The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  A leaf of paper was about a hundred thousand nanometers thick; a third of a million atoms could fit into this span. Smart paper consisted of a network of infinitesimal computers sandwiched between mediatrons. A mediatron was a thing that could change its color from place to place; two of them accounted for about two-thirds of the paper's thickness, leaving an internal gap wide enough to contain structures a hundred thousand atoms wide.

  Light and air could easily penetrate to this point, so the works were contained within vacuoles—airless buckminsterfullerene shells overlaid with a reflective aluminum layer so that they would not implode en masse whenever the page was exposed to sunlight. The interiors of the buckyballs, then, constituted something close to a eutactic environment. Here resided the rod logic that made the paper smart. Each of these spherical computers was linked to its four neighbors, north-east-south-west, by a bundle of flexible pushrods running down a flexible, evacuated buckytube, so that the page as a whole constituted a parallel computer made up of about a billion separate processors. The individual processors weren't especially smart or fast and were so susceptible to the elements that typically only a small fraction of them were working, but even with those limitations the smart paper still constituted, among other things, a powerful graphical computer.

  And still, Hackworth reflected, it had nothing on Runcible, whose pages were thicker and more densely packed with computational machinery, each sheet folded four times into a sixteen-page signature, thirty-two signatures brought together in a spine that, in addition to keeping the book from falling apart, functioned as an enormous switching system and database.

  It was made to be robust, but it still had to be born in the eutactic womb, a solid diamond vacuum chamber housing a start matter compiler. The diamond was doped with something that let only red light pass through; standard engineering practice eschewed any molecular bonds that were tenuous enough to be broken by those lazy red photons, underachievers of the visible spectrum. Thus the growth of your prototype was visible through the window—a good last-ditch safety measure. If your code was buggy and your project grew too large, threatening to shatter the walls of the chamber, you could always shut it down via the ludicrously low-tech expedient of shutting off the Feed line.

  Hackworth wasn't worried, but he watched the initial phases of growth anyway, just because it was always interesting. In the beginning was an empty chamber, a diamond hemisphere, glowing with dim red light. In the center of the floor slab, one could see a naked cross-section of an eight-centimeter Feed, a central vacuum pipe surrounded by a collection of smaller lines, each a bundle of microscopic conveyor belts carrying nanomechanical building blocks—individual atoms, or scores of them linked together in handy modules.

  The matter compiler was a machine that sat at the terminus of a Feed and, following a program, plucked molecules from the conveyors one at a time and assembled them into more complicated structures.

  Hackworth was the programmer. Runcible was the program. It was made up of a number of subprograms, each of which had resided on a separate piece of paper until a few minutes ago, when the immensely powerful computer in Hackworth's office had compiled them into a single finished program written in a language that the matter compiler could understand.

  A transparent haze coalesced across the terminus of the Feed, mold on an overripe strawberry. The haze thickened and began adopting a shape, some parts a little higher than others. It spread across the floor away from the Feed line until it had filled out its footprint: one quadrant of a circle with a radius of a dozen centimeters. Hackworth continued to watch until he was sure he could see the top edge of the book growing out of it.

  In the corner of this lab stood an evolved version of a copy machine that could take just about any kind of recorded information and transmogrify it into something else. It could even destroy a piece of information and then attest to the fact that it had been destroyed, which was useful in the relatively paranoid environment of Bespoke. Hackworth gave it the document containing the compiled Runcible code and destroyed it. Provably.

  When it was finished, Hackworth released the vacuum and lifted the red diamond dome. The finished book stood upright atop the system that had extruded it, which was turned into a junk heap as soon as it was touched by the air. Hackworth picked up the book in his right hand and the extruder in his left, and tossed the latter into a junk bin.

  He locked the book in a desk drawer, picked up his top hat, gloves, and walking-stick, stepped into his walker, and set off for the Causeway. Toward Shanghai.

