Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

HELP WANTED

LOST IN THE SHADOWS of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there — the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat.

I am holding on for dear life, one hand on the ladder, the other on the lip of a shelf, fingers pressed white. My eyes trace a line above my knuckles, searching the spines — and there, I spot it. The book I’m looking for.

But let me back up.

My name is Clay Jannon and those were the days when I rarely touched paper.

I’d sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I’d get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I’d add it to my reading list. Then I’d follow another link to a book review. I’d add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book — third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I’d retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.

I was unemployed, a result of the great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century, leaving bankrupt burger chains and shuttered sushi empires in its wake.

The job I lost was at the corporate headquarters of NewBagel, which was based not in New York or anywhere else with a tradition of bagel-making but instead here in San Francisco. The company was very small and very new. It was founded by a pair of ex-Googlers who wrote software to design and bake the platonic bagel: smooth crunchy skin, soft doughy interior, all in a perfect circle. It was my first job out of art school, and I started as a designer, making marketing materials to explain and promote this tasty toroid: menus, coupons, diagrams, posters for store windows, and, once, an entire booth experience for a baked-goods trade show.

There was lots to do. First, one of the ex-Googlers asked me to take a crack at redesigning the company’s logo. It had been big bouncy rainbow letters inside a pale brown circle; it looked pretty MS Paint. I redesigned if using a newish typeface with sharp black serifs that I thought sort of evoked the boxes and daggers of Hebrew letters. It gave NewBagel some gravitas and it won me an award from San Francisco’s AIGA chapter. Then, when I mentioned to the other ex-Googler that I knew how to code (sort of), she put me in charge of the website. So I redesigned that, too, and then managed a small marketing budget keyed to search terms like “bagel” and “breakfast” and “topology.” I was also the voice of @NewBagel on Twitter and attracted a few hundred followers with a mix of breakfast trivia and digital coupons.

None of this represented the glorious next stage of human evolution, but I was learning things. I was moving up. But then the economy took a dip, and it turns out that in a recession, people want good old-fashioned bubbly oblong bagels, not smooth alien-spaceship bagels, not even if they’re sprinkled with precision-milled rock salt.

The ex-Googlers were accustomed to success and they would not go quietly. They quickly rebranded to become the Old Jerusalem Bagel Company and abandoned the algorithm entirely so the bagels started coming out blackened and irregular. They instructed me to make the website look old-timey, a task that burdened my soul and earned me zero AIGA awards. The marketing budget dwindled, then disappeared. There was less and less to do. I wasn’t learning anything and I wasn’t moving anywhere.

Finally, the ex-Googlers threw in the towel and moved to Costa Rica. The ovens went cold and the website went dark. There was no money for severance, but I got to keep my company-issued MacBook and the Twitter account.

So then, after less than a year of employment, I was jobless. It turned out it was more than just the food chains that had contracted. People were living in motels and tent cities. The whole economy suddenly felt like a game of musical chairs, and I was convinced I needed to grab a seat, any seat, as fast as I could.

That was a depressing scenario when I considered the competition. I had friends who were designers like me, but they had already designed world-famous websites or advanced touch-screen interfaces, not just the logo for an upstart bagel shop. I had friends who worked at Apple. My best friend, Neel, ran his own company. Another year at NewBagel and I would have been in good shape, but I hadn’t lasted long enough to build my portfolio, or even get particularly good at anything. I had an art-school thesis on Swiss typography (1957–1983) and I had a three-page website.

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

It was paper that saved me. It turned out that I could stay focused on job hunting if I got myself away from the internet, so I would print out a ream of help-wanted ads, drop my phone in a drawer, and go for a walk. I’d crumple up the ads that required too much experience and deposit them in dented green trash cans along the way, and so by the time I’d exhausted myself and hopped on a bus back home, I’d have two or three promising prospectuses folded in my back pocket, ready for follow-up.

This routine did lead me to a job, though not in the way I’d expected.

San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong. The city is a tiny square punctuated by steep hills and bounded on three sides by water, and as a result, there are surprise vistas everywhere. You’ll be walking along, minding your own business with a fistful of printouts, and suddenly the ground will fall away and you’ll see straight down to the bay, with the buildings lit up orange and pink along the way. San Francisco’s architectural style didn’t really make inroads anywhere else in the country, and even when you live here and you’re used to it, it lends the vistas a strangeness: all the tall narrow houses, the windows like eyes and teeth, the wedding-cake filigree. And looming behind it all, if you’re facing the right direction, you’ll see the rusty ghost of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had followed one strange vista down a line of steep stairstepped sidewalks, then walked along the water, taking the very long way home. I had followed the line of old piers — carefully skirting the raucous chowder of Fisherman’s Wharf — and watched seafood restaurants fade into nautical engineering firms and then social media startups. Finally, when my stomach rumbled, signaling its readiness for lunch, I had turned back in toward the city.

