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

by Neal Stephenson

  The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.

  On one of her forays into the surf, Nell had encountered a man—a Drummer—who had come swimming out of the deep, naked except for a gill pack. This should have astonished her; instead, she had known he was out there before she saw him, and when he came close, she could feel things happening in her mind that were coming in from outside. There was something in her brain that made her connected to the Drummers.

  Nell had drawn up some general plans and given them to her engineers for further elaboration, and they had given them to Carl, who had taken them to a functioning portable M.C. in the New Atlantan camp and compiled a little system for examining and manipulating nanotechnological devices.

  In the dark, motes of light sparkled in Nell's flesh, like airplane beacons in the night sky. They scraped one of these away with a scalpel and examined it. They found similar devices circulating in her bloodstream. These things, they realized, must have been put into Nell's blood when she was raped. It was clear that the sparkling lights in Nell's flesh were beacons signaling to others across the gulf that separates each of us from our neighbors.

  Carl opened one of the things from Nell's blood and found a rod logic system inside, and a tape drive containing some few gigabytes of data. The data was divided into discrete chunks, each one of which was separately encrypted. Carl tried all of the keys that he had obtained from John Percival Hackworth and found that one of them—Hackworth's key—unlocked some of the chunks. When he examined the decrypted contents, he discovered fragments of a plan for some kind of nanotechnological device.

  They drew blood from several volunteers and found that one of them had the same little devices in his blood. When they put two of these devices in close proximity, they locked onto one another using lidar and embraced, exchanging data and performing some sort of computation that threw off waste heat.

  The devices lived in the blood of the human race like viruses and passed from one person to the next during sex or any other exchange of bodily fluids; they were smart packets of data, just like the ones traversing the media network, and by mating with one another in the blood, they formed a vast system of communication, parallel to and probably linked with the dry Net of optical lines and copper wires. Like the dry Net, the wet Net could be used for doing computations—for running programs. And it was now clear that John Percival Hackworth was using it for exactly that, running some kind of vast distributed program of his own devising. He was designing something.

  “Hackworth is the Alchemist,” Nell said, “and he is using the wet Net to design the Seed.”

  Half a kilometer offshore, the tunnels began. Some of them must have been there for many years, for they were rough as tree trunks, encrusted with barnacles and algae. But it was clear that in the last few days they had forked and split organically, like roots questing for moisture; clean new tubes forced their way out through the encrustation and ran uphill toward the tide line, splitting again and again until many orifices presented themselves to the refugees. The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater. The tunnels were lined with mediatronic images urging them forward into the deep; it always seemed as though a warm dry well-lit space awaited them just a bit farther down the line. But the light moved along with the viewer so that they were drawn down the tunnels in a kind of peristalsis. The refugees came to the main tunnel, the old encrusted one, and continued moving on, now packed together in a solid mass, until they were disgorged into a large open cavity far below the surface of the ocean. Here, food and fresh water awaited them and they ate hungrily.

  Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl.

  After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out and destroy the Drummers' devices. She and Carl had both put these devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so. Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were shining down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow. The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.

  Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.

  “We have to go,” Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.

  A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.

  Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had passed—it was impossible to know how long—his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.

  The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light, moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high fever and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course, he realized why: They were exchan
ging packets of data with their bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.

  The orgy went on for hours, but the pattern of convection gradually slowed down and condensed into a stable arrangement, like a circulating crowd in a theatre that settles into its assigned seats as curtain time approaches. A broad open space had formed at the center of the pit, and the innermost ring of spectators consisted of men, as if these were in some sense the winners of the enormous fornication tournament that was nearing its final round. A lone Drummer circulated around this innermost ring, handing something out; the something turned out to be mediatronic condoms that glowed bright colors when they were stripped onto the men's erect phalluses.

  A lone woman entered the ring. The floor at the absolute center of the pit rose up beneath her feet, shoving her into the air as on an altar. The drumming built to an unbearable crescendo and then stopped. Then it began again, a very slow steady beat, and the men in the inner circle began to dance around her.

  Carl Hollywood saw that the woman in the center was Miranda.

  He saw it all now: that the refugees had been gathered into the realm of the Drummers for the harvest of fresh data running in their bloodstreams, that this data had been infused into the wet Net in the course of the great orgy, and that all of it was now going to be dumped into Miranda, whose body would play host to the climax of some computation that would certainly burn her alive in the process. It was Hackworth's doing; this was the culmination of his effort to design the Seed, and in so doing to dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.

