The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  “I must humbly apologize to the Judge,” Chang said in Shanghainese. “My resignation is hereby proffered.”

  Judge Fang took this with due gravity. “Why?”

  “I was unable to wrest the evidence from the young one's grasp,” Chang said.

  “I have seen you kill adult men with your hands,” Judge Fang reminded him. He had been raised speaking Cantonese, but could make himself understood to Chang by speaking a kind of butchered Mandarin.

  “Age has not been kind,” Chang said. He was thirty-six.

  “The hour of noon has passed,” said Judge Fang. “Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  “As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Chang.

  “As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Miss Pao.

  Judge Fang switched back to English. “Your case is very serious,” he said to the boy. “We will go and consult the ancient authorities. You will remain here until we return.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the defendant, abjectly terrified. This was not the abstract fear of a first-time delinquent; he was sweating and shaking. He had been caned before.

  The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier. Judge Fang had what amounted to a private table in the corner. He had once reduced Chang to a state of catalepsis by describing an avenue in Brooklyn that was lined with fried chicken establishments for miles, all of them ripoffs of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Miss Pao, who had grown up in Austin, Texas, was less easily impressed by these legends.

  Word of their arrival preceded them; their bucket already rested upon the table. The small plastic cups of gravy, coleslaw, potatoes, and so on had been carefully arranged. As usual, the bucket was placed squarely in front of Chang's seat, for he would be responsible for consumption of most of it. They ate in silence for a few minutes, communicating through eye contact and other subtleties, then spent several minutes exchanging polite formal chatter.

  “Something struck a chord in my memory,” Judge Fang said, when the time was right to discuss business. “The name Tequila—the mother of the suspect and of the little girl.”

  “The name has come before our court twice before,” Miss Pao said, and refreshed his memory of two previous cases: one, almost five years ago, in which this woman's lover had been executed, and the second, only a few months ago, a case quite similar to this one.

  “Ah, yes,” Judge Fang said, “I recall the second case. This boy and his friends beat a man severely. But nothing was stolen. He would not give a justification for his actions. I sentenced him to three strokes of the cane and released him.”

  “There is reason to suspect that the victim in that case had molested the boy's sister,” Chang put in, “as he has a previous record of such accomplishments.”

  Judge Fang fished a drumstick out of the bucket, arranged it on his napkin, folded his hands, and sighed. “Does the boy have any filial relationships whatsoever?”

  “None,” said Miss Pao.

  “Would anyone care to advise me?” Judge Fang frequently asked this question; he considered it his duty to teach his subordinates

  Miss Pao spoke, using just the right degree of cautiousness. “The Master says, “The superior man bends his attention to what is radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up. Filial piety and fraternal submission!—are they not the
root of all benevolent actions?' ”

  “How do you apply the Master's wisdom in this instance?”

  “The boy has no father—his only possible filial relationship is with the State. You, Judge Fang, are the only representative of the State he is likely to encounter. It is your duty to punish the boy firmly—say, with six strokes of the cane. This will help to establish his filial piety.”

  “But the Master also said, “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishments, but have no sense of shame. Whereas, if they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.' ”

  “So you are advocating leniency in this case?” Miss Pao said, somewhat skeptically.

  Chang chimed in: “ 'Mang Wu asked what filial piety was. The Master said, “Parents are anxious lest their children should be sick.” ' But the Master said nothing about caning.”

  Miss Pao said, “The Master also said, “Rotten wood cannot be carved.' And, “There are only the wise of the highest class, and the stupid of the lowest class, who cannot be changed.' ”

  “So the question before us is: Is the boy rotten wood? His father certainly was. I am not certain about the boy, yet.”

  “With utmost respect, I would direct your attention to the girl,” said Chang, “who should be the true subject of our discussions. The boy may be lost; the girl can be saved.”

  “Who will save her?” Miss Pao said. “We have the power to punish; we are not given the power to raise children.”

  “This is the essential dilemma of my position,” Judge Fang said. “The Mao Dynasty lacked a real judicial system. When the Coastal Republic arose, a judicial system was built upon the only model the Middle Kingdom had ever known, that being the Confucian. But such a system cannot truly function in a larger society that does not adhere to Confucian precepts. “From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.' Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?”

  Chang was ready for this opening and exploited it quickly. “The Master stated in his Great Learning that the extension of knowledge was the root of all other virtues.”

  “I cannot send the boy to school, Chang.”

  “Think instead of the girl,” Chang said, “the girl and her book.”

  Judge Fang contemplated this for a few moments, though he could see that Miss Pao badly wanted to say something.

  “ 'The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely,' ” Judge Fang said. “Since the victim has not contacted the police seeking return of his property, I will allow the girl to keep the book for her own edification—as the Master said, “In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.' I will sentence the boy to six strokes of the cane. But I will suspend all but one of those strokes, since he has displayed the beginnings of fraternal responsibility by giving the book to his sister. This is correctly firm.”

  “I have completed a phenomenoscopic survey of the book,” Miss Pao said. “It is not an ordinary book.”

  “I had already surmised that it was a ractive of some sort,” Judge Fang said.

