The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

by Neal Stephenson

  “Where'd you learn to do that stuff?”

  “What—directing plays?”

  “No. The technical stuff—programming the lights and so on.”

  Carl turned around to look at her. “This may be at odds with your notion of how people learn things,” he said, “but I had to teach myself everything. Hardly anyone does live theatre anymore, so we have to develop our own technology. I invented all of the software I was just using.”

  “Did you invent the little spotlights?”

  “No. I'm not as good at the nanostuff. A friend of mine in London came up with those. We swap stuff all the time—my mediaware for his matterware.”

  “Well, I want to buy you dinner somewhere,” Miranda said, “and I want you to explain to me how it all works.”

  “That's a rather tall order,” Carl said calmly, “but I accept the invitation.”

  “Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing, starting with Turing machines, or what?” Carl said pleasantly—humoring her. Miranda decided not to become indignant. They were in a red vinyl booth at a restaurant near the Bund that supposedly simulated an American diner on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. Chinese hipsters—classic Coastal Republic types in their expensive haircuts and sharp suits—were lined up on the rotating stools along the lunch counter, sucking on their root beer floats and flashing wicked grins at any young women who came in.

  “I guess so,” Miranda said.

  Carl Hollywood laughed and shook his head. “I was being facetious. You need to tell me exactly what you want to know. Why are you suddenly taking up an interest in this stuff? Aren't you happy just making a good living from it?”

  Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful flashing lights on a vintage jukebox.

  “This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?” Carl said.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yeah. Now, what do you want?”

  “I want to know who she is,” Miranda said. This was the most guarded way she could put it. She didn't suppose that it would help matters to drag Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.

  “You want to backtrace a payer,” Carl said.

  It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of language.

  Carl sucked powerfully on his milk shake for a bit, his eyes looking over Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund. “Princess Nell's a little kid, right?”

  “Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old.”

  His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. “You can tell that?”

  “Yes,” she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.

  “So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is someone else. You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there, track down Nell.” Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and tried unsuccessfully to whistle through frozen lips. “Even the first step is impossible.”

  Miranda was startled. “That seems pretty unequivocal. I expected to hear “difficult' or “expensive.' But—”

  “Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe”—Carl thought about it for a while—“maybe “astronomically improbable' is a better way of putting it.” Then he looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's expression change. “You can't just trace the connection backward. That's not how media works.”

  “How does media work, then?”

  “Look out the window. Not toward the Bund—check out Yan'an Road.”

  Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window, which was partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and descriptions of blue plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. In many places the traffic was so dense that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown stream.

  It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. “What am I looking for?”

  “Notice how no one's empty-handed? They're all carrying something.”

  Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier loads.

  “Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and think about how to set up a global telecommunications network.”

  Miranda laughed. “I don't have any basis for thinking about something like that.”

  “Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the telephone system in the old passives. In that system, each transaction had two participants—the two people having the conversation. And they were connected by a wire that ran through a central switchboard. So what are the key features of this system?”

  “I don't know—I'm asking you,” said Miranda.

  “Number one, only two people, or entities, can interact. Number two, it uses a dedicated connection that is made and then broken for the purposes of that one conversation. Number three, it is inherently centralized—it can't work unless there is a central switchboard.”

  “Okay, I think I'm following you so far.”

  “Our media system today—the one that you and I make our livings from—is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more. But the key point to remember is that it is totally different from the old phone system. The old phone system—and its technological cousin, the cable TV system—tanked. It crashed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch.”

  “Why? It worked, didn't it?”

  “First of all, we needed to enable interactions between more than one entity. What do I mean by entity? Well, think about the ractives. Think about First Class to Geneva. You're on this train—so are a couple of dozen other people. Some of those people are being racted, so in that case the entities happen to be human beings. But others—like the waiters and porters—are just software robots. Furthermore, the train is full of props: jewelry, money, guns, bottles of wine. Each one of those is also a separate piece of software—a separate entity. In the lingo, we call them objects. The train itself is another object, and so is the countryside through which it travels.

  “The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of First Class to Geneva send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing data—a digital map of the world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it, for a price of course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in the memory of a computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive itself. It doesn't matter. The data might be in California, it might be in Paris, it might be down at the corner—or it might be distributed among all of those places and many more. It doesn't matter. Because our media system no longer works like the old system—dedicated wires passing through a central switchboard. It works like that.” Carl pointed to the traffic on the street again.

