The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Nell seeks work as a scriptwriter at Madame Ping’s, where the elite can engage in BDSM play. Madame Ping hires her almost immediately. Madame Ping’s business model is to take the ractive fantasies of neo-Victorian clients and turn them into culturally specific ractives that appeal to non-neo-Victorians who want to be as much like the neo-Victorians as possible. Despite tweaks for cultural differences, the stories are all the same.

Hackworth and Fiona hunt for information about the Alchemist. They meet with Maggie, a woman whose blood turns out to contain Drummer particles she got after having sex with Mr. Beck (Miranda’s new backer) months ago. She got a high fever shortly after. During the interview, Maggie offers Fiona a sanitized version of what CryptNet is. Afterward, Hackworth tells Fiona that CryptNet is dangerous. They are building a seed to replace the centralized feed system and destroy the Common Economic Protocol. The CEP and Feed dependence on sites like Source Victoria bring order to society, while CryptNet believes the feeds are a mechanism for oppression. Hackworth fears a world in which the Seed dominates. The Hackworths leave for London.

The princess becomes the Duchess of Turing and learns programming skills by reading the duke’s book and repairing Castle Turing. She captures four more castles, all increasingly complex but broken Turing machines that she fixes as she becomes a better programmer. She is stymied by the next castle but enters the Cipherers’ Market around it, which has a steady flow of messages to and from the Castle of King Coyote. She learns that the Cipherers encrypt and decrypt messages for the king. Once she learns their craft, she makes enough money to buy back all her lost keys. Nell indirectly narrates much of this action. Most of her interactions with the Primer are simply puzzle-solving and programming. She suspects the story in the Primer is almost over. Nell spends much of her day writing scripts for Madame Ping and observing the ractors around her.

Colonel Napier is at Madame Ping’s one day as the Fists burn foreign feeds outside. Nell is the scriptwriter for his scenario. Napier is so bored with it that she rewrites it to make him believe Miss Braithwaite, the ractor, is an actual member of CryptNet. He blurts out classified information: CryptNet, Dr. X, and someone called the Alchemist are conspiring to do something that is a grave threat to New Atlantis. The “contest of wills” with another person (Nell, in reality) and the perception that he is really in danger excite him (333).

The session ends when the Fists of Righteous Harmony attack Madame Ping’s. The colonel instantly leaves his submissive, emotional role and methodically kills anyone in his path with his dress uniform sword until he makes it to the street. Nell, meanwhile, improvises and relies on the training she got from the Primer and the constable. She kills Fists using whatever she finds. She still isn’t accustomed to violence. She has a flashback to her unsuccessful attack against Burt with the screwdriver.

Madame Ping’s survives the attack. Madame Ping congratulates Nell on her able performance in changing the colonel’s script, a comment that makes Nell uncomfortable. Although her interaction with Napier was mediated by the ractive, Napier recognized some essence of her and could sense the difference. Nell concludes that some constant, human presence—something like a mother—has been with her in the Primer up until recently.

Carl Hollywood returns to Shanghai. The unsettled city reminds him of his childhood in the western United States, which was essentially cowboy and ranch country that he and his family protected using old-fashioned guns until unrest forced them to adopt nanotechnology. He goes to Mrs. Kwan’s teahouse, where, as crowds of people in the street stare at him through the windows, he begins interacting with the network to find Miranda.

Fiona and Hackworth continue the search for the Alchemist in London. Fiona scoffs when Hackworth tells her that he has been set this task because he and the Alchemist are both engineers: She reminds him how he told her so many stories in the Primer, many of them full of seeds. He becomes emotional about how much she remembers but ends the discussion abruptly with a warning about CryptNet spying on them. They attend a performance of the Dramatis Personae troupe, located on a ship offshore.

With a sarcastic clown egging him on to participate, Hackworth eventually engages with the performance. He learns that the performance emerges from an interaction between the psyches of the audience and random inputs from the networked world beyond the ship. Hackworth escapes the performance by hacking and intuition once he realizes everything around him is data. The performance is likely controlled by a nearby Drummer colony, and he knows how to manipulate the performance; he concludes, therefore, that he must be the Alchemist. He wakes naked the next morning. He goes back to Atlantis/Shanghai, but Fiona stays behind to join the Dramatis Personae.

After a friend watching the network alerts him to what is happening with Hackworth, Carl introduces the clown into Hackworth’s quest through the Dramatis Personae to spy on and manipulate Hackworth. The Drummers are using their network of humans to break the encryption system that enables the secure, anonymous transactions underwriting the Common Economic Protocol and system of centralized feeds. Hackworth is unwittingly helping them. He smuggles out decryption keys in his system every time he interacts with Drummers, unmasking identities, locations, and transactions. Hackworth must be the Alchemist. Carl uses the Dramatis Personae production to snatch these keys. Carl is newly powerful. He can assume the identify of any agent in the network, including Nell and Miranda, and if he can do that, he can also find them in real space.

The princess gains the last key when she destroys the Castle of King Coyote. She does so by figuring out that the castle is just a data processing operation and that the machine at the heart of it—Wizard 0.2, a massive “thinking machine” (367)—can be broken by forcing it to process a zero divide (dividing a number by 0, which always produces an undefined result). King Coyote, aka John Hackworth, reveals that Wizard 0.2 is a sham and the Land Beyond is a seed-generated simulation. The king answers all the messages that come to the castle, so the Land Beyond is just a “person” in disguise (372).

