twenty-one lesser but still mighty trees of code, each subtly different from the others, though up until the main branchings the trunks looked much the same. Behind about a third of these trees stood glowing wireframe shadows of each. These were shuntspaces—alternate universes, each perfectly identical to its twinned Macrocosm except for its population. The master Conscientious Objector routine caught players who tried to cheat the Omnitopian game system and shunted them into these duplicate Macrocosms, which were otherwise populated only by other cheaters, game- generated characters with a built-in bad attitude, and those Omnitopia staff who occasionally descended into these “Lesser Hells” to blow off steam by punishing the wicked.
But the shuntspaces weren’t Dev’s major concern right now. There was no sign of Tau just yet, so Dev breathed out and just stood there in the midst of it all for a few moments, turning slowly, looking at the flow of light in the trunks of the Macrocosm-trees and the lesser, more shadowy flickering in the shuntspaces. There were too few peaceful moments like this these days: too little time to hold still and appreciate what he’d achieved. Miri would say this was the price of success, he thought. Well, I don’t care. I hate the price. I just want to play.
Dev sighed. And there’s my inner three year old talking. Never mind. . . . He glanced away from the great ring of Macrocosm-trees and their shuntspaces and off to one side, toward the sapling forest in the distance—the rowdy crowd of Microcosms that had sprung up in the fertile ARGOT earth in such a short time. Since Tau hadn’t yet turned up, Dev wandered over that way. In response the virtual landscape poured itself toward him at increased speed until he was standing under the tangled eaves of that energetic young forest. The slender trunks of the sapling forest were not as regular or as elegant as the great piles of Macrocosm code had to be. They straggled, they leaned, their upper branches had bumps and galls—places where some Leveler’s design had tried to get the WannaB version of ARGOT to do something it hadn’t really been designed to do, and sometimes had succeeded. The code got twisted out of shape, got inelegantly assembled, branches tangled rather than interlacing gracefully. But the energy of it was undeniable. There are people having fun in there, Dev thought with satisfaction. And that’s what it’s all about.
He paused by the nearest sapling, laid his hand against it. Instantly the landscape around him was drowned in darkness, and in the dark a new set of images burst across his vision: the shore of a tropically blue ocean with a huge ringed planet rising slant-ringed from the haze and clouds on the distant horizon. Out over the water he spotted a hard glint of light off something moving. Dev squinted at it and saw it was a glider: as it wheeled above that warm bright water he caught another glint of the sun on translucent wings.
He nodded appreciatively. “System management?” he said.
“Here, Dev.”
“Make me a window and show me meta, please.”
“Done.” A rectangle of air on his right opaqued and began to flow with details about the Microcosm—its designer, the extra WannaB modules that had been plugged into this space, what they were being used for. Dev discovered that this little world was surprisingly detailed, if on a very small scale: this ocean was teeming with strange and intriguing life-forms, all hung on interestingly tweaked variations of the basic WannaB non-playing character template. A lot of time spent on this, Dev thought, briefly putting his finger on one of the template names on the virtual panel. Instantly that whole stack of code displayed itself in front of him like a pile of glowing DVDs. Dev reached out to it, pulled a single module out of the stack and looked it over. Interesting. Somebody’s taken a linguistics module and stuck it into a personality heurism routine out of the game-generated character stack, so these creatures in the water can learn from each other as well as the live players. Clever way to use WannaB to mimic some of the same effects we get in the full implementation of ARGOT . . . Dev slipped the code module back into the stack and waved it away. The stack vanished as Dev looked more closely at the meta display. A twelve-year-old built this? Dev thought as he glanced down at the MicroLeveler’s bio. Her name