Diamond Age

Finally, sometime around midnight, he wandered past a man in a funny gray jacket and cap with a red star on it, trying to give away little red books, and it hit him: Sendero. Most Senderistas were either Incan or Korean, but they'd take anyone. They had a nice clave here in the Leased Territories, a clave with good security, and every one of them, down to the last man or woman, was batshit. They'd be more than a match for a few dozen Ashantis. And you could join anytime just by walking in the gates. They would take anyone, no questions asked.

He'd heard it was not such a good thing to be a Communist, but under the circumstances he figured he could hold his nose and quote from the little red book as necessary. As soon as those Ashantis left town, he'd bolt.

Once he made up his mind, he couldn't wait to get there. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a jog, which would be sure to draw the attention of any Ashantis on the street. He couldn't bear the idea of being so close to safety and then blowing it.

He rounded a corner and saw the wall of the Sendero Clave; four stories high and two blocks long, one solid giant mediatron with a tiny gate in the middle. Mao was on one end, waving to an unseen multitude, backed up by his horsetoothed wife and his beetle-browed sidekick Lin Biao, and Chairman Gonzalo was on the other, teaching some small children, and in the middle was a slogan in ten-meter-high letters: STRIVE TO UPHOLD THE PRINCIPLES OF MAO-GONZALO-THOUGHT!

The gate was guarded, as always, by a couple of twelve-year-old kids in red neckerchiefs and armbands, ancient bolt-action rifles with real bayonets leaning against their collarbones. A blond white girl and a pudgy Asian boy. Bud and his son Harv had whiled away many an idle hour trying to get these kids to laugh: making silly faces, mooning them, telling jokes. Nothing ever worked. But he'd seen the ritual: They'd bar his path with crossed rifles and not let him in until he swore his undying allegiance to Mao-Gonzalo-thought, and then-

A horse, or something built around the same general plan, was coming down the street at a hand-gallop. Its hooves did not make the pocking noise of iron horseshoes. Bud realized it was a chevaline— a four-legged robot thingy.

The man on the chev was an African in very colorful clothing.

Bud recognized the patterns on that cloth and knew without bothering to check for the scar that the guy was Ashanti. As soon as he caught Bud's eye, he kicked it up another gear, to a tantivy. He was going to cut Bud off before he could reach Sendero. And he was too far away, yet, to be reached by the skull gun, whose infinitesimal bullets had a disappointingly short range.

He heard a soft noise behind him and swiveled his head around, and something whacked him on the forehead and stuck there. A couple more Ashantis had snuck up on him barefoot.

"Sir," one of them said, "I would not recommend operation of your weapon, unless you want the round to detonate in your own forehead. Hey?" and he smiled broadly, enormous perfectly white teeth, and touched his own forehead. Bud reached up and felt something hard glued to the skin of his brow, right over the skull gun.

The chev dropped to a trot and cut toward him. Suddenly Ashantis were everywhere. He wondered how long they'd been tracking him. They all had beautiful smiles. They all carried small devices in their hands, which they aimed at the pavement, trigger fingers laid alongside the barrels until the guy on the chev told them otherwise. Then, suddenly, they all seemed to be aimed in his direction.

The projectiles stuck to his skin and clothing and burst sideways, flinging out yards and yards of weightless filmy stuff that stuck to itself and shrank. One struck him in the back of the head, and a swath of the stuff whipped around his face and encased it. It was about as thick as a soap bubble, and so he could see through it pretty well— it had peeled one of his eyelids back so he couldn't help but see— and everything now had that gorgeous rainbow tinge characteristic of soap bubbles. The entire shrink-wrapping process consumed maybe half a second, and then Bud, mummified in plastic, toppled over face-forward. One of the Ashantis was good enough to catch him. They laid him down on the Street and rolled him over on his back. Someone poked the blade of a pocketknife through the film over Bud's mouth so that he could breathe again.

Several Ashantis set about the chore of bonding handles to the shrinkwrap, two up near the shoulders and two down by the ankles, as the man on the chev dismounted and knelt over him.