Nell shuts the Primer and cries. Maybe the Primer is really just a machine with a person on the other side as well. Princess Nell asks the king if there is a person beyond the simulation of the Land Beyond. He says there is, but the princess must build a new world to connect with this person. The king gives the princess the last key and his library. He leaves on a quest to find the Alchemist. The princess then finds the Mouse Army in the library. She releases them from an enchantment, and they become an army of girls with her as their queen.

Hackworth rides out from Shanghai on Kidnapper for a meeting with Dr. X. He is in full neo-Victorian gear. Dr. X confirms that Hackworth is the Alchemist. Hackworth became the Alchemist when Dr. X placed him among the Drummers so that his engineering and coding skills could help the Drummers create the Seed. New Atlantis pulled Hackworth out before that work was finished, and CryptNet is too steeped in Western values to finish. It is impossible make a Confucian society with Western technology like the Feed because Western values—selfishness, individual self-interest—are inextricably a part of that technology. In a Confucian system, people who make things, right down to the farmer who puts a seed in the ground, are the prized bedrock of a virtuous society. The Feed makes everyone a consumer, and people have no contact whatsoever with the source of the things they get from the feeds. After all the disruption Westerners have caused in China, Hackworth owes it to the Celestial Kingdom to make the Seed, Dr. X argues.

Hackworth refuses. He sees a young serving woman shuffle on tiny feet formed with foot binding that began when she was an infant. His own Fiona is free of the constraints of neo-Victorian womanhood. He thinks of the mice, whom Dr. X says are a failed educational experience. They aren’t Confucians because there were no families, no communities behind the Primers when Hackworth made them nonractive. Hackworth says that remains to be seen. Hackworth leaves. His return to the city is impeded by the Mouse Army, which is marching on Shanghai with their jade Primers in hand. Some mice, slightly older than the others and with tiny feet like the serving woman, ride on litters and study engineering blueprints in their Primers. 

Queen Nell returns to the Dark Castle and unlocks it with her 12 keys. She buries Prince Harv, dead of consumption. She sends mice to find out who she really is. In her library, she finds the Books of Books and the Book of the Seed. She uses the 12th key to unlock the Book of Books, which includes instructions for assembling a complicated technology that sounds like the Primer in Nell’s world. She is unable to open the Book of the Seed, however.

Back in real space, Nell reads the final page of the story as she rests in Madame Ping’s dormitory. Queen Nell has found her people down by the cliff where she and the prince washed up as babies and realizes she is “alone only by her own choice” (390). Nell has a vision of the images of the Seed, the Book, and the golden keys of Turing combined. The vision ends when the Fists explode a nanoweapon in the Pudong district, destroying the last foreign feed. They set up headquarters at Madame Ping’s.

The Fists initially ignore Nell, in part because she urinates and defecates on herself as self-protection after the women of Madame Ping’s torture her and tie her up. Some of the Fists later rape her—violence Stephenson describes using euphemistic diction. Nell disassociates during these events and plans her escape. She uses the Primer to help her manufacture a knife and sword. She kills the next man who comes to the closet where she is captive, then cuts a path through the Fists (much like Colonel Napier). She escapes immediate danger by surfing through the elevator shaft, something she learned about from Harv. She then destroys the elevator shaft but finds herself trapped. In a daze, she draws the arms of Queen Nell—the book, the seed, and the keys—on the system that controls the mediatronic displays on Madame Ping’s. The symbol is a beacon that leads the Mouse Army to her. The army takes the city, and Nell accepts their oaths. They set to work taking care of the many people displaced and damaged by the Fists. The chapter closes with Nell walking with sword in hand, a “barbarian Princess with her book and sword” (401).

The sounds of explosions wake Carl Hollywood up in his hotel room at the Cathay, a hotel in the old colonial quarter of Shanghai. Unable to sneak to the waterfront because he is notably white, he falls in with a group that includes Zulus, Israelis, and neo-Victorian Colonel Spence. They join up with some New Boers, but their path to the waterfront is blocked by the formidable troops of the Celestial Kingdom. They escape when a grandmotherly New Boer woman blows herself up after approaching the Celestial Kingdom troops. The party escapes, but Spence dies. Carl goes to the New Atlantis encampment to keep working on locating Miranda.

New Atlantis recognizes Nell as a queen and her Mouse Army as a phyle. Queen Elizabeth III appoints Carl Hollywood as an envoy to Nell. Hackworth, the Alchemist, is creating the Seed, and he is the last foreigner to leave Shanghai. Carl observes as Nell spends her days looking at the sea and one of her books as she searches for Miranda. Miranda is likely in a Drummer colony off the coast, waiting to be the vessel for the final Drummer computation needed to make the Seed. The heat from the process will kill Miranda.

Nell and Carl eventually follow the refugees down to the Drummer colony, which they reach using breathing packs that washed ashore. Immune to the Drummer colony because they’ve killed the seed nanosites (some of which were introduced into Nell’s system during the rapes at Madame Ping’s) in their blood, the two locate Miranda before the seed can consume her. Nell rescues Miranda by transferring seed-killing nanosites into her blood with a kiss. Nell knows the Drummers will passively wait until another woman comes along to help them complete the Seed with their human “wet Net” (415). Members of the Mouse Army pull Miranda, Carl, and Nell from the water.