For The Win (41 page)

Why had he put it there? Because he couldn't bear the thought of sitting, bored and restless, in his box for days more. Why was he doing any of it? Why was he on his way to China? Why had he left home to be a gamer? Why had he learned Chinese in the first place? Trapped with his own thoughts, he found himself confronting some pretty ugly answers. He hadn't wanted to be like all the other kids. He'd wanted to stand out, be special. Different. To know and understand and be skilled at things that his fahter didn't know anything about. To triumph. To be a part of something bigger than himself, but to be an
important
part. To be romantic and special. To care about a justice that his friends didn't even know existed.

It made him all feel sad and pathetic and needy. It made him want to go plug into his laptop and get away from his thoughts.

It worked. What he found on his laptop was nothing short of amazing. First there was a haul of photos emailed from the captain back to the shipping company, showing the cargo deck of the ship looking like a tumbled Jenga tower, containers scattered everywhere, on their sides, on their backs, at crazy angles. It looked as if the entire top layer of boxes had slipped into the ocean, and then several more layers' worth on the port side. He looked more closely. His container was on the starboard side, and the container from the corresponding position on the other side appeared to be gone. He looked up the ship's manifest, found the serial number of the container, matched it to a list of overboard boxes, swallowed. It had been pure random chance that put his box on the starboard side. If he'd gone the other way, he'd be raspberry jam in a crushed tin can at the bottom of the ocean.

He scanned the email traffic for information about the mysterious stowaway, but it looked as though the storm had literally blown any concern over him overboard. The manifest he had listed the value for customs of all the containers on the ship. Most of them were empty, or at least partially empty, as there wasn't much that America had that China needed, except empty containers to fill with more goods to ship to America. Still, the total value of the missing containers went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He winced. That was going to be a huge insurance bill.

Now it was time to get
his
email, something that he'd been putting off, because that was even riskier; if the ship's own administrators were wiretapping their own network, they'd see his traffic. Oh, it wouldn't look like email from him to Big Sister Nor and his guildies and the Turks back in America. It'd look like gigantic amounts of random junk, originating on an internal address that didn't correspond to any known machine on the ship. Its destination was unclear -- it hopped immediately into TOR, The Onion Router, which bounced it like a pea in a maraca around the globe's open relays. He was counting on the ship's lax IT security and the fact that the crew were always connecting up new devices like phones and handheld games they picked up in port to help him slide past the eyes of the network. Still, if they were looking for a stowaway, they might think of looking at the network traffic.

He sat at his keyboard, fingers poised, and debated with himself. Deep down, he knew how this debate would end. He could no more stay off the network and away from his friends than he could stay cooped up in the tin can without poking his antenna off the ship.

So he did it. Sent emails, watched the network traffic, held his breath. So far, so good. Then: a rumble and a clatter and a pair of thunderous
clangs
from above. His heart thudded in his ears and more metallic sounds crashed through the confined space. What was it? He placed the noises, connected them to the pictures he'd seen earlier. The crew had the forklift and tractor out, and the crane swinging, and they were rearranging the containers for stability and trim. He yanked his antenna in and dove for the inner sanctum, dogging his hatch and throwing all loose objects into the lockers before flinging himself over the bed and grabbing hold of the post and clinging to it with fingers and toes as the container rocked and rolled for the second time in 24 hours.

#

"So where'd you end up?" Ping asked, passing Wei-Dong another parcel of longzai rice and chicken folded in a lotus leaf. Ping had wanted to go to the Pizza Hut, but Wei-Dong had looked so hurt and offended at the suggestion, and had been so insistent on eating something "real" that he'd taken the gweilo to a cafe in the Cantonese quarter, near the handshake buildings. Wei-Dong had loved it from the moment they'd sat down, and had ordered confidently, impressing both Ping and the waiter with his knowledge of South Chinese food.

