For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  “All right,” she said, “all right. Enough talk-talk. Let’s kill something.” Her headphone erupted in ragged cheering, and she skirmished alongside her commanders for a happy hour until The Mighty Krang came and dragged her away so that she could eat dinner.

  Big Sister Nor waited until she was seated, with food on her plate—sizzling cha kway teow and fried Hokkien noodles, smelling like heaven—before she started speaking. “All right,” she said. “Our man’s landing in Shenzhen tomorrow. We’ve got people who’ll help get him out of the port safely, and he says he’s got our cargo, no problems there. He’s been logging in on the voyage, he says he can get us hundreds of Turks.”

  The Mighty Krang waved his chopsticks at her. “Do you believe him?”

  Big Sister Nor chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. “I think I do,” she said. “He’s all enthusiasm, that one. He’s one of those kids who absolutely loves gaming and wanted to be part of the ‘magic,’ but discovered that he was working every hour God sent, and there were always hidden rules that ended up docking his pay.” The other two nodded vigorously—they recognized the pattern, it was the template for sweatshops all over the world. They also recognized that Big Sister Nor was winding up for another one of her speeches. They made eye-rolls at each other, making sure that Big Sister Nor saw too. “His employers told him to be grateful to have such a wonderful opportunity and didn’t he know that there were plenty more who’d have his job if he didn’t want it?”

  “Okay, so he’s upset—what makes you think he can deliver lots of other upset people?”

  She shrugged and speared a prawn. “He’s a natural networker, a real do-er. You should hear him talk about that shipping container of his! It’s a real hotel on the high seas. Very ingenious. And his guildies say he’s bloody sociable. A nice guy. The kind of guy you listen to.”

  “The kind of guy you follow?” asked Justbob, scratching at her scarred eye-socket. She could forget about the itch and the ache from the side of her face when she was in conference with her warriors, but she lost that precious distraction the rest of the time. And her dreams were full of phantom aches from the ruined eye, and she sometimes woke with tears on her face.

  Big Sister Nor said, “That’s what I think.”

  The Mighty Krang drank some watermelon juice and drew glyphs in the table with the condensation. The waitress—a pretty Tamil girl—scowled at him with mock theatricality and wiped it away. All the waitresses had crushes on The Mighty Krang. Even Justbob had to admit that he was pretty. “I don’t like the idea,” he said. “This is about, you know, workers.”

  Big Sister Nor fixed him with a level stare. “You mean ‘he’s white, I don’t trust him.’ He’s a worker, too—even though he works for the game. We’re all workers. That’s the point of the Webblies. All workers in one big union—solidarity. Start making distinctions between workers who deserve the union and workers who don’t, and the next thing you know, your job will be handed over to the workers you left out of your private club house. Krang, if you’re not clear on this, you’re in the wrong place. Absolutely the wrong place. Do I make myself clear?”

  This was a different Big Sister Nor than the one they usually knew, the motherly, patient, understanding one. Her voice was brittle and stern, her stare piercing. Krang visibly wilted under its glare. “Fine,” he said, without much conviction. “Sorry.” Justbob felt embarrassed for him, but not sympathetic. He knew better.

  They finished the meal in silence. Big Sister Nor’s phone buzzed at her. She looked at the face, saw the number, put it back down again. There was a rule: no taking calls during “family dinners” between the three of them. But BSN was visibly anxious to get to this one. She began to eat faster, as fast as she could with her twisted hand.

  “Who was it?” Justbob asked.

  “China,” she said. “Urgent. Our boy from America.”

  Ping didn’t like the port. Too many cops. He had good papers, but not even the best papers would stand up long to a cop who actually radioed in the ID and asked about it. The counterfeiters claimed that they used good identities for the fakes, real people who weren’t in any kind of trouble, but who knew whether to believe them?

  Anyway, it was just crazy. The gweilo was supposed to wait until the ship came into dock, change into a set of clean clothes, pin on ID from his father’s company, and just walk out of the port, flashing his identification at anyone who bothered to ask the skinny white kid what he was doing, carrying two heavy cardboard boxes out of the secure region. Once he made it clear of the port, Ping could take him away, make him disappear into the mix of foreigners, merchants, and business people thronging the area.

