For the Win, Cory Doctorow [free reads .TXT] 📗

the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with a delicate little sniffle. "Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo. Very good. Very good for ladies' reproductive issues." She patted his stomach. "You'll have a little baby there in no time!"
He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally, the room spinning around him.
She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and gave his hand a squeeze. "Don't worry," she said. "It's only teasing. Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have given it to you." And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew that smell from -- he remembered wishing that his mother was there to give him some herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand among the many bottles in her shower.
"Do you live here?" he said.
"In this pit?" She made a face. "No, no! This is just one of my studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes life harder for the zengfu."
"But the clothes, the bed?"
"Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My show can go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I have." She smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn't ever noticed a girl's dimples before. The head injury was making him feel woozy. Or maybe it was love.
"And now?"
"And now we talk to you about what you've seen," she said. "My show starts in --" she looked at the face of her phone -- "12 minutes. Just enough time for you to have a drink and get comfortable." She fished in her fridge and brought out a water filter jug and filled a glass from a small rack next to the tiny sink. He took it and drank it greedily and she fetched him the filter, setting it down on one side of the desk before settling into the chair on the other side.
She began to click and type and furrow her brow in an adorable way, slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She waved to him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his glass.
"What kind of show is this again?"
"You are such a boy!" she said, looking up from her screen, fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks from her manicured fingernails.
He looked down at himself. "I suppose I am," he said.
"What I mean is, if you were a girl, you'd know all about this. Every factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting after dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone and tell me all their troubles and I tell them what they need to hear. Mostly, it comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw you, find another job, or be prepared to be screwed in more ways than one. If your boyfriend is a deadbeat who won't work and borrows money from you, get a new boyfriend, even if he is the 'love of your life.' If your girlfriends are talking trash about you, confront them, have a good cry, and start over. If your girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of them. If you are screwing your girlfriend's boyfriend, stop -- dump him, confess to her, and don't do it again." She was ticking these off on her fingers like a shopping list.
"It sounds a little repetitive," he said. He wondered if she was making it up, or possibly delusional. Could there really be a show that every factory girl listened to that he'd never heard of? He thought of how little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had talked to him when he worked as a security guard and decided that yes, it was totally possible.
"It's very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and me. Some problems are universal. Some things you just can't say too often. Anyway, that's not all there is to it. We have variety! We have you!"
"Me," he said. "You're going to put me on a show with all these girls on it? Why? Won't that make the police want to get me even more?"
"Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your face is everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be for them to arrest you. Trust me."
"How can you be sure? Have you ever done this before?"
"Every day," she said, eyes wide. "I'm my own case study. The police have been after me for two years now, and I've stayed out of their clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!"
"I don't think I understand how that works," he said.
She looked at the face of her phone. "We've only got a minute. Here, quickly, I'll explain: if you're a fugitive, being poor is hard. Even harder than for non-fugitives. It's expensive being on the run. You need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones that you can abandon. You need to be able to pay li --" bribes -- "and you need to be able to move fast. Being famous means that you have access to money and favors from a lot of different people. My listeners keep me going, either through direct donations or through my advertisers."
"You have ads? Who would buy an ad on a fugitive's radio show?"
She shrugged. "The Taiwanese," she said. The island of Taiwan had considered itself separate from China since 1949 but China had never stopped laying claim to it -- without much success. "Falun Gong, sometimes." She saw the look of shock on his face. "Don't worry, I'm not religious. But I'll take their money. They don't care if I make fun of them on the show, so long as I run their ads, too."
He shook his head. "It's all too strange," he said.
