"Only very recently," Hackworth said. "Then I understood it all in an 
instant—I pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a 
fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. 
The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would 
only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long 
for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by 
developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation 
with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they 
proved
unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered 
by Protocol Enforcement.