Rik sat down at the picnic table and relaxed there for a moment, just enjoying the lush and elaborate detail of the space around them. “You made this?”
“Some of it. It’s a tweaked template.” Jean leaned back, looking up past the vines and the trees to where sunlight flashed through the occasionally parting leaves as they moved. “A friend of mine did a rain forest. He lent me some of the terrain, and I started decorating it—hung a lot of my girlfriend’s orchids all over it; she breeds them. But then it started to feel a little too domesticated, so I installed a lot of dinosaurs. Very nonstandard ones.”
“I believe you,” Rik said, as the pterodactyl stretched its wings out, yawned, and snapped its beak shut.
“So tell me,” Jean said. “You have any idea at all what kind of game world you’d like to build?”
Rik blushed. “Absolutely none,” he said.
Jean shook his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Lots of our new MicroLevelers don’t. Even people who apply to level up and have all kinds of ideas sometimes lose them all of a sudden when they get elected. But you didn’t actually apply for the program, did you?”
“No. I go to a lot of Microcosms, though.”
Jean nodded. “I saw that in your record. How come?”
Rik had to think about that for a moment. “I don’t know. They’re just—more quirky. Maybe a little less, I don’t know, polished than the Macrocosms. Funnier, sometimes. In fact, funnier a lot of the time.” He laughed. “A long time ago I stumbled into Million Monkeys and had a lot of fun there. And I started to get, I don’t know, impressed. It never occurred to me that Omnitopia would let people do text games in here.”
Jean nodded. “Yeah, I like going there myself. I bet Shakespeare would like it too, once he got over the idea that people were writing turn-based collaborative fanfic in his universe. Hey, want a beer?”
“Sure.”
“Brand?”
“Uh, Miller’s fine.”
Jean plucked a can of virtual Miller out of the air, handed it to Rik. Rik popped it open: Jean reached out again and produced a bottle with a label that Rik had never seen before. “Belgian,” he said. “Fruit beer. Some guys in the RealFeel sensorium design group are trying to get the taste nailed down right. I can’t tell you how tired I’m getting of raspberry booze.” He took a long drink, looked thoughtful. “Well, maybe not that tired. Anyway,” Jean said, “here’s how it goes. First thing: there are a lot of templates like this one available.” He waved a hand at the rain forest around them. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with basing your first ’cosm on a template, especially since most of our templates are based on our most successful Macrocosms. What you cannot do is run an exact copy of a Macro. You have to vary it, in form, storyline, play style, or function, by at least ten percent. There are a lot of ways to do that math: we’ll help you understand what they are, so don’t make yourself crazy about it at the moment. But as regards templates, don’t forget this: the more different your Microcosm is from the template you based it on, the more money you make. The percentage of your profit goes up as the divergence from the original goes up. So the more of yourself you build into your world, the more you’ll take home if it takes off. Capisce?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Great. Now, once you’re ready to start modifying your template, that’s when things start to get a little complex.” Jean gestured at the air.
Things around them suddenly went dark, except for bright wirelike outlines of light that described where everything—table, trees, flowers, upside-down pterodactyl—had been. “What you’re seeing here,” Jean said, “is a visual expression of the framework that the virtual textures and other sensory information are hung on. The framework, and the textures, and all the descriptions of the virtual space itself—stuff that determines how fast time goes by in here as compared to the real world and the other games in the Omnitopia structure—all of these are written in a subset of a programming language called ARGOT.”
“Oh, God,” Rik said, staring at his beer. What had a moment ago been an apparently perfectly normal can of beer, with a little foam on the top that had popped out when Rik pulled the tab, was now a delicate cylindrical wireframe in blue, silver, and gold. He sloshed it experimentally in the air, and could see, inside the shape of the can, a wireframe representation of sloshing liquid, complete right down to the little wireframe bubbles rising inside it. “Oh, no . . .”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m no good at math,” Rik said. “Or languages. It’s why I skipped college.”
