The Starry Rift Part 14

"Lucy, don't," Anda said. She interposed her avatar between Lucy's and Raymond. "Don't do it. He deserves to have a say."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Anda, what is wrong with you? Did you come here to play the game, or to screw around with this pervert dork?"

> what do you want from me raymond?

> Don't kill them-let them have their wages. Go play somewhere else.

> They're leeches Lucy typed, > they're wrecking the game economy and they're providing a gold-for-cash supply that lets rich a.s.sholes buy their way in. They don't care about the game and neither do you > If they don't play the game, they don't eat. They care about the game as much as you do. You're being paid cash to kill them, yes? So you need to play for your money too. I think that makes you and them a little the same.

> go screw yourself Raymond's character was so far away now that his texting came out in tiny type, almost too small to read. Lucy drew her bow again and nocked an arrow.

"Lucy, don't!" Anda cried. Her hands moved of their own volition and her character followed, clobbering Lucy barehanded so that her avatar reeled and dropped its bow.

"You b.i.t.c.h!" Lucy said. She drew her sword.

"I'm sorry, Lucy," Anda said, stepping back out of range. "But I don't want you to hurt him. I want to hear him out."

Lucy's avatar came on fast, and there was a click as the voicelink dropped. Anda typed one-handed while she drew her own sword.

> dont lucy come on talk2me Lucy slashed at her twice and she needed both hands to defend herself. Anda blew out through her nose and counterattacked, fingers pounding the keyboard. Lucy had more experience points than she did, but she was a better player, and she knew it. She hacked away at Lucy, driving her back and back, back down the road they'd marched together.

Abruptly, Lucy broke and ran, and Anda thought she was going away and decided to let her go, no harm no foul, but then she saw that Lucy wasn't running away, she was running toward the BFGs, armed and primed.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," she breathed, as a BFG swung around to point at her. Her fingers flew. She cast the fireball at Lucy in the same instant that she cast her s.h.i.+eld spell. Lucy loosed the bolt at her a moment before the fireball engulfed her, cooking her down to ash, and the bolt collided with the s.h.i.+eld and drove Anda high into the air, and the s.h.i.+eld spell wore off before she hit ground, scattering her inventory.

"Lucy?"

There was no reply.

> I'm very sorry you and your friend quarreled.

She felt numb and unreal. There were rules for Fahrenheits, lots of rules, and the penalties for breaking them varied, but the penalty for attacking a fellow Fahrenheit was-she couldn't think the word, she closed her eyes, but there it was in big glowing letters: EXPULSION.

But Lucy had started it, right? It wasn't her fault. But who would believe her?

She opened her eyes. Her vision swam through incipient tears. Her heart was thudding in her ears.

> The enemy isn't your fellow player. It's not the players guarding the fabrica, it's not the girls working there. The people who are working to destroy the game are the people who pay you and the people who pay the girls in the fabrica, who are the same people. You're being paid by rival factory owners, you know that? THEY are the ones who care nothing for the game. My girls care about the game. You care about the game. Your common enemy is the people who want to destroy the game and who destroy the lives of these girls.

"Anda, dear, there's a phone call for you."

Her eyes stung. She'd been lying in her darkened bedroom for hours now, snuffling and trying not to cry, trying not to look at the empty desk where her PC used to live.

Her da's voice was soft and caring, but after the silence of her room, it sounded like a rusting hinge.

"Anda?"

She opened her eyes. He was holding a cordless phone, silhouetted against the open doorway.

"Who is it?"

"Someone from your game, I think," he said. He handed her the phone.

"Hullo?"

"Hullo, chicken." It had been a year since she'd heard that voice, but she recognized it instantly.

"Liza?"

"Yes."

Anda's skin seemed to shrink over her bones. This was it: expelled. Her heart felt like it was beating once per second; time slowed to a crawl.

"Hullo, Liza."

"Can you tell me what happened today?"

