What are we to make of the Han girls raised by the The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer becoming the Mouse Army, rather than creative, individualistic subversives like Nell? One explanation is given by Dr. X:
We lacked the resources to raise them individually, and so we raised them with books. But the only proper way to raise a child is within a family. The Master could have told us as much, had we listened to his words.
The Han girls turned out differently because they had an AI caring for them instead of a ractor like Miranda; and they lacked supportive influences like Harv, the Constable, and Miss Matheson’s Academy.
But another read is that the Han girls were actively sabotaged. When asked to modify the Primer for them, a few sentences suggest Hackworth manages a bit of subversion after all:
At this point, John Percival Hackworth, almost without thinking about it and without appreciating the ramifications of what he was doing, devised a trick and slipped it in under the radar of the Judge and Dr. X and all of the other people in the theatre, who were better at noticing tricks than most other people in the world. “While I’m at it, if it pleases the court, I can also,” Hackworth said, most obsequiously, “make changes in the content so that it will be more suitable for the unique cultural requirements of the Han readership. But it will take some time.”
What might those changes have been? As far as I can determine, the book doesn’t come out and say directly. We could speculate that (from Hackworth’s perspective as a Victorian) making the book “more suitable” for Han readers might mean shifting its priorities from subversion and individualism to conformity and collectivism. Were these changes intended to ensure (directly or indirectly) that the girls end up as Nell’s loyal soldiers?
We get a few hints which suggest that his subversion was really about undermining the interests of the Celestial Kingdom.
Despite the fact that the Han Primer’s program “contained all of the hooks that Dr. X’s coders would need to translate the text into Chinese,” we later see that “Carl Hollywood was surprised to hear the girls all speaking perfect English in a rather high Victorian style. They seemed to prefer it when discussing things in the abstract, but when it came to practical matters they reverted to mandarin.” Was that unintentional residue of the original programming, or did Hackworth intentionally indoctrinate them in Victorian cultural values?
Another hint, near the end of the book:
A young woman padded out of the kitchen on silk slippers and gave Hackworth his own tumbler full of green tea. Watching her mince away, Hackworth was only mildly shocked to see that her feet were no more than four inches long. There must be better ways to do it now, maybe by regulating the growth of the tarsal bones during adolescence. It probably didn’t even hurt.
Realizing this, Hackworth also realized, for the first time, that he had done the right thing ten years ago.
What do we imagine the “right thing” was that he did ten years ago? Empowering these young girls, liberating these young girls’ minds from Confucian subservience? Turning them into loyal soldiers for Nell, whom he imagined would combat the Kingdom’s advances?
The latter is tough for me to imagine, since at that point he didn’t know about Dr. X’s plans for the Seed. But Hackworth’s final conversation with Dr. X suggests he might have had some idea:
“You have helped us willingly for ten years,” Dr. X said. “It is your destiny to make the Seed.”
“Nonsense,” Hackworth said, “I did not know the nature of the project.”
Dr. X smiled. “You knew it perfectly well.”