Diamond Age

"It's done!" she said.

Harv paused his ractive, swaggered into the kitchen, and poked a mediaglyphic that was an animated picture of a door swinging open. The M.C. took to hissing loudly. Harv watched her scared face and ruffled her hair; she could not fend him off because she had her hands over her ears. "Got to release the vacuum," he explained.

The sound ended, and the door popped open. Inside the M.C., folded up neatly, was Nell's new red mattress. "Give it to me! Give it to me!" Nell shouted, furious to see Harv's hands on it. Harv amused himself for a second playing keep-away, then gave it to her. She ran to the room that she shared with Harv and slammed the door as hard as she could. Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple were waiting for her. "I got us a new bed," she told them. She grabbed her old crib mattress and heaved it into the corner, then unfolded the new one precisely on the floor. It was disappointingly thin, more blanket than mattress. But when she had it all laid out on the floor, it made a whooshing noise— not loud— the sound of her brother's breathing late at night. It thickened as it inhaled, and when it was done, it looked like a real mattress. She gathered Dinosaur and Duck and Peter and Purple up into her arms and then, just to make sure, jumped up and down on it several hundred times.

"You like it?" Harv said. He had opened the door.

"No! Get out!" Nell screamed.

"Nell, it's my room too," Harv said. "I gotta deke your old one."

Later, Harv went out with his buddies, and Nell was alone in the house for a while. She had decided that her kids needed mattresses too, and so she dragged the chair to the counter and climbed up on top, right in front of the M.C., and tried to read the mediaglyphics. A lot of them she didn't recognize. But she remembered that Tequila just used words when she couldn't read something, so she tried talking to it instead.

"Please secure the permission of an adult," the M.C. said, over and over again.

Now she knew why Harv always poked at things rather than talking to them. She poked at the M.C. for a long time until finally she came to the same mediaglyphics that Harv had used to choose her mattress. One showed a man and woman sleeping in a very large bed. A man and woman in a somewhat smaller bed. A man by himself. A child by herself. A baby.

Nell poked at the baby. The white circle and red wedge appeared, the music played, the M.C. hissed and opened.

She spread it out on the floor and formally presented it to Dinosaur, who was too little to know how to jump up and down on it; so Nell showed him for a while. Then she went back to the M.C. and got mattresses for Duck, Peter, and Purple. Now, much of the room was covered with mattresses, and she thought how fun it would be to have the whole room just be one big mattress, so she made a couple of the very largest size. Then she made a new mattress for Tequila and another new one for her boyfriend Rog.

When Harv came back, his reaction swerved between terror and awe. "Mom's gonna have Rog beat the shit out of us," he said. "We gotta deke all this stuff now."

Easy come, easy go. Nell explained the situation to her kids and then helped Harv stuff all of the mattresses, except her own, into the deke hopper. Harv had to use all his strength to shove the door closed. "Now we just better hope this stuff all dekes before Mom gets home," he said. "It's gonna take a while."

Later they went to bed and both lay awake for a while, dreading the sound of the front door opening. But neither Mom nor Rog came home that night. Mom finally showed up in the morning, changed into her maid outfit, and ran for the bus to the Vicky Clave, but she just left all her garbage on the floor instead of throwing it in the hopper. When Harv checked the hopper later, it was empty. "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. MachinePhase 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 longsuffering mom, ordered chronologically. On the left were the spirits of generations past who had showed 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 Dung, 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 mediation 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, Dung 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 Merkie 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 tel

"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 den 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 larger 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 Hanv'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.

"How many does it have?" Nell said.

"Nell," Harv said, turning to face her so that his light shone into her face, his voice coming out of the light epiphanically, "you got it wrong. It's not that the thing has threads in it— it is threads. Threads going under and over each other. If you pulled out all of the threads, nothing would be left."

"Did mites make it?" Nell asked.

"The way it's made— so digital— each thread going over and under other threads, and those ones going over and under all the other threads-" Harv stopped for a moment, his mind overloaded by the inhuman audacity of the thing, the promiscuous reference frames. "It had to be mites, Nell, nothing else could do it."

Security measures adopted by Atlantis/Shanghai.

Atlantis/Shanghai occupied the loftiest ninety percent of New Chusan's land area— an inner plateau about a mile above sea level, where the air was cooler and cleaner. Parts of it were marked off with a lovely wrought iron fence, but the real border was defended by something called the dog pod grid— a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.

Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays. Nanotech materials were stronger. Computers were infinitesimal. Power supplies were much more potent. It was almost difficult not to build things that were lighter than air. Really simple things like packaging materials— the constituents of litter, basically— tended to float around as if they weighed nothing, and aircraft pilots, cruising along ten kilometers above sea level, had become accustomed to the sight of empty, discarded grocery bags zooming past their windshields (and getting sucked into their engines). As seen from low earth orbit, the upper atmosphere now looked dandruffy. Protocol insisted that everything be made heavier than need be, so that it would fall, and capable of being degraded by ultraviolet light. But some people violated Protocol.

Given that it was so easy to make things that would float in air, it was not much of a stretch to add an air turbine. This was nothing more than a small propeller, or series of them, mounted in a tubular foramen wrought through the body of the aerostat, drawing in air at one end and forcing it out the other to generate thrust. A device built with several thrusters pointed along different axes could remain in one position, or indeed navigate through space.

Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball. These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern, about ten centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher. In this fashion a hemispherical dome was limned around the sacrosanct airspace of the New Atlantis Clave. When wind gusted, the pods all swung into it like weathervanes, and the grid deformed for a bit as the pods were shoved around; but all of them eventually worked their way back into place, swimming upstream like minnows, propelling the air turbines. The 'bines made a thin hissing noise, like a razor blade cutting air, that, when multiplied by the number of pods within earshot, engendered a not altogether cheerful ambience. Enough wrestling with the wind, and a pod's battery would run down. Then it would swim over and nuzzle its neighbor. The two would mate in midair, like dragonflies, and the weaker would take power from the stronger. The system included larger aerostats called nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods all over the grid, which would then distribute it to their neighbors. If a pod thought it was having mechanical trouble, it would send out a message, and a fresh pod would fly out from the Royal Security installation beneath Source Victoria and relieve it so that it could fly home to be decompiled.

As numerous eight-year-old boys had discovered, you could not climb the dog pod grid because the pods didn't have enough thrust to support your weight; your foot would just mash the first pod into the ground. It would try to work its way loose, but if it were stuck in mud or its turbines fouled, another pod would have to come out and replace it. For the same reason you could pluck any pod from its place and carry it away. When Hackworth had performed this stunt as a youth, he had discovered that the farther it got from its appointed place the hotter it became, all the while politely informing him, in clipped military diction, that he had best release it or fall victim to vaguely adumbrated consequences. But nowadays you could just steal one or two whenever you felt like it, and a new one would come out and replace it; once they figured out they were no longer part of the grid, the pods would self-scramble and become instant souvenirs.

This user-friendly approach did not imply that grid-tampering went ignored, or that such activities were approved of. You could walk through the grid whenever you chose by shoving a few pods out of the way— unless Royal Security had told the pods to electrocute you or blast you into chum. If so, they would politely warn you before doing it. Even when they were in a more passive mode, though, the aerostats were watching and listening, so that nothing got through the dog pod grid without becoming an instant media celebrity with hundreds of uniformed fans down in Royal Joint Forces Command.

Unless it was microscopic. Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. It took about seven minutes for all of the blood in a typical person's body to recirculate, so after this interval the cookie-cutters would be randomly distributed throughout the victim's organs and limbs.

A cookie-cutter was shaped like an aspirin tablet except that the top and bottom were domed more to withstand ambient pressure; for like most other nanotechnological devices a cookie-cutter was filled with vacuum. Inside were two centrifuges, rotating on the same axis but in opposite directions, preventing the unit from acting like a gyroscope. The device could be triggered in various ways; the most primitive were simple seven-minute time bombs.

Detonation dissolved the bonds holding the centrifuges together so that each of a thousand or so balhisticules suddenly flew outward. The enclosing shell shattered easily, and each ballisticule kicked up a shock wave, doing surprisingly little damage at first, tracing narrow linear disturbances and occasionally taking a chip out of a bone. But soon they slowed to near the speed of sound, where shock wave piled on top of shock wave to produce a sonic boom. Then all the damage happened at once. Depending on the initial speed of the centrifuge, this could happen at varying distances from the detonation point; most everything inside the radius was undamaged but everything near it was pulped; hence, "cookie-cutter."

The victim then made a loud noise like the crack of a whip, as a few fragments exited his or her flesh and dropped through the sound barrier in air. Startled witnesses would turn just in time to see the victim flushing bright pink. Bloodred crescents would suddenly appear all over the body; these marked the geometric intersection of detonation surfaces with skin and were a boon to forensic types, who could thereby identify the type of cookie-cutter by comparing the marks against a handy pocket reference card. The victim was just a big leaky sack of undifferentiated gore at this point and, of course, never survived.