> Cute! You must miss him
> A lot. It’s like being in the army. I will do this for a few years, then go home.
What a world! Here was this civil engineer, accomplished, in love, a father, living far away, working all day to amass virtual treasures, playing cat-and-mouse with Connor and his people.
> So what advice do you have for someone going into civil engineering?
The ogre emoted a big laugh.
> Don’t try to find work in China
Connor emoted a big laugh, too—and led the party to Dvalinn’s Runes, losing himself in the play even as he struggled to remain clinical and observant. Some of his fellow gamerunners looked over his shoulder now and again, watched them run the mission, made little cutting remarks. Among the gamerunners, the actual game itself was slightly looked down upon, something for the marks to play. The real game, the big game, was the game of designing the game, the game of tweaking all the variables in the giant hamster cage that all the suckers were paying to run through.
But Connor never forgot how he came to the game, where his equations had come from: from play, thousands of hours in the worlds, absorbing their physics and reality through his fingers and ears and eyes. As far as he was concerned, you couldn’t do your job in the game unless you played it, too. He marked the snotty words, noticed who delivered them, and took down his mental estimation of each one by a few pegs.
Now they were in the dungeon, which he’d just slapped together, but which he nevertheless found himself really enjoying. As a raiding guild, the Chinese were superb: coordinated, slick, smart. He had a tendency to think of gold farmers as mindless droids, repeating a task set for them by some boss who showed them how to use the mouse and walked away. But of course the gold farmers played all day, every day, even more than the most hardcore players. They were hardcore players. Hardcore players he’d sworn to eliminate, but he couldn’t let himself forget that they were hardcore.
They fought their way through to the big boss, and the team were so good that Connor couldn’t help himself—he reached into the game’s guts and buffed the hell out of the boss, upping his level substantially and equipping him with a bunch of special attacks from the library of nasties that he kept in his private workspace. Now the boss was incredibly intimidating, a challenge that would require flawless play from the whole team.
> Oh no
he typed.
> What are we going to do?
And the ogre sprang into action, and the players formed two ranks, those with melee attacks in the vanguard, spellcasters, healers, ranged attackers and AOE attackers in the back, seeking out ledges and other high places out of range of the boss, a huge dire wolf with many ranged spells as well as a vicious bite and powerful paws that could lash out and pin a player until the wolf could bring its jaws to bear on him.
The boss had a bunch of smaller fighters, dwarves, who streamed out of the caves leading to the central cavern in great profusion, harassing the back rank and intercepting the major attacks the forward guard assembled. As a healer and rezzer, Connor ran to and fro, looking for safe spots to sit down, meditate, and cast healing energy at the fighters in the fore who were soaking up incredible damage from the big boss and his minions. He lost concentration for a second and two of the dwarves hit him with thrown axes, high and low, and he found himself in-capped, sprawled on the cave floor, with more bad guys on the way.
His heart was thundering, that old feeling that reminded him that his body couldn’t tell the difference between excitement on screen and danger in the real world, and when another player, one of the Chinese whom he had not spoken with at all, rescued him, he felt a surge of gratitude that was totally genuine, originating in his spine and stomach, not his head.
In the end, twelve of the twenty players were irreversibly killed in the battle, respawned at some distant point too far away to reach them before the battle ended. The boss finally howled, a mighty sound that made stalactites thunder down from the ceiling and shatter into sprays of sharp rock that dealt minor damage to the survivors of their party, damage that they flinched away from anyway, as they were all running in the red. The experience points were incredible—he dinged up a full level—and there were several very good drops. He almost reached for his workspace to add a few more to reward his comrades for their skill and bravery, forcibly reminding himself that he was not on their side, that this was research and infiltration.
> You guys are great!
The ogre emoted a bow and a little victory dance, another custom number that was graceful and funny at once.
> You play well. Good luck with your studies.
Connor’s fingers hovered over the keys.
> I hope you get to see your family soon
The ogre emoted a quick hug, and it made Connor feel momentarily ashamed of what he did next. But he did it. He added the entire guild to his watchlist, so that every message and move would be logged, machine-translated into English. Every transaction they made—all the gold they sold or gave away—would be traced and traced again as part of Connor’s efforts to unravel the complex, multi-thousand-party networks that were used to ware house, convert and distribute game-goods. He had hundreds of accounts in the database already, and at the rate he was going, he’d have thousands by the end of the week—and it was already Wednesday.
The police raided Jie’s studio while she and Lu were out eating dumplings and staring into each others’ eyes. It was one of her backup studios, but they’d worked out of it two days in a row, and had been about to work out of it for a third. This was a violation of basic security, but Jie’s many apartments were fast filling up with Webblies who had quit their farming jobs in frustration and joined the full-time effort to amass gold and treasure for the plan.
The dumpling shop was run by a young woman who looked after her two-year-old son and her sister’s four-year-old daughter, but she was nevertheless always cheerful when they came in, if prone to making suggestive remarks about young love and the dangers of early parenthood.