  Ping had asked around, found a Webbly whose brother had worked as a hauler the year before, gotten information about where Leonard would most likely emerge, and emailed all that info to Leonard as he trundled across the ocean.

  But there weren’t supposed to be this many cops, were there? There were hundreds of them, it seemed like, and not just uniforms. There were plenty of especially tall men with brush-cuts and earpieces, dressed like civilians, but moving with far too much coordination and purpose, standing where they had good sight-lines to the whole street. Ping walked past the entrance twice, the first time conducting an imaginary argument with someone over his phone, trying to exude an aura of distraction that would make him seem harmless. The second time he walked past while staring intently at a tourist map, trying to maintain the show of helplessness. In between, he checked his watch, saw that Leonard was an hour late, sent a message back to Lu and asked him to see if he could email Big Sister Nor and find out what was going on. This was the trickiest moment, since the ship’s satellite link was down while it was in dock, and so Leonard’s stolen network connection was down with it. Once he was clear of the port, they’d give him a prepaid phone, get him back on the grid, but until then…

  He nearly dropped the tourist map when his phone went off. A nearby cop, the tallest man he’d ever seen, looked hard at him, and he smiled sheepishly and withdrew his phone and tried to control the shaking in his hands as he touched it to life, hoping the noise hadn’t aggro’d him.

  “Is he with you?” Big Sister Nor’s Mandarin was heavily accented, but good. He recognized the voice instantly from many late-night chat sessions and raids.

  “Hi!” he said, in a bright, brittle voice, trying to sound like he was talking to a girlfriend or sister. “It’s great to hear from you!”

  “You haven’t seen him yet?”

  “That’s right!” he said, pasting a fake grin on his face for the benefit of the security man.

  “Shit. He was due out hours ago.” Big Sister Nor went quiet. “Okay, here’s the thing. What ever happened to him, we need those boxes.” She cursed in some other language. “I should have just had him put the boxes in the container. He wanted to come see you all so badly, though—” She broke off.

  “Okay!” he said, walking as casually as he could away from the cop. There was a spot, a doorway in front of a closed grocery store down the road. He could go there, sit down, talk this through.

  “A lot of cops where you are, huh? Don’t answer. Listen, Ping, I need to know—can you get into the port? If he doesn’t make it out?”

  He swallowed. “I don’t think so,” he whispered. He was almost to his doorway now.

  “What if you have to?”

  He was a raid leader, a master strategist. He was no Matthew, but still, he understood how to get in and out of tight places. And he’d been a pretty good climber a few years ago, before he’d found gold-farming. Maybe he could go over the fence? He felt like throwing up at the thought. There were so many cameras, so many cops, the fence was so high.

  “I’d try,” he said. “But I would almost certainly go to jail.” He’d been held for three days in the local lockup along with most of the strikers and then released. It had been bad enough—not as bad as Matthew’s stories—and he never wanted to go back. “You have to see this place. I
t’s like a fortress.”

  She sighed. “I know what ports look like,” she said. “Okay, tell you what—you wait another hour, see if you can find him. I’ll work on something else here, and call you.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Casually, he drifted back along the length of the high fence that guarded the port, keenly aware of the cameras drilling into the back of his neck. How many times could he pass by before someone decided to figure out what he was doing there? They should have brought a whole party, half a dozen of the gang who could trade off looking for the stupid gweilo. Ping shook his head in disgust. It had been fun to know Leonard when he was a kid in California and they were five kids in China—exotic, even. No one else partied with exotic foreigners with bad accents.

  It was even exciting when the gweilo had turned into a smuggler for the cause, crossing the ocean with his booty of hard-earned prepaid game-cards that would let them all fly under the game companies’ radar.

  But it was no longer exciting now that he was about to go to jail because some dumb kid from across the ocean couldn’t figure out how to get his ass out of the port of Shenzhen.

