And then she sent her armies against one another again.
It wasn’t like any other game anyone had ever played. The armies were vast, running to the thousands and growing every day. She drilled them for hours, and the generals and leaders and commandants and what ever they called themselves dreamt up their best strategy and tactics, devised nightmare ambushes and sneaky guerilla wars, and they sharpened their antlers against one another.
As Big Sister Nor’s complaints grew more serious, Justbob presented her with statistics on the number of high-level characters the Webblies now had at their disposal, as the skirmishing was a fast way to level up. She had players who controlled five or six absolute top-level toons, each associated with its own prepaid account, each accessed via a different proxy and untraceable to the others. Big Sister Nor warned her again to be careful, and The Mighty Krang took her aside and told her how irresponsible she was to endanger the whole effort with her warring. She took off her eyepatch and scratched at the oozing scars over the ruined socket, a disconcerting trick that never failed to send The Mighty Krang packing with a greenish face.
Justbob tried to keep the smile off her face when Big Sister Nor woke her in the middle of the night to tell her that the plan was dead, and the action had started, right then, in the middle of monsoon season, in the middle of Diwali, with only weeks to go before Mid-Autumn Festival.
“What did it?” she said, as she pulled on a long dress and wound her hijab around her head. She’d spent most of her life in western dress, dressing to shock and for easy getaways, but since she’d gone straight, she’d opted for the more traditional dress. What it lacked in mobility it made up for in coolness, anonymity, and the disorienting effect it had on the men who had once threatened her (though it hadn’t stopped the thugs who’d cost her her eye).
“Another strike in Dongguan. This time in Guangzhou. It’s big.”
The room was stuffy. These rooms always were. But the September heat had pushed the temperature up to stratospheric heights, so that the cafe smouldered like the caldera of a dyspeptic volcano. The cafe’s owner, a scarred old man whom everyone knew to be a front for some heavy gangsters, had sent a technician around with a screwdriver to remove all the cases from the PCs so that the heat could dissipate more readily from the sweating motherboards and those monster-huge graphics cards that bristled with additional fans and glinted with copper heatsinks, then aimed industrial floor-fans at their back. This might have been better for the computers, but it made the room even hotter and filled it with a jet-engine roar that was so loud the players couldn’t even use noise-cancelling headsets to chat: they had to confine all their communications to text.
The cafe had once catered to gamers from off the street, along with love-sick factory girls who spent long nights chatting with their virtual boyfriends, homesick workers who logged in to spin lies about their wonderful lives in South China for the people back home, as well as the occasional lost tourist who was hoping to get a little online time to keep up with friends and find cheap hotel rooms. But for the past two years, it had exclusively housed an ever-growing cadre of gold farmers sent there by their bosses, who over-saw a dozen shifting, interlocked businesses that formed and dissolved overnight, every time a little trouble blew their way and it became convenient to roll up the store and disappear like a genie.
The boys in the cafe that night were all young, not a one over seventeen. All the older boys had been purged the month before, when they’d demanded a break after a 22-hour lock-in to meet a huge order from an upstream supplier. Getting rid of those troublemakers had two nice effects for their bosses: it let them move in a cheaper workforce and it let them avoid paying for all those locked-in hours. There were always more boys who’d play games for a living.
And these boys could play. After a twelve-hour shift, they’d hang around and do four or five more hours’ worth of raiding for fun. The room was a cauldron in which boys, heat, noise, dumplings and network connections were combined to make a neverending stew of wealth for some mostly invisible older men.
Ruiling knew that there had been some other boys working there before, older boys who’d had some kind of dispute with the bosses. He didn’t think about them much but when he did, he pictured slow, greedy fools who didn’t want to really work for a living. Lamers whose asses he could kick back to Sichuan province or what ever distant place they’d snuck to the Pearl River Delta from.