Whenever I walked the streets of San Francisco, I’d watch for HELP WANTED signs in windows — which is not something you really do, right? I should probably be more suspicious of those. Legitimate employers use Craigslist.

Sure enough, the 24-hour bookstore did not have the look of a legitimate employer:

Now: I was pretty sure “24-hour bookstore” was a euphemism for something. It was on Broadway, in a euphemistic part of town. My help-wanted hike had taken me far from home; the place next door was called Booty’s and it had a sign with neon legs that crossed and uncrossed.

I pushed the bookstore’s glass door. It made a bell tinkle brightly up above, and I stepped slowly through. I did not realize at the time what an important threshold I had just crossed.

Inside: imagine the shape and volume of a normal bookstore turned up on its side. This place was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall, and the shelves went all the way up — three stories of books, maybe more. I craned my neck back (why do bookstores always make you do uncomfortable things with your neck?) and the shelves faded smoothly into the shadows in a way that suggested they might just go on forever.

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest — not a friendly California forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight’s reach. There were ladders that clung to the shelves and rolled side to side. Usually those seem charming, but here, stretching up into the gloom, they were ominous. They whispered rumors of accidents in the dark.

So I stuck to the front half of the store, where bright midday light pressed in and presumably kept the wolves at bay. The wall around and above the door was glass, thick square panes set into a grid of black iron, and arched across them, in tall golden letters, it said (in reverse):

Below that, set in the hollow of the arch, there was a symbol — two hands, perfectly flat, rising out of an open book.

So who was Mr. Penumbra?

“Hello, there,” a quiet voice called from the stacks. A figure emerged — a man, tall and skinny like one of the ladders, draped in a light gray button-down and a blue cardigan. He tottered as he walked, running a long hand along the shelves for support. When he came out of the shadows, I saw that his sweater matched his eyes, which were also blue, riding low in nests of wrinkles. He was very old.

He nodded at me and gave a weak wave. “What do you seek in these shelves?”

That was a good line, and for some reason, it made me feel comfortable. I asked, “Am I speaking to Mr. Penumbra?”

“I am Penumbra”—he nodded—“and I am the custodian of this place.”

I didn’t quite realize I was going to say it until I did: “I’m looking for a job.”

Penumbra blinked once, then nodded and tottered over to the desk set beside the front door. It was a massive block of dark-whorled wood, a solid fortress on the forest’s edge. You could probably defend it for days in the event of a siege from the shelves.

“Employment.” Penumbra nodded again. He slid up onto the chair behind the desk and regarded me across its bulk. “Have you ever worked at a bookstore before?”

“Well,” I said, “when I was in school I waited tables at a seafood restaurant, and the owner sold his own cookbook.” It was called The Secret Cod and it detailed thirty-one different ways to— You get it. “That probably doesn’t count.”

“No, it does not, but no matter,” Penumbra said. “Prior experience in the book trade is of little use to you here.”

Wait — maybe this place really was all erotica. I glanced down and around, but glimpsed no bodices, ripped or otherwise. In fact, just next to me there was a stack of dusty Dashiell Hammetts on a low table. That was a good sign.

“Tell me,” Penumbra said, “about a book you love.”

I knew my answer immediately. No competition. I told him, “Mr. Penumbra, it’s not one book, but a series. It’s not the best writing and it’s probably too long and the ending is terrible, but I’ve read it three times, and I met my best friend because we were both obsessed with it back in sixth grade.” I took a breath. “I love The Dragon-Song Chronicles.”

Penumbra cocked an eyebrow, then smiled. “That is good, very good,” he said, and his smile grew, showing jostling white teeth. Then he squinted at me, and his gaze went up and down. “But can you climb a ladder?”

And that is how I find myself on this ladder, up on the third floor, minus the floor, of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The book I’ve been sent up to retrieve is called AL-ASMARI and it’s about 150 percent of one arm-length to my left. Obviously, I need to return to the floor and scoot the ladder over. But down below, Penumbra is shouting, “Lean, my boy! Lean!”

And wow, do I ever want this job.

COAT BUTTONS

SO THAT WAS A MONTH AGO. Now I’m the night clerk at Penumbra’s, and I go up and down that ladder like a monkey. There’s a real technique to it. You roll the ladder into place, lock its wheels, then bend your knees and leap directly to the third or fourth rung. You pull with your arms to keep your momentum going, and in a moment you’re already five feet in the air. As you’re climbing, you look straight ahead, not up or down; you keep your eyes focused about a foot in front of your face and you let the books zoom by in a blur of colorful spines. You count the rungs in your head, and finally, when you’re at the right level, reaching for the book you’ve come up to retrieve … why, of course, you lean.

