《ICANN Shrugs》


 Chapter 1: Hands in Her Pockets, Dagny Entered a New World

    Dagny Taggart stepped into a well-lit room, adorned with fluorescent light strips, like zebra stripes across the office. Wires connected a heavy steel computer to its neighbor. She recalled the Christian minister she had been forced to see in her youth speaking about neighbors. He was more blubber than man, his thin gray hairs combed with grease over a dry, flaking bald spot. He read with lackluster enthusiasm the parable of the good Samaritan, where Jesus said that your neighbor was whoever was of use to you; despite Dagny¡¯s feelings on the man, he had a point there. Her hands in her pockets, she noticed a terminal across the room.


    The terminal was, like the rest of the room, oddly out-of-place. She was used to a life in the center of industry, where men and serfs built things with their own brawn and courage. But this room represented an odd vestige of the 1980s, a time where men devoted themselves to stock trading and cocaine. She remembered, with a slight smirk, watching a legally-purchased copy of American Psycho, and watching the scene where the main character shoved a kitten into an ATM. She was not without affection for the 1980s.


    A moth-faced attendant rose lazily from his repose to speak. ¡°I got me here the capsule, lady,¡± he said, his eyes and wrists too limp to meet her own, and his ancient wrinkles seemed to hang on him like bulbs of fat that should have been lanced long ago. Her dark gray eyes darted with a flicker of aggression toward the man, and then came to rest comfortably above him, her hands in her coat pockets. There was no one she truly hated, Dagny told herself, except the coward who couldn¡¯t stand at a rigid angle when dealing with his betters.


    She followed his flaccid gesture toward the capsule that sat in the center of the room. It was a virtual reality console, developed to allow its user to play a children¡¯s game, Royal Road. The game itself was Korean, and while normally she would never let such a contemptible waste of time distract her from the more important business of trains, she had heard about this game. Specifically, about its opportunities to make money.


    The People¡¯s Republic of Korea had suffered economic catastrophe due to their impulsive, thoughtless parliament. The Labor Welfare Law, revised by Parliament, took away from all industrious children the right to work for their keep. When Dagny heard of the injustice of it, relayed to her approvingly by some slack-jawed man with clinical obesity while she was busy in her office with decisions, she thought back to her ancestor, Nathaniel Taggart, who murdered a legislator who tried to stop him from building his railroad. Nothing would stop her from working. Nothing would stop those children from working.


    Stolen story; please report.


    She walked swiftly over to the pod, and a twinge of disgust crossed her otherwise angularly emotionless face as she observed the restraints she would have to don. Dagny Taggart did not take kindly to restraint.


    As she worked tirelessly to connect to the machine, the fraction of a man took notice of something for once in his miserable life, and slowly drawled out an unnecessary sentence. ¡°We got ourselves a problem here.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°The terminal, computer, whatever they call it these days. It¡¯s not connecting to the American server.¡±


    She stared at him, unblinking, her hands in her pockets.


    ¡°It wants¡¯cha to go to a Korean server.


    Dagny remembered the pilgrims, who came to the continent in hope of freedom from the taxes and violence of the British. They found new land, land without owners, and conquered it. They were men of action. So was she. A person of action, that is, not a man, though it hardly mattered; her eyes and jawline were as chiseled as any man¡¯s was, and her bearing itself seemed to scorn femininity. She made up her mind so quickly, it was as though the pause itself were imperceptible.


    ¡°Do it.¡±


    ¡°Ya sure? I think it¡¯s better to¡­¡±


    ¡°I have made my decision, and you are my employee; you will obey it.¡±


    ¡°Do ya even speak Korean?¡±


    Dagny made a mental note to replace this human failure with anyone else as soon as she returned. Possibly a Korean child; market rate of pay for them was rather low. ¡°I take all responsibility for this decision; do as I tell you to.¡±


    ¡°Well, arright¡­,¡± and the ¡®man¡¯ dialed a password into the terminal. A flash of blue light crossed her eyes, and she saw a message in front of her.


    ¨C Connect to Royal Road ¨C


    Yes | No


    When the message came, Dagny Taggart spoke without any hesitation.


    ¡°Yes.¡±

 Chapter 2: She Thought He Almost Resembled a Smaller, Uglier Hank Rearden

    A dumb monkey-like teenager in ill-fitting medieval cosplay stared slack-jawed at the woman in front of him. She had appeared in a flash of light in the The Citadel of Serabourg. She had told the nasally, ill-translated robot voice that she had no preference as to where she would be sent.


    ¨C Select a city and kingdom you want to start.


    ¡°Anywhere.¡±


    ¨C Please select a city and kingdom you want to start.


    She glared at the void of nothingness speaking to her. It sounded like a People¡¯s Republic of Russian actor imitating an American accent on a gramophone.


