“How much land does Zone Two cover?”
“A million square kilometers, more or less, would be enough to build all the consoles. Now I’ll show you Zone Three: the zoo.”
Their environment switched to the boundary between a forest and a plain. Hordes of animals cavorted on the plain and ran in and out of the forest. “These megazoos are true animal kingdoms. They have no cages, and all the animals can move freely through the natural environment. When you go into these zoos, you’re entering the mountains and wilderness where you may come across all sorts of animals. You’ll wear powered protective clothing, so no wild beast will be able to hurt you. You’ll travel through the forest atop an elephant, or take a photo with a Bengal tiger. The biggest zoo is nearly three hundred thousand square kilometers in area, even bigger than the UK. That one doesn’t have any roads; helicopters are the only form of transportation available, and when you go in, you’ll feel like you’re entering a primeval world right at the dawn of humanity. We’ll also build three animal cities with streets and buildings just like human ones, but they’ll be filled with cute puppies and kittens and other animals kids can be friends with. You can go in and play with them, and you can take the ones you like back with you…. This zone covers an area of nearly one million square kilometers.”
“Does it need to be that big?”
“What kind of a question is that? Animals need freedom of migration. Birds need to fly freely. Can they do that without enough space? Next I’ll show you Zone Four, the adventure zone.”
Their environment changed rapidly, from the foot of a steep snow-covered mountain to an endless savannah to a deep mountain gorge to the banks of a raging river…
When they stopped at last beneath a huge waterfall, Huahua remarked, “There doesn’t seem to be anything built in these places.”
“That’s right. All of the old cities will be torn down, and the zone will be restored to its pristine state.”
“What for?”
“Adventuring!”
“Can’t you adventure in some of the Zone Two games?”
“That’s totally different! In games, the program is preset. Everything is predictable. It’s totally different here. You don’t know what you’ll find. That’s what makes it exciting. Besides, this is far bigger than any game in Zone Two.”
“How large is Zone Four?”
“The entire northwest!”
“That’s excessive.”
“The hell it is. It’s got to be big. Where’s the adventure if the edge is just a few steps away?”
“Well, if you do it that way, our country doesn’t have nearly enough territory.”
“And that’s why Zone Five only contains one small project.”
“There’s a Zone Five?”
“Right. Candytown.”
The city they now found themselves in was an exquisite miniature in comparison to the gigantic scale of the previous zones. The buildings were short, and its most striking characteristic was that it was colored in vibrant monochromes, as if it were built from big wooden blocks. “This is Candytown. All the buildings are built from candy. The brown stadium you’re looking at is made entirely of chocolate. That translucent building over there is made of rock sugar.”
“Can you eat it?”
“Of course!”
Huahua went up to the stadium and clicked on a brown pillar beside the door; a chunk came right off. Xiaomeng went over to a small, dainty building and lightly touched a window; the glass shattered, and she picked up a fragment imagining how sweet the thin bit of sugar crystal would taste on her tongue.
Specs broke his long silence to snort, “This is a violation not only of the laws of economics but of science as well. Is candy strong enough to build with?”
The virtual citizen replied, “That’s the reason there are no tall buildings in Candytown. And they’ve got steel skeletons for strength.”
“Won’t they melt in the heat?”
“Excellent point.” Their environment changed again, but not by much. Now they were on the outskirts of Candytown, at one of the small hills that ringed it. The brilliant colors and soft lines of the hills made them seem plucked from a watercolor painting.
The virtual citizen said, “It’s a shame you can’t smell them, but they’re delicious. These are the Ice Cream Hills.”
When they looked closer, they saw rivulets of cream running all over the hills, some of them tumbling in creamy waterfalls. The streams joined into a river flowing down the valley, an undulating flow of milk-colored soft ripples and waves that passed without sound. “Climate conditions were somewhat ignored, so the ice cream is melting. Candytown might have to be constructed someplace colder.”
Later Supernova Era historians devoted considerable research to the Candytown concept, first of all to the puzzle of why, when children of the Common Era didn’t care much for candy, were they so captivated by it in the new world of their imagination? Maybe candy was for children a representation of something adults could never understand, a symbol of beauty.
From their analysis of Big Quantum’s original records, historians learned that the architects of the New Five-Year Plan and the virtual country were mainly children between the ages of five and eleven, bolstered by younger children, and by sheer force of numbers they held an unbeatable advantage under the statistical and inductive principles of the New World Assembly. Disappointment with the real world led a significant proportion of older children to join them, and in the frenzy that gradually developed, only a minority of children maintained any sense of rationality.
DEBATE
Their environment changed a final time, returning the three young leaders to the platform in the New World Assembly at the center of a sea of people. Looking down, they saw not just a sea of eyes but a sea of mouths, two hundred million mouths constantly in motion speaking words that only Big Quantum could hear and remember.
Virtual Citizen 1 (91.417%) asked, “What do you think of the New Five-Year Plan? Can you guide us to make it real?”
Huahua said, “Are you the only one here? There’s no Virtual Citizen 2?”
Virtual Citizen 1 said, “VC 2 has been around a few times, but is really annoying. I told them to piss off. Hey, VC 2, come out and speak if you’ve got any guts!”
And so the country launched into a huge debate, the biggest ever seen in human history, in which direct participants numbered more than 200 million. Across the vast territory of the country, children could be found on the phone or at their computers shouting or typing away, each of them vying to contribute their 1/200,000,000th part toward the world of their dreams. The smaller of the two competing groups of children had a larger average age, but tragically, Big Quantum’s summarized statements did not (or could not) take age into account, and so the larger group held an absolute advantage. And thus, with a huge number of younger children taking part in the debate to determine the fate of the country, the least rational and most capricious formed a highly dangerous social force.
The timid voice of Virtual Citizen 2 (8.792%) ventured, “Don’t listen to them, Huahua, Specs, and Xiaomeng. That’s just the jeering of a group of ignorant babies who only care about playing. I recommend that the assembly’s rules for tabulation and summarization should be altered to incorporate an age-based weighting.”
A commotion shook the sea of people down below. The cartoon avatars shouted and whirled about, as if a stiff wind had churned up waves on the ocean.