For the Win - Cory Doctorow (read novels website txt) 📗

I'm done for today, time to go back to a base.' And you run for a base, which is never very close to the quests, and on the way, you get a new quest, a short one that has a lot of good rewards. You do the quest. Now you head for the base again, but again, you find yourself on a quest, but this one is a little longer than it seemed, and now even more time has gone by. Finally, you reach the base, but you've played so much that you've almost levelled up, and it would be a pity to stop playing now when just a few random kills would get you to the next level and then you can buy some very good new weapons and training at the base, so you hunt down some of the biters around the base-entrance, and now you level up, and you get some good new weapons, and you've also just unlocked many new quests. These quests are given to you when you reach the base, and some of them look very interesting, and now some of your friends have joined you, so you can group with them and run the quests together, which will be much quicker and a lot more fun. And by the time you stop, it's been three, sometimes four hours more play than you thought you'd do."

"This happens a lot?"

"Oh yes. Many times a week for me. And I don't even play for points -- I play to help the union! The more play you do, the more sense it makes to keep on playing. All this business with gold and rupees and dollars and steel plates -- we play that game all the time, don't we? So of course it works. Everyone plays it because everyone has played it all their lives."

"I can see why Big Sister Nor told me I must talk with you," he said. "You're a very clever girl."

She looked down.

"What do we do about Big Sister Nor?"

"She thinks we need to find money and support for the strikers. I think she needs money and support for herself. She says she's fine, but she's in hospital and it sounds like she was badly beaten."

"How do we get her support from here? They're so far away." Thinking: Mumbai's opposite corner is far away for me -- China might as well be the moon or the Mushroom Kingdom. "And how do we know that Big Sister Nor will be safe where she is?"

"Both good questions," he said. "It's frustrating. They're so close when we're all online, but so far when we need to do something that involves the physical world." He began to pace. "This is Big Sister Nor's department. She sees a way to tie up the virtual world and the real world, to move work and ideas and money from one to the other."

"Maybe we should just concentrate on the games, then? They're the part we know how to use."

"But these people are in trouble in the real world," Ashok said, balling his hands into fists.

And Yasmin found herself giggling, and then laughing, really laughing. It was so obvious!

"Oh, Ashok," she said, "oh, yes, they certainly are."

And she knew just what to do about it.

This

scene is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK bookselling

chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel

of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great stock

(especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff. Of particular note is the Manchester Deansgate store, which has an outstanding sf section.

Waterstones

Lu didn't know where to go. Boss Wing's dormitories were out of the question, of course. And while he knew a dozen Internet cafes in Shenzhen where he could sit and log on to the game, he didn't really want to be playing just then. Not with everyone else in jail.

But he had to sit down. He'd been hit hard in the head and on the shoulder and he was very dizzy. He'd thrown up once already, holding onto a bus-stop pole and leaning over the gutter, earning a disapproving cluck from an old woman who walked past hauling a huge barrow full of electronic waste.

He had thought of texting Matthew and the others, to find out if the police had them in custody, but he was afraid that the police would track him back if he did, using the phone network to locate him and pick him up.

It had all felt so wonderful. They'd stood up from their computers, chanting angrily, the war-chants from the games, which Boss Wing and his goons never played, and so it had all been totally perplexing to them. Their faces had gone from puzzlement to anger to fear as all the boys in the room stood together and marched out of the cafe, blocking the doorways so that no one could come in.

And there had been girls, and old grannies, and young men stopping to admire them as they stood, shoulder to shoulder, chanting bravely at the cowardly goons from Boss Wing's factory, goons who'd been so tough just a few minutes before, willing to slap you in the head if you talked too much, ready to dock your pay, too. Ever since they'd tried to go out on their own, life had gotten steadily worse. Boss Wing had a huge operation, with plenty of in-game muscle to stand guard against rich players who hunted the gold farmers for sport, but he was cruel and cheap and you were lucky if you saw half the wages you'd earned after all the fines for "breaking rules" had been charged against your salary.

Their phones rang and buzzed with photos from other Boss Wing factories where the workers had gone out too, and there were wars in Mushroom Kingdom as the Webblies kept anyone else from working their zone. And the police came and they'd stayed brave, Matthew and Ping and all his friends. They were workers, they were warriors, they were an army and their cause was just. They would not be intimidated.

