That’s where the brokers came in. They bought gold from everyone, and held it in an ever-shifting network of accounts, millions of toons who fanned out all over the worlds and exchanged small amounts of gold at irregular intervals, to fool the anti-laundering snoops in the game logic that relentlessly hunted for farmers and brokers to bust. They’d take your server A gold and pay your server B buyer out of another account, slicing off a piece for themselves.
Avoiding those filters was a science, one that had been hammered together over decades in the real world before it migrated to the games. If a big pension fund in the real world wants to buy half a billion dollars’ worth of stock in Google, the last thing they want to do is tip off everyone else that they’re about to sink that much cash into Google. If they did, everyone else would snap up Google stock before they could get to it, mark it up, and gouge them on it.
So anyone who wants to buy a lot of anything—who wants to move a lot of money around—has to know how to do it in a way that’s invisible to snoops. They have to be statistically insignificant, which means that a single big trade has to be broken up into millions of little trades that look like ordinary suckers buying and selling a little stock for the hell of it.
No matter what secrets you’re trying to keep and no matter who you’re trying to keep them from, the techniques are the same. In every game world there were thousands of seemingly normal characters doing seemingly normal things, giving each other seemingly normal sums of money, but at the end of the day, it all added up to millions of gold in trade, taking place right under the noses of the game gods.
Matthew downpriced his gold, seeking the price at which a broker would deign to notice him and take it off of him. All the trading took place in slangy, rapid Chinese—that was one of the ways the brokers kept their hold on the market, since there weren’t that many Russians and Indonesians and Indians who could follow it and play along—replete with insults and wheedles. Eventually, Matthew found the magic price. It was lower than he’d hoped for, but not by much, and now that he’d found it, he was able to move the team’s gold as fast as they could accumulate it, shuttling dummy players in and out of the dungeon they were working to take the cash to bots run by the brokers.
Finally, it dried up. First, the amount of gold in the dungeon sharply decreased, with the gold dropping from 12,000 per hour to 8,000, then 2,000, then a paltry 100. The mareridtbane disappeared next, which was a pity, because he was able to sell that directly, hawking it in the big towns, pasting and pasting and pasting his offer into the chat where the real players could see it. And then in came the cops, moderators with special halos around them who dropped canned lectures into the chat, stern warnings about having violated the game’s terms of service.
And then the account suspensions, the games vanishing from one screen after another, popping like soap bubbles. They were all dropped back to the login screens and they slumped, grinning crazy and exhausted, in their seats, looking at each other in exhausted relief. It was over, at last.
“How much?” Lu asked, flung backwards over his chair, not opening his eyes or lifting his head. “How much, Master Fong?”
Matthew didn’t have his notebooks anymore, so he’d been keeping track on the insides of Double Happiness cigarette packages, long, neat tallies of numbers. His pen flickered from sheet to sheet, checking the math one final time, then, quietly, “Thirty-four hundred dollars.”
There was a stunned silence. “How much?” Lu had his eyes open now.
Matthew made a show of checking the figures again, but that’s all it was, a show. He knew that the numbers were right. “Three thousand, four hundred and two dollars and fourteen cents.” It was double the biggest score they’d ever made for Boss Wing. It was the most money any of them had ever made. His share of it was more than his father made in a month. And he’d made it in one night.
“Sorry, how much?”
“Eighty thousand eighty bowls of dumplings, Lu. That much.”
The silence was even thicker. That was a lot of dumplings. That was enough to rent their own place to use as a factory, a place with computers and a fast internet connection and bedrooms to sleep in, a place where they could earn and earn, where they could grow rich as any boss.
Lu leapt out of his chair and whooped, a sound so loud that the entire cafe turned to look at them, but they didn’t care, they were all out of their seats now, whooping and dancing around and hugging each other.
And now it was the day, a new day, the sun had come up and gone down and risen in their long labor in the cafe, and they had won. It was a new day for them and for everyone around them.
