For the Win by Cory Doctorow (short books to read .TXT) 📕

changing three lanes smoothly, with a shoulder-check before each, weaving through the tourist traffic and gardeners' pickup trucks without raising a single horn. He popped the emergency brake with one hand and his seatbelt with the other, twisting in his seat to bring his face right up to Leonard's.
"You are on thin goddamned ice, kid. You can make me the villain if you want to, if you need to, but you know, somewhere in that hormone-addled teenaged brain of yours, that this was your doing. How many times, Leonard? How many times have we talked to you about balance, about keeping your grades up, taking a little time out of your game? How many chances did you get before this?"
Leonard laughed hotly. There were tears of rage behind his eyes, trying to get out. He swallowed hard. "Kidnapped," he said. "Kidnapped and shipped away because you don't think I'm getting good enough grades in math and English. Like any of it matters -- when was the last time you solved a quadratic equation Dad? Who cares if I get into a good university? What am I going to get a degree in that will help me survive the next twenty years? What did you get your degree in, again, Dad? Oh, that's right, Ancient Languages. Bet that comes up a lot when you're shipping giant containers of plastic garbage from China, huh?"
His father shook his head. Behind them, cars were braking and honking at each other as they maneuvered around the stopped Huawei. "This isn't about me, son. This is about you -- about pissing away your life on some stupid game. At least speaking Latin helps me understand Spanish. What are you going to make of all your hours and years of killing dragons?"
Leonard fumed. He knew the answer to this, somewhere. The games were taking over the world. There was money to be made there. He was learning to work on teams. All this and more, these were the reasons for playing, and none of them were as important as the most important reason: it just felt right, adventuring in-world --
There was a particularly loud shriek of brakes from behind them, and it kept coming, getting louder and louder, and there was a blare of horns, too, and the sound didn't stop, got louder than you could have imagined it getting. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and --
Crash
The car seemed to leap into the air, rising up first on its front tires in a reverse-wheelie and then the front wheels spun and the car shot forward ten yards in a second. There was the sound of crumpling metal, his father's curse, and then a clang like temple bells as his head bounced off the dashboard. The world went dark.
#
This scene is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.
Books of Wonder: 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212 989 3270
Mala was in the world with a small raiding party, just a few of her army. It was late -- after midnight -- and Mrs Dibyendu had turned the cafe over to her idiot nephew to run things. These days, the cafe stayed open when Mala and her army wanted to use it, day or night, and there were always soldiers who'd vie for the honor of escorting General Robotwallah home afterwards. Mamaji -- Mamaji had a new fine flat, with two complete rooms, and one of them was all for Mamaji alone, hers to sleep in without the snuffling and gruffling of her two children. There were places in Dharavi where ten or fifteen might have shared that room, sleeping on coats -- or each other. Mamaji had a mattress, brought to her by a strong young man from Chor Bazaar, carried with him on the roof of the Marine Line train through the rush hour heat and press of bodies.
Mamaji didn't complain when Mala played after midnight.
"More, just there," Sushant said. He was two years older than her, the tallest of them all, with short hair and a crazy smile that reminded her of the face of a dog that has had its stomach rubbed into ecstasy.
And there they were, three mecha in a triangle, methodically clubbing zombies in the head, spattering their rotten brains and dropping them into increasing piles. Eventually, the game would send out ghouls to drag away the bodies, but for now, they piled waist deep around the level one mechas.
"I have them," Yasmin said, her scopes locking on. This was a new kind of mission for them, wiping out these little trios of mecha who were grinding endlessly against the zombies. Mr Banerjee had tasked them to this after the more aggressive warriors had been hunted to extinction by their army. According to Mr Banerjee, these were each played by a single person, someone who was getting paid to level up basic mecha to level four or five, to be sold at auction to rich players. Always in threes, always grinding the zombies, always in this part of the world, like vermin.
"Fire," she said, and the pulse weapons fired concentric rings of force into the trio. They froze, systems cooked, and as Mala watched, the zombies swarmed over the mechas, toppling them, working relentlessly at them, until they had found their way inside. A red mist fountained into the sky as they dismembered the pilots.
