Why didn’t you tell me this when all this started? She wanted to say. But her parents had told her. Management had warned them, through bullhorns, that they were risking everything. She’d laughed at them, filled with the feeling of sisterhood and safety, of power. That feeling was gone now.
And she’d gone with Affendi, and she’d worked in a factory that was much like the factory she’d left, and there had been a union fight much like the one she’d fought, but this time, they were better prepared and the workers had called Nor “Big Sister,” a term of endearment that had scared her a little, coming from the mouths of women much older than her, coming from young girls who could never appreciate the danger.
And this time, the owners hadn’t fled, the workers had won better conditions, and Big Sister Nor found that she didn’t want to make textiles anymore. She found that she had a taste for the fight.
Now there was a young man, someone called Matthew Fong, in Shenzhen, and he was relying on her to help him win his dignity, fair wages, and a safe and secure workplace. And he was doing it in China, where unofficial unions were illegal and where labor organizers sometimes disappeared into prison for years.
The Mighty Krang could speak a beautiful Mandarin as well as his native Cantonese, so he was in charge of giving soundbites to the foreign Chinese press, that network of news resources serving the hundreds of millions of people of Chinese ancestry living abroad. They were key, because they were intimately connected to the whole sprawling enterprise of imports and exports, and when they spoke, the bureaucrats in Beijing listened. And The Mighty Krang could put on a voice that was so smoothly convincing you’d swear it was a newscaster.
Justbob was in charge of moral support for the strikers, talking to them in broken Cantonese and Singlish and gamer-speak on conference calls, keeping their morale up. She could work three phones and two computers like a human octopus, her attention split across a dozen conversations without losing the thread in any of them.
And Big Sister Nor? She was in-world, in several worlds, rallying Webblies to the site of the Mushroom Kingdom, finding gamers converging from all over Asia—where it was night—and from Europe—where it was day—and America—where it was morning. Management had wasted no time moving replacement workers in. There were always desperate subcontractors out in the provinces of China, ten kids in a dead industrial town in Dongbei who’d been lured to computers with pretty talk about getting paid to play. Across a dozen different shards of the same Mushroom Kingdom world, a dozen alternate realities, they came, and Big Sister Nor played general in a skirmish against them, as strikers blocked the entrance to the dungeon and sent a stream of pro-union chats and URLs to them even as they fought to keep them out of the dungeon.
The battle wasn’t much of a fight, not at first. The replacement workers were there to kill dumb non–player characters in a boring, predictable way that wouldn’t trigger the Mechanical Turks and bring their operation to the attention of Nintendo-Sun. They were all seasoned gamers, and they were used to team play, and many of the Webblies had never fought side-by-side before. But the Webblies were fighting for the movement, and the replacement workers—they called them “scabs,” another old word from out of history—were fighting because they didn’t know what else to do.
It was a rout. The scabs were sent back to their respawn points by the thousand, unable to return to work until they’d done their corpse runs, and the Webblies raised their swords and shot fireballs into the sky and cheered in a dozen languages.
The news was good from Shenzhen, too, judging from what Justbob was saying into her headsets and typing onto her screens. The strike line was holding, and while the police were there, they hadn’t moved in—in fact, it sounded like they’d moved to hold back the private factory security!
Silently, Big Sister Nor thanked Matthew Fong for picking a fight that—seemingly—they’d be able to win. She shouted up to Ezhil in the front of Headshot, calling for ginseng bubble-tea all around; the ginseng root would give them all a little shot of energy. Couldn’t live on caffeine and taurine alone!
“Ezhil!” she shouted a minute later, looking up from her mouse. “Bubble tea!” If she’d been paying attention, she would have noticed the squeak in his voice as he promised right away, right away.
But her attention was fixed on her screens, because that’s where it was all suddenly going very wrong indeed. What she’d taken for strikers’ victorious fireballs launched into the sky were landing among the players now, inflicting major damage. Just as she was noticing this, a volley of skidding, spiked turtle-shells came sliding in from offscreen, in twelve worlds at once.
