Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

But the Primer had some pages in the back that were called the Encyclopædia, and by consulting these, Nell was able to establish that Constable Moore was, or at least had used to be, a brigadier general in the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force. One ribbon implied that he had spent some time as an exchange officer in a Nipponese division, but his home division was apparently the Third. According to the Encyclopædia, the Third was often known as the Junkyard Dogs or, simply, the Mongrels, because it tended to draw its members from the White Diaspora: Uitlanders, Ulster Loyalists, whites from Hong Kong, and rootless sorts from all of the Anglo-American parts of the world.

One of the pins on the Constable's uniform said that he had graduate-level training in nanotechnological engineering. This was consistent with his belonging to the Second Brigade, which specialized in nanotech warfare. The Encyclopædia said that it had been formed some thirty years ago to tackle some nasty fighting in Eastern Europe where primitive nanotech weapons were being employed.

A couple of years later, the division had been sent off to South China in a panic. Trouble had been brewing there since Zhang Han Hua had gone on his Long Ride and forced the merchants to kowtow. Zhang had personally liberated several lao gai damps, where slave laborers were hard at work making trinkets for export to the West, smashing computer display screens with the massive dragon's-head grip of his cane, beating the overseers into bloody heaps on the ground. Zhang's "investigations" of various thriving businesses, mostly in the south, had thrown millions of people out of work. They had gone into the streets and raised hell and been joined by sympathetic units of the People's Liberation Army. The rebellion was eventually put down by PLA units from the north, but the leaders had vanished into the "concrete countryside" of the Pearl Delta, and so Zhang had been forced to set up a permanent garrison state in the south. The northern troops had kept order crudely but effectively for a few years, until, one night, an entire division of them, some 15,000 men, was wiped out by an infestation of nanosites.

The leaders of the rebellion emerged from their hiding places, proclaimed the Coastal Republic, and called for Protocol Enforcement troops to come in and protect them. Colonel Arthur Hornsby Moore, a veteran of the fighting in Eastern Europe, was brought in to command. He had been born in Hong Kong, left as a small child when the Chinese took it over, spent much of his youth wandering around Asia with his parents, and eventually settled in the British Isles. He was picked for the job because he was fluent in Cantonese and not half bad in Mandarin. Looking at the old cine clips in the Encyclopædia, Nell could see a younger Constable Moore, the same man with more hair and fewer doubts.

The Chinese Civil War began in earnest three years later, when the Northerns, who didn't have access to nanotech, started lobbing nukes. Not long afterward, the Muslim nations had finally gotten their act together and overrun much of Xinjiang Province, killing some of the Han Chinese population and driving the rest eastward into the maw of the civil war. Colonel Moore suffered an extremely dire infestation of primitive nanosites and was removed from the action and put on extended convalescent leave. By that time, the truce line between the Celestial Kingdom and the Coastal Republic had been established.

Since then, as Nell knew from her studies at the Academy, Lau Ge had succeeded Zhang as the northern leader-the leader of the Celestial Kingdom. After a decent interval had passed, he had thoroughly purged all remaining traces of Communist ideology, denouncing it as a Western imperialist plot, and proclaimed himself Chamberlain to the Throneless King. The Throneless King was Confucius, and Lau Ge was now the highest-ranking of all the mandarins.

The Encyclopædia did not say much more about Colonel Arthur Hornsby Moore, except that he'd resurfaced as an adviser a few years later during some outbreaks of nanotech terrorism in Germany, and later retired and became a security consultant. In this latter capacity he had helped to promulgate the concept of defense in depth, around which all modern cities, including Atlantis/Shanghai, were built.

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