As a professional capability, this might not be as marketable as web design, but it’s probably more fun, and at this point I’ll take anything I can get.

I only wish I had to use my new skill more often. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore does not operate around the clock due to an overwhelming number of customers. In fact, there are hardly any, and sometimes I feel more like a night watchman than a clerk.

Penumbra sells used books, and they are in such uniformly excellent condition that they might as well be new. He buys them during the day — you can only sell to the man with his name on the windows — and he must be a tough customer. He doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the bestseller lists. His inventory is eclectic; there’s no evidence of pattern or purpose other than, I suppose, his own personal taste. So, no teenage wizards or vampire police here. That’s a shame, because this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.

I’ve told my friends about Penumbra’s, and a few of them have stopped in to ogle the shelves and watch me climb into the dusty heights. I’ll usually cajole them into buying something: a Steinbeck novel, some Borges stories, a thick Tolkien tome — all of those authors evidently of interest to Penumbra, because he stocks the complete works of each. At the minimum, I’ll send my friends packing with a postcard. There’s a pile of them on the front desk. They show the front of the store in pen and ink — a fine-lined design so old and uncool that it’s become cool again — and Penumbra sells them for a dollar each.

But a buck every few hours doesn’t pay my salary. I can’t figure out what does pay my salary. I can’t figure out what keeps this bookstore in business at all.

There’s a customer I’ve seen twice now, a woman who I am fairly certain works next door at Booty’s. I am fairly certain about this because both times her eyes were ringed raccoon-like with mascara and she smelled like smoke. She has a bright smile and dusty blond-brown hair. I can’t tell how old she is — she could be a tough twenty-three or a remarkable thirty-one — and I don’t know her name, but I do know she likes biographies.

On her first visit, she browsed the front shelves in a slow circle, scuffing her feet and doing absentminded stretches, then came up to the front desk. “D’you have the one about Steve Jobs?” she asked. She was wearing a puffy North Face jacket over a pink tank top and jeans, and her voice had a little twang in it.

I frowned and said, “Probably not. But let’s check.”

Penumbra has a database that runs on a decrepit beige Mac Plus. I pecked its creator’s name into the keyboard and the Mac made a low chime — the sound of success. She was in luck.

We tilted our heads to scan the BIOGRAPHY section and there it was: a single copy, shiny like new. Maybe it had been a Christmas present to a tech-executive dad who didn’t actually read books. Or maybe Tech Dad wanted to read it on his Kindle instead. In any case, somebody sold it here, and it passed Penumbra’s muster. Miraculous.

“He was so handsome,” North Face said, holding the book at arm’s length. Steve Jobs peered out of the white cover, hand on his chin, wearing round glasses that looked a bit like Penumbra’s.

A week later, she came hopping through the front door, grinning and silently clapping her hands — it made her seem more twenty-three than thirty-one — and said, “Oh, it was just great! Now listen”—here she got serious—“he wrote another one, about Einstein.” She held out her phone, which showed an Amazon product page for Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. “I saw it on the internet but I thought maybe I could buy it here?”

Let’s be clear: This was incredible. This was a bookseller’s dream. This was a stripper standing athwart history, yelling, Stop! — and then we discovered, heads tilted hopefully, that Penumbra’s BIOGRAPHY section did not contain Einstein: His Life and Universe. There were five different books about Richard Feynman, but nothing at all about Albert Einstein. Thus spoke Penumbra.

“Really?” North Face pouted. “Shoot. Well, I guess I’ll buy it online. Thanks.” She wandered back out into the night, and so far she hasn’t returned.

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this:

1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley.

2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it — those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches.

3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.)

4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific.

5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

So I set myself to righting the ship. No, I do not know anything about bookstore management. No, I do not have my finger on the pulse of the post-strip-club shopping crowd. No, I have never really righted any ships, unless you count the time I saved the Rhode Island School of Design fencing club from bankruptcy by organizing a twenty-four-hour Errol Flynn movie marathon. But I do know there are things that Penumbra is obviously doing wrong — things he isn’t doing at all.

Like marketing.

I have a plan: First I’ll prove myself with some small successes, then ask for a budget to place some print ads, put a few signs in the window, maybe even go big with a banner on the bus shelter just up the street: WAITING FOR YOUR BUS? COME WAIT WITH US! Then I’ll keep the bus schedule open on my laptop so I can give customers a five-minute warning when the next one is coming. It will be brilliant.