Ambush!
She barked the word into her headset in Mandarin, then Cantonese, then Hindi, then English. The cry was taken up by the players and they rallied, forming battle-squares, healers in the middle, tanks on the outside, nimble thieves and scouts spreading out into the mushroom forests, looking for the ambush.
This would work much better if they were a regular guild, all playing on the side of the evil Bowser or the valiant Princess Peach, because if you were all on the same side, the game would coordinate your movements for you, give you radar for where and how all the other players were moving. But the strikers were from both sides of Mushroom Kingdom’s moral coin, and as far as the game was concerned, they were sworn enemies. Their IMs were unintelligible to one another, and the default option for any “opposing” av you clicked on was ATTACK, leading to a lot of accidental skirmishes.
But gold farmers knew all about playing their own game, one that lived on top of the game that the companies wanted them to play. The game’s communications tools were powerful and easy, but nothing (apart from the ridiculous “agreement” you had to click every time you started up the game) kept you from using anything you wanted. They favored free chat systems developed to help corporate work-groups collaborate, since these services always had free demo versions available, hoping to snag some office-person into buying 30,000 licenses for their megacorp. These systems even allowed them to stream screen-caps from their own computers, and Big Sister Nor saw to it that these were arranged sequentially, forming a huge, panoramic view of the entire battlefield.
She flicked through the battlescenes and the communications hub, fingers flying on the keyboard. They had a Koopa Turbo Hammer in seven of the worlds, a huge, whirling god-hammer that could clobber a score of attackers on a single throw, and she had it brought forward, using the scouts’ screen-caps to pinpoint the enemies’ positions, conferring them to the hammer-throwers, a passel of hulking Kongs with protruding fangs and enormous, hairy chests.
That was seven battles down; in the remaining five, she ordered the Peaches to form up with their umbrellas at the ready, then had two Bowsers “bounce” each of them, sticking to them while doing minimum damage. The Peaches unfurled their umbrellas and sailed into the air, taking their Bowsers with them, to drop behind enemy lines, ready to breathe fire and stomp the opposing forces. This was a devastating attack, one that was only possible if you played the farmers’ game, cooperating through a side-channel.
It should have worked—the hammers, the Bowsers, the skilled players of a dozen guilds, bristling with armament and armor, spelling and firing and skirmishing.
It should have worked—but it hadn’t.
The mysterious attackers—she’d branded them “Pinkertons” in her mind, after the strikebreaking goons from the Pinkerton Detective Agency who’d been the old Wobblies’ worst enemies—had seemingly endless numbers, and every attack they launched seemed to do maximum damage. Meanwhile, they were able to pull off incredible dodges and defenses against the strikers’ attacks. And their aim! Every fireball, every turtle, every sound-bomb, every flung axe found its target with perfect accuracy.
It was almost as though they were—
—Cheating!
That had to be it. They were using aimhacks, dodgehacks, all the prohibited add-on software that the game was supposed to be able to spot an
d disable. Somehow, they’d gotten past the game’s defenses. It didn’t matter. The game was always stacked against gold farmers.
“Pull back!” she shouted. “Retreat!” This was going to have to be guerrilla war, jungle war, hiding in the bushes and sniping at them as they’d sniped at her. She’d lure them into the clearing that marked the dungeon’s entrance and then they’d slip around them into the mushroom forest, using the Webblies’ superior coordination to trump the hacks and numbers the Pinkertons had on their side. In her headset, she heard the ragged breathing, the curses in six languages, the laughter and shouting of players all over the world, listening to her rap out commands in all the different versions of Mushroom Kingdom that they were fighting in.
She found that she was grinning. This was fun. This was a lot more fun than being tear gassed.
It had been Big Sister Nor’s idea to use the games for organizing. Why risk your neck in the factory or standing at its gates when you could slip right in among the workers, no matter where they were in the world, and talk to them about joining up? Plenty of the MUTE old guard had thought she was crazy, but there was lots of support, too—especially when Nor showed them that they could reach the Indonesian textile workers who’d inherited her job when her factory had closed up and moved on, simply by logging into Spirals of the Golden Snail, a game that had taken the whole Malay peninsula by storm.
