For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  Once they had the water, Yasmin helped Mala carry it back to her building, but stopped her before they got there, in the lee of an overhanging chute that workers used to dump bundled cardboard from a second-storey factory down to carriers on the ground. The factory hadn’t started up yet, so it was quiet now.

  “Big Sister Nor asked me to talk to you, Mala.”

  Mala stiffened and her smile faded. They weren’t talking as sisters anymore. The hard look, the General Robotwallah look, was in her eyes. “What did she say to you?”

  “The same as she said to you, I imagine. That the people we fight against are also workers, like us. Children, like us. That we can live without hurting others. That we can work with them, with workers everywhere—”

  Mala held up her hand, the General’s command for silence in the war-room. “I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it. And what, you think she’s right? You want to give it all up and go back to how we were before? Back to school, back to work, back to no money and no food and being afraid all the time?”

  Yasmin didn’t remember being afraid all the time, and school hadn’t been that bad, had it? “Mala,” she said, placatingly. “I just wanted to talk about this with you. You’ve saved us, all of us in the army, brought us out of misery and into riches and work. But we work and work for Mr. Banerjee, for his bosses, and our parents work for bosses, and the children we fight in the game work for bosses, and I just think—” She drew in a breath. “I think I have more in common with the workers than I do with the bosses. That maybe, if we all come together, we can demand a better deal from all of them—”

  Mala’s eyes blazed. “You want to lead the army, is that it? You want to take us on this mission of yours to make friends with everyone, to join with them to fight Mr. Banerjee and the bosses, Mr. Bhatt who owns the factory and the people who own the game? And how will you fight, little Yasmin? Are you going to upset the entire world so that it’s finally fair and kind to everyone?”

  Yasmin shrank back, but she took a deep breath and looked into the General’s terrible eyes. “What’s so wrong with kindness, Mala? What’s so terrible about surviving without harming other people?”

  Mala’s lip curled up in a snarl of pure disgust. “Don’t you know by now, Yasmin? Haven’t you figured it out yet? Look around us!” She waved her water can wildly, nearly clubbing an old woman who was inching past, bearing her own water cans. “Look around! You know that there are people all over the world who have fine cars and fine meals, servants and maids? There are people all over the world who have toilets, Yasmin, and running water, and who get to each have their own bedroom with a fine bed to sleep in! Do you think those people are going to give up their fine beds and their fine houses and cars for you? And if they don’t give it up, where will it come from? How many beds and cars are there? Are there enough for all of us? In this world, Yasmin, there just isn’t enough. That means that there are going to be winners and losers, just like in any game, and you get to decide if you want to be a winner or a loser.”

  Yasmin mumbled something under her breath.

  “What?” Mala shouted at her. “What are you saying, girl? Speak up so I can hear you!”

  “I don’t think it’s like that. I think we can be kind to other people and that they will be kind to us. I think that we can stick together, like a team, like the army, and we can all work together to make the world a better place.”

  Mala laughed, but it sounded forced, and Yasmin thought she saw tears starting in her friend’s eyes. “You know what happens when you act like that, Yasmin? They find a way to destroy you. To force you to become an animal. Because they’re animals. They want to win, and if you offer them your hand, they’ll slice off your fingers. You have to be an animal to survive.”

  Yasmin shook her head, negating everything. “It’s not true, Mala! Our neighbors here, they’re not animals. They’re people. They’re good people. We have nothing and yet we all cooperate. We help each other—”

  “Oh fine, maybe you can make a little group of friends here, people who would have to look you in the eye if they did you a dirty trick. But it’s a big world. Do you think that Big Sister Nor’s friends in Singapore, in China, in America, in Russia—do you think they’ll think twice before they destroy you? In Africa, in—” She waved her arm, taking in all the countries she didn’t know the names of, filled with teeming masses of predatory workers, ready to take their jobs from them. “Listen: Do you really care so much for Chinese and Russians and all those other people? Will you take bread out of your mouth to give it to them? For a bunch of foreigners who wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire?”

