free time what the monsters do to Tokyo? His second game—conquistadores ravaging the virgin Americas—is another freeware hit. A Usenet group forms just to trade game strategies. The program generates a new, geologically realistic New World each time you play. It turns any grocery store bag boy into stout Cortez.
His games spawn imitations. The more people steal from him, the better Neelay feels about his chair-bound life. The more he gives away, the more he has. From his vantage, stranded in his wheelchair in a basement lab, whole new continents swing into view. The gift economy—free duplication of well-shaped commands—promises to solve scarcity at last and cure the hunger at the heart’s core. The name Neelay Mehta grows mini-legendary among the pioneers. People thank him on dial-up boards and in game news groups. College kids talk about him in chat rooms as if he’s some Tolkien character. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines.
But by his eighteenth birthday, paradise is sprouting fences. Former philanthropists of free code start taking out s and making actual coin. They even have the nerve to form private companies. Granted, they’re still just peddling floppy discs in baggies, but it’s clear how things will go. The commons are getting enclosed. The gift culture will be throttled in the cradle.
Neelay blasts the betrayal at each week’s meeting of the Home-Rolled Club. He spends his free time re-creating one of the most famous commercial offerings, improving on it, then releasing the clone into the public domain. Infringement? Maybe. But every one of the so-called ed properties relies on decades of prior unpaid art. For a year, Neelay plays Robin Hood, camped out in the anarchic forest with his merry men, under a massive oak older than the deed to the land it grows on.
HE WORKS FOR MONTHS on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors. He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets. Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood.
Needing a break, he rolls across campus down Serra Mall to see what’s cooking in the labs. It’s near dusk, in that soft perfection that flavors this place for nine months of the year. He heads toward his cubicle in the networked lab, navigating as through a first-person adventure. The Oval’s grandiose palm arcade snakes away to his right. To his left, the Santa Cruz Mountains peek out from behind the fake Spanish Romanesque cloisters. Once, in another life, he walked the trails up near Skyline under the redwoods with his father and mother. Behind the mountains, half an hour away by wheelchair-ready van, lies the sea. The beaches and bays are not forbidden him. He visited them only three months ago. Several friends had to carry him down near the shore and set him in the sand. He sat and stared at the waves and watched the diving shorebirds and listened to their spectral complaints. Hours later, when his friends were done swimming and throwing Frisbees and chasing each other up and down the sand, he was the only one who hadn’t had enough.
He turns up the ramp to Memorial Court into the main quad, past Rodin’s life-sized Burghers of Calais. The night will be long, and he needs to stock up on snacks to power him through. He motors straight into the inner court, toward the back exit to the Union and all the best vending machines. Lost in his intergalactic plans, he almost mows down a group of Japanese tourists photographing the chapel. Backing away, apologizing, he runs over the toes of an elderly woman on her first trip abroad. She bows, mortified. Neelay extricates himself, slams the chair into a hard left, and looks up. There, in a car-sized planter, just to the side of the chapel entrance, bulbous and elephantine, is the most mind-boggling organism he has ever seen. It’s the thing he has been searching for, for his intergalactic opera. A living hallucination from a nearby star system at the other end of a wormhole in space. The groundskeepers must have snuck it in last night under cover of dark. Either that, or