The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  A few days later, the gold pen on Hackworth's watch chain chimed. Hackworth pulled out a blank sheet of paper and summoned his mail. The following appeared on the page:

  THE RAVEN

  A CHRISTMAS TALE, TOLD BY A SCHOOL-BOY TO

  HIS LITTLE BROTHERS AND SISTERS

  by

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

  Underneath an old oak tree

  There was of swine a huge company

  That grunted as they crunched the mast:

  For that was ripe, and fell full fast.

  Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:

  One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.

  Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:

  He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!

  Blacker was he than blackest jet,

  Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.

  He picked up the acorn and buried it straight

  By the side of a river both deep and great.

  Where then did the Raven go?

  He went high and low,

  Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.

  Many Autumns, many Springs

  Travelled he with wandering wings:

  Many summers, many Winters—

  I can't tell half his adventures.

  At length he came back, and with him a She

  And the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree.

  They built them a nest in the topmost bough,

  And young ones they had, and were happy enow.

  But soon came a Woodman in leathern guise,

  His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.

  He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,

  But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,

  At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.

  His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,

  And their mother did die of a broken heart.

  The boughs from the trunk the Woodman did sever;

  And they floated it down on the course of the river.

  They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,

  And with this tree and others they made a good ship.

  The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land

  Such a storm there did rise as no ship would withstand.

  It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush'd in fast;

  Round and round flew the Raven, and cawed to the blast.

  He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls—

  See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!

  Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,

  And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,

  And he thank'd him again and again for this treat:

  They had taken his all, and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET!

  Mr. Hackworth:

  I hope the above poem illuminates the ideas I only touched on during our meeting of Tuesday last, and that it may contribute to your parœmiological studies.

  Coleridge wrote it in reaction to the tone of contemporary children's literature, which was didactic, much like the stuff they feed to our children in the “best” schools. As you can see, his concept of a children's poem is refreshingly nihilistic. Perhaps this sort of material might help to inculcate the sought-after qualities.

  I look forward to further conversations on the subject.

  Finkle-McGraw

  This was only the starting-point of development that had lasted for two years and culminated today. Christmas was just over a month away. Four-year-old Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw would receive the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from her grandfather.

  Fiona Hackworth would be getting a copy of the Illustrated Primer too, for this had been John Percival Hackworth's crime: He had programmed the matter compiler to place the cockleburs on the outside of Elizabeth's book. He had paid Dr. X to extract a terabyte of data from one of the cockleburs. That data was, in fact, an encrypted copy of the matter compiler program that had generated the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. He had paid Dr. X for the use of one of his matter compilers, which was connected to private Sources owned by Dr. X and not connected to any Feed. He had generated a second, secret copy of the Primer.

  The cockleburs had already self-destructed, leaving no evidence of his crime. Dr. X probably had a copy of the program on his computers, but it was encrypted, and Dr. X was smart enough simply to erase the thing and free up the storage, knowing that the encryption schemes apt to be used by someone like Hackworth could not be cracked without divine intervention.

  Before long the streets widened, and the hush of tires on pavement blended with the buller of waves against the gradual shores of Pudong. Across the bay, the white lights of the New Atlantis Clave rose up above the particolored mosaic of the Leased Territories. It seemed a long way off, so on impulse Hackworth rented a velocipede from an old man who had set up a stall in the lee of the Causeway's thrust bearing. He rode out onto the Causeway and, invigorated by the cool moist air on his face and hands, decided to pedal for a while. When he reached the arch, he allowed the bike's internal batteries to carry him up the slope. At the summit he turned it off and began to coast down the other side, enjoying the speed.

  His top hat flew off. It was a good one, with a smart band that was supposed to make these mishaps a thing of the past, but as an engineer, Hackworth had never taken the manufacturer's promise seriously. Hackworth was going too fast to make a safe U-turn, and so he put on the brakes.

