The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  “Can't say I'm surprised, really,” said Finkle-McGraw. “I just wish it were a completely self-contained system.”

  “It might as well be, sir. At any given time there are tens of millions of professional ractors in their stages all over the world, in every time zone, ready to take on this kind of work at an instant's notice. We are planning to authorise payment at a relatively high rate, which should bring in only the best talent. You won't be disappointed with the results.”

  Nell's second experience with the Primer; the story

  of Princess Nell in a nutshell.

  Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.

  Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a Raven would come to visit them and tell them of the wonderful things over the sea in the Land Beyond. One day the Raven helped Princess Nell escape from the castle, but alas, poor Harv was too big and had to stay locked up behind the castle's great iron door with twelve locks.

  Princess Nell loved Harv like a brother and refused to abandon him, so she and her friends, Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple, traveled over the sea in a little red boat, having many adventures, until they came to the Land Beyond. This was divided into twelve countries each ruled by a Faery King or a Faery Queen. Each King or Queen had a wonderful Castle, and in each Castle was a Treasury containing gold and jewels, and in each Treasury was a jeweled Key that would open one of the twelve locks on the iron door of the Dark Castle.

  Princess Nell and her friends had many adventures as they visited each of the twelve kingdoms and collected the twelve keys. Some they got by persuasion, some by cleverness, and some they took in battle. By the end of the quest, some of Nell's four friends had died, and some had gone their separate ways. But Nell was not alone, for she had become a great heroine during her adventures.

  In a great ship, accompanied by many soldiers, servants, and elders, Nell traveled back over the sea to the island of the Dark Castle. As she approached the iron door, Harv saw her from the top of a tower and gruffly told her to go away, for Princess Nell had changed so much during her Quest that Harv no longer recognized her. “I have come to set you free,” Princess Nell said. Harv again told her to go away, saying that he had all the freedom he wanted within the walls of the Dark Castle.

  Princess Nell put the twelve keys into the twelve locks and began to open them one by one. When the rusty door of the castle finally creaked open, she saw Harv standing with a bow at the ready, and an arrow drawn, pointed straight at her heart. He let fly the arrow, and it struck her in the chest and would have killed her except that she was wearing a locket Harv had given her many years ago, before she left the castle. The arrow struck and shattered the locket. In the same moment, Harv was cut down by an arrow from one of Princess Nell's soldiers. Nell rushed to her fallen brother to comfort him and wept over his body for three days and three nights. When finally she dried her eyes, she saw that the Dark Castle had become glorious; for the river of tears that had flowed from her eyes had watered the grounds, and beautiful gardens and forests had sprung up overnight, and the Dark Castle itself was no longer dark, but a shining beacon filled with delightful things. Princess Nell lived in that castle and ruled over that island for the rest of her days, and every morning she would go for a walk in the garden where Harv had fallen. She had many adventures and became a great Queen, and in time she met and married a Prince, and had many children, and lived happily ever after.

  “What's an adventure?” Nell said.

  The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. Nell spent a long time looking at all of the pictures, and after awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.

  Judge Fang visits his district; Miss Pao arranges a

  demonstration; the case of the stolen book

  takes on unexpected depth.

  As Judge Fang proceeded across the Causeway on his chevaline, accompanied by his assistants, Chang and Miss Pao, he saw the Leased Territories wreathed in a mephitic fog. The emerald highlands of Atlantis/Shanghai floated above the squalor. A host of mirrored aerostats surrounded that lofty territory, protecting it from the larger and more obvious sorts of intruders; from here, miles away, the individual pods were of course not visible, but they could be seen in the aggregate as a subtle gleam in the air, a vast bubble, perfectly transparent, enveloping the sacrosanct territory of the Anglo-Americans, stretching this way and that in the shifting winds but never tearing.

  The view was spoiled as they drew closer to the Leased Territories and entered into their eternal fogs. Several times as they rode through the streets of the L.T., Judge Fang made a peculiar gesture: He curled the fingers of his right hand into a cylinder, as though grasping an invisible stalk of bamboo. He cupped his other hand beneath, forming a dark enclosed cavity, and then peeked into it with one eye. When he stared into the pocket of air thus formed, he saw the darkness filled with coruscating light—something like staring into a cavern filled with fireflies, except that these lights came in all colors, and all of the colors were as pure and clear as jewels.

  People who lived in the L.T. and who performed this gesture frequently developed a feel for what was going on in the microscopic world. They could tell when something was up. If the gesture was performed during a toner war, the result was spectacular.

  Today it was nowhere near toner war levels, but it was fairly intense. Judge Fang suspected that this had something to do with the purpose of this errand, which Miss Pao had declined to explain.

  They ended up in a restaurant. Miss Pao insisted on a table out on the terrace, even though it looked like rain. They ended up overlooking the street three stories below. Even at that distance it was difficult to make out faces through the fog.

