The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel. The planet T’Rain hung in space before a backdrop of stars. The stars’ positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy. Anyway, the planet then began to rotate and draw closer as Richard’s POV plunged down through the atmosphere, which sported realistic cloud formations. The shapes of continents and islands began to take on three-dimensionality. Dustings of snow appeared at higher elevations. Waves appeared on the surfaces of bodies of water, rivers were seen to move. Roads, citadels, and palaces became visible. Some of these had been presupplied at T’Rain’s inception, and therein lay a great number of tales. Others had been constructed by player-characters during the Prelude, a period of speeded-up time that had occupied the first calendar year of T’Rain’s existence, and still others were being constructed now, though much more slowly since the game world had slowed down into Real Time Lock. At the moment, Richard’s main character was twiddling his thumbs in a half-completed fortress in a system of fortifications that, in this part of T’Rain, was roughly analogous to the Great Wall of China, in the sense that everything north of it was overrun by high-spirited horse archers.