For The Win (49 page)

Wei-Dong had a new use for the boards: he was using them to figure out which players were likely to switch sides. The game-runners had created a facility for bulk-downloading historical data from them, and Turks were encouraged to make crazy mash-ups and visualizations showing whose play was the best. Wei-Dong had a different idea.

For weeks now, he'd been downloading gigantic amounts of data from the boards, piping it all into a database that Matthew had helped him build and now he could run some very specialized queries on it, queries like, "Show me Turks who used to lead the pack but have fallen off, despite long hours of work." Or "Show me Turks who use a lot of profanity when they're filling in the dialog for non-player characters." And especially, "Show me Turks who have a below-average level of ratting out gold-farmers to the bosses." This last one was a major enterprise among Turks, who got a big bonus every time they busted a farmer. Most of the Turks went "de-lousing" pretty often, looking to rack up the extra cash. But a significant minority never, ever hunted the farmers, and these were Wei-Dong's natural starting point.

He had a long list of leads, and for each one, he had a timetable of the Turk's habitual login hours and the parts of the world that the Turk worked most often. Then it was only a matter of logging in using one of the Webblies many, many toons, heading to that part of the world, and invoking the Turk and hoping the right person showed up. It would be easier to just use the Turk message boards, but if he did, he'd be busted and fired in seconds. This way was less efficient but it was a lot safer.

Now he was in the Goomba's Star-Fields, a cloudscape in Mushroom Kingdom where the power-up stars were cultivated in endless rows. Players could quest here, taking jobs with comical farmers who'd put them to work weeding the star patches and pulling up the ripe ones. It was good for training up your abilities; a highly ranked Star Farmer could get more power-up out of his stars.

And here was the farmer, chewing a corn-stalk and puttering around his barn, which was also made from clouds. He offered Wei-Dong a quest -- low-level, just pulling up weeds from some of the easier-to-reach clouds, the ones that weren't patrolled by hostile Lakitus. Wei-Dong accepted the quest, and then opened a chat with the farmer: "How long have you owned this farm?"

"Oh, youngster, I've been working this farm since I was but a boy -- and my pappy worked it before me and his pappy before him. Yep, I guess you could say that we're a farming gamily, hee hee!"

This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring himself to type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole range of snappy answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking a Turk was to get outside the box.

"Do you like farming?"

"Ay-yuh, you might say I do. It's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"

Wei-Dong rolled his eyes. Who
wrote
this stuff? "What problems do you have as a farmer?"

"Oh, it's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"

Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself, a Turk would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.

"Do you have any problems apart from lack of sunshine?"

"Oh, youngster, you don't want to hear an old farmer's complaints. Many and many a day I have toiled in these fields and my hands are tired. Let's speak of more pleasant things, if you please." That was more like it. The dialog was the kind of thing an enthusiastic role-playing Turk would come up with, and that fit the profile of the Turk he was after.

"Is your name Jake Snider?" he typed.

The character didn't move for a second. "I ken not this Jake Snider, youngster. You'd best be on with your chores, now."

"I think you
are
Jake Snider and I think you know that you're not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You're pulling down more hours than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose that is? Did you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best quarter, ever? And that the entire executive group got a 20 percent raise? Did you know that Coke systematically rotates Turks who make too much money out of duty, replacing them with newbies who don't know how to maximize their revenue?"

The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder. Wei-Dong followed.

"Wait! Here's the thing. It
doesn't have to be this way
! Workers can organize and demand a better deal from their bosses. Workers
are
organizing. You give it two more months and you'll be out on the street. Isn't your pay and your dignity worth fighting for?

The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a second that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had logged out. But no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer's movements, a little hesitation. There was still someone home. "I know you can't talk to me in-game. Here's an email address -- [email protected]. Send me a message and we'll talk in private."

He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to game management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter of minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one more prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing happened. Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a few minutes later, when his email pinged.

> Tell me more

It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.

#

"You should go to Hong Kong," Lu said to Jie, holding her hand tightly and staring into her eyes. "You can do the show from there. It's safer."

Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed his hand. "I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won't do it and I want you to stop talking about it. I'm a Webbly, just like you, just like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong,
technically
, but what would I broadcast
about
? I'm a journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what's going on, to report on it. I can't do that from HK."

"But it's not safe --"

She cut him off with a chopping gesture. "Of course it's not safe! I haven't been interested in safety since the day I went on the air. You're not safe. My factory girls aren't safe. The Webblies on the picket lines aren't safe. Why should I be safe?"

Lu bit down on the words:
because I love you
. Secretly, he was relieved. He didn't know what he'd do if Jie was in Hong Kong and he was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another flat in a handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys all studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in. They slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went out to work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more than two or three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to themselves. Just the day before, two boys had been followed out of a cafe by a couple of anonymous hard men who methodically kicked the everloving crap out of them, right on the public street, sending one to the hospital.

"You know it's only a matter of time until this place is blown," is what Lu said. "Someone will get careless and be followed home, or one of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who trek in and out of the flat at all hours, and then --"

"And then we'll move to another one," she said. "I have been renting and blowing off apartments for longer than you've been killing trolls. So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I'll keep on earning, and if I keep on earning, I can keep on renting."