  Yasmin thought she knew her friend, but this was like nothing she’d ever heard from Mala before. Where had all this Indian patriotism come from? “Mala, it’s foreigners who own all the games we’re playing. Who cares if they’re foreigners? Isn’t the fact that they’re people enough? Didn’t you used to rage about the stupid caste system and say that everyone deserved equality?”

  “Deserved!” Mala spat the word out like a curse. “Who cares what you deserve, if you don’t get it. Fill your belly with deserve. Sleep on a bed of deserve. See what you get from deserve!”

  “So your army is about taking what ever they can get, even if it hurts someone else?”

  Mala stood up very straight. “That’s right, it’s my army, Yasmin. My army! And you’re not a part of it anymore. Don’t bother coming around again, because, because—”

  “Because I’m not your friend or your lieutenant anymore,” Yasmin said. “I understand, General Mala Robotwallah. But your army won’t last forever and our sisterhood might have, if you’d only valued it more. I’m sorry you are making this decision, General Robotwallah, but it’s yours to make. Your karma.” She set down the water-can and turned on her heel and started away, back stiff, waiting for Mala to jump on her back and wrestle her into the mud, waiting for her to run up and hug her and beg her for forgiveness. She got to the next corner, a narrow laneway between more plastic recycling factories, and contrived to look back over her shoulder as she turned, pretending to be dodging to avoid a pair of goats being led by an old Tamil man.

  Mala was standing tall as a soldier, eyes burning into her, and they transfixed her for a moment, froze her in her tracks, so that she really did have to dodge around the goats. When she looked back again, the General had departed, her skinny arms straining with her water-cans.

  Big Sister Nor told her to be understanding.

  “She’s still your friend,” the woman said, her voice emanating from the gigantic robot that stood guard over a group of Webbly gold farmers who were methodically raiding an old armory, clearing out the zombies and picking up the cash and weapon-drops that appeared every time they ran the dungeon. “She may not know it, but she’s on the side of workers. The other side—the boss’s side—they’ll use her services, but they’ll never let her into their camp. The best she can hope for is to be a cherished pet, a valuable bit of hired muscle. I don’t think she’ll stay put for that, do you?”

  But it wasn’t much comfort. In one morning, Yasmin had lost her best friend and her occupation. She started going to school again, but she’d fallen behind in the work in the six months she’d been away and now the master wanted her to stay back a year and sit with the grade four students, which was embarrassing. She’d always been a good student and it galled her to sit with the younger kids—and to make things worse, she was tall for her age and towered over them. Gradually, she stopped attending the school.

  Her parents were outraged, of course. But they’d been outraged when Yasmin had joined the army, too, and her father had beaten her for ten days running, while she refused to cry, refused to have her will broken. In the end, they’d been won over by her stubbornness. And, of course, by the money she brought home.

  Yasmin could handle her parents.

  Mrs. Dotta’s internet cafe was a sad place now that the army had moved on. Mala had forced that on Mr. Banerjee, and had
counted it as a great show of her strength when she prevailed. But Yasmin thought she never would have won the argument if Mrs. Dotta hadn’t been so eager to get rid of the army and all the demands it made on her, taking over her business and chasing off her regular customers.

  Yasmin doubted that Mrs. Dotta had anticipated the effect that the army’s departure would have on her little shop, though. Once the army had gone, every kid in Dharavi had moved with them—no one under the age of 30 would set foot in the cafe. No one except Yasmin, who now sat there all day long, fighting for the workers.

  “You are very good at this,” Justbob told her. She was Big Sister Nor’s lieutenant, and her Hindi was terrible, so they got by in a broken English that each could barely understand. Nevertheless, Justbob’s play was aggressive and just this side of reckless, utterly fearless, and she screamed out fearsome battle-cries in Tamil and Chinese when she played, which made Yasmin laugh even as the hairs on her arms stood up. Justbob liked to put Yasmin in charge of strategy while she led the armies of defenders from around the world who played on their side, defending workers from people like Mala.