  Miss Pao drew a rectangular package from her bag, wrapped up in Nanobar. She unwrapped it and drew out two objects of roughly the same size and shape: a book and a block of wood. She placed them side by side on the table. Then she ignored them, turning her attention to the menu. She continued to ignore them for several minutes more, as she and Chang and Judge Fang sipped tea, exchanged polite chatter, and began to eat their meals.

  “At Your Honor's convenience,” Miss Pao said, “I would invite you to examine the two objects I laid on the table.”

  Judge Fang was startled to notice that, while the block's appearance had not changed, the book had become covered in a layer of thick gray dust, as if it had been growing mildew for several decades.

  “Oooh,” Chang blurted, sucking a lengthy skein of noodles into his maw and bulging his eyes in the direction of this peculiar exhibit.

  Judge Fang rose, walked around the table, and bent down for a closer look. The gray dust was not uniformly distributed; it was much thicker toward the edges of the book cover. He opened the book and was startled to notice that the dust had infiltrated deep between the pages.

  “This is dust with a purpose in life,” Judge Fang observed.

  Miss Pao glanced significantly at the block of wood. Judge Fang picked it up and examined it on all sides; it was clean.

  “This stuff is discriminating too!” Judge Fang said.

  “It is Confucian toner,” Chang said, finally choking down his noodles. “It has a passion for books.”

  The Judge smiled tolerantly and looked to Miss Pao for an explanation. “You have examined this new species of mite, I take it?”

  “It is more interesting than that,” Miss Pao said. “Within the last week, not one but two new species of mite have appeared in the Leased Territories—both programmed to seek out anyt
hing that looks like a book.” She reached into her bag again and handed her master a rolled-up piece of mediatronic paper.

  A waitress scurried up and helped move the dishes and teacups aside. Judge Fang unrolled the page and anchored it with various small items of faience. The paper was divided into two panes, each containing a magnified view of a microscopic device. Judge Fang could see that both were made to navigate through the air, but beyond that, they could hardly have been more different. One of them looked like a work of nature; it had several bizarre and elaborate arms and sported four enormous, wildly involuted, scooplike devices, arranged ninety degrees apart.

  “The ears of a bat!” Chang exclaimed, tracing their impossibly complex whorls with the tip of a chopstick. Judge Fang said nothing but reminded himself that this sort of quick insight was just the sort of thing Chang excelled at.

  “It appears to use echolocation, like a bat,” Miss Pao admitted. “The other one, as you can see, is of a radically different design.”

  The other mite looked like a spacecraft as envisioned by Jules Verne. It had a streamlined, teardrop shape, a pair of manipulator arms folded neatly against its fuselage, and a deep cylindrical cavity in the nose that Judge Fang took to be its eye. “This one sees light in the ultraviolet range,” Miss Pao said. “Despite their differences, each does the same thing: searches for books. When it finds a book, it lands on the cover and crawls to the edge, then creeps between the pages and examines the internal structure of the paper.”

  “What is it looking for?”

  “There is no way to tell, short of disassembling its internal computer system and decompiling its program—which is difficult,” Miss Pao said, with characteristic understatement. “When it finds that it has been investigating a normal book made of old-fashioned paper, it deactivates and becomes dust.”

  “So there are many dirty books in the Leased Territories now,” Chang said.

  “There aren't that many books to begin with,” Judge Fang said. Miss Pao and Chang chuckled, but the Judge showed no sign that he had been making a joke; it was just an observation.

  “What conclusions do you draw, Miss Pao?” the Judge said.

  “Two different parties are searching the Leased Territories for the same book,” Miss Pao said.

  She did not have to state that the target of this search was probably the book stolen from the gentleman named Hackworth.

  “Can you speculate as to the identity of these parties?”

  Miss Pao said, “Of course, neither device carries a maker's mark. The bat-eared one has Dr. X written all over it; most of its features appear to be evolved, not engineered, and the Doctor's Flea Circus is nothing more than an effort to collect evolved mites with useful features. At a first glance, the other device could have come from any of the engineering works associated with major phyles—Nippon, New Atlantis, Hindustan, the First Distributed Republic being prime suspects. But on deeper examination I find a level of elegance—”

  “Elegance?”

  “Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain—there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack—signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.”

  “Or an engineer and an artifex?” Judge Fang said.

  A trace of a smile came across Miss Pao's face.

  “I fear that I have enmeshed that little girl in a much deeper business than I ever imagined,” Judge Fang said. He rolled up the paper and handed it back to Miss Pao. Chang set the Judge's teacup back in front of him and poured more tea. Without thinking about it, the Judge put his thumb and fingertips together and tapped them lightly against the tabletop several times.

  This was an ancient gesture in China. The story was that one of the early Emperors liked to dress as a commoner and travel about the Middle Kingdom to see how the peasants were getting along. Frequently, as he and his staff were sitting about the table in some inn, he would pour tea for everyone. They could not kowtow to their lord without giving away his identity, so they would make this gesture, using their hand to imitate the act of kneeling. Now Chinese people used it to thank each other at the dinner table. From time to time, Judge Fang caught himself doing it, and thought about what a peculiar thing it was to be Chinese in a world without an Emperor.

