The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  “This way, Madame Ping does a magic trick—she turns one satisfied client from New Atlantis into a thousand clients from all tribes.”

  “I must confess that I am surprised,” Nell ventured. “Inexperienced as I am in these matters, I had supposed that each tribe would exhibit a different preference.”

  “We change the script a little,” Madame Ping said, “to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.”

  Peculiar practices in the woods; the Reformed

  Distributed Republic; an extraordinary conversation

  in a log cabin; CryptNet; the Hackworths depart.

  Half a day's slow eastward ride took them well up into the foothills of the Cascades, where the clouds, flowing in eternally from the Pacific, were forced upward by the swelling terrain and unburdened themselves of their immense stores of moisture. The trees were giants, rising branchless to far above their heads, the trunks aglow with moss. The landscape was a checkerboard of old-growth forest alternating with patches that had been logged in the previous century; Hackworth tried to guide Kidnapper toward the latter, because the scarcity of undergrowth and deadfalls made for a smoother ride. They passed through the remains of an abandoned timber town, half small clapboard buildings and half moss-covered and rust-streaked mobile homes. Through their dirty windows, faded signs were dimly visible, stenciled THIS HOUSEHOLD DEPENDS ON TIMBER MONEY. Ten-foot saplings grew up through cracks in the streets. Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples. They also passed through an old mining encampment that had been abandoned even longer ago. For the most part, the signs of modern habitation were relatively subtle. The houses up here tended to be of the same unassuming style favored by the software khans closer to Seattle, and from place to place a number of them would cluster around a central square with playground equipment, café, stores, and other amenities. He and Fiona stopped at two such places to exchange ucus for coffee, sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls.

  The unmarked, decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native. Hackworth had never been here before. He had gotten the coordinates from the second fortune cookie in Kidnapper's glove compartment, which was much less cryptic than the first had been. He had no way to tell whether he was really going anywhere. His faith did not begin to waver until evening approached, the eternal clouds changed from silver to dark gray, and he noticed that the chevaline was taking them higher and toward less densely populated ground.

  Then he saw the rocks and knew he had chosen the right path. A wall of brown granite, dark and damp from the condensing fog, materialized before them. They heard it before they saw it; it made no sound, but its presence changed the acoustics of the forest. The fog was closing in, and they could barely see the silhouettes of scrubby, wind-gnarled mountain trees lined up uncomfortably along the top of the cliff.

  Amid those trees was the silhouette of a human being.

  “Quiet,” Hackworth mouthed to his daughter, then reined Kidnapper to a stop.

  The person had a short haircut and wore a bulky waist-length jacket with stretch pants; they could tell by the curve of the hips that it was a woman. Around those hips she had fastened an arrangement of neon green straps: a climbing harness. She wore no other outdoor paraphernalia, though, no knapsack or helmet, and behind her on the clifftop they could just make out the silhouette of a horse, prodding the ground with its nose. From time to time she checked her wristwatch.

  A tenuous neon strand of rope hung down the bulging face of the cliff from where the woman stood. The last several meters dangled loosely in the mist in front of a small cozy pocket sheltered by the overhang.

  Hackworth turned around to get Fiona's attention, then pointed something out: a second person, making his way along the base of the cliff, out of sight of the woman above. Moving carefully and quietly, he eventually reached the shelter of the overhang. He gingerly took the dangling end of the rope and tied it to something, apparently a piece of hardware fixed into the rock. Then he left the way he had come, moving silently and staying close to the cliff.

  The woman remained still and silent for several minutes, checking her watch more and more frequently.

  Finally she backed several paces away from the edge of the cliff, took her hands out of her jacket pockets, seemed to draw a few deep breaths, then ran forward and launched herself into space. She screamed as she did it, a scream to drive out her own fear.

  The rope ran through a pulley fixed near the top of the cliff. She fell for a few meters, the rope tightened, the man's knot held, and the rope, which was somewhat elastic, brought her to a firm but not violent stop just above the wicked pile of rubble and snags at the base of the cliff. Swinging at the end of the rope, she grabbed it with one hand and leaned back, baring her throat to the mist, allowing herself to dangle listlessly for a few minutes, basking in relief.

  A third person, previously unseen, emerged from the trees. This one was a middle-aged man, and he was wearing a jacket that had a few vaguely official touches such as an armband and an insignia on the breast pocket. He walked beneath the dangling woman and busied himself for a few moments beneath the overhang, eventually releasing the rope and letting her safely to the ground. The woman detached herself from the rope and then the harness and fell into a businesslike discussion with this man, who poured both of them hot drinks from a thermal flask.

