Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Hackworth walked across the parking lot toward the McDonald's, followed at a respectful distance by one of the soldiers. Another soldier opened the door for him, and Hackworth sighed with delight as cold dry air flowed over his face and began to chase the muggy stuff through the weave of his clothing. The place had been lightly sacked. He could smell a cold, almost clinical greasy smell wafting from behind the counter, where containers of fat had spilled onto the floor and congealed like snow. Much of this had been scooped up by looters; Hackworth could see the parallel tracks of women's fingers. The place was decorated in a Silk Roadmotif, transpicuous mediatronic panels portraying wondrous sights between here and the route's ancient terminus in Cadiz.

Dr. X was seated in the corner booth, his face radiant in the cool, UV-filtered sunlight. He was wearing a Mandarin cap with dragons embroidered in gold thread and a magnificent brocade robe. The robe was loose at the neck and had short sleeves so that Hackworth could see the inner garment of a hoplite suit underneath.

Dr. X was at war, and had emerged from the safe perimeter of Suzhou, and needed to be prepared for an attack. He was sipping green tea from a jumbo McDonald's cup, made in the local style, great clouds of big green leaves swirling around in a tumbler of hot water. Hackworth doffed his hat and bowed in the Victorian style, which was proper under the circumstances. Dr. X returned the bow, and as his head tilted forward, Hackworth could see the button on the top of his cap. It was red, the color of the highest ranks, but it was made of coral, marking him as second rank. A ruby button would have put him at the very highest level. In Western terms this made Dr. X roughly equivalent to a lesser cabinet minister or three-star general. Hackworth supposed that this was the highest rank of Mandarin permitted to converse with barbarians.

Hackworth sat down across the table from Dr. X. A young woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during adolescence. It probably didn't even hurt.

Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that he had done the right thing ten years ago.

Dr. X was watching him and might as well have been reading his mind. This seemed to put him in a pensive mood. He said nothing for a while, just gazed out the window and occasionally sipped his tea. This was fine with Hackworth, who had had a long ride.

"Have you learned anything from your ten-year sentence?" Dr. X finally said.

"It would seem so. But I have trouble pulling it up," Hackworth said.

This was a bit too idiomatic for Dr. X. By way of explanation, Hackworth flipped out a ten-year-old card bearing Dr. X's dynamic chop. As the old fisherman hauled the dragon out of the water, Dr. X suddenly got it, and grinned appreciatively. This was showing a lot of emotion– assuming it was genuine– but age and war had made him reckless.

"Have you found the Alchemist?" Dr. X said.

"Yes," Hackworth said. "I am the Alchemist."

"When did you know this?"

"Only very recently," Hackworth said. "Then I understood it all in an instant– pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol Enforcement.

"But through these failures you made contact for the first time with CryptNet, whom you doubtless view as just another triad-a contemptible band of conspirators. However, CryptNet was tied in with something much deeper and more interesting-the society of the Drummers. With their flaky and shallow Western perspective, CryptNet didn't grasp the full power of the Drummers' collective mind. But you got it right away.

"All you required to initiate the Seed project was the rational, analytical mind of a nanotechnological engineer. I fit the bill perfectly. You dropped me into the society of the Drummers like a seed into fertile soil, and my knowledge spread through them and permeated their collective mind-as their thoughts spread into my own unconscious. They became like an extension of my own brain. For years I laboured on the problem, twenty-four hours a day.