They stepped out into the sun and there were people on the streets, throngs buying and selling, touts hustling, pretty girls in good clothes walking arm in arm under a single parasol. The heat of the day was like a blast furnace after the air-conditioned cool of the cafe, but that was good, too—it baked out the funk of cigarette-mouth, coffee-mouth, no-food-mouth. Suddenly, none of them were sleepy. They all wanted to eat.
So Matthew took them out for breakfast. They were his team, after all. They took over the back table at an Indian restaurant near the train station, a place he’d overheard his uncle Yiu-Yu telling his parents about, bragging about some business associate who took him there. Very sophisticated. And he’d read so much about Indian food in his comics, he couldn’t wait to try some.
All the other customers in there were either foreigners or Hong Kong people, but they didn’t let that get to them. The boys sat at their back table and played with their forks and ate plate after plate of curry and fresh hot flatbreads called naan, and it was delicious and strange and the perfect end to what had turned out to be the perfect night.
Halfway through the dessert—delicious mango ice cream—the sleeplessness finally caught up with them all. They sat on their seats in their torpor, hands over their bellies, eyes half-open, and Matthew called for the check.
They stepped out again into the light. Matthew had decided to go to his parents’ place, to sleep on the sofa for a little while, before figuring out what to do about his smashed room with its smashed door.
As they blinked in the light, a familiar Wenjhou accented voice said, “You aren’t a very smart boy, are you?”
Matthew turned. Boss Wing’s man was there, and three of his friends. They rushed forward and grabbed the boys before they could react, one of them so big that he grabbed a boy in each hand and nearly lifted them off their feet.
His friends struggled to get free, but Boss Wing’s man methodically slapped them until they stopped.
Matthew couldn’t believe that this was happening—in broad daylight, right here next to the train station! People crossed the street to avoid them. Matthew supposed he would have done so, too.
Boss Wing’s man leaned in so close Matthew could smell the fish he’d had for lunch on his breath. “Why are you a stupid boy, Matthew? You didn’t seem stupid when you worked for Boss Wing. You always seemed smarter than these children.” He flapped his hand disparagingly at the boys. “But Boss Wing, he trained you, sheltered you, fed you, paid you—do you think it’s honorable or fair for you to take all that investment and run out the door with it?”
“We don’t owe Boss Wing anything!” Lu shouted. “You think you can make us work for him?”
Boss Wing’s man shook his head. “What a little hothead. No one wants to force you to do anything, child. We just don’t think it’s fair for you to take all the training and investment we made in you and run across the street and start up a competing business. It’s not right, and Boss Wing won’t stand for it.”
The curry churned in Matthew’s stomach. “We have the right to start our own business.” The words were braver than he felt, but these were his boys, and they gave him bravery. “If Boss Wing doesn’t like the competition, let him find another line of work.”
Boss Wing’s man didn’t give him any forewarning before he slapped Matthew so hard his head rang like a gong.
He stumbled back two steps, then tripped over his heels and fell on his ass, landing on the filthy sidewalk. Boss Wing’s man put a foot on his chest and looked down at him.
“Little boy, it doesn’t work like that. Here’s the deal—Boss Wing understands if you don’t want to work at his factory, that’s fine. He’s willing to sell you the franchise to set up your own branch operation of his firm. All you have to do is pay him a franchise fee of 60 percent of your gross earnings. We watched your gold-sales from Svartalfheim. You can do as much of that kind of work as you like, and Boss Wing will even take care of the sales end of things for you, so you’ll be free to concentrate on your work. And because it’s your firm, you get to decide how you divide the money—you can pay yourself anything you like out of it.”
Matthew burned with shame. His friends were all looking at him, goggle-eyed, scared. The weight from the foot on his chest increased until he couldn’t draw a breath.
Finally, he gasped out, “Fine,” and the pressure went away. Boss Wing’s man extended a hand, helped him to his feet.
