He peed.
The phone started ringing again.
He went into the kitchen and rummaged in his freezer. There was a loaf of brown bread there—he never could get through a whole loaf before it went moldy, so now he bought a dozen loaves at a time and froze them. He chipped off two slices and put them in the toaster. There was peanut butter from the health-food store, crunchy-style, with nothing added. While the bread was toasting, he stirred the peanut butter with a knife, mixing the oil that was floating on top with the ground peanuts below. He had honey, but it had crystallized. No problem—twenty seconds in the microwave and it was liquid again. What he really wanted was bananas, but there weren’t any (the phone was ringing again) and he was hungry and wanted a sandwich now. He’d get bananas later.
The sandwich was (the phone was ringing again) delicious. He needed fresh bread though, he’d get some of that when he picked up the bananas. Throw out the frozen (there it was again) bread. He’d eat fresh from now on, and relish (and again) every bite.
Up until the moment that his finger pressed the green button, he believed that he was going to switch his phone off. But his finger came down on the green button and the anxiety sizzled up his arm and spread out from his shoulder to his whole body as the distant voice from the phone’s earpiece said, “Hello? Connor?”
Connor watched as his hand wrapped itself around his phone and lifted it to his ear.
“Yes?” his mouth said, in the old, tight Connor voice.
“It’s Bill,” the head of security said. “Can you come into the office?”
Connor heaved a sigh. “I’ll courier over my badge. You can pack up my desk and ship it back. If you want to sue me, you’ll have to hire a process server and have him come out here.”
Bill’s laugh was bitter and mirthless. “We’re not suing you, Connor. We’re not firing you. We need your help.”
Connor swallowed. This was the one thing he hadn’t anticipated: that his life might come back and suck him into it again. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“We think it’s your gold farmers,” Bill said. “They’ve got us by the balls, and they’re squeezing. We need you here so we can handle this as a group.”
Connor changed into his work clothes like a condemned man dressing for his own hanging. He prayed that his car wouldn’t start, but it was a new car—he bought a new one every year, just like everyone else in Command Central—and its electric motor hummed to life as he eyeballed the retina-scanner in the sun-visor.
He drove down his street again, seeing it all through the smoked glass of his car, the rolled-up windows and air-conditioning drowning out the birdsong and shutting out the smells of the trees and the nodding flowers. Too fast to spot a snail or a bird.
He headed back to work.
They came for Big Sister Nor and The Mighty Krang and Justbob in the dead of night, and this time they brought the police. The three of them watched the police break down the door, accompanied by a pair of sour Chinese men with the look of mainland gangsters, the kind who came to Singapore on easy two-week tourist visas. Nor and her friends watched the door be broken down from two Lorongs—side-streets—down, using a webcam and streaming the video live to the Webblies’ network and a bunch of journalists they’d woken up as soon as they’d bugged out of the old place, warned by a sympathetic grocer at the top of Geylang Road.
The fallback house wasn’t nearly as nice as the one they’d vacated, naturally, but the two quickly came into balance as the police methodically smashed every piece of furniture in the place to splinters. The Mighty Krang drew real-time annotations on the screen as the police worked, sometimes writing in the dollar value of the furniture being smashed, sometimes just drawing mustaches and eye-patches on the police in the video. When the Chinese men took out their dicks and began to piss on the wreckage, he leapt to his trackpad, circled the members in question, drew arrows pointing to them, and wrote “TINY!” in three languages before they’d finished.
They watched as one of the policemen answered his phone, listened in as he said, “Hello?” and “What?” and “Where?” and then “Here?” “Here?” feeling around the place where the wall met the ceiling, until he found the video camera. The look on his face—a mixture of horror and fury—as he disconnected it was priceless.
“Priceless,” The Mighty Krang said, and turned to his companions, who were far less amused than he was.
“Oh, do lighten up,” he said. “They didn’t catch us. The strikers are striking. Mumbai and Guangdong are going crazy. The New York Times is sending us about ten emails a minute. The Financial Times, too. And the Times of London. That’s just the English papers. Germans, French…and the Times of India, of course, they’ve got a reporter in Dharavi, and so do the Mumbai tabloids. We’re six of the top twenty YouTube videos. I’ve got—” he looked down, moused some—“82,361 emails from people to the membership address.”
Justbob glowered at him with her good eye. “Matthew is trapped in Dafen. Forty-two are dead. We don’t know where Jie and the white boy, Wei-Dong, are.”
Big Sister Nor reached out her hands and they each took one of hers. “Comrades,” she said, “comrades. This is the moment, the one we planned for. We’ve been hurt. Our friends have been hurt. More will be hurt when this is over.
“But people like us get hurt every single day. We get caught in machines, we inhale poison vapors, we are beaten or drugged or raped. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget what we go through, what we’ve been through. We’re going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we’ll lose again. And again. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it’s impossible to win by doing nothing.” Justbob clicked off her recorder and efficiently fired off the audio to her press contacts and the audio-dump for the Webblies. She’d finally found a use for Big Sister Nor’s speeches.
