Diamond Age

Carl said, 'I have explained to the gentlemen, without getting into any details, that you would like to do the impossible. Can I get you something to drink, Miranda?'

After Carl Hollywood left, there was a rather long silence during which Mr. Beck presumably stared at Miranda, though she could not tell because of the dark glasses. Mr. Oda's primary function appeared to be that of nervous spectator, as if he had wagered half of his net worth on whether Miranda or Mr. Beck would speak first.

A stratagem occurred to Mr. Oda. He pointed in the direction of the bandstand and nodded significantly. 'You like this band?' Miranda looked over at the band, half a dozen men and women in an assortment of races. Mr. Oda's question was difficult to answer because they had not yet made any music. She looked back at Mr. Oda, who pointed significantly at himself.

'Oh. You're the backer?' Miranda said.

Mr. Oda withdrew a small glittering object from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Miranda. It was a cloisonne pin shaped like a dragonfly. She had noticed similar ones adorning several partygoers. She picked it up cautiously. Mr. Oda tapped himself on the lapel and nodded, encouraging her to put it on. She left it sitting there on the table for the time being.

'I'm not seeing anything,' Mr. Beck finally said, apparently for Mr. Oda's benefit. 'To a first approximation, she is clean.'

Miranda realized that Mr. Beck had been checking her out using some kind of display in his phenomenoscopic glasses. Miranda was still trying to work out some kind of unpleasant response when Mr. Oda leaned forward into his own cloud of cigar smoke. 'It is our understanding,' he said, 'that you wish to make a connection. Your wish is very strong.'

Privateers. The word also implied that these gentlemen, at least in their own minds, had some kind of an angle, some way of making money off of their own lack of tribal affiliation.

'I've been told that such things are impossible.'

'It's more correct to speak in probabilistic terms,' said Mr. Beck. His accent was more Oxford than anything else, with a Jamaican lilt, and a crispness that owed something to India.

'Astronomically improbable, then,' Miranda said.

'There you go,' said Mr. Beck.

Now, somehow, the ball had found its way into Miranda's court. 'If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?'

Misters Beck and Oda were actually more amused by that crack than she had expected them to be. They were capable of irony. That was one good sign in the almost overwhelming barrage of negative signals she'd been getting from them so far.

The band started up, playing dance music with a good beat. The lights came down, and the party began to glitter as light flashed from the dragonfly pins.

'It wouldn't work,' Mr. Beck said, 'because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers.'

'But probability is probability,' Miranda said.

'What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?'

'It could be a coincidence.'

'Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved.'

Miranda supposed that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Oda understood the essential cruelty of what they were saying. It was much better not to have any hope at all. 'Are you guys involved in some kind of religious thing?' she said.

Misters Beck and Oda looked at each other significantly. Mr. Oda went into some peculiar routine of tooth-sucking and throat-clearing that would probably convey a torrent of information to another Nipponese person but meant nothing to Miranda, other than giving her a general hint that the situation was rather complicated.

Mr. Beck produced an antique silver snufibox, or a replica of one, took out a pinch of nanosite dust, and hoovered it up into one of his great circular nostrils, then nervously scratched the underside of his nose. He slid his glasses way down, exposing his big brown eyes, and stared distractedly over Miranda's shoulder into the thick of the party, watching the band and the dancers' reaction to it. He was wearing a dragonfly pin, which had begun to glow and to flash gorgeous colored lights, like a fleet of police cars and firetrucks gathered round a burning house.

The band segued into a peculiar, tuneless, beatless miasma of noise, spawning lazy convection currents in the crowd.

'How do you guys know Carl?' Miranda said, hoping to break the ice a bit.

Mr. Oda shook his head apologetically. 'I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance until recently.'

'Used to do thyuh-tuh with him in London.'

'You're a ractor?'

Mr. Beck snorted ironically. A variegated silk hankie flourished in his hand, and he blew his nose quickly and cleanly like a practiced snufftaker. 'I am a technical boy,' he said.

'You program ractives?'

'That is a subset of my activities.'

'You do lights and sets? Or digital stuff? Or nanotech?'

'Invidious distinctions do not interest me. I am interested in one thing,' said Mr. Beck, holding up his index finger, topped with a very large but perfectly manicured claw of a fingernail, 'and that is use of tech to convey meaning.'

'That covers a lot of areas nowadays.'

'Yes, but it shouldn't. That is to say that the distinctions between those areas are bogus.'

'What's wrong with just programming ractives?'

'Nothing at all,' said Mr. Beck, 'just as nothing is wrong with traditional live theatre, or for that matter, sitting round a campfire telling stories, like I used to enjoy on the beach when I was a lad. But as long as there are new ways to be found, it is my job, as a technical boy, to find them. Your art, lady, is racting. Searching for the new tech is mine.'

The noise coming from the band had begun to pulse irregularly. As they talked, the pulses gathered themselves into beats and became steadier. Miranda turned around to look at the people on the dance floor. They were all standing around with faraway looks on their faces, concentrating on something. Their dragonfly pins were flashing wildly now, joining in a coherent pulse of pure white on each beat. Miranda realized that the pins were somehow patched into the wearers' nervous systems and that they were talking to each other, creating the music collectively. A guitarist began to weave an improvised melodic line through the gradually coalescing pattern of sound, and the sound condensed around it as all of the dancers heard the tune. They had a feedback loop going. A young woman began to chant out some kind of tuneless rap that sounded improvised. As she went on, she broke into melody. The music was still weird and formless, but it was beginning to approach something you might hear on a professional recording.

Miranda turned back to face Mr. Beck. 'You think you've invented a new way to convey meaning with technology-'

'Medium.'

'A new medium, and that it can help me get what I want. Because when meaning is involved, the laws of probability can be broken.'

'There are two misconceptions in your statement. One: I did not invent the medium. Others did, perhaps for different purposes, and I have stumbled across it, or actually just heard intimations.

'As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and