Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.

A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.

"Why did I think of that?" he said.

Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. "Fiona and Gwendolyn are in Atlantis/Seattle now-half an hour from your present location by tube," he said.

"Of course! They live– we live– in Seattle now. I knew that." He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some snow-covered volcano.

"If you are under the impression that you've been in contact with her recently-which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid– then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot of time racting in the last ten years."

"Ten years!?"

"Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from evidence."

"It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble coming to grips."

"We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers," Napier said. "It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned-you know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers."

"I've been working on something," Hackworth said. Images of a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner might do.

"What sort of thing exactly?" Napier asked, suddenly sounding rather tense.

"Can't get a grip on it," Hackworth finally said, shaking his head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space, like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.

"What the hell happened?"

"Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter compiler, no?"

"Yes."

"Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?"

"I guessed it was hæmocules of some description."

"We took blood samples before you left Shanghai."

"You did?"

"We have ways," Colonel Napier said. "We also did a full workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several million nanosites in her brain."

"Several million?"

"Very small ones," Napier said reassuringly. "They are introduced through the blood, of course-the hæmocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to each other with visible light."

"So when I was on my own, my 'sites just talked to themselves," Hackworth said, "but when I came into close proximity with other people who had these things in their brains-"

"It didn't matter which brain a 'site was in. They all talked to one another indiscriminately, forming a network. Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society."

"But the interface between these nanosites and the brain itself-"

"Yes, I admit that a few million of these things piggybacking on randomly chosen neurons is only a feeble interface to something as complicated as the human brain," Napier said. "We're not claiming that you shared one brain with these people."

"So what did I share with them exactly?" Hackworth said.

"Food. Air. Companionship. Body fluids. Perhaps emotions or general emotional states. Probably more."

"That's all I did for ten years?"

"You did a lot of things," Napier said, "but you did them in a sort of unconscious, dreamlike state. You were sleepwalking. When we figured that out-after doing the biopsy on your fellow-troglodyte– we realised that in some sense you were no longer acting of your own free will, and we engineered a hunter-killer that would seek out and destroy the nanosites in your brain. We introduced it, in a dormant mode, into this female Drummer's system, then reintroduced her to your colony. When you had sex with her-well, you can work out the rest for yourself."