He could almost hear the gears turning in Vaughan’s head. “You’re in Asia, somewhere?”
“Is that the only thing that you got from that?”
He made a little conciliatory snort. “You’re a long way from home, kid. Ten minutes, huh?”
Wei-Dong said, “Eight, now. Give or take.”
“That’s some pretty impressive economic forecasting.”
“When you’ve got four hundred thousand gold farmers working with a few thousand Mechanical Turks, you can do some pretty impressive things.” The numbers were all inflated. But Vaughan would assume they were. If Wei-Dong had given him the real numbers, he’d have underestimated their strength. He liked how this was going.
2 min more from Justbob.
“Okay, Vaughan, here’s how Mr. Prikkel can reach me. Sooner, rather than later.” He named the ID and the service, one that was run out of the Mangalore Special Economic Zone. It was pretty reliable and easy to sign up for, and they supported strong crypto and didn’t log connections. He’d heard that it was a favorite with diplomats from poor countries that couldn’t run their own servers.
“Wait—”
“Call me!” he said, and gave him the details once more.
They’ll call me back he typed to Justbob. Our guy wasn’t there.
Justbob called him right away, and he heard The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor holding another conversation in the background. “You hung up?”
“It wasn’t the right guy. I think he was away, maybe on holidays or something. They’ll get him on the phone. No worries.” But Justbob sounded worried, and he didn’t like that. He shrugged mentally. He’d done the best he could, using his best judgement. He’d been shot at, seen his friend killed. He’d smuggled himself halfway around the world. He’d earned some autonomy.
He ate some of the now-cold dumplings and tried not to worry as the time stretched out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Justbob sent more and more impatient notes. Jie fell asleep on the disgusting mattress, her sweater spread out beneath her head, her face girlish and sad in repose.
Then his computer rang.
“Hello?” Texting, Phone.
“This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you needed to speak to me?”
Now he texted and clicked the button that pulled Justbob and her economist onto the call.
No one in Command Central would meet Connor’s eye when he came back into the office, his nose swollen and his eyes red and puffy. He grabbed a spare computer from the shelves by the door—smashed laptops weren’t exactly unheard-of in the high-tension environment of Command Central—and plugged it in and powered it up.
“The markets are going crazy,” Bill said in a low voice, while around them, Command Central’s denizens—minus Kaden, who seemed to have been removed for his own good—made a show of pretending not to listen in. “Huge amounts of gold have hit the market in the past ten minutes, and the price is whipsawing down.”
Connor nodded. “Sure, our normal monetary policy has had to assume that a certain amount of gold would be entering the system from these characters. When they stopped the flow a couple weeks ago, we had to pick up production to keep inflation down. I had assumed that they were too busy fighting to mine any more gold, but it looks like they spent that time building up their reserves. Now that they’re dumping it—”
“Can you do something about it?”
Connor thought. All the peace and serenity he’d attained just an hour ago, when he was a man with nothing to lose, was melting away. He had the curious sensation of his muscles returning to their habitual, knotted states. But a new clarity descended on him. He’d been thinking of the Webblies as a pack of gang kids, fighting a gang war with their former bosses. This business, though, was sophisticated beyond anything that some gangsters would kick up. It was an act of sophisticated economic sabotage.
“I’d better talk to this kid,” he said, quickly paging through the data, setting up feeds, feeling the return of his fingerspitzengefühl.
Bill made a sour face. “You think they’re for real?”
“I think we can’t afford to assume they aren’t.” The voice was someone else’s. He recognized it: the voice of a company man doing the company’s business.
A few minutes later, he said, “This is Connor Prikkel. I understand you needed to speak to me?”
“Mr. Prikkel, it is very good to speak with you.” The voice had a heavy Indian accent, and the background was flavored with the unmistakable sound of gamers at their games, shooting, shouting.
Bill, listening in with his own earpiece, shook his head. “That’s not the kid.”
“I’m here, too.” This voice was young, unmistakably American. When it cut in, the background changed, no gamers, no shouting. These two were in different rooms. He had an intuition that they might be in different countries, and he remembered all the battles he’d spied upon in which the sides were from all over Asia and even Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.
“Mr. Prikkel—Dr. Prikkel,” Connor suppressed a laugh. The PhD was purely honorary, given years after he dropped out, and he never used it. “My name is Ashok Balgangadhar Tilak. Allow me to begin by saying that, having read your publications and watched dozens of your presentations, I consider you to be one of the great economics thinkers of our age.”
“Thank you, Mr. Tilak,” Connor said. “But—”
“So it is somewhat brash of me to say what I am about to say. Nevertheless, I will say it: We own your games. We control the underlying assets against which a critical mass of securities have been written; further, we control a substantial number of those securities and can sell them as we see fit, through a very large number of dummy accounts. Finally, we have orders in ourselves for many of the sureties that you have used to hedge this deal, orders that will automatically execute should you try to float more to absorb the surplus.”
