For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  It was the most miserable he’d ever been. It seemed to go on forever. At a certain point, he found himself thinking of what it would be like to be crammed in with ten or twenty other people, in the pitch dark, with no chemical toilet, just a bucket that might overturn on the first pitch and roll. Crammed in and locked in, the door not due to be opened for days yet, and no way to know what might greet you at the other side—

  Suddenly, he didn’t feel nearly so miserable. He roused himself to look at his computer a little more, but staring at the screen instantly brought back his seasickness. He remembered packing some ginger tablets that were supposed to be good for calming the stomach—he’d read about them on a FAQ page for people going on their first ocean cruise—and searching for them in the rocking box distracted him for a while. He gobbled two of them with water, noting that the tank was only half full, and resolving to save every drop now that his collector was shut down.

  He wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the storm was letting up. He drank a little more water, checked in with his nausea—a little better—and got back to the screen. It was a minor miracle, but there was no report at all of him being spotted, no urgent communique back to corporate HQ about the stowaway. Maybe they hadn’t noticed? Maybe they had been focused on the storm?

  And there the storm was again, back and even more fierce than it had been before. The rocking built, and built, and built. It wasn’t sickening anymore—it was violent. At one point, Wei-Dong found himself hanging on to his bed with both hands and feet, his laptop clamped between his chest and the mattress, as the entire ship rolled to port and hung there, teetering at an angle that felt nearly horizontal, before crashing back and rocking in the other direction. Once, twice more the ship rolled, and Wei-Dong clenched his teeth and fists and eyes and prayed to a nameless god that they wouldn’t tip right over and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Container ships didn’t go down very often, but they did go down. And of course, there was the one percent of containers were lost at sea, gone over the side in rough water. His father always took that personally. One percent didn’t sound like a lot, but, as Wei-Dong’s father liked to remind him, that was 20,000 containers, enough to build a high-rise out of. And the number went up every year, as the seas got rougher and the weather got harder to predict.

  All this went through Wei-Dong’s head as he clung for dear life to his bolted-down bed, battered from head to toe by loose items that he’d missed when he’d packed everything into his chest. The ship groaned and strained and then there was a deep metallic grating noise that he felt all the way to his balls, and then—

  —the container moved.

  It was a long moment and it seemed like everything had gone silent, as the sensation of sliding across the massive deck tunneled through his inner ear and straight into the fear center of his brain. In that moment, he knew that he was about to die. About to sink and sink and sink in a weightless eternity as the pressure of the ocean all around him mounted, until the container imploded and smeared him across its crumpled walls, dissipating in red streamers as the container fell to the bottom of the sea.

  And then, the ship righted itself. There were tears in his eyes, and a dampness from his crotch. He’d pissed himself. The rocking slowed, slowed. Stopped. Now the ship was bobbing as normal, and Wei-Dong knew that he would live.

  His hidey-hole was a wreck. His clothes, his toys, his survival gear—all tossed to the four corners. Thankfully, the chemical toilet had stayed put, with its lid dogged down tight. That would have been messy. Puke, water, other spills slicked every available surface. According to his watch—a ridiculous inheritance from his father that he was grateful for now—it was 4AM on his personal clock. That made it, uh, 11AM ship’s time, which was set to Los Angeles. If he’d done the math right, it was about 6AM at their longitude, which should be just about directly in line with New Zealand. Which meant the sun would be up, and the crew would no doubt be swarming on deck, surveying the damage and securing the remaining containers as best as they could with the ship’s little crane and tractors. And that meant that he’d have to stay put, amid the puke and the bad air and the mess, wait until that ship’s night or maybe even the next night. And he had no WiFi, either.

  Shit.

  He’d brought along some sleeping pills, just in case, as part of his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink first-aid box. He found the sealed plastic chest still bungeed to one of the wire shelving units, beside the precious two boxes of prepaid cards, still securely lashed to the frame. As he broke the blisterpack and poured a stingy sip of water into his tin cup, he had a moment’s pause: what if they discovered his container while he was drugged senseless?

  Well, what if they discovered it while he was wide awake? It’s not like he could run away.

  What an idiot he was.

  He ate the pills, then set about cleaning up his place as best as he could, using spare t-shirts as rags. He flipped over the mattress to expose the unpissed-upon side, and wondered when the pills would take effect. And then he found that he was too tired to do another thing except for lying down with his cheek on the bare mattress and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  The pills were supposed to be a non-drowsy formula, but he woke feeling like his head was wrapped in foam rubber. Maybe that was the near-death experience. It was now the middle of ship’s night, and real night. Theoretically, it would be dark outside, and he could sneak out, survey the damage, maybe rig up his WiFi antenna and find out whether he was about to be arrested when they made port. But when he climbed gingerly out of his inner box and tried to open the door of his container, he discovered that it had been wedged shut. Not just sticky, or bent at the hinge, but properly jammed up against the next container, with several tons of cargo on the other side of the door for him to muscle out of the way. Or not.