Wei-Dong chewed, made a face. "On the bloody top of the stack, three high!" he said. "With more containers sandwiched in on every side of me, except the door side, thankfully! But I couldn't climb down the stack with these." He thumped the dirty, beat up cardboard boxes beside the table. "So I had to transfer the cards to my backpack and then climb up and down that stack, over and over again, until I had it all on the ground. Then I threw down the collapsed cardboard boxes, climbed to the bottom, and boxed everything up again."

Ping's jaw dropped. "You did all that in the
port
?" He thought of all the guards he'd seen, all the cameras.

Wei-Dong shook his head. "No," he said. "I couldn't take the chance. I did it at night, in relays, the night before we got in. And I covered it all in some plastic sheeting I had, which is a good thing because it rained yesterday. There was a lot of water on the deck and some of it leaked through the plastic, but the boxes seem OK. Let's hope the cards are still readable. I figure they must be -- they're in plastic-wrapped boxes inside."

"But what about the crew seeing you?"

Wei-Dong laughed. "Oh, I was shitting bricks the whole time over that, I promise! I was in full sight of the wheelhouse most of the time, though thankfully there wasn't any moon out. But yeah, that was pretty freaky."

Ping looked at the gweilo, his skinny arms, the fuzz of pubescent moustache, the shaggy hair, the bad smell. When the boy had finally emerged from the gate, confidently flashing some kind of badge at the guard, Ping had wanted to strangle him for being so late and for looking so
relaxed
about it. Now, though, he couldn't help but admire his old guildie. He said so.

Wei-Dong actually blushed, and his chest inflated, and he looked so proud that Ping had to say it again. "I'm in awe," he said. "What a story!"

"I just did what I had to do," Wei-Dong said with an unconvincing, nonchalant shrug. His Mandarin was better than Ping remembered it. Maybe it was just being face to face rather than over a fuzzy, unreliable net-link, the ability to see the whole body, the whole face.

All of Ping's earlier worry and irritation melted away. He was overcome by a wave of affection for this kid who had travelled thousands of kilometers to be part of the same big guild. "Don't take this the wrong way," he said, "but I have to tell you this. A few hours ago, I was very upset with you. I thought it was just ego or stupidity, your coming all this way with the boxes. I wanted to strangle you. I thought you were a stupid, spoiled --" He saw the look on Wei-Dong's face, pure heartbreak and stopped, held up his hands. "Wait! What I'm trying to say is, I thought all this, but then I met you and heard your story, and I realized that you want this just as much as I do, and have as much at stake now. That you're a real, a real
comrade
." The word was funny, an old communist word that had been leached of color and meaning by ten million hours of revolutionary song-singing in school. But it fit.

And it worked. Wei-Dong's chest swelled up even bigger, like a balloon about to sail away, and his cheeks glowed like red coals. He fumbled for words, but his Chinese seemed to have fled him, so Ping laughed and handed him another lotus leaf, this one filled with seafood.

"Eat!" he said. "Eat!" He checked the time on his phone, read the coded messages there from Big Sister Nor. "You've got 10 minutes to finish and then we have to get to the guild-house for the big call!"

#

You're in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little disoriented already, that's key. Maybe it's just a strange time to be out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or very late at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the suburbs, and no one else is around.

A stranger approaches you. He's well-dressed, smiling. His body-language says,
I am a friend, and I'm slightly out of place, too.
He's holding something. It's a pane of glass, large, fragile, the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He's struggling with it. It's heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he says, with a note of self-awareness at the absurdity of this all, "Can you please hold this for a second?" He sounds a little desperate too, like he's about to drop it.

You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.

And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly plunges his hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your keys, wallet and cash into his own pockets. He never breaks eye-contact in the ten or 15 seconds it takes him to accomplish the task, and then he turns on his heel and walks away (he doesn't run, that's important) very quickly, for a dozen steps, and
then
he breaks into a wind-sprint of a run, powering up like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.

You're still holding onto the pane of glass.

Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?

