For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  Why no one had thought to merge the two disciplines was beyond him. If you’re going to smuggle people across the ocean, why not avail yourself of a cute little kit to transform their steel box into a cozy little camper? Was he missing something?

  Nope. Other than the fact that people-smugglers were all criminal dirtbags, he couldn’t find any reason why a smuggle-ee couldn’t enjoy the ten days at sea in high style. Especially if the smuggle-ee was now co-owner of a huge shipping and logistics company based in Los Angeles, with the run of the ware house and a Homeland Security all-access pass for the port.

  It had taken Wei-Dong three weeks to do the work on the container. The mail-order conversion kit said that it could be field-assembled by two unskilled laborers in a disaster area with hand tools in two days. It took him two weeks, which was a little embarrassing, as he’d always classed himself as “skilled” (but there you go).

  And he had special needs, after all. He’d read up on port security and knew that there’d be sensors looking for the telltale cocktail of gasses given off by humans: acetone, isoprene, alpha pinene and lots of other exotic exhaust given off with every breath in a specific ratio. So he built a little container inside the container, an airtight box that would hold his gasses in until they were at sea—he figured he could survive in it for a good ten hours before he used up all the air, provided he didn’t exercise too much. The port cops could probe his container all they wanted, and they’d get the normal mix of volatiles boiling off of the paint on the inside of the shipping container, untainted by human exhaust. Provided they didn’t actually open his container and then get too curious about the hermetically sealed box inside, he’d be golden.

  Anyway, by the time he was done, he had a genuinely kick-ass little nest. He’d loaded up his dad’s Huawei with an entire apartment’s worth of IKEA furniture and then he’d hacked it and nailed it and screwed it and glued it into the container’s interior, making a cozy ship’s cabin with a king-sized bed, a chemical toilet, a microwave, a desk, and a play area. Once they were at sea, he could open his little hatch and string out his WiFi receiver—tapping into the on-board WiFi used by the crew would be simple, as they didn’t devote a lot of energy to keeping out freeloaders while they were in the middle of the ocean—and his solar panel. He had some very long wires for both, because he’d fixed the waybills so that his container would be deep in the middle of the stack alongside one of the gaps that ran between them, rather than on the outside edge: one percent of shipping containers ended up at the bottom of the sea, tossed overboard in rough waters, and he wanted to minimize the chance of dying when his container imploded from the pressure of hundreds of atmospheres’ worth of deep ocean.

  Inheritances were handier than he’d suspected. He was able to click onto Huawei’s website and order four power-packs for their all-electric runabouts, each one rated for 80 miles’ drive. They were delivered directly to the pier his shipping container was waiting on. (He considered the possibility that the power-packs had been shipped to America in the same container he was installing them in, but he knew the odds against it were astronomical—there were a lot of shipping containers arriving on America’s shores every second.) They stacked neatly at one end of the container, with a bar-coded waybill pasted to them that said they were being returned as defective. They arrived charged, and he was pretty sure that he’d be able to keep them charged between the Port of Los Angeles and Shenzhen, using the solar sheets he was going to deploy on the top of the container stack. He’d tested the photovoltaic sheets on his father’s Huawei and found that he could fully charge it in six hours, and he’d calculated that he should be able to run his laptop, air conditioner, and water pumps for four days on each pack. Sixteen days’ power would be more than enough to complete the crossing, even if they got hit by bad weather, but it was good to know that recharging was an option.

  Water had given him some pause. Humans consume a lot of water, and while there was plenty of room in his space capsule—as he’d come to think of the container—he thought there had to be a better way to manage his liquid needs on the voyage than simply moving three or four tons of water into the box. He was deep in thought when he realized that the solar sheets were all waterproof and could be easily turned into a funnel that would feed a length of PVC pipe that he could snake from the top of the container stack into the space capsule, where a couple of sterile hollow drums would hold the water until he was ready to drink it—after a pass through a particulate and iodine filter—or shower in it. Afterwards, his waste water could just be pumped out onto the ship’s deck, where it would wash overboard with all the other water that fell on the ship. If he packed enough water to keep him going on minimal showers and cooking for a week, the odds were good that they’d hit a rainstorm and he’d be topped up—and if they didn’t he could ration his remaining water and arrive in China a little smellier than he’d started.

