For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  “Mala,” Mr. Banerjee said, spreading his hands. “Be reasonable.”

  Mala stepped onto the porch of the cafe and sat down, awkwardly folding her legs beneath her. In a clear, loud voice, she said, “I work here. This is my job. I demand the right to safe working conditions, decent wages, and a just and fair workplace.”

  Mr. Banerjee snorted. The men behind him laughed. He took a step forward, then stopped.

  One by one, Mala’s army filed out of the cafe, in a disciplined, military rank. Each one sat down, until the little porch was crowded with children, sitting down.

  Mr. Banerjee snorted again, then laughed. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You want, you want, you want. When I found you, you were a Dharavi rat, no money, no job, no hope. I gave you a good job, good wages, and now you want and want and want?” He made a dismissive noise and waved his hand at her. “You will remove yourself from my cafe and take your school chums with you, or you will be hurt. Very badly.”

  The neighbors made scandalized clucking noises at that and Mr. Banerjee ignored them.

  “You won’t hurt us,” Mala said. “You will go back to your fine house and your fine friends and you will leave us alone to control our destiny.”

  Mr. Banerjee said nothing, only smoked his cigarette in the night and stared at them, considering them like a scientist who’s discovered a new species of insects.

  “You are making mischief, Mala. I know what you are up to. You are disrupting things that are bigger than you. I tell you one more time. Remove yourself from my cafe.”

  Mala made a very soft spitting sound, full of contempt.

  Mr. Banerjee raised his hand and his mob fell silent, prepared themselves.

  And then there was a sound. A sound of footsteps, hundreds of them. Thousands of them. An army marching down the laneway from both sides, and then they were upon them. Ashok leading the column from the left, old Mrs. Rukmini and Mr. Phadkar leading the column from the right.

  The columns themselves were composed of union workers—textile workers, steelworkers, train workers. Ashok’s phone calls and photos and stories had paid off. Hundreds of text messages were sent and workers roused from their beds, and they hastily dressed and gathered to be picked up by union busses and driven all across Mumbai to Dharavi, guided in to Mrs. Dotta’s shop by Ashok, who had whispered his thanks to the leaders who had given him their support.

  The workers halted, just a few paces from the gangsters and their evil smells. Ashok looked at the two groups, the sitting army and the standing mob, and he deliberately and slowly sat down.

  The exquisitely elderly ladies leading the other column did the same. The sitting spread, moving back through the group, and if any worker thought of his trousers or her sari before sitting in the grime of the Dharavi lane, none said a word and none hesitated.

  Banerjee swallowed audibly. One of the neighbors leaning out of a window snickered. Banerjee glared up at the windows. “Houses in slums like this burn down all the time,” he said, but his voice quavered. The neighbor who’d snickered—a young shirtless man with burns up and down his bare chest from some old accident—closed his shutters. A moment later, he was on the street. He walked up to Banerjee, looked him in the eye, and then, deliberately, folded his legs and sat down before him. Banerjee raised his leg as if to kick and the crowd growled, a low, savage sound that made the hair on the back of Mala’s neck stand up, even as she made it herself. It sounded as though all of Dharavi was an angry dog, straining at its leash, threatening to lunge.

  More neighbors drifted into the street—old and young, men and women. They’d known Mrs. Dotta for years. They’d seen her driven from her home and business. They were making the same noise. They sat too.

  Mr. Banerjee looked at Mala and opened his mouth as if to say something, then stopped. She stared at him with utter calm, and then smiled broadly. “Boo,” she said, softly, and he took a step back.

  His own men laughed at this and he went purple in the dim light of the street. Mala bit her tongue to keep from laughing. He looked so comical!

  He turned with great dignity to look at his men, who were so tense they practically vibrated. Mala watched in stupefied awe as he grabbed one at random and slapped him, hard, across the face, a sound that rang through the narrow laneway. It was the single dumbest act of leadership she’d ever seen, so perfectly stupid you could have put it in a jar and displayed it for people to come at marvel at.

