“Lucy?”
There was no reply.
> I’m very sorry you and your friend quarreled.
She felt numb and unreal. There were rules for Fahrenheits, lots of rules, and the penalties for breaking them varied, but the penalty for attacking a fellow Fahrenheit was—she couldn’t think the word, she closed her eyes, but there it was in big glowing letters:
EXPULSION.
But Lucy had started it, right? It wasn’t her fault. But who would believe her?
She opened her eyes. Her vision swam through incipient tears. Her heart was thudding in her ears.
> The enemy isn’t your fellow player. It’s not the players guarding the fabrica, it’s not the girls working there. The people who are working to destroy the game are the people who pay you and the people who pay the girls in the fabrica, who are the same people. You’re being paid by rival factory owners, you know that? THEY are the ones who care nothing for the game. My girls care about the game. You care about the game. Your common enemy is the people who want to destroy the game and who destroy the lives of these girls.
“Anda, dear, there’s a phone call for you.”
Her eyes stung. She’d been lying in her darkened bedroom for hours now, snuffling and trying not to cry, trying not to look at the empty desk where her PC used to live.
Her da’s voice was soft and caring, but after the silence of her room, it sounded like a rusting hinge.
“Anda?”
She opened her eyes. He was holding a cordless phone, silhouetted against the open doorway.
“Who is it?”
“Someone from your game, I think,” he said. He handed her the phone.
“Hullo?”
“Hullo, chicken.” It had been a year since she’d heard that voice, but she recognized it instantly.
“Liza?”
“Yes.”
Anda’s skin seemed to shrink over her bones. This was it: expelled. Her heart felt like it was beating once per second; time slowed to a crawl.
“Hullo, Liza.”
“Can you tell me what happened today?”
She did, stumbling over the details, backtracking and stuttering. She couldn’t remember, exactly—did Lucy move on Raymond and Anda asked her to stop and then Lucy attacked her? Had Anda attacked Lucy first? It was all a jumble. She should have saved a screenmovie and taken it with her, but she couldn’t have taken anything with her, she’d run out—
“I see. Well, it sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into quite a pile of poo, haven’t you, my girl?”
“I guess so,” Anda said. Then, because she knew that she was as good as expelled, she said, “I don’t think it’s right to kill them, those girls. All right?”
“Ah,” Liza said. “Well, funny you should mention that. I happen to agree. Those girls need our help more than any of the girls anywhere else in the game. The Fahrenheits’ strength is that we are cooperative—it’s another way that we’re better than the boys. We care. I’m proud that you took a stand when you did—glad I found out about this business.”
“You’re not going to expel me?”
“No, chicken, I’m not going to expel you. I think you did the right thing—”
That meant that Lucy would be expelled. Fahrenheit had killed Fahrenheit—something had to be done. The rules had to be enforced. Anda swallowed hard.
“If you expel Lucy, I’ll quit,” she said, quickly, before she lost her nerve.
Liza laughed. “Oh, chicken, you’re a brave thing, aren’t you? No one’s being expelled, fear not. But I want to talk to this Raymond of yours.”
Anda came home from remedial hockey sweaty and exhausted, but not as exhausted as the last time, nor the time before that. She could run the whole length of the pitch twice now without collapsing— when she’d started out, she could barely make it halfway without having to stop and hold her side, kneading her loathsome podge to make it stop aching. Now there was noticeably less podge, and she found that with the ability to run the pitch came the freedom to actually pay attention to the game, to aim her shots, to build up a degree of accuracy that was nearly as satisfying as being really good in-game.
Her dad knocked at the door of her bedroom after she’d showered and changed. “How’s my girl?”
“Revising,” she said, and hefted her math book at him.
“Did you have a fun afternoon on the pitch?”
“You mean ‘did my head get trod on?’“
“Did it?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I did more treading than getting trodden on.” The other girls were really fat, and they didn’t have a lot of team skills. Anda had been to war: she knew how to depend on someone and how to be depended upon.
“That’s my girl.” He pretended to inspect the paint-work around the light switch. “Been on the scales this week?”
She had, of course: the school nutritionist saw to that, a morning humiliation undertaken in full sight of all the other fatties.
“Yes, Dad.”
“And . . . ?”
“I’ve lost a stone,” she said. A little more than a stone, actually. She had been able to fit into last year’s jeans the other day.
She hadn’t been to the sweets shop in a month. When she thought about sweets, it made her think of the little girls in the sweatshop. Sweatshop, sweetshop. The sweets shop man sold his wares close to the school because little girls who didn’t know better would be tempted by them. No one forced them, but they were kids, and grown-ups were supposed to look out for kids.
Her da beamed at her. “I’ve lost three pounds myself,” he said, holding his tum. “I’ve been trying to follow your diet, you know.”
“I know, Da,” she said. It embarrassed her to discuss it with him.
The kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grown-ups too. It was why their situation was so impossible: the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them were exploiting them.