"How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours every night telling factory girls to fight back against their bosses?"

A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that always melted his heart. "Oh, Tank," she said. "The advertisers don't care what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are listening, and they are
listening
."

She patted his hands. "Now, I want you to go and find me a Webbly to interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it's all going. Any more protests?"

He shook his head. "Not the noisy kind. Too many arrests." There were over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over south China. "But you heard about Dongguan?"

She shook her head.

"The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of making a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very slowly around the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating ice cream."

"Ice-cream?"

He grinned. "Ice-cream. After the jingcha started to arrest anyone who even
looked
like he was going to protest, they started posting these very public notices: 'show up at such-and-such a place and buy an ice-cream.' Dozens, then hundreds of them, eating ice-cream, grinning like maniacs, and the police were there, staring at each other like mannequins, like,
Are we going to arrest these boys for eating ice-cream?
And then someone got the bright idea of buying
two
ice-creams and giving one away to someone random passing by. It's the easiest recruitment tool you can imagine!"

She laughed so long and hard that tears ran down her face. "I love you guys," she said. "I can't
wait
to talk about this on tonight's show."

"If they get arrested for eating ice-cream, they're going to switch to getting together and
smiling
at each other. Can you imagine?
Are we going to arrest these boys for smiling?
"

Her laughter broke through the invisible wall that separated them from the lounging, off-shift Webblies, who demanded to know what was so funny. Not all of them knew about the ice-cream -- they were too busy patrolling the worlds, keeping the gold-farms from being run with replacement workers -- but everyone agreed that it was pure genius.

Soon they were downloading videos of the ice-cream eating, and then another shift of boys trickled in and wanted to be let in on the joke, and before they knew it, they were planning their own ice-cream eating festival, and the general hilarity continued until Jie and Lu slipped away to 'cast her show for the night, grabbing a couple of hysterical Webblies to interview in between the calls from the factory girls.

As Lu put his head down on his pillow and draped his arm around Jie's narrow shoulders and put his face in her thick, fragrant hair, he had a moment's peace and joy, real joy, knowing that they couldn't possibly lose.

#

The strike was entering its second week when the empire struck back. Connor had known about the strike for days, but he hadn't taken action right away. At first he wasn't sure he
wanted
to take action. The parasites were keeping each other busy, after all, and the strikers were doing a better job of shutting down the gold markets than he ever had (much as it hurt to admit it). Plus there was something
fascinating
about the organization of these characters -- they all came in through proxies, but by watching their sleep schedules and sniffing their chatter he knew that they were scattered all across the Pacific Rim and the subcontinent. Sitting there in his god's eye, in Command Central, he felt like he had a front-row seat to an amazing and savage flea circus in which exotic, armored insects fought each other endlessly, moving in precise regimented lines that spoke of military discipline.

But he couldn't leave them to do this forever. He wasn't the only one in Command Central who'd noticed that this was going on, and the derivative markets were starting to pick up on the news, yo-yo-ing so crazily that even the mainstream press had begun to sniff around. Game-gold markets had been an exotic, silly-season news-story a couple years back but these days the only people who paid attention to them were players: high-volume traders controlling huge fortunes that bought and sold game gold and its many sub-species in a too-fast-to-follow blur. Until, of course, word started to leak out about these Webblies and their pitched battles, their ice-cream socials, their global span -- and now corporate PR was calling Command Central five times a day, trying to get a meeting so they could agree on what to tell the press.

So first thing on Monday morning, he gathered all of Command Central, along with some of the cooler -- that is, less neurotically paranoid -- lawyers and a couple of the senior PR people in one of Coke's secure board-rooms for a long session with the white-board.

"We should just exterminate these parasites," Bill said. "You can have the ten grand." Connor and Bill's bet had become a running joke in Command Central, but Connor and Bill knew that it was deadly serious. They were both part of the financial markets, and they knew that a bet was just another kind of financial transaction, and had to be honored.

Connor's smile was grim. He hadn't known whether the security chief would come over to his side; he was such a pragmatist about these things. Maybe they'd get something done after all. "You know I'm with you, but the question is, how high a price are we prepared to pay to get rid of these people?"

"No price is too high," said Kaden, who prided himself on being the most macho guy in Command Central -- the kind of guy who won't shut up about his gun collection and his karate prowess. Kaden might have been a black belt 20 years ago, but five years in Command Central had made him lavishly, necklessly fat, and unable to go up a flight of stairs without losing his breath.

Bill -- no lightweight himself -- craned his head around to stare fishily at Kaden. He made a dismissive grunt and said, "Oh, really?"

Kaden -- called out in front of a room full of people -- colored, dug in. "Goddamned right. These crooks are in
our
worlds. We can outspend and outmanoeuvre them. We just have to have the balls to do what it takes, instead of pussying out the way we always do."

Bill grunted again, a sound like a cement-mixer with indigestion. "No price is too high?"

"Nope."

"How about shutting down the game? Is that price too high?"

"Don't be stupid."

"I don't think I'm the one being stupid. There's an upper limit on how much this company can afford to spend on these jerks. If removing them from the game costs us more than leaving them there, we're just shooting ourselves in the head. So let's stop talking about 'pussying out' and 'no cost is too high' and set some parameters that we can turn into action, all right?"