Diamond Age

That turned a few heads in the waiting room. From there on it was all very good, madam, and please make yourself comfortable here and would you like tea, madam. It was the first time since she and her mother had left home that anyone had offered her tea, instead of ordering her to make some, and she knew perfectly well it would be the last time for several years, even if she got lucky.

The tat machine worked on her for sixteen hours; they dripped Valium into her arm so she wouldn't whine. Most tats nowadays went on like a slap on the back. "You sure you want the skull?" "Yeah, I'm sure." "Positive?" "Positive." "Okay-" and SPLAT there was the skull, dripping blood and lymph, blasted through your epidermis with a wave of pressure that nearly knocked you out of the chair. But a dermal grid was a whole different thing, and a Jodie was top of the line, it had a hundred times as many 'sites as the lo-res grid sported by many a porn starlet, something like ten thousand of them in the face alone. The grossest part was when the machine reached down her throat to plant a trail of nanophones from her vocal cords all the way up to her gums. She closed her eyes for that one.

She was glad she'd done it on the day before Christmas because she couldn't have handled the kids afterward. Her face swelled up just like they said it would, especially around the lips and eyes where the 'site density was greatest. They gave her creams and drugs, and she used them. The day after that, her mistress double-taked when Miranda came upstairs to fix the children breakfast. But she didn't say anything, probably assuming she'd gotten slapped around by a drunken boyfriend at a Christmas party. Which was hardly Miranda's style, but it was a comfortable assumption for a New Atlantan woman to make.

When her face had gotten back to looking exactly the same as it had before her trip to the tat parlor, she packed everything she owned into a carpet bag and took the tube into the city.

The theatre district had its good end and its bad end. The good end was exactly what and where it had been for centuries. The bad end was a vertical rather than a horizontal development, being a couple of old office skyscrapers now fallen into disreputable uses. Like many such structures they were remarkably unpleasant to look at, but from the point of view of a ractive company, they were ideal. They had been designed to support a large number of people working side by side in vast grids of semiprivate cubicles.

"Let's have a gander at your grid, sweetheart," said a man identifying himself as Mr. Fred ("not my real name") Epidermis, after he had removed his cigar from his mouth and given Miranda a prolonged, methodical, full-body optical grope.

"My grid ain't no Sweetheart," she said. SweetheartTM and HeroTM were the same grid as purveyed to millions of women and men respectively. The owners didn't want to be ractors at all, just to look good when they happened to be in a ractive. Some were stupid enough to fall for the hype that one of these grids could serve as the portal to stardom; a lot of those girls probably ended up talking to Fred Epidermis.

"Ooh, now I'm all curious," he said, writhing just enough to make Miranda's lip curl. "Let's put you on stage and see what you got."

The cubicles where his ractors toiled were mere head stages. He had a few body stages, though, probably so he could bid on fully ractive porn. He pointed her toward one of these. She walked in, slammed the door, turned toward the wall-size mediatron, and got her first look at her new Jodie.

Fred Epidermis had put the stage into Constellation Mode. Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network— a new bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph, and vascular systems.

"Holy shit! Got a fucking Hepburn or something here!" Fred Epidermis was exclaiming, watching her on a second monitor outside the stage.

"It's a Jodie," she said, but she stumbled over the words as the field of stars moved, tracking the displacements of her jaw and lips.

Outside, Fred Epidermis was wielding the editing controls, zooming in on her face, which was dense as a galactic core. By comparison, her arms and legs were wispy nebulas and the back of her head nearly invisible, with a grand total of maybe a hundred 'sites placed around her scalp like the vertices of a geodesic dome. The eyes were empty holes, except (she imagined) when she closed her eyes. Just to check it out, she winked into the mediatron. The 'sites on her eyelids were dense as grass blades on a putting green, but accordioned together except when the lid expanded over the eye.

Fred Epidermis recognized the move and zoomed in so violently on her winking eye that she nearly threw herself back on her ass. She could hear him chortling. "You'll get used to it, honey," he said. "Just hold still so I check the 'sites on your lips."

