The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  Nell was already in the correct stance to defend herself. If she had to beat each of the girls to death individually, she would do it. But none of them rushed the elevator. Instead, the leader stepped forward and aimed something at Nell. There was a little popping noise, a pinprick in Nell's midsection, and within a few seconds she felt her arms becoming impossibly heavy. Her bottom drooped. Her head bowed. Her knees buckled. She could not keep her eyes open; as they closed, she saw the girls coming toward her, smiling with pleasure, holding up the red ribbons. Nell could not move any part of her body, but she remained perfectly conscious as they tied her up with the ribbon. They did it slowly and methodically and perfectly; they did it every day of their lives.

  The tortures of the next few hours were of a purely experimental and preliminary nature. They did not last for long and accomplished no permanent damage. These girls had made a living out of binding and torturing people in a way that didn't leave scars, and that was all they really knew. When the leader came up with the idea of shoving a cigarette into Nell's cheek, it was something entirely novel and left the rest of the girls startled and silent for a few minutes. Nell sensed that most of the girls had no stomach for such things and merely wanted to turn her over to the Fists in exchange for citizenship in the Celestial Kingdom.

  The Fists themselves began to arrive some twelve hours later. Some of them wore conservative business suits, some wore the uniforms of the building's security force, others looked as if they'd arrived to take a girl out to a disco.

  They all had things to do when they arrived. It was obvious that this suite would act as local headquarters of some sort when the rebellion began in earnest. They began to bring up supplies on the freight elevator and seemed to spend a lot of time on the telephone. More arrived every hour, until Madame Ping's suite was playing host to between one and two dozen. Some of them were very tired and dirty and went to sleep in the bunks immediately.

  In a way, Nell wished that they would do whatever they were going to do and get it over with fast. But nothing happened for quite some time. When the first Fists arrived, the girls brought them in to see Nell, who had been shoved under a bed and was now lying there in a puddle of her own urine. The leader shone a light on her face briefly and then turned away, completely uninterested. It seemed that once he'd verified that the girls had done their bit for the revolution, Nell ceased to be relevant.

  She supposed it was inevitable that, in due time, these men would take those liberties with her that have ever been claimed as angary by irregular fighting men, who have willfully severed themselves from the softening feminine influence of civilized society, with those women who have had the misfortune to become their captives. To make this prospect less attractive, she took the desperate measure of allowing her person to become tainted with the noisome issue of her natural internal processes. But most of the Fists were too busy, and when some of the grungy foot-soldier types arrived, Madame Ping's girls were eager to make themselves useful in this regard. Nell reflected that a bunch of soldiers who found themselves billeted in a bawdy-house would naturally arrive with certain expectations, and that the inmates would be unwise to disappoint them.

  Nell had gone into the world to seek her fortune and this was what she had found. She understood more forcibly than ever the wisdom of Miss Matheson's remarks about the hostility of the world and the importance of belonging to a powerful tribe; all of Nell's intellect, her vast knowledge and skills, accumulated over a lifetime of intensive training, meant nothing at all when she was confronted with a handful of organized peasants. She could not really sleep in her current position but drifted in and out of consciousness, visited occasionally by hallucinatory waking dreams. More than once she dreamed that the Constable had come in his hoplite suit to rescue her; and the pain she felt when she returned to full consciousness and realized that her mind had been lying to her, was worse than any tortures others might inflict.

  Eventually they got tired of the stink under the bed and dragged her out of there on a smear of half-dried body fluids. It had been at least thirty-six hours since her capture. The leader of the girls, the one who had put out the cigarette on Nell's face, cut the red ribbon away and cut off Nell's filthy nightgown with it. Nell's limbs bounced on the floor. The leader had brought a whip that they sometimes used on clients and beat Nell with it until circulation returned. This spectacle drew quite a crowd of Fist soldiers, who crowded into the bunk room to watch.

  The girl drove Nell on hands and knees to a maintenance closet and made her get out a bucket and mop. Then she made Nell clean up the mess under the bed, frequently inspecting the results and beating her, apparently acting out a parody of a rich Westerner bossing around some poor running dog. It became clear after the third or fourth scrubbing of the floor that this was being done as much for the entertainment of the soldiers as for hygienic reasons.

  Then it was back to the maintenance closet, where Nell was bound again, this time with lightweight police shackles, and left there on the floor in the dark, naked and filthy. A few minutes later, her possessions—some clothes that the girls didn't like and a book they couldn't read—were thrown in there with her.

  When she was sure that the girl with the whip had gone, she spoke to her Primer and told it to make light.

  She could see a big matter compiler on the floor in the back of the closet; the girls used it to manufacture larger items when they were needed. This building was apparently hooked up to the Coastal Republic's Pudong Feed, because it hadn't lost Feed services when the Causeway had blown up; and indeed the Fists probably would not have bothered to establish their base here if the place had been cut off.

