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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Beck. Mr. Beck.”

  “With Mr. Beck. Could it be that you found the experience just a bit alarming? Exchange of bodily fluids followed by a violent rise in core temperature?”

  Maggie was poker-faced.

  “I recommend that you look into the subject of spontaneous combustion,” Hackworth said. And without further ceremony, he reclaimed his bowler and umbrella from the entryway and led Fiona back out into the forest.

  Hackworth said, “Maggie did not tell you everything about CryptNet. To begin with, it is believed to have numerous unsavoury connexions and is a perennial focus of Protocol Enforcement's investigations. And”—Hackworth laughed ruefully—“it is patently untrue that ten is the highest level.”

  “What is the goal of this organisation?” Fiona asked.

  “It represents itself as a simple, moderately successful data-processing collective. But its actual goals can only be known by those privileged to be included within the trust boundary of the thirty-third level,” Hackworth said, his voice slowing down as he tried to remember why he knew all of these things. “It is rumoured that, within that select circle, any member can kill any other simply by thinking of the deed.”

  Fiona leaned forward and wrapped her arms snugly around her father's body, nestled her head between his shoulder blades, and held tight. She thought that the subject of CryptNet was closed; but a quarter of an hour later, as Kidnapper carried them swiftly through the trees down toward Seattle, her father spoke again, picking up the sentence where he had left it, as if he had merely paused for breath. His voice was slow and distant and almost trancelike, the memories percolating outward from deep storage with little participation from his conscious mind. “CryptNet's true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward—and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society.”

  He stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and seemed to stir awake; when he spoke again, it was in a clearer and stronger voice. “Of course, it can't be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive power rivalled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet's activities.”

  The trees parted to reveal a long blue lake below them. Kidnapper found its way to a road, and Hackworth spurred it on to a hand-gallop. Within a few hours, father and daughter were settling into bunkbeds in a second-class cabin of the airship Falkland Islands, bound for London.

  From the Primer, Princess Nell's activities as

  Duchess of Turing; the Castle of the Water-gates;

  other castles; the Cipherers' Market; Nell prepares

  for her final journey.

  Princess Nell remained in Castle Turing for several months. During her quest for the twelve keys, she had entered many castles, outwitted their sentries, picked their locks, and rifled their treasuries; but Castle Turing was an altogether different place, a place that ran on rules and programs that were devised by men and that could be rewritten by one who was adept in the language of the ones and zeroes. She need not content herself with sneaking in, seizing a trinket, and fleeing. Castle Turing she made her own. Its demesne became Princess Nell's kingdom.

  First she gave the Duke of Turing a decent burial. Then she studied his books until she had mastered them. She acquainted herself with the states by which the soldiers, and the mechanical Duke, could be programmed. She entered a new master program into the Duke and then restarted the turning of the mighty Shaft that powered the castle. Her first efforts were unsuccessful, as her program contained many errors. The original Duke himself had not been above this; he called them bugs, in reference to a large beetle that had become entangled in one of his chains during an early experiment and brought the first Turing machine to a violent halt. But with steadfast patience, Princess Nell resolved these bugs and made the mechanical Duke into her devoted servant. The Duke in turn had the knack of putting simple programs into all of the soldiers, so that an order given him by Nell was rapidly disseminated into the entire force.

  For the first time in her life, the Princess had an army and servants. But it was not a conquering sort of army, because the springs in the soldiers' backs unwound rapidly, and they did not have the adaptability of human soldiers. Still, it was an effective force behind the walls of the castle and made her secure from any conceivable aggressor. Following maintenance schedules that had been laid down by the original Duke, Princess Nell set the soldiers to work greasing the gears, repairing cracked shafts and worn bearings, and building new soldiers out of stockpiled parts.

  She was heartened by her success. But Castle Turing was only one of seven ducal seats in this kingdom, and she knew she had much work to do.

  The territory around the castle was deeply forested, but grassy ridges rose several miles away, and standing on the castle walls with the original Duke's spyglass, Nell was able to see wild horses grazing there. Purple had taught her the secrets of mastering wild horses, and Duck had taught her how to win their affection, and so Nell mounted an expedition to these grasslands and returned a week later with two beautiful mustangs, Coffee and Cream. She equipped them with fine tack from the Duke's stables, marked with the T crest—for the crest was hers now, and she could with justification call herself the Duchess of Turing. She also brought a plain, unmarked saddle so that she could pass for a commoner if need be—though Princess Nell had become so beautiful over the years and had developed such a fine bearing that few people would mistake her for a commoner now, even if she were dressed in rags and walking barefoot.