He was blushing, and ashamed to be doing so. “Rik,” Jean said, “this isn’t that kind of language, and unless you want to, you don’t have to touch any math harder than long division. Not even that, actually.” He took a drink of his own wireframe beer. “Huh,” he said. “Weird. The flavor changes slightly when the texture’s turned off. Your beer taste any different to you now?”
“Uh—” Rik had to look at the can and make sure of where the poptop was supposed to be. He took a drink, spent a moment tasting what he was drinking. “No,” he said, “tastes the same as before.”
“Okay,” Jean said, putting his bottle down on the wireframe table. “Let me make a note . . .” He pulled a pen apparently out of the empty air and scribbled for a moment, apparently on the table itself. “You ask me, the beta team in Belgium’s spending too much time drinking the real thing for comparison’s sake, and not enough time programming the virtual stuff . . . Anyway.” He put down the pen of light he’d been writing with. “About the programming language. All the Microcosm templates are based on a very cut-down version of ARGOT called WannaB. It reads like English, and you work with it in paragraph-sized chunks called ‘modules.’ They describe everything—shapes, textures, mass and time relationships, the works. They’re held together with special commands we call ‘connectors,’ because they’re kind of like the connectors in a set of TinkerToys. It sound complicated right now, but I promise you that if you get interested enough to start working with them directly, you’ll be able to pick up the details really fast. If you can speak English, you can work in WannaB. But don’t worry about that right now, okay? Right now you should be working on the most basic concepts of what you want to build here. That boils down to just a few questions. What kind of game? What kind of time frame? How many players? What payoff at the end? And what kind of environment?”
“A lot of questions,” Rik said. He suddenly felt helpless, even more confused than he’d been earlier.
“I know,” Jean said. “You should have seen me the first week. I went to bed for three days and refused to get up.”
Rik looked surprised. “I thought you worked for Omnitopia!”
“I wasn’t working for them then,” said Jean. “I was working at McDonald’s. They fired me.” He smiled.
“Wow,” Rik said, and examined his beer can again.
“Whoops, sorry,” Jean said. Suddenly the normal landscape—if that was the word for it—came back. Rik had a long drink of his beer, and then noticed that a shadow had fallen over him. He glanced up and saw that the pterodactyl was eyeing his beer can.
“He eats them,” Jean said. “All the dinos here do. It keeps the place clean . . . So Rik, just be clear about this: you don’t have to program your ’cosm from scratch. You can go completely modular. There are thousands of free basic modules available: you plug them into your basic design, altering specific kinds of terrain, or textures or shapes or timeflow or other characteristics of your space and behaviors of your characters. Or you can use game gold to buy modules from other players. There are forums and groups where players pool their talents to produce co-op modules, and then pay each other off in the various kinds of game value, or else thrash out sub-royalty agreements with each other. If you like, you can even commission other MicroLevelers to produce modules for you, though that can get expensive.”
Jean finished his beer, threw the bottle in the air. The pterodacty
l dropped off the limb from which it had been hanging, swooped down, and grabbed the bottle in midair, then flew off with it, crunching loudly. “So think about what you want to see here. There’s a checklist in the info pack that came to you in the e- mail. What landscapes do you love most—or hate most? Where would you really love to live—or never want to? What kind of game do you like playing the most? Do you ever get the urge to rewrite history—and if so, which part?”
“Alternate histories,” Rik said softly.
“A very popular theme,” Jean said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of Microcosms built along those lines. Doesn’t have to be a huge swath of history, either. Ask yourself a single ‘what if?’ question and build from that. We have medieval scenarios with tanks and machine guns. Roman Empires based in North America. A golden age of Spanish exploration that went sideways and established the kingdom of New Spain in California after Europe was destroyed by a series of massive earthquakes. Vikings in Manhattan, rain forests in Antarctica after the Earth’s poles flip.”
Rik sat there for a moment thinking about some of the classic tales he’d read when he was a kid, in ancient tattered pulp novels that his dad had given him. “The Hollow Earth,” he said.
