You

Chapter Eleven



Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem—they’re still wrestling with it. At that point Simon had only seen or touched a computer twice in his life. He had played maybe two or three computer games at most. He came to the Thursday class with an actual computer program.

“Look look look,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

It wasn’t clear whether Simon had slept since the last time we’d seen him. He had about nineteen pages of smudged, crossed-out writing on notebook paper, text bracketed and underlined, arrows connecting the segments across pages. He spent the first forty minutes of class just typing it in as we watched.

It was terrible code, as I now understand these things—no architecture, just one big glob of undigested, “uncommented” instructions looping back and forth.

I leaned forward, waiting to see what this odd, obsessive personality had brought us. Darren looked nervous for his friend; Lisa, skeptical. On the third try, Simon’s program compiled and ran. We saw a grid of dots on the screen, thirty-two by thirty-two, except the dot in the top left corner was replaced by a plus sign, a +.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s the world. There are a thousand and twenty-four places you can be in the world,” he said. He showed us how the plus sign could move around from grid point to grid point. “And that’s you.”

I didn’t know it, but what I was seeing was the equivalent of the first grainy black-and-white image of Mars sent from the Viking lander seven years before—it was our first glimpse of the primal Endorian landscape. We didn’t have access to a graphics mode, so everything was drawn with alphanumeric characters. You could use the H, J, K, and L keys to go left, down, up, and right. (The HJKL movement scheme was copied from an antediluvian text editor called vi. Years later, at Black Arts, using vi as your principal text editor was one of a hundred things you could do to cultivate a hardcore image.)

And if there could be a “you” in the world, there had to be monsters, or it wasn’t a fantasy world at all. The first species of monster was an ampersand, a &, and the first thing its AI ever knew was the rule that every time you moved, the & would move one space toward your previous position (and time was divided into turns; Realms of Gold wouldn’t make the jump to real-time simulation until a decade later). And if the + moved on top of the &, the & was erased. So the first “human” inhabitant of Realms of Gold was the lone, all-conquering, invulnerable plus sign—Brennan’s distant forebear—which roamed the primordial landscape and against which no ampersand could stand.

The world had to be made entirely of periods. This was going to be a dungeon maze, so there had to be walls. Rooms. So walls would be made of asterisks, *s, and open space would be periods, .s. We made a rule that you couldn’t step on a *, and thus the grid of the world became a maze. And at the end of the maze, a prize, an exclamation point, !. When you stepped on it, the game ended—you had won!

We’d begun to answer that question—how to make a world. We still had no idea why one would, except that we needed to. We didn’t know it, but thousands of people were trying to solve exactly this problem. Simon had no particular experience with the issues, nor did he have a preconceived idea how to do it other than the way Dungeons & Dragons did it—graph paper, numerical ratings for how good you were at things, which determined your statistical likelihood of doing it, and lots and lots of rules and numbers determining what weapons there were in the world, what spells, what abilities, what monsters. A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.