“Smart,” he said. “I knew you were a smart boy.” He turned to Matthew’s friends. “Your little boss here is a smart man. He’ll take you places. You listen to him now.”
Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, his men following him.
The car that had plowed into Wei-Dong’s father’s car was driven by a very exasperated, very tired British man, fat and bald, with two angry kids in the back seat and an angry wife in the front seat.
He was steadily, quietly cursing in British, which was a lot like cursing in American, but with a lot more “bloodies” in it. He paced the sidewalk beside the wrecked Huawei, his wife calling at him from inside the car to get back in the bloody car, Ronald, but Ronald wasn’t having any of it.
Wei-Dong sat on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the sidewalk, dazed in the noon sun, waiting for his vision to stop swimming. Benny sat next to him, holding a wad of kleenex to staunch the bleeding from his nose, which he’d bounced off of something hard when the airbag snapped his head to one side. Wei-Dong brought his hands up to his own nose to finger the lump there again. His hands smelled of new plastic, the smell of the airbag that he’d had to punch his way out of.
The fat man crouched next to him. “Christ, son, you look like you’ve been to the wars. But you’ll be all right, right? Could have been much worse.”
“Sir,” Benny Goldberg said, in a quiet voice muffled by the kleenex. “Please leave us alone now. When the police come, we can all talk, all right?”
“’Course, ’course.” His kids were screaming now, hollering from the back seat about getting to Disneyland, when were they getting to Disneyland? “Shut it, you monsters,” he roared. The sound made Wei-Dong flinch back. He wobbled to his feet.
“Sit down, Leonard,” his father said. “You shouldn’t have gotten out of the car, and you certainly shouldn’t be walking around now. You could have a concussion or a spinal injury. Sit down,” he repeated, but Wei-Dong needed to get off the grass, needed to walk off the sick feeling in his stomach.
Uh-oh. He made it to the curb, hands braced on the crumpled, flaking rear section of the Huawei, not sure if he would barf or not. A moment later, his father’s hands were on his shoulders, steadying him. Angrily, he shook them off.
There were sirens coming now, and the fat man was talking intensely to old Benny, though it was quiet enough that Wei-Dong could only make out a few words—insurance, fault, vacation—all in a wheedling tone. His father kept trying to get a word in, but the guy was talking over him. Wei-Dong could have told him that this wasn’t a good strategy. Nothing was surer to make Volcano Benny blow. And here it came.
“Shut your mouth for a second, all right? Just SHUT IT!”
The shout was so loud that even the kids in the back seat went silent.
“YOU HIT US, you goddamned idiot! We’re not going to go halves on the damage. We’re not going to settle this for cash. I don’t care if you’re jetlagged, I don’t care if you didn’t buy the extra insurance on your rental car, I don’t care if this will ruin your vacation. You could have killed us, you understand that, moron?”
The man held up his hands and cringed behind them. “You were parked in the middle of the road, mate,” he said, a note of pleading in his voice.
Everyone was watching them, the kids and the guy’s wife, the rubberneckers who slowed down to see the accident. The two men were totally focused on each other.
In other words, no one was watching Wei-Dong.
He thought about the sound his earwig made, crunching under his father’s steel-toed shoe, heard the sirens getting closer, and…
He…
Left.
He sidled away toward the shrubs that surrounded a mini-mall and gas-station, nonchalant, clutching his school bag, like he was just getting his bearings, but he was headed toward a gap there, a narrow one that he just barely managed to squeeze through. He popped through into the parking lot around the mini-mall, filled with stores selling $3 t-shirts and snow-globes and large bottles of filtered water. On this side of the shrubs, the world was normal and busy, filled with tourists on their way to or from Disneyland.
He picked up his pace, keeping his face turned away from the stores and the CCTV cameras outside of them. He felt in his pocket, felt the few dollars there. He had to get away, far away, fast, if he was going to get away at all.
