the second major character. He is an upper-level engineer at Bespoke and develops the code for the Primer. He makes an illicit copy of the primer for his daughter, who is Nell's age. When his crime is detected, he is forced to become a double agent in a covert power struggle between the Victorians and the Confucians. He is forced to spend ten years with a colony of "Drummers," to use their distributed intelligence (similar but not identical to distributed artificial intelligence) for the development of a new technology, the Seed. He turns out to be the mysterious figure he was supposedly sent to find, The Alchemist.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Characters