  The man regarded Banerjee for a moment, his eyes furious, his fists bunched. He was shorter than Banerjee, but he was carrying a length of wood and the muscles in his bare forearms jerked and bunched like a basketful of snakes. Deliberately, the man spat a glob of evil, pink, betel-stained saliva into Banerjee’s face, turned on his heel and walked away, delicately picking his way through the sitting Webblies and workers and neighbors. After a moment, the rest of Banerjee’s mob followed.

  Banerjee stood alone. The saliva slid down his face. Mala thought, If he takes out a gun and starts blazing away, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. He was totally beaten, humiliated before children and the poor of Dharavi, and there were so many cameraphone flashes dancing in the night it was like a disco in a movie.

  But perhaps Banerjee didn’t have a gun, or perhaps he had more self-control than Mala believed. In any case, he, too, turned on his heel and walked away. At the end of the alley, he turned back and said, in a voice that could be heard above the buzz of conversation that sprang up in his wake, “I know where your family lives, Mala,” and then he walked away altogether into the night.

  The crowd roared with triumph as he disappeared. Ashok helped her stand, his hand lingering in hers for longer than was strictly necessary. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for hugging Yasmin, who was crying, happy tears like the ones they’d shared so many times before. Yasmin was as thin as a piece of paper but her arms were strong, and oh, it did feel good to be held for a moment, instead of holding everyone else up.

  She let go at last and turned to Ashok. “They came,” she said.

  Instead of answering, he led her to two tiny old ladies, and a man with a skullcap and a beard. “Mr. Phadkar, Mrs. Rukmini and Mrs. Muthappa,” he said. “This is Mala. They call her General Robotwallah. Her workers have been defending the strike. They are unbeatable, so long as they have a place to work.”

  Mr. Phadkar looked fierce. “You will always have a place to work, General,” he said, in a voice that was pitched to carry to the workers who gathered around them, excitedly passing whispered accounts of the historic meeting back through their ranks.

  The old ladies rolled their eyes at one another, which made Mala smile. They each took one of her hands in their calloused, dry old hands and squeezed. “You were very brave,” one said. “Please, introduce us to your comrades.”

  They chatted all night, and the women’s papadam collective brought them food, and there was chai, and as there were far too many people to fit in the little cafe, the party occupied the whole of the laneway and then out into the street. Mala and her fighters fought on through the night in shifts, stepping out on their breaks to mingle, making friends, bringing them into the cafe to explain what they did and how they did it.

  And there were reporters asking questions, and the gupshup flew up and down the streets and lanes of Dharavi, picking up steam as the roosters began to call and the first of the early risers walked to the toilets and the taps and had their ears bent. The bravery of the children, the valor of the workers, the evil of the sinister Banerjee in his suit and the thugs he’d brought with him—it was a story straight off the movie screen, and every new ear it entered was attached to a mouth that was anxious to spread it.

  Mala’s and Yasmin’s parents came to see them the next morning, as they sat groggy after a night like no other night, on the porch of Mrs. Dotta’s cafe. The parents didn’t know what to make of their strange daughters, but they were visibly proud of them, even Yasmin’s father, which clearly surprised Yasmin,
who’d looked like she expected a beating.

  As their mothers gathered them into their bosoms, Mala looked at Yasmin, and saw the haunted look in Yasmin’s eye and knew, just knew that she was thinking of the little boy who’d died.

  How did she know? Because Mala herself had never stopped thinking of him, and thinking of how she’d taken the actions that led to his death. And because Mala herself knew that no amount of sitting down peacefully and braving thugs with her moral force instead of her army would ever wipe the stain of that boy’s death off her karma.

  And then Mamaji kissed Mala’s forehead and murmured many things in her ear, and her little brother emerged from behind her skirts and demanded to be shown how it all worked and stared at her with so much admiration that she thought he’d burst and for a moment, it was all golden.

