I'm a developer and computer guy, so it's only natural that the most fascinating genre in science fiction for me is Cyberpunk. My favourite novel - hereby recommended - is Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".

The coolest part in this type of story always was the 3D version of the internet in there - like the "metaverse" but much cooler, darker and also filthier. Just like the real internet was before it was dominated by 5 mega sites.

We're still not there - nothing is 3D. Nobody (including Zuck) has even shown off a realistic concept. We might be right ahead of a big shift in that direction. I'm waiting for those apple ski goggles to become useful. But for now, it's still imagination.

My imagined version of a Cyberpunk internet (starting after I had read Snow Crash and Neuromancer in 1992) is called "The Mesh" and throughout the course of this small essay, I show off some of its details.

Geometry

The virtual world is a giant torus with exactly the same surface as the earth. The measuring is decimal and uses units (u) which are equivalent to 1 meter and klicks (k) for kilometres.

The form factor of the torus is 7. So the tube ends up with a radius of 929 k and the inner radius (the hole) is 6504 k.

The tube is split into 512 sectors, which results in a width of 11,4 k per sector. The torus has 4.096 sectors. Therefore on the outside equator, the sectors are nearly squares.

Sectors have a unique address written as @ttt.TTT. ttt represents the tube segment in octal (as lower case letters a..h). TTT represents the torus segment in hexadecimal (as numbers and uppercase letters 0..9A..F). Valid addresses look like this: @had.14D. You can imagine what the tube segment @bad has to offer, right?

Now let's zoom in a bit more into my very own metaverse clone. We've learned that one sector has a length of 11.4 k. This area again is split into 256 x 256 so-called areas. Each around 44 x 44 u (meters) in size (a bit less on the inside of the torus as mentioned). With that addition, the formal addresses are complete. Four additional hex digits now form the full location like @had.14D.00.1a.

Just like today's IP addresses, these formal ones may have easy-to-remember aliases. The most well-known one is surely @root, the global main entrance to the mesh welcoming all newbies.

Each area is hosted on a dedicated server or cloud space including all its 3d information. Unmaintained or better unclaimed areas are forwarded to a generic landscape generating server. Whenever your avatar moves around in the mesh, it is located in one of the areas.

There is only one contract between areas. 6 u (units) in the exact middle of each side of a square have to stay open to be able to move from one area to the next. That's where usually streets go through.

Moving in the Mesh

As mentioned, an avatar can travel between two areas by stepping over the 6 u wide gap in the middle of each side of the area square. This happens more or less without noticing.

But there is another way of reaching a certain area. You don't have to walk around the whole world to reach a certain place. Every area is filled with streets and buildings and public art and lights etc. One of these constructs is a portal. Each area has exactly one of them. The owner of the area is responsible for the look of that portal but there has to be one and it follows some rules.

It's always a door - minimum 2 u high and 1 u wide. It is placed anywhere in the area. And in eye height at 1.5 u there has to be a well-visible standardised portal sign. Other than that, portals are creative spaces for their architects. Some just resemble backdoors or weird standalone objects, others are landmarks like the pyramids.

You can step through the portal and then choose your destination and travel to the other side of the doughnut in an instant.

Speaking of Avatars. After the first exercises, where test users had been given the ability to design their own characters, it turned out that people tended to experiment. Some of them created disproportionally huge or much too small avatars.

After that, the designers of the mesh added restrictions. An Avatar, which is the representation of a user in the Mesh must be between 1 u and 2 u in height and a maximum of 1 u in width and depth. The minimal portal sizes are based on these values.

Up to today, these are the only restrictions. If you walk along the streets of the more crowded areas, you see many different characters ranging from photorealistic to exotically fluffy. Most people even have several avatars they can choose from when entering the Mesh. One of the photorealistic types is usually always in the portfolio.

Clothing is a big topic as well and because you can already express a lot of individuality with it, the realistic avatar is being picked 19 out of 20 times.

The Mesh has four attraction points on its outer equator - South, West, North and East. The southern centre is @root, the default entry point if you log into the Mesh. It is therefore the largest travelling hub. Most people enter here just to directly transit through its portal to other destinations.

But there are also quite some attractions located around that spot - mainly for the newbies and occasional surfers.

If you visit the mesh often - and that is the majority of over a billion users - you most likely have a home base. This is a flat, an apartment or your own house built somewhere in the vast regions of the mesh space. In case you have that, you always respawn in there after a new login.

For most people, the home base has much more functions than only an access point. It's a central message hub and often has facilities to control other things inside or outside the mesh from setting the indoor temperature in your real flat at home to organising your week. It is like a mixture between the old desktop screen on a two-dimensional computer and a personal assistant.

Coding

When the Mesh and its predecessors had been introduced, the way how content was created changed drastically. Before that, the web had consisted of semantic text, most of the time dynamically controlled by software that ran on servers or in a browser.

With the introduction of three-dimensional virtual realities, developers also had to consider the space and the representation of their data in it.

The Mesh is still an open, decentral net. To allow a homogenous virtual impression of such a heterogeneous situation, the managing consortium introduced a development standard called UNO, Unified Net Objects.

This standard splits the 3d world into a huge tree of nodes that permanently change. Each node in there is represented by three characteristics:

• its look and feel including its relation to its children and parent nodes
• the data that it stores
• and the possibilities of how it could interact with data and environment aka. the code.

Writing programs for the Mesh is more complicated and fuzzy than in previous versions of the internet.