  He sat down. He had his headlamp on, as the inside of the container was dark as the inside of a can of Coke. It splashed crazy shadows on the walls, the stack of batteries (he praised his own foresight at using triple layers of steel strapping to keep them in place), the hatch leading to his inner sanctum.

  By his reckoning, they were only three days out of Shenzhen, plus or minus what ever course corrections they’d have to make now that the storm had passed. Theoretically, he could make it. He had the water, the food, the electricity, provided that he rationed all three. But the Webblies would be expecting him to check in before then, and the boredom would drive him loopy.

  He thought about trying to saw through the steel container. It was possible—the container-converter message boards were full of talk about what it took to cut up a container and use it for other purposes. But nothing in his toolkit could manage it. The closest he could come would be to drill a hole in the skin with his cordless drill. He’d used it to assemble his nest, and he had a couple spare boxes of high-speed bits in his toolchest. His biggest bit, a small circular saw, would punch a hole as big as his thumb, but only after he’d drilled a guide-hole through fourteen-gauge steel, several times thicker than the support-struts he’d drilled out when doing his interior work.

  It would make an unholy racket, but he was on the cargo deck, well away from the deck house. Assuming no one was patrolling the deck, there was no way he’d be heard over the sound of the sea and the rumble of the diesels. He told himself that it was worth the risk of discovery, since getting a hole would mean getting an antenna out, and therefore getting onto the network and finding out whether he’d be safe once they got to China.

  No time like the present. He found the toolchest inside a bigger, bolted-down box, and recovered the drill. He had a spare charger for it, with an inverter that would run off the batteries, and he plugged it in and got it charging. He’d need a lot of batteries to get through the corner where the wall met the ceiling.

  Several hours later, he realized that the ceiling might have been a mistake. His shoulders, arms, and chest all burned and ached. He found himself taking more and more frequent breaks, windmilling his arm
s, but the ache wouldn’t subside. His ears hurt too, from the echoey whining racket of the drill, a hundred nightmares of the dentist’s chair. He kept an eye on his watch, telling himself he’d just work until the morning shift came on duty, to reduce the risk that the sound would be heard. But it was still an hour away from shift change when the battery on his drill died, and he discovered that the last time he’d switched batteries, he’d neglected to push the dead one all the way into the charger, and now both his batteries were dead.

  That was as good an excuse as any to stop. He fingered the dent he’d made in the sheet steel through all his hours of drilling. His fingertip probed it, but barely seemed to sink in at all. He detached a chair from its anchors and dragged it over, stood on it, and put an eye to it, and saw a pinprick of dirty grey light, the first light of dawn, glimmering at the top of his drill-hole.

  Sleep did not help his arms. If anything, it just made them worse. It took him five minutes just to get to the point where he could lift his arms over his face, working them back and forth. He had a little pot of Tiger Balm, the red, smelly Chinese muscle rub, in his first-aid box, and he worked it into his arms, shoulders, chest and neck, thinking as he did so, This stuff isn’t doing anything. A few minutes later, a new burning spread across his skin, a fiery, minty feeling, hot and cold at the same time. It was alarming at first, but a few seconds later, it was incredible, like his muscles were all letting go of their tension at once. He took up his drill, checked his watch—middle of the first shift, but screw it, the engines were groaning, no one would hear it—and went to work.

  He punched through five minutes later. Five minutes! He’d been so close! He put his eye to the hole again, saw sky, clouds, the shadows of other containers nearby. His wireless antenna awaited. It had a big heavy magnetic base, powerful rare-earth magnets that he’d used to attach it to its earlier spot. They’d worked so well that he’d had to plant both feet on either side of it and heave, like he was pulling up a stubborn carrot. Now he didn’t need the base, just the willowy wand of the antenna itself. He disassembled the antenna, reattached it to the bare wire-ends, and then gently, gingerly, fed it through his dime-sized hole.

  He had a moment’s pause as he fed it up, picturing it sticking up among the even, smooth surfaces of the container-tops, as obvious as a boner at the chalkboard, but he’d been drilling for so long, it seemed crazy to stop now. A voice in his head told him that getting caught was even crazier, but he shut that voice up by telling it to shut up, since getting information on the ship’s status would be vital to completing his mission. And then the antenna was up.

  He grabbed his laptop and logged into the network and began snaffling up traffic. He could watch it in realtime—his sniffer would helpfully group intercepted emails, clicks, pages, search terms and IMs into their own reporting panels—but that was just frustrating, like watching a progress bar creep across the screen.

  Instead he went inside his sanctum and made himself a cup of instant ramen noodles, using a little more of his precious electricity and water, and then opened up a can of green tea with soymilk to wash it down. He ate as slowly as he could, trying to savor every bite and tell his stomach that food was okay, despite the rock and roll of the past day. During the meal, he heard footsteps near his container, the grumble of heavy machinery working at the containers, and his mouth went dry at the thought of his antenna sticking up there.

