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

mouth thrown open, huddled under a fake designer coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a picture of a Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake buildings, hanging up an illegal cable-wire. The images had been poignant and painful and beautiful, and he'd stood there looking at them until the gallery owner chased him out. These were for people with money, not people like him.

Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as he saw the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each others' shoulders, in the shop's windows. It hadn't sold -- or maybe the painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was a factory full of painters devoted to making copies of this painting.

He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of angry voices. He thought he'd been hearing it for some time now, but it had been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now it was growing louder, and he wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. It was a chant, thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic feet. The crowd craned their necks around to locate the disturbance, and he joined them.

Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of young men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with beautifully calligraphed slogans: "NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY UNFAIR!" "WE DEMAND WAGES!" "BOSS SIU IS CORRUPT!" The signs were decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end of the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of paper, brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: "REMEMBER THE 42!" and then one that simply said "IWWWW" in the funny Western script, and Matthew felt a surge of elation.

"Who are the 42?" he asked one of the painters, a pretty young woman with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair behind her ears. "It was three hours ago," she said, then looked at the time on her phone. "Four hours ago." She shook her head, brought up some pictures on her phone. "The police executed 42 boys in Cantonese town. They say that the boys were criminals, but the neighbors say they were just gold-farmers." She showed him the pictures. His friends, on the ground, heads in hoods, being shot by policemen, reeling back under the fire. The policemen anonymous behind their masks. The girl saw the expression on his face and nodded. "Terrible, isn't it? Just terrible. And the things the fifty-cent army have been saying about them --" The fifty-cent army was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents -- 4 RMB -- to write patriotic comments and posts about the government.

He found that he was sitting on the dirty sidewalk, holding the girl's phone. She knelt down with him and said, "Hey, mister, are you all right?"

He nodded his head automatically, then shook it. Because he wasn't all right. Nothing was all right. "No," he said.

The girl looked at the sign she'd been painting and then at him. She turned her back on the painting and took his chin, tilted his face up. "Are you hurt?"

"Not hurt," he said. "But." He shook his head. Pointed at her phone. Drew out his own. Brought up the photos he'd taken while trembling on the roof.

"The same photos?" she said. Then looked closer. "Different photos. Where'd you get them?"

He said, "I took them," and it came out in a rasp. "They were my friends."

She jolted as if shocked, then bit her lip and paged through the photos. She smelled of turpentine and her fingers were very long and elegant. She reminded Matthew of an elf. "You were there?" It was only half a question, but he nodded anyway. "Oh, oh, oh," she said, handing him back the phone and giving him a strong, sisterly hug. "You poor boy," she said.

"We heard about it an hour ago, while we were settling in to work. We gathered to discuss it, leaving our canvasses, and our boss, Boss Siu, came by and demanded that we all get back to work. He wouldn't let us tell him why we were gathered. He never does. It's like Jiandi says on her radio show -- he controls our bathroom breaks, docks our wages for talking or sometimes just for looking up for too long. And when he told us we were all being docked, one of the girls stood up and shouted a slogan, something like 'Boss Siu is unfair!' and though it was funny, it was also so real, straight from her heart, and we all stood up too and then --" She gestured at the line.

Matthew remembered the day they'd walked out, a million years ago, remembered the police arriving and taking them to jail, remembered his vow never to go to jail again. And then he picked up the sign she'd been making and gripped it by the corners and joined the line. He wasn't the only one. He shouted the slogans, and his voice wasn't hoarse anymore, it was strong and loud.

And when the police finally did come, something miraculous happened: the huge crowd of painters and other workers who'd gathered at the factory joined ranks with the picketers and picked up their slogans. They held their phones aloft and photographed the police as they advanced, with masks and helmets and shields and batons.

They held their ground.

The police fired gas cannisters.

Painters with big filter masks from the factories seized the cannisters and calmly threw them through the factory windows, smoking out the bosses and security men who'd been cowering there, and they came coughing and weeping and wheezing.

The crowd expanded, moved toward the police instead of away from it, and a policeman darted forward out of his line, club raised, mouth and eyes open very wide behind his facemask, and three factory girls sidestepped him, tripped him, and the crowd closed over him. The police line trembled as the man disappeared from view, and just as it seemed like they would charge, the mob backed away, and the man was there, moving a little but painfully, lying on the ground. His helmet, truncheon and shield were gone, as was his utility belt with its gun and its gas and its bundle of plastic cuffs.

Now we have a gun, Matthew thought, and from a far distance observed that he was thinking like a tactician again, not like a terrorized boy, and he knew which way the police should come from next, that alley over there, if they took it they'd control all the entrances to the square, trapping the picketers.

