The Diamond Age

The volume went up but couldn't scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which resonated in his long bones.

A nasty popping sensation radiated through Bud's skull when the robot arm snapped in the new model.

Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.

All the action took place in the walls separating the tanks, which were not really walls but nearly infinite grids of submicroscopic wheels, ever-rotating and many-spoked.

If they accepted you, they'd shoot the credit card right into you, then and there, on the spot.

The enforcement regime consists of three phases: one, a polite reminder; two, well in excess of your pain threshold; three, spectacularly fatal.

Their envelopes, filled with nothing, were predominantly transparent; instead of blocking the sunlight, they yellowed and puckered it.

They seemed to float above the glittering moonlit surface of the Pacific as they did the waltz, minuet, Lindy, and electric slide into the night.

It reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface.

The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.

She extended her hand, and he kissed it, which was racy but allowed if you were old and stylish, like Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw.

He found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

The surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

Stereotyped behaviors were fine for the birds, dinosaurs, and so on, but for the centaurs and fauns we wanted more interactivity, something that would provide an illusion of sentience.

My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for laxity in the first place.

The pressures of fatherhood!

Bud kept walking until he was a little too close to the guy; he kept his head tilted back until the last minute, like he was kicking back listening to some loud tunes, and then suddenly snapped his head forward so he was staring the guy right in the face.

He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere.

All of those Ashanti—except the first one—came to town hunting for you.

They had a nice clave here in the Leased Territories, a clave with good security, and every one of them, down to the last man or woman, was batshit.

The entire shrink-wrapping process consumed maybe half a second, and then Bud, mummified in plastic, toppled over face-forward.

“Don't be jerk,” he said in pretty decent English, “this is China.”

A rowing machine cleverly fashioned of writhing sea-serpents and hard-bodied nereids, a rack of free weights supported by four callipygious caryatids—not chunky Greeks but modern women.

One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.

When he reached the line of bamboo poles, he was given one last shove and ejected, his body virtually exploding as he flew through the invisible plane of the perimeter.

Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

The general idea is that as judge, I actually perform several roles at once: detective, judge, jury, and if need be, executioner.

Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

It thickened as it inhaled, and when it was done, it looked like a real mattress.

Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read.

Hard art demanded commitment from the artist. It could only be done once, and if you screwed it up, you had to live with the consequences.

In fact they were not motors but little wire factories that generated wire when it was needed and, when slack needed to be taken up or a wire needed a tug, sucked it back in and digested it.

Cotton's gloved hand fluttered and probed like a stuck horsefly in the center of the black web.

Think about it, Mr. Hackworth—is the function of makeup to respond to one's emotions—or precisely not to do so?

She knew, because Tequila repeated it often, that when Tequila got pregnant with Nell, she had been using something called the Freedom Machine—a mite that lived in your womb and caught eggs and ate them.

It's not that the thing has threads in it—it is threads.

The two would mate in midair, like dragonflies, and the weaker would take power from the stronger.

The victim then made a loud noise like the crack of a whip, as a few fragments exited his or her flesh and dropped through the sound barrier in air.

The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic.

A cineritious cloud swirled out of it, like a drop of ink in a glass of water, and hung swirling in the air, neither rising nor falling.

The flexible Feed line, which ran from the wall into the back of the cabinet, jerked and stiffened orgasmically as the computer's works sucked in a tremendous jolt of hypersonic ice and shot back warm water.

The flexible Feed line, which ran from the wall into the back of the cabinet, jerked and stiffened orgasmically as the computer's works sucked in a tremendous jolt of hypersonic ice and shot back warm water.

A transparent haze coalesced across the terminus of the Feed, mold on an overripe strawberry.

They don't look like pirates, with the big hats and swords and all. They just look like normal people. But they're pirates on the inside, and they like to grab kids and tie 'em up.

She knew from the way Harv had reacted that the showers were a bad thing, and in a way it felt good to know this because it explained why it felt wrong.

It was a pair of heavy sticks, each about a foot long, joined in the middle by a short chain, and the whole thing was smeared with reddish-brown stuff that had gone sticky and crusty.

The scalpel's edge was exactly one atom wide; it delaminated the skin of Hackworth's palm like an airfoil gliding through smoke.