She did, stumbling over the details, backtracking and stuttering. She couldn't remember, exactly-did Lucy move on Raymond and Anda asked her to stop and then Lucy attacked her? Had Anda attacked Lucy first? It was all a jumble. She should have saved a screenmovie and taken it with her, but she couldn't have taken anything with her, she'd run out- "I see. Well, it sounds like you've gotten yourself into quite a pile of poo, haven't you, my girl?"

"I guess so," Anda said. Then, because she knew that she was as good as expelled, she said, "I don't think it's right to kill them, those girls. All right?"

"Ah," Liza said. "Well, funny you should mention that. I happen to agree. Those girls need our help more than any of the girls anywhere else in the game. The Fahrenheits' strength is that we are cooperative-it's another way that we're better than the boys. We care. I'm proud that you took a stand when you did-glad I found out about this business."

"You're not going to expel me?"

"No, chicken, I'm not going to expel you. I think you did the right thing-"

That meant that Lucy would be expelled. Fahrenheit had killed Fahrenheit-something had to be done. The rules had to be enforced. Anda swallowed hard.

"If you expel Lucy, I'll quit," she said, quickly, before she lost her nerve.

Liza laughed. "Oh, chicken, you're a brave thing, aren't you? No one's being expelled, fear not. But I want to talk to this Raymond of yours."

Anda came home from remedial hockey sweaty and exhausted, but not as exhausted as the last time, nor the time before that. She could run the whole length of the pitch twice now without collapsing- when she'd started out, she could barely make it halfway without having to stop and hold her side, kneading her loathsome podge to make it stop aching. Now there was noticeably less podge, and she found that with the ability to run the pitch came the freedom to actually pay attention to the game, to aim her shots, to build up a degree of accuracy that was nearly as satisfying as being really good in-game.

Her dad knocked at the door of her bedroom after she'd showered and changed. "How's my girl?"

"Revising," she said, and hefted her math book at him.

"Did you have a fun afternoon on the pitch?"

"You mean 'did my head get trod on?'"

"Did it?"

"Yes," she said. "But I did more treading than getting trodden on." The other girls were really fat, and they didn't have a lot of team skills. Anda had been to war: she knew how to depend on someone and how to be depended upon.

"That's my girl." He pretended to inspect the paint-work around the light switch. "Been on the scales this week?"

She had, of course: the school nutritionist saw to that, a morning humiliation undertaken in full sight of all the other fatties.

"Yes, Dad."

"And . . . ?"

"I've lost a stone," she said. A little more than a stone, actually. She had been able to fit into last year's jeans the other day.

She hadn't been to the sweets shop in a month. When she thought about sweets, it made her think of the little girls in the sweatshop. Sweatshop, sweetshop. The sweets shop man sold his wares close to the school because little girls who didn't know better would be tempted by them. No one forced them, but they were kids, and grown-ups were supposed to look out for kids.

Her da beamed at her. "I've lost three pounds myself," he said, holding his tum. "I've been trying to follow your diet, you know."

"I know, Da," she said. It embarra.s.sed her to discuss it with him.

The kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grown-ups too. It was why their situation was so impossible: the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them were exploiting them.

"Well, I just wanted to say that I'm proud of you. We both are, your mum and me. And I wanted to let you know that I'll be moving your PC back into your room tomorrow. You've earned it."

Anda blushed pink. She hadn't really expected this. Her fingers twitched over a phantom game controller.

"Oh, Da," she said. He held up his hand.

"It's all right, girl. We're just proud of you."

She didn't touch the PC the first day, or the second. The kids in the game-she didn't know what to do about them. On the third day, after hockey, she showered and changed and sat down and slipped the headset on.

"h.e.l.lo, Anda."

"Hi, Sarge."

Lucy had known the minute she entered the game, which meant that she was still on Lucy's buddy list. Well, that was a hopeful sign.

"You don't have to call me that. We're the same rank now, after all."

Anda pulled down a menu and confirmed it: she'd been promoted to sergeant during her absence. She smiled.

"Gosh," she said.

