For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  The bull was tiring. The next time he passed, his breath came in terrible wheezes that blew the stink of betel before him like sweet rot. She could wait for his next pass, then run.

  It was a good plan. She hated it. He had—he’d threatened her. He’d scared her. He should pay. She was the General Robotwallah, not merely some girl from the village. She was from Dharavi, tough. Smart.

  He wheezed past and she slipped out of the alley, her feet coming free of the muck with audible plops. He was facing away from her still, hadn’t heard her yet, and he had his back to her. The stupid boys in her army only fought face to face, talked about the “honor” of hitting from behind. Honor was just a stupid boy-thing. Victory beat honor.

  She braced herself and ran toward him, both arms stiff, hands at shoulder-height. She hit him high and kept moving, the way she had before, and down he fell again, totally unprepared for the assault from the rear. The sound he made on the dirt was like the sound of a goat dropping at the butcher’s block. He was trying to roll over and she turned around and ran at him, jumping up in the air and landing with both muddy feet on his back, feeling, through the soles of her sandals, the cracking of his ribs. He sobbed in pain, the sound muffled by the dirt, and then lay, stunned.

  She went back to him then, and knelt at his head, his hairy earlobe inches from her lips.

  “I wasn’t waiting for you at the cafe. I was minding my own business,” she said. “I don’t like you. You shouldn’t chase girls or the girls might turn around and catch you. Do you understand me? Tell me you understand me before I rip out your tongue and wipe your ass with it.” They talked like this on the chat channels for the games all the time, the boys did, and she’d always disapproved of it. But the words had power, she could feel it in her mouth, hot as blood from a bitten tongue.

  “Tell me you understand me, idiot!” she hissed.

  “I understand,” he said, and the words came mashed, from mashed lips and a mashed nose.

  She turned on her heel and began to walk away. He groaned behind her, then called out, “Whore! Stupid whore!”

  She didn’t think, she just acted. Turned around, ran at his still-prone body, indistinct in the dark, one step, two steps, like a champion footballer coming in for a penalty kick, and then she did kick him, the fetid water spraying off her shoe’s saturated toe as it connected with his big, stupid ribcage. Something snapped in there—maybe several somethings, and oh, didn’t that feel wonderful?

  He was every man who’d scared her, who’d shouted filthy things after her, who’d terrorized her mother. He was the bus driver who’d threatened to put them out on the roadside when they wouldn’t pay him a bribe. Everything and everyone that had ever made her feel small and afraid, a girl from the village. All of them.

  She turned around. He was clutching at his side and blubbering now, crying stupid tears on his stupid cheeks, luminous in the smudgy moonlight that filtered through the haze of plastic smoke that hung over Dharavi. She wound up and took another pass at him, one step, two step, kick, and crunch, that satisfying sound from his ribs again. His sobs caught in his chest and then he took series of painful, shuddering breaths and howled like a wounded cat in the night, screamed so loud that here in Dharavi, the lights came on and voices came to the windows.

  It was as though a spell had been broken. She was shaking and drenched in sweat, and there were people peering at her in the dark. Suddenly she wanted to be home as fast as possible, if not faster. Time to go.

  She ran. Mala had loved to run through the fields as a little girl, hair flying behind her, knees and arms pumping, down the dirt roads. Now she ran in the night, the reek of the ditch water smacking her in the nose with each squelching step. Voices chased her through the night, though they came filtered through the hammer of her pulse in her ears and later she could not say whether they were real or imagined.

  But finally she was home and pelting up the steps to the third-floor flat she had rented for her family. Her thundering footsteps raised cries from the downstairs neighbors, but she ignored them, fumbled with her key, let herself in.

  Her brother Gopal looked up at her from his mat, blinking in the dark, his skinny chest bare. “Mala?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Nothing. Sleep, Gopal.”

