

  Now it was Jie’s turn to watch Wei-Dong, as he typed furiously at his keyboard, reaching out to hundreds of Mechanical Turks who’d said, “Yes, yes, we’re on your side; yes, we’re tired of the crummy pay and of always having the threat of being fired hanging over our heads.” He reached out to them and what he told them all was:

  Now

  Now it begins, now we are ready, now we move. He sent them links to the YouTube videos of the protests in China, the picket lines in India, the workers who’d begun to walk off the job in Indonesia and Vietnam and Cambodia, saying, “Us too, us all together, us too.”

  Only it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. The Mechanical Turks had been happy enough to seed a little disinformation, to pass on some weird-sounding stock tips or to look the other way when the Webblies were fighting the Pinkertons, but they balked at going to Coke and saying, “We demand, we want, we are all one.” Just from their typing, he could feel their fear, the terror that they might find themselves without a job next
month, that they might be the only ones who stood up.

  But not all of them. First one, then five, then fifty, and finally over a hundred of his Turks were with him, ready to put their names to a list of dues-paying Webblies who wanted to bargain as a group with Coke for a better deal. That was only twenty percent of what he’d bargained for, but they still accounted for thirty-five of the top fifty performers on the Webbly leaderboards.

  He kept up a running account for Jie, muttering in Chinese to her between messages and quick voice calls.

  “Now what?” she said. She was jammed up in a corner of the room, resting on her sweater, which she’d spread out over the filthy mattress, eyes barely open.

  “Now I call Coke,” he said. He had talked this over with Big Sister Nor a dozen times, iterating through the plan, even role-playing it with The Mighty Krang playing the management on the other end. But that didn’t mean that he was calm; anything but—he felt like he might throw up at any instant.

  “How is that supposed to work?”

  He closed his eyes, which were burning with exhaustion and dried tears. “Are you hungry?”

  She nodded. “I was thinking of going upstairs for some dumplings,” she said.

  “Bring me some?”

  She got up and walked unsteadily to the door. She pulled a compact out of her purse and looked at herself, made a face, then said, “Tea?”

  He’d drunk tea for years, but right now he needed coffee, no matter how American that made him feel. “Coffee,” he said. “Two coffees.”

  She smiled a sad little smile. “Of course. I’ll bring a syringe, too.”

  But he was already back at his computer, screwing in his borrowed earwig, dialing in on the employee-only emergency number.

  “Co’ Cola Games level two support, this is Brianna speaking,” the voice was flat, American, bored, female, Hispanic.

  “I need to speak to someone in operations,” he said. “This is Leonard Goldberg, Turk number 4446E764.”

  “Hello, Leonard. Can I have the fifth letter of your security code?”

  He had to think hard for a moment. Like the name Leonard Goldberg, like his entire American life, the security code he used to communicate with his employers seemed like it was in a distant fairytale land. “K for kilo,” he said. “No, wait, Z for Zulu.”

  “And the second letter?”

  “A for alpha.”

  “Okay, Leonard, what can I do for you?”

  “I need to speak to someone in operations,” he said. “Level four, please.”

  “What do you need to speak to operations about, please?” He could hear her clicking away at her screen, looking up the escalation procedures. Technically it wasn’t supposed to be possible to go from level two support to level four without going through level three. But the entire escalations manual was available in the private discussion forums on the unofficial Turk groups if you knew where to look for them.

  “I, uh, I think I found someone, who was, like, a pedophile? Like he might have been trying to get some kids to give him their RL addresses?” Kid-diddlers, mafia, terrorists or pirates, the four express tickets to level-four support. Anything that meant calling in the federal cops or the international ones. He figured that a potential pedophile would have just the right amount of ick to get him escalated without the call being sent straight to the cops.

  Brianna typed something, read something, muttered “Just a minute, hon,” read some more. “Okay, level four it is.” She parked him on hold.

  Jie came back with a styrofoam clamshell brimming over with steaming dumplings and a bottle of nuclear-hot Vietnamese rooster sauce and a pair of chopsticks. She picked one up, blew on it, dipped it in the sauce and held it out to him. He popped it into his mouth and chewed it, blowing out at the same time to try to cool off the scalding pork inside. They shared a smile, then the call started up again.

  “Hello, Coca-Cola Games, level four ops, Gordon speaking, your name please.”

  Leonard went through the authentication routine with Gordon again, his password coming more easily to him this time.

  “All right, Leonard, I hear you found a pedophile? One moment while I pull up your interaction history—”

  “Don’t bother,” Wei-Dong said, his pulse going so fast he felt like he was going to explode. “I made that up.”

  “Did you.” It wasn’t really a question.

  “I need to speak to Command Central,” he said. “It’s urgent.”

  “I see.”

  Wei-Dong waited. This Gordon character was supposed to get angry or sarcastic, not quiet. The pause stretched until he felt he had to fill it. “It’s about the Webblies, I have a message for Command Central.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. “Gordon, listen. I know you think I’m just a kid and you probably think I’m full of crap, but I need to speak to Command Central right now. I promise you, if you don’t connect me with them, you’ll regret it.”