  It had gone better than Wei-Dong had any right to expect. After they took to the sea, he’d cut the freighter’s WiFi like butter and hopped onto their satellite link. It was slow—too slow for gaming—but it was okay for messaging and staying in touch with both the Webblies and the cell of Turks he’d pieced together from the best people he knew. He’d let himself out of the container on the first night and climbed up to the top of the stack, trailing his solar rig and water collector behind him, and affixed both to an inconspicuous spot on the outside roof of the topmost containers, where no crewmember could spot them. Again, the operation went off without a hitch.

  By day three, he was wishing for some trouble. There was only so much time he could spend watching the planning emerge on the Webbly boards, especially since so many pieces of the plan were closely guarded secrets, visible only as blank spots in his understanding of where he was going and why he was going there. A thousand times a day, he was struck with the absolute madness of his position—a smuggler on the high seas, going to make revolution in Asia, at the tender age of seventeen! It was fabulous and terrifying, depending on what mood he was in.

  Mostly, that mood was bored.

  There was nothing to do, and by day five he was snaffling up all the traffic on the boat, watching the lovesick crew of six Filipino sailors sending long-distance romantic notes to their pining loved-ones and watching the endless chatter about storm-systems. It was entertaining enough downloading a Tagalog dictionary so he could look up some of the phrases they dropped into their letters, but after a while, that paled too.

  And there were still days to go, and the rains had come and filled up his reservoirs so he had plenty of water to drink and cook with, so he didn’t even have itchy skin or malnutrition to keep him distracted. He’d started to do stupid things.

  He’d started to sneak around.

  Oh, only at night, of course, and at first only among the containers, where the crew rarely ventured. But there wasn’t much to see in the container spaces, just the unbroken, ribbed expanses of containers, radio tagged and painted with huge numbers, stickered over and locked tight.

  So then he started to sneak over to the crew’s quarters.

  He knew what they’d look like. You can book passage on a freighter, take a long, weird holiday drifting from port to port around the world. The travel agents who sell these lonely, no-frills cruises had plenty of online photos and videos and panoramas of the accommodations and common rooms. They looked like institutional rooms everywhere, with big scratched flat-panel displays, worn and stained carpet, sagging sofas, scuffed tables and chairs. The difference being that shipside, all that stuff was bolted down.

  But after days stuck inside his little secret fortress of solitude, any change of scenery sounded like a trip to Disneyland and a half. That’s how he found himself strolling into the ship’s kitchen at 2AM ship’s time—they were living on Los Angeles time, and he’d shifted to Chinese time after they put to sea, so this wasn’t much of a hardship. In the fridge, sandwich fixings, Filipino single-serving ice cream cones, pre-made boba tea with huge pearls of tapioca in it, and cans of Starbucks frappucino. He helped himself, snitching it all into a shoulder-bag he’d brought along, scurrying back to his den to scarf it down.

  That was the first night. The second night, he ate his snack in the TV room, watching a bootleg DVD of a current-release comedy movie that opened the day he left LA. He kept the sound low and kept an ear cocked for the tread of shoes on the noisy metal deck, and even used the bathroom outside the common room on the corridor that led to the crew’s quarters. He crept around on tiptoe, and muted the TV every time the ship creaked, his heart thundering as his eyes darted to each corner of the room, seeking out a non existent hiding spot among the bolted-down furniture.

  It was the best night of the trip so far.

  So the next night, he had to go further. After having a third pig-out and watching a Bollywood science fiction comedy movie about a turban-wearing robot that attacked Bangalore, only to be vanquished by IT nerds, he snuck down into the engine rooms.

  Now this was a change of scenery. The door to the engine room was bolted but not locked, just like all the other doors on the ship that he’d tried. After all, they were in the middle of the damned ocean—it wasn’t like they had to worry about cat burglars, right? (Present company excepted, of course!)

  The big diesel engines were as loud as jets. He found a pair of greasy soundproof earmuffs and slipped them over his ears, cutting the noise down somewhat, but it still vibrated up through the soles of his sneakers, making his bones shake. Everything down here was fresh and gleaming, polished, oiled and painted. He trailed his fingers over the control panels, gauges, shut-off valves, raised his arms to tickle the flexi-hoses that coiled overhead. He’d gamed a couple of maps set in rooms like this, but the experience in real life was something else. He was actually inside the machine, inside an engine so powerful it could move thousands of tons of steel and cargo halfway around the world.

