The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  “We dodged a bullet,” he said. “You gotta be careful how you use the matter compiler, Nell.”

  “What's a matter compiler?”

  “We call it the M.C. for short.”

  “Why?”

  “Because M.C. stands for matter compiler, or so they say.”

  “Why?”

  “It just does. In letters, I guess.”

  “What are letters?”

  “Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words.”

  Hackworth arrives at work; a visit to the Design

  Works; Mr. Cotton's vocation.

  Rain beaded on the specular toes of Hackworth's boots as he strode under the vaulting wrought-iron gate. The little beads reflected the silvery gray light of the sky as they rolled off onto the pedomotive's tread plates, and dripped to the gray-brown cobblestones with each stride. Hackworth excused himself through a milling group of uncertain Hindus. Their hard shoes were treacherous on the cobblestones, their chins were in the air so that their high white collars would not saw their heads off. They had arisen many hours ago in their tiny high-rise warrens, their human coin lockers on the island south of New Chusan, which was Hindustani. They had crossed into Shanghai in the wee hours on autoskates and velocipedes, probably paid off some policemen, made their way to the Causeway joining New Chusan to the city. Machine-Phase Systems Limited knew that they were coming, because they came every day. The company could have set up an employment office closer to the Causeway, or even in Shanghai itself. But the company liked to have job-seekers come all the way to the main campus to fill out their applications. The difficulty of getting here prevented people from coming on a velleity, and the eternal presence of these people—like starlings peering down hungrily at a picnic—reminded everyone who was lucky enough to have a job that others were waiting to take their place.

  The Design Works emulated a university campus, in more ways than its architects had really intended. If a campus was a green quadrilateral described by hulking, hederated Gothics, then this was a campus. But if a campus was also a factory of sorts, most of whose population sat in rows and columns in large stuffy rooms and did essentially the same things all day, then the Design Works was a campus for that reason too.

  Hackworth detoured through Merkle Hall. It was Gothic and very large, like most of the Design Works. Its vaulted ceiling was decorated with a hard fresco consisting of paint on plaster. Since this entire building, except for the fresco, had been grown straight from the Feed, it would have been easier to build a mediatron into the ceiling and set it to display a soft fresco, which could have been changed from time to time. But neo-Victorians almost never used mediatrons. Hard art demanded commitment from the artist. It could only be done once, and if you screwed it up, you had to live with the consequences.

  The centerpiece of the fresco was a flock of cybernetic cherubs, each shouldering a spherical atom, converging on some central work-in-progress, a construct of some several hundred atoms, radially symmetric, perhaps intended to look like a bearing or motor. Brooding over the whole thing, quite large but obviously not to scale, was a white-coated Engineer with a monocular nanophenomenoscope strapped to his head. No one really used them because you couldn't get depth perception, but it looked better on the fresco because you could see the Engineer's other eye, steel-blue, dilated, scanning infinity like the steel oculus of Arecibo. With one hand the Engineer stroked his waxed mustache. The other was thrust into a nanomanipulator, and it was made obvious, through glorious overuse of radiant tromp l'oeil, that the atom-humping cherubs were all dancing to his tune, naiads to the Engineer's Neptune.

  The corners of the fresco were occupied with miscellaneous busywork; in the upper left, Feynman and Drexler and Merkle, Chen and Singh and Finkle-McGraw reposed on a numinous buckyball, some of them reading books and some pointing toward the work-in-progress in a manner that implied constructive criticism. In the upper right was Queen Victoria II, who managed to look serene despite the gaudiness of her perch, a throne of solid diamond. The bottom fringe of the work was crowded with small figures, mostly children with the occasional long-suffering mom, ordered chronologically. On the left were the spirits of generations past who had shown up too early to enjoy the benefits of nanotechnology and (not explicitly shown, but somewhat ghoulishly implied) croaked from obsolete causes such as cancer, scurvy, boiler explosions, derailments, drive-by shootings, pogroms, blitzkriegs, mine shaft collapses, ethnic cleansing, meltdowns, running with scissors, eating Drano, heating a cold house with charcoal briquets, and being gored by oxen. Surprisingly, none of them seemed sullen; they were all watching the activities of the Engineer and his cherubic workforce, their cuddly, uplifted faces illuminated by the light streaming from the center, liberated (as Hackworth the engineer literal-mindedly supposed) by the binding energy of the atoms as they plummeted into their assigned potential wells.