This equestrian had several prominent scars on his cheeks. "Sir," the man said, smiling, "I accuse you of violating certain provisions of the Common Economic Protocol, which I will detail at a more convenient time, and I hereby place you under personal arrest. Please be aware that anyone who has been so arrested is subject to deadly force in the event he tries to resist— which— ha! ha!— does not seem likely at present— but it is a part of the procedure that I am to say this. As this territory belongs to a nation-state that recognizes the Common Economic Protocol, you are entitled to a hearing of any such charges within the judicial framework of the nation-state in question, which in this case happens to be the Chinese Coastal Republic. This nation-state may or may not grant you additional rights; we will find out in a very few moments, when we present the situation to one of the relevant authorities. Ah, I believe I see one now."

A constable from the Shanghai Police, legs strapped into a pedomotive, was coming down the street with the tremendous loping strides afforded by such devices, escorted by a couple of power-skating Ashantis. The Ashantis had big smiles, but the constable looked stereotypically inscrutable.

The chief of the Ashantis bowed to the constable and graciously spun out another lengthy quotation from the fine print of the Common Economic Protocol. The constable kept making a gesture that was somewhere between a nod and a perfunctory bow. Then the constable turned to Bud and said, very fast: "Are you a member of any signatory tribe, phyle, registered diaspora, franchise-organized quasi-national entity, sovereign polity, or any other form of dynamic security collective claiming status under the CEP?"

"Are you shitting me?" Bud said. The shrink-wrap squished his mouth together so he sounded like a duck.

Four Ashantis took the four handles and hoisted Bud off the ground. They began to follow the loping constable in the direction of the Causeway that led over the sea to Shanghai. "How 'bout it," Bud quacked through the hole in the shrink-wrap, "he said I might have other rights. Do I have any other rights?"

The constable looked back over his shoulder, turning his head carefully so he wouldn't lose his balance on that pedomotive. "Don't be a jerk," he said in pretty decent English, "this is China."

Hackworth's morning ruminations;

breakfast and departure for work.

Thinking about tomorrow's crime, John Percival Hackworth slept poorly, rising three times on the pretext of having to use the loo.

Each time he looked in on Fiona, who was sprawled out in her white lace nightgown, arms above her head, doing a backflip into the arms of Morpheus. Her face was barely visible in the dark room, like the moon seen through folds of white silk.

At five A.M., a shrill pentatonic reveille erupted from the North Koreans' brutish mediatrons. Their clave, which went by the name Sendero, was not far above sea level: a mile below the Hackworths' building in altitude, and twenty degrees warmer on the average day. But whenever the women's chorus chimed in with their armor-piercing refrain about the all-seeing beneficence of the Serene Leader, it felt as if they were right next door.

Gwendolyn didn't even stir. She would sleep soundly for another hour, or until Tiffany Sue, her lady's maid, came bustling into the room and began to lay out her clothes: stretchy lingerie for the morning workout, a business frock, hat, gloves, and veil for later.

Hackworth drew a silk dressing gown from the wardrobe and poured it over his shoulders. Binding the sash around his waist, the cold tassels splashing over his fingers in the dark, he glanced through the doorway to Gwendolyn's closet and out the other side into her boudoir. Against that room's far windows was the desk she used for social correspondence, really just a table with a top of genuine marble, strewn with bits of stationery, her own and others', dimly identifiable even at this distance as business cards, visiting cards, note cards, invitations from various people still going through triage. Most of the boudoir floor was covered with a tatty carpet, worn through in places all the way down to its underlying matrix of jute, but hand-woven and sculpted by genuine Chinese slave labor during the Mao Dynasty. Its only real function was to protect the floor from Gwendolyn's exercise equipment, which gleamed in the dim light scattering off the clouds from Shanghai: a step unit done up in Beaux-Arts ironmongery, a rowing machine cleverly fashioned of writhing sea-serpents and hard-bodied nereids, a rack of free weights supported by four callipygious caryatids-not chunky Greeks but modern women, one of each major racial group, each tricep, gluteus, latissimus, sartorius, and rectus abdominus casting its own highlight. Classical architecture indeed. The caryatids were supposed to be role models, and despite subtle racial differences, each body fit the current ideal: twenty-two-inch waist, no more than 17% body fat. That kind of body couldn't be faked with undergarments, never mind what the ads in the women's magazines claimed; the long tight bodices of the current mode, and modern fabrics thinner than soap bubbles, made everything obvious. Most women who didn't have superhuman willpower couldn't manage it without the help of a lady's maid who would run them through two or even three vigorous workouts a day. So after Fiona had stopped breast-feeding and the time had loomed when Gwen would have to knacker her maternity clothes, they had hired Tiffany Sue— just another one of the child-related expenses Hackworth had never imagined until the bills had started to come in. Gwen accused him, half-seriously, of having eyes for Tiffany Sue. The accusation was almost a standard formality of modern marriage, as lady's maids were all young, pretty, and flawlessly buffed. But Tiffany Sue was a typical thete, loud and classless and heavily made up, and Hackworth couldn't abide her. If he had eyes for anyone, it was those caryatids holding up the weight rack; at least they had impeccable taste going for them.

