Diamond Age

Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful flashing lights on a vintage jukebox.

"This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?" Carl said.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Yeah. Now, what do you want?"

"I want to know who she is," Miranda said. This was the most guarded way she could put it. She didn't suppose that it would help matters to drag Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.

"You want to backtrace a payer," Carl said. It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of language.

Carl sucked powerfully on his milk shake for a bit, his eyes looking over Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund. "Princess Nell's a little kid, right?"

"Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old."

His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. "You can tell that?"

"Yes," she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.

"So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is someone else. You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there, track down Nell." Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and tried unsuccessfully to whistle through frozen lips. "Even the first step is impossible."

Miranda was startled. "That seems pretty unequivocal. I expected to hear 'difficult' or 'expensive.' But-"

"Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe"-Carl thought about it for a while-"maybe 'astronomically improbable' is a better way of putting it." Then he looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's expression change. "You can't just trace the co

"How does media work, then?"

"Look out the window. Not toward the Bund-check out Yan'an Road."

Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window, which was partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and descriptions of blue plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the major thoroughfares in Shanghai, was filled, from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. In many places the traffic was so dense that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown stream.

It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. "What am I looking for?"

"Notice how no one's empty-handed? They're all carrying something."

Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier loads.

"Now just hold that image in your head for a moment, and think about how to set up a global telecommunications network."

Miranda laughed. "I don't have any basis for thinking about something like that."

"Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the telephone system in the old passives. In that system, each transaction had two participants-the two people having the conversation. And they were co

"I don't know-I'm asking you," said Miranda.

"Number one, only two people, or entities, can interact.

Number two, it uses a dedicated co

"Okay, I think I'm following you so far."

"Our media system today-the one that you and I make our livings from-is a descendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for essentially the same purposes, plus many, many more. But the key point to remember is that it is totally different from the old phone system. The old phone system-and its technological cousin, the cable TV system— tanked. It crashed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from scratch."

"Why? It worked, didn't it?"

"First of all, we needed to enable interactions between more than one entity. What do I mean by entity? Well, think about the ractives. Think about First Class to Geneva . You're on this train— so are a couple of dozen other people. Some of those people are being racted, so in that case the entities happen to be human beings. But others-like the waiters and porters-are just software robots. Furthermore, the train is full of props: jewelry, money, guns, bottles of wine. Each one of those is also a separate piece of software-a separate entity. In the lingo, we call them objects. The train itself is another object, and so is the countryside through which it travels.

"The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of First Class to Geneva send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing data-a digital map of the world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it, for a price of course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in the memory of a computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive itself. It doesn't matter. The data might be in California, it might be in Paris, it might be down at the corner-or it might be distributed among all of those places and many more. It doesn't matter. Because our media system no longer works like the old system— dedicated wires passing through a central switchboard. It works like that." Carl pointed to the traffic on the street again.

"So each person on the street is like an object?"

"Possibly. But a better analogy is that the objects are people like us, sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose that we want to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We write the message down on a piece of paper, and we go to the door and hand it to the first person who goes by and say, 'Take this to Mr. Gu in Pudong.' And he skates down the street for a while and runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he might be headed for Pudong, and says, 'Take this to Mr. Gu.' A minute later, that person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian who can negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he sends us a message in the same way."

"So there's no way to trace the path taken by a message."

"Right. And the real situation is even more complicated. The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up and ru

"Okay, I guess that answers my question," Miranda said.

"Good!" Carl said brightly. He was obviously pleased that he'd been able to help Miranda, and so she didn't tell him how his words had really made her feel. She treated it as an acting challenge: Could she fool Carl Hollywood, who was sharper about acting than just about anyone, into thinking that she was fine?

Apparently she did. He escorted her back to her flat, in a hundred story high-rise just across the river in Pudong, and she held it together long enough to bid him good-bye, get out of her clothes, and run a bath. Then she climbed into the hot water and dissolved in awful, wretched, blubbery, self-pitying tears.

Eventually she got it under control. She had to keep this in perspective. She could still interact with Nell and still did, every day. And if she paid attention, sooner or later she would find some way to penetrate the curtain. Barring that, she was begi

General description of life with the Constable;

his avocations and other peculiarities;

a disturbing sight;

Nell learns about his past;

a conversation over di

The garden house had two rooms, one for sleeping and one for playing. The playing room had a set of double doors, made of many small windows, that opened onto Constable Moore's garden. Nell had been told to be careful with the little windows, because they were made of real glass. The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as though she were hiding behind something.

The garden itself was forever trying to draw the little house into it; many vast-growing vines of ivy, wisteria, and briar rose were deeply engaged in the important project of climbing the walls, using the turtleshell-colored copper drainpipes, and the rough surfaces of the brick and mortar, as fingerholds. The slate roof of the cottage was phosphorescent with moss. From time to time, Constable Moore would charge into the breach with a pair of trimmers and cut away some of the vines that so prettily framed the view through Nell's glass doors, lest they imprison her.

During Nell's second year living in the cottage, she asked the Constable if she might have a bit of garden space of her own, and after an early phase of profound shock and misgivings, the Constable eventually pulled up a few flagstones, exposing a small plot, and caused one of the Dovetail artisans to manufacture some copper window boxes and attach them to the cottage walls. In the plot, Nell planted some carrots, thinking about her friend Peter who had vanished so long ago, and in the window boxes she planted some geraniums. The Primer taught her how to do it and also reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.