A row of mason jars stood on a high shelf, filled with what looked like giblets floating in urine.

The natural ones looked like little crabs and had been quietly inhabiting the outer layers of other creatures' bodies for hundreds of millions of years.

The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up the naked mole rat.

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer.

Having never done anything illegal in his life, he was startled to understand, all of a sudden, that a ruthless constabulary was a crucial resource to more imaginative sorts of criminals, such as himself.

To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week's paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there.

Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, the embodiment of the Victorian establishment, was a subversive.

Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet, And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet, And he thank'd him again and again for this treat.

He pulled it down onto his head and grinned insolently as he shot past.

It was a young man, covered in a slick Nanobar outfit. Except for his head, which was smartly adorned with Hackworth's top hat.

And in the fog of light from all of the Leased Territories' mediatronic billboards glittered the chromium chains of their nunchuks.

The grossest part was when the machine reached down her throat to plant a trail of nanophones from her vocal cords all the way up to her gums.

Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white light.

What looked like guarded skepticism on Miranda came across as bubble-brained innocence on Spirit.

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.

The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive.

The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily throwing a book toward the little girl.

The voice was like a real person's—though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like slow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings.

The revolving chain of a nunchuk has a unique radar signature—reminiscent of that of a helicopter blade, but noisier.

Two of them were discharging fountains of material into the air from canisters on their bicycles' equipment racks, like fire extinguishers, waving the nozzles in all directions.

The image of the barbed dart altered itself, the midsection—which contained a taped record of the dart's movements—breaking free and accelerating into the void.

I was unable to wrest the evidence from the young one's grasp.

Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.

“I have completed a phenomenoscopic survey of the book,” Miss Pao said. “It is not an ordinary book.”

As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory—

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.

As she approached the iron door, Harv saw her from the top of a tower and gruffly told her to go away, for Princess Nell had changed so much during her Quest that Harv no longer recognized her.

When he stared into the pocket of air thus formed, he saw the darkness filled with coruscating light—something like staring into a cavern filled with fireflies, except that these lights came in all colors, and all of the colors were as pure and clear as jewels.

“This is dust with a purpose in life,” Judge Fang observed.

It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.

From time to time, Judge Fang caught himself doing it, and thought about what a peculiar thing it was to be Chinese in a world without an Emperor.

Live theatre was an ancient and peculiar taste, roughly on par with listening to Gregorian chants, and it didn't pay the bills.

Miranda had large bunny eyes while Kate had cat eyes, and cat eyes were used differently from bunny eyes, especially when delivering a slashing witticism.

Miranda had large bunny eyes while Kate had cat eyes, and cat eyes were used differently from bunny eyes, especially when delivering a slashing witticism.

Margaret had been morphed up by a marketing computer in London that knew more about this gentleman's taste in girlflesh than he would like to think.

Finally Miranda lured him into the kitchen in the back of the dining car, shoved a foot-long butcher knife into his chest, and left him in the fridge.

She fought with the monster and slew it, but in so doing suffered grievous wounds and died the next day with her adopted children still nestled in her bosom.

On the map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was contained within a couple of square kilometers.

On the map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was contained within a couple of square kilometers.

Swarms of fire-colored fish hung just beneath the surface of the khaki water, glowing like latent coals, as Judge Fang and his assistants, Miss Pao and Chang, crossed the bridge.

This meant that he had noticed the unicorn and understood its message, which was that Judge Fang had seen through all of his efforts at bribery.

The first exchange had been simple, but now the East/West curtain fell between them like a rusty cleaver.

Watching himself getting mugged was one of the most astonishing things Hackworth had ever seen.

Not that Chang's abilities had even been tested this evening; nothing could be easier than getting the New Atlantans to believe that Chinese police were corrupt.

She knew that on the other end of this connection was a little girl insatiably asking why.

Miranda never needed much evidence to confirm her belief that rich parents were just as capable of fucking with their children's minds as anyone.

Still, Nell did not sleep very well, for she could hear the mutterings of the trolls off in the darkness and see the red sparks of their eyes.

These nerves, used by the body to transmit information such as (to name only one example) excruciating pain to the brain, had a distinctive texture and appearance that the 'sites were clever enough to recognize.

So you could even, like, torture a basket case.

