Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Maggie threw back her head and laughed, thinking that this was a bit of wry humor on Hackworth's part. But he was serious.

'After we were finished?' she said.

'Yes. Let us say, several minutes afterward.'

Suddenly Maggie became disconcerted. 'Yeah, actually,' she said. 'I got hot. Really hot. We had to leave, 'cause I thought I had a flu or something. We went back to the hotel, and I took my clothes off and stood out on the balcony. My temperature was a hundred and four. But the next morning I felt fine. And I've felt fine ever since.'

'Thank you, Maggie,' Hackworth said, rising to his feet and pocketing the sheet of paper. Fiona rose too, following her father's cue. 'Prior to your London visit, had your social life been an active one?'

Maggie got a little pinker. 'Relatively active for a few years, yes.'

'What sort of crowd? CryptNet types? People who spent a lot of time near the water?'

Maggie shook her head. 'The water? I don't understand.'

'Ask yourself why you have been so inactive, Maggie, since your liaison with Mr.-'

'Beck. Mr. Beck.'

'With Mr. Beck. Could it be that you found the experience just a bit alarming? Exchange of bodily fluids followed by a violent rise in core temperature?'

Maggie was poker-faced.

'I recommend that you look into the subject of spontaneous combustion,' Hackworth said. And without further ceremony, he reclaimed his bowler and umbrella from the entryway and led Fiona back out into the forest.

Hackworth said, 'Maggie did not tell you everything about CryptNet. To begin with, it is believed to have numerous unsavoury connexions and is a perennial focus of Protocol Enforcement's investigations. And'– Hackworth laughed ruefully– 'it is patently untrue that ten is the highest level.'

'What is the goal of this organisation?' Fiona asked.

'It represents itself as a simple, moderately successful data-processing collective. But its actual goals can only be known by those privileged to be included within the trust boundary of the thirty-third level,' Hackworth said, his voice slowing down as he tried to remember why he knew all of these things. 'It is rumoured that, within that select circle, any member can kill any other simply by thinking of the deed.'

Fiona leaned forward and wrapped her arms snugly around her father's body, nestled her head between his shoulder blades, and held tight. She thought that the subject of CryptNet was closed; but a quarter of an hour later, as Kidnapper carried them swiftly through the trees down toward Seattle, her father spoke again, picking up the sentence where he had left it, as if he had merely paused for breath.

His voice was slow and distant and almost trancelike, the memories percolating outward from deep storage with little participation from his conscious mind. 'CryptNet's true desire is the Seed– a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and peace– to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward– and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books– that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society.'

He stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and seemed to stir awake; when he spoke again, it was in a clearer and stronger voice. 'Of course, it can't be allowed– the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society– if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive power rivalled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet's activities.'

The trees parted to reveal a long blue lake below them. Kidnapper found its way to a road, and Hackworth spurred it on to a hand-gallop. Within a few hours, father and daughter were settling into bunkbeds in a second- class cabin of the airship Falkland Islands, bound for London.

From the Primer, Princess Nell's activities as Duchess of Turing; the Castle of the Water-gates; other castles; the Cipherers' Market; Nell prepares for her final journey.

Princess Nell remained in Castle Turing for several months. During her quest for the twelve keys, she had entered many castles, outwitted their sentries, picked their locks, and rifled their treasuries; but Castle Turing was an altogether different place, a place that ran on rules and programs that were devised by men and that could be rewritten by one who was adept in the language of the ones and zeroes. She need not content herself with sneaking in, seizing a trinket, and fleeing. Castle Turing she made her own. Its demesne became Princess Nell's kingdom.

First she gave the Duke of Turing a decent burial. Then she studied his books until she had mastered them. She acquainted herself with the states by which the soldiers, and the mechanical Duke, could be programmed. She entered a new master program Into the Duke and then restarted the turning of the mighty Shaft that powered the castle. Her first efforts were unsuccessful, as her program contained many errors. The original Duke himself had not been above this; he called them bugs, in reference to a large beetle that had become entangled in one of his chains during an early experiment and brought the first Turing machine to a violent halt. But with steadfast patience, Princess Nell resolved these bugs and made the mechanical Duke into her devoted servant. The Duke in turn had the knack of putting simple programs into all of the soldiers, so that an order given him by Nell was rapidly disseminated into the entire force.

For the first time in her life, the Princess had an army and servants. But it was not a conquering sort of army, because the springs in the soldiers' backs unwound rapidly, and they did not have the adaptability of human soldiers. Still, it was an effective force behind the walls of the castle and made her secure from any conceivable aggressor. Following maintenance schedules that had been laid down by the original Duke, Princess Nell set the soldiers to work greasing the gears, repairing cracked shafts and worn bearings, and building new soldiers out of stockpiled parts.

She was heartened by her success. But Castle Turing was only one of seven ducal seats in this kingdom, and she knew she had much work to do.

The territory around the castle was deeply forested, but grassy ridges rose several miles away, and standing on the castle walls with the original Duke's spyglass, Nell was able to see wild horses grazing there. Purple had taught her the secrets of mastering wild horses, and Duck had taught her how to win their affection, and so Nell mounted an expedition to these grasslands and returned a week later with two beautiful mustangs, Coffee and Cream. She equipped them with fine tack from the Duke's stables, marked with the T crest-for the crest was hers now, and she could with justification call herself the Duchess of Turing. She also brought a plain, unmarked saddle so that she could pass for a commoner if need be-though Princess Nell had become so beautiful over the years and had developed such a fine bearing that few people would mistake her for a commoner now, even if she were dressed in rags and walking barefoot.

Lying in her bunkbed in Madame Ping's dormitory, reading these words from a softly glowing page in the middle of the night, Nell wondered at that. Princesses were not genetically different from commoners.

On the other side of a fairly thin wall she could hear water running in half a dozen sinks as young women performed their crepuscular ablutions. Nell was the only scripter staying in Madame Ping's dormitory; the others were performers and were just coming back from a long vigorous shift, rubbing liniment on their shoulders, sore from wielding paddles against clients' bottoms, or snorting up great nostril-loads of mites programmed to seek out their inflamed buttocks and help to repair damaged capillaries overnight. And of course, many more traditional activities were going on, such as douching, makeup removal, moisturizing, and the like. The girls went through these motions briskly, with the unselfconscious efficiency that the Chinese all seemed to share, discussing the day's events in the dry Shanghainese dialect. Nell had been living among these girls for a month and was just starting to pick up a few words. They all spoke English anyway.

She stayed up late reading the Primer in the dark. The dormitory was a good place for this; Madame Ping's girls were professionals, and after a few minutes of whispering, giggling, and scandalized communal shushing, they