Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—that’s the orders. Kill them all and then I’ll make a phone call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul ass back to the island. I’m coming out there to meet you, but it’s a long haul from the respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, okay?”

  “Sure,” Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten. One, two, one, two and through and through, she thought, lopping their heads off. Her vorpal blade went snicker-snack. One left. He stood off in the back.

  > no porfa necesito mi plata

  Italian? No, Spanish. She’d had a term of it in Third Form, though she couldn’t understand what this twit was saying. She could always paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who cared? She cut his head off.

  “They’re all dead,” she said into her headset.

  “Good job!” Lucy said. “Okay, I’m gonna make a call. Sit tight.”

  Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and shirts. She picked some of them up. They were totally generic: the shirts you crafted when you were down at level zero and trying to get enough skillz to actually make something of yourself. Each one would fetch just a few coppers. Add it all together and you barely had two thousand gold.

  Just to pass the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.

  > no [colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial] [money|silver]

  Pathetic. A few thousand golds—he could make that much by playing a couple of the beginner missions. More fun. More rewarding. Crafting shirts!

  She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars showed up. More generics.

  > are you players or bots?

  she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.

  > any trouble?

  Well, all right, then.

  > no trouble

  > good

  One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.

  > you can go now

  “Lucy?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Two blokes just showed up and told me to piss off. They’re noobs, though. Should I kill them?”

  “No! Geez, Anda, those are the contacts. They’re just making sure the job was done. Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern, okay?”

  Anda went over to Lucy’s corpse and looted it, then set out down the road, dragging the BFG behind her. She stopped at the bend and snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs standing amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand golds’ worth of badly crafted shirts.

  That was the first of Anda and Lucy’s missions, but it wasn’t the last. That month, she fought her way through six more, and the PayPal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, pounds sterling that she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 meters away from the school gate, next to the candy shop that was likewise 501 meters away.

  “Anda, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to spend so much time with your game,” her dad said, prodding her bulging podge with a finger. “It’s not healthy.”

  “Daaaa!” she said, pushing his finger aside. “I go to PE every stinking day. It’s good enough for the Ministry of Education.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little potbelly that he wore his belted trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin, and two bat wings of flab hanging off his upper arms. She pinched his chin and wiggled it.

  “I get loads more exercise than you, Mr. Kettle.”

  “But I pay the bills around here, little Miss Pot.”

  “You’re not seriously complaining about the cost of the game?” she said, infusing her voice with as much incredulity and disgust as she could muster. “Ten quid a week and I get unlimited calls, texts, and messages! Plus play, of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and spell-checker and translator bots!” (This was all from rote—every member of the Fahrenheits memorized this or something very like it for dealing with recalcitrant, ignorant parental units.) “Fine, then. If the game is too dear for you, Da, let’s set it aside and I’ll just start using a normal phone, is that what you want?”

  Her da held up his hands. “I surrender, Miss Pot. But do try to get a little more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?”

  “Getting my head trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like,” she said darkly.

  “Zackly!” he said, prodding her podge anew. “That’s the stuff! Getting my head trodden on was what made me the man I are today!”

  Her da could bluster all he liked about paying the bills, but she had pocket money for the first time in her life: not book tokens and fruit tokens and milk tokens that could be exchanged for “healthy” snacks and literature. She had real money, cash money that she could spend outside of the five-hundred-meter sugar-free zone that surrounded her school.

  She wasn’t just kicking arse in the game, now—she was the richest kid she knew, and suddenly she was everybody’s best pal, with handfuls of Curly Wurlys and Dairy Milks and Mars bars that she could selectively distribute to her schoolmates.

  —

  “Go get a BFG,” Lucy said. “We’re going on a mission.”

  Lucy’s voice in her ear was a constant companion in her life now. When she wasn’t on Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running missions into the wee hours of the night. The Fahrenheit armorers, non-player characters, had learned to recognize her and they had the Clan’s BFGs oiled and ready for her when she showed up.

  Today’s mission was close to home, which was good: the road trips were getting tedious. Sometimes, non-player characters or Game Masters would try to get them involved in an official in-game mission, impressed by their stats and weapons, and it sometimes broke her heart to pass them up, but cash always beat gold and experience beat experience points: Money talks and bullshit walks, as Lucy liked to say.

  They caught the first round of snipers/lookouts before they had a chance to attack or send off a message. Anda used the scrying spell to spot them. Lucy had kept both BFGs armed and she loosed rounds at the hilltops flanking the roadway as soon as Anda gave her the signal, long before they got into bow range.

  As they picked their way through the ruined chunks of the dead player-character snipers, Anda still on the lookout, she broke the silence over their voice link.

  “Hey, Lucy?”

