The Primer in The Diamond Age is a complex and highly elaborate descendant of today's hypertext. Unlike the very static version we are familiar with today, the Primer is fully interactive. It not only offers the reader an open-ended narrative, but it also changes to the reader's demands, among many other features.

      As Stuart Moulthrop said in the November issue of Wired, "The primer is an ecologically updated version of a book-not a static object, but an active interface to a global information network. It may look 'exactly like a book,' but it is a nanotechnological parallel computer linked to a biomechanical processing collective."

      When Nell first recives the primer, it reads to her:

      "The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person's-though not like anyone Nell had ever met." (Stephenson 84)

      What Nell doesn't know is that Miranda is racting in the Primer's story, and is the one who is reading and interacting with her. The programming of the Primer sends prompts to Miranda's viewscreen in her 'body stage,' telling her how to proceed with the story.

      The programming immediately makes the Primer identify with her, and it begins to tell the story of Princess Nell and her four friends (Nell's four stuffed toys) who were locked in a "tall dark castle" (her apartment building) with a boy named Harv (her brother) by their evil stepmother (their mother). And, almost as immediately, Nell is introduced to the interactive capablities of the Primer:

      "What's a raven?" Nell said.

      The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now, say it with me."

      "Raven"

      "Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?" (85)

      After this exchange, the Primer proceeds to teach Nell how to read, among other things:

      "Within a week [Miranda] was teaching this girl how to read. They'd work on letters for a while, and then wander off into more stories about Princess Nell, stop in the middle for a quick practical demonstration of basic math, and then get sidetracked with and endless chain of "why this?" and "why that?" (121)

      In this way, the Primer is working the way we hope that hypertext will in the future; following an individual's train of thought, moving from one topic to another with amazing fluidity.

      In the first years that Nell has the Primer, it would "help her sound out all the words, or even read the whole story to her." At other times, the Primer would "tell it to her with moving pictures just like a cine." (135) Furthermore, it would become fully "ractive," letting her enter the story and act out the actions herself; such as learing how to start a fire with flints, or martial arts, or the logic behind computers. It would even let her tell it her own stories, creating pictures to match the story as she went along. As Nell gets older, the Primer essentialy grows with her: the puzzles she faces become more complex, the language becomes more sophisticated, and it depends less on working like a "cine."

      The Primer had other amazing features as well. It would give her scratch paper for logic problems, it contained a massive Encyclopaedia of information in the back, and at any given time, it could become a microscope or a telelscope:

      Nell planted some carrots...The Primer taught her how to do it, and also reminded her to dig up a carrot sprout every few days and examine it so that she could learn how they grew. Nell learned that if she held the Primer above the carrot and stared at a certain page, it would turn into a magic illustration that would grow larger and larger until she could see the tiny little fibers that grew out of the roots, and the one-celled organisms clinging to the fibers, and the mitochondria inside them. The same trick worked on anything, and she spent many days examining flies' eyes, bread mold, and blood cells that she got out of her own body by pricking her finger. She could also go up on hilltops during cold clear nights, and use the Primer to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. (249)

      Although the book primarily focuses on Nell's interaction with the Primer, Stephenson introduces the two other characters who interact with their own copies of the Primer, Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, and Fiona Hackworth. They are foils to Nell's experiences, as each takes differing paths in life. One of Stephenson's major themes, that a person shapes their hypertextual experience in different ways because of their personal experiences, and not vice versa, is developed through the comparison of the three girls. As Gwendolyn Hackworth ponders, "These girls weren't any stranger than any other girls, and to blame their behavior on the Primers was to miss the point entirely." (266)