  He sat, hands folded into sleeves, and thought about this and other issues for several minutes, watching the vapor rise from his tea and form into a fog as it condensed round the bodies of micro-aerostats.

  “Soon we will obtrude upon Mr. Hackworth and Dr. X and learn more by observing their reactions. I will consider the right way to set about this. In the meantime, let us concern ourselves with the girl. Chang, visit her apartment building and see whether there has been any trouble there—suspicious characters hanging about.”

  “Sir, with all respect, everyone who lives in the girl's building is a suspicious character.”

  “You know what I mean,” said the Judge with some asperity. “The building should have a system for filtering nanosites from the air. If this system is working properly, and if the girl does not take the book out of her building, then she should go unnoticed by these.” The Judge drew a streak through the dust on the book's cover and smeared the toner between his fingers. “Speak with the landlord of her building, and let him know that his air-filtering system is due for an inspection, and that this is genuine, not just a solicitation for a bribe.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chang said. He pushed his chair back, rose, bowed, and strode out of the restaurant, pausing only to extract a toothpick from the dispenser by the exit. It would have been acceptable for him to finish his lunch, but Chang had, in the past, evinced concern for the girl's welfare, and apparently wanted to waste no time.

  “Miss Pao, plant recording surveillance devices in the girl's flat. At first we will change and review the tapes every day. If the book is not detected soon, we will begin changing them every week.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miss Pao said. She slipped on her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Colored light reflected from the surfaces of her eyes as she lost herself in some kind of interface. Judge Fang refilled his tea, cupped it in the palm of his hand, and went for a stroll round the edge of the terrace. He had much more important things to think about than this girl and her book; but he suspected that from now on he would be thinking about little else.

  Description of Old Shanghai; situation of the

  Theatre Parnasse; Miranda's occupation.

  Before the Europeans got their hooks into it, Shanghai had been a walled village on the Huang Pu River, a few miles south of its confluence with the estuary of the Yangtze. Much of the architecture was very sophisticated Ming Dynasty stuff, private gardens for rich families, a shopping street here and there concealing interior slums, a rickety, vertiginous teahouse rising from an island in the center of a pond. More recently the wall had been torn down and a sort of beltway built on its foundations. The old French concession wrapped around the north side, and in that neighborhood, on a corner looking across the ring road into the old city, the Theatre Parnasse had been constructed during the late 1800s. Miranda had been working there for five years, but the experience had been so intense that it often seemed more like five days.

  The Parnasse had been built by Europeans back when they were serious and unapologetic about their Europeanness. The facade was classical: a three-quarter-round portico on the streetcorner, supported by Corinthian columns, all done in white limestone. The portico was belted by a white marquee, circa 1990, outlined by tubes of purple and pink neon. It would have been easy enough to tear it off and replace it with something mediatronic, but they enjoyed hauling the bamboo ladders out from the set shop and snapping the black plastic letters into place, advertising whatever they were doing tonight. Sometimes they would lower the big mediatronic screen and show movies, and Westerners would come from all over Greater S
hanghai, dressed up in their tuxedos and evening gowns, and sit in the dark watching Casablanca or Dances With Wolves. And at least twice a month, the Parnasse Company would actually get out on stage and do it: become actors rather than ractors for a night, lights and greasepaint and costumes. The hard part was indoctrinating the audience; unless they were theatre buffs, they always wanted to run up on stage and interact, which upset the whole thing. Live theatre was an ancient and peculiar taste, roughly on par with listening to Gregorian chants, and it didn't pay the bills. They paid the bills with ractives.

  The building was tall and narrow, making the most of precious Shanghai real estate, so the proscenium had a nearly square aspect ratio, like an old-fashioned television. Above it was the bust of some forgotten French actress, supported on gilt wings, flanked by angels brandishing trumpets and laurel wreaths. The ceiling was a circular fresco depicting Muses disporting themselves in flimsy robes. A chandelier hung from the center; its incandescent bulbs had been replaced by new things that didn't burn out, and now it cast light evenly onto the rows of tiny, creaking seats closely packed together on the main floor. There were three balconies and three stories of private boxes, two on the left side and two on the right side of each level. The fronts of the boxes and balconies were all painted with tableaux from classical mythology, the predominant color there as elsewhere being a highly French robin's-egg blue. The theatre was crammed with plasterwork, so that the faces of cherubs, overwrought Roman gods, impassioned Trojans, and such were always poking out of columns and soffits and cornices, catching you by surprise. Much of this work was spalled from bullets fired by high-spirited Red Guards during Cultural Revolution times. Other than the bullet holes, the Parnasse was in decent shape, though sometime in the twentieth century great black-iron pipes had been anchored vertically alongside the boxes and horizontally before the balconies so that spotlights could be bolted on. Nowadays the spotlights were coin-size disks—phased-array devices that carried their own batteries—and could be stuck up anywhere and controlled by radio. But the pipes were still there and always required a lot of explaining when tourists came through.