  The children in the center had their backs to Hackworth and were mostly seen in silhouette, looking directly up and raising their arms toward the light. The kids in bottom right balanced the angelic host on the bottom left; these were the spirits of unborn children yet to benefit from the Engineer's work, though they certainly looked eager to get born as soon as possible. Their backdrop was a luminescent, undulous curtain, much like the aurora, which was actually a continuation of the flowing skirts of Victoria II seated on her throne above.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Cotton,” Hackworth said, almost sotto voce. He had worked here once, for several years, and knew the etiquette. A hundred designers were sitting in the hall, neatly arranged in rows. All had their heads wrapped up in phenomenoscopes. The only persons who were aware of Hackworth's presence in the hall were Supervising Engineer Däurig, his lieutenants Chu, DeGrado, and Beyerley, and a few water-boys and couriers standing erect at their stations around the perimeter. It was bad form to startle the engineers, so you approached them loudly and spoke to them softly.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hackworth,” Cotton said.

  “Good morning, Demetrius. Take your time.”

  “I'll be with you in a moment, sir.”

  Cotton was a southpaw. His left hand was in a black glove. Laced through it was a network of invisibly tiny rigid structures, motors, position sensors, and tactile stimulators. The sensors kept track of his hand's position, how much each joint of each knuckle was bent, and so on. The rest of the gear made him feel as though he were touching real objects.

  The glove's movements were limited to a roughly hemispherical domain with a radius of about one cubit; as long as his elbow stayed on or near its comfy elastomeric rest, his hand was free. The glove was attached to a web of infinitesimal wires that emerged from filatories placed here and there around the workstation. The filatories acted like motorized reels, taking up slack and occasionally pulling the glove one way or another to simulate external forces. In fact they were not motors but little wire factories that generated wire when it was needed and, when slack needed to be taken up or a wire needed a tug, sucked it back in and digested it. Each wire was surrounded by a loose accordion sleeve a couple of millimeters in diameter, which was there for safety, lest visitors stick their hands in and slice off fingers on the invisible wires.

  Cotton was working with some kind of elaborate structure consisting, probably, of several hundred thousand atoms. Hackworth could see this because each workstation had a mediatron providing a two-dimensional view of what the user was seeing. This made it easy for the supervisors to roam up and down the aisles and see at a glance what each employee was up to.

  The structures these people worked with seemed painfully bulky to Hackworth, even though he'd done it himself for a few years. The people here in Merkle Hall were all working on mass-market consumer products, which by and large were not very demanding. They worked in symbiosis with big software that handled repetitive aspects of the job. It was a fast
way to design products, which was essential when going after the fickle and impressionable consumer market. But systems designed that way always ended up being enormous. An automated design system could always make something work by throwing more atoms at it.

  Every engineer in this hall, designing those nanotechnological toasters and hair dryers, wished he could have Hackworth's job in Bespoke, where concinnity was an end in itself, where no atom was wasted and every subsystem was designed specifically for the task at hand. Such work demanded intuition and creativity, qualities neither abundant nor encouraged here in Merkle Hall. But from time to time, over golf or karaoke or cigars, Däurig or one of the other supervisors would mention some youngster who showed promise.

  Because Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw was paying for Hackworth's current project, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, price was no object. The Duke would brook no malingering or corner-cutting, so everything was as start as Bespoke could make it, every atom could be justified.

