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

Now? But I thought this was confidential --"
"You don't have to. But do you want another girl to go through what you just went through? What do you think would have happened if you had heard another girl speak his name on this show, last month, before you went out with him. What will you do? Will you save your sisters from the pain you're in? Or will you protect your bruised ego and let the next girl suffer, and the next?" She waited a moment. The girl on the phone said nothing, though the sounds of people moving around the dorm could still be faintly heard. Lu imagined her under her blanket on her bunk, hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, whispering her secrets to millions of girls. What a strange world. "Well?"
"I'll do it," the girl said.
"What's that? Say it loud!"
"I'll do it!" the girl said, and let out a little laugh, and the laugh was echoed by the girlish voices near her, as the girls in her dorm realized that the confession they'd been listening into on their computers and phones and radios had been emanating from a bunk in their midst. There was a squeal of feedback as one of the radios got too close to the phone, and Jie's fingers clicked at the keyboard, squelching the feedback but somehow leaving the other squeals, the girlish squeals. They were cheering her, the girls in the dorm, cheering her and chanting her name, her real name, now on the radio, but it didn't matter, because the girl was laughing harder than ever.
"It's Bau Peixiong," she said, laughing. "Bau Peixiong at the HuaXia sports factory." She laughed, a liberated sound.
"OK, OK, girls," Jie said into her mic, in a commanding tone. The voices quieted. "Now, your sister has just made a sacrifice for all of you, so you need to help her. She needs money -- your pig of a boss won't give her the eight weeks' pay he's holding onto, especially not after she calls his wife. She needs help packing, help finding a job. Someone there is thinking of changing jobs, someone there knows where there's a job for this girl. Tell her. Help her move out. Help her find the new job. This is your duty to your sister. Promise me!"
From the phone, a babble of girls saying, "I promise! I promise!"
"Very good," Jie said. "Now, stay tuned friends, for soon I will be unveiling a wonderful surprise!" A mouseclick and then there was another ad, this time for a company that provided fake credentials for people looking for work, guaranteed to pass database lookups. Both of them slipped their headphones off and Jie drained her water-glass, a little trickle sliding down her chin and throat. Lu suppressed a groan. She was so beautiful, and all that power and confidence --
"That was a pretty good opener, wasn't it?" she said, raising her eyebrows at him.
"Is it like this all the time?"
"Oh, that was a particularly good one. But yes, most nights it goes like that. Six or seven hours' worth of it. You still think it'd get repetitious?"
"I can see how that would stay interesting."
"After all, you kill the same monsters over and over again all night long, don't you? That must be pretty dull."
He considered this. "Not really," he said. "It's the teamwork, I guess. All of us working together, and it's not really the same every time -- the games vary the monster-spawning a lot. Sometimes you get really good drops, too -- that can be very exciting! You're going down a corridor you've cleared a dozen times, and you discover that this time it's filled with 200 vampires and then one of them drops an epic sword, and it's not boring at all anymore." He shrugged. "My guildie Matthew says it's intermittent reinforcement."
She held up a finger and said, "Hold on to that," and clicked and started talking into her mic again, taking a call from another factory girl, this one more angry than sad. "I had a friend who was selling franchises for a line of herbal remedies," she said, and Jie rolled her eyes.
"Go on," she said. "Sounds like a great opportunity." The sarcasm in her voice was unmistakable.
"That's what I thought," the girl said. She sounded like she wanted to punch something. "At first I thought it was about selling the herbal remedies, and I liked that, because my mother always gave me herbs when I was sick as a girl, and I thought that a lot of the girls here would want to buy the remedies too because they missed home."
"Yes," Jie said. "Who wouldn't want to remember her mommy?"
"Exactly! Just what I thought. And my friend told me about how much money I could make, but not from selling the herbs! She said that selling the herbs would be my 'downliners' job, and that I would manage them. I would be a boss!"
"Who wouldn't want to be a boss?"
"Right! She said that she was recruiting me to be in the top layer of the organization, and that I would then go and recruit two of my friends to be my salespeople. They'd each pay me for the right to sign up more downliners, and that all the downliners would buy herbs from me and then I would get a share of all their profits. She showed me how if my two downliners signed up two more, and each of them signed up two more, and so on, that I would have hundreds of downliners working for me in just a few days! And if I only got a few RMB from each one, I'd be making thousands every month, just for signing up two people."