  “So each person on the street is like an object?”

  “Possibly. But a better analogy is that the objects are people like us, sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose that we want to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We write the message down on a piece of paper, and we go to the door and hand it to the first person who goes by and say, “Take this to Mr. Gu in Pudong.' And he skates down the street for a while and runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he might be headed for Pudong, and says, “Take this to Mr. Gu.' A minute later, that person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian who can negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he sends us a message in the same way.”

  “So there's no way to trace the path taken by a message.”

  “Right. And the real situation is even more complicated. The media net was designed from the gr
ound up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nation-states collapsed—as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared. So if the old IRS, for example, wasn't able to trace these messages, then there's no way that you'll be able to track down Princess Nell.”

  “Okay, I guess that answers my question,” Miranda said.

  “Good!” Carl said brightly. He was obviously pleased that he'd been able to help Miranda, and so she didn't tell him how his words had really made her feel. She treated it as an acting challenge: Could she fool Carl Hollywood, who was sharper about acting than just about anyone, into thinking that she was fine?

  Apparently she did. He escorted her back to her flat, in a hundred-story high-rise just across the river in Pudong, and she held it together long enough to bid him good-bye, get out of her clothes, and run a bath. Then she climbed into the hot water and dissolved in awful, wretched, blubbery, self-pitying tears.

  Eventually she got it under control. She had to keep this in perspective. She could still interact with Nell and still did, every day. And if she paid attention, sooner or later she would find some way to penetrate the curtain. Barring that, she was beginning to understand that Nell, whoever she was, had been marked out in some way, and that in time she would become a very important person. Within a few years, Miranda expected to be reading about her in the newspaper. Feeling better, she got out of the bath and climbed into bed, getting a good night's sleep so she'd be ready for her next day of taking care of Nell.

  General description of life with the Constable; his

  avocations and other peculiarities; a disturbing

  sight; Nell learns about his past;

  a conversation over dinner.

  The garden house had two rooms, one for sleeping and one for playing. The playing room had a set of double doors, made of many small windows, that opened onto Constable Moore's garden. Nell had been told to be careful with the little windows, because they were made of real glass. The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as though she were hiding behind something.

  The garden itself was forever trying to draw the little house into it; many vast-growing vines of ivy, wisteria, and briar rose were deeply engaged in the important project of climbing the walls, using the turtle-shell-colored copper drainpipes, and the rough surfaces of the brick and mortar, as fingerholds. The slate roof of the cottage was phosphorescent with moss. From time to time, Constable Moore would charge into the breach with a pair of trimmers and cut away some of the vines that so prettily framed the view through Nell's glass doors, lest they imprison her.

  During Nell's second year living in the cottage, she asked the Constable if she might have a bit of garden space of her own, and after an early phase of profound shock and misgivings, the Constable eventually pulled up a few flagstones, exposing a small plot, and caused one of the Dovetail artisans to manufacture some copper window boxes and attach them to the cottage walls. In the plot, Nell planted some carrots, thinking about her friend Peter who had vanished so long ago, and in the window boxes she planted some geraniums. The Primer taught her how to do it and also reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.

  Constable Moore continued to work his daily shift at the gatehouse. When he came home in the evening, he and Nell would often dine together inside his house. At first they got food straight from the M.C., or else the Constable would fry up something simple, like sausage and eggs. During this period, Princess Nell and the other characters in the Primer found themselves eating a lot of sausage and eggs too, until Duck lodged a protest and taught the Princess how to cook healthier food. Nell then got in the habit of cooking a healthy meal with salad and vegetables, several afternoons a week after she got home from school. There was some grumbling from the Constable, but he always cleaned up his plate and sometimes washed the dishes.

