Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Carl's grandfather was a Lone Eagle who had ridden out from the crowding and squalor of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and homesteaded a patch of abandoned ranch along a violent cold river on the eastern slope of the Wind River Range. From there he had made a comfortable living as a freelance coder and consultant. His wife had left him for the bright lights and social life of California and been startled when he had managed to persuade a judge that he was better equipped to raise their son than she was. Grandfather had raised Carl Hollywood's father mostly in the out-of-doors, hunting and fishing and chopping wood when he wasn't sitting inside studying his calculus. As the years went by, they had gradually been joined by like-minded sorts with similar stories to tell, so that by the time of the Interregnum they had formed a community of several hundred, loosely spread over a few thousand square miles of nearwilderness but, in the electronic sense, as tightly knit as any small village in the Old West. Their technological prowess, prodigious wealth, and numerous large weapons had made them a dangerous group, and the odd pickup-truck-driving desperadoes who attacked an isolated ranch had found themselves surrounded and outgunned with cataclysmic swiftness. Grandfather loved to tell stories of these criminals, how they had tried to excuse their own crimes by pleading that they were economically disadvantaged or infected with the disease of substance abuse, and how the Lone Eagles– many of whom had overcome poverty or addiction themselves-had dispatched them with firing squads and left them posted around the edge of their territory as NO TRESPASSING signs that even the illiterate could read.

The advent of the Common Economic Protocol had settled things down and, in the eyes of the old-timers, begun to soften and ruin the place. There was nothing like getting up at three in the morning and riding the defensive perimeter in subzero cold, with a loaded rifle, to build up one's sense of responsibility and community. Carl Hollywood's clearest and best memories were of going on such rides with his father. But as they squatted on packed snow boiling coffee over a fire, they would listen to the radio and hear stories about the jihad raging across Xinjiang, driving the Han back into the east, and about the first incidents of nanotech terrorism in Eastern Europe. Carl's father didn't have to tell him that their community was rapidly acquiring the character of a historical theme park, and that before long they would have to give up the mounted patrols for more modern defensive systems.

Even after those innovations had been made and the community had mostly joined up with the First Distributed Republic, Carl and his father and grandfather had continued to do things in the old way, hunting elk and heating their houses with wood-burning stoves and sitting behind their computer screens in dark rooms late into the night hand-tooling code in assembly language. It was a purely male household (Carl's mother had died when he was nine years old, in a rafting accident), and Carl had fled the place as soon as he'd found a way, going to San Francisco, then New York, then London, and making himself useful in theatrical productions. But the older he got, the more he understood in how many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he never felt it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street in a Shanghai thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching the rain dribble from the rim of his hat. The most intense and clear sensations of his life had flooded into his young and defenseless mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the desperadoes were out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in later life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty years he felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm in years.