  Lying in her bunkbed in Madame Ping's dormitory, reading these words from a softly glowing page in the middle of the night, Nell wondered at that. Princesses were not genetically different from commoners.

  On the other side of a fairly thin wall she could hear water running in half a dozen sinks as young women performed their crepuscular ablutions. Nell was the only scripter staying in Madame Ping's dormitory; the others were performers and were just coming back from a long vigorous shift, rubbing liniment on their shoulders, sore from wielding paddles against clients' bottoms, or snorting up great nostril-loads of mites programmed to seek out their inflamed buttocks and help to repair damaged capillaries overnight. And of course, many more traditional activities were going on, such as douching, makeup removal, moisturizing, and the like. The girls went through these motions briskly, with the unselfconscious efficiency that the Chinese all seemed to share, discussing the day's events in the dry Shanghainese dialect. Nell had been living among these girls for a month and was just starting to pick up a few words. They all spoke English anyway.

  She stayed up late reading the Primer in the dark. The dormitory was a good place for this; Madame Ping's girls were professionals, and after a few minutes of whispering, giggling, and scandalized communal shushing, they always went to sleep.

  Nell sensed that she was coming close to the end of the Primer.

  This would have been evident even if she hadn't been closing in on Coyote, the twelfth and final Faery King. In the last few weeks, since Nell had entered the domain of King Coyote, the character of the Primer had changed. Formerly, her Night Friends or other characters had acted with minds of their own, even if Nell just went along passively. Reading the Primer had alway
s meant racting with other characters in the book while also having to think her way through various interesting situations.

  Recently the former element had been almost absent. Castle Turing had been a fair sample of King Coyote's domain: a place with few human beings, albeit filled with fascinating places and situations.

  She made her lonesome way across the domain of King Coyote, visiting one castle after another, and encountering a different conundrum in each one. The second castle (after Castle Turing) was built on the slope of a mountain and had an elaborate irrigation system in which water from a bubbling spring was routed through a system of gates. There were many thousands of these gates, and they were connected to each other in small groups, so that one gate's opening or closing would, in some way, affect that of the others in its group. This castle grew its own food and was suffering a terrible famine because the arrangement of gates had in some way become fubared. A dark, mysterious knight had come to visit the place and apparently sneaked out of his bedroom in the middle of the night and fiddled with connections between some gates in such a way that water no longer flowed to the fields. Then he had disappeared, leaving behind a note stating that he would fix the problem in exchange for a large ransom in gold and jewels.

  Princess Nell spent some time studying the problem and eventually noticed that the system of gates was actually a very sophisticated version of one of the Duke of Turing's machines. Once she understood that the behavior of the water-gates was orderly and predictable, it was not long before she was able to program their behavior and locate the bugs that the dark knight had introduced into the system. Soon water was flowing through the irrigation system again, and the famine was relieved.

  The people who lived in this castle were grateful, which she had expected. But then they put a crown on her head and made her their ruler, which she had not expected.

  On some reflection, though, it only made sense. They would die unless their system functioned properly. Princess Nell was the only person who knew how it worked; she held their fate in her hands. They had little choice but to submit to her rule.

  So it went, as Princess Nell proceeded from castle to castle, inadvertently finding herself at the helm of a full-fledged rebellion against King Coyote. Each castle depended on some kind of a programmable system that was a little more complicated than the previous one. After the Castle of the Water-gates, she came to a castle with a magnificent organ, powered by air pressure and controlled by a bewildering grid of push-rods, which could play music stored on a roll of paper tape with holes punched through it. A mysterious dark knight had programmed the organ to play a sad, depressing tune, plunging the place into a profound depression so that no one worked or even got out of bed. With some playing around, Princess Nell established that the behavior of the organ could be simulated by an extremely sophisticated arrangement of water-gates, which meant, in turn, that it could just as well be reduced to an unfathomably long and complicated Turing machine program.

  When she had the organ working properly and the residents cheered up, she moved on to a castle that functioned according to rules written in a great book, in a peculiar language. Some pages of the book had been ripped out by the mysterious dark knight, and Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.

  Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After familiarizing herself with some of these rule-books and establishing that the castle was another Turing machine, Princess Nell fixed a problem in the message-delivery system that had been created by the vexatious dark knight, collected another ducal coronet, and moved on to castle number six.

