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