CryptNet is a powerful secret society that has spread its tendrils high into every phyle and corporation in the world.

Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.

“Mr. PhyrePhox, before we start torturing you, let me explain to you my state of mind,” Judge Fang said, coming close to the prisoner so that they could look each other in the eye.

“Go ahead,” the prisoner said encouragingly, “give me a jolt.”

I can pick up a brush at any time, Dr. X was saying, and toss off a work of art that can hang on the wall beside the finest calligraphy of the Ming Dynasty.

It was like a summons sent down through the ages from his own ancestors.

Nell felt safe—as though she could never be really lost when she had her book with her.

Nell rubbed the tears out of her eyes and ran over toward the book again, and this time the kids didn't throw it away from her; she picked it up and cradled it against her chest.

Suddenly all the kids were silent and afraid.

At the very end, I think that Everett may have put two and two together; I saw him blink in surprise once, as if the light had finally gone on in his head.

We were the last four dinosaurs on earth. Pretty soon we would be three, and then two, and then one, and then none at all, and the only question left to settle was in what order we'd go.

“There's only zero of you,” said the Queen of the Ants. In ant arithmetic, there are only two numbers: Zero, which means anything less than a million, and Some.

In the end I had to go over among the ants and crush them with my tail until I had killed a few million, which is the only way that you can get an ant to take you seriously.

If the vote results in a tie, we will eat all four of you and bring the Kingdom of Reptiles to an end.

I could not see the claws in front of my face for all of the steam, but on the third day it finally cleared away, and I saw a bridge of hardened lava running straight to that black rock.

“I regret to say that I killed them all in self-defense.”

Something thumped against the hull of the yacht, and he looked into the water to see a human corpse wrapped up in a white sheet, blundering along a foot or two beneath the surface, dimly luminescent in the light from the building overhead.

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.

Even without the moonlight this vessel would have been noticeable for the fact that it blocked out all of the stars in one quadrant of the sky.

In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.

Judge Fang had to set his teacup down for a few moments while he grappled with this notion. Fifty thousand lives on this ship alone.

Judge Fang gripped the rail with both hands and bowed his head. He was very close to clinical shock.

It was such a relief to have nothing to lose.

So elaborate waiting-room etiquette had flourished, and sophisticated people all over the world understood that when they called upon someone, even a close friend, they could expect to spend some time sipping tea and perusing magazines in a front room infested with unobtrusive surveillance equipment.

No one could stand face-to-face with Zhang without imagining the blood streaming down his chin.

He stoops, puts one knee down, then the other, bends forward at the waist until he is on all fours, then settles himself down full-length on the nicely interlocked paving-stones.

The door opened just as they were sitting down, and Hackworth was almost knocked off balance as the tube sneezed nanofiltered wind.

He knelt silently and waited in a stunned, hyper-relaxed state, like a pithed frog on the dissection table.

At this point, John Percival Hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it in under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X.

The revelation that he would be released to his family this very evening hit Hackworth like a deep lungful of opium smoke.

Dojo flipped me over his shoulder and bounced me off the walls of the cave a few times to demonstrate that I was fully under control.

Nell tried it too. It was confusing at first, because the world kept spinning around her while she did it.

By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.

By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.

By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.

She hit the ball so hard, she didn't even feel it; it shot up in a wide arc that took it behind and above Kevin's head, and after that all she had to do was give it a few more slaps as it whizzed by, and she'd won the game.

Bowler hats hung in clusters from poles and wall hooks all over the room, like great bunches of black grapes.

For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done.

The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human.

In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness.

Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

Napier winced, as if he were being caned himself. 'It is a crashingly unsubtle phrase. But I can forgive your using it in this context.'

If he plays his role well and provides information of value to Her Majesty's Joint Forces, then he has rather deftly parlayed a small error into a grand act of heroism.

There are many shades of gray in the world, and many times when the hidden way is best; but some things are purely evil and must be fought to the death.

After a long silence, the Primer began to speak again, but the lovely voice of the Vicky woman who told the story sounded thick and hoarse all of a sudden and would stumble in the middle of sentences.

Please get out of there. Please run away. Get out of that chamber of horrors where you've been living, Nell, and get to an orphanage or a police station or something, and I will find you.

Get out of that chamber of horrors where you've been living, Nell, and get to an orphanage or a police station or something, and I will find you.