  “I will, will I? Well, listen, Leonard, I’ve been looking at your interaction history and you certainly seem like an efficient worker, so I’m going to go easy on you. You can’t talk to Command Central. Period. Tell me what you want, and I’ll see that someone gets back to you.”

  This was something Wei-Dong had prepared for. “Gordon, please relay the following to Command Central. Do you have a pen?”

  “Oh, this is all being recorded.” There was the sarcasm he’d been waiting for. He was getting under his skin. Right.

  “Tell them that I represent the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, Local 56, and that we need to speak with Coca-Cola Games’s Chief Economist immediately in order to avert a collapse on the scale of the Mushroom Kingdom disaster in eight of your games. Tell them that we have two hours to act before the collapse takes place. Did you get that?”

  “What? You’re kidding—”

  “I’m serious. I’ll hold while you tell them.” He muted the connection and immediately dialed back to Singapore and told Justbob what had happened. She assured him that they’d get their economist on the line as quickly as possible and put him on hold. He bridged both calls into his earpiece but isolated them so that they wouldn’t be able to hear him, then told Jie what had just happened.

  “When can I interview you about this for the radio show?”

  He swallowed. “I think maybe never. Part of this story can probably never be publicly told. We’ll ask BSN, okay?”

  She made a face, but nodded. And now there was Gordon.

  “Leonard, you there, buddy?”

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “You’re logging in from a lot of proxies lately. Where exactly are you located? We have you in LA.”

  “I’m not in LA,” Wei-Dong said, grinning. “I’m a little ways off from there. You don’t need to know where. How’s it coming with Command Central, Gordon? Time’s a-wastin’.” Keep the pressure up, that was a critical part of the plan. Don’t give them time to think. Get them to run around like headless chickens.

  “I’m on it,” Gordon said. He swallowed audibly. “Look, you’re not serious, are you?”

  “You saw what happened to Mushroom Kingdom, right?”

  “I saw.”

  “Okay then,” Wei-Dong said. He’d been warned not to admit to any wrongdoing personally.

  “You’re serious?”

  “You know, fifteen minutes have gone by already.”

  Another swallow. “I’ll be right back.”

  A new line cut in, different background noise, chaotic, lots of chatter. Gordon had probably been a teleworker sitting in his underwear in his living room. This was different. This was a room filled with angry, arguing people who were typing on keyboards like machineguns.

  “This is William Vaughan, head of security for Coca-Cola Games. Hello, Leonard.”

  “Hello, Mr. Vaughan.” Leonard said. Be polite. That was part of the plan, too. Real operators were grown-ups, polite, businesslike. “May I speak with Connor
Prikkel, please?” Prikkel’s name had been easy enough to google. Wei-Dong had spent some time watching videos of the man at conferences. He seemed like an awkward, super-brainy academic type run to fat. He typed a quick one-handed message to Justbob: Got cmd ctnrl, where r u?

  “Mr. Prikkel is away from the office. I have been asked to speak with you in his stead.”

  He had prepped for this, too. “I’m afraid that I need to talk with Connor Prikkel personally.”

  “That’s not possible,” Vaughan said, sounding like he was barely holding onto his temper.

  “Mr. Vaughan,” Wei-Dong said. He hadn’t spoken this much English for weeks. It was weird. He’d started to think in Chinese, to dream in it. “I don’t know if, uh, Gordon told you what I told him—”

  “Yes, he did. That’s why you’re talking to me now.”

  “Mr. Prikkel is qualified to evaluate what I have to say to him. I’m not qualified to understand it. And no offense, I don’t think you are either.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Justbob sent him a message back: 5 min.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Wei-Dong said. “You get Mr. Prikkel and call me back. I’ll leave you a voice-chat ID. You can listen in on the call.”

  “How about if I just trace where you’re calling us from and we call the police? Leonard, kid, you are working on my last good nerve and I’m about to lose it with you. Fair warning.”

  Wei-Dong tsk’d. He was starting to enjoy this. “Mr. Vaughan, here’s the thing. In—” he looked at the clock—“about ten minutes, you’re going to see total chaos in your gold markets. All those contracts that Coke Games has written for gold futures are going to start to slide into oblivion. You can spend the next ten minutes trying to trace me, but you’re not going to find me, and even if you do, you’re not going to be able to do anything about it, because I am an ocean away from the nearest police force that will give you the time of day.” The security man started to choke out a response, but Wei-Dong kept talking. “I’d prefer not to destroy the game. I love it. I love playing all these games. You have my record there, you know it. We all feel that way, all the Webblies. It’s where we go to work every day. We want it to succeed. But we want that to happen on terms that are fair to us. So believe me when I tell you that I am calling to strike a bargain that you can afford, that we can live with and that will save the game and get everything back on track by the end of the day.” He looked at the clock again, did some mental arithmetic. “By tomorrow morning, your time, that is.”