Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  This equipment came from diverse technological epochs and had been smuggled into this, the Outer Kingdom, from a variety of sources, but all of it contributed to the same purpose: It surveyed the microscopic world through X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, and direct nanoscale probing, and synthesized all of the resulting information into a single three-dimensional view. If Hackworth had been doing this at work, he would already be finished, but Dr. X’s system was a sort of Polish democracy requiring full consent of all participants, elicited one subsystem at a time. Dr. X and his assistants would gather around whichever subsystem was believed to be farthest out of line and shout at each other in a mixture of Shanghainese, Mandarin, and technical English for a while. Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the realm of software. Much of this performance seemed to be genuine, the rest merely for Hackworth’s consumption, presumably laying the groundwork for a renegotiation of the deal.

  Eventually they were looking at the severed portion of John Percival Hackworth on a meter-wide sheet of mediatronic paper that one of the assistants had, with great ceremony, unfurled across a low, black lacquer table. They sought something that was bulky by nanotech standards, so the magnification was not very high– even so, the surface of Hackworth’s skin looked like a table heaped with crumpled newspapers. If Dr. X shared Hackworth’s queasiness, he didn’t show it. He appeared to be sitting with hands folded in the lap of his embroidered silk robe, but Hackworth leaned forward a bit and saw his yellowed, inch-long fingernails overhanging the black Swiss cross of an old Nintendo pad. The fingers moved, the image on the mediation zoomed forward. Something smooth and inorganic unfolded at the top of their field of view: some kind of remotely controlled manipulator. Under Dr. X’s direction it began to sift through the heap of desiccated skin. They found a lot of mites, of course, both natural and artificial.

  The natural ones looked like little crabs and had been quietly inhabiting the outer layers of other creatures’ bodies for hundreds of millions of years. The artificial ones had all been developed in the past few decades. Most of them consisted of a spherical or ellipsoidal hull with various attachments. The hull was a vacuole, a wee bit of the eutactic environment to coddle the mite’s machinephase innards. The hull’s diamondoid structure was protected from the light by a thin layer of aluminum that made mites look like miniature spaceships– only with the air on the outside and the vacuum inside.

  Attached to the hulls were various bits of gear: manipulators, sensors, locomotion systems, and antennas. The antennas were not at all like the ones on an insect– they were usually flat patches studded with what looked like close-cropped fuzz– phased-array systems for sweeping beams of visible light through the air. Most of the mites were also clearly marked with the manufacturer’s name and a part number; this was demanded by Protocol. A few of them were unmarked. These were illicit and had been invented either by people like Dr. X; by outlaw phyles who spurned Protocol; or by the covert labs that most people assumed were run by all the zaibatsus.

  During half an hour’s rooting around through Hackworth’s skin, roaming around an area perhaps a millimeter on a side, they observed a few dozen artificial mites, not an unusual number nowadays. Almost all of them were busted. Mites didn’t last very long because they were small but complicated, which left little space for redundant systems. As soon as one got hit with a cosmic ray, it died. They also had little space for energy storage, so many of them simply ran out of juice after a while. Their manufacturers compensated for this by making a lot of them.

  Nearly all of the mites were connected in some way with the Victorian immune system, and of these, most were immunocules whose job was to drift around the dirty littoral of New Chusan using lidar to home in on any other mites that might disobey protocol. Finding one, they killed the invader by grabbing onto it and not letting go. The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up tile naked mole rat. Dr. X took time out to zoom in on an especially freakish killer locked in a death-grip around an unlabeled mite. This did not necessarily mean that Hackworth’s flesh had been invaded, rather that the dead mites had become part of the dust on a table somewhere and been ground into his skin when he touched it.

  To illustrate the kind of mite he was presently looking for, Hackworth had brought along a cocklebur that he had teased from Fiona’s hair after they had gone for a walk in the park. He had shown it to Dr. X, who had understood immediately, and eventually he found it. It looked completely different from all the other mites, because, as a cocklebur, its sole job was to stick to whatever touched it first. It had been generated a few hours previously by the matter compiler at Bespoke, which, following Hackworth’s instructions, had placed a few million of them on the outer surface of the Illustrated Primer. Many of them had been embedded in Hackworth’s flesh when he had first picked the book up. Many remained on the book, back at the office, but Hackworth had anticipated that.

