Bud

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Diamond Age page for Bud

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Bud seems to be a raw version of Jack Shaftoe minus the luck. I'm betting Tequila named the kids. Seems that Bud missed a clue from the good Judge just before the end there: ... The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun. Bud had a nice new pair of blades with a top speed of anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether or not you wore aero. Bud liked wearing skin-tight leather, to show off his muscles. On a previous visit to the mod parlor, two years ago, he had paid to have a bunch of 'sites implanted in his muscles little critters; too small to see or feel, that twitched Bud's muscle fibers electrically according to a program that was supposed to maximize bulk. Combined with the testosterone pump embedded in his forearm, it was like working out in a gym night and day, except you didn't have to actually do anything and you never got sweaty. The only drawback was that all the little twitches made him kind of tense and jerky. He'd gotten used to it, but it still made him a little hinky on those skates, especially when he was doing a hundred clicks an hour through a crowded street. But few people hassled Bud, even when he knocked them down in the street, and after today no one would hassle him ever again. Bud had walked away, improbably unscratched, from his last job decoy - with something like a thousand yuks in his pocket. He'd spent a third of it on new clothes, mostly black leather, another third of it on the blades, and was about to spend the last third at the mod parlor. You could get skull guns a lot cheaper, of course, but that would mean going over the Causeway to Shanghai and getting a back-alley job from some Coaster, and probably a nice bone infection in with the bargain, and he'd probably pick your pocket while he had you theezed. Besides, you could only get into a Shanghai if you were virgin. To cross the Causeway when you were already packing a skull gun, like Bud, you had to bribe the shit out of numerous Shanghai cops. There was no reason to economize here. Bud had a rich and boundless career ahead of him, vaulting up a hierarchy of extremely dangerous drug-related occupations for which decoy served as a paid audition of sorts. A start weapons system was a wise investment. The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume went up but couldn't scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which resonated in his long bones. He wondered whether, as long as he was at the mod parlor, he should have the batteries drilled out of his right mastoid and replaced. Supposedly they were ten-year jobs, but he'd had them for six and he listened to music all the time, loud. Three people were waiting. Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger cine panes in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets. Bud frisbeed the mediatron back onto the table; this was the same review he'd been poring over for the last day, they hadn't updated it, his decision was still valid. One of the guys ahead of him got a tattoo, which took about ten seconds. The other guy just wanted his skull gun reloaded, which didn't take much longer. The girl wanted a few 'sites replaced in her racting grid, mostly around her eyes, where she was starting to wrinkle up. That took a while, so Bud picked up the mediatron again and went in a ractive, his favorite, called Shut Up or Die! ... An example of his regular guy wit: ... "What, sir, do you want?" "Oh, money'n shit," ...

Authored entries

Community Entry: Bud

Bud is the biological father of both Nellodee and Harvard, sometime boyfriend to their mother, Tequila, but his primary function in the plot of the novel is as a mechanism for introducing the reader to the particular sort of social plenum and legal regieme our characters function within, particularly the Phyles and FOQNEs that most members of Diamond Age society are members of, as well as the Common Economic Protocol, Protocol Enforcement, Confucian Law and to introduce us to the Confucian Judge Fang and his assistants as persons rather than merely functionaries. Bud's fate, in being sentenced to a terminal case of a long walk off a short pier, explains why Fang & Co. take such an interest in the lives of Nell and Harv, beyond Harv being just one more juvenile delinquent to enter Fang's courtroom.

Bud is a redneck, the product of southern Florida trailer trash. How he arrived in China remains a mystery. As a New Chusan 'thete, he is a grown street thug with a criminal past, muscle electrostimulators implanted all over his body, and a hypervelocity microprojectile accellerator, known colloquially as a "Skull Gun", to match his bad attitude and presumption of entitlement that comes from humble beginnings.

Breakin' The Law

The idea, to Bud, of earning an honest living, is anathema, consequently we are taken on a tour of various crime opportunities, features of the Diamond Age banking system, and how one can obtain asylum in a balkanized age.

Bud runs afoul particularly when he makes the mistake of mugging a member of the Ashanti phyle, rather than sticking to phyle-less individuals who are dependent upon their own resources, and blows a hole in his victims arm primarily out of racist rage against the fact that his black victim is wealthier and more cultured than himself.

We then see the Ashantis arrive in New Chusan en-masse to hunt Bud down, which they do in short order as Bud runs desperately to find a phyle to join that will protect him (Sendero is his last resort). The Ashantis, being of a phyle not in control of the territory in which Bud is arrested, must utilize the CEP to obtain justice through the legal system of the Chinese Coastal Republic for whom Judge Fang renders swift justice, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, in keeping with Confucian principles, utilizing some Cookie Cutters and a fine waterfront view.