  “Have you heard of these people? The Reformed Distributed Republic,” Hackworth said to Fiona, still keeping his voice low.

  “I am only familiar with the First.”

  “The First Distributed Republic doesn't hang together very well—in a way, it was never designed to. It was started by a bunch of people who were very nearly anarchists. As you've probably learned in school, it's become awfully factionalized.”

  “I have some friends in the F.D.R.,” Fiona said.

  “Your neighbors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Software khans,” Hackworth said. “The F.D.R. works for them, because they have something in common—old software money. They're almost like Victorians—a lot of them cross over and take the Oath as they get older. But for the broad middle class, the F.D.R. offers no central religion or ethnic identity.”

  “So it becomes balkanized.”

  “Precisely. These people,” Hackworth said, pointing to the man and the woman at the base of the cliff, “are R.D.R., Reformed Distributed Republic. Very similar to F.D.R., with one key difference.”

  “The ritual we just witnessed?”

  “Ritual is a good description,” Hackworth said. “Earlier today, that man and that woman were both visited by messengers who gave them a place and time—nothing else. In this case, the woman's job was to jump off that cliff at the given time. The man's job was to tie the end of the rope before she jumped. A very simple job—”

  “But if he had failed to do it, she'd be dead,” Fiona said.

  “Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example, person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger.”

  “But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has done his job?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What is the role of the third person?”

  “A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two participants don't try to communicate.”

  “How f
requently must they undergo this ritual?”

  “As frequently as their name comes up at random, perhaps once every couple of years,” Hackworth said. “It's a way of creating mutual dependency. These people know they can trust each other. In a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute.”

  The woman finished her hot drink, shook hands with the proctor, then began to ascend a polymer ladder, fixed to the rock, that took her back toward her horse. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper into movement, following a path that ran parallel to the base of the cliff, and rode for half a kilometer or so until it was joined by another path angling down from above. A few minutes later, the woman approached, riding her horse, an old-fashioned biological model.

  She was a healthy, open-faced, apple-cheeked woman, still invigorated by her leap into the unknown, and she greeted them from some distance away, without any of the reserve of neo-Victorians.

  “How do you do,” Hackworth said, removing his bowler.

  The woman barely glanced at Fiona. She reined her horse to a gentle stop, eyes fixed on Hackworth's face. She was wearing a distracted look. “I know you,” she said. “But I don't know your name.”

  “Hackworth, John Percival, at your service. This is my daughter Fiona.”

  “I'm sure I've never heard that name,” the woman said.

  “I'm sure I've never heard yours,” Hackworth said cheerfully.

  “Maggie,” the woman said. “This is driving me crazy. Where have we met?”

  “This may sound rather odd,” Hackworth said gently, “but if you and I could both remember all of our dreams—which we can't, of course—and if we compared notes long enough, we would probably find that we had shared a few over the years.”

  “A lot of people have similar dreams,” Maggie said.

  “Excuse me, but that's not what I mean,” Hackworth said. “I refer to a situation in which each of us would retain his or her own personal point of view. I would see you. You would see me. We might then share certain experiences together—each of us seeing it from our own perspective.”

  “Like a ractive?”

  “Yes,” Hackworth said, “but you don't have to pay for it. Not with money, anyway.”

  The local climate lent itself to hot drinks. Maggie did not even take off her jacket before going into her kitchen and putting a kettle on to boil. The place was a log cabin, airier than it looked from the outside, and Maggie apparently shared it with several other people who were not there at the moment. Fiona, walking to and from the bathroom, was fascinated to see evidence of men and women living and sleeping and bathing together.

  As they sat around having their tea, Hackworth persuaded Maggie to poke her finger into a thimble-size device. When he took this object from his pocket, Fiona was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu. She had seen it before, and it was significant. She knew that her father had designed it; it bore all the earmarks of his style.

  Then they all sat around making small talk for a few minutes; Fiona had many questions about the workings of the R.D.R., which Maggie, a true believer, was pleased to answer. Hackworth had spread a sheet of blank paper out on the table, and as the minutes went by, words and pictures began to appear on it and to scroll up the page after it had filled itself up. The thimble, he explained, had placed some reconnaissance mites into Maggie's bloodstream, which had been gathering information, flying out through her pores when their tape drives were full, and offloading the data into the paper.

  “It seems that you and I have a mutual acquaintance, Maggie,” he said after a few minutes. “We are carrying many of the same tuples in our bloodstreams. They can only be spread through certain forms of contact.”

  “You mean, like, exchange of bodily fluids?” Maggie said blankly.

  Fiona thought briefly of old-fashioned transfusions and probably would not have worked out the real meaning of this phrase had her father not flushed and glanced at her momentarily.