He panned to her lips, rotated them this way and that, as she puckered and pursed. She was glad they'd drugged her out of her mind while they were doing the lips; thousands of nanosites in there.

"Looks like we got ourselves an artiste here," Fred Epidermis said. "Lemme try you in one of our most challenging roles."

Suddenly a blond, blue-eyed woman was standing in the mediatron, perfectly aping Miranda's posture, wearing big hair, a white sweater with a big letter F in the middle, and a preposterously short skirt. She was carrying big colored puffy things. Miranda recognized her, from old passives she'd seen on the mediatron, as an American teenager from the previous century. "This is Spirit. A little old-fashioned to you and me, but popular with tube feeders," said Fred Epidermis. "'Course your grid's way overkill for this, but hey, we're about giving the customer what they want— moving those bids, you know."

But Miranda wasn't really listening; for the first time ever, she was watching another person move exactly as she moved, as the stage mapped Miranda's grid onto this imaginary body. Miranda pressed her lips together as if she'd just put on lipstick, and Spirit did the same. She winked, and Spirit winked. She touched her nose, and Spirit got a face full of pom-pon.

"Let's run you through a scene," said Fred Epidermis.

Spirit vanished and was replaced by an electronic form with blanks for names, numbers, dates, and other data. He flashed through it before Miranda could really read it; they didn't need a contract for a dry run. Then she saw Spirit again, this time from two different camera angles. The mediatron had split up into several panes. One was a camera angle on Spirit's face, which still did whatever Miranda's face did. One was a two-shot showing Spirit and an older man, standing in a room full of big machines. Another pane showed a closeup of the old man, who as Spirit realized was being played by Fred Epidermis. The old man said, "Okay, keep in mind we usually play this through a head stage, so you don't control Spirit's arms and legs, just her face-"

"How do I walk around?" Miranda said. Spirit's lips moved with hers, and from the mediatron came Spirit's voice— squeaky and breathy at the same time. The stage was programmed to take the feeds from the nanophones in her throat and disp them into a different envelope.

"You don't. Computer decides where you go, when. Our dirty little secret: This isn't really that ractive, it's just a plot tree— but it's good enough for our clientele because all the leaves of the tree— the ends of the branches, you understand— are exactly the same, namely what the payer wants you to follow? Well, you'll see," said the old man on the screen, reading Miranda's confusion in Spirit's face. What looked like guarded skepticism on Miranda came across as bubble-brained innocence on Spirit. "Cue! Follow the fucking cues! This isn't improv workshop!" shouted the old man.

Miranda checked the other panes on the display. One she reckoned was a map of the room, showing her location and the old man's, with arrows occasionally pulsing in the direction of movement. The other was a prompter, with a line waiting for her, flashing red.

"Oh, hello, Mr. Willie!" she said, "I know school's out, and you must be very tired after a long day of teaching shop to all of those nasty boys, but I was wondering if I could ask you for a big, big favor."

"Certainly, go ahead, whatever," said Fred Epidermis through the face and body of Mr. Willie, not even pretending to emote.

"Well, it's just that I have this appliance that's very important to me, and it seems to have broken. I was wondering if you knew how to fix— one of these," Miranda said. On the mediatron, Spirit said the same thing. But Spirit's hand was moving. She was holding something up next to her face. An elongated glossy white plastic thing. A vibrator.

"Well," said Mr. Willie, "it's a scientific fact that all electrical devices work on the same principles, so in theory I should be able to help you. But I must confess, I've never seen an appliance quite like that one. Would you mind explaining what it is and what it does?"

"I'd be more than happy to— " said Miranda, but then the display froze and Fred Epidermis cut her off by shouting through the door. "Enough already," he said. "I just had to make sure you could read."

He opened the stage door and said, "You're hired. Cubicle 238. My commission is eighty percent. The dormitory's upstairs— pick your own bunk, and clean it out. You can't afford to live anywhere else."

Harv brings Nell a present;

she experiments with the Primer.

When Harv came back home, he was walking with all of his weight on one foot. When the light struck the smudges on his face in the right way, Nell could see streaks of red mixed in with the dirt and the toner. He was breathing fast, and he swallowed heavily and often, as though throwing up were much on his mind. But he was not empty-handed. His arms were crossed tightly across his belly. He was carrying things in his jacket.

