Diamond Age

What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules— microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. In the case of Atlantis/Shanghai this zone was never shallower than twenty kilometers. The i

It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air sensed as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. Lidar was like radar except that it used the smaller wavelengths that happened to be visible to the human eye. The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic.

Nell sees something peculiar;

Harv explains all.

One morning Nell looked out the window and saw the world had turned the color of pencil lead. Cars, velocipedes, quadrupeds, even power-skaters left towering black vortices in their wakes. Harv came back from being out all night. Nell screamed when she saw him because he was a charcoal wraith with two monstrous growths on his face. He peeled back a filter mask to reveal grayish-pink skin underneath. He showed her his white teeth and then took up coughing. He went about this methodically, conjuring tangles of spun phlegm from his deepest alveoli and projecting them into the toilet. Now and then he would stop just to breathe, and a faint whistling noise would come from his throat.

Harv did not explain himself but went about working with his things. He unscrewed the bulges on his mask and took out black things that kicked up little black dust storms when he tossed them onto the floor. He replaced them with a couple of white things that he took from a Nanobar wrapper, though by the time he was finished, the white things were covered with his black fingerprints, the ridges and whorls perfectly resolved. He held the Nanobar wrapper up to the light for a moment. "Early protocol," he rasped, and pitched it toward the wastebasket.

Then he held the mask up to Nell's face, guided the straps around her head, and tightened them down. Her long hair got caught in the buckles and pinched, but her objections were muffled by the mask. It took a little effort to breathe now. The mask pressed against her face when she inhaled and whooshed when she exhaled.

"Keep it on," Harv said. "It'll protect you from toner."

"What's toner?" she mumbled. The words did not make it out through the mask, but Harv guessed them from the look in her eyes.

"Mites," he said, "or so they say down at the Flea Circus anyway." He picked up one of the black things taken from the mask and flicked it with a fingertip. A cineritious cloud swirled out of it, like a drop of ink in a glass of water, and hung swirling in the air, neither rising nor falling. Sparkles of light flashed in the midst of it like fairy dust. "See, there's mites around, all the time. They use the sparkles to talk to each other," Harv explained. "They're in the air, in food and water, everywhere. And there's rules that these mites are supposed to follow, and those rules are called protocols. And there's a protocol from way back that says they're supposed to be good for your lungs. They're supposed to break down into safe pieces if you breathe one inside of you." Harv paused at this point, theatrically, to summon forth one more ebon loogie, which Nell guessed must be swimming with safe mite bits. "But there are people who break those rules sometimes. Who don't follow the protocols. And I guess if there's too many mites in the air all breaking down inside your lungs, millions— well maybe those safe pieces aren't so safe if there's millions. But anyways, the guys at the Flea Circus say that sometimes the mites go to war with each other. Like maybe someone in Shanghai makes a mite that doesn't follow the protocol, and gets his matter compiler to making a whole lot of them, and sends them all across the water to New Atlantis Clave to snoop on the Vickys, or even maybe to do them harm. Then some Vicky— one of their Protocol Enforcement guys— makes a mite to go out and find that mite and kill it, and they get into a war.

That's what's happening today, Nell. Mites fighting other mites. This dust— we call it toner— is actually the dead bodies of all those mites."

"When will the war be over?" Nell asked, but Harv could not hear her, having entered into another coughing jag.

Eventually Harv got up and tied a strip of white Nanobar around his face. The spot over his mouth immediately began turning gray. He ejected used cartridges from his mite gun and inserted new ones. It was shaped like a gun, but it sucked air in instead of shooting things out. You loaded it with drum-shaped cartridges filled with accordion-pleated paper. When you turned it on, it made a little whooshing noise as it sucked air— and hopefully mites— through the paper. The mites got stuck in there. "Gotta go," he said, goosing the trigger on the gun a couple of times. "Never know what I might find." Then he headed for the exit, leaving black toner footprints on the floor, which were scoured away by the swirling air currents in his wake, as if he had never passed that way.

Hackworth compiles the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer;

particulars of the underlying technology.

Bespoke was a Victorian house on a hill, a block long and replete with wings, turrets, atria, and breezy verandas. Hackworth was not senior enough to merit a turret or a balcony, but he did have a view into a garden where gardenia and boxwood grew. Sitting at his desk, he could not see the garden, but he could smell it, especially when the wind blew in from the sea.

Runcible was sitting on his desk in the form of a stack of papers, most of them signed JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH.

He unfolded Cotton's document. It was still ru

Hackworth put Cotton's document atop the Runcible stack and guillotined it against the desktop a couple of times, superstitiously trying to make it look neat. He carried it to the corner of his office, over by the window, where a new piece of furniture had recently been rolled in by the porter: a cherrywood cabinet on brass casters. It came up to his waist. On top was a polished brass mechanism— an automatic document reader with detachable tray. A small door in the back betrayed a Feed port, one centimeter, typical of household appliances but startlingly wimpy in a heavy industrial works, especially considering that this cabinet contained one of the most powerful computers on earth— five cc's of Bespoke rod logic. It used about a hundred thousand watts of power, which came in over the superconducting part of the Feed. The power had to be dissipated, or else the computer would incinerate itself and most of the building too. Getting rid of that energy had been much more of an engineering job than the rod logic. The latest Feed protocol had a solution built in: a device could now pull ice off the Feed, one microscopic chunk at a time, and output warm water.

Hackworth put the stack of documents into the feed tray on top and told the machine to compile Runcible. There was a card-shuffling buzz as the reader grabbed the edge of each page momentarily and extracted its contents. The flexible Feed line, which ran from the wall into the back of the cabinet, jerked and stiffened orgasmically as the computer's works sucked in a tremendous jolt of hypersonic ice and shot back warm water. A fresh sheet of paper appeared in the cabinet's output tray.

The top of the document read, "RUNCIBLE VERSION 1.0— COMPILED SPECIFICATION." The only other thing on the document was a picture of the final product, nicely rendered in Hackworth's signature pseudo-engraved style. It looked exactly like a book.

On his way down the vast helical stair in the largest and most central of Bespoke's atria, Hackworth pondered his upcoming crime. It was entirely too late to go back now. It flustered him that he had unconsciously made up his mind months ago without marking the occasion.

Though Bespoke was a design rather than a production house, it had its own matter compilers, including a couple of fairly big ones, a hundred cubic meters. Hackworth had reserved a more modest desktop model, one-tenth of a cubic meter. Use of these compilers had to be logged, so he identified himself and the project first. Then the machine accepted the edge of the document.

Hackworth told the matter compiler to begin immediately, and then looked through a transparent wall of solid diamond into the eutactic environment.

The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organized anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwhale, Gwendolyn holding the sash of her dress, and felt those vortices with her hands, wanting to understand them. The rest of the pond, simply water in no particular order, was uninteresting.

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. "Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving— no, demanding— of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.