For The Win (64 page)
His words -- Big Sister Nor's words -- went out all over the world, spreading from phone to message board to site to site. You lead yourselves.
The words were heard by factory girls all over South China, back on the job after a few short days of energetic chaos, mass firings and mass arrests. They were heard by factory boys all over Cambodia and Vietnam. They were heard in the alleys of Dharavi and in the living rooms of Mechanical Turks all over Europe, the US and Canada. They were published in many languages on the cover of many newspapers and aired on many broadcasts.
These last treated the words as a report from a distant world -- "Did you know that these strange games and the people who played them took it all so seriously?" But for the people who needed to hear them, the words were heard.
They were heard by five friends who downloaded them over the achingly slow network connection on the container ship, a day out of Shenzhen port. Five friends who wept to hear them. Five friends who took strength from them.
#
They hid in the inner container when the ship entered the Mumbai Harbor, heading for the Mumbai Port Trust. Wei-Dong had googled the security procedures at Mumbai Port, and he didn't think they were using gas chromatograph to detect smuggled people, but they didn't want to take any chances. It was crowded, and the toilet had stopped working, and they had only managed to gather enough water for one brief shower each on the three day passage.
They fell against one-another, then clung to the floor as the container was lifted on a crane and set down again. They heard the outer door open, then shut, and muffled conversations. Then they were rolling.
Cautiously, they opened the inner door. The smell of Mumbai -- spicy, dusty, hot and wet -- filled the container. Light streamed in from the little holes Wei-Dong had drilled an eternity ago on the passage to Shenzhen.
Now they heard the sound of horns, many, many horns. Lots of motorcycle engines, loud. Diesel exhaust. The huge, bellowing air-horn of the truck their container had been placed upon. The truck stopped and started many times, made a few slow, lumbering turns, then stopped. A moment later, the engines stopped too.
The five of them held their breaths, listened to the footsteps outside, listened to a conversation in Hindi, adult male voices. Listened to the scrape of the catch on the container's big rear doors.
And then sunlight -- dusty, hot, with swirling clouds of dust and the pong of human urine -- flooded into the container. They shielded their eyes and looked into the faces of two grinning Indian men, with fierce mustaches and neatly pressed shirts. The men held out their hands and helped them down, one at a time, into a narrow alley that was entirely filled by the truck, which neatly shielded them from view. Wei-Dong couldn't imagine backing a truck into a space this narrow.
The men gestured at the interior of the container, miming,
Do you have everything?
Wei-Dong and Jie made sure everyone was clear and then nodded. The men waggled their chins at them, shook Wei-Dong and Jie's hands, brief and dry, and edged their way back along the space between the truck and the alley's walls. The engine roared to life, a cloud of diesel blew into their face, and the truck pulled away, lights glowing over a handpainted sign on the bumper that read HORN PLEASE.
The truck blew its horn once as it cleared the alley-mouth and turned an impossibly tight right turn. The alley was flooded with light and noise from the street, and then they saw a man and a girl walking down it, toward them.
They drew close. The girl was wearing some kind of headscarf with a veil that covered most of her face. The man had short, gelled hair and was dressed in a pressed white shirt tucked into black slacks. The two groups stood and looked at one another for a long moment, then the man held his hand out.
"Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak," he said.
"Leonard Goldberg," Leonard said. They shook. It was another short, dry handshake.
The girl held her hand out. "Yasmin Gardez," she said.
She barely took his hand, and the shake was brief.
"We all lead ourselves," Leonard said. He hadn't planned on saying it, but it came out just the same, and Wing understood it and translated it into Chinese, and for a moment, no one needed to say anything more.
"We have places for you to stay in Dharavi," Yasmin said. Leonard translated. "We all want to hear what you have to tell us. And we have work for you, if you want."
"We want to work," Wing said.
"That's good," Ashok said, and they struck out.
They emerged beside a hotel. The street before them thronged with people, more than they could comprehend, and cars, and three-wheelers, and bicycles, and trucks of all sizes. It was a hive of activity that made even Shenzhen seem sedate. For a moment none of them said anything.
"Mumbai is a busy place," Yasmin said.
"We have friends in the Transport and Dock Workers' Union," Ashok said, casually, setting off down the crowded pavement, ignoring the children who approached them, begging, holding their hands out, tugging at their sleeves. Leonard felt as though he was walking through an insane dream. "They were glad to help."
The street ended at the ocean, a huge, shimmering harbor dotted with ferries and other craft. Ahead of them spread an enormous plaza, the size of several football fields stitched together, covered in gardens, and, where it met the ocean, an enormous archway topped with minarets and covered with intricate carvings, and all around them, thousands of people, talking, walking, selling, begging, sleeping, running, riding.
The five of them stopped and gaped. Three days locked in a container with nothing to see that was more than a few yards away had robbed them of the ability to easily focus on large, far-away objects, and it took a long while to get it all into their heads. Yasmin and Ashok indulged them, smiling a little.
"The Gateway of India," Yasmin said, and Leonard translated absently.
To one side stood a hotel as big as the giant conference center hotels near Disneyland, done up like some kind of giant temple, vast and ungainly. Leonard looked at it for a moment, then shooed away the beggars that had approached them. Yasmin scolded them in Hindi and they smiled at her and backed off a few paces, saying something clearly insulting that Yasmin ignored.
"It's incredible," Leonard said.
"Mumbai is..." Ashok waved his hand. "It's amazing. Even where we're going -- the other end of the Harbour Line, our humble home, is incredible. I love it here."
