Reamde

He was expecting bright simple colors, which would have been true of the Hy-Vee diners of his youth. But this one had post-Starbucks decor, meaning no primary colors, everything earthtone, restful, minutely textured. Big steaming pickups trundled by the window, enhanced, like Lego toys, with bolt-on equipment. Pallets of giant salt bags were stacked in front of the windows like makeshift fortifications. At the tables: a solitary general contractor rolling messages on his phone. Truckers, great of beard, wide of suspender, and huge of belly, looking around and BSing. Uniformed grocery store employees taking coffee breaks with spouses. Small-town girls with raccoon eye makeup, not understanding that it simply didn’t work on pale blondes. Hunched and vaguely furtive Mexicans. Gaffers showing the inordinate good cheer of those who, ten years ago, had accepted the fact that they could die any day now. A few younger clients, and some gentlemen in bib overalls, fixated on laptops. Richard made himself comfortable in a booth, ordered two eggs over easy with bacon and whole wheat toast, and pulled his own laptop out of his bag.

The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel. The planet T’Rain hung in space before a backdrop of stars. The stars’ positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy. Anyway, the planet then began to rotate and draw closer as Richard’s POV plunged down through the atmosphere, which sported realistic cloud formations. The shapes of continents and islands began to take on three-dimensionality. Dustings of snow appeared at higher elevations. Waves appeared on the surfaces of bodies of water, rivers were seen to move. Roads, citadels, and palaces became visible. Some of these had been presupplied at T’Rain’s inception, and therein lay a great number of tales. Others had been constructed by player-characters during the Prelude, a period of speeded-up time that had occupied the first calendar year of T’Rain’s existence, and still others were being constructed now, though much more slowly since the game world had slowed down into Real Time Lock. At the moment, Richard’s main character was twiddling his thumbs in a half-completed fortress in a system of fortifications that, in this part of T’Rain, was roughly analogous to the Great Wall of China, in the sense that everything north of it was overrun by high-spirited horse archers.

Richard hadn’t logged on since late Wednesday evening. During the intervening thirty-six hours, of course, an equal amount of time had gone by in the virtual world of T’Rain, which meant that Richard’s character had to have been doing something during that day and a half—something quiet, innocuous, and inconsequential, such as sleeping. And indeed, according to the minilog that was now superimposed on Richard’s view of the world, the character, whose name was Fudd, had slept for eight hours, spent seventeen hours awake, slept for another eight, and rolled out of bed three hours ago. During Fudd’s waking hours he had, without any intervention from Richard, consumed a total of four meals, which accounted for two hours, and had devoted the remainder of his time to “meditation” and “training,” which had had the effect of making Fudd slightly more magically powerful and slightly better at kicking ass (not that Fudd needed a lot of improvement in either department). Every race and class of character in T’Rain had such automatic behaviors. Some, such as sleeping and eating, were shared by all. Others were specific to certain character types. Since Fudd was a sort of warrior magician, his “bothaviors” were meditation and training. If he’d been a miner, his bothavior would have been digging up gold, and whenever Richard logged on to that character he would have observed a slightly larger amount of gold dust in its purse.

Of course, being a warrior mage had way more entertainment value than being a miner. Players selected their character types accordingly. Still, the entire virtual economy would collapse unless miners were digging up the gold and other minerals that Pluto’s algorithms had salted around the world, and so miner characters had to exist in very large numbers to make the whole thing work. Here was how Corporation 9592 had squared this with making a game that was actually fun to play:

• Warrior mages and other interesting characters were expensive to maintain. Corporation 9592 charged the owners of such characters more money. Miners, hunter-gatherers, farmers, horse archers, and the like cost virtually nothing; teenagers in China could easily afford to maintain scores or hundreds of such characters.