  He slumped back down. Mala’s shoes stank. She peeled them off, using just the tips of her fingers, and left them outside the door. Perhaps they would be stolen—though you would have to be desperate indeed to steal those shoes. Now her feet stank. There was a large jug of water in the corner, and a dipper. Carefully, she carried the dipper to the window, opened the squealing shutter, and poured the water slowly over her feet, propping first one and then the other on the windowsill. Gopal stirred again. “Be quiet,” he said, “it’s sleep-time.”

  She ignored him. She was still out of breath, and the reality of what she’d done was setting in for her. She had kicked the idiot nephew—how many times? Four? Five? And something in his body had gone crack each time. Why did he have to block her? Why did he have to follow her into the night? What was it that made the big and the strong take such sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of boys would do this to girls and even grown women sometimes—follow them, calling after them, touching them, sometimes it even led to rape. They called it “Eve-teasing,” and they treated it like a game. It wasn’t a game, not if you were the victim.

  Why did they make her do it? Why did all of them make her do it? The sound of the crack had been so satisfying then, and it was so sickening now. She was shaking, though the night was so hot, one of those steaming nights where everything was slimy with the low-hanging soupy moisture.

  And she was crying, too, the crying coming out without her being able to control it, and she was ashamed of that, too, because that’s what a girl from the village would do, not brave General Robotwallah.

  Calloused hands touched her shoulders, squeezed them. The smell of her mother in her nose: clean sweat, cooking spice, soap. Strong, thin arms encircled her from behind.

  “Daughter, oh daughter, what happened to you?”

  And she wanted to tell Mamaji everything, but all that came out were cries. She turned her head to her mother’s bosom and heaved with the sobs that came and came and came in waves, feeling like they’d turn her inside out. Gopal got up and moved into the next room, silent and scared. She noticed this, noticed all of it as from a great distance, her body sobbing, her mind away somewhere, cool and remote.

  “Mamaji,” she said at last. “There was a boy.”

  Her mother squeezed her harder. “Oh, Mala, sweet girl—”

  “No, Mamaji, he didn’t touch me. He tried to. I knocked him down. Twice. And I kicked him and kicked him until I heard things breaking, and then I ran home.”

  “Mala!” her mother held her at arm’s length. “Who was he?” Meaning, Was he someone who can come after us, who can make trouble for us, who could ruin us here in Dharavi?

  “He was Mrs. Dotta’s nephew, the big one, the one who makes trouble all the time.”

  Her mother’s fingers tightened on her arms and her eyes went wide.

  “Oh, Mala, Mala—oh, no.”

  And Mala knew exactly what her mother meant by this, why she was consumed with horror. Her relationship with Mr. Banerjee came from Mrs. Dotta. And the flat, their lives, the phone and the clothes they wore—they all came from Mr. Banerjee. They balanced on a shaky pillar of relationships, and Mrs. Dotta could knock it over. And the idiot nephew could convince her to do it—losing Mala’s family the money, the security, all of it.

  That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had driven her to kick and kick and kick—this oaf of a boy knew that he could get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she couldn’t afford to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could not—would not—be sorry.

  “I can talk with Mr. Banerjee,” she said. “I have his phone number. He knows that I’m a good worker—he’ll make it all better. You’ll
see, Mamaji, don’t worry.”

  “Why, Mala, why? Couldn’t you have just run away? Why did you have to hurt this boy?”

  Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her own mother—

  But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her mother wasn’t a general. She was just a girl from the village, all grown up. She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn’t afford to anger them.

  She wouldn’t do it.

  No matter what happened with Mr. Banerjee and Mrs. Dotta and her stupid idiot nephew, she was not going to become that person.

  There’s a way to get rich without making anything or doing anything that anyone needs or wants, but you have to be fast.

  The technical term for this method is arbitrage. Imagine that you live in an apartment block and it’s snowing so hard out that no one wants to dash out to the convenience store. Your neighbor to the right, Mrs. Hungry, wants a banana and she’s willing to pay $0.50 for it. Your neighbor to the left, Mr. Full, has a whole cupboard full of bananas, but he’s having a hard time paying his phone bill this month, so he’ll sell as many bananas as you want to buy for $0.30 apiece.