An alert popped up on Krang’s screen, reminding him to switch a new prepaid SIM card into his mobile phone. A second later, the same alert came up on Big Sister Nor and Justbob’s screens.
Big Sister Nor smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Back to work.”
They swapped SIMs, pulling new ones out of dated envelopes they carried in money-belts under their clothes. They powered up their phones. Both Justbob’s and The Mighty Krang’s phones rang as soon as they powered up.
The Mighty Krang looked down at the number. “It’s Wei-Dong,” he said. “Told you he was safe.”
Justbob looked at her phone. “Ashok,” she said.
They both answered their phones.
Ashok knew that this time would come. For months, he’d slaved over models of economic destruction: how much investment in junk game securities would it take to put the gamerunners into a position of total vulnerability? He’d modeled it a thousand ways, tried many variables in his equations, sweated over it, awakened in the night to pace or ride his motorcycle around until the doubts left his mind.
Somewhere out there, some distant follower of Big Sister Nor’s had convinced the Mechanical Turks to go to work selling his funny securities. It had been easy enough to package them—there were so many companies that would let you roll your own custom security packages together and market them, and all it took was to figure out which one was most lax with its verification procedures and create an account there and invent a ton of virtual wealth through it. Then he logged in to less-sloppy competitors and repackaged the junk he’d created, making something that seemed a little more legit. Working his way up the food chain, he’d gone from packager to packager, steadily accumulating a shellac of respectability on top of his financial turds.
Once they had acquired this sheen, brokers came hunting for his funny money. And since the Webblies were diverting a sizeable chunk of game wealth into the underlying pool, he was able to make everything seem as though it was growing at breakneck speed—
and it was. After all, all those traders swapping the derivatives were driving up the prices every time they completed a sale.
Once, at about two in the morning, as Ashok watched the trading proceed, he realized that he could simply quit the Webblies, sell the latest batch of funny money, and retire. But he was never tempted. He’d always known that it was possible to get rich by trampling on the people around you, by treating them as suckers to be ripped off. He couldn’t do it.
Of course, here he was, doing it, but this was different. His little financial game could end well if all went according to plan, and now it was time to see if the plan would go the way it was supposed to.
Justbob took his call in her fractured English, which was better than her Hindi, limited as it was to orders of battle and military cursing. He told her that he needed to speak to Big Sister Nor, and she asked him to wait a moment, as BSN was on the phone with someone else at the time.
In the background, he heard Big Sister Nor conversing in a mix of Chinese and English, flipping back and forth in a way that reminded him of his buddies at university and the way they’d have fun mixing up English and Hindi words, turning out puns and obscurely dirty phrases that nevertheless sounded innocent.
He looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. It was 5AM, and outside he could hear the birds singing. In the next room, Mala’s army fought on in tireless shifts, defending the strike. They slept in shifts on the floor now, and there were fifty or sixty steel and garment workers prowling the street out front, visiting other striking sites around Dharavi with sign-up sheets, trying to organize the workers of little five-or ten-person shops into their unions.
He realized he was falling asleep. How long had it been since he’d last slept for more than an hour or so? Days. He jerked his head up and forced his eyes open and there was Yasmin before him, raccoon-eyed beneath the hijab across her forehead. She was frowning, her mouth bracketed by deep worry lines, another one above the bridge of her nose. She was holding her lathi.
“Yasmin?” he said.
She bit her lip. “Mala is gone,” she said. “No one’s seen her for hours. Twelve, maybe fourteen.”
He started to say something but then Big Sister Nor spoke on the phone, “Ashok, sorry to keep you waiting.”
He looked to Yasmin, then back at his screen. “One second,” he said to the phone.
“Yasmin, she’s probably gone home to sleep—”
Yasmin shook her head once, emphatically. He felt a jolt of fear.
“Ashok?” Big Sister Nor’s voice in his ear.
“Come in,” he said to Yasmin, “come here. Close the door.”
He stood up and held his chair out to Yasmin and dropped into a squat beside her, heels on the ground. He pressed the speaker button on the phone.
“Nor,” he said. He always felt faintly ridiculous calling this woman “Big Sister,” though the Webblies seemed to relish it in the same way they loved saying General Robotwallah. “I have Yasmin with me here. She tells me that Mala is missing, has been missing for some hours.”
There was a momentary pause. “Ashok,” Nor said, “that’s terrible news. But I thought you were calling about the other thing—”
He looked at Yasmin, whose eyes were steady on him. He never talked about the work he did for Big Sister Nor, but everyone knew he was up to something back here.
“Yes,” he said. “The other thing. I need to talk to you about that. But Yasmin is here and she tells me that Mala is missing.”
Big Sister Nor seemed to hear the gravity in his voice. She took a deep breath, spoke in a patient voice: “You know Dharavi better than I do. What do you think has happened?”
He nodded to Yasmin. “I think that Banerjee has her,” she said. “I think that he will hurt her, if he hasn’t already.”
From the phone, The Mighty Krang’s voice broke in. “I have Banerjee’s phone number,” he said. “From one of our people in Guzhen. He emailed us a list of everyone in his boss’s address book.”