What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break on the strange pavement? Set it down carefully?

Tell you one thing you're not going to do. You're not going to run with it. Running with a ten kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in your hands is even dumber than taking hold of it in the first place.

#

"What's at work here?" Big Sister Nor was on the video-conference window, with The Mighty Krang and Justbob to either side of her, heads down on their screens, keeping the back-channel text-chat running while Big Sister Nor lectured. She was speaking Mandarin, then Hindi. The text-chat was alive in three alphabets and five languages, and machine-translations appeared beneath the words. English for Wei-Dong, Chinese for his guildies. There were a couple thousand people logged in direct, and tens of thousands due to check in later when they finished their shifts.

"Dingleberry in K-L says 'Disorientation,'" The Mighty Krang said, without looking up.

Big Sister Nor nodded. "And?"

"'Social Contract,'" said Justbob. "That's MrGreen in Singapore."

BSN showed her teeth in a hard grin. "Singapore, where they know all about the social contract! Yes, yes! That's just it. A person comes up to you and asks you for help, you help; it's in our instincts, it's in our upbringing. It's what keeps us all civilized."

And then she told them a story of a group of workers in Phenom Penh, gold farmers who worked for someone who was supposed to be very kindly and good to them, took them out for lunch once a week, brought in good dinners and movies to show when they worked late, but who always seemed to make small...
mistakes
... in their pay-packets. Not much, and he was always embarrassed when it happened and paid up, and he was even more embarrassed when he "forgot" that it was pay day and was a day, two days, three days late paying them. But he was their friend, their good friend, and they had an unwritten contract with him that said that they were all good friends and you don't call your good friend a thief.

And then he disappeared.

They came to work one day -- three days after pay-day, and they hadn't been paid yet, of course -- and the man who ran the Internet cafe had simply shrugged and said he had no idea where this boss had gone. A few of the workers had even worked through the day, and even the next, because their good friend must be about to show up someday soon! And then their accounts stopped working; all the accounts, all the characters they'd been levelling, the personal characters they used for the big rare-drop raids, everything.

Some of them went home, some of them found other jobs. And eventually, some of them ran into their old boss again. He was running a new gold farm, with new young men working for him. The boss was so apologetic, he even cried and begged their forgiveness; his creditors had called in their loans and he'd had to flee to escape them, but he wanted to make it up to the workers, his friends, whom he'd loved as sons. He'd put them to work as senior members of his new farm, at double their old wages, just give him another chance.

The first pay-day was late. One day. Two days. Three days. Then, the boss didn't come to work at all. Some of the younger, newer workers wanted to work some more, because, after all, the boss was their dear friend. And the old hands, the ones who'd just been taken for a second time, they finally admitted to their fellow workers what they'd known all along: the boss was a crook, and he'd just robbed them all.

"That's how it works. You violate the social contract, the other person doesn't know what to do about it. There's no script for it. There's a moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you can empty out his pockets."

There were more stories like this, and they made everyone laugh, sprinkles of "kekekekeke" in the chat, but when it was over, Wei-Dong felt his first tremor of doubt.

"What is it?" Jie asked him. She was very beautiful, and from what he could understand, she was a very famous radio person, some kind of local hero for the factory girls. It was clear that Lu was head-over-heels in love with her, and everyone else deferred to her as well. When she turned her attention on him, the whole room turned with her. The room -- a flat in a strange old part of town -- was crowded with people, hot and loud with the fans from the computers.

"It's just," he said, waved his hands. He was suddenly very tired. He hadn't had a nap or even a shower since sneaking out of the port, and meeting all these people, having the videoconference with Big Sister Nor, it was all so much. His Chinese fled him and he found himself fumbling for the words. He swallowed, thought it through. "Look," he said. "I want to help all the workers get a better deal, the Turks, the farmers, the factory girls." They all nodded cautiously. "But is that what we're doing here? Are we going to win any rights by, you know, by being crooks? By ripping people off?"