  Once every couple of hours or so, a Fist would come into this closet and order the M.C. to create something, usually a simple bulk substance like rations. On two of these occasions, Nell was outraged in the manner she had long suspected was inevitable. She closed her eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal shaman. She tried to think about the machine that she was designing in her head, with the help of the Primer, about how the gears meshed and the bearings spun, how the rod logic was programmed and where the energy was stored.

  On her second night in the closet, after most of the Fists had gone to bed and use of the matter compiler had apparently ceased for the night, she instructed the Primer to load her design into the M.C.'s memory, then crept forward and pressed the START button with her tongue.

  Ten minutes later, the machine released its vacuum with a shriek. Nell tongued the door open. A knife and a sword rested on the floor of the M.C. She turned herself around, moving in small, cautious increments and breathing deeply so that she would not whimper from the pain emanating from those parts of her that were most tender and vulnerable and yet had been most viciously depredated by her captors. She reached backward with her shackled hands and gripped the handle of the knife.

  Footsteps were approaching down the hallway. Someone must have heard the hiss of the M.C. and thought it was dinner time. But Nell couldn't rush this; she had to be careful.

  The door opened. It was one of the ranking Fists, perhaps the rough equivalent of a sergeant. He shone a torch in her face, then chuckled and turned on the overhead light.

  Nell's body blocked his view of the M.C., but it was obvious that she was reaching for something. He probably assumed it was only food.

  He stepped forward and kicked her casually in the ribs, then grabbed her upper arm and jerked her away from the M.C., causing such pain in her wrists that tears spurted down her face. But she held on to the knife.

  The Fist was staring into the M.C. He was startled and would be for several moments. Nell maneuvered the knife so that the blade was touching nothing but the link between the shackles, then hit the ON switch. It worked; the edge of the blade came to life like a
nanotech chainsaw and zipped through the link in a moment, like clipping a fingernail. Nell brought it around her body in the same motion and buried it in the base of the Fist's spine.

  He fell to the ground without speaking—he wasn't feeling any pain from that wound or from anything below his waist. Before he could assess matters any further, she plunged the knife into the base of his skull.

  He was wearing simple peasant stuff: indigo trousers and a tank-top. She put them on. Then she tied her hair up behind her head using strings cut from a mop and devoted a precious minute or two to stretching her arms and legs.

  And then it was out into the hallway with her knife in her waistband and her sword in her hands. Going round a corner, she cut a man in half as he emerged from the bathroom; the sword kept going of its own momentum and carved a long gash in the wall. This assault released a prodigious amount of blood, which Nell put behind her as quickly as possible. Another man was on guard in the elevator lobby, and as he came to investigate the sounds, she ran him through several times quickly, taking a page from Napier's book this time.

  The elevators were now under some kind of central control and probably subject to surveillance; rather than press the button in the lobby, she cut a hole in the doors, sheathed her sword, and clambered out onto a ladder that ran down the shaft.

  She forced herself to descend slowly and carefully, pressing herself flat against the rungs whenever the car went by. By the time she had descended perhaps fifty or sixty floors, the building had come awake; all of the cars were in constant motion, and when they went past her, she could hear men talking excitedly inside them.

  Light flooded into the shaft several floors below. The doors had been forced open. A couple of Fists thrust their heads out carefully into the shaft and began looking up and down, shining torches here and there. Several floors below them, more Fists pried another door open; but they had to pull their heads in rapidly as the ascending car nearly decapitated them.

  She had imagined that Madame Ping's was playing host to an isolated cell of Fists, but it was now clear that most if not all of the building had been taken over. For that matter, all of Pudong might now be a part of the Celestial Kingdom. Nell was much more profoundly isolated than she had feared.

  The skin of her arms glowed yellow-pink in the beam of a torch shone up from below. She did not make the mistake of looking down into the dazzling light and did not have to; the excited voice of the Fist below her told her that she had been discovered. A moment later, the light vanished as the ascending elevator interposed itself between Nell and the Fists who had seen her.

  She recalled Harv and his buds elevator-surfing in their old building and reckoned that this would be a good time to take up the practice. As the car rose toward her, she jumped off the ladder, trying to give herself enough upward thrust to match its velocity. She landed hard on the roof, for it was moving far more rapidly than she could jump. The roof knocked her feet out from under her, and she fell backward, slamming her arms out as Dojo had taught her so that she absorbed the impact with her fists and forearms, not her back.

  More excited talking from inside the car. The access panel on the roof suddenly flew into the air, driven out of its frame by a well-delivered kick from below. A head popped out of the open hatch; Nell skewered it on her knife. The man tumbled down into the car. There was no point in waiting now; the situation had gone into violent motion, which Nell was obliged to use. She rolled onto her belly and kicked both feet downward into the hatch, spun down into the car, landed badly on the corpse, and staggered to one knee. She had barked the point of her chin on the edge of the hatch as she fell through and bitten her tongue, so she was slightly dazed. A gaunt man in a black leather skullcap was standing directly in front of her, reaching for a gun, and while she was shoving her knife up through the center of his thorax, she bumped into someone behind her. She jumped to her feet and spun around, terrified, readying the knife for another blow, and discovered a much more terrified man in a blue coverall, standing by the elevator's control panel, holding his arms up in front of his face and screaming.