Ashok found his hands were in fists. He’d only met Banerjee once, but that was enough. The man looked like he was capable of anything, one of those aliens who could look at a fellow human being as nothing more than an opportunity to make money. Yasmin’s eyes were wide.
“You want to phone him?”
“Sure,” The Mighty Krang sounded calm, even flippant, just as he did in the inspirational videos he posted to the Webbly boards and YouTube. “It’s worth a try. Maybe he wants to ransom her.”
“Are you joking?”
The light tone left his voice. “No, Yasmin, I’m not joking. Look, the Webblies are powerful. Men like Banerjee understand that. Once I got Banerjee’s number, I used it to get a full workup on him. We have some leverage over him. It’s possible that we can make him see reason. And if we can’t—” He trailed off.
“We’re no worse off than before,” Big Sister Nor finished.
“When will we call him?”
“Oh, now would be good. Negotiations are always best in the small hours. Hang on, I’ll get the number.” The Mighty Krang typed some. “Okay, let’s do this.”
“Okay,” Yasmin said in a tiny voice.
“Okay,” Ashok said.
“I’ll keep you two muted for him, but live for me. Remember that—if you talk over him, I’ll hear both, which might confuse me.”
“We’ll mute our end,” Ashok said. He saw that his battery was low and fished around on his desk for a power-cable and plugged it in. Then he muted the phone. He and Yasmin unconsciously leaned their heads together over it, so that he could smell his sour breath and hers, which smelled of vomit. She had been sick. He closed his eyes and it felt as though there was sandpaper on the insides of his eyelids.
After a few rings, a sleepy voice mumbled “Victory to Rama” in Hindi, the traditional phone salutation. It made Ashok snort derisively. A man like Banerjee was about as pious as a turnip. As a jackal.
“Mr. Banerjee,” Big Sister Nor said in accented Hindi. “Good morning.”
“Who is it?” He had switched to English.
“The Webblies,” Big Sister Nor said.
“For a Webbly,” Banerjee grunted, still sounding half-asleep, “you sound an awful lot like an underage Chinese whore. Where are you calling from, China doll? A brothel in Hong Kong?”
“Twenty-five hundred kilometers from HK, actually. And I’m Indonesian.”
Banerjee grunted again. “But you are a whore, aren’t you?”
“Mr. Banerjee, I am a busy woman—”
“A popular whore!”
Yasmin hissed at the phone and Ashok double-checked that the mute was on. It was.
“—a busy woman. I’ve called to make you an offer.”
“I have all the whores I need,” he said. “Good-bye.”
“Mr. Banerjee! I’m calling to arrange for the release of Mala,” Big Sister Nor spoke quickly. “And I’m sure if you think about it for just a moment, you’ll realize that there’s plenty I can offer you for her safe return.”
Banerjee said, “Mala is missing?” in a tone that could have won a medal in the unconvincing Olympics.
“Stop playing games, please. You know that we’re not the police. We’re not going to have you arrested. We just want her back.”
“I’m sure you do. She’s a delightful girl.”
Yasmin was grasping her opposite elbows so hard her knuckles were white. Ashok had his fists bunched in the fabric of his trouser-legs. He made himself loosen them. But Big Sister Nor just continued on, as though she hadn’t heard.
“I’m sure you’ve seen what’s happened to the gold markets. Prices are on fire. No one can get any gold out of the gold farms, thanks to my Webblies. If you could promise a farmer access to one spot, without harassment, just think of what you could charge.”
Banerjee chuckled. “And all I have to do is find Mala for you and give her to you and you will guarantee this to me, is that right?”
“That’s the shape
and size of it.”
“You will, of course, honor your end of the bargain once I’ve found her for you.”
“Of course.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Big Sister Nor spoke again.
“I understand your skepticism. I can give you my word of honor.”
Banerjee made a rude sound, like a wet fart. “How about this: I get the gold out of the game, then I find Mala for you.”
Ashok hated this game he was playing, pretending that he didn’t have Mala, but he could somehow find her. He wanted to crawl through the phone and strangle the man.
“How about if we just get you some gold?” It was The Mighty Krang speaking.
“Oh, there’s more of you? Are you also an Indonesian whore twenty-five hundred kilometers from Hong Kong, or are you dialed in from some other exotic locale?”
“We can get the gold out of the game faster than anyone who’d hire you. All the best gold farmers are in the union. The scabs they’ve got working in the shops right now are so crap they’ll probably screw up and get themselves banned.” Ashok loved that Krang wasn’t playing Banerjee’s taunting game either.
Banerjee snorted. “That’s not bad,” he said.
“We could use an escrow service, one we both agree on.” The gold markets ran on escrow services, trustworthy parties that would hold gold and cash while a deal was closing, working for a small percentage.
“And you would return Mala to us?”
“I would do everything I could to find the poor girl and get her into your hands.” Gold, silver and bronze medals in the 100-yard slime.
They dickered over price and timing—Nor ended up promising him 300,000 Svartalfheim runestones—and Krang disconnected Banerjee.