The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  Of course she did not, because this would have created a cloud of opprobrium that would have blighted the young man's career. Instead, she excerpted one five-second piece of the cine record from the chaperone pod: the one in which, approached by the young man, Nell said, “I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” and the young man, failing to appreciate the ramifications, pressed on as if he had not heard. Nell placed this information into a smart visiting card and arranged to have it dropped by the young man's family home. A formal apology was not long in coming, and she did not hear again from the young man.

  Now that she had been introduced to society, her preparations for a visit to the Leased Territories were just as elaborate as for any New Atlantis lady. Outside of New Atlantis, she and her chevaline were surrounded everywhere by a shell of hovering security pods serving as a first line of personal defense. A modern lady's chevaline was designed with a sort of Y-shaped body that made it unnecessary to ride sidesaddle, so Nell was able to wear a fairly normal-looking sort of dress: a bodice that took advantage of her fashionably narrow waist, so carefully honed on the Academy's exercise machines that it might have been turned on a lathe from walnut. Beyond that, her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too.

  The veil was a field of microscopic, umbrellalike aerostats programmed to fly in a sheet formation a few inches in front of Nell's face. The umbrellas were all pointed away from her. Normally they were furled, which made them nearly invisible; they looked like the merest shadow before her face, though viewed sideways they created a subtle wall of shimmer in the air. At a command from Nell they would open to some degree. When fully open, they nearly touched each other. The outside-facing surfaces were reflective, the inner ones matte black, so Nell could see out as if she were looking through a piece of smoked glass. But others saw only the shimmering veil. The umbrellas could be programmed to dangle in different ways—always maintaining the same collective shape, like a fencing mask, or rippling like a sheet of fine silk, depending on the current mode.

  The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun and intercepting many deleterious nanosites that might otherwise slip unhindered into the nose and mouth.

  The latter function was of particular concern to Constable Moore on this morning. “It's been nasty of late,” he said. “The fighting has been very bad.” Nell had already inferred this from certain peculiarities of the Constable's behavior: he had been staying up late at night recently, managing some complicated enterprise spread out across his mediatronic floor, and she suspected that it was something along the lines of a battle or even a war.

  As she rode her chevaline across Dovetail, she came to a height-of-land that afforded a fine view across the Leased Territories, Pudong, and Shanghai on a clear day. But the humidity had congealed into drifts of clouds forming a seamless layer about a thousand feet below their level, so that this high territory at the top of New Chusan seemed to be an island, the only land in all the world except for the snowcapped cone of the Nippon Clave a few miles up the coast.

  She departed through the main gate and rode down the hill. She kept approaching the cloud layer but never quite reached it; the lower she went, the softer the light became, and after a few minutes she could no longer see the rambling settlements of Dovetail when she turned around, nor the spires of St. Mark's and Source Victoria above it. After another few minutes' descent the fog became so thick that she could not see more than a few meters, and she smelled the elemental reek of the ocean. She passed the former site of the Sendero Clave. The Senderos had been bloodily uprooted when Protocol Enforcement figured out that they were working in concert with the New Taiping Rebels, a fanatical cult opposed to both the Fists and the Coastal Republic. This patch of real estate had since passed into the hands of the Dong, an ethnic minority tribe from southwestern China, driven out of their homeland by the civil war. They had torn down the high wall and thrown up one of their distinctive many-layered pagodas.

  Other than that, the L.T. didn't look all that different. The operators of the big wall-size mediatrons that had so terrified Nell on her first night in the Leased Territories had turned the brightness all the way up, trying to compensate for the fog.

  Down by the waterfront, not far from the Aerodrome, the compilers of New Chusan had, as a charitable gesture, made some space available to the Vatican. In the early years it had contained nothing more than a two-story mission for thetes who had followed their lifestyle to its logical conclusion and found themselves homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law or abusive members of their own families.

  More recently those had become secondary functions, and the Vatican had programmed the building's foundation to extrude many more stories. The Vatican had a number of serious ethical concerns about nanotech but had eventually decided that it was okay as long as it didn't mess about with DNA or create direct interfaces with the human brain. Using nanotech to extrude buildings was fine, and that was fortunate, because Vatican/Shanghai needed to add a couple of floors to the Free Phthisis Sanatorium every year. Now it loomed high above any of the other waterfront buildings.

