For the Win - Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader .txt) 📗

their skill and bravery, forcibly reminding himself that he was not on their side, that this was research and infiltration.
> You guys are great!
The ogre emoted a bow and a little victory dance, another custom number that was graceful and funny at once.
> You play well. Good luck with your studies.
Connor's fingers hovered over the keys.
> I hope you get to see your family soon
The ogre emoted a quick hug, and it made Connor feel momentarily ashamed of what he did next. But he did it. He added the entire guild to his watchlist, so that every message and move would be logged, machine-translated into English. Every transaction they made -- all the gold they sold or gave away -- would be traced and traced again as part of Connor's efforts to unravel the complex, multi-thousand-party networks that were used to warehouse, convert and distribute game-goods. He had hundreds of accounts in the database already, and at the rate he was going, he'd have thousands by the end of the week -- and it was already Wednesday.
#
The police raided Jie's studio while she and Lu were out eating dumplings and staring into each others' eyes. It was one of her backup studios, but they'd worked out of it two days in a row, and had been about to work out of it for a third. This was a violation of basic security, but Jie's many apartments were fast filling up with Webblies who had quit their farming jobs in frustration and joined the full-time effort to amass gold and treasure for the plan.
The dumpling shop was run by a young woman who looked after her two year old son and her sister's four year old daughter, but she was nevertheless always cheerful when they came in, if prone to making suggestive remarks about young love and the dangers of early parenthood.
She was just handing them the bill -- Lu once again made a show of reaching for it, though not so fast that Jie coudn't snatch it from him and pay it herself, as she was the one with all the money in the relationship -- when his phone went crazy.
He pulled it out, looked at its face, saw that it was Big Sister Nor, calling from a number that she wasn't supposed to be using for another 24 hours according to protocol. That means that she worried her old number had been compromised, which meant that things were bad. Turning to the wall and covering the receiver with his hand, he answered.
"Wei?"
"You've been burned." It was The Mighty Krang, whose Taiwanese accent was instantly recognizable. "We're watching the webcams in the studio now. Ten cops, tearing the place apart."
"Shit!" he said it so loudly that the four year old cackled with laughter and dumpling lady scowled at him. Jie slid close to him and put her cheek next to his -- he instantly felt a little better for her company -- and whispered, "What is it?"
"You're all secure, right?"
He thought about it for a second. All their disks were encrypted, and they self-locked after ten minutes of idle time. The police wouldn't be able to read anything off any of the machines. He had two sets of IDs on him, the current one, which was due to be flushed later that day according to normal procedure, and the next set, hidden in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants-leg. Ditto for his current and next SIMs, one loaded in his current phone and a pouch of new ones in order of planned usage inserted into a slit in his belt. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Jie: "The studio's gone." She sucked air past her teeth. "Are you all buttoned-up?"
She clicked her tongue. "Don't worry about me, I've been doing this for a lot longer than you." She began to methodically curse under her breath, digging through her purse and switching out IDs and cracking open her phone to swap the SIM. "I had really nice stuff in that place," she said. "Good clothes. My favorite mic. We are such idiots. Never should have recorded there twice in a row."
The Mighty Krang must have heard, because he chuckled. "Sounds like you're both OK?"
"Well, Jiandi won't be able to go on the air tonight," he said.
"Screw that," Jie said. She took the phone from him. "Tell Big Sister Nor that we're going on air at the usual time tonight. Normal service, no interruptions."
Lu didn't hear the reply, but he could see from Jie's grimly satisfied expression that The Mighty Krang had praised her. It had been Big Sister Nor's idea to rig all the studios with webcams all the Webblies could access, just in the front rooms. It was a little weird, trying to ignore the all-seeing eye of the webcam screwed in over the door. But when you're sleeping 20 to a room, it's easy to let go of your ideas about privacy -- but all the same, Lu and Jie now sat far apart when broadcasting, and snuck into the bathroom to make out afterward.
And now the webcams had paid off. He took the phone back and listened as The Mighty Krang narrated a play-back of the video, cops breaking the door down, securing the space. Then an evidence team that spliced batteries into the computers' power cables so they could be unplugged without shutting down (Lu was grateful that Big Sister Nor had decreed that all their hardware had to be configured to unmount and re-encrypt the drives when they were idle), took prints and DNA. They already had Lu's DNA, of course, because they'd sniffed out one of Jie's other apartments. But Jie had been way ahead of this: she had a little pocket vacuum cleaner, intended for clearing crumbs and gunk out of keyboards, and she surreptitiously vacuumed out the seats whenever she took a train or a bus, sucking up the random DNA of thousands of people, which she carefully scattered around her apartments when she got in. He'd laughed at the ingenuity of this, and she told him she'd read about it in a novel.