  “Anda, if you’re not going to call me Sarge, at least don’t call me ‘Hey, Lucy!’ My dad loved that old TV show and he makes that joke every visitation day.”

  “Sorry, Sarge. Sarge?”

  “Yes, Anda?”

  “I just can’t understand why anyone would pay us cash for these missions.”

  “You complaining?”

  “No, but—”

  “Anyone asking you to cyber some old pervert?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, then. I don’t know, either. But the money’s good. I don’t care. Hell, probably it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”

  “You really think that?”

  Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it this way. Most of the world is living on, like, a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every day on a frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends Mom three thousand a month in child support—that’s a hundred bucks a day. So if a day’s money here is a hundred dollars, then to an African or whatever my frappuccino is worth, like, five hundred dollars. And I buy two or three every day.

  “And we’re not rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t think twice about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee—how much do you think a hot dog and a Coke go for on the space station? A thousand bucks!”

  “So that’s what I think is going on. There’s someone out there, some Saudi or Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that this is just chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess around with so
me other rich person. To them, we’re like the Africans making a dollar a day to craft—I mean, sew—T-shirts. What’s a couple hundred bucks to them? A cup of coffee.”

  Anda thought about it. It made a kind of sense. She’d been on hols in Bratislava where they got a posh hotel room for ten quid—less than she was spending every day on sweeties and fizzy drinks.

  “Three o’clock,” she said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers pat-patted in bits around the forest floor.

  “Nice one, Anda.”

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  —

  They smashed half a dozen more sniper outposts and fought their way through a couple of packs of suspiciously badass brigands before coming upon the cottage.

  “Bloody hell,” Anda breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards, forty or fifty of them, with bows and spells and spears, in entrenched positions.

  “This is nuts,” Lucy agreed. “I’m calling them. This is nuts.”

  There was a muting click as Lucy rang off and Anda used up a scrying scroll to examine the inventories of the guards around the corner. The more she looked, the more scared she got. They were loaded down with spells, a couple of them were guarding BFGs and what looked like an even bigger BFG, maybe the fabled BFG10K, something that was removed from the game economy not long after gameday one as too disruptive to the balance of power. Supposedly one or two existed, but that was just a rumor. Wasn’t it?

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “Okay, this is how this goes. We’ve got to do this. I just called in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob prentices for backup.” Anda summed that up in her head to a hundred player characters and maybe three hundred non-player characters: familiars, servants, demons…

  “That’s a lot of shares to split the pay into,” Anda said.

  “Oh, ye of little tits,” Lucy said. “I’ve negotiated a bonus for us if we make it—a million gold and three missions’ worth of cash. The Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold—they’ll be here in an hour.”

  This wasn’t a mission anymore, Anda realized. It was war. Gamewar. Hundreds of players converging on this shard, squaring off against the ranked mercenaries guarding the huge cottage over the hill.

  —

  Lucy wasn’t the ranking Fahrenheit on the scene, but she was the designated general. One of the gamers up from Fahrenheit Island brought a team flag for her to carry, a long spear with the magical standard snapping proudly from it as the troops formed behind her.

  “On my signal,” Lucy said. The voice chat was like a wind tunnel from all the unmuted breathing voices, hundreds of girls in hundreds of bedrooms like Anda’s, all over the world, some sitting down before breakfast, some just coming home from school, some roused from sleep by their ringing game-sponsored mobiles. “Go, go, go!”

  They went, roaring, and Anda roared, too, heedless of her parents downstairs in front of the blaring telly, heedless of her throat lining, a Fahrenheit in berserker rage, sword swinging. She made straight for the BFG10K—a siege engine that could level a town wall, and it would be hers, captured by her for the Fahrenheits if she could do it. She spelled the merc who was cranking it into insensibility, rolled and rolled again to dodge arrows and spells, healed herself when an arrow found her leg and sent her tumbling, springing to her feet before another arrow could strike home, watching her hit points and experience points move in opposite directions.

  HERS! She vaulted the BFG10K and snicker-snacked her sword through two mercs’ heads. Two more appeared—they had the thing primed and aimed at the main body of Fahrenheit fighters, and they could turn the battle’s tide just by firing it—and she killed them, slamming her keypad, howling, barely conscious of the answering howls in her headset.

  Now she had the BFG10K, though more mercs were closing on her. She disarmed it quickly and spelled at the nearest bunch of mercs, then had to take evasive action against the hail of incoming arrows and spells. It was all she could do to cast healing spells fast enough to avoid losing consciousness.

  “LUCY!” she called into her headset. “LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!”

  Lucy snapped out orders, and the opposition before Anda began to thin as Fahrenheits fell on them from behind. The flood was stemmed, and now the Fahrenheits’ greater numbers and discipline showed. In short order, every merc was butchered or run off.