"I made out, Nell," he said, seeing his sister's face and knowing that she was too scared to talk first. "Didn't get much, but got some. Got some stuff for the Flea Circus."

Nell wasn't sure what the Flea Circus was, but she had learned that it was good to have stuff to take there, that Harv usually came back from the Flea Circus with an access code for a new ractive. Harv shouldered the light switch on and kneeled in the middle of the room before relaxing his arms, lest some small thing fall out and be lost in a corner. Nell sat in front of him and watched.

He took out a piece of jewelry swinging ponderously at the end of a gold chain. It was circular, smooth gold on one side and white on the other. The white side was protected under a flattened glass dome. It had numbers written around the edge, and a couple of slender metal things like daggers, one longer than the other, joined at their hilts in the center. It made a noise like mice trying to eat their way through a wall in the middle of the night.

Before she could ask about it, Harv had taken out other things. He had a few cartridges from his mite trap. Tomorrow Harv would take the cartridge down to the Flea Circus and find out if he'd caught anything, and whether it was worth money. There were other things like buttons. But Harv saved the biggest thing for last, and he withdrew it with ceremony.

"I had to fight for this, Nell," he said. "I fought hard because I was afraid the others would break it up for parts. I'm giving it to you."

It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.

"Both hands," Harv admonished her, "it's heavy."

Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.

Harv could not put up with the wait. "Open it," he said.

"How?"

Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-colored leaves after it. Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters. On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers.

The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains like the ones they supposedly had in the middle of New Chusan, where the fanciest Vickys of all had their жstival houses. The girl had a book open on her lap. The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.

The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bulged up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.

"Once upon a time," said a woman's voice, "there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books." The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.

Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa. The next day, Mom's boyfriend Tad came home in a bad mood. He slammed his six-pack down on the kitchen table, pulled out a beer, and headed for the living room. Nell was trying to get out of the way. She picked up Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple, her magic wand, a paper bag that was actually a car her kids could drive around in, and a piece of cardboard that was a sword for killing pirates. Then she ran for the room where she and Harv slept, but Tad had already come in with his beer and begun rooting through the stuff on the sofa with his other hand, trying to find the control pad for the mediatron. He threw a lot of Harv's and Nell's toys on the floor and then stepped on the book with his bare foot.

"Ouch, god damn it!" Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. "What the fuck is this?!" He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. "Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your flicking shit cleaned up!" Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a frisbee.

She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn't hurt at all.

The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page. The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl's head. "Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt," the book said.

"My name is Nell," Nell said.

A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

"Your name's mud if you don't fucking clean this shit up," Tad said. "But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once."

Nell's hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids' room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now, say it with me."

"Raven."

"Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?"

Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it. The letter grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. "R is for Run," the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. "Nell Runs on the Red Rug," the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.

"Why is she running?"

"Because an Angry Alligator Appeared," the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself into a circle, which became a small letter.

"A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell's Valiant Velocity." The little story went on to include an Excited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. "Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?" A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.

"R," Nell said.

"Very good! You are a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters," the book said. "What is this letter?" and it pointed to the second one.

This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.

A young hooligan before the court of Judge Fang;

the magistrate confers with his advisers;

Justice is served.

"The revolving chain of a nunchuk has a unique radar signature— reminiscent of that of a helicopter blade, but noisier," Miss Pao said, gazing up at Judge Fang over the half-lenses of her phenomenoscopic spectacles. Her eyes went out of focus, and she winced; she had been lost in some enhanced three-dimensional image, and the adjustment to dull reality was disorienting. "A cluster of such patterns was recognized by one of Shanghai P.D.'s sky-eyes at ten seconds after 2351 hours."

As Miss Pao worked her way through this summary, images appeared on the big sheet of mediatronic paper that Judge Fang had unrolled across his brocade tablecloth and held down with carved jade paperweights. At the moment, the image was a map of a Leased Territory called Enchantment, with one location, near the Causeway, highlighted. In the corner was another pane containing a standard picture of an anticrime sky-eye, which always looked, to Judge Fang, like an American football as redesigned by fetishists: glossy and black and studded.