“Got a few of those already,” said Jean. “Not that the theme’s overdone. Two of the present ones are comic-book based, licensed in Omnitopia by permission of the copyright owners. One’s based on Verne. But if you can bring something new and interesting to the concept, there’s always room for more. Always assuming you can get people to come and play in it.”
That was the part that had been freaking Rik out. “Marketing,” he moaned. “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.”
“I knew I wasn’t,” Jean said, “and look at me now. I got into designing custom weather. Now I license it to other Levelers.” He glanced around him at the rain forest. Overhead, the sky was darkening. He smiled. “Rainstorm coming through,” he said. “Watch this.”
“Uh—” Rik looked up at the clouds. “Shouldn’t we move?”
Jean waved at him to sit still. “Wait.”
The trees above them stirred: a rush of wind that sounded like the whole rain forest taking a deep breath went through them. Then the rain came down—not gradually, but all of a sudden, all at once, like a solid thing. It soaked everything but Rik and Jean, even though they weren’t under the umbrella. Thunder roared overhead, lightning cracked the leaf-fragmented sky above the trees from side to side, strobe-freezing every falling raindrop into a streak of liquid fire, then vanishing again. But miraculously Rik and Jean remained unaffected. The rain hammered on a dome shape that hovered over each of them like an invisible umbrella, and Jean leaned back, looking up into the rain with great satisfaction. “Terrain is easy,” he said. “Water is hard—so to speak. I was always a screen-porch sitter. Love to watch it rain. Hate to get wet. Now I never have to. I’ve built myself a screen porch the size of a world.”
“With recycling pterodactyls,” Rik said.
Jean grinned. “Recycling is important. And we all have to eat.”
The rain passed. Under the shadows of the trees, Jean’s pterodactyl came flapping heavily back, soared upward over their heads, seized the branch above them in its talons, and swung around to hang upside down again. “Rik, I’d stay,” Jean said, “but I have about twelve other people I have to be helping out today. So let me get going. I’ve passed you the linkname of the O-space where you can go browse some different templates, since I doubt you want to have Polly-Wanna-Beer-Can here hanging over your shoulder all day. You’ve got my username and my e-mail address: message me when I’m in-world, or mail me if you have any questions, and I’ll get to you just as soon as I can. Usually within an hour or so, if I’m on shift.” He grinned again. “Sometimes quicker, if I’m not. My girlfriend says I have no life.”
Rik wondered if Angela was about to start saying that about him. But maybe she won’t mind so much when the first check arrives. “One question before you go?” he said.
“Sure.”
Rik shook his head. “I keep asking myself, why me?”
Jean looked thoughtful. “That part of your records isn’t open to me,” he said. “But I can make an educated guess. Probably a combination of two factors: your ’cosm visitation habits, and your general karma in the game. Somebody up in the supervisory structures caught sight of you during some random audit, liked the way you carry yourself in the game, and said to somebody else, ‘That’s the kind of person we want as a MicroLeveler. Let’s see if he’s game.’ And so you got knighted.” Jean smiled.
Rik thought about that. “I wonder. I met kind of a Clueless Noob type just before I went through the Ring . . .”
“He could possibly have been a ‘hall monitor,’ ” Jean said. “There are a lot of them out there, awarding people points for good behavior. But it could also have simply been an automated Random Acts of Kindness update to your karma. The game’s structure is very semantically sensitive. You might have gotten just that extra bit of good karma you needed to kick you over the really-nice-guy threshold before you passed the Ring.”
“I wasn’t all that nice—”
Jean shook his head. “You wouldn’t have to have been. What happened to you is a result of cumulative behavior. And don’t forget, it works both ways. There are people who apply over and over again to be MicroLevelers, people who’re really hot for it, and they always get turned down because their karma’s not right.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about that.”
“Anyway, there are about fifty other people who got the accolade yesterday,” Jean said, getting up, “and I have to talk to at least ten of them before I go off shift. So start going over that checklist! I’ll be back in touch with you in a few days. Or wave me off if you’re not ready, and I’ll check on you in a week. Whenever. This is your world.”