She was just handing them the bill—Lu once again made a show of reaching for it, though not so fast that Jie couldn’t snatch it from him and pay it herself, as she was the one with all the money in the relationship—when his phone went crazy.
He pulled it out, looked at its face, saw that it was Big Sister Nor, calling from a number that she wasn’t supposed to be using for another 24 hours according to protocol. That means that she worried her old number had been compromised, which meant that things were bad. Turning to the wall and covering the receiver with his hand, he answered.
“Wei?”
“You’ve been burned.” It was The Mighty Krang, whose Taiwanese accent was instantly recognizable. “We’re watching the webcams in the studio now. Ten cops, tearing the place apart.”
“Shit!” he said it so loudly that the four year old cackled with laughter and dumpling lady scowled at him. Jie slid close to him and put her cheek next to his—he instantly felt a little better for her company—and whispered, “What is it?”
“You’re all secure, right?”
He thought about it for a second. All their disks were encrypted, and they self-locked after ten minutes of idle time. The police wouldn’t be able to read anything off any of the machines. He had two sets of IDs on him, the current one, which was due to be flushed later that day according to normal procedure, and the next set, hidden in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants-leg. Ditto for his current and next SIMs, one loaded in his current phone and a pouch of new ones in order of planned usage inserted into a slit in his belt. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Jie: “The studio’s gone.” She sucked air past her teeth. “Are you all buttoned-up?”
She clicked her tongue. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve been doing this for a lot longer than you.” She began to methodically curse under her breath, digging through her purse and switching out IDs and cracking open her phone to swap the SIM. “I had really nice stuff in that place,” she said.
“Good clothes. My favorite mic. We are such idiots. Never should have recorded there twice in a row.”
The Mighty Krang must have heard, because he chuckled. “Sounds like you’re both okay?”
“Well, Jiandi won’t be able to go on the air tonight,” he said.
“Screw that,” Jie said. She took the phone from him. “Tell Big Sister Nor that we’re going on air at the usual time tonight. Normal service, no interruptions.”
Lu didn’t hear the reply, but he could see from Jie’s grimly satisfied expression that The Mighty Krang had praised her. It had been Big Sister Nor’s idea to rig all the studios with webcams all the Webblies could access, just in the front rooms. It was a little weird, trying to ignore the all-seeing eye of the webcam screwed in over the door. But when you’re sleeping twenty to a room, it’s easy to let go of your ideas about privacy—but all the same, Lu and Jie now sat far apart when broadcasting, and snuck into the bathroom to make out afterward.
And now the webcams had paid off. He took the phone back and listened as The Mighty Krang narrated a play-back of the video, cops breaking the door down, securing the space. Then an evidence team that spliced batteries into the computers’ power cables so they could be unplugged without shutting down (Lu was grateful that Big Sister Nor had decreed that all their hardware had to be configured to unmount and re-encrypt the drives when they were idle), took prints and DNA. They already had Lu’s DNA, of course, because they’d sniffed out one of Jie’s other apartments. But Jie had her little pocket vacuum cleaner, intended for clearing crumbs and gunk out of keyboards, and she surreptitiously vacuumed out the seats whenever she took a train or a bus, sucking up the random DNA of thousands of people, which she carefully scattered around her apartments when she got in.
The evidence team brought in a panoramic camera and set it in the middle of the room and the police cleared out momentarily as it swept around in a tight, precise mechanical circle, producing a wraparound high-resolution image of the room. Then the cops swept back in, minus their paper overshoes, and put every scrap of paper and every piece of optical and magnetic and optical media into more bags, and then they destroyed the place.
Working with wrecking bars and wicked little knifes, and starting from the corner under the front door, they methodically smashed every single stick of furniture, every floor tile, every gyprock wall, turning it all into pieces no bigger than playing-cards, heaping it behind them as they went. They worked in near silence, without rushing, and didn’t appear to relish the task. This wasn’t vandalism, it was absolute annihilation. The policemen had the regulation brushcut short hair, identical blue uniforms, paper face-masks, kevlar gloves. One drew closer and closer to the webcam, spotted it—a little pinhead with a peel-away adhesive backing stuck up in a dusty corner—and peeled it away. His face loomed large in it for a moment, his pores, a stray hair poking out of his nostrils, his eyes dead and predatory. Then chaos, and nothing.
“He stamped on it, we think,” The Mighty Krang said. “So much for the webcams. It’ll be the first thing they look for next time. Still, saved your ass, didn’t it?”
The description had momentarily taken away Lu’s breath. All his things, his spare clothes, the comics he’d been reading, a half-chewed pack of energy gum he’d bought the day before, disappeared into the bowels of the implacable authoritarian state. It could have been him.
“We’re going to move on to the next safe-house,” he said. “We’ll find somewhere to broadcast from tonight.”
“You’re bloody right we will,” said Jie, from his side.
They gave the old building a wide berth as they made their way down into the metro, and consciously forced themselves not to flinch every time a police siren wailed past them. When they came back up to street level, Jie took Lu’s hand and said, out of the corner of her mouth, “All right, Tank, what do we do now?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. That was, uh, close.” He swallowed. “Don’t be mad if I say something?”
