The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  “It's not that—the project should finish itself. But after work, I believe I'll get a surprise for Fiona. Something special.”

  “Being home for dinner would be more special than anything you could get her.”

  “No, darling. This is different. I promise.”

  He kissed her and went to the stand by the front door. Mrs. Hull was awaiting him, holding his hat in one hand and his briefcase in the other. She had already removed the pedomotive from the M.C. and set it by the door for him; it was smart enough to know that it was indoors, and so its long legs were fully collapsed, giving him almost no mechanical advantage. Hackworth stepped onto the tread plates and felt the straps reach out and hug his legs.

  He told himself that he could still back out. But a flash of red caught his eye, and he looked in and saw Fiona creeping down the hallway in her nightie, her flaming hair flying in all directions, getting ready to surprise Gwendolyn, and the look in her eyes told him that she had heard everything. He blew her a kiss and walked out the door, resolute.

  Bud is prosecuted; noteworthy features of the

  Confucian judicial system; he receives an invitation

  to take a long walk on a short pier.

  Bud had spent the last several days living in the open, in a prison on the low, smelly delta of the Chang Jiang (as most of his thousands of fellow inmates called it) or, as Bud called it, the Yangtze. The walls of the prison were lines of bamboo stakes, spaced at intervals of a few meters, with strips of orange plastic fluttering gaily from their tops. Yet another device had been mounted on Bud's bones, and it knew where those boundaries were. From place to place one could see a corpse just on the other side of the line, body striped with the lurid marks of cookie-cutters. Bud had mistaken these for suicides until he'd seen a lynching in progress: a prisoner who was thought to have stolen some other fellow's shoes was picked up bodily by the mob, passed from hand to hand overhead like a crowd-surfing rock singer, all the time flailing frantically trying to grab something. When he reached the line of bamboo poles, he was given one last shove and ejected, his body virtually exploding as he flew through the invisible plane of the perimeter.

  But the ever-present threat of lynching was a minor irritation compared to the mosquitoes. So when Bud heard the voice in his ears telling him to report to the northeast corner of the compound, he didn't waste any time—partly because he wanted to get away from that place and partly because, if he didn't, they could pop him by remote control. They could have just told him to walk directly to the courtroom and take a seat and he would have done it, but for ceremonial purposes they sent a cop to escort him.

  The courtroom was a high-ceilinged room in one of the old buildings along the Bund, not lavishly furnished. At one end was a raised platform, and on that was an old folding table with a red cloth tossed over it. The red cloth had gold threads woven through it to make a design: a unicorn or a dragon or some shit like that. Bud had trouble discriminating among mythical beasts.

  The judge came in and was introduced as Judge Fang by the larger of his two gofers: a bulky, rounded-headed Chinese guy who smelled tantalizingly of menthol cigarettes. The constable who had escorted Bud to the courtroom pointed to the floor, and Bud, knowing his cue, dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the floor.

  The Judge's other gofer was a tiny little Amerasian woman wearing glasses. Hardly anyone used glasses anymore to correct their vision, and so it was a likely bet that this was actually some kind of phantascope, which let you see things that weren't there, such as ractives. Although, when people used them for purposes other than entertainment, they used a fancier word: phenomenoscope.

  You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

  Judge Fang was surprisingly young, probably not out of his thirties yet. He sat at the red cloth-covered table and started to talk in Chinese. His two gofers stood behind him. A Sikh was here; he stood up and said a few words back to the Judge in Chinese. Bud couldn't figure out why there was a Sikh here, but he'd become accustomed to Sikhs turning up where they were least sought.

  Judge Fang said in a New York City accent, “The representative from Protocol has suggested that we conduct these proceedings in English. Any objections?”

  Also present was the guy he had mugged, who was holding the one arm rather stiffly but seemed otherwise healthy. His wife was with him too.