Ruiling was a hell of a player. His specialty was PvP—player versus player—because he had the knack of watching another player’s movements for a few seconds and then building up a near-complete view of that player’s idiosyncrasies and weak spots. He couldn’t explain it—the knowledge simply shone through at him, like an arrow in the eye-socket. The upshot of this was that no one could level a character faster than Ruiling. He’d simply wander around a game with a Chinese name, talking in Chinese to the players he met. Eventually, one of them—some rich, fat, stupid westerner who wanted to play vigilante—would start calling him names and challenge him to a fight. He’d accept. He would kick ass. He’d gain points.
It was amazing how satisfying this was.
Ruiling had just finished twelve hours of this and had ordered in a tray of pork dumplings and doused them in hot Vietnamese rooster red sauce and chopsticked them into his mouth as fast as he could chew, and now he was ready to relax with some after-work play. For this, he always used his own toon, a char he’d started playing with when he was a boy in Gansu. In some ways, this toon was him, so long had he lived with it, lovingly buffing it, training it, dressing it in the rarest of treasures. He had trained up innumerable toons and seen them sold off, but Ruiling was his.
Tonight, Ruiling partied with some other farmers he knew from other parts of China, some of whom he’d known back in his village, some of whom he’d never met. They were a ferocious nightly raiding guild that pulled off the hardest missions in the worlds, the cream of the crop. Word had gotten round and now every night he had an audience of players who’d just been hired on, watching in awe as he kicked fantastic quantities of ass. He loved that, loved answering their questions after he was done playing, helping the whole team get better. And you know, they loved him too, and that was just as great.
They ran Buri’s Fortress, the palace of a long-departed god, the father of gods, the powerful, elemental force that had birthed Svartalfheim and the universe in which it lay. It had fearsome guardians, required powerful spells just to reach, and had never been fully run in the history of Svartalfheim. Just the kind of mission Ruiling loved to try. This would be his sixth crack at it, and he was prepared to raid for six hours straight if that’s what it took, and so was the rest of his party.
And then he got Fenrir’s Tooth. It was the rarest and most legendary drop in all of Svartalfheim Warriors, a powerful talisman that would turn any wolf-pack or enthrall them to the Tooth’s holder. The message boards had been full of talk about it, and several times there’d been fraudulent auctions for it, but no one had ever seen it before.
After Ruiling picked it up—it had come from an epic battle with an army of Sky Giants, in which the entire raiding party had been killed—he was so stunned by it that he couldn’t speak for a moment. He just pointed at the screen while his mouth opened and shut.
The players watching him fell silent, too, following his gaze and his finger, slowly realizing what had just happened. A murmur built through the crowd, picking up steam, picking up volume, turning into a roar, a triumphant shout that brought the entire cafe over to see. Over the fans’ noise they buzzed excitedly, a hormone-drenched triumphant tribal chest-beating exercise that swept them all up. Every boy imagined what it would be like to go questing with Fenrir’s Tooth, able to defeat any force with a flick of the mouse that would send the wolf packs against your enemies. Every boy’s heart thudded in his chest.
But there was another sound, getting louder and more insistent. An older voice, raspy with a million cigarettes, a hard voice. “Si
t down! Sit down! Back to work! Everyone back to work!”
It was Huang the foreman, shouting with a fearsome Fujianese accent. He was rumored to be an ex-Snakehead, thrown out of the human smuggling gang for killing too many migrants with rough treatment. Usually, he sat lizardlike and motionless in the corner, smoking a succession of cheap Chinese Class-D fake Marlboros, harsh and unfiltered, a lazy curl of smoke giving him a permanent squint on one side of his face. Sometimes players would forget he was there and their shouting and horse play would get a little out of control and then he would steal up behind them on cat-silent feet and deliver a hard blow to the ear that would send them reeling. It was enough of an object lesson—“Don’t make the Snakehead mad or he’ll lay a beating on you that you won’t forget”—that he hardly ever had to repeat it.
Now, though, he was clouting boys left and right, bellowing orders in a loud, hoarse voice. The boys retreated to their computers in a shoving rush, leaving Ruiling alone in his seat, an uncertain smile on his face.
