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

into the fight.
"We should pull the plug on this," said Fairfax, a designer who'd worked her way up to Command Central.
"Forget it," said Kaden. "Twenty thousand gold on the Webblies."
"Two-to-one?" said Palmer, the number two economist, who had earned his PhD but hadn't invented the Prikkel Equations.
"No bets," Connor said. "Just watch the play."
"You're such a combat freak," said Kaden. "You chose the wrong specialty. You should have been a military strategist."
"Bad pay, stupid clothes, and you have to work for the government," Connor snapped, noting the stiffened spines of Kaden and Bill, both recruited out of the Pentagon's anti-terror Delta Force command to help analyze the big guilds' command-structures and figure out how to get more money out of them.
"Look at 'em go!" Fairfax said. Connor had a lot of time for her, even though they often disagreed. She'd run big teams of level-designers, graphic artists, AI specialists, programmers, the whole thing, and she had a good top-down and bottom-up view of things.
"They're good," Connor said. He clicked a little and colored each of the avs with a national flag representing the country the IP address of the player was registered to. "And it's a goddamned United Nations of players, look at that. What language are they speaking?" He clicked some more and took over the room's speakers, cleverly recessed into walls and floors, now buried under mountains of pizza-cardboard. The room filled with a gabble of heavily accented English mixed with Mandarin. His ear picked out Indian accents, Chinese, something else -- Malay? Indonesian? There were players from the whole Malay Peninsula in that mob.
"And look at the Pinkertons," Fairfax said. She had a background in programming artificial intelligences, a trade that had changed an awful lot since the Mechanical Turks stepped in to backstop the AIs in game. But she had invented the idea of giving the game's soundtrack its own AI, capable of upping the drama-quotient in the music when momentous things were afoot, and that holistic view of gameplay had landed her a seat in Command Central. She was the one who ordered out for health food and giant salads instead of burgers by the sack and pints of icecream. "They're nearly in the same distribution as the Webblies! Look at this --" she zoomed in on a scrolling list of IP addresses, then pulled up another table, fiddled with their sort order. "Look! These Pinkertons are fighting from a netblock that's within 200 meters of these Webblies! They're neighbors! Oh, this is hella weird."
It was true. Connor banged out a quick script to find and pair any players who were physically proximate to one another and to try for maps where they were available. Mostly they weren't -- he'd tried tracking down these rats before, tried to see where they lived, but ended up with a dead end. They didn't live on roads -- they lived in illegal squats, shantytowns in the world's slumzones. The best he could do was month-old sat photos of these mazes, revealing mountains of smoldering garbage, toxic open sewers, livestock pens... Connor felt like he should visit one of these places, fly a team of rats out to Command Central in the company jet, stick them in a lab and study them and learn how to exterminate them.
Because there was one chart Connor didn't need to load, the chart showing overall stability of the game economy: his fingerspitzengefuhl was filling him in just fine. The game economy was hosed.
"OK people, there's plenty to do here. No one else respawns on that shard. Create a new instance for the Caverns so any real players who hit them don't have to wade through that mess. Get every one of those accounts and freeze their assets." Esteban, who headed up customer service, groaned.
"You know they're mostly hacked," he said. "There's hundreds of them! We're going to be untangling the assets for months."
Connor knew it. The legit players whose accounts had been stolen by the warring clans of third-world rip-off artists didn't deserve to have their assets frozen. What's more, there'd be plenty of them whose assets were part of a larger guild bank that might have the wealth of dozens or hundreds of players. Of course the Bad Guys knew this and depended on it, knew it would make the game-runners cautious and slow when it came time to shut down the accounts they were using to smuggle around their illicit wealth.
He made eye-contact with Bill, head of security. They'd been going back and forth over whether it would be worth sucking some of Connor's budget into the security department to develop some forensic software that would ferret out the transaction histories of stolen accounts and figure out what assets the original player legitimately owned and where the dirty money ended up after it left his account. Connor hated to part with budget, especially when it involved Bill, who was a pompous ass who liked to act like he was some kind of super-cybercop rather than a glorified systems administrator.
But sometimes you had to bite the bullet. "We'll handle it," he said. "Right, Bill?" The head of security nodded, and began to pound at his keyboard, no doubt hiring a bunch of his old hacker buddies to come on board for top dollar and write the code.
"Yeah," Bill added. "Don't worry about it, we've got it covered."
