Other online games did this by fiat. Gold pieces were reposited in dungeons guarded by monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more gold it was squatting on. To get the gold, you had to kill the monster, and building a character powerful enough to do so required a certain amount of time and effort. The system functioned okay, but in the end, the decision as to where the gold was located and how much effort was needed to win it was just an arbitrary choice made by a geek in a cubicle somewhere.
Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening. Idly messing around on the Internet, he discovered the mind-alteringly idiosyncratic website of P. T. “Pluto” Olszewski, the then twenty-two-year-old son of an oil company geologist in Alaska, homeschooled above the Arctic Circle by his dad and his math major mom. Pluto, a classic Asperger’s syndrome “little professor” personality now trapped in the rather hirsute body of a full-grown Alaskan bushwhacker, had spent a lot of time playing video games and seething with rage at their cavalier treatment of geology and geography. Their landforms just didn’t look like real landforms, at least not to Pluto, who could sit and stare at a hill for an hour. And so, basically as a protest action—almost like an act of civil disobedience against the entire video-game industry—Pluto had put up a website showing off the results of some algorithms that he had coded up for generating imaginary landforms that were up to his standards of realism. Which meant that every nuance of the terrain encoded a 4.5-billion-year simulated history of plate tectonics, atmospheric chemistry, biogenic effects, and erosion. Of course, the average person could not tell them apart from the arbitrary landforms used as backdrops in video games, so in that sense Pluto’s efforts were all perfectly useless. But Richard didn’t care about the skin of Pluto’s world. He cared about its bones and its guts. What mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than papier-maché, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition, it would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.
Reader, they bought his IP. Pluto moved down to Seattle, where he found lodging in a special living facility for people with autism spectrum disorders. He set to work creating a whole planet. TERRAIN, the gigantic mess of computer code that he had single-handedly smashed out in his parents’ cabin in the Brooks Range, gave its name to T’Rain, the imaginary world where Corporation 9592 set its new game. And in time T’Rain became the name of the game as well.
NEAR RED OAK the highway ran past a shopping center anchored by a Hy-Vee, which was a local grocery store chain. Like a lot of the bigger Hy-Vees, this one had a captive diner just off the main entrance, where local gaffers would go in the mornings to enjoy the $1.99 breakfast special. Richard, seeing himself, for at least the next half hour, as a sort of aspirant gaffer, parked the Grand Marquis in one of the many available spaces and went inside.
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.