Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

The afternoon light coming in the windows behind him flickered as the crowd outside began to break up. They had been treated to a remarkable free media show, watching over his shoulders for hours as the dramaturgical exploits of John Percival Hackworth had played themselves out, in several different camera angles, on floating cine windows on Carl Hollywood's pages. None of them could read English, and so they had been unable to follow the story of Princess Nell's adventures in the land of King Coyote, which had been streaming across the pages at the same time, the storyline fluctuating and curling in upon itself like a cloud of smoke spun and torn by invisible currents.

Now the pages were blank and empty. Carl reached out lazily with one hand and began to stack the sheets on top of each other, just for something to occupy his hands while his mind worked– though it wasn't working, at this point, so much as stumbling blindly through a dark labyrinth a la John Percival Hackworth. Carl Hollywood had long suspected that, among other things, the network of the Drummers was a giant system for breaking codes. The cryptographic systems that made the media network run securely, and that made it capable of securely transferring money, were based on the use of immense prime numbers as magic keys. The keys could theoretically be broken by throwing enough computing power at the problem. But at any given level of computing power, code-making was always much easier than code-breaking, so as long as the system kept moving to larger and larger prime numbers as computers got faster, the code-makers could stay far ahead of the code-breakers forever.

But the human mind didn't work like a digital computer and was capable of doing some funny things. Carl Hollywood remembered one of the Lone Eagles, an older man who could add huge columns of numbers in his head as quickly as they were called out. That, in and of itself, was merely a duplication of something that a digital computer could do. But this man could also do numerical tricks that could not easily be programmed into a computer.

If many minds were gathered together in the network of the Drummers, perhaps they could somehow see through the storm of encrypted data that roared continuously through media space, cause the seemingly random bits to coalesce into meaning. The men who had come to talk to Miranda, who had persuaded her to enter the world of the Drummers, had implied that this was possible; that through them, Miranda could find Nell.

Superficially, this would be disastrous, because it would destroy the system used for financial transactions. It would be as if, in a world where commerce was based upon the exchange of gold, some person had figured out how to change lead into gold. An Alchemist.

But Carl Hollywood wondered if it really made a difference. The Drummers could only do such things by subsuming themselves into a gestalt society. As the case of Hackworth demonstrated, as soon as a Drummer removed himself from that gestalt, he lost touch with it completely. All communication between the Drummers and normal human society took place unconsciously, through their influence upon the Net, in patterns that appeared subliminally in the ractives that everyone played with in their homes and saw playing across the walls of buildings. The Drummers could break the code, but they couldn't take advantage of it in an obvious way, or perhaps they simply did not want to. They could make gold, but they were no longer interested in having it.

John Hackworth, somehow, was better than anyone else at making the transition between the society of Drummers and the Victorian tribe, and each time he crossed the boundary, he seemed to bring something with him, clinging to his garments like traces of scent. These faint echoes of forbidden data entrained in his wake caused tangled and unpredictable repercussions, on both sides of the boundary, that Hackworth himself might not even be aware of. Carl Hollywood had known little of Hackworth until several hours ago, when, alerted by a friend in Dramatis Personae, he had joined his story in progress on the black decks of the show boat. Now he seemed to know a great deal: that Hackworth was the progenitor of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, and that he had a deep relationship with the Drummers that went far beyond anything as simple-minded as captivity. He had not just been eating lotuses and getting his rocks off during his years beneath the waves.