Future Games: Anthology Part 26

"Nah." Arendsen shrugged. "No problem."

A camera flashed, and they both looked up. Someone had snapped a picture of the two of them together.

" 'Spose that'll be on eBay tomorrow, too," Arendsen said.

"Do you think so?"

Arendsen grinned. "Oh, yeah. First time we faced each other."

Grace made herself smile. "Probably the last, Ricky."

Arendsen shook her head. "Nah. You'll be back, Gracie." She raised an impressive forefinger. "And I'm gonna get you on the splitter next time."

Grace's heart lifted. She said, laughing, "We'll just see about that."

Ricky Arendsen clapped her on the shoulder and then turned and left, stopping once or twice to sign autographs. Grace went in for her shower, nodding to the security guys beside the door. Arendsen was right. She'd be back. She'd gotten her hits, made a good throw. If this team wouldn't have her, she'd get her agent to put her someplace else. She'd face Arendsen again, one way or another.

But she was going to watch out for that splitter.

As Cory Doctorow wrote in an introduction to this story, "The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day . . . 'Anda's Game' is a sterling example of this approach. I ripped a story from the headlines-reports on blogs about . . . 'gold farmers' in Latin America who were being paid a pittance [to] undertake boring, repet.i.tive wealth-creating tasks in a game, with the product of their labor sold to rich northern gamers who wanted to level-up without all the hard work." Unfortunately, exploitation and oppression, just like compet.i.tion, seems to be an eternal characteristic of humanity. (And, yes, the t.i.tle is an intentional reference to "Ender's Game" found elsewhere in this anthology.)

Anda's Game.

Cory Doctorow.

Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she'd played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she'd ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy's idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armor. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was twelve, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible t.i.ts and sensible armor and a b.l.o.o.d.y great sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting and ma.s.saging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE kit was at the bottom of her school-bag and her face was that stupid red color that she hated and now it was stinking maths which was hardly better than PE but at least she didn't have to sweat.

But instead of maths, all the girls were called to a.s.sembly, and Liza the Organiza stood on the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks the princ.i.p.al and Mrs Danzig, the useless counsellor.

"Hullo chickens," Liza said. She had an Australian accent. "Well, aren't you lot just precious and bright and expectant with your pink upturned faces like a load of flowers staring up at the sky?

"Warms me f.e.c.king heart it does."

That made Anda laugh, and she wasn't the only one. Miss Cruickshanks and Mrs. Danzig didn't look amused, but they tried to hide it.

"I am Liza the Organiza, and I kick a.r.s.e. Seriously." She tapped a key on her laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a game-not the one that Anda played, but something s.p.a.ce-themed, a s.p.a.ce-station with a rockets.h.i.+p in the background. "This is my avatar." Sensible b.o.o.bs, sensible armor, and a sword the size of the world. "In-game, they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the s.p.a.celanes, El Presidente of the Clan Fahrenheit." The Fahrenheits had chapters in every game. They were amazing and deadly and cool, and to her knowledge, Anda had never met one in the flesh. They had their own island in her game. Crikey.

On screen, The Lizanator was fighting an army of wookie-men, sword in one hand, laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning, strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.

"The whole Clan Fahrenheit. I won that t.i.tle through popular election, but they voted me in cos of my prowess in combat. I'm a world-champion in six different games, from first-person shooters to strategy games. I've commanded armies and I've sent armies to their resp.a.w.n gates by the thousands. Thousands, chickens: my battle record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I have taken home cash prizes from compet.i.tions totaling more than 400,000 pounds. I game for four to six hours nearly every day, and the rest of the time, I do what I like.

"One of the things I like to do is come to girls' schools like yours and let you in on a secret: girls kick a.r.s.e. We're faster, smarter, and better than boys. We play harder. We spend too much time thinking that we're freaks for gaming and when we do game, we never play as girls because we catch so much s.h.i.+te for it. Time to turn that around. I am the best gamer in the world and I'm a girl. I started playing at ten, and there were no women in games-you couldn't even buy a game in any of the shops I went to. It's different now, but it's still not perfect. We're going to change that, chickens, you lot and me.