  “I'm Judge Fang,” the Judge continued, looking straight at Bud. “You can address me as Your Honor. Now, Bud, Mr. Kwamina here has accused you of certain activities that are illegal in the Coastal Republic. You are also accused of actionable offenses under the Common Economic Protocol, to which we are a subscriber. These offenses are closely related to the crimes I already mentioned, but slightly different. Are you getting all this?”

  “Not exactly, Your Honor,” Bud said.

  “We think you mugged this guy and blew a hole in his arm,” Judge Fang said, “which is frowned upon. Capiche?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Judge Fang nodded at the Sikh, who took the cue.

  “The CEP code,” said the Sikh, “governs all kinds of economic interactions between people and organizations. Theft is one such interaction. Maiming is another, insofar as it affects the victim's ability to fend for himself economically. As Protocol does not aspire to sovereign status, we work in cooperation with the indigenous justice system of CEP signatories in order to pursue such cases.”

  “You familiar with the Confucian system of justice, Bud?” said Judge Fang. Bud's head was beginning to get dizzy from snapping back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “I'm guessing no. Okay, even though the Chinese Coastal Republic is no longer strictly or even vaguely Confucian, we still run our judicial system that way—we've had it for a few thousand years, and we think it's not half bad. The general idea is that as judge, I actually perform several roles at once: detective, judge, jury, and if need be, executioner.”

  Bud snickered at this crack, then noticed that Judge Fang did not appear to be in an especially jocose mood. His New Yorkish ways had initially fooled Bud into thinking that Judge Fang was something of a Regular Guy.

  “So in the first-mentioned role,” Judge Fang continued, “I would like for you, Mr. Kwamina, to tell me whether you recognize the suspect.”

  “He is the man,” said Mr. Kwamina, aiming one index finger at Bud's forehead, “who threatened me, shot me, and stole my money.”

  “And Mrs. Kum?” Judge Fang said. Then, as an aside to Bud, he added, “In their culture, the woman does not adopt her husband's family name.”

  Mrs. Kum just nodded at Bud and said, “He is the guilty party.”

  “Miss Pao, do you have anything to add?”

  The tiny woman in the spectacles looked at Bud and said, in Texan-accented English, “From this man's forehead I removed a voice-activated nanoprojectile launcher, colloquially known as a skull gun, loaded with three types of ammunition, including so-called Crippler rounds of the type used against Mr. Kwamina. Nanopresence examination of the serial numbers on those rounds, and comparison of the same with fragments removed from Mr. Kwamina's wound, indicated that the round used on Mr. Kwamina was fired from the gun embedded in the suspect's forehead.”

  “Dang,” Bud said.

  “Okay,” Judge Fang said, and reached up
with one hand to rub his temples for just a moment. Then he turned to Bud. “You're guilty.”

  “Hey! Don't I get to put up a defense?” Bud said. “I object!”

  “Don't be an asshole,” Judge Fang said.

  The Sikh said, “As the offender has no significant assets, and as the value of his labor would not be sufficient to compensate the victim for his injury, Protocol terminates its interest in this case.”

  “Got it,” Judge Fang said. “Okay, Bud, my man, do you have any dependents?”

  “I got a girlfriend,” Bud said. “She's got a son named Harv who is my boy, unless we counted wrong. And I heard she's pregnant.”

  “You think she is, or you know she is?”

  “She was last time I checked—a couple months ago.”

  “What's her name?”

  “Tequila.”

  A muffled snort came from one of the Protocol trainees—the young woman—who put one hand over her mouth. The Sikh appeared to be biting his lip.

  “Tequila?” Judge Fang said, incredulous. It was becoming clear that Judge Fang tried a lot of these cases and relished the odd scrap of entertainment value.

  “There are nineteen women named Tequila in the Leased Territories,” said Miss Pao, reading something out of her phenomenoscope, “one of whom delivered a baby girl named Nellodee three days ago. She also has a five-year-old boy named Harvard.”

  “Oh, wow,” Bud said.