“Well, I just wanted to say that I’m proud of you. We both are, your mum and me. And I wanted to let you know that I’ll be moving your PC back into your room tomorrow. You’ve earned it.”
Anda blushed pink. She hadn’t really expected this. Her fingers twitched over a phantom game controller.
“Oh, Da,” she said. He held up his hand.
“It’s all right, girl. We’re just proud of you.”
She didn’t touch the PC the first day, or the second. The kids in the game—she didn’t know what to do about them. On the third day, after hockey, she showered and changed and sat down and slipped the headset on.
“Hello, Anda.”
“Hi, Sarge.”
Lucy had known the minute she entered the game, which meant that she was still on Lucy’s buddy list. Well, that was a hopeful sign.
“You don’t have to call me that. We’re the same rank now, after all.”
Anda pulled down a menu and confirmed it: she’d been promoted to sergeant during her absence. She smiled.
“Gosh,” she said.
“Yes, well, you earned it,” Lucy said. “I’ve been talking to Raymond a lot about the working conditions in the factory, and, well—” She broke off. “I’m sorry, Anda.”
“Me too, Lucy.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” she said.
They went adventuring, running some of the game’s standard missions together. It was fun, but after the kind of campaigning they’d done before, it was also kind of pale and flat.
“It’s horrible, I know,” Anda said. “But I miss it.”
“Oh, thank God,” Lucy said. “I thought I was the only one. It was fun, wasn’t it? Big fights, big stakes.”
“Well, poo,” Anda said. “I don’t wanna be bored for the rest of my life. What’re we gonna do?”
“I was hoping you knew.”
She thought about it. The part she’d loved had been going up against grown-ups who were not playing the game, but gaming it, breaking it for money. They’d been worth
y adversaries, and there was no guilt in beating them, either.
“We’ll ask Raymond how we can help,” she said.
“I want them to walk out—to go on strike,” he said. “It’s the only way to get results: band together and withdraw your labor.” Raymond’s voice had a thick Mexican accent that took some getting used to, but his English was very good—better, in fact, than Lucy’s.
“Walk out in-game?” Lucy said.
“No,” Raymond said. “That wouldn’t be very effective. I want them to walk out in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. I’ll call the press in; we’ll make a big deal out of it. We can win—I know we can.”
“So what’s the problem?” Anda said.
“The same problem as always. Getting them organized. I thought that the game would make it easier: we’ve been trying to get these girls organized for years: in the sewing shops, and the toy factories, but they lock the doors and keep us out and the girls go home and their parents won’t let us talk to them. But in the game, I thought I’d be able to reach them. . . .”
“But the bosses keep you away?”
“I keep getting killed. I’ve been practicing my swordfighting, but it’s so hard. . . .”
“This will be fun,” Anda said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Lucy said.
“To an in-game factory. We’re your new bodyguards.” The bosses hired some pretty mean mercs, Anda knew. She’d been one. They’d be fun to wipe out.
Raymond’s character spun around on the screen, then planted a kiss on Anda’s cheek. Anda made her character give him a playful shove that sent him sprawling.
“Hey, Lucy, go get us a couple BFGs, okay?”
CORY DOCTOROW, self-described “renaissance geek,” is probably best known for his Web site boingboing.net and for his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Raised by Trotskyist schoolteachers in the wilds of Canada, Doctorow began selling fiction when he was seventeen, and published a small handful of stories through the early and mid-1990s. His best-known story, “Craphound,” appeared in 1998, and he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Doctorow’s first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published to good reviews in early 2003 and was followed by collections A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked, and novels Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Doctorow is currently working on three novels: usr/bin/god, Themepunks, and Little Brother. He is also the coauthor of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction with Karl Schroeder.
“Anda’s Game” is the first in a series of stories that play off the titles of famous SF short stories. Doctorow began this series after Ray Bradbury voiced his disapproval of filmmaker Michael Moore appropriating the title of Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. The ongoing series includes Hugo Award nominee “I, Robot” and “I, Rowboat,” both of which play off the name and concepts in Isaac Asimov’s famous short story, “I, Robot.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Anda’s Game” is meant to tackle some of the themes in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, a wildly popular novel that talks a lot about how gaming can numb kids to violence so that they end up committing unspeakable acts of violence. I wanted to talk a little about how games can arouse compassion, community, and fellow-feeling:
I was practically raised online and made some of my most important friendships that way. I think that networked communications can be magnificent for bringing people together.
Another important theme in this story is obesity. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2015, 1.5 billion people will be obese, many of them in the developing world. There are a lot of reasons for this, but laziness and lack of virtue aren’t among them. Obesity is an epidemic and needs to be studied like one, with an eye to the social/medical causes of its spread. In particular, I believe that industrial food products like high-fructose corn syrup and palm oil are basically toxic waste that unscrupulous food manufacturers add to their products, guaranteeing that their customers will become unhealthily fat.
SUNDIVER DAY
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Most of our brain is dedicated to vision. Did you know that?
My big brother Sam told me that. Before he died. He was a secret kite scout somewhere in the Middle East.