It didn’t matter where you fought, it mattered whether you won. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that they could win in-game. The bosses were better at firing teargas at them, but they were better at lobbing fireballs, pulsed energy weapons, photon torpedoes and savage flying fish—and they always would be. What’s more, a striker who lost a skirmish in-game merely had to respawn and do a corpse-run, possibly losing a little inventory in the process. A striker who lost a skirmish AFK—away from keyboard—might end up dead.
Big Sister Nor lived in perpetual fear of having someone’s death on her hands.
The battle was turning again. The Pinkertons had all fallen for her gambit, letting them rush past and back into the mushroom forest, effectively trading places. Now they were digging in the woods, laying little ambushes, fortifying positions and laying down withering fire from all directions. The breathing, gasping, triumphant muttering voices in her head and the hastily clattered in-game chat gave her a feeling like the battle was resting delicately balanced on her fingertips, every shift and change dancing felt as a tremor against the sensitive pads of her fingers.
Big Sister Nor called for her bubble tea again, realizing that a very long time indeed had gone by since she’d first ordered it. This time, no one answered. The skin on the back of her neck prickled and she slipped her headphones off her head. Justbob and The Mighty Krang caught on a second later, removing their earwigs. There was no noise at all from the front of Headshot, none of the normal hyperactive calling of gamer-kids, or the shouts of guestworkers phoning home on cheap earwigs.
Big Sister Nor stood up quietly and quickly and backed up against the wall, motioning to the others to do the same. On her screen, she saw another rally by the Pinkertons, who’d taken advantage of the sudden lack of strategic leadership to capture several of the small striker strongholds. She inched her way toward the door and very, very, very slowly tilted her head to see around the frame, then whipped it back as quick as she could.
RUN, she mouthed to her lieutenants, and they broke for the rear entrance, the escape hatch that Big Sister Nor always made sure of before she holed up to do union work.
On their heels came the Pinkertons, the real-world Pinkertons, Malay men in workers’ clothes, poor men, men armed with stout sticks and a few chains, men who’d been making their way to the door when Big Sister Nor chanced to look around it.
They shouted after them now, excited and tight voices, like the catcalls of drunken boys on street corners when they were feeling the bravery of numbers and hormones and liquor. That was a dangerous sound. It was the sound of fools egging each other on.
Big Sister Nor hit the crashbar on the rear door with both palms, slamming into it with the full weight of her body. The door’s gas-lift was broken, so it swung back like a mousetrap, and it was a good thing it did, because it moved so fast that the two Pinkertons waiting to bar their exit didn’t have time to get out of the way. One was knocked over on his ass, the other was slammed into the cinderblock wall with a jarring thud that Big Sister Nor felt in her palms.
The door rebounded into her, knocking her back into The Mighty Krang, who caught her, pushed her on, hands on her shoulderblades, breath ragged in her ears.
They were in a dark, narrow, stinking alley that connected two of the Lorangs, the small streets that ran off Geylang Road, and it was time to R and G—to run and gun, what you did when all your other plans collapsed. Big Sister Nor had thought this through far enough to make sure they had a back door, but no farther than that.
The Pinkertons were close behind, but they were all squeezed down into the incredibly narrow confines of the alleyway, and no one could really run or move faster than a desperate shuffle.
But then they broke free into the next Lorang, and Big Sister Nor broke left, hoping to make it far enough up the road to get into sight of the diners at the all-night restaurants.
She didn’t make it.
One of the men threw his truncheon at her and it hit her square between her shoulders, knocking the breath from her and causing her to go down on one knee. Justbob twined one hand in her blouse and hauled her to her feet with a sound of tearing cloth, and dragged her on, but they’d lost a step to her fall, and now the men were on them.