"A very generous friend," Jie said, and though she sounded like she was joking, she wasn't smiling.
"Yes, yes! That's what I thought. And all I needed to do was pay her one small fee for the right to sell downline, and she would supply me with herbs and sales kits and everything else I needed. She said that she was signing me up because I was Fujianese, like her, and she wanted to take care of me. She said I should find girls who were still back in the village, girls I'd gone to school with, and call them and sign them up, because they needed to make money."
"Why would girls in the village need herbal remedies? Wouldn't they have their mothers?"
That stopped the angry, fast-talking girl. "I didn't think of that," she said, at last. "It seemed like I was going to be a hero for everyone, and like I would escape from the factory and get rich. My friend said she was going to quit in a few weeks and get her own apartment. I thought about moving out of the dorm, having money to send home --"
"You dreamed about money and all that it could buy you, but you didn't devote the same attention to figuring out whether this thing could possibly work, right?"
Another silence. "Yes," she said. "I have to say that this is true."
"And then?"
"It started OK. I sold a few downlines, but they were having trouble making their downline commitments. And then my friend, she started to ask me for her percentage of my income. When I told her I wasn't receiving the income my downliners owed me, she changed."
"Go on." Jie's eyes were fixed on the wall behind Lu's head. She was in another world, it seemed, picturing the girl and her problem.
"She got angry. She said that I had made a commitment to her, and that she had made commitments to her uplines based on this, and that I would have to pay her so that she could pay the people she owed. She made me feel like I'd betrayed her, betrayed the incredible opportunity. She said I was just a simple girl from a village, not fit to be a business-woman. She called me all day, over and over, screaming, 'Where's my money?'"
"So what did you do?"
"I finally went to her. I cried. I told her I didn't know what to do. And she told me that I knew, but that I didn't have the courage to do it. She told me I had to go to my downliners, get tough on them, get the money out of them. And if they wouldn't pay, I'd have to get the money some other way: from my parents, my friends, my savings. I could get new downliners next month."
"And so you called up your downliners?"
"I did." She drew in a heaving breath. "At first, I was gentle and kind to them, but my friend called me over and over again, and I got angry. Angry at them, not at her. It was their fault that I was having to spend all this time and energy, that I couldn't sleep or eat. And so I got meaner. I threatened them, begged them, shouted at them. These two girls, they were my old friends. I'd known them since we were little babies. I knew their secrets. I threatened to call my friend's father and tell him that she had let a boy take naked pictures of her when she was 15. I threatened to tell my other friend's sister that she had kissed her boyfriend."
"Did they pay what they owed you?"
"At first. The first month, they paid. The next month, though, I had to call them and shout at them some more. It was like I was sitting above myself, watching a crazy stranger say these terrible things to my old, old friends. But they paid again. And then, in the third month --" She stopped abruptly. The silence swelled. Lu felt it getting thicker, staticky.
"What happened?"
"Then one friend ate rat poison." Her voice was a tiny, far-away whisper. More silence. "I had told her that I would go to her father and -- and --" Silence. "It was how her mother had committed suicide when we were both small. The same kind of poison. Her father was a hard man, an Old One Hundred Names who had lived through the Cultural Revolution. He has no mercy on him. When she couldn't get the money, she stole it. Got caught. He was going to find out. And if he didn't, I would tell him about the photos she'd taken. And she couldn't face that. I drove her to kill herself. It was me. I killed her."
"She killed herself," Jie said, her voice full of compassion. "It's the women's disease in China. We're the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men. You can't take the blame for this." She paused. "Not all of it."
"That's not all," the girl said, all the anger gone out of her voice now, nothing left behind but distilled despair.
"Of course not," Jie said. "You still owe for this month. And next month, and the month after."
"My friend, the one who brought me into this, she knows... things... about me. The kind of things I knew about my friends. Things that could cost me my job, my home, my boyfriend..."
"Of course. That's how cuanxiao works." Lu had heard the term before. "Network sales," is what it meant. There was always someone trying to sell you something as part of a cuanxiao scheme. He used to laugh at it. Now it seemed a lot more serious. "And somewhere, upline from here, there's