  “Congratulations, Bud, you're a pa,” Judge Fang said. “I gather from your reaction that this comes as something of a surprise. It seems evident that your relationship with this Tequila is tenuous, and so I do not find that there are any mitigating circumstances I should take into account in sentencing. That being the case, I would like you to go out that door over there”—Judge Fang pointed to a door in the corner of the courtroom—“and all the way down the steps. Leave through the exit door and cross the street, and you will find a pier sticking out into the river. Walk to the end of that pier until you are standing on the red part and await further instructions.”

  Bud moved tentatively at first, but Judge Fang gestured impatiently, so finally he went out the door and down the stairway and out onto the Bund, the street that ran along the waterfront of the Huang Pu River, and that was lined with big old European-style buildings. A pedestrian tunnel took him under the road to the actual waterfront, which was crowded with Chinese people strolling around, and legless wretches dragging themselves hither and thither. Some middle-aged Chinese people had set up a sound system playing archaic music and were ballroom-dancing. The music and dance style would have been offensively quaint to Bud at any other point in his life, but now for some reason the sight of these somewhat fleshy, settled-looking people, twirling around gently in one another's arms, made him feel sad.

  Eventually he found the right pier. As he strolled out onto it, he had to shoulder his way past some slopes carrying a long bundle wrapped in cloth, who were trying to get onto the pier ahead of him. The view was nice here; the old buildings of the Bund behind him, the vertiginous neon wall of the Pudong Economic Zone exploding from the opposite bank and serving as backdrop for heavy river traffic—mostly chains of low-lying barges.

  The pier did not turn red until the very end, where it began to slope down steeply toward the river. It had been coated with some kind of grippy stuff so his feet wouldn't fly out from under him. He turned around and looked back up at the domed court building, searching for a window where he might make out the face of Judge Fang or one of his gofers. The family of Chinese was following him down the pier, carrying their long bundle, which was draped with garlands of flowers and, as Bud now realized, was probably the corpse of a family member. He had heard about these piers; they were called funeral piers.

  Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

  Nell learns to work the matter compiler; youthful

  indiscretions; all is made better.

  Nell had grown too long for her old crib mattress, and so Harv, her big brother, said he would help get a new one. He was big enough, he offhandedly mentioned, to do that sort of thing. Nell followed him into the kitchen, which housed several important boxy entities with prominent doors. Some were warm, some cool, some had windows, some made noises. Nell had frequently seen Harv, or Tequila, or one of Tequila's boyfriends, removing food from them, in one stage or another of doneness.

  One of the boxes was called the M.C. It was built into the wall over the counter. Nell dragged a chair and climbed up to watch as Harv worked at it. The front of the M.C. was a mediatron, which meant anything that had pictures moving around on it, or sound coming out of it, or both. As Harv poked it with his fingers and spoke to it, little moving pictures danced around. It reminded her of the ractives she played on the big mediatron in the living room, when it wasn't being used by someone bigger.

  “What are those?” Nell said.

  “Mediaglyphics,” Harv said coolly. “Someday you'll learn how to read.”

  Nell could already read some of them.

  “Red or blue?” Harv asked magnanimously.

  “Red.”

  Harv gave it an especially dramatic poke, and then a new mediaglyphic came up, a white circle with a narrow green wedge at the top. The wedge got wider and wider. The M.C. played a little tune that meant you were supposed to wait. Harv went to the fridge and got himself a juice box and one for Nell too. He looked at the M.C. disdainfully. “This takes so long, it's ridiculous,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “ 'Cause we got a cheap Feed, just a few grams per second. Pathetic.”

  “Why do we got a cheap Feed?”

  “Because it's a cheap house.”

  “Why is it a cheap house?”