"Nice one," she said, arching her back over her chair, slurping the dregs of a cup of chai that had grown cold at her side. Mrs Dibyendu's idiot nephew was standing barefoot in the doorway of the cafe, spitting betel into the street, the sweet smell wafting back to her. The sleep was gathering in her mind, waiting to pounce on her, so it was time to go. She turned to tell her army so when her headphones filled with the thunder of incoming mechas, and lots of them.
She slammed her bottom down into the seat and spun around, fingers flying to the keyboard, eyes on the screen. The enemy mecha were coming in locked in a megamecha configurations, fifteen -- no twenty -- of them joined together to form a bot so huge that she looked like a gnat next to it.
"To me!" she cried, and "Formation," and her soldiers came to their keyboard, her army initiating their own megamecha sequence, but it took too long and there weren't enough of them, and though they fought bravely, the giant enemy craft tore them to pieces, lifting each warbot and peering inside its cowl as it ripped open the armor and dropped the squirming pilot to the surging zombie tide at its feet. Too late, Mala remembered her strategy, remembered what it had been like when she had always commanded the weaker force, the defensive footing she should have put her army on as soon as she saw how she was outmatched.
Too late. An instant later, her own mecha was in the enemy's clutches, lifted to its face, and as she neared it, the lights on her console changed and a soft klaxon sounded: the bot was attempting to infiltrate her own craft's systems, to interface with them, to pwn them. That was another game within this game, the hack-and-be-hacked game, and she was very good at it. It involved solving a series of logic puzzles, solving them faster than the foe, and she clicked and typed as she figured out how to build a bridge using blocks of irregular size, as she figured out how to open a lock whose tumblers had to be clicked just so to make the mechanism work, as she figured out --
She wasn't fast enough. Her army gathered around her as her console locked up, the enemy inside her mecha now, running it from bootloader to flamethrower.
"Hello," a voice said in her headphones. That was something you could do, when you controlled another player's armor -- you could take over its comms. She thought of yanking out the headphones and switching to speaker so that her army could listen in too, but some premonition stayed her hand. This enemy had gone to some trouble to talk to her, personally, so she would hear what it had to say.
"My name is Big Sister Nor," she said, and it was a she, a woman's voice, no, a girl's voice -- maybe something in between. Her Hindi was strangely accented, like the Chinese actors in the filmi shows she'd seen. "It's been a pleasure to fight you. Your guild did very well. Of course, we did better." Mala heard a ragged cheer and realized that there were dozens of enemies on the chat channel, all listening in. What she had mistaken for static on the channel was, in fact, dozens of enemies, somewhere in the world, all breathing into their microphones as this woman spoke.
"You are very good players," Mala said, whispering it so that only her mic heard.
"I'm not just a player, and neither are you, my dear." There was something sisterly in that voice, none of the gloating competitiveness that Mala felt for the players she'd bested in the game before. In spite of herself, Mala found she was smiling a little. She rocked her chin from side to side -- Oh, you're a clever one, do go on -- and her soldiers around her made the same gesture.
"I know why you fight. You think you're doing an honest job of work, but have you ever stopped to consider why someone would pay you to attack other workers in the game?"
Mala shooed away her army, making a pointed gesture toward the door. When she was alone, she said, "Because they muck up the game for the real players. They interfere."
The giant mecha shook its head slowly. "Are you really so blind? Do you think the syndicate that pays you does so because they care about whether the game is fun? Oh, dear."
Mala's mind whirred. It was like solving one of those puzzles. Of course Mr Banerjee didn't care about the other players. Of course he didn't work for the game. If he worked for the game, he could just suspend the accounts of the players Mala fought. Cleaner and neater. The solution loomed in her mind's eye. "They're business rivals, then?"
"Oh yes, you are as clever as I thought you must be. Yes indeed. They are business rivals. Somewhere, there is a group of players just like them, being paid to level up mecha, or farm gold, or acquire land, or do any of the other things that can turn labor into money. And who do you suppose the money goes to?"
"To my boss," she said. "And his bosses. That's how it goes." Everyone worked for someone.
"Does that sound fair to you?"
"Why not?" Mala said. "You work, you make something or do something, and the person you do it for pays you something for your work. That's the world, that's how it works."
"What does the person who pays you do