She held the screwdriver out in front of her like a lance and ran straight toward him.

Nell, who had been frozen in a nearby corner for some time, shot toward the door like a bolt finally loosed from a crossbow, snatching up the Primer as she ran past it.

The Chinese man gathered himself together into a black seed, rose into the air, spun around, and unfolded like a blooming flower.

“A magic book. I made it for you, because I love you and could not think of a better way to express that love.”

Hackworth was plugged directly into the Feed, not the regulation Atlantan kind but Dr. X's black-market kludge.

As they ran, the messages on the billboards pursued them like starving wolves, making sure they understood that if they used certain ractives or took certain drugs, they could rely on being able to have sex with certain unrealistically perfect young persons.

Nell made her unexpected breakaway, looking from Harv's increasingly distant point of view like an ant scuttling across a television screen with the intensity and saturation turned all the way up.

It was like one of those places she had read about in the Illustrated Primer, a magical zone where the fractal dimension of the terrain had been allowed to struggle off the pin.

If anyone finds out you still have that book, Doc'll kill me.

At times like this, the paper glowed softly and the letters stood out crisp and black, like tree branches silhouetted against a full moon.

What it comes down to, is that I'm raising someone's kid for them.

Tears gushed from her eyes and turned to blood as they rolled down her cheeks.

“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.”

Because the darkness is where danger comes from, and from the fire comes only illusion.

Because the darkness is where danger comes from, and from the fire comes only illusion.

The end of the nunchuk struck the stranger's left kneecap like a steel cobra, and she heard something crack.

Dr. X's chop depicted a poxy-looking gaffer with a conical hat slung on his back, squatting on a rock in a river with a bamboo pole, hauling a fish out of the water—no wait, it wasn't a fish, it was a dragon squirming on the end of the line.

The city itself was a sprawling bazaar of claves.

Much of the mechanical business in the legs was exposed so that you could see how the joints and pushrods worked, a little like staring at the wheels of an old steam locomotive.

Much of the mechanical business in the legs was exposed so that you could see how the joints and pushrods worked, a little like staring at the wheels of an old steam locomotive.

“They only have one book in Sendero, and it tells them to burn all the other books.”

The tiny octagonal room was cluttered with fine furniture made of dark wood, a shelf of old books, and a small cast-iron stove with a red enamel kettle on top, pocked like an asteroid from ancient impacts, piping out a tenuous column of steam.

The Constable picked up a piece of paper on which many names and strings and digits had been hand-written.

Constable Moore took it very carefully in both hands, and a tiny little moan of appreciation escaped his lips.

Nell and Harv had settled into a habit of concentrating very strongly on what they would like not to happen.

It can make fake wood, but some people don't like fake things.

Harv was paralyzed with wonder at this exhibition and stopped walking.

But she had been noticing how, in the Primer, whenever someone asked Peter Rabbit a direct question of any kind, he always lied.

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.

Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.

It was as if, sooner or later, every part of the world became India and thus ceased to function in any sense meaningful to straight-arrow Cartesian rationalists like John Percival Hackworth.

This promiscuous denial of boundaries was everywhere on the totem poles and on the woman's tattoo: The staring eyes of a bear were also the faces of some other sort of creature.

The walls were made of membranes that drew oxygen from the surrounding seawater and ejected carbon dioxide, so that seen from a fish's point of view, the tunnels steamed like hot pasta on a cold steel plate.

A second brain intermingled with his own. What would happen when he came close to other people with similar infestations?

The erections tell Hackworth why this is taking so long: He's watching foreplay here.

Flames erupt from several locations, all over her body, at once, seams of lava splitting open along her veins and the heart itself erupting from her chest like ball lightning.

Her body becomes a burning cross spread out on the floor, the bright apex of an inverted cone of turbulent steam and smoke.

It kept getting more like a ractive and less like a story, and by the end of each chapter she was exhausted from all the cleverness she had expended.

The sixth or seventh time, the plan worked perfectly—while King Magpie was locked in a battle of riddles with Peter Rabbit (which Peter won), Purple used a magic spell to smash open the door to his secret library.

Nell even reached out and touched one, then snapped her hand back, even though it hadn't done anything except push back.