"How many of you game?"

Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.

"And how many of you play girls?"

All the hands went down.

"See, that's a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Games.p.a.ce smells like a boy's armpit. It's time we girled it up a little. So here's my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given probationary members.h.i.+ps in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure up, in six months, you'll be full-fledged members."

In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders. She dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees with giant, goth boots with steel toes that looked like something you'd see in an in-game shop, though Anda was pretty sure they'd come from a real-world goth shop in Camden Town.

She stomped her boots, one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the stage. "Who's in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?"

Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it that she didn't notice that she was the only one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.

"That's all right, love," Liza called, "I like enthusiasm. Don't let those staring faces rattle yer: they're just flowers turning to look at the sky. Pink scrubbed s.h.i.+ning expectant faces. They're looking at you because you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came-and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick a.r.s.e. Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit."

She began to clap, and the other girls clapped too, and even though Anda's face was the color of a lollipop-lady's sign, she felt like she might burst with pride and good feeling and she smiled until her face hurt.

> Anda her sergeant said to her, > how would you like to make some money?

> Money, Sarge?

Ever since she'd risen to platoon leader, she'd been getting more missions, but they paid gold-money wasn't really something you talked about in-game.

The Sarge-sensible b.o.o.bs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz-moved her avatar impatiently.

> Something wrong with my typing, Anda?

> No, Sarge she typed.

> You mean gold?

> If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go voice?

Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting-room watching something loud on telly. She turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her headset. They said it could noise-cancel a Blackhawk helicopter-it had better be able to overcome the little inductive speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to voice.

"Hey, Lucy," she said.

"Call me Sarge!" Lucy's accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived somewhere in the middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda's best friend in-game but she was so hardcore it was boring sometimes.

"Hi, Sarge," she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She'd never smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was harder to remember to keep to the game norms.

"I have a mission that pays real cash. Whichever paypal you're using, they'll deposit money into it. Looks fun, too."

"That's a bit weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?" There were a lot of Clan rules about what kind of mission you could accept and they were always changing. There were kerb-crawlers in games.p.a.ce and the way that the Clan leaders.h.i.+p kept all the mummies and daddies from going ape-poo about it was by enforcing a long, boring code of conduct that was meant to ensure that none of the Fahrenheit girlies ended up being virtual prozzies for hairy old men in raincoats on the other side of the world.

"What?" Anda loved how Lucy quacked What? It sounded especially American. She had to force herself from parroting it back. "No, geez. All the executives in the Clan pay the rent doing missions for money. Some of them are even rich from it, I hear! You can make a lot of money gaming, you know."

"Is it really true?" She'd heard about this but she'd a.s.sumed it was just stories, like the kids who gamed so much that they couldn't tell reality from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much that they stopped eating and got all anorexic. She wouldn't mind getting a little anorexic, to be honest. b.l.o.o.d.y podge.

"Yup! And this is our chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you in?"

"It's not-you know, pervy, is it?"

"Gag me. No. Jeez, Anda! Are you nuts? No-they want us to go kill some guys."

"Oh, we're good at that!"

The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the largest continent on the gameworld, which was called Dandelionwine. The travel was tedious, and twice they were ambushed on the trail, something that had hardly happened to Anda since she joined the Fahrenheits: attacking a Fahrenheit was bad for your health, because even if you won the battle, they'd bring a war to you.

But now they were far from the Fahrenheits' power-base, and two different packs of brigands waylaid them on the road. Lucy spotted the first group before they got into sword-range and killed four of the six with her bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda's sword-gigantic and fast-was out then, and her fingers danced over the keyboard as she fought off the player who was attacking her, her body jerking from side to side as she hammered on the multib.u.t.ton controller beside her. She won-of course! She was a Fahrenheit! Lucy had already slaughtered her attacker. They desultorily searched the bodies and came up with some gold and a couple scrolls, but nothing to write home about. Even the gold didn't seem like much, given the cash waiting at the end of the mission.