“Boss,” he said, “you see what I’ve done?” He pointed to his screen.
Huang’s face was as impassive as ever. He put a hard, heavy hand on Ruiling’s shoulder and leaned in to read the screen, his head wreathed in smoke. Finally, he straightened. “Fenrir’s Tooth,” he said. He nodded. “A bonus for you, Ruiling. Very good.”
Ruiling shrank back. “Boss,” he said, respectfully, speaking loudly to be heard over the computer fans. “Boss, that is my character. I am not working now. It’s my personal character.”
Huang turned to look at him, his eyes hard and his expression flat. “A bonus,” he said again. “Well done.”
“It’s my character,” Ruiling said, speaking more loudly. “No bonus. It’s mine! I earned it, personally, on my own time.”
He didn’t even see the blow, it was that fast. One minute he was hotly declaring that Fenrir’s Tooth was his, the next he was sprawled on his ass on the floor, his head ringing like a gong. The foreman put one foot on his throat.
The man said, “No bonus,” clearly and distinctly, so that everyone around could hear. Then he hawked up a huge mouthful of poisonous green spit from the tar-soaked depths of his blackened lungs and carefully spat in Ruiling’s face.
From the age of four, Ruiling had practiced wushu, training with a man in the village that all the adults deferred to. The man had been sent north during the Cultural Revolution, denounced and beaten and starved, but he never broke. He was as gentle and patient as a grandmother, and he was as old as the hills, and he could send an attacker flying through the air with a flick of the wrist, break a board with his old hands, kick you into the next life with one old, gnarled foot. For twelve years, Ruiling had gone three times a week to train with the old man. All the boys had. It was just part of life in the village. He hadn’t practiced since he came to South China, had all but forgotten that relic of a different China.
But now he remembered every lesson, remembered it deep in his muscles. He gripped the ankle of the foot that was on his throat, twisted just slightly to gain maximum leverage, and applied a small, controlled bit of pressure and threw the foreman into the air, sending him sailing in a perfect, graceful arc that terminated when his head cracked against the side of one of the long trestle-tables, knocking it over and sending a dozen flatscreens tumbling to the ground, the crash audible over the computer fans.
Ruiling stood, carefully, and faced the foreman. The man was groaning on the ground, and Ruiling couldn’t keep the small grin off his face. That had felt good. He found that he was standing in a ready stance, weight balanced evenly on each foot, feet spread for stability, body side-on to the man on the ground, presenting a smaller target. His hands were loosely held up, one before the other, ready to catch a punch and lock the arm and throw the attacker, ready to counterstrike high or low. The boys around him were cheering, chanting his name, and Ruiling smiled more broadly.
The foreman picked himself up off the floor, no expression at all on his face, a terrible blankness, and Ruiling felt his first inkling of fear. Something about how the man held himself as he stood, not anything like the stance in the martial arts games he’d played in the village. Something altogether more serious. Ruiling heard a high whining noise and realized it was coming from his own throat.
He lowered his hands slightly, extended one in a friendly, palm up way. “Come on now,” he said. “Let’s be adults about this.”
And that’s when the foreman reached under the shoulder of his ill-fitting, rumpled, dandruff-speckled suit-jacket and pulled out a cheap little pistol, pointed it at Ruiling, and shot him square in the forehead.
Even before Ruiling hit the ground, one eye open, the other shut, the boys around him began to roar. The foreman had one second to register the sound of a hundred voices rising in anger before the boys boiled over, clambering over one another to reach him. Too late, he tried to tighten his finger on the trigger of the gun he’d carried ever since leaving Fujian province all those years before. By then, three boys had fastened themselves to his arm and forced it down so that the gun was aiming into the meat of his old thigh, and the .22 slug he squeezed off drilled itself into the big femur before flattening on the shattered bone, spreading out like a lead coin.