She squeezed his fingers. “Say it.”
“You don’t need to do this,” he said. She stopped and looked at him, her face white. Before they’d ever kissed, he always felt a void between them, an invisible forcefield he had to push his way through in order to tell her how he felt. Once they’d become a couple, the forcefield had thinned, but not vanished, and every time he said or did something stupid, he felt it pushing him away. It was back in force now. He spoke quickly, hoping his words would batter their way through it: “I mean, this is crazy. We’re probably all going to go to jail or get killed.” She was still staring at him. “You’re just—” He swallowed. “You’re good at this stuff, is what I’m trying to say. You could probably broadcast your show for ten more years without getting caught and retire a rich woman. You don’t need to throw it away on us.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did I promise not to get mad?”
He tried a little nervous smile. “Sort of?”
She looked back and forth. “Let’s walk,” she said. “We stand out here.” They walked. Her fingers were limp in his hand, and then slipped out. The forcefield grew stronger. He felt more afraid than he had when The Mighty Krang had described the action from the studio camera. “You think I’m doing this all for money? I could have more money if I wanted to. I could take dirtier advertisers. I could start a marketing scheme for my girls and ask them to send me money—there’s millions of them, if each one only sent me a few RMB, I’d be so rich I could retire.”
The handshake buildings loomed around them, and she broke off as they found themselves walking single file down a narrow alley between two buildings. She caught up with him and leaned in close, speaking so softly it was almost a whisper. “I could just be another dirty con-artist who comes to South China, steals all she can, and goes back home to the countryside. I’m not doing that. Do you know why?”
He fumbled for the words and she caught his hand and dug her fingernails into his palm. He fell silent.
“It’s a rhetorical question,” she said. “I’m doing it because I believe in this. I was telling my girls to fight back against their bosses before you ever played your first game. With or without you, I’ll be telling them to fight back. I like your group, I like the way they cross borders so easily, even more easily than I get back and forth from Hong Kong. So I’m supporting your friends, and telling my girls to support them too. The problem you have is a worker’s problem, not a Chinese problem, not a gamer’s problem. The factory girls are workers and they want a good deal just as much as you and your gamer friends do.”
She was breathing heavily, Lu noticed, angry little snorts through her nose.
He tried to say something, but all that came out was a mumble.
“What?” she said, her fingernails digging in again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Oh, Tank,” she said. “You don’t need to be my big, strong protector. I’ve been taking care of myself since I left home and came to South China. It may come as a huge surprise to you, but girls don’t need big, strong boys to look after them.”
He was silent for a moment. They were almost at the entrance of the safe house. “Can I just admit that I’m an idiot and we’ll leave it at that?”
She pretended to think it over for a moment. “That sounds okay to me,” she said. And she kissed him, a warm, soft kiss that made his feet sweaty and the hairs on his neck stand up. She chewed his lower lip for a moment before letting go, then made a rude gesture at the boys who were calling down at them from a high balcony overhead.
“Okay,” she said, “Let’s go do a broadcast.”
It had all been so neatly planned. They would wait until after monsoon season with its torrential rains; after Diwali with its religious observances and firecrackers; after Mid-Autumn Festival when so many workers would be back in their villages, where the surveillance was so much less intense. They would wait until the big orders came in for the US Thanksgiving seaso
n, when sweaty-palmed retailers hoped to make their years profitable with huge sales on goods made and shipped from the whole Pacific Rim.
That had been a good plan. Everyone liked it. Wei-Dong, the boy who’d crossed the ocean with their prepaid game-cards, had just about wet his pants at the brilliance of it. “You’ll have them over a barrel,” he kept repeating. “They’ll have to give in, and fast.”
The in-game project was running very well. That Ashok fellow in Mumbai had worked out a very clever plan for signaling the vigor of their various “investment vehicles” and the analysts who watched this were eating it up. They were selling more bad paper than they could print. It had surprised everyone, even Ashok, and they’d actually had to pull some Webblies off sales-duty: it turned out that a surprising number of people would believe any rumor they heard on an investment board or in-game canteen.
The Mighty Krang and Big Sister Nor were likewise very happy with the date and had stuck a metaphorical pin in it, and began to plan. Justbob was fine with this, but she was a warrior and so she understood that the first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack. So while Big Sister Nor and Krang and the other lieutenants in China and Indonesia and Singapore and Vietnam and Cambodia were beavering away making plans for the future, Justbob was leading skirmishers in exercises, huge, world-spanning battles where her warriors ran their armies up against one another by the thousand.
Big Sister Nor hated it, said it was too high-profile, that it would tip off the gamerunners that there were armies massing in gamespace, and then they would naturally wonder what the players were massing for and it would all unravel. Justbob thought it was a lot more likely that the gold farmers and the elaborate cons would tip them off, seeing as how armies were about as common in gamespace as onions were in a stir-fry. She didn’t try to tell this to Big Sister Nor, who hardly played games at all any more. Instead, she obediently agreed to take it easy, to be careful, and so on.