  A lone figure, remarkable because her skin did not emit any light, was fighting her way in toward the center. She burst into the inner circle, knocking down a dancer who got in her way, and climbed up onto the central altar where Miranda lay on her back, arms outstretched as if crucified, her skin a galaxy of colored lights.

  Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled. The light shining from Miranda's body diminished and slowly went out as the nanosites were hunted down and destroyed by the hunter-killers that had crossed into her blood from Nell's. Miranda came awake and arose, her arms draped weakly around Nell's neck.

  The drumming had stopped; the Drummers all sat impassively, clearly content to wait—for years if necessary—for a woman who could take Miranda's place. The light from their flesh had diminished, and the overhead mediatron had gone dim and vague. Carl Hollywood, seeing at last a role for himself, stepped into the center, got one arm under Miranda's knees and another beneath her shoulders, and lifted her into the air. Nell turned around and led them up out of the cavern, holding her sword out before her; but none of the Drummers moved to stop them.

  They passed up through many tunnels, always taking the uphill fork until they saw sunlight shining down from above through the waves, casting lines of white light on the translucent roof. Nell severed the tunnel behind them, wielding her sword like the sweep of a clock's hand. The warm water rushed in on them. Nell swam up toward the light. Miranda was not swimming strongly, and Carl was torn between a panicky desire to reach the surface and his duty to Miranda. Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous. Carl and Miranda were gripped by many gentle hands and borne upward into the light.

  New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Neal Stephenson is the author of The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and The Big U.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jeremy Bornstein

  Douglas (Carl Hollywood) Crockford

  K. Eric Drexler

  Wayne “Hank” Hansen

  Steve Horst

  Steve Johnson

  Marco Kaltofen

  Sachiko Emma Kashiwaya

  Kevin Kelly

  Alan Moores

  Chris Peterson

  Rattana Schicketanz

  Dean Tribble

  BANTAM BOOKS BY NEAL STEPHENSON:

  The Diamond Age

  Snow Crash

  Zodiac

  PRAISE FOR NEAL STEPHENSON

  THE DIAMOND AGE

  “Snow Crash hit like a lightning bolt and put Stephenson in the top echelon of cyberpunk, a brand of science fiction noir that's heav technology and futuristic grit. … The dominant technological thread in The Diamond Age has to do with nanotechnology . . . a potent literary brew.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Stephenson's animated imagination . . . circulates through the narrative. . . . Combined with the cutting-edge technology, . . . witticisms make reading The Diamond Age a lot of fun.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Stephenson creates a rich and complex world. . . . There's a wealth of invention and a large cast of intriguing characters.”

  —The Denver Post

  “The Diamond Age> displays Stephenson's skill in stitching together entire worlds from whole cloth, telling a rattling good adventure yarn with jabs from a sharp satiric needle.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “With breathtaking vision and insight, Stephenson establishes himself as not only a major voice in contemporary sf but also a prophet of technology's future.”

  —Booklist

  “Staggeringly inventive and meticulously detailed.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Yet another tour de force. Multi-layered, intricately plotted, and filled with memorable characters.”

  —The Des Moines Register

  SNOW CRASH

  “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”

  —Los Angeles Reader

  “The most influential book since William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “The all-too-near future masterfully conceived.”

  —San Francisco Bay Guardian

  “Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the 21st century.”

  —William Gibson

  “Brilliantly realized . . . Stephenson turns out to be an engaging guide to an onrushing tomorrow.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hip, real, distressingly funny . . . Neal Stephenson is a crafty plotter and a wry writer . . . Snow Crash is> great fun, both loopy and dense, a Tootsie Roll of a book—chewy center and all.”

  —The Des Moines Register

  “A fantastic, slam-bang-overdrive, supersurrealistic, comic-spooky whirl through a tomorrow that is already happening. Neal Stephenson is intelligent, perceptive, hip, and will become a major force in American writing.”

  —Timothy Leary

  THE DIAMOND AGE

  Bantam Spectra hardcover edition / February 1995

  Bantam Spectra mass market edition / March 1996

  Bantam trade paperback edition / March 2000

  Bantam trade paperback reissue / September 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1995 by Neal Stephenson.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-30486

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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  eISBN: 978-0-553-89820-0

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