  “I believe we understand each other, yes,” Hackworth said.

  Maggie thought about it for a moment and seemed to get irked, or as irked as someone with her generous and contented nature was ever likely to get. She addressed Hackworth but watched Fiona as she tried to construct her next sentence. “Despite what you Atlantans might think of us, I don't sleep . . . I mean, I don't have s . . . I don't have that many partners.”

  “I am sorry to have given you the mistaken impression that I had formed any untoward preconceptions about your moral standards,” Hackworth said. “Please be assured that I do not regard myself as being in any position to judge others in this regard. However, if you could be so forthcoming as to tell me who, or with whom, in the last year or so …”

  “Just one,” Maggie said. “It's been a slow year.” Then she set her tea mug down on the table (Fiona had been startled by the unavailability of saucers) and leaned back in her chair, looking at Hackworth alertly. “Funny that I'm telling you this stuff—you, a stranger.”

  “Please allow me to recommend that you trust your instincts and treat me not as a stranger.”

  “I had a fling. Months and months ago. That's been it.”

  “Where?”

  “London.” A trace of a smile came onto Maggie's face. “You'd think living here, I'd go someplace warm and sunny. But I went to London. I guess there's a little Victorian in all of us.

  “It was a guy,” Maggie went on. “I had gone to London with a couple of girlfriends of mine. One of them was another R.D.R. citizen and the other, Trish, left the R.D.R. about three years ago and co-founded a local CryptNet node. They've got a little point of presence down in Seattle, near the market.”

  “Please pardon me for interrupting,” Fiona said, “but would you be so kind as to explain the nature of CryptNet? One of my old school friends seems to have joined it.”

  “A synthetic phyle. Elusive in the extreme,” Hackworth said.

  “Each node is independent and self-governing,” Maggie said. “You could found a node tomorrow if you wanted. Nodes are defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to provide certain services when called upon to do so.”

  “What sorts of services?”

  “Typically, data is delivered into your system. You process the data and pass it on to other nodes. It seemed like a natural to Trish because she was a coder, like me and my housemates and most other people around here.”

  “Nodes have computers then?”

  “The people themselves have computers, typically embedded systems,” Maggie said, unconsciously rubbing the mastoid bone behind her ear.

  “Is the node synonymous with the person, then?”

  “In many cases,” Maggie said, “but sometimes it's several persons with embedded systems that are contained within the same trust boundary.”

  “May I ask what level your friend Trish's node has attained?” Hackworth said.

  Maggie looked uncertain. “Eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, we went to London. While we were there, we decided to take in some shows. I wanted to see the big productions. Those were nice—we saw a nice Doctor Faustus at the Olivier.”

  “Marlowe's?”

  “Yes. But Trish had a knack for finding all of these little, scruffy, out-of-the-way theatres that I never would have found in a million years—they weren't marked, and they didn't really advertise, as far as I could tell. We saw some radical stuff—really radical.”

  “I don't imagine you are using that adjective in a political sense,” Hackworth said.

  “No, I mean how they were staged. In one of them, we walked into this bombed-out old building in Whitechapel, full of people milling around, and all this weird stuff started happening, and after a while I realized that some of the people were actors and some were audience and that all of us were both, in a way. It was cool—I suppose you can get stuff like that on the net anytime, in a ractive, but it was so much better to be there with real, warm bodies around. I felt happy. Anyway, this guy w
as going to the bar for a pint, and he offered to get me one. We started talking. One thing led to another. He was really intelligent, really sexy. An African guy who knew a lot about the theatre. This place had back rooms. Some of them had beds.”

  “After you were finished,” Hackworth said, “did you experience any unusual sensations?”

  Maggie threw back her head and laughed, thinking that this was a bit of wry humor on Hackworth's part. But he was serious.

  “After we were finished?” she said.

  “Yes. Let us say, several minutes afterward.”

  Suddenly Maggie became disconcerted. “Yeah, actually,” she said. “I got hot. Really hot. We had to leave, 'cause I thought I had a flu or something. We went back to the hotel, and I took my clothes off and stood out on the balcony. My temperature was a hundred and four. But the next morning I felt fine. And I've felt fine ever since.”

  “Thank you, Maggie,” Hackworth said, rising to his feet and pocketing the sheet of paper. Fiona rose too, following her father's cue. “Prior to your London visit, had your social life been an active one?”

  Maggie got a little pinker. “Relatively active for a few years, yes.”

  “What sort of crowd? CryptNet types? People who spent a lot of time near the water?”

  Maggie shook her head. “The water? I don't understand.”

  “Ask yourself why you have been so inactive, Maggie, since your liaison with Mr.—”