"We need people over there," he shouted to the painter girl, whose name was Mei, and who had stood by his side, her fine slender arm upraised as she called the slogans with him. "There and there. Lots of them. If the police seal those areas off --"

She nodded and pushed off through the crowd, tapping people on the shoulder and shouting in their ears over the roar of the mob and the police sirens and the oncoming chopper. That chopper made Matthew's hands sweaty. If it dropped something on them -- gas, surely, not bombs, surely not bombs he thought like a prayer -- there'd be nowhere to hide. Protesters moved off to defend the alleyways he'd pointed to, armed with bricks and rocks and cameraphones. The same funnel-shaped alley-mouths that would make those alleys so deadly in the hands of their enemies would make them easier to defend.

The chopper was coming on now, and the cameraphones pointed at the sky, and then the helicopter veered off and headed in a different direction altogether. As Matthew raised his own phone to photograph it, he saw that he'd missed several calls. A number he didn't recognize, overseas. He dialled it back, crouching down low in the forest of stamping feet to get out of the noise.

"Hello?" a woman's voice said, in English.

"Do you speak Chinese?" he said, in Cantonese.

There was a pause, then the phone was handed off to someone else. "Who is this?" a man's voice said in Mandarin.

"My name is Matthew," he said. "You called me?"

"You're one of the Shenzhen group?" the man said.

"Yes," he said.

"We've got another survivor!" he called out and sounded genuinely elated.

"Who is this?"

"This is The Mighty Krang," the man said. "I work for Big Sister Nor. We are so happy to hear from you, boy! Are you OK, are you safe?"

"I'm in the middle of a strike," he said. "Thousands of painters in Dafen. That's a village in Shenzhen, where they paint --"

"You're in Dafen? We've been seeing pictures out of there, it looks insane. Tell me what's going on."

Without thinking, just acting, Matthew scaled a park bench and stood up very tall and dictated a compact, competent situation report to the The Mighty Krang, whom he'd seen on plenty of video-conferences with Big Sister Nor and Justbob, snickering and clowning in the background. Now he sounded absolutely serious and intent, asking Matthew to repeat some details to ensure he had them clear.

"And have you seen the other strikes?"

"Other strikes?"

"All around you," he said. "Lianchuang, Nanling and Jianying Gongyequ. There's a factory on fire in Jianying Gongyequ. That's bad business. Wildcatters -- if they'd talked to us first, we would have told them not to. Still." He paused. "Those photos were something. The 42."

"I have more."

"Where'd you get them?"

"I was there."

"Oh."

A long pause.

"Matthew, are you safe where you are?"

Matthew stood up again. The police line had fallen back, the demonstration had taken on something of a carnival air, the artists laughing and talking intensely. Some had instruments and were improvising music.

"Safe," he said.

"OK, send me those photos. And stay safe."

Two more helicopters now, not headed for them. Headed, he guessed, for the burning factory in Jianying Gongyequ. He hoped no one was in it.

Mr Bannerjee came for them that night, with another group of thugs, but these weren't skinny badmashes, but grown adults, dirty men with knives and clubs, men who smelled of betel and sweat and smoke and fiery liquor, a smell that preceded them like a messenger shouting "beware, beware." They came calling and joking through Dharavi, a mob that the Webblies heard from a long way off. Mrs Dibyendu's neighbors came to their windows and clucked worriedly and sent their children to lie down on the floor.

Mr Bannerjee led the procession, in his pretty suit, the mud sucking at his fine shoes. He stood in the laneway before the door to Mrs Dibyendu's cafe and put his hands on his hips and lit a cigarette, making a show of it, all nonchalance as he puffed it to life and blew a stream into the hot, wet air.

He waited.

Mala limped to the door and opened it. Behind her, the cafe was dark and not a thing moved.

Neither said a word. The neighbors looked on in worried silence.

"Mala," Mr Bannerjee said, spreading his hands. "Be reasonable."

Mala stepped onto the porch of the cafe and sat down, awkwardly folding her legs beneath her. In a clear, loud voice, she said, "I work here. This is my job. I demand the right to safe working conditions, decent wages, and a just and fair workplace."

Mr Bannerjee snorted. The men behind him laughed. He took a step forward, then stopped.

One by one, Mala's army filed out of the cafe, in a disciplined, military rank. Each one sat down, until the little porch was crowded with children, sitting down.

Mr Bannerjee snorted again, then laughed. "You can't be serious," he said. "You want,