Right now, my name is Sundiver Day. I live in Key West. I just turned sixteen. Ever since Sam died—or disappeared— last March, I have to get out on the water a lot.
My father died when I was ten. We still have his parrots, the brilliant Esmeralda and the shy Evylyn and the really cranky Ed. They live practically forever. I used to go around Key West with one or the other on my shoulder, usually Esmeralda. So my other name, the name my friends call me, is Parrot Girl. And I have cloned a parrot, little Alouicious, who also lives in the backyard with the others. Alouicious is what made me famous. Wow, they all said. All the adults, anyway. I was in the Key West Citizen and Science News and won a science prize.
But I’m tired of being Parrot Girl. I have a new name now, although I haven’t told anyone. It’s nobody’s business. They used to make fun of me and call me “Miss Smarty,” but I beat up the ringleader of that crowd, Marcy Phipps, when I was fourteen, and after that nobody bothered me. Sam taught me how to fight. It seems childish now, but it was worth it at the time. And Parrot Girl is better than Eelie.
People say my mother is eccentric, but she’s not. She studies orchids and has to go all over the world and leaves me with my aunt Cicily, who has a Cafe Cubano shop, even though she’s not Cuban but originally from Iowa. She’s my mother’s twin. She was a biologist and did cloning things. Famous cloning things. Things people got mad at her for doing. Even her husband, who divorced her. So now she has Cafe Cubano. Her work is on the Internet. I’ve been reading it a lot lately. She would be surprised at what I know.
We live in an old house. The wide front porch is decorated with wiggly white gingerbread. They call old houses “Conch houses” here, and they call the people who have lived in the Keys a long time Conchs. I guess we’re Conchs, although my dad was a hippie, too, and got thrown in jail a lot when he was young, in places like Chicago and Washington, D.C. My mother said they came down here because it was cheap and because she grew up here, in this house, and because people wouldn’t talk about them taking experimental life-extension drugs. Everybody takes them now; they’ve been FDA approved, and Key West isn’t cheap anymore. Our neighbor Millie, who is a real estate agent, keeps wanting to list our house. “It’s worth well over a million now, Hannah,” I heard her telling my mom one night in the living room. “Eelie needs a better place to grow up. A place where she can use her intellectual talents. She’s turning into a wild girl.”
I kind of liked hearing that. Wild girl, that’s me. My mother says, of course, that I need as normal a life as possible and it’s pretty normal here, and Millie laughs.
But Eelie? That’s what they call me. The adults. Short for Elendilia. They said that I called myself Eelie when I was a baby. It’s not quite fair. I had no idea what I was doing. It’s no wonder I haven’t really settled on a suitable name just yet.
After Sam disappeared I started using his Zodiac boat and found my own secret creek hidden in the mangroves, where gray snappers flock beneath the sea roots, silent-colored like wolves, brushing over and around one another in slow light.
They say he’s missing in action, but Mom says that we have to accept that he’s dead. It’s been eight months now. She only said that once, and really quietly at night when she came into my room and tucked me in, like she hadn’t done since I was little, and then kissed me, and then went away fast because she was crying.
Sometimes I think I see my brother up in the sky, drifting past, red hair streaming out, his eyes two blue stars and one of them winks at me.
Sometimes I hope, sometimes I think, that the whole world is his wink to me, his way of saying, “I’m still here, sis.” And that’s when I’m glad that most of my brain is for vision, b
ecause then it’s full of Sam.
If I didn’t think that, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I can barely move a finger. I’ve tried thinking that the world isn’t Sam’s wink, his way of staying with me always. I am much too heavy to move then, even though my mother worries and calls me her Thin Stick, and Louisa the Cuban therapist says that I have to find new ways of thinking.
They say his wings failed. That’s how they described it. But it wasn’t “they.” It was just one tall black woman wearing a uniform.
Most people when they walk up to our house from the street hesitate because the front yard is a private jungle and it’s hard to see the house, and it looks kind of haunted to my friends. A ghost lived here one time, a German ghost, my friend Janet, who is a true Conch, says, but I don’t believe it. This is a friendly house with big square rooms, tall wavy windows, and tilted wood floors.
And there are no ghosts.
Lobster claw helliconias drop down their yellow-orange flowers, hard and triangular like the claws they’re named for. White birds-of-paradise thrust their beaks between elephant ears as big as the front window. That morning our jungle was cool and dripping from the shower that usually passes over the island just before dawn, when the sky is the color between night and day; the color of no. Nautical twilight is that color, when you can’t tell a white thread from a black thread, when you have to start worrying about whether or not you will be able to see, and turn on your mast light if you are in a sailboat at anchor.
So I am sitting on a rocker on the front porch reading my messages and I glimpse her at the gate, looking worried. I think she is lost and yell, “Can I help you?”
“Is this the Wheeler residence?”
My father never liked to tell anybody anything; he said that if they didn’t know they shouldn’t be there, and maybe they were trying to serve a warrant or something. But I just say, “Yes, it is.”
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