  Nell stepped back and lowered the point of the knife. The man was wearing the uniform of a building services worker and had obviously been yanked away from whatever he had been doing and put in charge of the elevator's controls. The man whom Nell had just killed, the one in the black leather skullcap, was some sort of low-level official in the rebellion and could not be expected to demean himself by punching the buttons himself.

  “Keep going! Up! Up!” she said, pointing at the ceiling. The last thing she wanted was for him to stop the elevator at Madame Ping's.

  The man bowed several times in quick succession and did something with the controls, then turned and smiled ingratiatingly at Nell.

  As a Coastal Republic citizen working in services, he knew a few words of English, and Nell knew a few of Chinese. “Down below—Fists?” she said.

  “Many Fist.”

  “Ground floor—Fists?”

  “Yes, many Fist ground floor.”

  “Street—Fists?”

  “Fist, army have fight in street.”

  “Around this building?”

  “Fist around this building all over.”

  Nell looked at the elevator's control panel: four columns of tightly spaced buttons, color-coded according to each floor's function: green for shopping, yellow for residential, red for offices, and blue for utility floors. Most of the blue floors were below ground level, but one of them was fifth from the top.

  “Building office?” she said, pointing to it.

  “Yes.”

  “Fists there?”

  “No, Fist all down below. But Fist on roof!”

  “Go there.”

  When the elevator reached the fifth floor from the top, Nell had the man freeze it there, then climbed on top and trashed its motors so that it would remain there. She dropped back into the car, trying not to look at the bodies or smell the reek of blood and other body fluids that had gotten all over it, and that were now draining out the open doors and dripping down the shaft. It would not take long for any of this to be discovered.

  She had some time, though; all she had to do was decide how to make use of it. The maintenance closet had a matter compiler, just like the one Nell had used to make her weapons, and she knew that she could use it to compile explosives and booby-trap the lobby. But the Fists had explosives of their own and could just as well blow the top floors of the building to kingdom come.

  For that matter, they were probably down in some basement control room watching traffic on the building's Feed network. Use of the M.C. would simply announce her location; they would shut off the Feed and then come after her slowly and carefully.

  She took a quick tour of the offices, sizing up her resources. Looking out the panoramic windows of the finest office suite, she saw a new state of affairs in the streets of Pudong. Many of the skyscrapers had been rooted in lines from the foreign Feeds and were now dark, though in some places flames vented from broken windows, casting primitive illumination over the streets a thousand feet below. These buildings had mostly been evacuated, and so the streets were crowded with far more people than they could really handle. The plaza immediately surrounding this particular building had been staked out by a picket line of Fists and was relatively uncrowded.

  She found a windowless room with mediatronic walls that bore a bewildering collage of images: flowers, details of European cathedrals and Shinto temples, Chinese landscape art, magnified images of insects and pollen grains, many-armed Indian goddesses, planets and moons of the solar system, abstract patterns from the Islamic world, graphs of mathematical equations, head shots of models male and female. Other than that, the room was empty except for a model of the building that stood in the center of the room, about Nell's height. The model's skin was mediatronic, just like the skin of the building itself, and it was currently echoing (as she supposed) whatever images were being displayed on the outside of the building:
mostly advertising panels, though some Fists had apparently come in here and scrawled graffiti across them.

  On top of the model rested a stylus—just a black stick pointed on one end—and a palette, covered with a color wheel and other controls. Nell picked them up, touched the tip of the stylus to a green area on the palette's color wheel, and drew it across the surface of the model. A glowing green line appeared along the track of the stylus, disfiguring an ad panel for an airship line.

  Whatever other steps Nell might take in the time she had left, there was one thing she could do quickly and easily here. She was not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a few minutes. She began by erasing all of the big advertising panels on the upper levels of the skyscraper. Then she sketched out a simple line drawing in primary colors: an escutcheon in blue, and within it, a crest depicting a book drawn in red and white; crossed keys in gold; and a seed in brown. She caused this image to be displayed on all sides of the skyscraper, between the hundredth and two-hundredth floors.

  Then she tried to think of a way out of this place. Perhaps there were airships on the roof. There would certainly be Fist guards up there, but perhaps through a combination of stealth and suddenness she could overcome them. She used the emergency stairs to make her way up to the next floor, then the next, and then the next. Two flights above, she could hear Fist guards posted at the roof, talking to each other and playing mah-jongg. Many flights below, she could hear more Fists making their way up the stairs one flight at a time, looking for her.

  She was pondering her next move when the guards above her were rudely interrupted by orders squawking from their radios. Several Fists came charging down the stairway, shouting excitedly. Nell, trapped in the stairwell, made herself ready to ambush them as they came toward her, but instead they ran into the top floor and made for the elevator lobby. Within a minute or two, an elevator had arrived and carried them away. Nell waited for a while, listening, and could no longer hear the contingent approaching from below.