Shiny dark green robots, like refrigerators tipped over on their sides, hummed down the streets at a toddler's walking pace, squatting over piles of manure and inhaling them.

Miss Matheson smiled, her face blooming into a sunburst of radiating wrinkles.

Blood welled quietly from a smooth cut on the ball of her thumb, and she realized that the bucket was being used as a repository for a collection of old rusty swords of various descriptions.

It was as though worms had eaten through his torso, carving out a network of internal passageways that had later been backfilled with something that didn't quite match.

“You did not cry,” he said, “and you did not complain.”

It sounded terrible when he translated it into that kind of language.

A few half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown stream.

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.

The glass was bubbly and uneven, like the surface of a pot of water just before it breaks into a boil, and Nell liked to look at things through it because, even though she knew it was not as strong as a common window, it made her feel safer, as though she were hiding behind something.

The Constable was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child, the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and spattering onto the mediatron.

The Constable was down on his hands and knees amidst this, bawling like a child, the tears collecting in the shallow saucers of his half-glasses and spattering onto the mediatron, which illuminated them weirdly from below.

When he had passed out of the frame, Nell focused on the other man, the one who was lying in the dust, and she realized for the first time that he did not have a head.

The difference is, I know I'm a veteran. You persist in thinking you're just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school with.

The Chinese Civil War began in earnest three years later, when the Northerns, who didn't have access to nanotech, started lobbing nukes.

“All evildoers had best be on the lookout for little Nell—unless she happens to be wearing her bloody shoes.”

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

It's a very serious commitment, raising a child.

The difference was (as he realized, watching them more keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and Fiona never did.

Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about.

This world is not where my Fiona wants to live, Your Grace. She wants another world, where magic is everywhere, and stories come to life, and …

I know it's nonsense, of course, but she really believes that whenever she opens that book, her father reads her a story and even plays with her in an imaginary world.

Behind him, Mrs. Finkle-McGraw could be seen holding Elizabeth by the wrist in a grip that recalled the blacksmith's tongs holding a dangerously hot ingot ready for smiting; and the radiant glow of the little girl's face perfected that analogy.

Gwendolyn found it difficult to break her gaze; she felt like a captured butterfly staring up through a magnifying lens into the calm, keen eye of the naturalist.

The faces were texture-mapped, as if wearing elaborately painted makeup, or were sculpted to the texture of orange peels, alligator hide, or durian fruit.

The taxi turned a corner, and its headlights swept across a knot of young Chinese men gathered in a doorway, and as one of them lifted a cigarette to his mouth, she caught a glimpse of a scarlet ribbon knotted around his wrist.

I think with this Nell thing, I've incurred all the disadvantages of parenthood without actually getting to have a child.

Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling bloody light across the glossy shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with minuscule circular lenses held in some kind of ostentatiously complex metallic space grid.

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.

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.

So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.

Miranda looked into the Dionysian revel filling the floor and understood that the only way to be safe was to join it.

The gryphons crouched, the lions roared, and she could see all of these details, even though the castles should have been miles away; whenever she looked at something it got bigger and turned into a different picture.

It was twilight, and the wolves were beginning to howl.

The battle between Purple and the djinn raged for a day and a night, both combatants transforming themselves into any number of fantastical creatures and hurling all manner of devastating spells at each other.

She got up, tried to skooch the desk, and found that it was fixed to the floor.

She heard Miss Stricken's heels popping up her aisle, heard the whir of the ruler, and then suddenly felt her knuckles explode.

At the last moment, on an impulse, she flipped her hand over, caught the ruler on her palm, grabbed it, and twisted in a way that Dojo had taught her, bending it against the grain of Miss Stricken's fingers so that she was forced to let go.

She had brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of the knife.

The old book had scarcely come to rest on the floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it.

Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly ponderous motion.

During the next few minutes she gradually moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up and poach in its own fluids.

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.

Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.

Hackworth's memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for déjà vu, last night's dreams.

A hatch opened above him, and several tons of cold seawater landed on his head.

She was standing on the trail of a vast army of mice, who rode on the backs of cats in the way that knights ride on horses.

But Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her.

But Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her.

The outside-facing surfaces were reflective, the inner ones matte black, so Nell could see out as if she were looking through a piece of smoked glass.

It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs.