The second group of brigands was even less daunting, though there were twenty of them. They were total noobs, and fought like statues. They'd clearly clubbed together to protect themselves from harder players, but they were no match for Anda and Lucy. One of them even begged for his life before she ran him through, > please sorry u cn have my gold sorry!!!!!!

Anda laughed and sent him to the resp.a.w.n gate.

> You're a nasty person, Anda, Lucy typed.

> I'm a Fahrenheit!!!!!!!!!!

she typed back.

The brigands on the road were punters, but the cottage that was their target was guarded by an altogether more sophisticated sort. They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage, and they saw the warning spell travel up from the sentries' hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away toward the cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn't stop the sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, a.s.suming that the sentries were non-player characters-who wanted to pay to sit around in games.p.a.ce watching a boring road all day?-and to her surprise, the spears followed her. She took one in the chest and only some fast work with her s.h.i.+eld and all her healing scrolls saved her. As it was, her const.i.tution was knocked down by half and she had to retreat back down the hillside.

"Get down," Lucy said in her headset. "I'm gonna use the BFG."

Every game had one-the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-a.r.s.e weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the gameG.o.ds for her foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-metre bolts that exploded on impact. It was a beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at the bottom of the hill and it was there that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed, and ranged.

"Fire!" Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.

"Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark! Yee-haw!" Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and ichor.

In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won the World Cup.

Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their presence and waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking manoeuver around the cottage's sides, staying just outside of bow-range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the foliage around them fade to translucency.

There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling slings. One had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spellcasting.

"GO GO GO!" Lucy called.

Anda went! She had two scrolls left in her inventory, and one was a s.h.i.+eld spell. They cost a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of boiling oil on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.

She power-climbed the tree and nearly lost her grip when whatever the nasty spell was bounced off her s.h.i.+eld. She reached the fifth man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his b.l.o.o.d.y head off in one motion, then backflipped off the high branch, trusting to her s.h.i.+eld to stay intact for her impact on the cottage roof.

The strategy worked-now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of two more of the guards.

Shrieking a berserker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two remaining guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She'd blown a small fortune on spells and rations for this project with the expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and now it was all lost.

She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run, waiting for the guard's sword to find her avatar's back and knock her into the dirt.

"Got 'im!" It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was wrong, though: despite Lucy's avatar's awesome stats and despite Lucy's own skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to the cleaners. The guard was kicking her a.s.s. Anda went back to her stuck sword and recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another to her knee.

"s.h.i.+t!" Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her sword free-finally-and charged at the guard, screaming a ululating war cry. He managed to get his avatar swung around and his sword up before she reached him, but it didn't matter: she got in a lucky swing that took off one leg, then danced back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, nicking at his sword-hand until he dropped his weapon, then moving in for a fast kill.

"Lucy?"

"Call me Sarge!"

"Sorry, Sarge. Where'd you resp.a.w.n?"

"I'm all the way over at Body Electric-it'll take me hours to get there. Do you think you can complete the mission on your own?"

"Uh, sure." Thinking, Crikey, if that's what the guards outside were like, how'm I gonna get past the inside guards?

"You're the best, girl. Okay, enter the cottage and kill everyone there."

"Uh, sure."

She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside the cottage before she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.

She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She'd killed four of her adversaries before she even noticed that they weren't fighting back.

In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even non-player characters. They moved like total noobs, milling around in the little cottage. Around them were heaps of s.h.i.+rts, thousands and thousands of them. A couple of the noobs were sitting in the back, incredibly, still crafting more s.h.i.+rts, ignoring the swordswoman who'd just butchered four of their companions.

She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively, she walked up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one side and she followed him.

> Are you a player or a bot?

she typed.

The avatar did nothing. She killed it.

"Lucy, they're not fighting back."

"Good, kill them all."

"Really?"

"Yeah-that's the orders. Kill them all and then I'll make a phone call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul a.s.s back to the island. I'm coming out there to meet you, but it's a long haul from the resp.a.w.n gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, okay?"

"Sure," Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten. One two one two and through and through, she thought, lopping their heads off. Her vorpal blade went snicker-snack. One left. He stood off in the back.