  “Because that's all we can afford because of the economics,” Harv said. “Mom's gotta compete with all kinds of Chinese and stuff that don't have any self-respect and so they'll work for nothing. So Mom's gotta work for nothing.” He looked at the M.C. again and shook his head. “Pathetic. At the Flea Circus they got a Feed that's, like, this big around.” He touched his fingertips together in front of him and made a big circle with his arms. “But this one's probly like the size of your pinkie.”

  He stepped away from the M.C. as if he could no longer stand to share a room with it, sucked powerfully on his juice box, and wandered into the living room to get in a ractive. Nell just watched the green wedge get bigger and bigger until it filled half the circle, and then it began to look like a green circle with a white wedge in it, getting narrower and narrower, and finally the music came to a bouncy conclusion just as the white wedge vanished.

  “It's done!” she said.

  Harv paused his ractive, swaggered into the kitchen, and poked a mediaglyphic that was an animated picture of a door swinging open. The M.C. took to hissing loudly. Harv watched her scared face and ruffled her hair; she could not fend him off because she had her hands over her ears. “Got to release the vacuum,” he explained.

  The sound ended, and the door popped open. Inside the M.C., folded up neatly, was Nell's new red mattress.

  “Give it to me! Give it to me!” Nell shouted, furious to see Harv's hands on it. Harv amused himself for a second playing keep-away, then gave it to her. She ran to the room that she shared with Harv and slammed the door as hard as she could. Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple were waiting for her. “I got us a new bed,” she told them. She grabbed her old crib mattress and heaved it into the corner, then unfolded the new one precisely on the floor. It was disappointingly thin, more blanket than mattress. But when she had it all laid out on the floor, it made a whooshing noise—not loud—the sound of her brother's breathing late at night. It thickened as it inhaled, and when it was done, it looked like a real mattress. She gathered Dinosaur and Duck and Peter and Purple up into her arms and then, just to make sure, jumped up and down on it several hundred times.

  “You like it?” Harv said. He had opened the door.
<
br />   “No! Get out!” Nell screamed.

  “Nell, it's my room too,” Harv said. “I gotta deke your old one.”

  Later, Harv went out with his buddies, and Nell was alone in the house for a while. She had decided that her kids needed mattresses too, and so she dragged the chair to the counter and climbed up on top, right in front of the M.C., and tried to read the mediaglyphics. A lot of them she didn't recognize. But she remembered that Tequila just used words when she couldn't read something, so she tried talking to it instead.

  “Please secure the permission of an adult,” the M.C. said, over and over again.

  Now she knew why Harv always poked at things rather than talking to them. She poked at the M.C. for a long time until finally she came to the same mediaglyphics that Harv had used to choose her mattress. One showed a man and woman sleeping in a very large bed. A man and woman in a somewhat smaller bed. A man by himself. A child by herself. A baby.

  Nell poked at the baby. The white circle and red wedge appeared, the music played, the M.C. hissed and opened.

  She spread it out on the floor and formally presented it to Dinosaur, who was too little to know how to jump up and down on it; so Nell showed him for a while. Then she went back to the M.C. and got mattresses for Duck, Peter, and Purple. Now, much of the room was covered with mattresses, and she thought how fun it would be to have the whole room just be one big mattress, so she made a couple of the very largest size. Then she made a new mattress for Tequila and another new one for her boyfriend Rog.

  When Harv came back, his reaction swerved between terror and awe. “Mom's gonna have Rog beat the shit out of us,” he said. “We gotta deke all this stuff now.”

  Easy come, easy go. Nell explained the situation to her kids and then helped Harv stuff all of the mattresses, except her own, into the deke hopper. Harv had to use all his strength to shove the door closed. “Now we just better hope this stuff all dekes before Mom gets home,” he said. “It's gonna take a while.”

  Later they went to bed and both lay awake for a while, dreading the sound of the front door opening. But neither Mom nor Rog came home that night. Mom finally showed up in the morning, changed into her maid outfit, and ran for the bus to the Vicky Clave, but she just left all her garbage on the floor instead of throwing it in the hopper. When Harv checked the hopper later, it was empty.