But I have to start small, and with no customers to distract me, I work hard. First, I connect to the unprotected Wi-Fi network next door called bootynet. Then I go one by one through the local review sites, writing glowing reports of this hidden gem. I send friendly emails with winking emoticons to local blogs. I create a Facebook group with one member. I sign up for Google’s hyper-targeted local advertising program — the same one we used at NewBagel — which allows you to identify your quarry with absurd precision. I choose characteristics from Google’s long form:

• lives in San Francisco

• likes books

• night owl

• carries cash

• not allergic to dust

• enjoys Wes Anderson movies

• recent GPS ping within five blocks of here

I only have ten dollars to spend on this, so I have to be specific.

That’s all the demand side. There’s also supply to think about, and Penumbra’s supply is capricious to say the least — but that’s only part of the story. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is, I have learned, really two stores in one.

There’s the more-or-less normal bookstore, which is up front, packed in tight around the desk. There are short shelves marked HISTORY and BIOGRAPHY and POETRY. There’s Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Trevanian’s Shibumi. This more-or-less normal bookstore is spotty and frustrating, but at least it’s stocked with titles that you could find in a library or on the internet.

The other bookstore is stacked behind and above all that, on the tall laddered shelves, and it is comprised of volumes that, as far as Google knows, don’t exist. Trust me, I’ve searched. Many of these have the look of antiquity — cracked leather, gold-leaf titles — but others are freshly bound with bright crisp covers. So they’re not all ancient. They’re just all … unique.

I think of this as the Waybacklist.

When I started working here, I assumed they were just all from tiny presses. Tiny Amish presses with no taste for digital record-keeping. Or I thought maybe it was all self-published work — a whole collection of hand-bound one-offs that never made it to the Library of Congress or anywhere else. Maybe Penumbra’s was a kind of orphanage.

But now, a month into my clerkship, I’m starting to think it’s more complicated than that. You see, to go with the second store, there’s a second set of customers — a small community of people who orbit the store like strange moons. They are nothing like North Face. They are older. They arrive with algorithmic regularity. They never browse. They come wide awake, completely sober, and vibrating with need. For example:

The bell above the door will tinkle, and before it’s done, Mr. Tyndall will be shouting, breathless, “Kingslake! I need Kingslake!” He’ll take his hands off his head (has he really been running down the street with his hands on his head?) and clamp them down on the front desk. He will repeat it, as if he’s already told me once that my shirt is on fire, and why am I not taking swift action:

“Kingslake! Quickly!”

The database on the Mac Plus encompasses the regular books and the Waybacklist alike. The latter aren’t shelved according to title or subject (do they even have subjects?), so the computer assist is crucial. Now I will type K-I-N-G-S-L-A-K-E and the Mac will churn slowly — Tyndall bouncing on his heels — and then chime and show its cryptic response. Not BIOGRAPHY or HISTORY or SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, but: 3-13. That’s the Waybacklist, aisle 3, shelf 13, which is only about ten feet up.

“Oh, thank goodness, thank you, yes, thank goodness,” Tyndall will say, ecstatic. “Here is my book”—he will produce a very large book from somewhere, possibly his pants; it will be the one he’s returning, exchanging for KINGSLAKE—“and here is my card.” He will slide a prim laminated card across the table, marked with the same symbol that graces the front windows. It will bear a cryptic code, stamped hard into the heavy paper, which I will record. Tyndall will be, as always, lucky number 6WNJHY. I will mistype it twice.

After I do my monkey business on the ladder, I will wrap KINGSLAKE in brown paper. I will try to make small talk: “How’s your night going, Mr. Tyndall?”

“Oh, very good, better now,” he will breathe, taking the package with shaking hands. “Making progress, slow, steady, sure! Festina lente, thank you, thank you!” Then the bell will tinkle again as he hurries back out into the street. It will be three in the morning.

Is this a book club? How do they join? Do they ever pay?

These are the things I ask myself when I sit here alone, after Tyndall or Lapin or Fedorov has left. Tyndall is probably the weirdest, but they’re all pretty weird: all graying, single-minded, seemingly imported from some other time or place. There are no iPhones. There’s no mention of current events or pop culture or anything, really, other than the books. I definitely think of them as a club, though I have no evidence that they know one another. Each comes in alone and never says a word about anything other than the object of his or her current, frantic fascination.

I don’t know what’s inside those books — and it’s part of my job not to know. After the ladder test, back on the day I was hired, Penumbra stood behind the front desk, gazed at me with bright blue eyes, and said:

“This job has three requirements, each very strict. Do not agree to them lightly. Clerks in this store have followed these rules for nearly a century, and I will not have them broken now. One: You must always be here from ten p.m. to six a.m. exactly. You must not be late. You cannot leave early. Two: You may not browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes. Retrieve them for members. That is all.”

