First Steps Into the Extant 2000 World
Day one
On September 13 I made the first commit to a project I had been calling the office. The message was "An office building, and the six people who work in it." By that night the building had ten floors, a lift, a gym on four and a canteen on five, and it had moved to its permanent address at office.extant2000.com.
Six weeks and a little over 600 commits later, it is still an office building. It also has a street in front of it, a mall behind it, a university campus across the plaza and a medieval faire down the road. This post is the first in a series about that place: what it is, how you get around, and why a software company would build one.
The short version: Extant 2000 is a small company with a lot of products. The 3D world is where all of them have a desk.
Your first few steps
You arrive in the lobby. There is a reception desk, a waiting area, a mail room and a coffee counter called Lobby Grounds. Press E at the counter and you get the menu.
The controls fit on one line at the bottom of the screen: WASD to walk, the mouse or arrow keys to look, E to interact with whatever is in front of you, T to chat and M for sound. Nothing else is needed to get around.
The lift takes you anywhere the building has something to show you. Its directory lists only floors the lift will actually stop at. A board that names a floor you can't reach is the building lying to you, so I don't let it.
Walk out the front doors and you are on a street that runs 200 feet each way, with a plaza around the building, traffic, people on the pavement and a garage underneath. The building dresses itself by the calendar, so this week the street has its Halloween decorations up.
Where you can go
The building has fourteen floors above ground and a church on the level below the lobby. Outside, the world keeps going. These are the places a visitor can reach today.
Place | Where | What's there |
|---|---|---|
Lobby | Floor 1 | Reception, the mail room, Lobby Grounds coffee |
Conference floor | Floor 2 | One big room with a demo bay: seats, a projector, a whiteboard and an AV cart with a CRT on it |
The practice | Floor 3 | Six offices, one per department, each with its name and brief on the door |
Engineering | Floor 4 | A developer's desk for each product, a break room and a server room at the end of the corridor |
Gym and canteen | Floors 5 and 6 | Hitt Fitness, a training floor, a servery and a dining room |
Hitt Hosting suite | Floor 7 | The hosting products' own floor |
Records, studio, guest floor | Floors 8 to 10 | The archive, the marketing studio, rooms for visitors |
Executive suite | Floor 11 | Offices and the board room |
Roof | Floor 14 | A viewing deck and the observatory |
Church | Below the lobby | Pews, an altar, an organ and a font, open to anyone |
Extant 2000 Mall | Behind the building | Shops, a food court, a video store, a comic shop and an arcade, a 50s diner, a bar and grill and a day spa |
Extant 2000 Institute of Technology | Across the plaza | A campus laid out along one long walk, with a quad and fountain, a residence tower and a research center at the far end |
Ironfall Park | Down the road | A medieval faire, starting at the village green of Ashvale Commons |
The campus layout borrows the shape of Penn College's campus map: one pedestrian walk down the middle with halls set back on both sides. The mall's stores are real, and so are the products on the desks in the bullpen.
Why build a building
The six offices on floor 3 started as the point of the whole thing. Each one is an AI agent with a defined job: a CEO who keeps priorities straight across the portfolio, compliance, security, engineering, a front office for correspondence, and finance. You walk into an office, stand in front of the desk, press E and ask.
I could have put six chat boxes on a web page. A building turned out to be easier to think in. You can see which office is busy from the corridor. Reports go upstairs. A finding from security travels down the hall to engineering when I decide it should. The layout carries information that a list of tabs doesn't.
Visitors get the building but not the work. To anyone who isn't signed in, the screens read "locked", the door lamps stay off and the noticeboard says it's private. The doors, the briefs and the shops are all public, because none of that says more than the company website already does.
What comes next
The campus is in phase one: the outside, the walk and the research center. Classrooms, the dorm rooms, and people and signs inside come next. Later posts in this series will go floor by floor, starting with the practice and how the six offices work together.
Until then, the door is open at office.extant2000.com. Bring a mouse.