Mrs. Hull had not heard him and was still bumping sleepily around in her quarters. Hackworth put a crumpet into the toaster oven and went out on their flat's tiny balcony with a cup of tea, catching a bit of the auroral breeze off the Yangtze Estuary.

The Hackworths' building was one of several lining a block-long garden where a few early risers were already out walking their spaniels or touching their toes. Far down the slopes of New Chusan, the Leased Territories were coming awake: the Senderos streaming out of their barracks and lining up in the streets to chant and sing through their morning calisthenics. All the other thetes, coarcted into the tacky little claves belonging to their synthetic phyles, turning up their own mediatrons to drown out the Senderos, setting off firecrackers or guns— he could never tell them apart— and a few internal-combustion hobbyists starting up their primitive full-lane vehicles, the louder the better. Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neon-stained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.

This neighborhood was derisively called Earshot. But Hackworth didn't mind the noise so much. It would have been a sign of better breeding, or higher pretentions, to be terribly sensitive about it, to complain of it all the time, and to yearn for a townhouse or even a small estate farther inland.

Finally the bells of St. Mark's chimed six o'clock. Mrs. Hull burst into the kitchen on the first stroke and expressed shame that Hackworth had beaten her to the kitchen and shock that he had defiled it. The matter compiler in the corner of the kitchen came on automatically and began to create a pedomotive for Hackworth to take to work.

Before the last bell had died away, the rhythmic whack-whack-whack of a big vacuum pump could be heard. The engineers of the Royal Vacuum Utility were already at work expanding the eutactic environment. The pumps sounded big, probably Intrepids, and Hackworth reckoned that they must be preparing to raise a new structure, possibly a wing of the University.

He sat down at the kitchen table. Mrs. Hull was already marmalading his crumpet. As she laid out plates and silver, Hackworth picked up a large sheet of blank paper. "The usual," he said, and then the paper was no longer blank; now it was the front page of the Times.

Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his station in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father, ever anxious that he had not, even after all this time, sufficiently edified his son; and stories relating to the Uitlanders— a subphyle of New Atlantis, consisting of persons of British ancestry who had fled South Africa several decades previously. Hackworth's mother was an Uitlander, so he subscribed to the service.

A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chusan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press that did a run of a hundred or so, every morning at about three A.M. That the highest levels of the society received news written with ink on paper said much about the steps New Atlantis had taken to distinguish itself from other phyles.

Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.

Hackworth almost managed to dress without waking Gwendolyn, but she began to stir while he was stringing his watch chain around various tiny buttons and pockets in his waistcoat. In addition to the watch, various other charms dangled from it, such as a snuffbox that helped perk him up now and then, and a golden pen that made a little chime whenever he received mail.

"Have a good day at work, dear," she mumbled. Then, blinking once or twice, frowning, and focusing on the chintz canopy over the bed: "You finish it today, do you?"

"Yes," Hackworth said. "I'll be home late. Quite late."

"I understand."

"No," he blurted. Then he pulled himself up short. This was it, he realized.

"Darling?"

"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 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 tel

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.