  This place was entirely different. It was much bigger. It was much richer. And unlike all of the other castles in the domain of King Coyote, it worked. As she approached the castle, she learned to keep her horse to the edge of the road, for messengers were constantly blowing past her at a full gallop in both directions.

  It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books. The books were trundled from place to place on wheelbarrows and carried here and there on great long seedy-looking conveyor belts made of hemp and burlap. Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions—and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food.

  In the midst of this hubbub, Princess Nell saw a dark knight sitting on a black horse, paging through one of these books. Without further ado, she spurred her horse forward and drew her sword. She slew him in single combat, right there in the middle of the marketplace, and the book-sellers simply backed out of their way and ignored them as Princess Nell and the dark knight hacked and slashed at each other. When the dark knight fell dead and Princess Nell sheathed her sword, the commotion closed in about her again, like the waters of a turbulent river closing over a falling stone.

  Nell picked up the book that the dark knight had been reading and found that it contained nothing but gibberish. It was written in some kind of a cipher.

  She spent some time reconnoitering, looking for the center of the place, and found no center. One stall was the same as the next. There was no tower, no throne room, no clear system of authority.

  Examining the market stalls in more detail, she saw that each one included a man who did nothing but sit at a table and decipher books, writing them out on long sheets of foolscap and handing them over to other people, who would read through the contents, consult rule-books, and dictate responses to the man with the quill pen, who enciphered them and wrote them out in books that were then tossed out into the marketplace for delivery. The men with the quill pens, she noticed, always wore jeweled keys on chains around their necks; the key was apparently the badge of the cipherers' guild.

  This castle proved fiendishly difficult to figure out, and Nell spent a few weeks working on it. Part of the problem was that this was the first castle Princess Nell had visited that was actually functioning as intended; the dark knight had not been able to foul the place up, probably because everything was done in ciphers here, and everything was decentralized. Nell discovered that a smoothly functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken.

  In the end, Princess Nell had to apprentice herself to a master cipherer and learn everything there was to know about codes and the keys that unlocked them. This done, she was given her own key, as a badge of her office, and found a job in one of the stalls enciphering and deciphering books. As it turned out, the key was more than just a decoration; rolled up inside its shaft was a strip of parchment inscribed with a long number that could be used to decipher a message, if the sender wanted you to decipher it.

  From time to time she would go to the edge of the market, exchange a book for some gold, then go buy some food and drink.

  On one of these trips, she saw another member of the cipherer's guild, also taking his break, and noticed that the key hanging around his neck looked familiar: it was one of the eleven keys that Nell and her Night Friends had taken from the Faery Kings and Queens! She concealed her excitement and followed this cipherer back to his stall, making a note of where he worked. Over the next few days, going from stall to stall and examining each cipherer, she was able to locate the res
t of the eleven keys.

  She was able to steal a look at the rule-books that her employers used to respond to the encoded messages. They were written in the same special language used at the previous two castles.

  In other words, once Princess Nell had deciphered the messages, her stall functioned like another Turing machine.

  It would have been easy enough to conclude that this whole castle was, like the others, a Turing machine. But the Primer had taught Nell to be very careful about making unwarranted assumptions. Just because her stall functioned according to Turing rules did not mean that all of the others did. And even if every stall in this castle was, in fact, a Turing machine, she still could not come to any fixed conclusions. She had seen riders carrying books to and from the castle, which meant that cipherers must be at work elsewhere in this kingdom. She could not verify that all of them were Turing machines.

  It did not take long for Nell to attain prosperity here. After a few months (which in the Primer were summarized in as many sentences) her employers announced that they were getting more work than they could handle. They decided to split their operation. They erected a new stall at the edge of the market and gave Nell some of their rule-books.

  They also obtained a new key for her. This was done by dispatching a special coded message to the Castle of King Coyote himself, which was three days' ride to the north. Seven days later, Nell's key came back to her in a scarlet box bearing the seal of King Coyote himself.

  From time to time, someone would come around to her stall and offer to buy her out. She always turned them down but found it interesting that the keys could be bought and sold in this fashion.

  All Nell needed was money, which she quickly accumulated through shrewd dealings in the market. Before long, all eleven of the keys were in her possession, and after liquidating her holdings and turning them into jewels, which she sewed into her clothes, she rode her horse out of the sixth castle and turned north, heading for the seventh: the Castle of King Coyote, and the ultimate goal of her lifelong quest.