It was a cliché to joke that the outside of the Sanatorium looked much like the inside of its tenants' lungs.

A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path.

Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society.

Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society.

The Drummers don't mind. The explorers relate that the Drummers behave much the way people do in dreams. 'Poorly defined ego boundaries' was the phrase, as I recall.

The chains were all of the same, somewhat peculiar design, and she saw them everywhere: piled up in heaps on streetcorners, overflowing from metal baskets, dangling from rooftops, strung between towers.

She was startled to see a large square hole in the middle of his back.

This soldier flipped his visor open to expose some sort of mechanical device in the space where his head ought to have been.

Each link had a toggle: a movable bit of metal in the center, capable of rotating about and snapping into place in either of two positions, either parallel or perpendicular to the chain.

But in recent years the Primer had become much subtler than it used to be, full of hidden traps, and she could no longer make comfortable and easy assumptions.

That is, the machine could write on the chain as well as read from it.

Of course, for all she knew, he was upstairs punching the walls until his knuckles were bloody and simply pretending to be patient with her.

The whole castle was frozen, as if she had cast an enchantment over it.

These words struck Nell like a sudden cold wind of pure mountain air and stripped away the soporific cloud of sentimentality.

The Constable reached for the tiny alabaster teacup with armored hands that could have crumbled stones like loaves of stale bread.

Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

He could not tell where one house left off and the next one began, the houses were all intertangled with one another like neurons in the brain.

He could not tell where one house left off and the next one began, the houses were all intertangled with one another like neurons in the brain.

The expression on her face was one of perfect loathing mixed with fascination.

She took two steps across the oriental rug and then launched herself full-length across the settee into her father's arms, where she lay for some minutes alternately weeping and laughing.

Her skirts, poorly adapted to cowboy maneuvers, got all fouled up around her legs, and she ended up slung over Kidnapper's back like a sack of beans.

I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood.

She did it by sacrificing her career and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's mother.

He thought it would be to the entertainment industry what the philosopher's stone was to alchemy.

As she power-skated down the western slope of the arch and crossed the coastline of China, the thunderhead of neon reached above her head, spread out to embrace her, developed into three dimensions—and she was still several miles away from it.

The place was so tiny compared to the rest of Pudong that it looked as if you might trip over it.

This has always been true: There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Madame Ping turned two of her claws into walking legs and made them scurry across the tabletop, like a furtive Vicky gent trying to slip into Shanghai without being caught on a monitor.

Narrow hedges of blueberry shrubs and blackberry canes sprouted from the rain gutters of houses, and gigantic old cars, resting askew on flat and cracked tires, had become trellises for morning glories and vine maples.

She screamed as she did it, a scream to drive out her own fear.

In a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute.

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.

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

It is rumoured that, within that select circle, any member can kill any other simply by thinking of the deed.

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.

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.

Princess Nell was the only person who knew how it worked; she held their fate in her hands.

When the dark knight fell dead and Princess Nell sheathed her sword, the commotion closed in about her again, like the waters of a turbulent river closing over a falling stone.

Nell discovered that a smoothly functioning system was much harder to puzzle out than one that was broken.

The Nipponese Feed was heavy on the phosphorus and burned with a furious white flame that lit up the night sky in several places as seen from the tall buildings in Pudong.

The barge silently turned into a carbuncle of yellow flame that took up half the width of the Huang Pu.

Madame Ping kept telling her that no one ever complained about having to wait too long for an orgasm; that men could do that to themselves any time they wanted, and that it was the business leading up to it that they would pay for.

The client grunted and arched his back so violently that he fell out of his chair onto the rug, where he lay paralyzed.

He has accepted his guilt, and so he accepts the punishment. There is no longer a contest of wills, because he has become submissive.

The shouting meant simply, “Kill! Kill!” and was the battle cry of the Fists of Righteous Harmony.

Napier took advantage of it, methodically planting his feet in a rather prissy-looking stance, squaring his shoulders, calmly reaching out, as if he were using the saber to poke around in a dark closet.

They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial—a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite.

Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes.

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?

He sensed this ambience before he even left the Aerodrome; it leaked in from the streets, like ozone before a thunderstorm.

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 in years.

