The Diamond Age (13 page)

  "Let's have a gander at your grid, sweetheart," said a man identifying himself as Mr. Fred ("not my real name") Epidermis, after he had removed his cigar from his mouth and given Miranda a prolonged, methodical, full-body optical grope.

  "My grid ain't no Sweetheart," she said. SweetheartTM and HeroTM were the same grid as purveyed to millions of women and men respectively. The owners didn't want to be ractors at all, just to look good when they happened to be in a ractive. Some were stupid enough to fall for the hype that one of these grids could serve as the portal to stardom; a lot of those girls probably ended up talking to Fred Epidermis.

  "Ooh, now I'm all curious," he said, writhing just enough to make Miranda's lip curl. "Let's put you on stage and see what you got."

  The cubicles where his ractors toiled were mere head stages. He had a few body stages, though, probably so he could bid on fully ractive porn. He pointed her toward one of these. She walked in, slammed the door, turned toward the wall-size mediatron, and got her first look at her new Jodie.

  Fred Epidermis had put the stage into Constellation Mode. Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network- a new bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph, and vascular systems.

  "Holy shit! Got a fucking Hepburn or something here!" Fred Epidermis was exclaiming, watching her on a second monitor outside the stage.

  "It's a Jodie," she said, but she stumbled over the words as the field of stars moved, tracking the displacements of her jaw and lips.

  Outside, Fred Epidermis was wielding the editing controls, zooming in on her face, which was dense as a galactic core. By comparison, her arms and legs were wispy nebulas and the back of her head nearly invisible, with a grand total of maybe a hundred 'sites placed around her scalp like the vertices of a geodesic dome. The eyes were empty holes, except (she imagined) when she closed her eyes. Just to check it out, she winked into the mediatron. The 'sites on her eyelids were dense as grass blades on a putting green, but accordioned together except when the lid expanded over the eye.

  Fred Epidermis recognized the move and zoomed in so violently on her winking eye that she nearly threw herself back on her ass. She could hear him chortling. "You'll get used to it, honey," he said. "Just hold still so I check the 'sites on your lips."

  He panned to her lips, rotated them this way and that, as she puckered and pursed. She was glad they'd drugged her out of her mind while they were doing the lips; thousands of nanosites in there.

  "Looks like we got ourselves an
artiste
here," Fred Epidermis said. "Lemme try you in one of our most challenging roles."

  Suddenly a blond, blue-eyed woman was standing in the mediatron, perfectly aping Miranda's posture, wearing big hair, a white sweater with a big letter F in the middle, and a preposterously short skirt. She was carrying big colored puffy things. Miranda recognized her, from old passives she'd seen on the mediatron, as an American teenager from the previous century. "This is Spirit. A little old-fashioned to you and me, but popular with tube feeders," said Fred Epidermis. "'Course your grid's way overkill for this, but hey, we're about giving the customer what they want- moving those bids, you know."

  But Miranda wasn't really listening; for the first time ever, she was watching another person move exactly as she moved, as the stage mapped Miranda's grid onto this imaginary body. Miranda pressed her lips together as if she'd just put on lipstick, and Spirit did the same. She winked, and Spirit winked. She touched her nose, and Spirit got a face full of pom-pon.

  "Let's run you through a scene," said Fred Epidermis.

  Spirit vanished and was replaced by an electronic form with blanks for names, numbers, dates, and other data. He flashed through it before Miranda could really read it; they didn't need a contract for a dry run. Then she saw Spirit again, this time from two different camera angles. The mediatron had split up into several panes. One was a camera angle on Spirit's face, which still did whatever Miranda's face did. One was a two-shot showing Spirit and an older man, standing in a room full of big machines. Another pane showed a closeup of the old man, who as Spirit realized was being played by Fred Epidermis. The old man said, "Okay, keep in mind we usually play this through a head stage, so you don't control Spirit's arms and legs, just her face-"

  "How do I walk around?" Miranda said. Spirit's lips moved with hers, and from the mediatron came Spirit's voice- squeaky and breathy at the same time. The stage was programmed to take the feeds from the nanophones in her throat and disp them into a different envelope.

  "You don't. Computer decides where you go, when. Our dirty little secret: This isn't really that ractive, it's just a plot tree- but it's good enough for our clientele because all the leaves of the tree- the ends of the branches, you understand- are exactly the same, namely what the payer wants you to follow? Well, you'll see," said the old man on the screen, reading Miranda's confusion in Spirit's face. What looked like guarded skepticism on Miranda came across as bubble-brained innocence on Spirit. "Cue! Follow the fucking cues! This isn't improv workshop!" shouted the old man.

