Нил Стивенсон: Diamond Age

He stepped away from the M.C. as if he could no longer stand to share a room with it, sucked powerfully on his juice box, and wandered into the living room to get in a ractive. Nell just watched the green wedge get bigger and bigger until it filled half the circle, and then it began to look like a green circle with a white wedge in it, getting narrower and narrower, and finally the music came to a bouncy conclusion just as the white wedge vanished.

"It's done!" she said.

Harv paused his ractive, swaggered into the kitchen, and poked a mediaglyphic that was an animated picture of a door swinging open. The M.C. took to hissing loudly. Harv watched her scared face and ruffled her hair; she could not fend him off because she had her hands over her ears. "Got to release the vacuum," he explained.

The sound ended, and the door popped open. Inside the M.C., folded up neatly, was Nell's new red mattress. "Give it to me! Give it to me!" Nell shouted, furious to see Harv's hands on it. Harv amused himself for a second playing keep-away, then gave it to her. She ran to the room that she shared with Harv and slammed the door as hard as she could. Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple were waiting for her. "I got us a new bed," she told them. She grabbed her old crib mattress and heaved it into the corner, then unfolded the new one precisely on the floor. It was disappointingly thin, more blanket than mattress. But when she had it all laid out on the floor, it made a whooshing noise— not loud— the sound of her brother's breathing late at night. It thickened as it inhaled, and when it was done, it looked like a real mattress. She gathered Dinosaur and Duck and Peter and Purple up into her arms and then, just to make sure, jumped up and down on it several hundred times.

"You like it?" Harv said. He had opened the door.

"No! Get out!" Nell screamed.

"Nell, it's my room too," Harv said. "I gotta deke your old one."

Later, Harv went out with his buddies, and Nell was alone in the house for a while. She had decided that her kids needed mattresses too, and so she dragged the chair to the counter and climbed up on top, right in front of the M.C., and tried to read the mediaglyphics. A lot of them she didn't recognize. But she remembered that Tequila just used words when she couldn't read something, so she tried talking to it instead.

"Please secure the permission of an adult," the M.C. said, over and over again.

Now she knew why Harv always poked at things rather than talking to them. She poked at the M.C. for a long time until finally she came to the same mediaglyphics that Harv had used to choose her mattress. One showed a man and woman sleeping in a very large bed. A man and woman in a somewhat smaller bed. A man by himself. A child by herself. A baby.

Nell poked at the baby. The white circle and red wedge appeared, the music played, the M.C. hissed and opened.

She spread it out on the floor and formally presented it to Dinosaur, who was too little to know how to jump up and down on it; so Nell showed him for a while. Then she went back to the M.C. and got mattresses for Duck, Peter, and Purple. Now, much of the room was covered with mattresses, and she thought how fun it would be to have the whole room just be one big mattress, so she made a couple of the very largest size. Then she made a new mattress for Tequila and another new one for her boyfriend Rog.

When Harv came back, his reaction swerved between terror and awe. "Mom's gonna have Rog beat the shit out of us," he said. "We gotta deke all this stuff now."

Easy come, easy go. Nell explained the situation to her kids and then helped Harv stuff all of the mattresses, except her own, into the deke hopper. Harv had to use all his strength to shove the door closed. "Now we just better hope this stuff all dekes before Mom gets home," he said. "It's gonna take a while."

Later they went to bed and both lay awake for a while, dreading the sound of the front door opening. But neither Mom nor Rog came home that night. Mom finally showed up in the morning, changed into her maid outfit, and ran for the bus to the Vicky Clave, but she just left all her garbage on the floor instead of throwing it in the hopper. When Harv checked the hopper later, it was empty. "We dodged a bullet," he said. "You gotta be careful how you use the matter compiler, Nell."

"What's a matter compiler?"

"We call it the M.C. for short."

"Why?"

"Because M.C. stands for matter compiler, or so they say."

"Why?"