Connor typed furiously. “You don’t expect me to take your word for this?”
“Naturally not. I expect you to look to the example of Mushroom Kingdom. And to the turmoil in Svartalfheim Warriors. Then I’d suggest that you cautiously audit the books for Zombie Mecha and Clankers.”
“I will.” Again, that company man’s voice, from so far away. The feeds were confirming it, though, the trading volume was insane, but underneath it all there was a sense of directedness, as though someone were making it all happen.
“Very good.”
“Now, I suppose there’s something coming here. Blackmail, I’m guessing. Cash.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said the Indian man, sounding affronted. “All we’re after is peace.”
“Peace.”
“Exactly. I can undo everything we’ve done, put the markets back together again, stop the bleeding by unwinding the trades very carefully and very gently, working with you to make a soft landing for everyone. The markets will dip, but they’ll recover, especially when you make the announcement.”
“The announcement that we’ve made peace with you.”
“Oh yes,” Ashok said. “Of course. Your employers expect that you can run your economy like a toy train set, on neat rails. But we know better. Gold farming is an inevitable consequence of your marketplace, and that pushes the train off the rails. But imagine this: what if your employer were to recognize the legitimacy of gold farming as a practice, allowing our workers to participate as legitimate actors in a large and complex economy. Our exchanges would move aboveground, where you could monitor them, and we would meet regularly with you to discuss our membership’s concerns and you would tell us about your employers’ concerns. There would still be underground traders, of course, but they would be pushed off into the margins. Every decent farmer in the world wants to join the Webblies, for we represent the best players and everyone knows it. And we’ll be at every non-union farm site in every game, talking to the workers about the deal they will get if they band with us.”
“And all we have to do is…what?”
“C
ooperate. Union gold that comes out of Coke’s games will be legitimate and freely usable. We’ll have a cooperative that buys and sells, just like today’s exchange markets, but it will all be aboveboard, transparently governed by elected managers who will be subject to recall if they behave badly.”
“So we replace one cartel with another one?”
“Dr. Prikkel, I wouldn’t ever ask such a thing of you. No, of course not. We don’t object to other unionized operations in the space. I have colleagues here from the Transport and Dock Workers’ Union who are interested in organizing some of these workers. Let there be as many gold exchanges as the market can bear, all certified by you, all run by the workers who create them.”
“What about the players, Mr. Tilak? Do they get a say in this?”
“Oh, I think the players have already had their say. After all, who do you suppose is buying all this gold?”
“And you expect me to make all this happen in an hour?”
The American kid broke in. “Forty-five minutes now.”
“Of course not. Today, all we seek is an agreement in principle. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Coca-Cola Games’ board of directors will have to approve. However, we are of the impression that the board is likely to pay close attention to any recommendations brought to it by its chief economist, especially one of your standing.”
Connor found himself grinning. These kids—not just kids, he reminded himself—were gutsy. And what’s more, they were gamers, something that was emphatically not true of CCG’s board, who were as boring a bunch of mighty captains of industry as you could hope to find. “Is that it?”
“No.” It was the American kid again. He consulted his notes. Leonard Goldberg. In LA. Except Bill was pretty sure this kid was in Asia somewhere. He suspected there was a story in there.
“Hello, Leonard.”
“Hi, Connor. I’m emailing you a list of names right now.”
“I see it.” The message popped up in his public account, the one that was usually filtered by an intern before he saw it. He grabbed it, saw that it had been encrypted to his public key, decrypted it. It was a list of names, with numbers beside them. “Okay, go ahead.”
“That’s the names of Turks who’ve joined the Webblies.”
“You’ve got Turks who want to moonlight as gold farmers?”
“No.” The boy said, speaking as though to an idiot. “I’ve got Turks who want to join a union.”
“The Webblies.”
“The Webblies.”
Connor snorted. “I see. And is this union certified under US labor law? Have you considered the fact that you are all independent contractors and not employees?”
The boy cut in. “Yes, yes, all of that. But these are your best Turks, and they’re Webblies, and we’re all in it together.”
“You know, they’ll never go for it.”
“Your teamsters are unionized. Your janitors are unionized. Now your Mechanical Turks are—”
“Son, you’re not a union. Under US law, you’re nothing.”
The Indian man cleared his voice. “That is all true, but this is likewise true of IWWWW members around the world in all their respective countries. Many countries prohibit all unions. And we ask you to recognize these workers’ rights.”
“We’re not those workers’ employers.”
“You claim you’re not our employers, either,” said the boy, with a maddening note of triumph in his voice. “Remember? We’re ‘independent contractors,’ right?”
“Exactly.”
“Dr. Prikkel, let me explain. The IWWWW is open to all workers, regardless of nationality or employment, and it will work for all those workers’ rights, in solidarity. Our gold farmers will stand up for our Mechanical Turks, and vice versa.”
“Goddamned right,” said the boy. “An insult to one—”
“Is an insult to all. The gold farmers have a modest set of demands: modest benefits, job security, a pension plan. All the same things that we plan on asking our farmers’ employers for. Nothing your division can’t afford.”