Wing said, "I loved it in China." He looked grave.
"I hope that you can go back again some day," Ashok said. "All of you. All of us. Anywhere we want."
Jie said, "They put down the strikes in China." Leonard translated.
Yasmin and Ashok nodded solemnly. "There will be other strikes," Yasmin said.
A man was approaching them. A white man, pale and obvious among the crowds, trailing a comet-tail of beggars. Leonard saw him first, then Ashok turned to follow his gaze and whispered "Oh, my, this
is
interesting."
The man drew up to them. He was fat, racoon-eyed, hair a wild mess around his head. He was wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the Coca-Cola Games logo and a pair of blue-jeans that didn't fit him well, and Birkenstocks. He wouldn't have looked more American if he was holding up the Statue of Liberty's torch and singing "Star Spangled Banner."
Ashok held his hand out. "Dr Prikkel, I presume."
"Mr Tilak." They shook. He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, I believe."
Leonard gulped and took the man's hand. He had a firm, American handshake. The four Chinese Webblies were talking among themselves. Leonard whispered to them, explaining who the man was, explaining that he had no idea what he was doing there.
"You'll have to forgive me for the dramatics," Connor Prikkel said. "I knew that I would have to come to Mumbai to meet with you and your extraordinary friends, curiosity demanded it. But once we put our competitive intelligence people onto your organization, it wasn't hard to find a hole in your mail server, and from there we intercepted the details of this meeting. I thought it would make an impression if I came in person."
"Are you going to call the police?" Wing said, in halting English.
Prikkel smiled. "Shit, no, son. What good would that do? There's thousands of you Webbly bastards. No, I figure if Coca Cola Games is going to be doing business with you, it'd be worth sitting down and chatting. Besides, I had some vacation days I needed to use before the end of the year, which meant I didn't have to convince my boss to let me come out here."
They were blocking the sidewalk and getting jostled every few seconds as someone pushed past them. One of them nearly knocked Prikkel into a zippy three-wheeled cab and Ashok caught his arm and steadied him.
"Are you going to fire me?" Leonard said.
Prikkel made a face. "Not my department, but to be totally honest, I think that's probably a good bet. You and the other ones who signed your little petition." He shrugged. "I can do stuff like take money out of that bastard's account when your friend's life is at stake -- it's not like he's gonna complain, right? But how Coke Games contracts with its workforce? Not my department."
Yasmin's eyes blazed. "You can't -- we won't let you."
"That's a rather interesting proposition," he said, and two men holding a ten-foot-long tray filled with round tin lunchpails squeezed past him, knocking him into Jie. "One I think we could certainly have a good time discussing." He gestured toward the huge wedding-cake hotel. "I'm staying at the Taj. Care to join me for lunch?"
Ashok looked at Yasmin, and something unspoken passed between them. "Let us take
you
out for lunch," Ashok said. "As our guest. We know a wonderful place in Dharavi. It's only a short train journey."
Prikkel looked at each of them in turn, then shrugged. "You know what? I'd be honored."
They set off for the train station. Jie snorted. "I can't
wait
to broadcast this." Leonard grinned. He couldn't wait either.
Thanks to Russell Galen, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and my beautiful and enormously patient wife Alice -- I couldn't have written this without you three.
Thanks to the Silklisters, Rishab Ghosh, and Ashok Banker and Yoda, Keyan Bowes, Rajeev Suri, Sachin Janghel, Vishal Gondal, Sushant Bhalerao and Menyu Singhfor all your assistance in Mumbai.
Thanks to LemonED, Andrew Lih, Paul Denlinger, Bunnie Huang, Kaiser Kuo, Anne Stevenson-Yang, Leslie Chang, Ethan Zuckerman, John Kennedy, Marilyn Terrell, Peter Hessler, Christine Lu, Jon Phillips, Henry Oh, for invaluable aid in China.
Thanks to Julian Dibbell, Ge Jin, Matthew Chew, James Seng, Jonas Luster, Steven Davis, Dan Kelly and Victor Pineiro for help with the gold farmers.
Thanks to Max Keiser, Alan Wexelblat and Mark Soderstrom for economics advice.
Thanks to Thomas "CmdLn" Gideon, Dan McDonald, Kurt Von Finck, Canonical, Inc, and Ken Snider for tech support!
Thanks to MrBrown and the Singapore bloggers for unforgettable street-dinners.
Thanks also to JP Rangaswami and Marilyn Tyrell.
Many thanks to Ken Macleod for letting me use IWWWW and "Webbly."
GPG key fingerprint: 0BC4 700A 06E2 072D 3A77 F8E2 9026 DBBE 1FC2 37AF
Cory Doctorow (
[email protected]
/
craphound.com
) is the author of several science fiction novels. Some are for adults, others are for young people and adults. He's also the author of a book of essays (
Content
, Tachyon Books), a graphic novel (
Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now
, IDW) and two collections of short stories, both currently in print from Thunder's Mouth Press.
Born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London, England with his wonderful wife, Alice, and his scrumptious two year old daughter, Poesy. He formerly served as European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a fellow of that organization. He is also affiliated with the Open University Faculty of Computer Science (UK) and the University of Waterloo Independent Studies Program (Canada).
He is the co-editor and co-owner of the widely read blog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and writes columns for
The Guardian
newspaper,
Publishers Weekly
,
Locus Magazine
, and
Make Magazine
.
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