The Diamond Age (53 page)

  "Excuse me, but that's not what I mean," Hackworth said. "I refer to a situation in which each of us would retain his or her own personal point of view. I would see you. You would see me. We might then share certain experiences together-each of us seeing it from our own perspective.

  "Like a ractive?"

  "Yes," Hackworth said, "but you don't have to pay for it. Not with money, anyway."
. . .

 
The local climate lent itself to hot drinks. Maggie did not even take off her jacket before going into her kitchen and putting a kettle on to boil. The place was a log cabin, airier than it looked from the outside, and Maggie apparently shared it with several other people who were not there at the moment. Fiona, walking to and from the bathroom, was fascinated to see evidence of men and women living and sleeping and bathing together.

  As they sat around having their tea, Hackworth persuaded Maggie to poke her finger into a thimble-size device. When he took this object from his pocket, Fiona was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu. She had seen it before, and it was significant. She knew that her father had designed it; it bore all the earmarks of his style. Then they all sat around making small talk for a few minutes; Fiona had many questions about the workings of the R.D.R., which Maggie, a true believer, was pleased to answer. Hackworth had spread a sheet of blank paper out on the table, and as the minutes went by, words and pictures began to appear on it and to scroll up the page after it had filled itself up. The thimble, he explained, had placed some reconnaissance mites into Maggie's bloodstream, which had been gathering information, flying out through her pores when their tape drives were full, and offloading the data into the paper.

  "It seems that you and I have a mutual acquaintance, Maggie," he said after a few minutes. "We are carrying many of the same tuples in our bloodstreams. They can only be spread through certain forms of contact."

  "You mean, like, exchange of bodily fluids?" Maggie said blankly.

  Fiona thought briefly of old-fashioned transfusions and probably would not have worked out the real meaning of this phrase had her father not flushed and glanced at her momentarily.

  "I believe we understand each other, yes," Hackworth said.

  Maggie thought about it for a moment and seemed to get irked, or as irked as someone with her generous and contented nature was ever likely to get. She addressed Hackworth but watched Fiona as she tried to construct her next sentence.         "Despite what you Atlantans might think of us, I don't sleep ... I mean, I don't have s ... I don't have that many partners."

  "I am sorry to have given you the mistaken impression that I had formed any untoward preconceptions about your moral standards," Hackworth said. "Please be assured that I do not regard myself as being in any position to judge others in this regard. However, if you could be so forthcoming as to tell me who, or with whom, in the last year or so . . ."

  "Just one," Maggie said. "It's been a slow year." Then she set her tea mug down on the table (Fiona had been startled by the unavailability of saucers) and leaned back in her chair, looking at Hackworth alertly. "Funny that I'm telling you this stuff- you, a stranger."

  "Please allow me to recommend that you trust your instincts and treat me not as a stranger."

  "I had a fling. Months and months ago. That's been it."

  "Where?"

  "London." A trace of a smile came onto Maggie's face. "You'd think living here, I'd go someplace warm and sunny. But I went to London. I guess there's a little Victorian in all of us.

  "It was a guy," Maggie went on. "I had gone to London with a couple of girlfriends of mine. One of them was another R.D.R. citizen and the other, Trish, left the R.D.R. about three years ago and co-founded a local CryptNet node. They've got a little point of presence down in Seattle, near the market."

  "Please pardon me for interrupting," Fiona said, "but would you be so kind as to explain the nature of CryptNet? One of my old school friends seems to have joined it."

  "A synthetic phyle. Elusive in the extreme," Hackworth said.

  "Each node is independent and self-governing," Maggie said.

  "You could found a node tomorrow if you wanted. Nodes are defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to provide certain services when called upon to do so."

  "What sorts of services?"

  "Typically, data is delivered into your system. You process the data and pass it on to other nodes. It seemed like a natural to Trish because she was a coder, like me and my housemates and most other people around here."

  "Nodes have computers then?"

  "The people themselves have computers, typically embedded systems," Maggie said, unconsciously rubbing the mastoid bone behind her ear.

  "Is the node synonymous with the person, then?"

  "In many cases," Maggie said, "but sometimes it's several persons with embedded systems that are contained within the same trust boundary."

  "May I ask what level your friend Trish's node has attained?" Hackworth said.

  Maggie looked uncertain. "Eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, we went to London. While we were there, we decided to take in some shows. I wanted to see the big productions. Those were nice-we saw a nice
Doctor Faustus
at the Olivier."

  "Marlowe's?"

  "Yes. But Trish had a knack for finding all of these little, scruffy, out-of-the-way theatres that I never would have found in a million years- they weren't marked, and they didn't really advertise, as far as I could tell. We saw some radical stuff- really radical."

  "I don't imagine you are using that adjective in a political sense," Hackworth said.

  "No, I mean how they were staged. In one of them, we walked into this bombed-out old building in Whitechapel, full of people milling around, and all this weird stuff started happening, and after a while I realized that some of the people were actors and some were audience and that all of us were both, in a way. It was cool- I suppose you can get stuff like that on the net anytime, in a ractive, but it was so much better to be there with real, warm bodies around. I felt happy. Anyway, this guy was going to the bar for a pint, and he offered to get me one. We started talking. One thing led to another. He was really intelligent, really sexy. An African guy who knew a lot about the theatre. This place had back rooms. Some of them had beds."

  "After you were finished," Hackworth said, "did you experience any unusual sensations?"

  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.