"Yes, well, you earned it," Lucy said. "I've been talking to Raymond a lot about the working conditions in the factory, and, well-" She broke off. "I'm sorry, Anda."

"Me too, Lucy."

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," she said.

They went adventuring, running some of the game's standard missions together. It was fun, but after the kind of campaigning they'd done before, it was also kind of pale and flat.

"It's horrible, I know," Anda said. "But I miss it."

"Oh, thank G.o.d," Lucy said. "I thought I was the only one. It was fun, wasn't it? Big fights, big stakes."

"Well, poo," Anda said. "I don't wanna be bored for the rest of my life. What're we gonna do?"

"I was hoping you knew."

She thought about it. The part she'd loved had been going up against grown-ups who were not playing the game, but gaming it, breaking it for money. They'd been worthy adversaries, and there was no guilt in beating them, either.

"We'll ask Raymond how we can help," she said.

"I want them to walk out-to go on strike," he said. "It's the only way to get results: band together and withdraw your labor." Raymond's voice had a thick Mexican accent that took some getting used to, but his English was very good-better, in fact, than Lucy's.

"Walk out in-game?" Lucy said.

"No," Raymond said. "That wouldn't be very effective. I want them to walk out in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. I'll call the press in; we'll make a big deal out of it. We can win-I know we can."

"So what's the problem?" Anda said.

"The same problem as always. Getting them organized. I thought that the game would make it easier: we've been trying to get these girls organized for years: in the sewing shops, and the toy factories, but they lock the doors and keep us out and the girls go home and their parents won't let us talk to them. But in the game, I thought I'd be able to reach them. . . ."

"But the bosses keep you away?"

"I keep getting killed. I've been practicing my swordfighting, but it's so hard. . . ."

"This will be fun," Anda said. "Let's go."

"Where?" Lucy said.

"To an in-game factory. We're your new bodyguards." The bosses hired some pretty mean mercs, Anda knew. She'd been one. They'd be fun to wipe out.

Raymond's character spun around on the screen, then planted a kiss on Anda's cheek. Anda made her character give him a playful shove that sent him sprawling.

"Hey, Lucy, go get us a couple BFGs, okay?"

CORY DOCTOROW, self-described "renaissance geek," is probably best known for his Web site boingboing.net and for his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Raised by Trotskyist schoolteachers in the wilds of Canada, Doctorow began selling fiction when he was seventeen, and published a small handful of stories through the early and mid-1990s. His best-known story, "c.r.a.phound," appeared in 1998, and he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published to good reviews in early 2003 and was followed by collections A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked, and novels Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Doctorow is currently working on three novels: usr/bin/G.o.d, Themepunks, and Little Brother. He is also the coauthor of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science Fiction with Karl Schroeder.

"Anda's Game" is the first in a series of stories that play off the t.i.tles of famous SF short stories. Doctorow began this series after Ray Bradbury voiced his disapproval of filmmaker Michael Moore appropriating the t.i.tle of Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. The ongoing series includes Hugo Award nominee "I, Robot" and "I, Rowboat," both of which play off the name and concepts in Isaac Asimov's famous short story, "I, Robot."

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

"Anda's Game" is meant to tackle some of the themes in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a wildly popular novel that talks a lot about how gaming can numb kids to violence so that they end up committing unspeakable acts of violence. I wanted to talk a little about how games can arouse compa.s.sion, community, and fellow-feeling: I was practically raised online and made some of my most important friends.h.i.+ps that way. I think that networked communications can be magnificent for bringing people together.

Another important theme in this story is obesity. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2015, 1.5 billion people will be obese, many of them in the developing world. There are a lot of reasons for this, but laziness and lack of virtue aren't among them. Obesity is an epidemic and needs to be studied like one, with an eye to the social/medical causes of its spread. In particular, I believe that industrial food products like high-fructose corn syrup and palm oil are basically toxic waste that unscrupulous food manufacturers add to their products, guaranteeing that their customers will become unhealthily fat.

SUNDIVER DAY.