  The Constable spent a lot of time reading books. Nell was welcome to be in his house when he was doing this, as long as she was quiet. Frequently he would shoo her out, and then he would get in touch with some old friend of his over the big mediatron on the wall of his library. Usually Nell would just go back to her little cottage during these times, but sometimes, especially if the moon was full, she would wander around in the garden. This seemed larger than it really was by virtue of being divided into many small compartments. On late full-moon nights, her favorite place was a grove of tall green bamboo with some pretty rocks strewn around. She would sit with her back against a rock, read her Primer, and occasionally hear sound emanating from the inside of Constable Moore's house as he talked on the mediatron: mostly deep bellowing laughter and explosions of good-natured profanity. For quite some time she assumed that it was not the Constable who was making these sounds, but rather whomever he was talking to; because in her presence the Constable was always very polite and reserved, albeit somewhat eccentric. But one night she heard loud moaning noises coming from his house, and crept down out of the bamboo grove to see what was happening.

  From her vantage point through the glass doors, she couldn't see the mediatron, which was facing away from her. Its light illuminated the whole room, painting the normally warm and cozy space with lurid flashing colors, and throwing long jagged shadows. Constable Moore had shoved all the furniture and other obstructions to the walls and rolled up the Chinese carpet to expose the floor, which Nell had always assumed was made of oak, like the floor in her cottage; but the floor was, in fact, a large mediatron itself, glowing rather dimly compared to the one on the wall, and displaying a lot of rather high-resolution material: text documents and detailed graphics with the occasional cine feed. The Constable was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child, the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and spattering onto the mediatron, which illuminated them weirdly from below.

  Nell wanted badly to go in and comfort him, but she was too scared. She stood and watched, frozen in indecision, and realized as she did so that the flashes of light coming from the mediatrons reminded her of explosions—or rather pictures of explosions. She backed away and went back into her little house.

  Half an hour later, she heard the unearthly noise of Constable Moore's bagpipes emanating from the bamboo grove. In the past he had occasionally picked them up and made a few squealing noises, but this was the first time she'd heard a formal recital. She was not an expert on the pipes, but she thought he sounded not bad. He was playing a slow number, a coronach, and it was so sad that it almost tore Nell's heart asunder; the sight of the Constable weeping helplessly on his hands and knees was not half so sad as the music he was playing now.

  In time he moved on to a faster and happier pibroch. Nell emerged from her cottage into the garden. The Constable was just a silhouette slashed into a hundred ribbons by the vertical shafts of the bamboo, but when she moved back and forth, some trick of her eye reassembled the image. He was standing in a pool of moonlight. He had changed clothes: now he was wearing his kilt, and a shirt and beret that seemed to belong to some sort of a uniform. When his lungs were empty, he would draw in a great breath, his chest would heave, and an ar
ray of silvery pins and insignia would glimmer in the moonlight.

  He had left the doors open. She walked into the house, not bothering to be stealthy because she knew that she could not possibly be heard over the sound of the bagpipe.

  The wall and the floor were both giant mediatrons, and both had been covered with a profusion of media windows, hundreds and hundreds of separate panes, like a wall on a busy city street where posters and bills have been pasted up in such abundance that they have completely covered the substrate. Some of the panes were only as big as the palm of Nell's hand, and some of them were the size of wall posters. Most of the ones on the floor were windows into written documents, grids of numbers, schematic diagrams (lots of organizational trees), or wonderful maps, drawn with breathtaking precision and clarity, with rivers, mountains, and villages labeled in Chinese characters. As Nell surveyed this panorama, she flinched once or twice from the impression that something small was creeping along the floor; but there were no bugs in the room, it was just an illusion created by small fluctuations in the maps and in the rows and columns of numbers. These things were ractive, just like the words in the Primer; but unlike the Primer, they were responding not to what Nell did but, she supposed, to events far away.

  When she finally raised her gaze from the floor to view the mediatrons lining the walls, she saw that most of the panes there were much larger, and most of them carried cine feeds, and most of these had been frozen. The images were very sharp and clear. Some of them were landscapes: a stretch of rural road, a bridge across a dried-up river, a dusty village with flames bubbling from some of the houses. Some of them were pictures of people: talking-head shots of Chinese men wearing dirty uniforms with dark mountains, clouds of dust, or drab green vehicles as backdrops.

  In one of the cine feeds, a man was lying on the ground, his dusty uniform almost the same color as the dirt. Suddenly this image moved; the feed had not been frozen like the others. Someone was walking past the camera: a Chinese man in indigo pajamas, decorated with scarlet ribbons tied round his head and his waist, though these had gone brown with grime. When he had passed out of the frame, Nell focused on the other man, the one who was lying in the dust, and she realized for the first time that he did not have a head.