  He made it explicit now, just so Dr. X and his staff wouldn’t get any ideas: “The cocklebur has an internal timer,” he said, “that will cause it to disintegrate twelve hours after it was compiled. We have six hours left in which to extract the information. It’s encrypted, of course.”

  Dr. X smiled for the first time all day.

  …

  Dr. X was the ideal man for this job because of his very disreputability. He was a reverse engineer. He collected artificial mites like some batty Victorian lepidopterist. He took them apart one atom at a time to see how they worked, and when he found some clever innovation, he squirreled it away in his database. Since most of these innovations were the result of natural selection, Dr. X was usually the first human being to know about them.

  Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

  Dr. X selected a pair of detachable manipulator arms from his unusually large arsenal. Some of these had been copied from New Atlantan, Nipponese, or Hindustani designs and looked familiar to Hackworth; others, however, were bizarre naturalistic devices that seemed to have been torn loose from New Atlantan immunocules– evolved structures, rather than designed. The Doctor employed two of these arms to grip the cocklebur. It was an aluminum-covered megabuckyball in a sunburst of barbed spines, several of which were decorated with fragments of shishkebabed skin.

  Under Hackworth’s direction he rotated the cocklebur until a small spine-free patch came into view. A circular depression, marked with a regular pattern of holes and knobs, was set into the surface of the ball, like a docking port on the side of a spacecraft. Inscribed around the circumference of this fitting was his maker’s mark: IOANNI HACVIRTUS FECIT.

  Dr. X did not need an explanation. It was a standard port. He probably had half a dozen manipulator arms designed to mate with it. He selected one and maneuvered its tip into place, then spoke a command in Shanghainese. Then he p
ulled the rig off his head and watched his assistant pour him another cup of tea. “How long?” he said.

  “About a terabyte,” Hackworth said. This was a measure of storage capacity, not of time, but he knew that Dr. X was the sort who could figure it out.

  The ball contained a machinephase tape drive system, eight reels of tape rigged in parallel, each with its own read/write machinery. The tapes themselves were polymer chains with different side groups representing the logical ones and zeroes. It was a standard component, and so Dr. X already knew that when it was told to dump, it would spew out about a billion bytes a second.

  Hackworth had just told him that the total stored on the tapes was a trillion bytes, so they had a thousand seconds to wait. Dr. X took advantage of the time to leave the room, supported by assistants, and tend to some of the other parallel threads of his enterprise, which was known informally as the Flea Circus.

  Hackworth departs from Dr. X’s laboratory;

  further ruminations;

  poem from Finkle-McGraw;

  encounter with ruffians.

  Dr. X’s assistant swung the door open and nodded insolently. Hackworth swung his top hat into place and stepped out of the Flea Circus, blinking at the reek of China: smoky like the dregs of a hundred million pots of lapsang souchong, mingled with the sweet earthy smell of pork fat and the brimstony tang of plucked chickens and hot garlic. He felt his way across the cobbles with the tip of his walking-stick until his eyes began to adjust. He was now poorer by several thousand ucus. A sizable investment, but the best a father could make.

  Dr. X’s neighborhood was in the Ming Dynasty heart of Shanghai, a warren of tiny brick structures sheathed in gray stucco, topped with tiled roofs, frequently surrounded by stucco walls. Iron poles projected from the second-story windows for drying clothes, so that in the narrow streets the buildings appeared to be fencing with each other. This neighborhood was near the foundation of the ancient city wall, built to keep out acquisitive Nipponese ronin, which had been torn down and made into a ring road.

  It was part of the Outer Kingdom, which meant that foreign devils were allowed, as long as they were escorted by Chinese. Beyond it, deeper into the old neighborhood, was supposedly a scrap of the Middle Kingdom proper– the Celestial Kingdom, or C.K., as they liked to call it– where no foreigners at all were allowed.

  An assistant took Hackworth as far as the border, where he stepped into the Chinese Coastal Republic, an entirely different country that comprised, among many other things, virtually all of Shanghai. As if to emphasize this, young men loitered on corners in Western clothes, listening to loud music, hooting at women, and generally ignoring their filial duties.