I know what you’re thinking: dozens of nights alone, and you’ve never cracked a cover? No, I haven’t. For all I know, Penumbra has a camera somewhere. If I sneak a peek and he finds out, I’m fired. My friends are dropping like flies out there; whole industries, whole parts of the country, are shutting down. I don’t want to live in a tent. I need this job.

And besides, the third rule makes up for the second:

“You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer’s appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on.”

I guess under normal circumstances this would feel like a creepy job requirement. Under the actual circumstances — lending strange books to stranger scholars in the middle of the night — it feels perfectly appropriate. So, rather than spend my time staring at the forbidden shelves, I spend it writing about the customers.

On my first night, Penumbra showed me a low shelf inside the front desk where, lined up, there was a set of oversized leatherbound tomes, all identical except for bright Roman numerals on their spines. “Our logbooks,” he said, running his finger down the line, “going back nearly a century.” He hauled up the rightmost tome and laid it on the desk with a heavy whump. “You will help to keep them now.” The logbook’s cover bore the word NARRATIO, deeply embossed, and a symbol — the symbol from the front windows. Two hands, open like a book.

“Open it,” Penumbra said.

Inside, the pages were wide and gray, filled with dark handwriting. There were sketches, too: thumbnail portraits of bearded men, tight geometric doodles. Penumbra gave the pages a heave and found the place about halfway through, marked with an ivory bookmark, where the writing ran out. “You will note names, times, and titles,” he said, tapping the page, “but also, as I said, manner and appearance. We keep a record for every member, and for every customer who might yet become a member, in order to track their work.” He paused, then added, “Some of them are working very hard indeed.”

“What are they doing?”

“My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: “They are reading.”

So, on the pages of the book labeled NARRATIO, numbered IX, I do my best to keep a clear, accurate record of what transpires during my shift, with only an occasional literary flourish. I guess you could say rule number two isn’t quite absolute. There’s one weird book I’m allowed to touch in Penumbra’s. It’s the one I’m writing.

When I see Penumbra in the morning, if there’s been a customer, he will ask me about it. I’ll read a bit out of the logbook, and he will nod at my record-keeping. But then he will probe even deeper: “A respectable rendering of Mr. Tyndall,” he’ll say. “But tell me, do you remember, were the buttons on his coat made of mother-of-pearl? Or were they horn? Some kind of metal? Copper?”

Yes, okay: it does seem strange that Penumbra keeps this dossier. I can’t imagine a purpose for it, not even a nefarious one. But when people are past a certain age, you sort of stop asking them why they do things. It feels dangerous. What if you say, So, Mr. Penumbra, why do you want to know about Mr. Tyndall’s coat buttons? and he pauses, and scratches his chin, and there’s an uncomfortable silence — and we both realize he can’t remember?

Or what if he fires me on the spot?

Penumbra keeps his own counsel, and the message is clear: do your job, and don’t ask questions. My friend Aaron just got laid off last week and now he’s going to move back in with his parents in Sacramento. In this economic environment, I prefer not to test Penumbra’s boundaries. I need this chair.

Mr. Tyndall’s coat buttons were jade.

MATROPOLIS

TO RUN MR. PENUMBRA’S 24-Hour Bookstore around the clock, one owner and two clerks divide the circle of the sun into thirds, and I get the darkest slice. Penumbra himself takes the mornings — I guess you’d call it prime time, except that this store doesn’t really have one of those. I mean, a single customer is a major event, and a single customer is as likely to show up at midnight as at half-past noon.

So I pass the bookstore baton to Penumbra, but I receive it from Oliver Grone, the quiet soul who carries it through the evening.

Oliver is tall and solid, with thick limbs and huge feet. He has curly, coppery hair and ears that stick out perpendicular to his head. In another life, he might have played football or rowed crew or kept low-class gentlemen out of the club next door. In this life, Oliver is a graduate student at Berkeley, studying archaeology. Oliver is training to be a museum curator.

He’s quiet — too quiet for his size. He speaks in short, simple sentences and always seems to be thinking about something else, something long ago and/or far away. Oliver daydreams about Ionian columns.

His knowledge runs deep. One night I quizzed him using a book called The Stuff of Legend, snagged from the bottom of Penumbra’s tiny HISTORY section. I covered the headings with my hand and showed him the photos alone:

“Minoan bull totem, 1700 B.C.,” he called out. Correct.

“Basse Yutz flagon, 450 B.C. Maybe 500.” Yes.

“Roof tile, A.D. 600. Gotta be Korean.” Also yes.