Justbob whirled around, snarling, shouting a wordless cry, using the movement as inertia for a wild round house kick that connected with one of the Pinkertons, a man with sleepy eyes and a thick mustache. Justbob’s foot caught him in the side, and they all heard the sound of his ribs breaking under the toe of her demure sandal with its fake jewels. The sandal flew on and clattered to the road with the cheap sound of paste gems.
The men hadn’t expected that, and there was a moment when they stopped in their tracks, staring at their fallen comrade, and in that instant, Big Sister Nor thought that—just maybe—they could get away. But Justbob’s chest was heaving, her face contorted in rage, and she leapt at the next man, a fat man in a sweaty sportcoat, thumbs aiming at his eyes, and as she reached him, the man beside him lifted his truncheon and brought it down, glancing off her high, fine cheekbone and then smashing against her collarbone.
Justbob howled like a wounded dog and fell back, landing a hard punch in her attacker’s groin as she fell back.
But now the Pinkertons were on them, and their arms were raised, their truncheons held high, and as the first one swung into Big Sister Nor’s left breast, she cried out and her mind was filled with Affendi and her broken fingers, her unrecognizably bruised face. Somewhere, just a few tantalizing meters up the Lorang, night people were eating a huge feast of fish and goat in curry, the smells in the air. But that was there. Here, Big Sister Nor was infinitely far from them, and the truncheons rose and fell and she curled up to protect her head, her breasts, her stomach, and in so doing exposed her tender kidneys, her delicate short ribs, and there she lay, enduring a season in hell that went on for an eternity and a half.
Connor Prikkel sometimes thought of math as a beautiful girl, the kind of girl that he’d dreamt of wooing, dating, even marrying, while sitting in the back of any class that wasn’t related to math, daydreaming. A beautiful girl like Jenny Rosen, who’d had classes with him all through high school, who always seemed to know the answer no matter what the subject, who had a light dusting of freckles around her nose and a quirky half-smile. Who dressed in jeans that she’d tailored herself, in t-shirts she’d modded, stitching multiple shirts together to make tight little half-shirts, elaborate shawls, mock turtlenecks.
Jenny Rosen had seemed to have it all: beauty and brains and, above all, rationality: she didn�
�t like the way that store-bought jeans fit, so she hacked her own. She didn’t like the t-shirts that everyone wore, so she changed the shirts to suit her taste. She was funny, she was clever, and he’d been completely, head-over-heels in love with her from sophomore English right through to senior American History.
They’d been friendly through that time, though not really friends. Connor’s friends were into gaming and computers, Jenny’s friends were into cool music or the school paper. But friendly, sure, enough to say hello in the hallway, enough to become lab partners in sophomore physics (she was a careful taker of notes, and her hair-stuff smelled amazing, and their hands brushed against each other a hundred times that semester).
And then, in senior year, he’d asked her out to a movie. Then she’d asked him to a track rally. Then he’d asked her to work with him on an American History project on Chinese railway workers that involved going to Chinatown after school, and there they’d had a giant dim sum meal and then sat in a park and talked for hours, and then they’d stopped talking and started kissing.
And one thing led to another, and the kissing led to more kissing, and then their friends all started to whisper, “Did you hear about Connor and Jenny?” and she met his parents and he met hers. And it had all seemed perfect.
But it wasn’t perfect. Anything but.
In the four months, two weeks and three days that they were officially a couple, they had approximately 2,453,212 arguments, each more blazing than the last. Theoretically, he understood everything he needed to about her. She loved sports. She loved to use her mind. She loved humor. She loved silly comedies and slow music without words.
And so he would go away and plan out exactly how to deliver all these things to her, plugging in her loves like variables into an equation, working out elaborate schemes to get them to her.
But it never worked. He’d plan it so that they could go to a ball game at AT&T Park and she’d want to go see a concert at Cow Palace instead. He’d take her to see a new wacky comedy and she’d want to go home and work on an overdue assignment. No matter how hard he tried to get her reality and his theory to match up, he always failed.
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