  Anda waited by the BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahrenheits and saw them on their way. “Now we take the cottage,” Lucy said.

  “Right,” Anda said. She set her character off for the doorway. Lucy’s brushed past her.

  “I’ll be glad when we’re done with this—that was bugfuck nutso.” Her character opened the door and disappeared in a fireball that erupted from directly overhead. A door curse, a serious one, one that cooked her in her armor in seconds.

  “SHIT!” Lucy said in her headset.

  Anda giggled. “Teach you to go rushing into things,” she said. She used up a couple of scrying scrolls, making sure that there was nothing else in the cottage save for millions of shirts and thousands of unarmed noob avatars that she’d have to mow down like grass to finish out the mission.

  She descended upon them like a reaper, swinging her sword heedlessly, taking five or six out with each swing. When she’d been a noob in the game, she’d had to endure endless fighting practice, “grappling” with piles of leaves and other nonlethal targets, just to get enough experience points to have a chance of hitting anything. This was every bit as dull.

  Her wrists were getting tired, and her chest heaved and her hated podge wobbled as she worked the keypad.

  > Wait, please, don’t—I’d like to speak with you

  It was a noob avatar, just like the others, but not just like it, after all, for it moved with purpose, backing away from her sword. And it spoke English.

  > nothing personal

  she typed.

  > just a job

  > There are many here to kill—take me last at least. I need to talk to you.

  > talk, then

  she typed. Meeting players who moved well and spoke English was hardly unusual in gamespace, but here in the cleanup phase, it felt out of place. It felt wrong.

  > My name is Raymond, and I live in Tijuana. I am a labor organizer in the factories here. What is your name?

  > i don’t give out my name in-game

  > What can I call you?

  > kali

  It was a name she liked to use in-game: Kali, Destroyer of Worlds, like the Hindu goddess.

  > Are you in India?

  > london

  > You are Indian?

  > naw im a whitey

  She was halfway through the room, mowing down the noobs in twos and threes. She was hungry and bored and this Raymond was weirding her out.

  > Do you know who these people are that you’re killing?

  She didn’t answer, but she had an idea. She killed four more and shook out her wrists.

  > They’re working for less than a dollar a day. The shirts they make are traded for gold and the gold is sold on eBay. Once their avatars have leveled up, they too are sold off on eBay. They’re mostly young girls supporting their families. They’re the lucky ones: the unlucky ones work as prostitutes.

  Her wrists really ached. She slaughtered half a dozen more.

  > The bosses used to use bots, but the game has countermeasures against them. Hiring children to click the mouse is cheaper than hiring programmers to circumvent the rules. I’ve been trying to unionize them because they’ve got a very high rate of injury. They have to play for 18-hour shifts with only one short toilet break. Some of them can’t hold it in and they soil themselves where they sit.

  > look

  she typed, exasperated.

  > it’s none of my lookout, is it. the world’s like that. lots of people with no money. im just a kid, theres nothing i can do about it.

  > When you kill them, they don’t get paid.

  no porfa necesito mi plata

  > When you kill them, they
lose their day’s wages. Do you know who is paying you to do these killings?

  She thought of Saudis, rich Japanese, Russian mobsters.

  > not a clue

  > I’ve been trying to find that out myself, Kali.

  They were all dead now. Raymond stood alone among the piled corpses.

  > Go ahead

  he typed.

  > I will see you again, I’m sure.

  She cut his head off. Her wrists hurt. She was hungry. She was alone there in the enormous woodland cottage, and she still had to haul the BFG10K back to Fahrenheit Island.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m almost back there, hang on. I respawned in the ass end of nowhere.”

  “Lucy, do you know who’s in the cottage? Those noobs that we kill?”

  “What? Hell no. Noobs. Someone’s butler. I dunno. Jesus, that respawn gate—”

  “Girls. Little girls in Mexico. Getting paid a dollar a day to craft shirts. Except they don’t get their dollar when we kill them. They don’t get anything.”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, is that what one of them told you? Do you believe everything someone tells you in-game? Christ. English girls are so naive.”

  “You don’t think it’s true?”

  “Naw, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, okay? I’m almost there, keep your panties on.”

  “I’ve got to go, Lucy,” she said. Her wrists hurt, and her podge overlapped the waistband of her trousers, making her feel a bit like she was drowning.

  “What, now? Shit, just hang on.”

  “My mom’s calling me to supper. You’re almost here, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  She reached down and shut off her PC.

  Anda’s da and mum were watching the telly again with a bowl of crisps between them. She walked past them like she was dreaming and stepped out the door onto the terrace. It was nighttime, eleven o’clock, and the chavs in front of the council flats across the square were kicking a football around and swilling lager and making rude noises. They were skinny and rawboned, wearing shorts and string vests with strong, muscular limbs flashing in the streetlights.