"It just does. In letters, I guess."

"What are letters?"

"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. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words."

Rain beaded on the specular toes of Hackworth's boots as he strode under the vaulting wrought-iron gate. The little beads reflected the silvery gray light of the sky as they rolled off onto the pedomotive's tread plates, and dripped to the gray-brown cobblestones with each stride. Hackworth excused himself through a milling group of uncertain Hindus. Their hard shoes were treacherous on the cobblestones, their chins were in the air so that their high white collars would not saw their heads off. They had arisen many hours ago in their tiny high-rise warrens, their human coin lockers on the island south of New Chusan, which was Hindustani. They had crossed into Shanghai in the wee hours on autoskates and velocipedes, probably paid off some policemen, made their way to the Causeway joining New Chusan to the city. MachinePhase Systems Limited knew that they were coming, because they came every day. The company could have set up an employment office closer to the Causeway, or even in Shanghai itself. But the company liked to have job-seekers come all the way to the main campus to fill out their applications. The difficulty of getting here prevented people from coming on a velleity, and the eternal presence of these people— like starlings peering down hungrily at a picnic— reminded everyone who was lucky enough to have a job that others were waiting to take their place.

The Design Works emulated a university campus, in more ways than its architects had really intended. If a campus was a green quadrilateral described by hulking, hederated Gothics, then this was a campus. But if a campus was also a factory of sorts, most of whose population sat in rows and columns in large stuffy rooms and did essentially the same things all day, then the Design Works was a campus for that reason too.

Hackworth detoured through Merkle Hall. It was Gothic and very large, like most of the Design Works. Its vaulted ceiling was decorated with a hard fresco consisting of paint on plaster. Since this entire building, except for the fresco, had been grown straight from the Feed, it would have been easier to build a mediatron into the ceiling and set it to display a soft fresco, which could have been changed from time to time. But neo-Victorians almost never used mediatrons. 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.

The centerpiece of the fresco was a flock of cybernetic cherubs, each shouldering a spherical atom, converging on some central work-in-progress, a construct of some several hundred atoms, radially symmetric, perhaps intended to look like a bearing or motor. Brooding over the whole thing, quite large but obviously not to scale, was a white-coated Engineer with a monocular nanophenomenoscope strapped to his head. No one really used them because you couldn't get depth perception, but it looked better on the fresco because you could see the Engineer's other eye, steel-blue, dilated, scanning infinity like the steel oculus of Arecibo. With one hand the Engineer stroked his waxed mustache. The other was thrust into a nanomanipulator, and it was made obvious, through glorious overuse of radiant tromp l'oeil, that the atom-humping cherubs were all dancing to his tune, naiads to the Engineer's Neptune. The corners of the fresco were occupied with miscellaneous busywork; in the upper left, Feynman and Drexler and Merkle, Chen and Singh and Finkle-McGraw reposed on a numinous buckyball, some of them reading books and some pointing toward the work-in-progress in a manner that implied constructive criticism. In the upper right was Queen Victoria II, who managed to look serene despite the gaudiness of her perch, a throne of solid diamond. The bottom fringe of the work was crowded with small figures, mostly children with the occasional longsuffering mom, ordered chronologically. On the left were the spirits of generations past who had showed up too early to enjoy the benefits of nanotechnology and (not explicitly shown, but somewhat ghoulishly implied) croaked from obsolete causes such as cancer, scurvy, boiler explosions, derailments, drive-by shootings, pogroms, blitzkriegs, mine shaft collapses, ethnic cleansing, meltdowns, running with scissors, eating Drano, heating a cold house with charcoal briquets, and being gored by oxen. Surprisingly, none of them seemed sullen; they were all watching the activities of the Engineer and his cherubic workforce, their cuddly, uplifted faces illuminated by the light streaming from the center, liberated (as Hackworth the engineer literal-mindedly supposed) by the binding energy of the atoms as they plummeted into their assigned potential wells.