Free The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Page A

demanded intuition and creativity, qualities neither abundant nor encouraged here in Merkle Hall. But from time to time, over golf or karaoke or cigars, Dung or one of the other supervisors would mention some youngster who showed promise. Because Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw was paying for Hackworth's current project, the Young Lady's Illustrated Prime r, price was no object. The Duke would brook no malingering or corner-cutting, so everything was as start as Bespoke could make it, every atom could be justified.
      Even so, there was nothing especially interesting about the power supply being created for the Primer, which consisted of batteries of the same kind used to run everything from toys to airships. So Hackworth had farmed that part of the job out to Cotton, just to see whether he had potential.
      Cotton's gloved hand fluttered and probed like a stuck horsefly in the center of the black web. On the mediatronic screen attached to his workstation, Hackworth saw that Cotton was gripping a medium-size (by Merkie Hall standards) subassembly, presumably belonging to some much larger nanotechnological system. The standard color scheme used in these phenomenoscopes depicted carbon atoms in green, sulfur in yellow, oxygen in red, and hydrogen in blue. Cotton's assembly, as seen from a distance, was generally turquoise because it consisted mostly of carbon and hydrogen, and because Hackworth's point of view was so far away that the thousands of individual atoms all blended together. It was a gridwork of long, straight, but rather bumpy rods laid across each other at right angles. Hackworth recognized it as a rod logic system- a mechanical computer.
      Cotton was trying to snap it together with some larger part. From this Hackworth inferred that the auto-assembly process (which Cotton would have tried first) hadn't worked quite right, and so now Cotton was trying to maneuver the part into place by hand. This wouldn't fix what was wrong with it, but the telesthetic feedback coming into his hand through those wires would give him insight as to which bumps were lining up with which holes and which weren't. It was an intuitive approach to the job, a practice furiously proscribed by the lecturers at the Royal Nanotechnological Institute but popular among Hackworth's naughty, clever colleagues.
      "Okay," Cotton finally said, "I see the problem." His hand relaxed. On the mediatron, the subassembly drifted away from the main group under its own momentum, then slowed, stopped, and began to fall back toward it, drawn in by weak van den Waals forces. Cotton's right hand was resting on a small chordboard; he whacked a key that froze the simulation, then, as Hackworth noted approvingly, groped the keys for a few seconds, typing in some documentation. Meanwhile he was withdrawing his left hand from the glove and using it to pull the rig off his head; its straps and pads left neat indentations in the nap of his hair.
      "Is this the smart makeup?" Hackworth said, nodding at the screen.
      "The next step beyond," Cotton said. "Remote-control."
      "Controlled how? Yuvree?" Hackworth said, meaning Universal Voice Recognition Interface.
      "A specialised variant thereof, yes sir," Cotton said. Then, lowering his voice, "Word has it they considered makeup with nanoreceptors for galvanic skin response, pulse, respiration, and so on, so that it would respond to the wearer's emotional state. This superficial, need I say it, cosmetic issue concealed an undertow that pulled them out into deep and turbulent philosophical waters-"
      "What? Philosophy of makeup?"
      "Think about it, Mr. Hackworth- is the function of makeup to respond to one's emotions- or precisely not to do so?"
      "These waters are already over my head," Hackworth admitted.
      "You'll be wanting to know about the power supply for Runcible," Cotton said, using the code name for the Illustrated Primer. Cotton had no idea what Runcible was, just that it needed a