Miss Pao continued, "The sky-eye dispatched a flight of eight smaller aerostats equipped with cine cameras." The kinky football was replaced by a picture of a teardrop-shaped craft, about the size of an almond, trailing a whip antenna, with an orifice at its nose protected by an incongruously beautiful iris. Judge Fang was not really looking; at least three-quarters of the cases that came before him commenced with a summary almost exactly like this one. It was a credit to Miss Pao's seriousness and diligence that she was able to tell each story afresh. It was a challenge to Judge Fang's professionalism for him to listen to each one in the same spirit.

"Converging on the scene," Miss Pao said, "they recorded activities."

The large map image on Judge Fang's scroll was replaced by a cine feed. The figures were far away, flocks of relatively dark pixels nudging their way across a rough gray background like starlings massing before a winter gale. They got bigger and more clearly defined as the aerostat flew closer to the action. A man was curled on the street with his arms wrapped around his head. The nunchuks had been put away by this point, and hands were busy going through the innumerable pockets that were to be found in a gentleman's suit. At this point the cine went into slow-mo. A watch flashed and oscillated hypnotically at the end of its gold chain. A silver fountain pen glowed like an ascending rocket and vanished into the folds of someone's mite-proof raiment. And then out came something else, harder to resolve: larger, mostly dark, white around the edge. A book, perhaps.

"Heuristic analysis of the cine feeds suggested a probable violent crime in progress," Miss Pao said.

Judge Fang valued Miss Pao's services for many reasons, but her deadpan delivery was especially precious to him.

"So the sky-eye dispatched another flight of aerostats, specialized for tagging." An image of a tagger stat appeared: smaller and narrower than the cinestats, reminiscent of a hornet with the wings stripped off. The nacelles containing the tiny air turbines, which gave such devices the power to propel themselves through the air, were prominent; it was built for speed.

"The suspected assailants adopted countermeasures," Miss Pao aaid, again using that deadpan tone. On the cine feed, the criminals were retreating. The cinestat followed them with a nice tracking shot. Judge Fang, who had watched thousands of hours of film of thugs departing from the scenes of their crimes, watched with a discriminating eye. Less sophisticated hoodlums would simply have run away in a panic, but this group was proceeding methodically, two to a bicycle, one person pedaling and steering while the other handled the countermeasures. Two of them were discharging fountains of material into the air from canisters on their bicycles' equipment racks, like fire extinguishers, waving the nozzles in all directions.

"Following a pattern that has become familiar to law enforcement," Miss Pao said, "they dispersed adhesive foam that clogged the intakes of the stats' air turbines, rendering them inoperative." The big mediatron had also taken to emitting tremendous flashes of light that caused Judge Fang to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. After a few of these, the cine feed went dead.

"Another suspect used strobe illumination to pick out the locations of the cinestats, then disabled them with pulses of laser light— evidently using a device, designed for this purpose, that has recently become widespread among the criminal element in the L.T."

The big mediatron cut back to a new camera angle on the original scene of the crime. Across the bottom of the scroll was a bar graph depicting the elapsed time since the start of the incident, and the practiced Judge Fang noted that it had jumped backward by a quarter of a minute or so; the narrative had split, and we were now seeing the other fork of the plot. This feed depicted a solitary gang member who was trying to climb aboard his bicycle even as his comrades were riding away on contrails of sticky foam. But the bike had been mangled somehow and would not function. The youth abandoned it and fled on foot.

Up in the corner, the small diagram of the tagging aerostat zoomed in to a high magnification, revealing some of the device's internal complications, so that it began to look less like a hornet and more like a cutaway view of a starship. Mounted in the nose was a device that spat out tiny darts drawn from an interior magazine. At first these were almost invisibly tiny, but as the view continued to zoom, the hull of the tagging aerostat grew until it resembled the gentle curve of a planet's horizon, and the darts became more clearly visible. They were hexagonal in crosssection, like pencil stubs. When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage at the tail.

"The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique." Miss Pao was outdoing herself. Judge Fang raised an eyebrow at her, briefly hitting the pause button.

