Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

His head contacted the tunnel. He dropped to his belly and began to crawl along. Swarms of tiny sparkling lights kept lunging past his face, and he realized that they were his hands; light-emitting nanosites had become embedded in his flesh. They must have been put there by Dr. X's physician; but they had not come alight until he entered these tunnels.

If the woman hadn't already come through here, he would have given up at this point, thinking it a dead end, a busted tunnel that had failed to expand. The drumming was now coming into his ears and bones from all sides. He could not see a thing, though from time to time he thought he caught a glimmer of flickering yellow light.

The tunnel undulated slightly in the deep currents, rivers of bitterly cold water swirling along the floor of the straits. Whenever he allowed his mind to wander, reminding himself that he was deep below the surface of the ocean here, he had to stop and force himself not to panic. Concentrate on the nice airfilled tunnel, not what surrounds it.

There was definitely light ahead. He found himself in a swelling in the tube, just wide enough to sit up in, and rolled over on his back for a moment to rest. A lamp was burning in here, a bowl filled with some kind of melting hydrocarbon that left no ash or smoke. The mediatronic walls had animated scenes on them, barely visible in the flickering light: animals dancing in the forest.

He followed the tubes for some period of time that was quite long but difficult to estimate. From time to time he would come to a chamber with a lamp and more paintings. As he crawled through the long perfectly black tunnels, he began to experience visual and auditory hallucinations, vague at first, just random noise knocking around in his neural net, but increasingly well-resolved and realistic.

The hallucinations had a dreamlike quality in which things he'd actually seen recently, such as Gwen and Fiona, Dr. X, the airship, the boys playing fieldball, were mingled with images so alien he scarcely recognized them. It troubled him that his mind was taking something as dear to him as Fiona and blending her into a farrago of alien sights and ideas.

He could see the nanosites in his skin. But for all he knew, he might have a million more living in his brain now, piggybacking on axons and dendrites, sending data to one another in flashes of light. A second brain intermingled with his own.

There was no reason that information could not be relayed from one such nanosite to another, through his body and outward to the nanosites in his skin, and from there across the darkness to others. What would happen when he came close to other people with similar infestations?

When he finally reached the grand chamber, he could not really tell whether it was reality or another machine-made hallucination. It was shaped like a flattened ice-cream cone, a domed ceiling above a gently sloping conical floor. The ceiling was a vast mediatron, and the floor served as an amphitheatre. Hackworth spilled into the room abruptly as the drumming reached a crescendo. The floor was slick, and he slid down helplessly until he reached the central pit. He rolled onto his back and saw a fiery scene sprawling across the dome above, and in his peripheral vision, covering the floor of the theatre, a thousand living constellations pounding on the floor with their hands.

Bred and born in the Foreign regions beyond, there is much in the administration of the Celestial Dynasty that is not perfectly comprehensible to the Barbarians, and they are continually putting forced constructions on things of which it is difficult to explain to them the real nature.

-Qiying

PART THE SECOND

Hackworth has a singular experience; the rite of the Drummers.

In a cavernous dark space lit by many small fires, a young woman, probably not much more than a girl, stands on a pedestal naked except for an elaborate paint job, or maybe it is a total-body mediatronic tattoo. A crown of leafy branches is twined around her head, and she has thick voluminous hair spreading to her knees. She is clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, the thorns indenting her flesh. Many people, perhaps thousands, surround her, drumming madly, sometimes chanting and singing.