At the end of the quiz, Oliver was ten for ten. I’m convinced his brain simply works on a different time scale. I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday; Oliver, on the other hand, is casually aware of what was happening in 1000 B.C. and what it all looked like.

This makes me jealous. Right now, Oliver Grone and I are peers: we have exactly the same job and sit in exactly the same chair. But soon, very soon, he will advance by one very significant degree and accelerate away from me. He will find a place in the real world, because he’s good at something — something other than climbing ladders in a lonely bookstore.

Every night I show up at 10:00 p.m. and find Oliver behind the front desk, always reading a book, always with a title like The Care and Feeding of Terra-Cotta or Arrowhead Atlas of Pre-Columbian America. Every night I rap my fingers on the dark wood. He looks up and says, “Hey, Clay.” Every night I take his place, and we nod farewell like soldiers — like men who uniquely understand each other’s circumstances.

When I’m done with my shift, it’s six in the morning, which is an awkward time to be set loose in the world. Generally I go home and read or play video games. I’d say it was to unwind except that the night shift at Penumbra’s doesn’t really wind a person up. So mostly I’m just killing time until my roommates rise to meet me.

Mathew Mittelbrand is our artist-in-residence. He’s rail-thin, pale-skinned, and keeps strange hours — even stranger than mine, because they’re less predictable. Many mornings I don’t have to wait for Mat; instead, I come home to discover that he’s been up all night toiling on his latest project.

During the day (more or less) Mat works on special effects at Industrial Light and Magic in the Presidio, making props and sets for movies. He gets paid to design and build laser rifles and haunted castles. But — I find this very impressive — he doesn’t use computers. Mat is part of the dwindling tribe of special-effects artists who still make things with knives and glue.

Whenever he’s not at ILM, Mat is working on some project of his own. He works with crazy intensity, feeding hours like dry twigs into the fire, just absolutely consuming them, burning them up. He sleeps lightly and briefly, often sitting up straight in a chair or lying pharaoh-like on the couch. He’s like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.

Mat’s latest project is his biggest yet, and soon there won’t be room for me or the couch anymore. Mat’s latest project is taking over the living room.

He calls it Matropolis, and it’s made out of boxes and cans, paper and foam. It’s a model railroad with no railroad. The underlying topography is all steep hills made from packing peanuts held in place with wire mesh. It started on one card table, but Mat has added two more, both at different levels, like tectonic plates. Spreading across the tabletop terrain there’s a city.

It’s a scaled-down dreamscape, a bright glittering hyper-city made with scraps of the familiar. There are Gehry-esque curves made from smooth tinfoil. There are Gothic spikes and crenellations made from dry macaroni. There is an Empire State Building made from shards of green glass.

Taped to the wall behind the card tables there are Mat’s photo references: printed-out images of museums, cathedrals, office towers, and row houses. Some are skyline shots, but more are close-ups: zoomed-in photos of surfaces and textures taken by Mat himself. Often he stands and stares at them, rubbing his chin, processing the grit and glint, breaking it down and reassembling it with his own bespoke LEGO set. Mat uses everyday materials so ingeniously that their original provenance fades away and you can only see them as the tiny buildings they’ve become.

On the couch there’s a black plastic radio remote; I pick it up and click one of the knobs. A toy-sized airship dozing near the doorway buzzes to life and scoots toward Matropolis. Its master can maneuver it so it docks at the top of the Empire State Building, but I can only make it bump against the windows.

Just up the hall from Matropolis is my bedroom. There are three rooms here for three roommates. Mine is the smallest, just a little white cube with Edwardian filigree in the ceiling. Mat’s room is the biggest by far, but it’s drafty — it’s up in the attic, at the top of a steep narrow staircase. And the third room, a perfect balance between size and comfort, belongs to our third roommate, Ashley Adams. She’s currently asleep but will not be for long. Ashley rises at precisely six forty-five every morning.

Ashley is beautiful. Probably too beautiful — too shiny and clean-lined, like a 3-D model. Her hair is blond and straight, cropped clean at her shoulders. Her arms are toned from twice-weekly rock-climbing sessions. Her skin is perpetually sun-kissed. Ashley is an account executive at a PR agency, and in that capacity she ran PR for NewBagel, which is how we met. She liked my logo. At first I thought I had a crush on her, but then I realized she’s an android.

I don’t mean that in a bad way! I mean, when we figure them out, androids are going to be totally great, right? Smart and strong and organized and thoughtful. Ashley is all of those things. And she’s our patron: the apartment is hers. She’s been living here for years, and our low rent reflects her long tenure.

I for one welcome our new android overlords.