    ¨C Please select a city¡­


    ¡°Choose one now or I will find a video game that will.¡±


    She was dressed only in a plain white shirt and pants. Her clothes hadn¡¯t come over with her. She had been wearing a uniform indescribably suited for both hard work on railroads and intense professionalism in railroads. Her rigidly structured blazer only accentuated her figure, such as it was. It had fit her immaculately. All the clothes she tried on did. When she was twelve, she had spent time with Francisco d¡¯Anconia in a particularly well-bred clothing store. ¡°Why do you admire me?¡±, she had asked him.


    ¡°Because of that,¡± he said, pointing at a Bossi Annunzio blazer.


    ¡°That¡¯s not my suit.¡±


    ¡°I admire you because I know it will be.¡±


    Dagny felt like she had lost something for the first time in her life, as she reached for those blazer¡¯s pockets and found them missing. She resolved never to need a coat again, and she never did.


    She paid no heed to the moocher ogling her and instead started to walk down the hill. The city was enormous, filled with anonymous people who had never done anything to merit her attention, their faces oozing to blend into each other. Wooden advertisements for the businesses shot upward into the sky, pre-industrial obelisks to invention. She realized that she had been wishing for some time now that the businesses, not the pedestrians, were the ones jostling her as she took the long walk toward the Training Hall. It was there that she would find the titans of industry that she sought, people not content to wait for the developers to give them a chance, but who would work tirelessly, without sleep, to make chances of their own.


    She reached the training hall, filled with scarecrows, assembled by hand by men who worked from dawn to dusk bundling them together. Those scarecrows, she thought, were better company than most of the gamers here. There was no one she truly hated except people who refused to work in video games.


    Every scarecrow was presently in use. She saw a hunched-back man-gremlin with his brainless friends, limply beating a scarecrow with a pristine wooden sword he probably received through affirmative action. He complained to his drones about the effort it took to become good at something.


    ¡°God, this is so hard,¡± he said, spitting the greasy sweat that dripped down his face to speak. She walked up to him briskly, assertively, without a hint of self-consciousness. Dagny had never been self-conscious. When she was a child, she once thought, amused, that it should be everyone else who was self-conscious. If they were not going to be ashamed of who they were, she absolutely should not.


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    ¡°If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will trade me for the scarecrow.¡±


    ¡°You have literally nothing to trade.¡±


    The miserable little thing could not understand the value of a hard day¡¯s work, and she saw no reason to trade her labor, her very life, to satisfy him.


    ¡°I¡¯ll give you my clothes,¡± she said unhesitatingly.


    The lout stared at her blankly, and his eyes looked to her like a pregnant cow¡¯s.


    ¡°You¡¯d give me your clothes for a chance to hit a scarecrow?¡±


    ¡°Of course. You would like that, wouldn¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s insane. You have no other clothes.¡±


    The deal was quickly pushed through. Even when she was nude, one never thought of Dagny Taggart¡¯s body. Except her bone structure; her angular bone structure.


    She picked out a wooden sword that looked like it could have belonged to Nathaniel Taggart, her ancestor and the founder of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. Nat Taggart was a penniless journeyman who became unfathomably rich because of his refusal to take no for an answer. It was said that in the backroads of Oregon, he beat an engineer who did not think his railroad design was plausible to death with a wooden sword. Dagny despised the idea of family, but she still felt a certain affection for Nat Taggart¡¯s pluck.


    She savagely beat the scarecrow over and over, her muscle fibers literally breaking apart with the force of her blows. She attacked it mercilessly, like it was a family-owned competitor, driving it into the ground so that she might have complete control over the scarecrow. She could not even feel her pain, feeling only sudden stabs that made her aware of some part of her body. Mostly her jaw.


    She heard a swarm of locusts, or gamers, starting to buzz from their mouths as though to say something. They all seemed enraptured by a disturbance happening somewhere in particular.


    ¡°This guy¡¯s definitely got iron guts.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s freaking tough.¡±


    ¡°I wonder why he¡¯s not a VP of a railroad company.¡±


    She saw a dwarf-like man dealing unfathomable damage to a scarecrow, which was shredding before his might. The sweat rolled off his biceps as he struck the scarecrow, one blow after another, with his wooden sword. She watched for hours, thinking to herself that this was the sort of person that discouraged her from running her trains right through the city square.


    After eight hours of striking the scarecrow, the formidable man took a break, eating a lunch consisting of nutrition only, taking pride in his work and not his stomach. Dagny strode up to him, unclothed, feeling for the first time a flutter of awareness of her own body. She asked him, like a friend would ask about a vacation, what his name was.¡±


    ¡°Tell me who you are.¡±


    He did not make eye contact with her as he told her his name, his voice breathless and quiet.


    ¡°Weed.¡±