  As with any other extruded building, the design was drab in the extreme, each floor exactly alike. The walls were of an unexceptional beige material that had been used to construct many of the buildings in the L.T., which was unfortunate, because it had an almost magnetic attraction for the cineritious corpses of airborne mites. Like all the other buildings so constituted, the Free Phthisis Sanatorium had, over the years, turned black, and not evenly but in vertical rain-streaks. It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs. The Fists of Righteous Harmony had, however, done their best to pretty it up by slapping red posters over it in the dead of night.

  Harv was lying on the top of a three-layer bunkbed on the twentieth floor, sharing a small room and a supply of purified air with a dozen other chronic asthma sufferers. His face was goggled into a phantascope, and his lips were wrapped around a thick tube plugged into a nebulizer socket on the wall. Vaporized drugs, straight from the matter compiler, were flowing down that tube and into his lungs, working to keep his bronchi from spasming shut.

  Nell stopped for a moment before breaking him out of his ractive. Some weeks he looked better than others; this week he did not look good. His body was bloated, his face round and heavy, his fingers swollen to puffy cylinders; they had been giving him heavy steroid treatments. But she would have known he'd had a bad week anyway, because usually Harv didn't go in for immersive ractives. He liked the kind you held in your lap on a sheet of smart paper. Nell tried to send Harv a letter every day, simply written in mediaglyphics, and for a while he had tried to respond in kind. Last year he had even given up on this, though she wrote him faithfully anyway.

  “Nell!” he said when he had peeled the goggles away from his eyes. “Sorry, I was chasing some rich Vickys.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah. Or Burly Scudd was, I mean. In the ractive. See, Burly's bitch gets pregnant, and she's got to buy herself a Freedom Machine to get rid of it, so she gets a job as a maid-of-all-work for some snotty Vickys and rips off some of their nice old stuff, figuring that's a faster way to get the money. So the bitch is running away and they're chasing her on their chevs, and then Burly Scudd shows up in his big truck and turns the tables and starts chasing them. If you do it right, you can get the Vickys to fall into a big pit of manure! It's great! You should try it,” Harv said, then, exhausted by this effort, grabbed his oxygen tube and pulled on it for a wh
ile.

  “It sounds entertaining,” Nell said.

  Harv, temporarily gagged by the oxygen tube, watched her face carefully and was not convinced. “Sorry,” he blurted between breaths, “forgot you don't care for my kind of ractive. Don't they have Burly Scudd in that Primer of yours?”

  Nell made herself smile at the joke, which Harv had been making every week. She handed him the basket of cookies and fresh fruit that she had brought down from Dovetail and sat with him for an hour, talking about the things he enjoyed talking about, until she could see his attention wandering back toward the goggles. Then she said good-bye until next week and kissed him good-bye.

  She turned her veil to its highest level of opacity and made her way toward the door. Harv impulsively grabbed his oxygen tube and sucked on it mightily a few times, then called her name just as she was about to leave.

  “Yes?” she said, turning toward him.

  “Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look,” he said, “just like the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat—remember those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a lot to do with that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer—so full of stuff I could never understand or even read—you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?” With that he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began to heave.

  “Of course I will, Harv,” Nell said, her eyes filling with tears, and blundered her way back across the room until she could sweep Harv's bloated body up in her strong arms. The veil swirled like a sheet of water thrown into Harv's face, all the little umbrellas drawing themselves out of the way as she brought his face up to hers and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  The veil congealed again as he sank back down onto the foam mattress—just like the mattresses he had taught her to get from the M.C., long ago—and she turned and ran out of the room sobbing.

  Hackworth is brought up-to-date

  by the great Napier.

  “Have you had the opportunity to speak with your family?” Colonel Napier said, speaking out of a mediatronic tabletop from his office in Atlantis/Shanghai. Hackworth was sitting in a pub in Atlantis/Vancouver.

