THE PLANET is black, perfectly spherical, does not really exist, and is exactly 65,536km round (being the sixteenth power of two, a number any hacker worth their salt would recognise). A single 100-metre-wide road runs round it. All the real estate on the virtual planet is owned by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an academic body.
The ACM sells parcels of land to enterprising programmers wishing to develop them. Many do: their efforts are responsible for the houses, bars and skyscrapers that line the great road. At any given hour the road bustles with people, or at least, with their 3D avatars. Some are going to work; some are
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