The Chinese people outside, separated from him by half an inch of crosslinked diamond, watched with their noses making white ellipses against the pane, their faces glowing in the candlelight like ripe peaches hanging in dark lush foliage.

When her father spoke freely, she could sense the man who had told her the stories; when certain subjects were broached, he drew down his veil and became just another Victorian gentleman.

The ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist.

Fiona caught sight of an old Union Jack, then did a double-take and realized that the limbs of the St. Andrew's Cross had been enhanced with stars, like the Confederate Battle Flag.

Several passengers, including Hackworth, had turned on micro torches and focused their beams on Fiona, whose skirts had inflated as she'd jumped in feet-first and now surrounded her like a raft of flowers.

She had somehow flung herself through an unknown and unmarked barrier and become supernatural, a naiad rising from the waves cloaked in fire and steam.

Hackworth took a slow turn around the deck, watching his fellow-tribesmen trying to solve the following problem: get close enough to another couple to recognize them without getting so close that they can recognize you.

Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.

The spectacles would not release his head.

“I don't want you to watch me like that,” she said, and vanished from Hackworth's display in a burst of light.

“We can fake sounds, we can fake images, we can even fake the wind blowing over your face, but how do we fake the sensation of free fall?”

“Dead in the water!” cried the Clown triumphantly, sounding as if he were standing right there, though Hackworth couldn't see him.

They showed an uncanny ability to act in unison—something to do with the 'sites that had burrowed into their brains—but their bodies were stiff, weak, and badly coordinated.

The show reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens moment to moment—and mind you, not just what happens here, but what is happening in the world at large.

The woman was staring at him, and he could feel her eyes on his face like the warmth of a follow spot.

The woman looked different too; her face had reverted to the way it looked when she came in, and Hackworth now understood that her image in his spectacles had been gradually evolving during their conversation, getting feedback from whatever part of his brain buzzed when he saw a beautiful woman.

The labyrinth was constructed of information. In order to escape, he would have to hack it.

I was a bigger hit than you were. I've found my calling in life, Father. I've accepted an invitation to join Dramatis Personae.

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.

He had emerged with a set of numerical keys that were used to identify certain entities: the Primer, Nell, Miranda, and someone else who went by the name of Dr. X.

Its base was as wide as a mountain, and its walls rose sheer and straight into the clouds. Galactic clouds of lights shone from its myriad windows.

By the time this man had walked back to the spiral road, a tall shaft of gleaming crystal had arisen from the soil and grown far above their heads, gleaming in the sunlight, and branched out like a tree.

The lights seemed to be quite brilliant whenever Wizard 0.2 was cogitating and dropped to a low flicker the rest of the time.

Each of its million push-rods was tiny, but the force needed to move all of them at once was seismic, and she could sense the tremendous strains on the power shafts and gearboxes thundering through the sturdy floor of the keep.

The Wizard had worked itself up to such a pitch that all of them felt trapped within the bowels of a mighty machine that could tear them to shreds in a moment.

The flowery garden beyond it was gone, and the horses, the wall, the spiral road, the City of King Coyote, and the Land Beyond.

So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person—a few people, to be precise.

In this way, the following message was written across the floor of the library: WE ARE ENCHANTED REQUEST ASSISTANCE REFER TO BOOKS

There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that knocked Princess Nell flat on her back.

One of them refused to let go until the smell of burned flesh rose from his palm, and then he peeled his hand away slowly and calmly, staring up at Hackworth to show that he didn't mind a little pain.

A long skein of intestine trailed from one of their bellies down into the dirt, where a gaunt pig was tugging on it stubbornly.

A McDonald's sign lay toppled across the highway like a giant turnpike; something had burned through the single pillar that thrust it into the air.

He was sipping green tea from a jumbo McDonald's cup, made in the local style, great clouds of big green leaves swirling around in a tumbler of hot water.

Dr. X grinned broadly for a moment. Then the emotion dropped beneath the surface again, like a breaching whale.

In our hands the Seed would be harmless.

Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society.

For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side.

Sixty-five thousand girls ran past him, hell-bent on Shanghai.

Princess Nell dug throughout the long day, softening the hard earth with her tears, but did not slacken until the ground was level with her own head . .

The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's possession, and because this book had been built atom by atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could not possibly be broken open.

Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating, mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire.