  You might think that the neighborly thing to do here would be to call up Mrs. Hungry and tell her about Mr. Full, letting them consummate the deal. If you think that, forget getting rich without doing useful work.

  If you’re an arbitrageur, then you think of your neighbors’ regrettable ignorance as an opportunity. You snap up all of Mr. Full’s bananas, then scurry over to Mrs. Hungry’s place with your hand out. For every banana she buys, you pocket $0.20. This is called arbitrage.

  Arbitrage can be a low-risk way to earn a living. But what happens if some other arbitrageur beats you to Mrs. Hungry’s door, filling her apartment with all the bananas she could ever need? Once again, you’re stuck with a bunch of bananas and nowhere to put them.

  In the real world, arbitrageurs don’t drag around bananas—they buy and sell using networked computers, surveying all the outstanding orders (“bids”) and offers, and when they find someone willing to pay more for something than someone else is paying for it, they snap up that underpriced item, mark it up, and sell it. They used to call this a “simultaneous” deal, pretending that they bought and sold at the same instant. But as computers and software got faster, the difference between “simultaneous” and incredibly fast got bigger.

  And this happens very, very quickly. If you’re going to beat the other arbitrageurs with the goods, you’ve got to move faster than the speed of thought. Literally. Arbitrage isn’t a matter of a human being vigilantly watching the screens for price-differences.

  No, arbitrage is all done by automated systems. These little traderbots rove the world’s networked marketplaces, looking for arbitrage opportunities, buying something and selling it in less than a microsecond. A good arbitrage house conducts a billion or more trades every day, squeezing a few cents out of each one. A billion times a few cents is a lot of money—if you’ve got a fast computer cluster, a good software engineer, and a blazing network connection, you can turn out ten or twenty million dollars a day, until everyone else gets as fast as you—then you’re back to square one, trying to breed a better traderbot.

  Still, it’s not bad, considering that all you’re doing is exploiting the fact that there’s a person over here who wants to buy something and a person over there who wants to sell it. Not bad, considering that if you and all your arbitrageur buddies were to vanish tomorrow, the economy and the world wouldn’t even notice. No one needs or wants your “service,” but it’s still a sweet way to get rich.

  The best thing about arbitrage is that you don’t need to know a single, solitary thing about the stuff you’re buying and selling in order to get rich off of it. Whether it’s bananas or a vorpal blade, all you need to know about the things you’re buying is that someone over here wants to buy them for more than someone over there wants to sell them for and that they’re both talking about the same thing. Good thing, too—if you’re closing the deal in less than a microsecond, there’s no time to sit down and google up a bunch of factoids about the merchandise.

  And the merchandise is pretty weird. Start with the fact that a lot of this stuff doesn’t even exist—vorpal blades, Grabthar’s hammers, the gold of a thousand imaginary lands.

  Now consider that people trade more than gold: the game gods sell all kinds of funny money. How about this one:

  Offered: Svartalfheim Warriors bonds, worth 100,000 gold, payable six months from now. This isn’t even real fake gold—it’s the promise of real fake gold at some time in the future. Stick that into the market for a couple months, baby, and watch it go. Here’s a trader who’ll pay five percent more than it was worth yesterday—he’s betting that the game will become more popular some time between now and six months from now, and so the value of goods in the game will go up at the same time.

  Or maybe he’s betting that the game gods will just raise the price on everything and make it harder to clobber enough monsters to raise the gold to get it, driving away all but the hardest-core players, who’ll pay anything to get their hands on the dough.

  Or maybe he’s an idiot.

  Or maybe he thinks you’re an idiot and you’ll give him ten percent more tomorrow, figuring that he knows something you don’t.

  And if you think that’s weird, here’s an even better one!