  Nell & Harv's general living situation;

  the Leased Territories; Tequila.

  China was right across the water, and you could see it if you went down to the beach. The city there, the one with skyscrapers, was called Pudong, and beyond that was Shanghai. Harv went there with his friends sometimes. He said it was bigger than you could imagine, old and dirty and full of strange people and sights.

  They lived in the L.T., which according to Harv was short for Leased Territories in letters. Nell already knew the mediaglyphics for it. Harv had also taught her the sign for Enchantment, which was the name of the Territory where they lived; it was a princess sprinkling golden specks from a stick onto some gray houses, which turned yellow and bright when the specks touched them. Nell thought that the specks were mites, but Harv insisted that mites were too small to be seen, that the stick was a magic wand and the specks were fairy dust. In any case, Harv made her remember that mediaglyph so that if she ever got lost, she could find her way home.

  “But it's better if you just call me,” Harv said, “and I'll come and find you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there's bad people out there, and you shouldn't walk through the L.T. alone, ever.”

  “What bad people?”

  Harv looked troubled, heaved multiple sighs, fidgeted. “You know that ractive I was in the other day, where there were pirates, and they tied up the kids and were going to make them walk the plank?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are pirates in the L.T. too.”

  “Where?”

  “Don't bother looking. You can't see 'em. They don't look like pirates, with the big hats and swords and all. They just look like normal people. But they're pirates on the inside, and they like to grab kids and tie 'em up.”

  “And make them walk the plank?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Call the police!”

  “I don't think the police would help. Maybe they would.”

  Police were Chinese. They came across the Causeway from Shanghai. Nell saw them up close once, when they came into the house to arrest Mom's boyfriend Rog. Rog wasn't home, just Nell and Harv were, and so Harv let them in and let them sit in the living room and fetched tea for them. Harv spoke some words of Shanghainese to them, and they grinned and ruffled his hair. He told Nell to stay in their bedroom and not come out, but Nell came out anyway and peeked. There were three policemen, two in uniforms and one in a suit, and they sat smoking cigarettes and watching something on the mediatron until Rog came back. Then they had an argument with him and took him out, shouting the whole way. After that, Rog didn't come around anymore, and Tequila started going out with Mark.

  Unlike Rog, Mark had a job. He worked in the New Atlantis Clave cleaning windows of the Vickys' homes. He would come home late in the afternoon all tired and dirty and take a long shower in their bathroom. Sometimes he would have Nell come into the bathroom with him and help scrub his back, because he couldn't quite reach one spot in the middle. Sometimes he would look at Nell's hair and tell her that she needed a bath, and then she would take off her clothes and climb into the shower with him and he would help wash her.

  One day she asked Harv whether Mark ever gave him a shower. Harv got upset and asked her a lot of questions. Later, Harv told Tequila about it, but Tequila had an argument with him and sent him to his room with one side of his face red and puffy. Then Tequila talked to Mark. They argued
in the living room, the thumps booming through the wall as Harv and Nell huddled together in Harv's bed.

  Harv and Nell both pretended to go to sleep that night, but Nell heard Harv getting up and sneaking out of the house. She didn't see him for the rest of the night. In the morning, Mark got up and went to work, and then Tequila got up and put a lot of makeup all over her face and went to work.

  Nell was alone the whole day, wondering if Mark was going to make her take a shower that evening. She knew from the way Harv had reacted that the showers were a bad thing, and in a way it felt good to know this because it explained why it felt wrong. She did not know how to stop Mark from making her take the shower this evening. She told Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple about it.

  These four creatures were the only animals that had survived a great massacre perpetrated during the previous year by Mac, one of Mom's boyfriends, who in a fit of rage had gathered up all of the dolls and stuffed animals in Nell's room and stuffed them into the knacking hatch.

  When Harv had opened it up a few hours later, he had found all of the toys vanished except for these four. He had explained that the deke bin would only work on things that had come from the M.C. originally, and that anything that had been made “by hand” (a troublesome concept to explain) was rejected. Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple were old ragged things that had been made “by hand.”

