The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

“This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr. Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that? Or are they like the schools that Wordsworth complained of?”

Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

The difference lay in personality, not in native intelligence.

How could he inculcate her with the nobleman's emotional stance—the pluck to take risks with her life, to found a company, perhaps found several of them even after the first efforts had failed?

“And thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her as a datum from which to chart a psychological terrain, as it were. Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book's primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain.”

After all of our technology, the pseudo-intelligence algorithms, the vast exception matrices, the portent and content monitors, and everything else, we still can't come close to generating a human voice that sounds as good as what a real, live ractor can give us.”

By the end of the quest, some of Nell's four friends had died, and some had gone their separate ways. But Nell was not alone, for she had become a great heroine during her adventures.

Kids on the West Coast were getting back from school and jumping right into the high-priced educational ractives that their parents made available to them. These things created a plethora of extremely short but fun roles; in

If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.”

is better for society that the girl is educated than that she remain ignorant.”

“It has always been done with us. The great rebellions of the 1800's were fueled by throngs of angry young men who could not find wives. In the darkest days of the Mao Dynasty's birth control policy, two hundred thousand little ones were exposed in this fashion”—

you are too wise a magistrate not to understand the importance of proper upbringing of small children. No doubt you will exhibit the same concern for each one of these quarter of a million infants as you did for one little barbarian girl.”

The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars.

Hundreds of thousands of four-year-old girls was hard for the mind to grasp. Just one of them was quite a handful. But it was, after all, China.

even without my instruction, you weigh ten tons and have a cavernous mouth filled with teeth like butcher knives, and that all creatures except me flee in abject terror at the mere sound of your footsteps, I do not think that you should begrudge a lonely little girl some play-time.”

Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved—the missteps we make along the way—are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”

which might or might not have been their assigned vessel, but the passengers now had a sufficient numerical majority to hijack it to America, which was the only thing that really counted in China.

“Then I shall do my duty as a warrior,” Dinosaur said. “My usefulness to you is finished, Princess Nell; from now, you must listen to the wisdom of your other Night Friends and use what you have learned from me only when nothing else will work.” And he dove into the water and disappeared beneath the waves.

Before Nell understood what was going on, he came up to her and gave her a hug and a kiss on the lips. Then he turned away from her and began running across a green field, down toward the ocean. Nell ran after him, but she could not keep up, and finally she fell down in a stand of bluebells and watched Harv dissolve into a curtain of tears.

all this foreplay has got these guys in hair-trigger mode.

“In some tribes, children are regarded as an economic asset of their parents. So if one phyle shelters runaways from another phyle, it has a possible economic impact which is covered under the CEP.”

“Okay, do you want a complete grounding in the whole thing, starting with Turing machines, or what?” Carl said pleasantly—humoring her.

That's one reason the nation-states collapsed—as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared. So if the old IRS, for example, wasn't able to trace these messages, then there's no way that you'll be able to track down Princess Nell.”

Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.

Nell had said a remarkable number of things this evening without having ever, to her memory, thought them first; or at least she didn't believe she had ever thought them before.

Now, as to the fact that killing people is a more complicated business in practice than in theory, I will certainly concede your point. But I think it is not likely to be the only instance in which real life turns out to be more complicated than what you have seen in the book. This is the Lesson of the Screwdriver, and you would do well to remember it. All it amounts to is that you must be ready to learn from sources other than your magic book.”

“In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all of the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent, and then, a few years down the road, you will probably give me cause to wish I were several decades younger.”

“One of four personages who accompanies and advises Princess Nell. Duck embodies domestic, maternal virtues. Actually, Peter and Dinosaur are now gone—both male figures who embodied survival skills.” “Who's the fourth one?” “Purple. I think she'll become a lot more relevant to Nell's life around puberty.”

It is like a little interactive empire, with Elizabeth the empress, issuing all sorts of perfectly bloodcurdling decrees to her obedient subjects. It's important to bring her back to reality from time to time, so that she can get some perspective.”

that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer—so full of stuff I could never understand or even read—you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?” With

Besides, she had known, from the very first day Harv had given her the book, how the story would come out in the end. It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

“Teachers are not supposed to have favorites, but I am approaching that time when I must confess all my sins, so there it is.

“I am suggesting that you are one of those rare people who transcends tribes, and you certainly don't need a bosom anymore,” Miss Matheson said. “You will find, in time, that this tribe is as good as any other—better than most, really.”

“The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.” “They believe it,” the Constable said, “because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.” “Yes. Some of them never challenge it—they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel—as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.” “Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?” “Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.”

suspect that Lord Finkle-McGraw, being an intelligent man, sees through all of the hypocrisy in his society, but upholds its principles anyway, because that is what is best in the long run. And I suspect that he has been worrying about how best to inculcate this stance in young people who cannot understand, as he does, its historical antecedents—which might explain why he has taken an interest in me.

“I realize that any hope I might harbour in my breast of rekindling our former relationship, sincere as it might be, is futile, and so I will not trouble you after today.”

You encourage subversiveness because you think that it will have an effect opposite to what one might naively suppose.”

It became clear that, in the case of Elizabeth, the racting was done by hundreds of different performers. In Fiona's case, the bills were strikingly lower because much of the racting was done by someone who did not charge money for his or her services—probably her father. But that's a different story. In Nell's case, virtually all of the racting was done by the same person.”

“There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us alive. But making things is easy now that we have the Feed. This is not a very interesting business anymore. “After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. This is Madame Ping's business.”

“We change the script a little,” Madame Ping said, “to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.”

Nodes are defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to provide certain services when called upon to do so.”

Colonel Napier did not know her and probably never would. All of the intercourse between him and Nell had been mediated through the actress pretending to be Miss Braithwaite, and through various technological systems. Nonetheless she had touched him deeply. She had penetrated farther into his soul than any lover. If Colonel Napier had chosen to return the following week and Nell had not been present to make up the story for him, would he have missed her? Nell suspected that he would have. From his point of view, some indefinable essence would have been wanting, and he would have departed unsatisfied.

If this could happen to Colonel Napier in his dealings with Madame Ping's, could it happen to Nell in her dealings with the Primer? She had always felt that there was some essence in the book, something that understood her and even loved her, something that forgave her when she did wrong and appreciated what she did right. When she'd been very young, she hadn't questioned this at all; it had been part of the book's magic. More recently she had understood it as the workings of a parallel computer of enormous size and power, carefully programmed to understand the human mind and give it what it needed.

In Castle Turing she had learned that a Turing machine could not really understand a human being. But the Primer was, itself, a Turing machine, or so she suspected; so how could it understand Nell?

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a cavewoman discovering fire for the first time. But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.

But the older he got, the more he understood in how many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he never felt it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street in a Shanghai thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching the rain dribble from the rim of his hat. The most intense and clear sensations of his life had flooded into his young and defenseless mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the desperadoes were out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in later life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty years he felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm

Superficially, this would be disastrous, because it would destroy the system used for financial transactions. It would be as if, in a world where commerce was based upon the exchange of gold, some person had figured out how to change lead into gold. An Alchemist.

And as she had established when she'd been locked up in the dungeon at Castle Turing, communicating with the mysterious Duke by sending messages on a chain, a Turing machine, no matter how complex, was not human. It had no soul. It could not do what a human did.