  He loved this stuff. The planning was exquisite fun, a real googlefest of interesting how-tos and advice. Lots of parts of the problem of self-sufficiency at sea had been considered before this, though no one had given much thought to the problem of travelling in style and secrecy in a container. He was a pioneer. He was making notes and planning to publish them when the adventure was over.

  Of course, he wouldn’t mention the reason he needed to smuggle himself into China, rather than just applying for a tourist visa.

  Wei-Dong’s mother didn’t know what to make of her son. His father’s death had shattered her, and half the time she seemed to be speaking to him from behind a curtain of gauze. He found the anti-depressants her doctor had prescribed and looked up the side-effects and decided that his mother probably wouldn’t be in any shape to notice that he was up to something weird. Mostly she just seemed relieved to have him home, and industriously involved in the family business. She hadn’t even blinked when he told her he was going to take a road trip up the coast, a nice long drive up to Alaska with minimal net-access, phone activity and so on.

  The last cargo to go into the space capsule was three cardboard boxes, small enough to load into the trunk of the Huawei, which he put in long-term parking and double-locked after he’d loaded them up. Each one was triple-wrapped in waterproof plastic, and inside them were twenty-five thousand–odd prepaid game-cards for various MMOs. The face-value of these cards was in excess of $200,000, though no money changed hands when he collected them, in lots of a few hundred, from Chinese convenience stores all over Los Angeles and Orange County. It had taken three days to get the whole load, and it had been the hairiest part of the gig so far. The cards were part of a regular deal whereby the big gold farmers used networks of overseas retailers to snaffle up US playtime and ship it back to China, so that their employees could get online using the US servers.

  Technically, that meant that all the convenience store clerks he visited were part of a vast criminal underground, but none of them seemed all that dangerous. Still, if any one of them had been suspicious about the white kid with the bad Mandarin accent who was doing the regular pickup, who knew what might happen?

  It hadn’t, though. Now he had the precious cargo, the boxes of untraceable, non-sequential game-credit that would let him earn game gold. It was all so weird, now that he sat there on his red leather IKEA sofa, sipping an iced tea and munching a power bar and contemplating his booty.

  Under their scratch-off strips, these cards contained unique numbers produced by a big random-number generator on a server in America, then printed in China, then shipped back to America, now destined for China again. He thought about how much simpler it would have been to come up with the random numbers in China in the first place, and chuckled and put his feet up on the boxes.

  Of course, if they’d done that, he wouldn’t have had any excuse to build the space capsule and smuggle himself into China.

  Ashok did his best thinking on paper, big sheets of it. He knew that it was ridiculous. The smart thing to do would be to keep all the files digital, encryp
ted on a shared drive on the net where all the Webblies could get at it. But the numbers made so much more sense when they were written neatly on flip-chart paper and tacked up all around the walls of his “war room”—the back room at Mrs. Dotta’s cafe, rented by Mala out of the army’s wages from Mr. Banerjee.

  Oh yes, Mala was still drawing wages from Mr. Banerjee and her soldiers were still fighting the missions he sent them on. But afterwards, in their own time, they fought their own missions, in Mrs. Dotta’s shop. Mrs. Dotta was lavishly welcoming to them, grateful for the business in her shop, which had been in danger of drying up and blowing away. Idiot nephew had been sent back to Uttar Pradesh to live with his parents, limping home with his tail between his legs and leaving Mrs. Dotta to tend her increasingly empty shop on her own.