  Cool.

  As he slipped his muffs off and carefully rehung them, he noticed something he really should have spotted on the way in: a little optical sensor by the engine-room door at the top of the steel crinkle-cut nonskid stairs, and beside it, a pin-sized camera ringed with infrared LEDs. Which meant…

  Which meant that he had tripped an invisible alarm when he entered the room and broke the beam, and that he’d been recorded ever since he arrived. Which meant…

  Which meant he was doomed.

  His fingers trembled as he worked the catch on the door and slipped out into the steel shed that guarded the engine-room entrance at the crew end of the deck. He looked left and right, waiting for a spotlight to slice through the pitchy night, waiting for a siren to cut through the roar of the ocean as they sliced it in two with the boat’s mighty prow.

  It was quiet. It was dark. For now. The ship only had one nighttime watch-officer and one nighttime pilot, and from his network spying, he knew the duty was an excuse to send email and download pornography, so it might be that neither of them had noticed the alert—yet.

  He crept back toward the containers, moving as fast as he dared, painfully aware of how vividly he would stand out to anyone who even casually glanced down from the ship’s bridge atop the superstructure. Once he reached the containers, he slipped onto the narrow walkway that ringed the outside of the ship and took off running, racing for his nest. As he went, he made a mental checklist of the things he would have to do once he got there, reeling in his solar panels and antennas, his water collectors. He’d button down his container as tight as a frog’s ass, and they could search for months before they’d get to his. Meanwhile, he’d be in Shenzhen in a couple of days. Then it would just be a matter of evading the port security—who’d be on high alert, once the crew alerted them to the stowaway. Argh. He was s
uch an idiot. It was all going to crash and burn, just because he got bored.

  Cursing himself, hyperventilating, running, he skidded out on the deck and faceplanted into the painted, bird-streaked steel. The pain was insane. Blood poured from his nose, which he was sure he’d broken. And now the ship was rocking and pitching hard, and holy crap, look at those clouds streaking across the sky!

  This was not going well. He cornered wobbily around the container stack, had a hairy, one-foot-in-the-sky moment as the huge ship rolled beneath him and his hand flailed wildly for the guardrail, then he caught himself and finished the turn, racing to his container. Once there, he scrambled along the runs that marked the course of the life-support tentacles trailing from his box, and disconnected each one, working with shaking hands. Jamming the flexi-hose, cabling, solar cells, and antenna into his bag and slipping it across his chest, he spidered down the container-faces and slipped inside just as another roll sent him sprawling on his ass.

  He undogged the hatches on his airtight inner sanctum and let himself in. The ship was rocking hard now, and his kitchen stuff, carelessly left lying around, was rattling back and forth. He ignored it at first, diving for his laptop and punching up the traffic-logs from the ship’s network, but after a can of tuna beaned him in the cheek, raising a welt, he set the computer down and velcroed it into place, then gathered up everything that was loose and dumped it into his bolted-down chests. Then he went back to his traffic dumps, looking for anything that sounded like an official notice of his discovery.

  The nighttime traffic was always light—some telemetry, some flirty emails from the skeleton crew. Tonight was no exception. The file stopped dead at the point that he’d reeled in his antenna, but it probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. The rain was pounding down now, a real frog-strangler, sounding like a barrage of gravel on the steel containers all around him. After a few minutes of this, he found himself wishing he’d taken the earmuffs. A few minutes later, he’d forgotten all about the earmuffs, and was grabbing for a bag to heave up his stolen food into. The barfing and the rolling didn’t stop, just kept going on and on, his empty stomach trying to turn itself inside-out, slimy puke-smears everywhere in the tiny cabin. He tried to remember what you were supposed to do for seasickness. Watch the horizon, right? No horizon in the container, just pitching walls and floor and unsteady light from the battery-powered LED fixtures he’d glued to the ceiling. The shadows jumped and loomed, increasing his disorientation.