  When Nell told them her story, Dinosaur was brave and said that she should fight Mark. Duck had some ideas, but they were silly ideas, because Duck was just a little kid. Peter thought she should run away. Purple thought she should use magic and sprinkle Mark with fairy dust; some of it would be like the mites that (according to Harv) the Vickys used to protect themselves from bad people.

  In the kitchen was some food that Tequila had brought home last night, including chopsticks with little mediatrons built into their handles so that mediaglyphics ran up and down them while you ate. Nell knew that there must be mites in there, to make those mediaglyphics, and so she took one of the chopsticks as her magic wand.

  She also had a silvery plastic balloon that Harv had made her in the M.C. All the air had gone out of it. She reckoned it would make a nice shield like she had once seen on the arm of a knight in one of Harv's ractives. She sat in the corner of the room on her mattress with Dinosaur and Purple in front of her, and Duck and Peter behind her, and waited, clutching her magic wand and her shield.

  But Mark didn't come home. Tequila came home and wondered where Mark was, but didn't seem to mind that he wasn't there. Finally Harv came back, late that night, after Nell had gone to bed, and hid something under his mattress. The next day Nell looked: It was a pair of heavy sticks, each about a foot long, joined in the middle by a short chain, and the whole thing was smeared with reddish-brown stuff that had gone sticky and crusty.

  The next time Nell saw Harv, he told her that Mark was never coming back, that he was one of the pirates he'd warned her about, and that if anyone else ever tried to do such things to her, she should run away and scream and tell Harv and his friends right away. Nell was astonished; she had not understood just how tricky pirates were until this moment.

  Hackworth crosses the Causeway into

  Shanghai; ruminations.

  The Causeway joining New Chusan and the Pudong Economic Zone was Atlantis/Shanghai's whole reason for existence, being in fact a titanic Feed restrained by mountainous thrust bearings at each end. From the standpoint of mass&cash flow, the physical territory of New Chusan itself, a lung of smart coral respiring in the ocean, was nothing more or less than the fountainhead of China's consumer economy, its only function to spew megatons of nanostuff into the Middle Kingdom's ever-ramifying Feed network, reaching millions of new peasants every month.

  For most of its length the Causeway skimmed the high tide level, but the middle kilometer arched to let ships through; not that anyone really needed ships anymore, but a few recalcitrant swabbies and some creative tour operators were still plying the Yangtze estuary in junks, which looked precious underneath the catenary arch of the big Feed, strumming the ancient-meets-modern chord for adherents of the National Geographic worldview. As Hackworth reached the apogee, he could see similar Causeways to port and starboard, linking the outskirts of Shanghai with other artificial islands. Nippon Nano looked Fujiesque, a belt of office buildings around the waterline, houses above that, the higher the better, then a belt of golf courses, the whole top third reserved for gardens, bamboo groves, and other forms of micromanaged Nature. In the other direction was a little bit of Hindustan. The geotecture of their island owed less to the Mogul period than to the Soviet, no effort being made to shroud its industrial heart in fractal artifice. It squatted out there some ten kilometers from New Chusan, sabotaging many expensive views and serving as the butt of snotty wog jokes. Hackworth never joined in these jokes because he was better informed than most and knew that the Hindustanis stood an excellent chance of stomping all over the Victorians and the Nipponese in the competition for China. They were just as smart, there were more of them, and they understood the peasant thing.