  Napier looked good now that he was deeper into middle age—somewhat more imposing. He'd been working on his bearing. Hackworth had been temporarily impressed when Napier's image had first materialized on the mediatron, then he remembered his own image in the mirror. Once he'd gotten himself cleaned up and trimmed his beard, which he'd decided to keep, he realized that he had a new bearing of his own. Even if he was desperately confused about how he got it.

  “Thought I'd find out what the hell happened first. Besides—” He stopped talking for a while. He was having trouble getting his conversational rhythm back.

  “Yes?” Napier said in a labored display of patience.

  “I just spoke to Fiona this morning.”

  “After you left the tunnels?”

  “No. Before. Before I—woke up, or whatever.”

  Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.

  A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.

  “Why did I think of that?” he said.

  Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. “Fiona and Gwendolyn are in Atlantis/Seattle now—half an hour from your present location by tube,” he said.

  “Of course! They live—we live—in Seattle now. I knew that.” He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some snow-covered volcano.

  “If you are under the impression that you've been in contact with her recently—which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid—then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot of time racting in the last ten years.”

  “Ten years!?”

  “Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from evidence.”

  “It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble coming to grips.”

  “We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers,” Napier said. “It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned—you know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers.”

  “I've been working on something,” Hackworth said. Images of a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner might do.

  “What sort of thing exactly?” Napier asked, suddenly sounding rather tense.

  “Can't get a grip on it,” Hackworth finally said, shaking his head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space, like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter compiler, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?”

  “I guessed it was hæmocules of some description.”

  “We took blood samples before you left Shanghai.”

  “You did?”

  “We have ways,” Colonel Napier said. “We also did a full workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several million nanosites in her brain.”

  “Several million?”

  “Very small ones,” Napier said reassuringly. “They are introduced through the blood, of course—the hæmocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to each other with visible light.”

  “So when I was on my own, my 'sites just talked to themselves,” Hackworth said, “but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these things in their brains—”

  “It didn't matter which brain a 'site was in. They all talked to one another indiscriminately, forming a network. Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society.”

  “But the interface between these nanosites and the brain itself—”

  “Yes, I admit that a few million of these things piggybacking on randomly chosen neurons is only a feeble interface to something as complicated as the human brain,” Napier said. “We're not claiming that you shared one brain with these people.”

  “So what did I share with them exactly?” Hackworth said.

  “Food. Air. Companionship. Body fluids. Perhaps emotions or general emotional states. Probably more.”

  “That's all I did for ten years?”

  “You did a lot of things,” Napier said, “but you did them in a sort of unconscious, dreamlike state. You were sleepwalking. When we figured that out—after doing the biopsy on your fellow-troglodyte—
we realised that in some sense you were no longer acting of your own free will, and we engineered a hunter-killer that would seek out and destroy the nanosites in your brain. We introduced it, in a dormant mode, into this female Drummer's system, then reintroduced her to your colony. When you had sex with her—well, you can work out the rest for yourself.”

  “You have given me information, Colonel Napier, and I am grateful, but it has only made me more confused. What do you suppose the Celestial Kingdom wanted with me?”

  “Did Dr. X ask anything of you?”

  “To seek the Alchemist.”

  Colonel Napier looked startled. “He asked that of you ten years ago?”

  “Yes. In as many words.”

  “That is very singular,” Napier said, after a prolonged interlude of mustache-twiddling. “We have only been aware of this shadowy figure for some five years and know virtually nothing about him—other than that he is a wizardly artifex who is conspiring with Dr. X.”

  “Is there any other information—”

  “Nothing that I can reveal,” Napier said brusquely, perhaps having revealed too much already. “Do let us know if you find him, though. Er, Hackworth, there is no tactful way to broach this subject. Are you aware that your wife has divorced you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hackworth said quietly. “I suppose I did know that.” But he hadn't been conscious of it until now.

  “She was remarkably understanding about your long absence,” Napier said, “but at some point it became evident that, like all the Drummers, you had become sexually promiscuous in the extreme.”

  “How did she know?”

  “We warned her.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I mentioned earlier that we found things in your blood. These hæmocules were designed specifically to be spread through exchange of bodily fluids.”

  “How do you know that?”