  Why had he put it there? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of sitting, bored and restless, in his box for days more. Why was he doing any of it? Why was he on his way to China? Why had he left home to be a gamer? Why had he learned Chinese in the first place? Trapped with his own thoughts, he found himself confronting some pretty ugly answers. He hadn’t wanted to be like all the other kids. He’d wanted to stand out, be special. Different. To know and understand and be skilled at things that his father didn’t know anything about. To triumph. To be a part of something bigger than himself, but to be an important part. To be romantic and special. To care about a justice that his friends didn’t even know existed.

  It made him all feel sad and pathetic and needy. It made him want to go plug into his laptop and get away from his thoughts.

  It worked. What he found on his laptop was nothing short of amazing. First there was a haul of photos emailed from the captain back to the shipping company, showing the cargo deck of the ship looking like a tumbled Jenga tower, containers scattered everywhere, on their sides, on their backs, at crazy angles. It looked as if the entire top layer of boxes had slipped into the ocean, and then several more layers’ worth on the port side. He looked more closely. His container was on the starboard side, and the container from the corresponding position on the other side appeared to be gone. He looked up the ship’s manifest, found the serial number of the container, matched it to a list of overboard boxes, swallowed. It had been pure random chance that put his box on the starboard side. If he’d gone the other way, he’d be raspberry jam in a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.

  He scanned the email traffic for information about the mysterious stowaway, but it looked as though the storm had literally blown any concern over him overboard. The manifest he had listed the value for customs of all the containers on the ship. Most of them were empty, or at least partially empty, as there wasn’t much that America had that China needed, except empty containers to fill with more goods to ship to America. Still, the total value of the missing containers went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He winced. That was going to be a huge insurance bill.

  Now it was time to get his email, something that he’d been putting off, because that was even riskier; if the ship’s administrators were wiretapping their own network, they’d see his traffic. Oh, it wouldn’t look like email from him to Big Sister Nor and his guildies and the Turks back in America. It’d look like gigantic amounts of random junk, originating on an internal address that didn’t correspond to any known machine on the ship. Its destination was unclear—it hopped immediately into TOR, The Onion Router, which bounced it like a pea in a maraca around the globe’s open relays. He was counting on the ship’s lax IT security and the fact that the crew were always connecting up new devices like phones and handheld games they picked up in port to help him slide past the eyes of the network. Still, if they were looking for a stowaway, they might think of looking at the network traffic.

  He sat at his keyboard, fingers poised, and debated with himself. Deep down, he knew how this debate would end. He could no more stay off the network and away from his friends than he could stay cooped up in the tin can without poking his antenna off the ship.

  So he did it. Sent emails, watched the network traffic, held his breath. So far, so good. Then: a rumble and a clatter and a pair of thunderous clangs from above. His heart thudded in his ears and more metallic sounds crashed through the confined space. What was it? He placed the noises, connected them to the pictures he’d seen earlier. The crew had the forklift and tractor out, and the crane swinging, and they were rearranging the containers for stability and trim. He yanked his antenna in and dove for the inner sanctum, dogging his hatch and throwing all loose objects into the lockers before flinging himself over the bed and grabbing hold of the post and clinging to it with fingers and toes as the container rocked and rolled for the second time in 24 hours.

  “So where’d you end up?” Ping asked, passing Wei-Dong another parcel of longzai rice and chicken folded in a lotus leaf. Ping had wanted to go to the Pizza Hut, but Wei-Dong had looked so hurt and offended at the suggestion, and had been so insistent on eating something “real” that he’d taken the gweilo to a cafe in the Cantonese quarter, near the handshake buildings. Wei-Dong had loved it from the moment they’d sat down, and had ordered confidently, impressing both Ping and the waiter with his knowledge of South Chinese food.

  Wei-Dong chewed, made a face. “On the freakin’ top of the stack, three high!” he said. “With more containers sandwiched in on every side of me, except the door
side, thankfully! But I couldn’t climb down the stack with these.” He thumped the dirty, beat-up cardboard boxes beside the table. “So I had to transfer the cards to my backpack and then climb up and down that stack, over and over again, until I had it all on the ground. Then I threw down the collapsed cardboard boxes, climbed to the bottom, and boxed everything up again.”

  Ping’s jaw dropped. “You did all that in the port?” He thought of all the guards he’d seen, all the cameras.

  Wei-Dong shook his head. “No,” he said. “I couldn’t take the chance. I did it at night, in relays, the night before we got in. And I covered it all in some plastic sheeting I had, which is a good thing because it rained yesterday. There was a lot of water on the deck and some of it leaked through the plastic, but the boxes seem okay. Let’s hope the cards are still readable. I figure they must be—they’re in plastic-wrapped boxes inside.”

  “But what about the crew seeing you?”

  Wei-Dong laughed. “Oh, I was shitting bricks the whole time over that, I promise! I was in full sight of the wheel house most of the time, though thankfully there wasn’t any moon out. But yeah, that was pretty freaky.”

  Ping looked at the gweilo, his skinny arms, the fuzz of pubescent moustache, the shaggy hair, the bad smell. When the boy had finally emerged from the gate, confidently flashing some kind of badge at the guard, Ping had wanted to strangle him for being so late and for looking so relaxed about it. Now, though, he couldn’t help but admire his old guildie. He said so.