Chang, Judge Fang's other assistant, rotated his enormous, nearly spherical head in the direction of the defendant, who was looking very small as he stood before the court. Chang, in a characteristic gesture, reached up and rubbed the palm of his hand back over the short stubble that covered his head, as if he could not believe he had such a bad haircut. He opened his sleepy, slitlike eyes just a notch, and said to the defendant, "She say you have road rash."

The defendant, a pale asthmatic boy, had seemed too awed to be scared through most of this. Now the corners of his mouth twitched. Judge Fang noticed with approval that he controlled the impulse to smile.

"Consequently," Miss Pao said, "there were lapses in his Nanobar integument. An unknown number of tag mites passed through these openings and embedded themselves in his clothing and flesh. He discarded all of his clothing and scrubbed himself vigorously at a public shower before returning to his domicile, but three hundred and fifty tag mites remained in his flesh and were later extracted during the course of our examination. As usual, the tag mites were equipped with inertial navigation systems that recorded all of the suspect's subsequent movements."

The big cine feed was replaced by a map of the Leased Territories with the suspect's movements traced out with a red line. This boy did a lot of wandering about, even going into Shanghai on occasion, but he always came back to the same apartment.

"After a pattern was established, the tag mites automatically spored," Miss Pao said. The image of the barbed dart altered itself, the midsection— which contained a taped record of the dart's movements— breaking free and accelerating into the void.

"Several of the spores found their way to a sky-eye, where their contents were downloaded and their serial numbers checked against police records. It was determined that the suspect spent much of his time in a particular apartment. Surveillance was placed on that apartment. One of the residents clearly matched the suspect seen on the cine feed. The suspect was placed under arrest and additional tag mites found in his body, tending to support our suspicions."

"Oooh," Chang blurted, absently, as if he'd just remembered something important.

"What do we know about the victim?" Judge Fang said.

"The cine stat could track him only as far as the gates of New Atlantis," Miss Pao said. "His face was bloody and swollen, complicating identification. He had also been tagged, naturally— the tagger aerostat cannot make any distinction between victim and perpetrator— but no spores were received; we can assume that all of his tag mites were detected and destroyed by Atlantis/Shanghai's immune system."

At this point Miss Pao stopped talking and swiveled her eyes in the direction of Chang, who was standing quiescently with his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the floor as if his thick neck had finally given way under the weight of his head. Miss Pao cleared her throat once, twice, three times, and suddenly Chang came awake. "Excuse me, Your Honor," he said, bowing to Judge Fang. He rummaged in a large plastic bag and withdrew a gentleman's top hat in poor condition. "This was found at the scene," he said, finally reverting to his native Shanghainese.

Judge Fang dropped his eyes to the tabletop and then looked up at Chang. Chang stepped forward and placed the hat carefully on the table, giving it a little nudge as if its position were not quite perfect. Judge Fang regarded it for a few moments, then withdrew his hands from the voluminous sleeves of his robe, picked it up, and flipped it over. The words JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH were written in gold script on the hatband.

Judge Fang cast a significant look at Miss Pao, who shook her head. They had not yet contacted the victim. Neither had the victim contacted them, which was interesting; John Percival Hackworth must have something to hide. The neo-Victorians were smart; why did so many of them get mugged in the Leased Territories after an evening of brothel-crawling?

"You have recovered the stolen items?" Judge Fang said. Chang stepped to the table again and laid out a man's pocket watch. Then he stepped back, hands clasped behind him, bent his neck again, and watched his feet, which could not contain themselves from shuffling back and forth in tiny increments. Miss Pao was glaring at him.

"There was another item? A book, perhaps?" Judge Fang said. Chang cleared his throat nervously, suppressing the urge to hawk and spit— an activity Judge Fang had barred in his courtroom. He turned sideways and backed up one step, allowing Judge Fang to view one of the spectators: a young girl, perhaps four years old, sitting with her feet up on the chair so that her face was blocked by her knees. Judge Fang heard the sound of a page turning and realized that the girl was reading a book propped up on her thighs. She cocked her head this way and that, talking to the book in a tiny voice.