One by one, the combatants vanished as their accounts were shut down and frozen out. Some of the soldiers reappeared in the new instance -- a parallel universe containing an identical dungeon, but none of the same players -- using new avs, but they could tell who they were because they originated from the same IP addresses as the kicked accounts. "This is great," Connor said. "If they keep this up, we'll have all their accounts nuked by the end of the day."
But the Pinkertons and Webblies must have had the same thought, because the logins dropped off to near-zero, then zero. The screens shifted, the eating sounds began anew, and Connor went back to his economic charts. As he'd felt, the price of assets, currency and derivatives had gone bonkers. The market somehow knew when there was trouble in Gold Farmer Land, and began to see-saw with the expectation that the price of goods was about to change.
Connor's own holdings had dropped by 18 percent in 25 minutes, costing him a cool $321,498.18.
He popped open a chat to Bill.
> This stuff you're commissioning with my budget
> Yeah?
> I want to use it to run every gold farmer to ground and throw him out of the game
> What?
> It'll be there, in the transaction history. Some kind of fingerprint in play-style and spending that'll let us auto-detect farmers and toss them out. We're going to have a perfect, controlled, farmer-free economy. The first of its kind
> Connor every complex ecosystem has parasites.
> Not this one
> It won't work
> Wanna bet? Let's make it $10K. I'll give you 2-1
#
This scene is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.
The Tattered Cover 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070
Ashok wove his pretty bike through the narrow alleys of Dharavi, his headlamp slicing through the night. Yasmin's mother would be rigid with worry and anger, and would probably beat her, but it was OK. She and Ashok had sat in that studio shed for hours, talking it through, getting meat on the bones of her idea, and he had left long, detailed messages for Big Sister Nor before getting them back on his bike.
Yasmin tapped him on the shoulder at each junction, showing him which way to turn. Soon they were nearly at her family's house and shouted at him to stop, hollering through the helmet. He killed the engine and the headlight and her bum finally stopped vibrating, her legs complaining about the hours she'd spent gripping the bike with the insides of her thighs. She swung unsteadily off her bike and brought her hands up to her helmet.
Her hands were on her helmet when she heard the voices.
"Is that her?"
"I can't tell."
They were whispering loudly, and a trick of the grilles over the helmet's ear-coverings let her hear the sound as though it was originating from right beside her. She put a firm hand on Ashok's shoulder and squeezed.
"It's her." The voice was Mala's, hard.
Yasmin let go of Ashok's shoulder and brought her hand down to the cables tying the lathi to the bike, while her free hand moved to the helmet's visor, swinging it up. She'd repinned her hijab around her neck and now she was glad she had, as she had pretty good visibility. It had been a long time since she'd been in a physical fight, but she understood the principles of it well, knew her tactics.
The lathi was really well anchored -- Ashok hadn't wanted it to go flying off while they were running down the motorway -- and now she brought her other hand down to work at it blind, keeping her eyes on the shadows around her, listening for the footsteps.
"What about the man?"
"Him too," Mala said.
And then they charged, an army of them, coming from the shadows all around them. "GO!" she said to Ashok, trying to keep him from dismounting the bike, but he got to his feet, squared his shoulders, and faced away from her, to the soldiers who were charging him. A rock or lump of cement clanged off her helmet, making a sound like a cooking pot falling to the floor, and now she tugged as hard as she could at the lathi and at last it sprang free, the steel hooks on the tips of the bunjee cables whipping around and smacking painfully into her hands. She barely noticed, whirling with the two-meter stick held overhead like a cricket-bat.
And pulled up short.
The boy closest to her was Sushant. Sushant, who, that afternoon, had spoken of how he'd longed to join her cause. His face was a mask of terror in the weak light leaking out of the homes around them. The steel tip trembled over her shoulder as her wrists twitched. All she would need to do is unwind the swing, let the long pole and its steel end whistle through the air with all the whip-crack force penned up at the lathi's end and she would bash poor Sushant's head in.
And why not? After all, that's what Mala's army was here for.
All this thought in the blink of an eye, so fast she didn't even register that she'd thought it, but she did not swing the lathi through the air at Sushant's head. Instead, she swept it at his feet, pulling the swing so that it just knocked him backwards, flying into two more soldiers behind him, boys who had once taken orders from her.
"Stand down!" she barked, in the voice of command,