  Even so, there was nothing especially interesting about the power supply being created for the Primer, which consisted of batteries of the same kind used to run everything from toys to airships. So Hackworth had farmed that part of the job out to Cotton, just to see whether he had potential.

  Cotton's gloved hand fluttered and probed like a stuck horsefly in the center of the black web. On the mediatronic screen attached to his workstation, Hackworth saw that Cotton was gripping a medium-size (by Merkle Hall standards) subassembly, presumably belonging to some much larger nanotechnological system.

  The standard color scheme used in these phenomenoscopes depicted carbon atoms in green, sulfur in yellow, oxygen in red, and hydrogen in blue. Cotton's assembly, as seen from a distance, was generally turquoise because it consisted mostly of carbon and hydrogen, and because Hackworth's point of view was so far away that the thousands of individual atoms all blended together. It was a gridwork of long, straight, but rather bumpy rods laid across each other at right angles. Hackworth recognized it as a rod logic system—a mechanical computer.

  Cotton was trying to snap it together with some larger part. From this Hackworth inferred that the auto-assembly process (which Cotton would have tried first) hadn't worked quite right, and so now Cotton was trying to maneuver the part into place by hand. This wouldn't fix what was wrong with it, but the telæsthetic feedback coming into his hand through those wires would give him insight as to which bumps were lining up with which holes and which weren't. It was an intuitive approach to the job, a practice furiously proscribed by the lecturers at the Royal Nanotechnological Institute but popular among Hackworth's naughty, clever colleagues.

  “Okay,” Cotton finally said, “I see the problem.” His hand relaxed. On the mediatron, the subassembly drifted away from the main group under its own momentum, then slowed, stopped, and began to fall back toward it, drawn in by weak van der Waals forces. Cotton's right hand was resting on a small chordboard; he whacked a key that froze the simulation, then, as Hackworth noted approvingly, groped the keys for a few seconds, typing in some documentation. Meanwhile he was withdrawing his left hand from the glove and using it to pull the rig off his head; its straps and pads left neat indentations in the nap of his hair.

  “Is this the smart makeup?” Hackworth said, nodding at the screen.

  “The next step beyond,” Cotton said. “Remote-control.”

  “Controlled how? Yuvree?” Hackworth said, meaning Universal Voice Recognition Interface.

  “A specialised variant thereof, yes sir,” Cotton said. Then, lowering his voice, “Word has it they considered makeup with nanoreceptors for galvanic skin response, pulse, respiration, and so on, so that it would respond to the wearer's emotional state. This superficial, need I say it, cosmetic issue concealed an undertow that pulled them out into deep and turbulent philosophical waters—”

  “What? Philosophy of makeup?”

  “Think about it, Mr. Hackworth—is the function of makeup to respond to one's emotions—or precisely not to do so?”

  “These waters are already over my head,” Hackworth admitted.

  “You'll be wanting to know about the power supply for Runcible,” Cotton said, using the code name for the Illustrated Primer. Cotton had no idea what Runcible was, just that it needed a relatively long-lived power supply.

  “Yes.”

  “The modifications you requested are complete. I ran the tests you specified plus a few others that occurred to me—all of them are documented here.” Cotton grabbed the heavy brasslike pull of his desk drawer and paused for a fraction of a second while the embedded fingerprint-recognition logic did its work. The drawer unlocked itself, and Cotton pulled it open to reveal a timeless assortment of office drawer miscellany, including several sheets of paper—some blank, some printed, some scrawled on, and one sheet that was blank except for the word RUNCIBLE printed at the top in Cotton's neat draughtsman's hand. Cotton pulled this one out and spoke to it: “Demetrius James Cotton transferring all privileges to Mr. Hackworth.”

  “John Percival Hackworth in receipt,” Hackworth said, taking the page from Cotton. “Thank you, Mr. Cotton.”

  “You're welcome, sir.”

  “Cover sheet,” Hackworth said to the piece of paper, and then it had pictures and writing on it, and the pictures moved—a schematic of a machine-phase system cycling.

