Diamond Age

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 mediation 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-southwest, by a bundle of flexible pushrods ru

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 begi

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 junkheap 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 gri

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 Hanr) 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.