And then the gas came. And then the clubs started swinging. And then the screams had started. And then Lu had run, run through the stinging clouds of gas and the chaos of battle -- so like and so unlike the million battles he'd fought in the games -- and he'd thrown up and now --

Now he had no idea where to go.

And then his phone rang. The number was blanked out, which made his pulse hammer in his throat. Did the secret police blank out the number when they called you? But if the secret police knew he existed and had his phone number, they could just pick him up where he stood, using the phone's damned tracking function.

It wasn't the police. With trepidation, he slid his finger over the talk button on the screen.

"Wei?" he said, cautiously.

"Lu? Is that you?" The call had the weird, echoey sound of a cheap net-calling service, the digital fuzz of packets that travelled third class on the global network. The accent was difficult, too, thick-tongued and off-kilter. He knew the sound and he knew the voice.

"Wei-Dong?"

"Yes!"

"Wei-Dong in America?" He hadn't heard from the strange gweilo since they'd gone to Boss Wing and Ping had had to kick him out of the guild. Boss Wing didn't allow them to raid with outside people, or even talk to them in game. He had spyware on all his PCs that told him when you broke those rules, and you lost a day's wages for the first offense, a week's wages for the second.

"Lu, it's me! Look, did I just see you and Ping getting beaten up by the cops?"

"I don't know, did you?" The disorientation from his head wound was fierce, and he wondered if he was really having this conversation. It was very strange.

"I -- I just saw you getting beaten up on a video from Shenzhen. I think I did. Was it you?"

"We just got beaten up," he said. "I'm hurt."

"Are you badly hurt? I couldn't reach Ping, so I tried you." He was excited, his voice tight. "What happened?"

Lu was still grappling with the idea that the gweilo had just called him from thousands of kilometers away. "You saw me on the Internet in America?"

"Every gamer in the world saw you, Lu! You couldn't have timed it better! After dinner is the busiest time on the servers, and the word went around like nothing I've ever seen before. Everyone in every game was chatting about it, passing around links to the video streams and the photos. It was even on the real news! My neighbor banged on my wall and asked me if I knew anything about it. It was incredible!"

"You saw me getting beaten up on the Internet?"

"Dude, everyone saw you getting beaten up on the Internet."

Lu didn't know what to say. "Did I look good?"

Wei-Dong laughed like a hyena. "You looked great!"

A dam broke, Lu laughed and laughed and laughed, as all the tension flooded out of him. He finally stopped, knowing that if he didn't he'd throw up again. He was by the train station now, in the heavy foot-traffic, all kinds of people moving purposefully around him as he stood still, a woozy island in the rushing stream. He backed up to a stairwell in front of a beauty parlor and sank to his haunches, squatting and holding the phone to his head.

"Wei-Dong?"

"Yes."

"Why are you calling me?"

There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, broken by soft digital flanging. "I wanted to help you," he said at last. "Help the Webblies."

"You know about the Webblies?" Lu had half-believed that Matthew had made them up, a fantasy army of thousands of imaginary friends who would fight for them.

"Know about them? Lu, they're the ass-kickingest guild in the world! No one can beat them! Coca-Cola Games is sending us three memos a day about them!"

"Why does Coca-Cola send you memos?"

"Oh." More silence. "Didn't I tell you? I'm working for them now. I'm a Turk."

"Oh," said Lu. He knew about the Turks, but he never really thought about what kind of people would work in ten second increments making up dialog for non-player characters or figuring out what happened when you shot an office chair with a blunderbuss. "That must be interesting."

Wei-Dong made a wet noise. "It's miserable," he said. "I run four different sessions at once, and I'm barely earning enough to pay the rent. And they make so much money off of us! Last month, they announced quarterly profits and games with Turks are earning 30 percent more than the ones without. They're hiring more Turks as fast as they can -- it's all over the board here. But our wages aren't going up. So I've been thinking of the Webblies, you know..." He trailed off. "Like maybe you guys can help us if we help you? We all play for our money, right? So why shouldn't we be on the same side."

"Sounds right to me," Lu said. He was still trying to comprehend the fact that the Webblies were apparently famous with American teenagers. "Wait," he said, playing back Wei-Dong's accented, ungrammatical speech. "You're paying rent?"

"Yeah," Wei-Dong said. "Yeah! Living on my own now. It's great! I have a crappy room in a, not sure what you call it, a hotel, kind of. But for people who don't have any money. But I can get wireless here and I've got four machines and there's plenty of stuff I can walk to, at least compared to home --" He began to babble about his