“Are you saying that your demands are contingent on recognizing the demands from Mr. Goldberg’s friends.”
“Precisely.”
“And you will destroy the economy of Svartalfheim Warriors in forty-five minutes—”
“Thirty-eight minutes,” said the kid.
“Unless I agree in principle that we will do this?”
“You have summed it all up admirably,” said the Indian economist. “Well done.”
“Can you give me a minute?”
“I can give you thirty-eight minutes.”
“Thirty-seven,” said the kid.
He muted them, and he and Bill stared at each other for a long time.
“Is this as crazy as it sounds?”
“Actually, the crazy part is that it’s not all that crazy. Impossible, but not crazy. We already let lots of third parties play with our economies—independent brokers, the people who buy and sell their instruments. There’s no technical reason these characters can’t be a part of our planning. Hell, if they can do what they say, we’ll be way more profitable than we are now.
“For one thing, we won’t need to crash the servers tracking them all down.”
Connor grimaced. “Right. But then there’s the impossible part. Leaving out the whole thing about the Turks, which is just crazy, there’s the fact that the board will never, ever, never, never—”
Bill held a hand up. “Now, that’s where I disagree with you. When you meet with the board, you’re always trying to sell them on some weird-ass egghead financial idea that makes them worry that they’re going to lose their life’s savings. When I go to them, it’s to ask them for some leeway to fight scammers and hackers. They understand scammers and hackers, and they say yes. If we were to ask them together—”
“You think this is a good idea?”
“It’s a better idea than chasing these kids around gamespace like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale. It’s insane to do the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome. It’s time we tried something different.”
“What about the Turks?”
“What about them?”
“They’re looking for—”
“They’re looking to take about half a percent out of that business unit’s bottom line, if that. We spend more on your first-class plane tickets to economics conferences every year than they want. Big freakin’ deal.”
“But if we give in on this thing, they’ll ask for more.”
“And if we don’t give in on this, we’re going to spend the next hundred years chasing Chinese and Indian kids around gamespace instead of devoting our energy to fighting real ripoffs and hacker creeps. Security is always about choosing your battles. Every complex ecosystem has parasites. You’ve got ten times more bacteria cells than blood cells in your body. The trick with parasites is to figure out how to co-exist with them.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing you say this.”
“That’s because I’m not a gamer. I don’t care who wins. I don’t care who loses. I’m a security expert. I care about what the costs are to secure the systems that I’m in charge of. We can let these kids ‘win’ some little battles, pay the cost for that, and save ten times as much by not having to chase ’em.”
Connor shook his head. “What about them?” he said, rolling his eyes around the room to encompass the rest of Command Central, most of whom were openly eavesdropping now.
Bill turned to them. “Hands up: who wants to make and run totally kick-ass games that make us richer than hell?” Every hand shot up. “Who wants to spend their time chasing a bunch of skinny poor kids around instead of just finding a way to neutralize them?” A few hands stayed defiantly in the air, among them Kaden, who had come back into the room while Connor was on the phone and was now glaring at both of them. Bill turned back to Connor. “I think we’ll be okay,” he said. He jerked his head over his shoulder and said, loudly
, “Those goons are so ornery they’d say no if you asked them whether they wanted a lifetime’s supply of free ice cream.”
Three hundred thousand runestones hadn’t seemed like much when Yasmin started. After all, the gold was for Mala, and Mala was all she could think of. And she had Mala’s army on her side, all of them working together.
But it had been days since she’d slept properly, and there were reporters every few minutes, pushing into Mrs. Dotta’s cafe with their cameras and recorders and pads and asking her all sorts of mad questions and she had to keep her temper and speak modestly and calmly with them when every nerve in her body was shrieking, Can’t you see how busy I am? Can’t you see what I have to do? But the army covered itself with glory and not one soldier lost his or her temper, and the press all marvelled at them and their curious work.
At least the steelworkers and garment workers had the sense not to interrupt them, and they were mostly busy with their organizing adventures in Dharavi to bother them anyway. The story of how they’d saved this gang of Dharavi children from bad men with weapons had spread to every corner, and the workers they’d inspired to walk off the job were half in awe of them.
Piece by piece, though, they were able to build the fortune. Yasmin found them an instanced mission with a decent payoff, one that three or four players could run at a time, and she directed them all into it, sending them down the caverns after the dwarves and ogres below in gangs, prowling up and down the narrow, blisteringly hot aisles between the machines, pointing out ways of getting the work done faster, noting each player’s total, until, after a seeming eternity, they had it all.
“Ashok,” she said, banging unannounced into his office. He was bent over his keyboard, earwig screwed in, muttering in English to his Dr. Prikkel in America. He held up a hand and asked the man to excuse him—she hated how subservient he sounded, but had to admit that he’d been very cool when the negotiations had been underway—and put him on mute.