  He could have taken an auto-rickshaw, which was the only vehicle other than a bicycle or skateboard narrow enough to negotiate the old streets. But you never could tell what kind of surveillance might be present in a Shanghai taxi. The departure of a New Atlantis gentleman from the Flea Circus late at night could only stimulate the imaginations of the gendarmes, who had intimidated the criminal element to such a degree that they were now feeling restless and looking for ways to diversify. Sages, seers, and theoretical physicists could only speculate at what, if any, relationship might exist between the Shanghai Police Department’s astonishing scope of activities and actual law enforcement: Deplorable, but Hackworth was thankful for it as he sampled the French Settlement’s ramified backstreets. A handful of figures skulked across an intersection several blocks away, bloody light from a mediatron glancing off their patchwork Nanobar outfits, the kind of thing only street criminals would need to wear. Hackworth comforted himself by reasoning that this must be a gang from one of the Leased Territories who had just come over the Causeway. They wouldn’t possibly be so rash as to assault a gentleman in the street, not in Shanghai. Hackworth detoured around the intersection anyway. Having never done anything illegal in his life, he was startled to understand, all of a sudden, that a ruthless constabulary was a crucial resource to more imaginative sorts of criminals, such as himself.

  Countless times that afternoon, Hackworth had been overcome by shame, and as many times he had fought it off with rationalization: What was so bad about what he was doing? He was not selling any of the new technologies that Lord Finkle-McGraw had paid Bespoke to develop. He was not profiting directly. He was just trying to secure a better place in the world for his descendants, which was every father’s responsibility.

  Old Shanghai was close to the Huang Pu; the mandarins had once sat in their garden pavilions enjoying the river view. Within a few minutes Hackworth had crossed a bridge into Pudong and was navigating narrow ravines between illuminated skyscrapers, heading for the coast a few miles farther to the east.

  Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke’s elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He’d been working in San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their conical hats and get into some serious leisure time– and don’t think for one moment that the Nipponese didn’t already have some suggestions for what they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon’s prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.

  Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple– polymers and nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who’d eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better– and not that much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he’d made that conceptual leap, it wasn’t long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai. He saw these chopsticks everywhere now. To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week’s paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there. He wasn’t doing that badly, compared to most other people in the world, but it still rankled him. He wanted more for Fiona. He wanted Fiona to grow up with some equity of her own. And not just a few pennies invested in common stocks, but a serious position in a major company.

  Starting your own company and making it successful was the only way. Hackworth had thought about it from time to time, but he hadn’t done it. He wasn’t sure why not; he had plenty of good ideas. Then he’d noticed that Bespoke was full of people with good ideas who never got around to starting their own companies. And he’d met a few big lords, spent considerable time with Lord Finkle-McGraw developing Runcible, and seen that they weren’t really smarter than he. The difference lay in personality, not in native intelligence.

  It was too late for Hackworth to change his personality, but it wasn’t too late for Fiona.

  Before Finkle-McGraw had come to him with the idea for Runcible, Hackworth had spent a lot of time pondering this issue, mostly while carrying Fiona through the park on his shoulders. He knew that he must seem distant to his daughter, though he loved her so– but only because, when he was with her, he couldn’t stop thinking about her future. How could he inculcate her with the nobleman’s emotional stance– the pluck to take risks with her life, to found a company, perhaps found several of them even after the first efforts had failed? He had read the biographie
s of several notable peers and found few common threads between them.

  Just when he was about to give up and attribute it all to random chance, Lord Finkle-McGraw had invited him over to his club and, out of nowhere, begun talking about precisely the same issue. Finkle-McGraw couldn’t prevent his granddaughter Elizabeth’s parents from sending her to the very schools for which he had lost all respect; he had no right to interfere. It was his role as a grandparent to indulge and give gifts. But why not give her a gift that would supply the ingredient missing in those schools?

  It sounds ingenious, Hackworth had said, startled by Finkle-McGraw’s offhanded naughtiness. But what is that ingredient?

  I don’t exactly know, Finkle-McGraw had said, but as a starting-point, I would like you to go home and ponder the meaning of the word subversive.

  Hackworth didn’t have to ponder it for long, perhaps because he’d been toying with these ideas so long himself. The seed of this idea had been germinating in his mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of Hackworth’s ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness. Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, the embodiment of the Victorian establishment, was a subversive. He was unhappy because his children were not subversives and was horrified at the thought of Elizabeth being raised in the stodgy tradition of her parents. So now he was trying to subvert his own granddaughter.