After I’d been here for about nine months, our then-roommate Vanessa moved to Canada to get an eco-MBA, and it was me who found Mat to replace her. He was a friend of a friend from art school; I’d seen his show at a tiny white-walled gallery, all miniature neighborhoods built inside wine bottles and lightbulbs. When it came to pass that we were looking for a roommate and he was looking for an apartment, I was excited about living side by side with an artist, but I wasn’t sure Ashley would go for it.

Mat came to visit, wearing a snug blue blazer over sharp-creased slacks. We sat in the living room (then dominated by a flat-screen TV, with no tabletop cities even dreamt of) and he told us about his current task at ILM: the design and construction of a bloodthirsty demon with blue-denim skin. It was part of a horror movie set inside an Abercrombie & Fitch.

“I’m learning how to sew,” he explained. Then he pointed to one of Ashley’s cuffs: “Those are really good seams.”

Later, after Mat left, Ashley told me she appreciated his neatness. “So if you think he’ll be a good fit, I’m fine with him,” she said.

This is the key to our harmonious cohabitation: although their objectives are different, Mat and Ashley share a deep appreciation for details. For Mat, it’s a tiny graffiti tag on a tiny subway stop. For Ashley, it’s underwear that matches her twinset.

But the true test came early, with Mat’s first project. It happened in the kitchen.

The kitchen: Ashley’s sanctum sanctorum. I tread lightly in the kitchen; I prepare meals that are easy to clean up, like pasta and Pop-Tarts. I do not use her fancy Microplane or her complicated garlic press. I know how to turn the burners on and off, but not how to activate the oven’s convection chamber, which I suspect requires two keys, like the launch mechanism on a nuclear missile.

Ashley loves the kitchen. She’s a foodie, an epicurean, and she’s never prettier, or more android-perfect, than on weekends, cooking a fragrant risotto in a color-coordinated apron with her hair tied in a blond knot on top of her head.

Mat could have done his first project up in the attic, or in the small scrubby backyard. But no. He chose the kitchen.

This was during my post-NewBagel period of unemployment, so I was there to watch it happen. In fact, I was leaning in close, inspecting Mat’s handiwork, when Ashley appeared. She was just home from work, still dressed in J.Crew carbon and cream. She gasped.

Mat had a huge Pyrex cauldron set up on the stove, and inside there was a slow-churning mixture of oil and dye. It was heavy and highly viscous, and with the slow application of heat from below, it was curling and blooming in slow motion. The kitchen lights were all turned off, and Mat had two bright arc lamps set up behind the cauldron; they shone through and cast red and purple shadows that spun across the granite and travertine.

I straightened and stood, silent. The last time I’d been caught like this, I was nine, making vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes on the kitchen table after school. My mom wore pants just like Ashley’s.

Mat’s eyes rose slowly. His sleeves were rolled up around his elbows. His dark leather shoes were shiny in the gloom, and so were the tips of his fingers, coated in oil.

“It’s a simulation of the Horsehead Nebula,” he said. Obviously.

Ashley was silent, staring. Her mouth hung open a little bit. Her keys were dangling on her finger, arrested in midflight toward the tidy peg where they lived, just above the chore checklist.

Mat had been living with us for three days.

Ashley took two steps forward and leaned in close, just as I had, and peered into the cosmic depths. A saffron blob was pushing its way up through a roiling layer of green and gold.

“Holy shit, Mat,” she breathed. “That’s beautiful.”

So Mat’s astrophysical stew simmered on, and his other projects continued in sequence, getting bigger and messier and taking up more space. Ashley took an interest in his progress; she’d wander into the room, put a hand on one hip, scrunch her nose, and make a deftly constructive comment. She moved the TV herself.

This is Mat’s secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.

So of course I told Mat he should come visit the bookstore, and tonight he does, at half-past two. The bell over the door tinkles to announce his arrival, and before he says a word, his neck bends back to follow the shelves up into the shadowy reaches. He turns toward me, points a plaid-jacketed arm straight to the ceiling, and says: “I want to go up there.”

I’ve only been working here for a month and don’t quite have the confidence for mischief yet, but Mat’s curiosity is infectious. He stalks straight over to the Waybacklist and stands between the shelves, leaning in close, examining the grain of the wood, the texture of the spines.

I concede: “Okay, but you have to hold on tight. And don’t touch any of the books.”

“Don’t touch them?” he says, testing the ladder. “What if I want to buy one?”

“You can’t buy them — they’re for borrowing. You have to be a member of the club.”

“Rare books? First editions?” He’s already in midair. He moves fast.

“More like only editions,” I say. No ISBNs here.

“What are they about?”

“I don’t know,” I say quietly.