And there was his salvation, the tourist bus that rolled through the streets of the Anaheim Resort District, shuttling people from hotels to restaurants to the parks, crowded with sugared-up kids and conventioneers with badges hanging around their necks, and it was trundling to the stop just a few yards away. He broke into a run, stumbled from the pain that seared through his head like a lightning bolt, then settled for walking as quickly as he could. The sirens were very, very loud now, right there on the other side of the shrubs, and he was almost at the bus and there was his father’s voice, calling his name, and there was the bus and—
—his foot came down on the bottom step, his back foot came up to join it, and the impatient driver closed the doors behind him and released the air brake with a huge sigh and the bus lurched forward.
“Wei-Dong Goldberg,” he whispered to himself, “you’ve just escaped a parental kidnapping to a military school. What are you going to do now?” He grinned. “I’m going to Disneyland!”
The bus trundled down Katella, heading for Disneyland’s bus entrance, and then disgorged its load of frenetic tourists. Wei-Dong mingled with them, invisible in the mass of humanity skipping past the huge, primary-colored traffic pylons. He was on autopilot, remained on autopilot as he unslung his school bag to let the bored security goon paw through it.
He’d had a Disneyland annual pass since he was old enough to ride the bus. All the kids he knew had them too—it beat going to the mall after school, and even though it got boring after a while, he could think of no better place to disappear while thinking through his next steps.
He walked down Main Street, heading for the little pink castle at the end of the road. He knew that there were secluded benches on the walkways around the castle, places where he could sit down and think for a moment. His head felt like it was full of cotton candy.
First thing he did after sitting down was check his phone. The ringer had been off—school rules—but he’d felt it vibrating continuously in his pocket. Fifteen missed calls from his father. He dialed up his voicemail and listened to his dad rant about coming back right now and all the dire things that would happen to him if he didn’t.
“Kid, what ever you think you’re doing, you’re wrong about it. You’re going to come home eventually. The sooner you call me back, the less trouble we’re going to have. And the longer you wait—you listen to this, Leonard—the longer you wait, the worse it’s going to be. There are worse things than boarding school, kid. Much, much worse.”
He stared vacantly at the sky, listening to
this, and then he dropped the phone as though he’d been scorched by it.
It had a GPS in it. They were always using phones to find runaways and bad guys and lost hikers. He picked the phone up off the pavement and slid the back out and removed the battery, then put it in his jacket pocket, returning the phone to his jeans. He wasn’t much of a fugitive.
The police had been on the way to the accident when he left. They’d arrived minutes later. The old man had decided that he’d run away, so he’d be telling the cops that. He was a minor, and truant, and he’d been in a car accident, and hell, face it, his family was rich. That meant that the police would pay attention to his dad, which meant that they’d be doing everything they could to locate him. If they hadn’t yet figured out where his phone was, they’d know soon enough—they’d run the logs and find the call from Disneyland to his voicemail.
He started moving, shoving his way through the crowds, heading back up Main Street. He ducked around behind a barbershop quartet and realized that he was standing in front of an ATM. They’d be shutting down his card any second—or, if they were smart, they’d leave the card live and use it to track him. He needed cash. He waited while a pair of German tourists fumbled with the machine, and then jammed his card into it and withdrew $500, the most the machine would dispense. He hit it again for another $500, self-conscious now about the inch-thick wad of twenties in his hand. He tried for a third withdrawal, but the machine told him he’d gone to his daily limit. He didn’t think he had much more than $1,000 in the bank, anyway—that was several years’ worth of birthday money, plus a little from his summer job working at a Chinese PC repair shop at a mini-mall in Irvine.
He folded the wad, stuck it in his pocket, and headed out of the park, not bothering with the hand-stamp. He started to head for the street, but then he turned on his heel and headed toward the Downtown Disney shopping complex and the hotels attached to it. There were cheap tour buses that went from there up to LA, down to San Diego, to all the airports. There was no easier, cheaper way to get far from here.