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peering through walls of glass (actually solid diamond, which was cheaper) at various
phases of the molecular disassembly line that was Source Victoria. Dirty air and dirty water
came in and pooled in tanks. Next to each tank was another tank containing slightly cleaner
air or cleaner water. Repeat several dozen times. The tanks at the end were fi lled with
perfectly clean nitrogen gas and perfectly clean water.
The line of tanks was referred to as a cascade, a rather abstract bit of engineer's whimsy
lost on the tourists who did not see anything snapshot-worthy there. All the action took
place in the walls separating the tanks, which were not really walls but nearly infi nite grids
of submicroscopic wheels, ever-rotating and many-spoked. Each spoke grabbed a nitrogen
or water molecule on the dirty side and released it after spinning around to the clean
side. Things that weren't nitrogen or water didn't get grabbed, hence didn't make it through.
There were also wheels for grabbing handy trace elements like carbon, sulfur, and phospho-
rus; these were passed along smaller, parallel cascades until they were also perfectly
pure. The immaculate molecules wound up in reservoirs. Some of them got combined with
others to make simple but handy molecular widgets. In the end, all of them were funneled
into a bundle of molecular conveyor belts known as the Feed, of which Source Victoria and
the other half-dozen Sources of Atlantis/Shanghai, were the fountainheads (Stephenson
1995
, pp. 7-8).
The Sources, and by extension the Feed, are controlled by one particular cultural
group, the Neo-Victorians. Basic versions of food, water, and shelter can be
compiled for free, yielding a post-scarcity world in which work is not really strictly
necessary. As with many science fi ction dystopias, however, this freedom from the
burden of simple survival does not create a world of only intellectual and creative
explorers, but rather a large, illiterate population focused on consuming low-brow
entertainment. One of the main characters of the topic, a young girl named Nell,
grows up in this environment, living in a high-rise apartment she never leaves,
receiving all toys, food, and clothing from the MC (matter compiler) in the kitchen,
about which she knows only that “mites” inside the machine create the items that
emerge. At one point, her older brother comes home from a scavenging mission in
the outside world with a ragged piece of fabric he found washed up on a beach,
coming from the high-class compound of the Neo-Victorians, who do not rely solely
on MC-created goods. Nell and Harv investigate the strange material:
Harv gripped the end of the thread beneath his thumbnail and pulled. It looked quite short,
but it lengthened as he pulled, and the fuzzy edge of the piece of fabric waffl ed too fast to
see, and then the thread had come loose entirely. He held it up for inspection, then let it drift
down onto a heap of others just like it.
'How many does it have?' Nell said.
'Nell', Harv said, turning to face her so that his light shown into her face, his voice com-
ing out of the light epiphanically, 'You got it wrong. It's not that the thing has threads in
it— it is threads. Threads going under and over each other. If you pulled out all of the
threads, nothing would be left.'
'Did mites make it?' Nell asked.
'The way it's made—so digital—each thread going over and under other threads, and
those ones going over and under all the other threads—' Harv stopped for a moment, his
mind overloaded by the inhuman audacity of the thing, the promiscuous reference frames.
'It had to be mites, Nell, nothing else could do it'. (Stephenson
1995
, p. 55)
The children are unable to comprehend how human effort could produce
something like the intricacy of tightly woven cloth fabric. Later in the topic, Nell
encounters an enclave of craftspeople who still maintain the knowledge of making