He held out a hand; they shook again. “Thanks!” Rik said.
Jean waved, vanished. The template went out too, leaving only the glowing words hanging in the air again.
Rik stood there for a few more moments, thinking, I should have asked him to leave the table. But then he thought, Naah! I’ll get one of my own.
Rik activated the in-game control that put him back in his virtual office again. The phone was ringing: he picked it up. “Hello?”
“Where the heck were you yesterday?” his friend Tom’s voice said.
“We missed you! Angela crack down on you all of a sudden?”
Rik laughed. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. But something came up. When can we reschedule?”
“We’re all gonna be back in tonight,” Tom said. “An hour later than yesterday. One of Barbara’s kids cracked a tooth on the front steps; she has to take him to the dentist first.”
“You’re on,” Rik said.
“What is it?” Tom said, sounding a little suspicious. “Seriously, has something happened? You sound weird.”
Rik’s office “doorbell” rang, or rather buzzed. It was an audio cue that he’d built into his space that would go off when Angela texted or e-mailed him that she needed his attention. “I’m fine,” Rik said, “but that’s Herself buzzing. She mentioned she wanted to get some shopping done today.”
“It’s always something,” Tom said. “No problem. We’ll see you tonight!”
“Will do,” Rik said. “Best to Marsha.”
“Right. See you.”
Rik hung up, glancing around the office before killing his RealFeel link to Omnitopia. The Hollow Earth, he thought. Suddenly he could just see it in his head. The strange, concave landscape arching up around him in all directions, the bizarre little sun hanging in midair, in the center of everything. Mammoths, dinosaurs . . . But no, he thought. Those were in Verne. Bring something different to the table.
Rik put the dreams on hold and killed the link, vanishing.
But not for too long!
Outside the huge floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows, the Sixth Avenue traffic was pouri
ng past as usual, and the sidewalks just outside were full of the normal crush of midtown Manhattan lunchtime pedestrian traffic. But the sidewalk traffic was moving a lot more slowly than normal due to all the people who’d pushed up against the glass to stare in at the TV lights and strobe flashes illuminating the brightly decorated, neon-lit acreage inside.
The whole front half of the huge ground-floor display space was crammed with hundreds of people—disproportionately teenage and male—crowded around neon-decorated fixtures that incorporated gaming control consoles and wide-screen plasma displays. High over their heads, completely ignored, hung slowly rotating neon-and-strobe signs declaring INFINITE WORLDS—MAKE THEM YOURS! Here and there some local TV station’s camera crew tried desperately to push through the crowds around the gaming console, but they were making slow work of it: potential players were stacked six deep around the consoles, each one waiting for the five minute play-period that they’d been allotted on making it in through the front doors. Outside, the line went halfway around a long Manhattan block, and no one who’d made it in this far was going to take the chance of moving an inch and losing their chance to be one of the first to get his (or occasionally her) hands on the game. Thumping rock music blared over everything, even its insistent now!now!now!now! beat almost drowned out by the shouts of the game players as they hammered at the controllers, lost in the furious excitement of mortal combat in a brand-new world.
Past the triple line of game consoles, a wide cordon of gaudy advertising flats fronted by goodie bag tables and booth babes stretched from one side of the space to the other. In the middle of the cordon was a gap guarded by a platoon of intimidating black-clad bouncer types, most standing in faux-Secret-Service at-rest poses while a couple of their number checked press passes and hologrammed invitations and waved the fortunate few through. On the far side of the cordon there was a little more room to move and breathe. More camera crews and representatives of the print and electronic press, along with various Band C-list celebrities, jostled for access to the bars on either side and the tables with swag bags that contained merchandise more valuable than the advertising-laden “nickel bags” being laid out for the fans in front. The contents of most of those bags—for the early possession of which the fans out front would probably have committed any number of misdemeanors—would be for sale on eBay within hours, and the host of the party knew this and didn’t care. It would be great publicity that was what counted. And thank God this is almost over.