In former times, coding was precise. A developer controlled every single pixel and every interaction. But the surface of a 3D world is much bigger than a web browser's interface. The Mesh can be entered with devices from watches to immersive suits. Each of them comes with different ways of dealing with the Mesh space.

Therefore a good part of the interaction between different objects in the Mesh is controlled by the Mesh's core software itself. Developers could do, but rarely do detailed motion studies to tweak micro movement curves of objects. These days, that is the realm of AI. Aspects like facial expressions or body gestures are derived from live or trained video footage and applied by an artificial intelligence algorithm.

Developers and designers are plumbing the pieces together. Additionally, there are huge libraries of basics to choose from. Devs can concentrate on the 20% that make the difference. And the stars among them can do real magic with it.

Structure and Texture

We already know that the Mesh is a giant doughnut, But I want to give you some more details.

The Builders wanted to introduce as many different sceneries as possible. That is why they chose the for of a torus. The doughnut is rotating around one axis in a daily cycle and around the symmetrical centre in a yearly cycle and it's illuminated by a giant sun from one side. This creates the effect of day and night and sometimes even a tube eclipse. Then the shadow of one tube side casts a shadow on some areas on the other side.

In addition, the torus has four spokes on the inside and in the centre of it all, there is a spherical core. The spokes are small compared to the diameter of the doughnut tube but gigantic when you stand right in front of one of the sockets. All of this central construction contains the management and controlling facilities to run the mesh - from teleportation logic to search engines. Companies who build infrastructure to run the mesh have their home turf inside a spoke or even in the core sphere.

The freshly created pristine Mesh contained virtual landscapes that resembled different regions of the earth from Antarctica over deserts to rainforests.

There is one unifying element, a gigantic river called Lethe that spans the whole outside equator of the Mesh doughnut. The river is in some areas as wide as an ocean but in other areas as small as 10u.

Besides that, you can find wide land, hills and mountains, forests and other rivers and lakes all of which in the end lead into the Lethe.

In the first year, the Mesh was exclusively opened for designers, architects and companies in a closed Beta. They started to terraform the surface. They created cities, they designed geometric structures, organic streets, artificial monuments and re-formed some of the landscapes to make them even more interesting.

They also became the owners of the first claimed areas. They defined the first look of a world that was meant to be changing over and over from that point onwards.

Architecture and Interior

Architecture in the Mesh Cyberspace is an essential ingredient. It has become the most admired discipline amongst designers and produced buildings and cities as diverse as the real world and beyond.

In theory, buildings are logistically restricted to an area (you remember? That's around 44 x 44 u) and have a maximum height of 200 u to avoid superlative effects. Only towards the largest spokes of the doughnut wheel, higher skyscrapers up to 1.000 u are allowed to compete with the gigantic column that spans into a seemingly infinite sky. And don't forget that streets have to go through the middle of the area borders. Within the boundaries of these parameters, the owner of an area has absolute freedom to build whatever they want.

Some designers have found ways to overcome these limits with tricks and exceptional rules. For example, there are 6 beautiful sports stadiums that span 3 x 4 areas (170 x 130 u) consisting of 12 distinct buildings. If you look at their construction in detail, you'd still see the rules applied. But for most people, they look like a homogenous whole.

The mesh is a dynamic model. A renderer only loads what it currently needs. On the outside, this divides the world into areas. But the inside of buildings is only loaded when your avatar enters them.

There are no physical rules for the geometry of building interiors. The geometry doesn't even have to fit its outer size. As a designer, you could build a small Swedish cabin by a lake and make the inside a huge warehouse for space rockets.

On the other hand, some views on the torus are so spectacular, that you want to provide windows to look outside. The best example is one of the high towers next to one of the giant spokes of the torus construct. At 1.000 u height, you can oversee the whole curving with the city structures and the far-out landscapes below.

The architectural design - interior like exterior - is therefore an art form in itself. Just like in the real world it spans from profane and off-the-shelf to masterfully crafted and genius. And it changes its form every day.

The Train

The train is probably the most iconic attraction on the Mesh. Technically, nobody needs a transportation facility in the virtual world. Just go to the next teleporter, pick your target area and there you are. The train has a different purpose, however.

Its monorail is precisely spanning the outer equator. It is built at a height of 500 u, way above the height of buildings. The rail is constructed as a transparent tube and the trains wagons are also equipped with generously huge windows. The sight if you sit in there takes your breath away. This is a trip everyone should do from time to time.

Every 16 sectors, there is a stop. The 256 iconic train stations are the only exceptions to the 200u rule mentioned before. They are designed by the best architects. The northern, eastern, southern and western stations are the most well known buildings in the virtual world. The @root travelling hub on the south pole, where the majestic train station and the main entry into the VR fall together, is the epicentre of the whole Mesh.

Final Thoughts

I got started with the concept of the Mesh back in the late eighties when I had read Neuromancer. So it was way before Zuckerberg's Metaverse and the modern world that is on the brink of introducing Augmented Reality to our everyday life. But one part is missing to becoming Cyberpunk: the real world.

Cyberpunk is a melange combining virtual worlds with a most often dystopian future. But there is no easy way to include the real world in a world-building concept. As an author and inventor of stories, you have to feel it. You have to re-live future world scenes in your head. Everything must come to life.

You might have already read the first part of the first storylines playing with the Mesh. I've also dedicated the story of my left arm's tattoo motives to this universe. Expect much more where this comes from. I have so much fun writing this.

World-building is not only a necessary tool for consistency. It's a source of ideas. I hope you've enjoyed it.