  Coca-Cola sells you a six-month Svartalfheim Warriors 100,000 gold security, but you’re worried that the company might be so broke that it decides not to pay off the security at the end of six months. So you find another trader and you ask him for some insurance: you offer him $1.50 to insure your security. If the company honors it, he gets to keep the $1.50 and you get to keep the profits. If the company breaks its promise (say, because it has gone broke), he has to pay you the full amount. If that’s more than $1.50, he’s losing money.

  This is basically an insurance policy. If you go to a life insurance company and ask them for a policy on your life, they’ll make a bet on how likely it is that you’re going to croak, and charge you enough that, on average, they make a profit (providing they’re guessing accurately at your chances of dying). So if the trader you’re talking to thinks that Svartalfheim Warriors is going to tank, he might charge you $10, or $100.

  So far, so good, right?

  Now, here’s where it gets even weirder. Follow along.

  Imagine that there’s a third party to this transaction, some guy sitting on the sidelines, holding onto a pot of money, trying to figure out what to do with it. He watches you go to the trader and buy an insurance policy for $1.50—if Svartalfheim Warriors gold securities pay off, you’re out $1.50; if they don’t, the trader has to make up the difference.

  After you’ve sealed your deal, this third party, being something of a ghoul, goes up to the same trader and says, “Hey, how about this? I want to place the same bet you’ve just placed with that guy. I’ll give you $1.50, and if he gets paid, you keep it. If the company goes down in flames, you pay me and him the difference.” Essentially, this guy is betting that your security is junk, and so maybe he finds a taker.

  Now he’s got this bet, which is worth nothing if your bet pays off, and worth lots if it doesn’t. And you know what he does with it?

  He sells it.

  He packages it up and finds some sucker who wants to buy his $1.50 bet for more than the $1.50 he’ll have to cough up if he loses. And the sucker buys it and then he sells it. And then another sucker buys it and he sells it. And before you know it, the 100,000-gold security you bought for $15 has $1,000 worth of bets hanging off of it.

  And this is the kind of thing an arbitrageur is buying and selling. He’s not carrying bananas from Mr. Full to Mrs. Hungry—he’s buying and selling bets on insurance policies on promises of imaginary gold.

  And this is what he
calls an honest day’s work.

  Nice work if you can get it.

  Matthew Fong and his employees raided through the night and into the next day, farming as much gold as they could get out of their level while the getting was good. They slept in shifts, and they co-opted anyone who made the mistake of asking what they were up to, dragooning them into mining the dungeon with them.

  All the while, Master Fong was getting the gold out of their accounts as fast as it landed in them. He knew that once the game gods got wind of his operation, they’d swoop in, suspend everyone’s accounts, and seize any gold they had in their inventory. The trick was to be sure that there wasn’t anything for them to seize.

  So he hopped online and hit the big brokerage message-boards. These weren’t just grey market, they were blackest black, and you needed to know someone heavy to get in on them. Matthew’s heavy was a guy from Sichuan, skinny and shaky, with several missing teeth. He called himself “Cobra,” and he’d been the one who’d introduced Matthew to Boss Wing all those months before. Cobra worked for someone who worked for someone who worked for one of the big cartels, tough criminal organizations that had all the markets for turning game gold into cash sewn up.

  Cobra had given him a login and a briefing on how to do deals on the brokernet. Now as the night wore on, he picked his way through the interface, listing his gold and setting an asking price that was half of the selling price listed on the white, aboveground gold-store that gweilos used to buy the game gold from the brokers.

  He waited, and waited, and waited, but no one bought his gold. Every game world was divided into local servers and shards, and when you signed up, you needed to set which server you wanted to play on. Once you’d picked a server, you were stuck there—your toon couldn’t just wander between the parallel universes. This made buying and selling gold all the more difficult: if a gweilo wanted to buy gold for his toon on server A, he needed to find a farmer who had mined his gold on server A. If you mined all your gold on server B, you were out of luck.