When he opened his mouth to scream, fingers found their way into his cheeks, viciously tearing at them even as other hands twined themselves in his hair, fastened themselves to his feet and his arms, even yanked at his ears. Someone punched him hard in the balls, twice, and he couldn’t breathe around the hands in his mouth, couldn’t scream as he tumbled down. The gun was wrenched from his hand at the same instant that two fists drilled into his eyes, and then it was dark and painful and infinite, a moment that stretched off into his unconsciousness and then into—annihilation.
“So now what?” Justbob slurped at her congee, which they’d sent out for, along with strong coffee and a plate of fresh rolls. At 3AM in the Geylang, food choices were slightly limited, but they never went away altogether.
The Mighty Krang pulled up a video, waited for it to buffer, then scrolled it past, fast. “Three of the boys caught the shooting—the execution—on their phones. The goon who went down, well, he doesn’t look so good.” A shot from inside the dark room, now abandoned, the foreman on his back amid a wreck of broken computers and monitors, motionless, both arms broken at the elbows, face a ruin of jelly and blood. “We assume he’s dead, but the strikers aren’t letting anyone in.”
“Strikers,” Justbob said, and The Mighty Krang clicked another video. This one took longer to load, some server somewhere groaning under the weight of all the people trying to access it at once. That never happened any more, it had been years since it had happened, and it made Justbob realize how fast this thing must be spreading. The realization scythed through her grogginess, made her eye spring open, the other ruin work behind its patch.
The video loaded. Hundreds of boys, gathered in front of an anonymous multi-storey building, the kind of place you pass by the thousand. They’d tied their shirts around their faces, and they were pumping their fists in the air and more people were coming out to join them. Boys, old people, girls—
“Girls?”
“Factory girls. Jiandi. She did a special broadcast. Stupid. She nearly got caught, chased out of another safe house. She’s running out of bolt holes. But she got the word out.”
“Did we know?”
Big Sister Nor’s face was a thundercloud, ominous and dark. “Of course not. If we’d known, we would have told her not to do it. Chill out. Hold off. We have a schedule, lots of moving parts.”
“The dead boy?”
“There—” Krang said, and pointed his mouse at the edge of the video. A trestle table, set up beside the boys, with the dead boy draped on it. Looking closely, she could see the bullet hole in his forehead, the streak of blood running down the side of his face.
“Aha,” Justbob said. “Well, we’re not going to cool anything out now.”
B
ig Sister Nor said, “We don’t know that. There’s still a chance—”
“There’s no chance,” Justbob said, and her finger stabbed at the screen. “There are thousands of them out there. What’s happening in-world?”
“It’s a disaster,” Krang said. “Every gold-farming operation is in chaos. Webblies are attacking them by the thousands. And it gets worse as the day goes by. They’re just waking up in China, so fresh forces should be coming in—”
Justbob swallowed. “That’s not a disaster,” she said. “That’s battle. And they’ll win. And they’ll keep on winning. From this moment forward, I’d be surprised to see if any new gold comes onto the markets, in any game. We can change logins as fast as the gamerunners shut down accounts, and what’s more, there are plenty of regular players who’ve been skirmishing with us for the fun of it who’ll shout bloody murder if they lose their accounts. We’ve got the games sewn up.” She kept her face impassive, reached for a cup of tea, sipped it, set it down.
Big Sister Nor stared at her for a long time. They had been friends for a long time, but unlike Krang, Justbob wasn’t in worshipful love with Nor. She knew just how human Big Sister Nor could be, had seen her screw up in small and big ways. Big Sister Nor knew it, too, and had the strength of character to listen to Justbob even when she was saying things that Nor didn’t want to hear.
Krang looked back and forth between the two young women, feeling shut out as always, trying not to let it show, failing. He got up from the table, muttering something about going out for more coffee, and neither woman took any notice.
“You think that we’re ready?” Big Sister Nor said after the safe-house door clicked shut.
“I think we have to be,” said Justbob. “The first casualty of any battle…”
“I know, I know,” Big Sister Nor said. “You can stop saying that now.”
When The Mighty Krang came back, he saw immediately how things had gone. He distributed the coffee and got to work.