  From the high point of the arch, Hackworth could look across the flat territory of outer Pudong and into the high-rise district of metropolis. He was struck, as ever, by the sheer clunkiness of old cities, the acreage sacrificed, over the centuries, to various stabs at the problem of Moving Stuff Around. Highways, bridges, railways, and their attendant smoky, glinting yards, power lines, pipelines, port facilities ranging from sampan-and-junk to stevedore-and-cargo-net to containership, airports. Hackworth had enjoyed San Francisco and was hardly immune to its charm, but Atlantis/Shanghai had imbued him with the sense that all the old cities of the world were doomed, except possibly as theme parks, and that the future was in the new cities, built from the bedrock up one atom at a time, their Feed lines as integral as capillaries were to flesh. The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. Hackworth was heading for one of those neighborhoods right now, as fast as he could

  walk.

  If you counterfeited directly from a Feed, it would be noticed sooner or later, because all matter compilers fed information back to the Source. You needed your very own private Source, disconnected from the Feed network, and this was a difficult thing to make. But a motivated counterfeiter could, with some ingenuity and patience, put together a Source capable of providing an assortment of simple building blocks in the range of ten to a hundred daltons. There were a lot of people like that in Shanghai, some more patient and ingenious than others.

  Hackworth in the hong of Dr. X.

  The scalpel's edge was exactly one atom wide; it delaminated the skin of Hackworth's palm like an airfoil gliding through smoke. He peeled off a strip the size of a nailhead and proffered it to Dr. X, who snatched it with ivory chopsticks, dredged it through an exquisite cloisonné bowl filled with chemical dessicant, and arranged it on a small windowpane of solid diamond.

  Dr. X's real name was a sequence of shushing noises, disembodied metallic buzzes, unearthly quasi-Germanic vowels, and half-swallowed R's, invariably mangled by Westerners. Possibly for political reasons, he preferred not to pick a fake Western name like many Asians, instead suggesting, in a vaguely patronizing way, that they should just be satisfied with calling him Dr. X—that letter being the first in the Pinyin spelling of his name.

  Dr. X placed the diamond slide into a stainless-steel cylinder. At one end was a Teflon-gasketed flange riddled with bolt-holes. Dr. X handed it to one of his assistants, who carried it with both hands, as if it were a golden egg on a silken pillow, and mated it with another flange on a network of massive stainless-steel plumbing that covered most of two tabletops. The assistant's assistant got the job of inserting all the shi
ny bolts and torque-wrenching them down. Then the assistant flicked a switch, and an old-fashioned vacuum pump whacked into life, making conversation impossible for a minute or two. During this time Hackworth looked around Dr. X's laboratory, trying to peg the century and in some cases even the dynasty of each item. A row of mason jars stood on a high shelf, filled with what looked like giblets floating in urine. Hackworth supposed that they were the gall bladders of now-extinct species, no doubt accruing value by the moment, better than any mutual fund. A locked gun cabinet and a primæval Macintosh desktop-publishing system, green with age, attested to the owner's previous forays into officially discouraged realms of behavior. A window had been cut into one wall, betraying an airshaft no larger than a grave, from the bottom of which grew a gnarled maple. Other than that, the room was packed with so many small, numerous, brown, wrinkled, and organic-looking objects that Hackworth's eyes lost the ability to distinguish one from the next. There were also some samples of calligraphy dangling here and there, probably snatches of poetry. Hackworth had made efforts to learn a few Chinese characters and to acquaint himself with some basics of their intellectual system, but in general, he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it—say, in a nice stained-glass window—not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.

  Everyone in the room could tell by its sound when the mechanical pump was finished with its leg of the relay. The vapor pressure of its own oil had been reached. The assistant closed a valve that isolated it from the rest of the system, and then they switched over to the nanopumps, which made no noise at all. They were turbines, just like the ones in jet engines but very small and lots of them. Casting a critical eye over Dr. X's vacuum plumbing, Hackworth could see that they also had a scavenger, which was a cylinder about the size of a child's head, wrinkled up on the inside into a preposterous surface area coated with nanodevices good at latching onto stray molecules. Between the nanopumps and the scavenger, the vacuum rapidly dropped to what you might expect to see halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Then Dr. X himself quivered up out of his chair and began shuffling around the room, powering up a gallimaufry of contraband technology.