  “Thank you,” Yasmin said, and dispatched a squadron to feint at the left flank of a twenty-cruiser unit of rusting battle-cars that bristled with bolted-on machine guns and grenade launchers. She mostly played Mad Max: Autoduel and Civilization these days, avoiding Zombie Mecha and the other games that Mala and her army ruled in. Autoduel was huge now, linked to a reality TV show in which crazy white people fought each other in the deserts in Australia with killer cars just like the ones in the game.

  The opposing army bought the feint, turning in a wide arc to present their forward guns to her zippy little motorcycle scouts who must have looked like easy pickings—the fast dirt bikes couldn’t support any real arms or armor, so each driver was limited to hand weapons, mostly Uzis on full auto, spraying steel-jacketed rounds toward the heavily armored snouts of the enemy, who returned withering fire with tripod-mounted machine guns and grenades.

  But as they turned, they rolled into a double row of mines Yasmin had laid by stealth at the start of the battle, and then, as the cars rocked and slammed into each other and spun out of control, Justbob’s dragoons swept in from the left, and their splendid battle-wagon came in from the right—a lumbering two-storey RV plated with triple-thick armor, pierced with gun slits for a battery of flamethrowers and automatic ballistic weapons, mostly firing depleted uranium rounds that cut through the enemy cars like butter. It wasn’t hard to outrun the battle-wagon, but there was nowhere for the enemy to go, and a few minutes later, all that was left of the enemy were oily petrol fires and horribly mutilated bodies.

  Yasmin zoomed out and booted her command-trike around a dune to where the work-party continued to labor, doing their job, excavating a buried city full of feral mutants and harvesting its rich ammo dumps and art treasures for the tenth time that day. Yasmin couldn’t really talk to them—they were from somewhere in China called Fujian, and besides, they were busy. They’d left their boss and formed a worker’s co-op that split the earnings evenly, but they’d had to go heavily into debt to buy the computers do it, and from what Yasmin understood, their families could be hurt or even killed if they missed a payment, since they’d had to borrow the money from gangsters.

  It would have been nice if they’d had access to a better source of money, but it certainly wouldn’t be Yasmin. Her army money had run out a few weeks after she’d left Mala, and though the IWWWW paid her a little money to guard union shops, it didn’t come to much, especially compared to the money Mr. Banerjee had to throw around.

  At least she wasn’t hurting other poor people to survive. The goons she’d just wiped out would get paid even though they’d lost. And she had to admit it: this was fun. There was a real thrill in playing the game, playing it well, getting this army of people to follow her lead to cooperate and become an unstoppable weapon.

  Then, Justbob was gone. Not even a hastily typed “gtg,” she just wasn’t on the end of her mic. And there were crashing sounds, shouts in a language Yasmin didn’t speak. Distant screaming.

  Yasmin flipped over to Minerva, the social networking site that the Webblies favored, as she did a thousand times a day. Minerva had been developed for gamers, and it had all kinds of nice dashboards that showed you what worlds all your friends were in, what kind of battles they were fighting and so on. It was easy to get lost in Minerva, falling into a clicktrance of screencaps of famous battles, trash-talking between guilds, furious arguments about the best way to run a level—and the endless rounds of gold-farmer bashing. One thing she loved about Minerva was the auto-translate feature, whose database included all kinds of international gamer shorthands and slangs, knowing that kekekekeke was Korean for LOL and a million other bits of vital dialects. This made Minerva especially useful for the Webblies’ global network of guilds, worker co-ops, locals and clans.

  Her dashboard was going crazy. Webblies from all over the world were tweeting about something happening in China, a big strike from a group of gold farmers who’d walked out on their boss, and were now picketing outside of their factories. Players from all over the world were rushing to a site in Mushroom Kingdom to blockade some sploit that they’d been mining before they walked out. Yasmin hadn’t ever played Mushroom Kingdom and she wouldn’t be any use there—you had to know a lot about a world’s weapons and physics and player-types before you could do any damage. But judging from the status ticker zipping past, there were plenty of Webblies available on every shard to fill the gap.

