› insulin-sensitivity.
Obesity-related diabetes. They had lectures on this every term in health class-the fastest-growing ailment among British teens, accompanied by photos of orca-fat sacks of lard sat up in bed surrounded by an ocean of rubbery, flowing podge. Anda prodded her belly and watched it jiggle.
It jiggled. Her thighs jiggled. Her chins wobbled. Her arms sagged.
She grabbed a handful of her belly and squeezed it, pinched it hard as she could, until she had to let go or cry out. She’d left livid red fingerprints in the rolls of fat and she was crying now, from the pain and the shame and oh, God, she was a fat girl with diabetes-
“JESUS, Anda, where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, Sarge,” she said. “My PC’s been broken-” Well, out of service, anyway. Under lock-and-key in her dad’s study. Almost a month now of medications and no telly and no gaming and double PE periods at school with the other whales. She was miserable all day, every day now, with nothing to look forward to except the trips after school to the newsagents at the 501-meter mark and the fistsful of sweeties and bottles of fizzy drink she ate in the park while she watched the chavs play footy.
“Well, you should have found a way to let me know. I was getting worried about you, girl.”
“Sorry, Sarge,” she said again. The PC Baang was filled with stinky spotty boys-literally stinky, it smelt like goats, like a train-station toilet-being loud and obnoxious. The dinky headphones provided were greasy as a slice of pizza, and the mouthpiece was sticky with excited boy-saliva from games gone past.
But it didn’t matter. Anda was back in the game, and just in time, too: her money was running short.
“Well, I’ve got a backlog of missions here. I tried going out with a couple other of the girls-” A pang of regret shot through Anda at the thought that her position might have been usurped while she was locked off the game, “-but you’re too good to replace, OK? I’ve got four missions we can do today if you’re game.”
“Four missions! How on earth will we do four missions? That’ll take days!”
“We’ll take the BFG10K.” Anda could hear the savage grin in her voice.
THE BFG10K simplified things quite a lot. Find the cottage, aim the BFG10K, fire it, whim-wham, no more cottage. They started with five bolts for it-one BFG10K bolt was made up of twenty regular BFG bolts, each costing a small fortune in gold-and used them all up on the first three targets. After returning it to the armoury and grabbing a couple of BFGs (amazing how puny the BFG seemed after just a couple hours’ campaigning with a really big gun!) they set out for number four.
“I met a guy after the last campaign,” Anda said. “One of the noobs in the cottage. He said he was a union organiser.”
“Oh, you met Raymond, huh?”
“You knew about him?”
“I met him too. He’s been turning up everywhere. What a creep.”
“So you knew about the noobs in the cottages?”
“Um. Well, yeah, I figured it out mostly on my own and then Raymond told me a little more.”
“And you’re fine with depriving little kids of their wages?”
“Anda,” Lucy said, her voice brittle. “You like gaming, right, it’s important to you?”
“Yeah, ’course it is.”
“How important? Is it something you do for fun, just a hobby you waste a little time on? Are you just into it casually, or are you committed to it?”
“I’m committed to it, Lucy, you know that.” God, without the game, what was there? PE class? Stupid Acanthosis Nigricans and, someday, insulin jabs every morning? “I love the game, Lucy. It’s where my friends are.”
“I know that. That’s why you’re my right-hand woman, why I want you at my side when I go on a mission. We’re bad-ass, you and me, as bad-ass as they come, and we got that way through discipline and hard work and really caring about the game, right?”
“Yes, right, but-”
“You’ve met Liza the Organiza, right?”
“Yes, she came by my school.”
“Mine too. She asked me to look out for you because of what she saw in you that day.”
“Liza the Organiza goes to Ohio?”
“ Idaho. Yes-all across the US. They put her on the tube and everything. She’s amazing, and she cares about the game, too-that’s what makes us all Fahrenheits: we’re committed to each other, to teamwork, and to fair play.”
Anda had heard these words-lifted from the Fahrenheit mission statement-many times, but now they made her swell a little with pride.
“So these people in Mexico or wherever, what are they doing? They’re earning their living by exploiting the game. You and me, we would never trade cash for gold, or buy a character or a weapon on eBay-it’s cheating. You get gold and weapons through hard work and hard play. But those Mexicans spend all day, every day, crafting stuff to turn into gold to sell off on the exchange. That’s where it comes from-that’s where the crappy players get their gold from! That’s how rich noobs can buy their way into the game that we had to play hard to get into.
“So we burn them out. If we keep burning the factories down, they’ll shut them down and they’ll find something else to do for a living and the game will be better. If no one does that, our work will just get cheaper and cheaper: the game will get less and less fun, too.
“These people don’t care about the game. To them, it’s just a place to suck a buck out of. They’re not players, they’re leeches, here to suck all the fun out.”
They had come upon the cottage now, the fourth one, having exterminated four different sniper-nests on the way.
“Are you in, Anda? Are you here to play, or are you so worried about these leeches on the other side of the world that you want out?”
“I’m in, Sarge,” Anda said. She armed the BFGs and pointed them at the cottage.
“Boo-yah!” Lucy said. Her character notched an arrow.
› Hello, Kali
“Oh, Christ, he’s back,” Lucy said. Raymond’s avatar had snuck up behind them.
› Look at these
he said, and his character set something down on the ground and backed away. Anda edged up on them.
“Come on, it’s probably a booby-trap, we’ve got work to do,” Lucy said.
They were photo-objects. She picked them up and then examined them. The first showed ranked little girls, fifty or more, in clean and simple T-shirts, skinny as anything, sitting at generic white-box PCs, hands on the keyboards. They were hollow-eyed and grim, and none of them older than her.
The next showed a shantytown, shacks made of corrugated aluminium and trash, muddy trails between them, spraypainted graffiti, rude boys loitering, rubbish and carrier bags blowing.
The next showed the inside of a shanty, three little girls and a little boy sitting together on a battered sofa, their mother serving them something white and indistinct on plastic plates. Their smiles were heartbreaking and brave.
› That’s who you’re about to deprive of a day’s wages
“Oh, hell, no,” Lucy said. “Not again. I killed him last time and I said I’d do it again if he ever tried to show me photos. That’s it, he’s dead.” Her character turned towards him, putting away her bow and drawing a short sword. Raymond’s character backed away quickly.
“Lucy, don’t,” Anda said. She interposed her avatar between Lucy’s and Raymond. “Don’t do it. He deserves to have a say.” She thought of old American TV shows, the kinds you saw between the Bollywood movies on telly. “It’s a free country, right?”
“God damn it, Anda, what is wrong with you? Did you come here to play the game, or to screw around with this pervert dork?”