The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night.

The sight of the cruel red ribbons in the small hands of the girls had for some reason struck more terror into her heart than the sight of knives in the hands of Fists.

All of Nell's intellect, her vast knowledge and skills, accumulated over a lifetime of intensive training, meant nothing at all when she was confronted with a handful of organized peasants.

She closed her eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal shaman.

She closed her eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal shaman.

It worked; the edge of the blade came to life like a nanotech chainsaw and zipped through the link in a moment, like clipping a fingernail.

A head popped out of the open hatch; Nell skewered it on her knife.

She dropped back into the car, trying not to look at the bodies or smell the reek of blood and other body fluids that had gotten all over it, and that were now draining out the open doors and dripping down the shaft.

She was not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a few minutes.

When that sound echoed up two hundred stories to Nell's ears, she felt her hair standing on end, because it was not the deep lusty roar of grown men but the fierce thrill of thousands of young girls, sharp and penetrating as the skirl of massed bagpipes.

One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense.

He could already hear the cries of “Sha! Sha!” boiling up from the streets, and shining a pocket torch through the bars of his balcony, he could see many Fists, emboldened by the destruction of the foreign Feeds, running around with their scarlet girdles and headbands exposed to the world.

“One might think we had come for an antique weapons convention,” the gentleman said through his mustache.

One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people.

The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.

The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon.

The entire center of the line was guarded against a direct frontal assault by Princess Nell's tribe/army of twelve-year-old girls, who were gradually trading in their pointed sticks for more modern weapons.

She stood with her back to the shore, holding a book in her hands, and did not move for a long time.

Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze.

On the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach balls.

As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals.

The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater.

The sound of the drumming did not build gradually but exploded to a deafening, mind-dissolving roar as Carl emerged into a vast cavern, a conical amphitheatre that must have been a kilometer wide.

Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled.

Then he saw shadows descending from above, dozens of naked girls swimming downward, garlands of silver bubbles streaming from their mouths, their almond eyes excited and mischievous.

A fantastic, slam-bang-overdrive, supersurrealistic, comic-spooky whirl through a tomorrow that is already happening.

The volume went up but couldn't scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which resonated in his long bones.

Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.

It reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface.

Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

Cotton's gloved hand fluttered and probed like a stuck horsefly in the center of the black web.

A transparent haze coalesced across the terminus of the Feed, mold on an overripe strawberry.

The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up the naked mole rat.

He pulled it down onto his head and grinned insolently as he shot past.

The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily throwing a book toward the little girl.

As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory—

In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.

Judge Fang gripped the rail with both hands and bowed his head. He was very close to clinical shock.

At this point, John Percival Hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it in under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X.

Please get out of there. Please run away. Get out of that chamber of horrors where you've been living, Nell, and get to an orphanage or a police station or something, and I will find you.

Nell, who had been frozen in a nearby corner for some time, shot toward the door like a bolt finally loosed from a crossbow, snatching up the Primer as she ran past it.

The end of the nunchuk struck the stranger's left kneecap like a steel cobra, and she heard something crack.

Judge Fang stood up to find himself surrounded by a hundred little girls, all facing toward the little jade book, standing on tiptoes, mouths open.

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.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.

Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society.

These words struck Nell like a sudden cold wind of pure mountain air and stripped away the soporific cloud of sentimentality.

Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

She did it by sacrificing her career and much of her life. It is important for you to understand, Your Grace, that she was not merely Nell's tutor. She became Nell's mother.

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.

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?

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.

The flowery garden beyond it was gone, and the horses, the wall, the spiral road, the City of King Coyote, and the Land Beyond.

So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person—a few people, to be precise.

There was a violent thunderclap, and a rush of wind that knocked Princess Nell flat on her back.

Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society.

The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night.

One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense.

On the morning of the sixth day of the siege, the neap tide carried a peculiar omen up onto the sand: a harvest of translucent eggs the size of beach balls.

The shoots terminated in lips that grabbed people and drew them in, like the tip of an elephant's trunk, accepting the refugees with a minimum of seawater.

Nell cradled Miranda's head in her arms, bent down, and kissed her, not a soft brush of the lips but a savage kiss with open mouth, and she bit down hard as she did it, biting through her own lips and Miranda's so that their blood mingled.