  Mrs. Dotta didn’t mind the big sheets of paper. She loved Ashok, smartly dressed and well turned out, and clearly thought that he and Yasmin had something going on. Ashok tried gently to disabuse her of this, but she wasn’t having any of it. She brought him sweet chai all day and all night, as he labored over his sheets.

  “Ashok,” Mala called, limping toward him through the empty cafe, leaning on the trestle-tables that supported the long rows of gasping PCs.

  He stood up from the table, wiping the chai from his chin with his hand, wiping his hand on his trousers. Mala made him nervous. He’d visited her in the hospital, with Yasmin, and sat by her bed while she refused to look at either of them. He’d picked her up when she was discharged, and she’d fixed him with that burning look, like a holy woman, and she’d nodded once at him, and asked him how her army could help.

  “Mala,” he said. “You’re early.”

  “Not much fighting today,” she said, shrugging. “Fighting Webblies is like fighting children. Badly organized children. We knocked over twenty jobsites before lunch and I had to call a break. The army was getting bored. I’ve got them on training exercises, fighting battles against each other.”

  “You’re the commander, General Robotwallah, I’m sure you know best.”

  She had a very pretty smile, Mala did, though you rarely got to see it. Mostly you saw her ugly smiles, smiles that seemed to have too many sharp teeth in them. But her pretty smile was like the sun. It changed the whole room, made your heart glow. He understood how a girl like this could command an army. He stared at the pretty smile for a minute and his tongue went dry and thick in his mouth.

  “I want to talk to you, Ashok. You’re sitting here with your paper and your figures, and you keep telling us to wait, wait a little, and you’ll explain everything. It’s been months, Ashok, and still you say wait, explain. I’m tired of waiting. The army is tired of waiting. Being double agents was amusing for a little while, and it’s fun to fight real Pinkertons at night, but they’re not going to wait around forever.”

  Ashok held his hands out in a placating gesture that often worked on Mala. She needed to know that she was the boss. “Look, it’s not a simple matter. If we’re going to take on four virtual worlds at once, everything has to run like clockwork, each piece firing after the other. In the meantime—”

  She waved at him dismissively. “In the meantime, Banerjee grows more and more suspicious. The man is an idiot, not a moron. He will eventually figure out that something is going wrong. Or his masters will. And then—”

  “And then we’ll have to placate him, or misdirect him. General, this is a confidence game, a scam, running on four virtual worlds and twenty real nations, with hundreds of confederates. Confidence games require planning and cunning. It’s not enough to go in, guns blazing—”

  “You think we don’t understand planning? You think we don’t understand cunning? Ashok, you have never fought. You should fight. It would help you understand this business you’ve gotten into. You think that we’re thugs, idiot muscle. Running a battle requires as much skill as anything you do—I don’t have a fine education, I am just a girl from the village, I am just a Dharavi rat, but I am smart, Ashok, and don’t you ever forget it.”

  The worst part was, she was right. He did often think of her as a thug. “Mala, I want to play, but playing would take me away from planning.”

  “You can’t plan if you don’t play. I’m the general, and I’m ordering it. You’ll join the junior platoon on maneuvers tomorrow at 10AM. There’s skirmishing, then theory, then a couple of battles overseen by the senior platoon when they arrive. It will be good for you. They will rag you some, because you are new, but that will be good for you, too.”

  That look in her eyes, the fiery one, told him that he didn’t dare disagree. “Yes, General,” he said.

  “And you will explain this business to me, now. You will learn my world, I will learn yours.”

  “Mala—”

  “I know, I know. I came in and shouted at you because you were taking too long and now I insist that you take longer.” She gave him that smile. She wasn’t pretty—her features were too sharp for pretty—but she was beautiful when she smiled. She was going to be a heart-breaker when she grew up. If she grew up.

  “Yes, General.”

  “Chai!” she called to Mrs. Dotta, who brought it round quickly, averting her eyes from Mala.

  “All right, let’s start with the basic theory of the scam. Who is easiest to trick?”

  “A fool,” she said at once.