  When he finally got himself turned around, he was unable to see his hat. He did see another cyclist coming toward him. It was a young man, covered in a slick Nanobar outfit. Except for his head, which was smartly adorned with Hackworth's top hat.

  Hackworth was prepared to ignore this jape; it was probably the only way the boy could safely get the hat down the hill, as prudence dictated keeping both hands on the handlebars.

  But the boy did not seem to be applying his brakes, and as he accelerated toward Hackworth, he actually sat up, taking both hands off the handlebars, and gripped the brim of the hat with both hands. Hackworth thought the boy was preparing to throw it back as he went by, but instead he pulled it down onto his head and grinned insolently as he shot past.

  “Say! Stop right there! You have my hat!” Hackworth shouted, but the boy did not stop. Hackworth stood astride his bicycle and watched unbelievingly as the boy began to fade into the distance. Then he turned on the bicycle's power assist and began chasing him.

  His natural impulse had been to summon the police. But since they were on the Causeway, this would mean the Shanghai Police again. In any case, they could not possibly have responded fast enough to catch this boy, who was well on his way to the end of the Causeway, where he could fork off into any of the Leased Territories.

  Hackworth nearly caught him. Without the power assist it would have been no contest, as Hackworth exercised daily in his club while this boy had the pudgy, pasty look typical of thetes. But the boy had a considerable head start. By the time they reached the first ramp leading down into the Leased Territories, Hackworth was only ten or twenty meters away, just close enough that he could not resist following the boy down the ramp. An overhead sign read: ENCHANTMENT.

  They both picked up more speed on the ramp, and once again the boy reached up to grip the brim of the top hat. This time the bike's front wheel turned the wrong way. The boy erupted from the seat. The bicycle skittered into the irrelevant distance and clattered into something. The boy bounced once, rolled, and skidded for a couple of meters. The hat, its crown partially collapsed, rolled on its brim, toppled, and wobbled to a stop. Hackworth hit the brakes hard and overshot the boy for some distance. As before, it took him longer than he would have liked to get turned around.

  And then he knew for the first time that the boy was not alone but part of a gang, probably the same group he'd seen in Shanghai; that they'd followed him onto the Causeway and taken advantage of his fallen top hat
to lure him into the Leased Territories; and that the rest of the gang, four or five boys on bicycles, was coming toward him down the ramp, coming fast; and in the fog of light from all of the Leased Territories' mediatronic billboards glittered the chromium chains of their nunchuks.

  Miranda; how she became a ractor; her early career.

  From the age of five, Miranda wanted to be in a ractive. In her early teens, after Mother had taken her away from Father and Father's money, she'd worked as a maid-of-all-work, chopping onions and polishing people's sterling-silver salvers, cake combs, fish trowels, and grape shears. As soon as she got good enough with hair and makeup to pass for an eighteen-year-old, she worked as a governess for five years, which paid a little better. With her looks she probably could have gotten a job as a lady's maid or parlormaid and become an Upper Servant, but she preferred the governess job. Whatever bad things her parents had done to her along the way, they had at least put her through some nice schools, where she'd learned to read Greek, conjugate Latin verbs, speak a couple of Romance languages, draw, paint, integrate a few simple functions, and play the piano. Working as a governess, she could put it all to use. Besides, she preferred even bratty children to adults.

  When the parents finally dragged their worn-out asses home to give their children Quality Time, Miranda would run to her subterranean quarters and get into the cheapest, trashiest ractive she could find. She wasn't going to make the mistake of spending all her money being in fancy ractives. She wanted to be a payee, not a payer, and you could practice your racting just as well in a dead shoot-'em-up as a live Shakespeare.

  As soon as she had saved up her ucus, she made the long-dreamed-of trip to the mod parlor, strode in with her jawline riding high as the hull of a clipper ship above a black turtleneck, looking very like a ractor, and asked for the Jodie. 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. Sweetheart™ and Hero™ 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-pom.

  “Let's run you thro
ugh 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 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.”