  Miranda checked the other panes on the display. One she reckoned was a map of the room, showing her location and the old man's, with arrows occasionally pulsing in the direction of movement. The other was a prompter, with a line waiting for her, flashing red.

  "Oh, hello, Mr. Willie!" she said, "I know school's out, and you must be very tired after a long day of teaching shop to all of those nasty boys, but I was wondering if I could ask you for a big, big favor."

  "Certainly, go ahead, whatever," said Fred Epidermis through the face and body of Mr. Willie, not even pretending to emote.

  "Well, it's just that I have this appliance that's very important to me, and it seems to have broken. I was wondering if you knew how to fix- one of these," Miranda said. On the mediatron, Spirit said the same thing. But Spirit's hand was moving. She was holding something up next to her face. An elongated glossy white plastic thing. A vibrator.

  "Well," said Mr. Willie, "it's a scientific fact that all electrical devices work on the same principles, so in theory I should be able to help you. But I must confess, I've never seen an appliance quite like that one. Would you mind explaining what it is and what it does?"

  "I'd be more than happy to- " said Miranda, but then the display froze and Fred Epidermis cut her off by shouting through the door. "Enough already," he said. "I just had to make sure you could read."

  He opened the stage door and said, "You're hired. Cubicle 238. My commission is eighty percent. The dormitory's upstairs- pick your own bunk, and clean it out. You can't afford to live anywhere else."

Harv brings Nell a present;  she experiments with the Primer.

When Harv came back home, he was walking with all of his weight on one foot. When the light struck the smudges on his face in the right way, Nell could see streaks of red mixed in with the dirt and the toner. He was breathing fast, and he swallowed heavily and often, as though throwing up were much on his mind. But he was not empty-handed. His arms were crossed tightly across his belly. He was carrying things in his jacket.

  "I made out, Nell," he said, seeing his sister's face and knowing that she was too scared to talk first. "Didn't get much, but got some. Got some stuff for the Flea Circus."

  Nell wasn't sure what the Flea Circus was, but she had learned that it was good to have stuff to take there, that Harv usually came back from the Flea Circus with an access code for a new ractive. Harv shouldered the light switch on and kneeled in the middle of the room before relaxing his arms, lest some small thing fall out and be lost in a corner. Nell sat in front of him and watched.

  He took out a piece of jewelry swinging ponderously at the end of a gold chain. It was circular, smooth gold on one side and white on the other. The white side was protected under a flattened glass dome. It had numbers written around the edge, and a couple of slender metal things like daggers, one longer than the other, joined at their hilts in the center. It made a noise like mice trying to eat their way through a wall in the middle of the night.

  Before she could ask about it, Harv had taken out other things. He had a few cartridges from his mite trap. Tomorrow Harv would take the cartridge down to the Flea Circus and find out if he'd caught anything, and whether it was worth money. There were other things like buttons. But Harv saved the biggest thing for last, and he withdrew it with ceremony.

  "I had to fight for this, Nell," he said. "I fought hard because I was afraid the others would break it up for parts. I'm giving it to you."

  It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.

  "Both hands," Harv admonished her, "it's heavy."

  Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.

  Harv could not put up with the wait. "Open it," he said.

  "How?"

  Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-colored leaves after it. Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters. On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers.

  The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains like the ones they supposedly had in the middle of New Chusan, where the fanciest Vickys of all had their æstival houses. The girl had a book open on her lap. The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.

  The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bulged up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.

  "Once upon a time," said a woman's voice, "there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books." The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.

  Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa. The next day, Mom's boyfriend Tad came home in a bad mood. He slammed his six-pack down on the kitchen table, pulled out a beer, and headed for the living room. Nell was trying to get out of the way. She picked up Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple, her magic wand, a paper bag that was actually a car her kids could drive around in, and a piece of cardboard that was a sword for killing pirates. Then she ran for the room where she and Harv slept, but Tad had already come in with his beer and begun rooting through the stuff on the sofa with his other hand, trying to find the control pad for the mediatron. He threw a lot of Harv's and Nell's toys on the floor and then stepped on the book with his bare foot.

  "Ouch, god damn it!" Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. "What the fuck is this?!" He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. "Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your flicking shit cleaned up!" Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a frisbee.

  She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn't hurt at all.

  The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page. The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl's head. "Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt," the book said.

  "My name is Nell," Nell said.

  A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

  "Your name's mud if you don't fucking clean this shit up," Tad said. "But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once."

  Nell's hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids' room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now, say it with me."