  “If I'm not being too forward by enquiring,” Cotton said, “will you be compiling Runcible soon?”

  “Today most likely,” Hackworth said.

  “Please feel free to inform me of any glitches,” Cotton said, just for the sake of form.

  “Thank you, Demetrius,” Hackworth said. “Letter fold,” he said to the piece of paper, and it creased itself neatly into thirds. Hackworth put it in the breast pocket of his jacket and walked out of Merkle Hall.

  Particulars of Nell&Harv's domestic situation;

  Harv brings back a wonder.

  Whenever Nell's clothes got too small for her, Harv would pitch them into the deke bin and then have the M.C. make new ones. Sometimes, if Tequila was going to take Nell someplace where they would see other moms with other daughters, she'd use the M.C. to make Nell a special dress with lace and ribbons, so that the other moms would see how special Nell was and how much Tequila loved her. The kids would sit in front of the mediatron and watch a passive, and the moms would sit nearby and talk sometimes or watch the mediatron sometimes. Nell listened to them, especially when Tequila was talking, but she didn't really understand all the words.

  She knew, because Tequila repeated it often, that when Tequila got pregnant with Nell, she had been using something called the Freedom Machine—a mite that lived in your womb and caught eggs and ate them. Victorians didn't believe in them, but you could buy them from Chinese and Hindustanis, who, of course, had no scruples. You never knew when they'd all gotten too worn-out to work anymore, which is how Tequila had ended up with Nell. One of the women said you could buy a special kind of Freedom Machine that would go in there and eat a fetus. Nell didn't know what a fetus was, but all of the women apparently did, and thought that the idea was the kind of thing that only the Chinese or Hindustanis would ever think up. Tequila said she knew all about that sort of Freedom Machine but didn't want to use one, because she was afraid it might be gross.

  Sometimes Tequila would bring back pieces of real cloth from her work, because she said that the rich Victorians she worked for would never miss them. She never let Nell play with them, and so Nell did not understand the difference between real cloth and the kind that came from the M.C.

  Harv found a piece of it once. The Leased Territories, where they lived, had their own beach, and Harv and his friends liked to go prospecting there, early in the morning, for things that had drifted across from Shanghai, or that the Vickys in New Atlantis Clave had flushed down their water-closets. What they were really looking for was pieces of stretchy, slippery Nanobar. Sometimes the Nanobar was in the shape of condoms, sometimes it came in larg
er chunks that were used to wrap things up and preserve them from the depredations of mites. In any case, it could be gathered up and sold to certain persons who knew how to clean it and weld one piece of Nanobar to another and make it into protective suits and other shapes.

  Harv had quietly stuffed the piece of cloth into his shoe and then limped home, not saying a word to anyone. That night Nell, lying on her red mattress, was troubled by vague dreams about strange lights and finally woke up to see a blue monster in her room: It was Harv underneath his blanket with a torch, doing something. She climbed out very slowly so as not to disturb Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple, and stuck her head beneath the blanket, and found Harv, holding the little flashlight in his teeth, working at something with a pair of toothpicks.

  “Harv,” she said, “are you working on a mite?”

  “No, dummy.” Harv's voice was hushed, and he had to mumble around the little button-shaped torch he was holding in his teeth. “Mites are lots smaller. See, look!”

  She crawled forward a little more, drawn as much by warmth and security as by curiosity, and saw a limp mottled brown thing a few centimeters on a side, fuzzy around the edges, resting on Harv's crossed ankles.

  “What is it?”

  “It's magic. Watch this,” Harv said. And worrying at it with his toothpick, he teased something loose.

  “It's got string coming out of it!” Nell said.

  “Sssh!” Harv gripped the end of the thread beneath his thumbnail and pulled. It looked quite short, but it lengthened as he pulled, and the fuzzy edge of the piece of fabric waffled too fast to see, and then the thread had come loose entirely. He held it up for inspection, then let it drift down onto a heap of others just like it.