The evidence team brought in a panoramic camera and set it in the middle of the room and the police cleared out momentarily as it swept around in a tight, precise mechanical circle, producing a wraparound high-resolution image of the room. Then the cops swept back in, minus their paper overshoes, and put every scrap of paper and every piece of optical and magnetic media into more bags, and then they destroyed the place.
Working with wrecking bars and wicked little knifes, and starting from the corner under the front door, they methodically smashed every single stick of furniture, every floor tile, every gyprock wall, turning it all into pieces no bigger than playing-cards, heaping it behind them as they went. They worked in near silence, without rushing, and didn't appear to relish the task. This wasn't vandalism, it was absolute annihilation. The policemen had the regulation brushcut short hair, identical blue uniforms, paper face-masks, kevlar gloves. One drew closer and closer to the webcam, spotted it -- a little pinhead with a peel-away adhesive backing stuck up in a dusty corner -- and peeled it away. His face loomed large in it for a moment, his pores, a stray hair poking out of his nostrils, his eyes dead and predatory. Then chaos, and nothing.
"He stamped on it, we think," The Mighty Krang said. "So much for the webcams. It'll be the first thing they look for next time. Still, saved your ass, didn't it?"
The description had momentarily taken away Lu's breath. All his things, his spare clothes, the comics he'd been reading, a half-chewed pack of energy gum he'd bought the day before, disappeared into the bowels of the implacable authoritarian state. It could have been him.
"We're going to move on to the next safe-house," he said. "We'll find somewhere to broadcast from tonight."
"You're bloody right we will," said Jie, from his side.
They gave the old building a wide berth as they made their way down into the Metro, and consciously forced themselves not to flinch every time a police siren wailed past them. When they came back up to street level, Jie took Lu's hand and said, out of the corner of her mouth, "All right, Tank, what do we do now?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. That was, uh, close." He swallowed. "Don't be mad if I say something?"
She squeezed his fingers. "Say it."
"You don't need to do this," he said. She stopped and looked at him, her face white. Before they'd ever kissed, he always felt a void between them, an invisible force-field he had to push his way through in order to tell her how he felt. Once they'd become a couple, the force-field had thinned, but not vanished, and every time he said or did something stupid, he felt it pushing him away. It was back in force now. He spoke quickly, hoping his words would batter their way through it: "I mean, this is crazy. We're probably all going to go to jail or get killed." She was still staring at him. "You're just --" He swallowed. "You're good at this stuff, is what I'm trying to say. You could probably broadcast your show for ten more years without getting caught and retire a rich woman. You don't need to throw it away on us."
Her eyes narrowed. "Did I promise not to get mad?"
He tried a little nervous smile. "Sort of?"
She looked back and forth. "Let's walk," she said. "We stand out here." They walked. Her fingers were limp in his hand, and then slipped out. The force-field grew stronger. He felt more afraid than he had when The Mighty Krang had described the action from the studio camera. "You think I'm doing this all for money? I could have more money if I wanted to. I could take dirtier advertisers. I could start a marketing scheme for my girls and ask them to send me money -- there's millions of them, if each one only sent me a few RMB, I'd be so rich I could retire."
The handshake buildings loomed around them, and she broke off as they found themselves walking single file down a narrow alley between two buildings. She caught up with him and leaned in close, speaking so softly it was almost a whisper. "I could just be another dirty con-artist who comes to South China, steals all she can, and goes back home to the countryside. I'm not doing that. Do you know why?"
He fumbled for the words and she dug her fingernails into his palm. He fell silent.
"It's a rhetorical question," she said. "I'm doing it because I believe in this. I was telling my girls to fight back against their bosses before you ever played your first game. With or without you, I'll be telling them to fight back. I like your group, I like the way they cross borders so easily, even more easily than I get back and forth from Hong Kong. So I'm supporting your friends, and telling my girls to support them too. The problem you have is a worker's problem, not a Chinese problem, not a gamer's problem. The factory girls are workers and they want a good deal just as much as you and your gamer friends do."
She was breathing heavily, Lu noticed, angry little snorts through her nose.
He tried to say something, but all that came out