  “It is considerably more sophisticated than that description implies. I believe that it may embody hot I.P.,” Miss Pao said.

  “You think that this book incorporates stolen technology?”

  “The victim works in the Bespoke division of Machine-Phase Systems. He is an artifex.”

  “Interesting,” Judge Fang said.

  “Is it worthy of further investigation?”

  Judge Fang thought about it for a moment, carefully wiping his fingertips on a fresh napkin.

  “It is,” he said.

  Hackworth presents the Primer to

  Lord Finkle-McGraw.

  “Is the binding and so on what you had in mind?” Hackworth said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Lord Finkle-McGraw. “If I found it in an antiquarian bookshop, covered with dust, I shouldn't give it a second glance.”

  “Because if you were not happy with any detail,” Hackworth said, “I could recompile it.” He had come in hoping desperately that Finkle-McGraw would object to something; this might give him an opportunity to filch another copy for Fiona. But so far the Equity Lord had been uncharacteristically complacent.

  He kept flipping through the book, waiting for something to happen.

  “It is unlikely to do anything interesting just now,” Hackworth said. “It won't really activate itself until it bonds.”

  “Bonds?”

  “As we discussed, it sees and hears everything in its vicinity,” Hackworth said. “At the moment, it's looking for a small female. As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory—”

  “Bonding with her. Yes, I see.”

  “And thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her as a datum from which to chart a psychological terrain, as it were. Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book's primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain.”

  “You mean the database of folklore.”

  Hackworth hesitated. “Pardon me, but not precisely, sir. Folklore consists of certain universal ideas that have been mapped onto local cultures. For example, many cultures have a Trickster figure, so the Trickster may be deemed a universal; but he appears in different guises, each appropriate to a particular culture's environment. The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker.”

  Finkle-McGraw chuckled. “When I was a lad, that word had a double meaning. It could mean a trickster who broke into things—but it could also mean an especially skilled coder.”

  “The ambiguity is common in post-Neolithic cultures,” Hackworth said. “As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts—of technology, if you will—while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.

  “In any case,” Hackworth continued, “Trickster/Technologist is just one of the universals. The database is full of them. It's a catalogue of the collective unconscious. In the old days, writers of children's books had to map these universals onto concrete symbols familiar to their audience—like Beatrix Potter mapping the Trickster onto Peter Rabbit. This is a reasonably effective way to do it, especially if the society is homogeneous and static, so that all children share similar experiences.

  “What my team and I have done here is to abstract that process and develop systems for mapping the universals onto the unique psychological terrain of one child—even as that terrain changes over time. Hence it is important that you not allow this book to fall into the hands of any other little girl until Elizabeth has the opportunity to open it up.”

  “Understood,” said Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw. “I'll wrap it up myself, right now. Compiled some nice wrapping paper this morning.” He opened a desk drawer and took out a roll of thick, glossy mediatronic paper bearing animated Christmas scenes: Santa sliding down the chimney, the ballistic reindeer, the three Zoroastrian sovereigns dismounting from their dromedaries in front of the stable. There was a lull while Hackworth and Finkle-McGraw watched the little scenes; one of the hazards of living in a world filled with mediatrons was that conversations were always being interrupted in this way, and that explained why Atlantans tried to keep mediatronic commodities to a minimum. Go into a thete's house, and every object had moving pictures on it, everyone sat around slackjawed, eye
s jumping from the bawdy figures cavorting on the mediatronic toilet paper to the big-eyed elves playing tag in the bathroom mirror to …

  “Oh, yes,” Finkle-McGraw said. “Can it be written on? I should like to inscribe it to Elizabeth.”

  “The paper is a subclass of both input-paper and output-paper, so it possesses all the underlying functionality of the sort of paper you would write on. For the most part these functions are not used—beyond, of course, simply making marks where the nib of the pen has moved across it.”

  “You can write on it,” Finkle-McGraw translated with some asperity, “but it doesn't think about what you're writing.”

  “Well, my answer to that question must be ambiguous,” Hackworth said. “The Illustrated Primer is an extremely general and powerful system capable of more extensive self-reconfiguration than most. Remember that a fundamental part of its job is to respond to its environment. If the owner were to take up a pen and write on a blank page, this input would be thrown into the hopper along with everything else, so to speak.”

  “Can I inscribe it to Elizabeth or not?” Finkle-McGraw demanded.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Finkle-McGraw extracted a heavy gold fountain pen from a holder on his desk and wrote in the front of the book for a while.

  “That being done, sir, there remains only for you to authorise a standing purchase order for the ractors.”

  “Ah, yes, thank you for reminding me,” said Finkle-McGraw, not very sincerely. “I still would have thought that for all the money that went into this project—”

  “That we might have solved the voice-generation problem to boot, yes sir,” Hackworth said. “As you know, we took some stabs at it, but none of the results were up to the level of quality you demand. After all of our technology, the pseudo-intelligence algorithms, the vast exception matrices, the portent and content monitors, and everything else, we still can't come close to generating a human voice that sounds as good as what a real, live ractor can give us.”