Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Two people did not eat or drink except from the provisions they had brought with them; these were Nell and Carl. After they had discovered the nanosites in Nell's flesh that made her a part of the Drummers, Nell had stayed up through the night and designed a counternanosite, one that would seek out and destroy the Drummers' devices. She and Carl had both put these devices into their bloodstreams, so that Nell was now free of the Drummers' influences and both of them would remain so. Nevertheless they did not press their luck by eating of the Drummers' food, and it was well, because after their meal the refugees became drowsy and lay down on the floor and slept, steam rising from their naked flesh, and before long the sparks of light began to come on, like stars coming out as the sun goes down. After two hours the stars had merged together into a continuous surface of flickering light, bright enough to read by, as if a full moon were shining down upon the bodies of slumbering revelers in a meadow.

The refugees, now Drummers, all slept and dreamed the same dream, and the abstract lights flickering across the mediatronic lining of the cavern began to coalesce and organize themselves into dark memories from deep within their unconscious mind. Nell began to see things from her own life, experiences long since assimilated into the words of the Primer but here shown once more in a raw and terrifying form. She closed her eyes; but the walls made sounds too, from which she could not escape.

Carl Hollywood was monitoring the signals passing through the walls of the tunnels, avoiding the emotional content of these images by reducing them to binary digits and trying to puzzle out their internal codes and protocols.

"We have to go," Nell said finally, and Carl arose and followed her through a randomly chosen exit. The tunnel forked and forked again, and Nell chose forks by intuition. Sometimes the tunnels would widen into great caverns full of luminescent Drummers, sleeping or fucking or simply pounding on the walls. The caverns always had many outlets, which forked and forked and converged upon other caverns, the web of tunnels so vast and complicated that it seemed to fill the entire ocean, like neural bodies with their dendrites knitting and ramifying to occupy the whole volume of the skull.

A low drumming sound had been skirting the lower limits of perceptibility ever since they had left the cavern where the refugees slumbered. Nell had first taken it for the beat of submarine currents on the walls of the tunnel, but as it grew stronger, she knew that it was the Drummers talking to each other, convened in some central cavern sending messages out across their network. Realizing this, she felt a sense of urgency verging on panic that they find the central assembly, and for some time they ran through the perfectly bewildering three-dimensional maze, trying to locate the epicenter of the drumming.

Carl Hollywood could not run as quickly as the nimble Nell and eventually lost her at a fork in the tunnels. From there he made his own judgments, and after some time had passed– it was impossible to know how long– his tunnel dovetailed with another that was carrying a stream of Drummers downward toward the floor of the ocean. Carl recognized some of these Drummers as former refugees from the beaches at Pudong.

The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide, roofed with a storm of mediatronic images that played across a vast dome. The Drummers, visible by the flickering light of the overhead media storm and by their own internal light, moved up and down the slopes of the cone in a kind of convection pattern. Caught up in an eddy, Carl was transported down toward the center and found that an orgy of fantastic dimensions was underway. The steam of vaporized sweat rose from the center of the pit in a cloud. The bodies pressing against Carl's naked skin were so hot that they almost burned him, as if everyone were running a high fever, and in some logical abstract compartment of his mind that was, somehow, continuing to run along its own reasonable course, he realized why: They were exchanging packets of data with their bodily fluids, the packets were mating in their blood, the rod logic throwing off heat that drove up their core temperature.