  “Wrong,” he said. “Fools are often suspicious, because they’ve been taken advantage of. The easiest person to trick is a successful person, the more successful the better. Why is that?”

  Mala thought. “They have more money, so it’s worth tricking them?”

  Ashok waggled his chin. “No, sorry—by that reasoning, they should be more suspicious, not less.”

  Mala scraped a chair over the floor and sat down and made a face at him. “I give up, tell me.”

  “It’s because if a man is successful at doing one thing, he’s apt to assume that he’ll be successful at anything. He believes he’s a Brahmin, divinely gifted with the wisdom and strength of character to succeed. He can’t bear the thought that he just got lucky, or that his parents just got lucky and left him a pile of rupees. He can’t stand the thought that understanding physics or computers or cameras doesn’t make him an expert on economics or beekeeping or cookery.

  “And his intelligence and his pride work together to make him easier to trick. His pride, naturally, but his intelligence, too: he’s smart enough to understand that there are lots of ways to get rich. If you tell him a complex tale about how some market works and can be tricked, he can follow along over rough territory that would lose a dumber man.

  “And there’s a third reason that successful men are easier to trick than fools: they dread being shown up as a fool. When you trick them, you can trick them again, make them believe that the scheme fell through. They don’t want to go to the police or tell their friends, because if word gets out that some mighty and powerful man was tricked, he stands to lose his reputation, without which he cannot recover his fortune.”

  Mala waggled her chin. “It all makes sense, I suppose.”

  “It does,” Ashok said.

  “I am a successful and powerful person,” she said. Her eyes were cat-slits.

  “You are,” Ashok said, more cautiously.

  “So I would be easier to fool than any of the fools in my army?”

  Ashok laughed. “You are so sharp, General, it’s a wonder you don’t cut yourself. Yes, it’s possible that all of this is a giant triple-twist bluff, aimed at fooling you. But what would I want to fool you for? As rich as your army has made you, you must know that I could be just as rich by working as a junior lecturer in economics at IIT. But General, at the end of the day, you either trust me or you don’t. I can’t prove to you that you’re inside the scheme rather than its target. If you want out, that’s fine. It will hurt the plan, but it won’t be its death. There’s a lot of people involved here.”

  Mala smiled her sunny smile. “You are a clever man,” she said. �
�And for now, I will trust you. Go on.”

  “Let’s step back a little. Do you want to learn some history?”

  “Will it help me understand why you’re taking so long?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I think it’s a bloody good story, in any case.”

  She made a go-on gesture and sipped her chai, her back very erect, her bearing regal.

  “Back in the 1930s, the biggest confidence jobs were called ‘The Big Store.’ They were little stage plays in which there was only one audience-member, the ‘mark’ or victim. Everyone else was in the play. The mark would meet a ‘roper’ on a train, who would feel him out to see if he had any money. He’d sometimes give him a little taste of the money to be made—maybe they’d share some mysterious ‘found’ money that he’d planted. That sort of thing makes the mark trust you more, and also puts him in your power, because now you know that he’s willing to cheat a little.

  “Once the train pulled into the strange city and the mark got off, every single person he met or talked with would be part of the trick. If the mark was good at finance, the roper would hand him off to a partner, the ‘inside man’ who would tell him about a scam he had for winning horse races; if the mark was good at horse races, the scam would be about fixing the stock market—in other words, what ever the mark knew the least about, that was the center of the game.

  “The mark would be shown a betting parlor or a stock-broker’s office filled with bustling, active people—so many people that it was impossible to believe that they could all be part of a scam. Then he’d have the deal explained to him: the brokerage house or betting parlor got its figures from a telegraph office—this was before computers—that would phone in the results. The mark would then be shown the ‘telegraph office’—another totally fake business—and meet a ‘friend’ of the inside man who was willing to delay the results by a few minutes, giving them to the roper and the market just quick enough to let them get their bets or buys down. They’d know the winners before the office did, so they’d be betting on a sure thing.