  Ashok looked on from his little office, meeting with the union leaders, talking to Big Sister Nor. Something big was brewing with him, she knew, something even bigger than this miracle that he’d pulled off. She fobbed her brother off on a group of boys who were eager to teach him some of the basics and bask in the pure hero-worship radiating off of him, then slipped back into Ashok’s room and perched at his side on a stool, moving a pile of papers away first.

  “That was incredible,” she said. “Absolutely incredible.” She said it quietly, with conviction. “You’re our savior.”

  He snorted through his nose, then scrubbed at his eyes with his fists. “Mala, my general, you do a hundred incredible things every day. The only reason all those people came out is because I could show them what you’d done, explain how you had organized these children, these slum-rats, into a disciplined force that was committed to justice.”

  She squirmed on her seat. “I’m just bloodthirsty,” she said. “I’m just one of those people who fights all the time.” Thinking again of the boy, the dead boy. His blood was still under Ashok’s fingernails.

  He turned and, just for an instant, touched her arm. The gesture was gentle, tender. No one had ever touched her quite like that. It broke something in her, some flood-dam that had safely contained all the pain and fear and shame, and she had to turn and run blindly out into the lane and around a corner to weep and weep, biting her lip to keep from screaming out her grief. Though she heard some of the others looking for her, she kept silent and did not let them find her. Then she realized she was hiding in the same place in which she’d hidden from Mrs. Dotta’s idiot nephew, and that broke another dam and it was quite some time before she could get herself under control and head back into the laneway again.

  She didn’t get very far. Out front of dozens of businesses, there were small groups of people boisterously shouting rhymed chants about working conditions and pay. Crowds gathered to talk to each other, and there were arguments, laughter, a fistfight. She stood in the middle of the road and thought, How can this be?

  And at that moment, she realized that she was not alone. All over Dharavi, all over the world, there were people like her who wanted more, demanded more, with a yearning that was always just there, beneath the skin, and it only took the lightest scratch to let it out.

  She didn’t go back to Mrs. Dotta’s cafe. Instead, she took her walking stick and limped all around Dharavi, up and down the streets where the tiny factories would normally have been hives of activity. Many of them were, but many were not—many had workers and crowds out front, and it was like a virus that was spreading through the streets and lanes and alleys, and now it was as if all the crying had lightened her so that her feet barely touched the ground, as though she might fly away at any instant.

  She was just turning to go back to her army and maybe a few hours’ sleep when they grabbed her, hit her very hard on the head, and dragged her into a tiny, stinking room.

  Confidence is a funny thing. When lots of people believe something is valuable, it becomes valuable. So if you’re selling game gold and people think game gold is valuable, they buy it.

  But it’s better than that. If there’s a widespread belief that Svartalfheim Warriors swords are valuable, then even people who don’t think they’re valuable will buy them, because they believe they can sell them to people who do believe that they’re valuable.

  And when people who buy to sell to others start to bid on Svartalfheim swords, the price of the swords goes up. Of course it does: the more buyers there are for something, the higher the price goes. And the higher the price goes, the more buyers there are, because hey, if the price is high, there must be plenty of suckers who’ll take the swords off your hands in a little while for an even higher price.

  Confidence makes value. Value makes more value, which makes more confidence. Which makes more value.

  But it’s not infinite. Think of a cartoon character who runs off a cliff and keeps running madly in place, able to stay there until someone points out that he’s dancing on air, at which point he plummets to the sharp rocks beneath him.

  For so long as everyone believes in the value of a Svartalfheim sword, the sword will be valuable, and get more valuable. As the pool of people who might buy a Svartalfheim sword grows—say, because they’re getting calls from their brokers offering to sell them elaborate, complex sword futures (a contract to buy a sword at a later date), or because their smart-ass nieces and nephews are talking them up—the likelihood that someone will say, “Are you kidding me? This is a sword in a video game!” goes up.

  Indeed, this doubter might have other choice observations, like this: “If everyone has these swords, doesn’t that mean that there’s more swords than anyone could possibly use? Doesn’t that mean that they’re not valuable, but valueless?”