She held up her hand for silence and swung down a little mic from one of the headphones' earpieces. "Hello, girls!" she called into the mic, clicking her mouse. "It's your best friend here, Sister Jiandi, the friend you can always rely on, the friend who will never let you down, the friend you can confide all your secrets in -- provided you don't mind eight million factory girls finding out about it!" She giggled at her own joke. "Oh, sisters, it's going to be a good night, I can tell! I have a special surprise for you a little later, but first, let's talk! Tonight I'm using Amazon France chat, chat.amazon.fr, so go and sign up now. You'll get me at jiandi88888. Remember to use a couple of the latest FLG proxies before you make the call -- and it looks like the translation services at Yahoo.ru and 123india.in are both unblocked at the moment, which should make it easier to sign up. Well, what are you waiting for? Get signed up!"
She clicked something and he heard a blaring ad for Falun Gong start in his headphone and he slipped one off the side of his head. Jie swung her mic away and pointed a finger at him. "Feeling the magic yet?"
"This is it? This is your big show?"
"Oh yes," she said. "We'll probably have to switch chats three or four times tonight, as they update the firewall. It's fun! Wait, you'll see." In his ear, the ad was wrapping up and he slipped the other headphone back into place.
"Talk to me," Jie said, her voice full of warmth. It took him a moment to realize she was talking into her mic, to her audience, not to him. Her fingers were working the keyboard and mouse.
"Hello?"
"Yes, darling, hello. You're live. Talk, talk! We've only got all night!"
"Oh, um --" The voice was female, with a strong Henan accent, and it was scared.
"It's OK, sweetie, my heart, it's OK. Tell me." Jie's voice was a coo, a purr, a seduction. Her eyes were moist, her lips pursed in a gesture of pure caring. Lu wanted to tell her his secrets.
"It's just that --" The voice stopped. Crying noises. In the background, the sounds of a busy factory dorm, girlish calls and laughter and conversation. Jie made soothing shhh shhh sounds. "It's my boss," the girl said. "He was so nice to me at first. He said he was taking an interest in me because we are both from Henan. He said that he would protect me. Show me around the city. We went to nice places. A restaurant in the stock exchange. He took me to the Windows on the World park and we dressed up like ancient warriors."
"And he wanted something in return, didn't he?"
"I knew he would. I listen to your show. But I thought it would be different for me. I thought he was different. But he --" She broke off. "After he kissed me, he told me he wanted to do more. Everything. He told me I owed it to him. That I'd understood that when I accepted his invitation, and that I would be cheating him if I didn't --" She began to cry.
Jie made a face, twirled her finger in an impatient gesture. Lu was horrified by her callousness. But when the crying stopped, her voice was again full of compassion and understanding.
"Oh, sweet child, you've been done badly, haven't you? Well, of course you knew it would happen, but the heart and the head don't always agree with each other, do they? The question isn't whether you acted like a fool -- because you did, you acted like a perfect fool -- the question is what you can do about it now. Am I right?"
"Yes." The voice was so tiny and soft he could barely hear it. He pictured a girl shrunk to the size of a mouse, trembling in fear.
"Well, that's simple. Not easy, but simple. Forfeit your last eight weeks' wages and walk out of the factory first thing tomorrow morning. Go down to a job-broker on Xi Li street and find something -- anything -- that can get you started again. Then you call your boss's wife -- is he married?"
"Yes." The voice was a little bigger now.
"Call his wife and tell her everything. Tell her what he did, what he said, what you said back. Tell her you're sorry, and tell her you're sorry her husband is such a sack of rotten, stinking garbage. Tell her you walked away on the pay he was holding back, and that you've left your job. And then you start to work again. And no matter what your new boss says or does, don't go out with him. Do you understand?"
"Call his wife --"
"Call his wife, walk away from your pay, and start over. There's nothing else that will work. You can't talk to this man. He has raped you -- that's what it is, you know, when someone in power coerces you into sex, it's rape, just rape -- and he'll do it again and again and again. He'll do it to the other girls in the factory. You tell as many as you can why you're leaving. In fact, you tell me what factory you work in and the name of your boss, right now, and then millions and millions of girls will know about it, too. They'll steer clear of this dog, and maybe you'll save a few souls with your bravery. What do you say?"
"You want me to name my boss?