  She followed the messages as they went by, watched the rallies and the retreats, the victories and defeats, and waited on tenter-hooks for the battle to end when the GMs discovered what they were up to and banned everyone’s accounts.

  That was the secret weapon in all these battles: anyone who snitched to the employees of the companies that ran the worlds could destroy both teams, wiping out their accounts and loot in an instant. No one could afford that—and no one could afford to fight in battles that were so massive that they caught the eye of the GMs, either.

  And yet, here were the Webblies, hundreds of them, all risking their accounts and their livelihoods to beat back goons who were trying to break a strike. Yasmin’s blood sang—this was it, this was what Big Sister Nor was always talking about: Solidarity! An injury to one is an injury to all! We’re all on the same team—and we stay together.

  There were videos and pictures streaming from the strike, too—skinny Chinese boys blinking owlishly in the daylight, on busy streets in a distant land, standing with arms linked in front of glass doorways, chanting slogans in Chinese. Passers-by goggled at them, or pointed, or laughed. Mostly they were girls, older than Yasmin, in their late teens and early twenties, very well-dressed, with fashionable haircuts and short skirts and ironed blouses and shining hair. They stared and some of them talked with the boys, who basked in the attention. Yasmin knew about boys and girls and the way they made each other act—hadn’t she seen and used that knowledge when she was Mala’s lieutenant?

  And now more and more of the girls were joining the boys—not exactly joining, but crowding around them, standing in clumps, talking amongst themselves. And there were police coming in, too, lots of pictures of the police filling in, and Yasmin’s heart sank. She could see, with her strategist’s eye, how the police positions would work in planning a rush at the strikers, shutting off their escape routes, boxing them in and trapping them when the police swept in.

  Now the photos slowed, now the videos stopped. Gloved hands reached up and snatched away cameras, covering lenses. The last audiofeed was shouts, angry, scared, hurt—

  And now the ticker at the bottom of her screen was going even crazier, messages from the pickets in China about the police rush, and there was a moment of unreality as Yasmin felt that she was reading about an in-game battle again, set in some gameworld modeled on industrial China, a place that seemed as foreign to her as Zombie Mecha or Mad Max. But these were r
eal people, skirmishing with real police, being clubbed with real truncheons. Yasmin’s imagination supplied images of people screaming, writhing, trampling each other with all the vividness of one of her games. It was a familiar scene, but instead of zombies, it was young, pale Chinese boys and beautiful, fashionable Chinese girls caught in the crush, falling beneath the truncheons.

  And then the messages died away, as everyone on the scene fell silent. The ticker still crawled with other Webblies around the world, someone saying that the Chinese police could shut down all the mobile devices in a city or a local area if they wanted. So maybe the people were still there, still recording and writing it down. Maybe they hadn’t all been arrested and taken away.

  Yasmin buried her face in her hands and breathed heavily. Mrs. Dotta shouted something at her, maybe concerned. It was impossible to tell over the song of the blood in her ears and the hammer of the blood in her chest.

  Out there, Webblies all over the world were fighting for a better deal for poor people, and what did it matter? How could her solidarity help those people in China? How could they help her when she needed it? Where were Big Sister Nor and Justbob and the Mighty Krang now that she needed them?

  She stumbled out into the light, blinking, thinking of those skinny Chinese boys and the police in their strategic positions around them. Suddenly, the familiar alleys and lanes of Dharavi felt sinister and claustrophobic, as though people were watching her from every angle, getting ready to attack her. And after all, she was just a girl, a little girl, and not a mighty warrior or a general.

  Her treacherous feet had led her down the road, around a corner, behind the yard where the women’s baking co-op set out their papadams in the sun, and past the new cafe where Mala and her army fought. They were in there now, the sound of their boisterous play floating out on the air like smoke, like the mouth-watering temptation smells of cooking food.