  Or if the doubter is impossibly old-fashioned, he might even say: “What if the people who run this Fartenstein game decide to change the number of swords available by just deleting a ton of them? Or by printing up a kazillion more? Or change the swords into toothpicks?”

  “Oh,” the sword-speculators will reply, “they’ll never do that, it would ruin the game, they can’t afford to do it.” And here’s the thing: they’re half-right. So long as the gamerunners believe that messing around with the swords will piss off all these people who own, speculate on, buy, and sell swords, they can’t afford to do it.

  These cartoon characters run in place on air, shouting that the swords will always go up in value, shouting that the gamerunners will never nerf or otherwise bork them, and they can stay there, up in the air, waving their swords, being joined by others who are convinced by their arguments and the incontrovertible fact that they are indeed not falling, until…

  Until…

  Until there’s enough widespread confidence in the proposition that they will fall. Until the press starts to publish wide-eyed stories about the absurdity of ever believing in the value of these swords, pointing out that the fall is inevitable, that it was pre-ordained from the moment the first speculator bought his first sword.

  Think of the belief in infallible swords as an electromagnet, drawing nearby bits of iron toward it. At the middle, the force is quite strong. Around the edge is a dandruff of iron filings that can be blown off with a faint puff of air. If they get too far away, they disappear, forever lost to the magnet’s influence. Think of these as the people who bought one or two little swords or sword futures or “fully hedged complex sword-derived securities” because everyone else was doing it. They hear that this thing is too good to be true and see the prices start to drop, and so they sell off what they’ve got, take a small loss, and tell their friends.

  Now there’s a bunch of people saying that swords aren’t really that valuable. Less confidence equals lower prices. And there are more swords on the market. More swords equal lower prices. The larger piles of iron filings closer in, the investors with a fair bit of money in imaginary cutlery, see the prices dip and continue to fall. They hear the brokers and analysts scurrying around, saying, “No, no, the magnet will hold us forever! Prices will come up again. This is temporary.”

  Here’s the th
ing: if the brokers and analysts can convince these bigger investors that they’re right, they will be right. If these bigger investors hold on to their swords, the market will stay healthy for a while longer.

  But if they aren’t convincing enough, if these bigger investors lose confidence and start selling, they’ll never stop. That’s because the first seller to get out of the sword-market will get the highest price for his goods. But once he gets out, his swords will be on the market (remember, more swords equals lower prices) and everyone else will get a lower price. And when they sell, the prices will go down further, panicking more investors, putting more swords on the market, forcing the prices down further.

  Somewhere in there, the gamerunners are apt to have a minor freakout and then a major one. They’ll start to mess with the sword supply. They’ll take swords out of the market, or put swords in, or nerf swords, or buff the hell out of them, anything to keep the fun from collapsing out of the game.

  And that’ll probably make things worse, because this isn’t an exact science, it’s a bunch of guesswork, and there are ten zillion ways to get this wrong and so few ways to get it right.

  But the magnet is losing power, and those close-in filings are feeling the tug of oblivion now, the call of deep space that says, “Fall away, fall away to forever, for the magnet is dying!”

  They don’t want to fall away. They want to hang on. They have so many swords in the bank, they’re practically made of swords. They’ve made a fortune buying and selling swords. Of course, they spent the fortune on more swords. Or different swords. Or axes. But what ever they’ve spent it on, it’s basically the same thing, because every broker knows that you won’t get in trouble for recommending that people buy things that have always been profitable.

  If the sword market collapses, these flakes of iron—these major, committed investors—will die. They will be wiped out. They have pledged their lives and love and immortal souls to magic swords, and if the swords break their hearts, they will never recover. So as the market for swords gets crummier and crummier and crummier and crummier, they grow more and more insistent that everything is fine, just fine, it’ll all be back to “normal” any day now. They can’t afford to lose confidence, because they aren’t going to fly off into space.