“What?”

Saying it louder, I realize how lame it sounds: “I don’t know.”

“You’ve never looked at one?” He’s paused on the ladder, looking back down. Incredulous.

Now I’m getting nervous. I know where this is going.

“Seriously, never?” He’s reaching for the shelves.

I consider shaking the ladder to signal my displeasure, but the only thing more problematic than Mat looking at one of the books would be Mat plunging to his death. Probably. He has one in his hands, a fat black-bound volume that threatens to unbalance him. He teeters on the ladder and I grit my teeth.

“Hey, Mat,” I say, my voice suddenly high-pitched and whiny, “why don’t you just leave it—”

“This is amazing.”

“You should—”

“Seriously amazing, Jannon. You’ve never seen this?” He clutches the book to his chest and takes a step back down.

“Wait!” Somehow it feels less transgressive to keep it closer to the place where it belongs. “I’ll come up.” I pull another ladder into position opposite his and leap up the rungs. In a moment, Mat and I are level, having a hushed conference at thirty feet.

The truth, of course, is that I am desperately curious. I’m annoyed at Mat, but also grateful that he’s playing the part of the devil on my shoulder. He balances the thick volume against his chest and tilts it my way. It’s dark up here, so I lean across the space between the shelves to see the pages clearly.

For this, Tyndall and the rest come running in the middle of the night?

“I was hoping it would be an encyclopedia of dark rituals,” Mat says.

The two-page spread shows a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space. The letters are big and bold, punched onto the paper in a sharp serif. I recognize the alphabet — it’s roman, which is to say, normal — but not the words. Actually, there aren’t really words at all. The pages are just long runs of letters — an undifferentiated jumble.

“Then again,” Mat says, “we have no way of knowing it’s not an encyclopedia of dark rituals…”

I pull another book from the shelf, this one tall and flat with a bright green cover and a brown spine that says KRESIMIR. Inside, it’s just the same.

“Maybe they’re recreational puzzles,” Mat says. “Like, super-advanced sudoku.”

Penumbra’s customers are, in fact, exactly the kind of people you’d see in coffee shops, working through one-sided chess problems or solving Saturday crosswords with blue ballpoints pressed perilously hard into the newsprint.

Down below, the bell tinkles. A jangle of cold fear makes a quick round-trip from my brain to my fingertips and back. From the front of the store, a low voice calls out, “Is anyone der?”

I hiss at Mat: “Put it back.” Then I hustle down the ladder.

When I step wheezing from the stacks, it is Fedorov at the door. Of all the customers I’ve met, he’s the oldest — his beard is snowy white and the skin on his hands is papery-thin — but also probably the most clear-eyed. He seems a lot like Penumbra, actually. Now he slides a book across the desk — he’s returning CLOVTIER — then taps two fingers sharply and says, “I vill need Murao next.”

Here we go. I find MVRAO in the database and send Mat back up the ladder. Fedorov eyes him curiously. “Anudder clerk?”

“A friend,” I say. “Just helping out.”

Fedorov nods. It occurs to me that Mat could pass muster as a very young member of this club. He and Fedorov are both wearing brown corduroys tonight.

“You hev been here, vat, tirty-seven days?”

I couldn’t have told you that, but yes, I’m sure it’s thirty-seven days exactly. These guys tend to be very precise. “That’s right, Mr. Fedorov,” I say cheerily.

“End vat do you tink?”

“I like it,” I say. “It’s better than working in an office.”

Fedorov nods at that and passes over his card. He’s 6KZVCY, naturally. “I vorked at HP”—he says it Heych-Pee—“for tirty years. Now, det vas an office.” Then he ventures: “You hev used a HP celculator?”

Mat returns with MVRAO. It’s a big one, thick and wide, bound in mottled leather.

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I say, wrapping the book in brown paper. “I had one of the graphing calculators all through high school. It was an HP-38.”

Fedorov beams like a proud grandparent. “I vorked on de tventy-eight, vhich vas de precursor!”

That makes me smile. “I probably still have it somewhere,” I tell him, and pass MVRAO across the front desk.

Fedorov scoops it up in both hands. “Tenk you,” he says. “You know, de tirty-eight did not hev Reverse Polish Notation”—he gives his book (of dark rituals?) a meaningful tap—“end I should tell you, RPN is hendy for dis kind of work.”

I think Mat’s right: sudoku. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.

“Okay, tenk you again.” The bell tinkles and we watch Fedorov go slowly up the sidewalk toward the bus stop.

“I looked at his book,” Mat says. “Same as the others.”

What seemed strange before now seems even stranger.

“Jannon,” Mat says, turning to face me squarely. “There’s something I have to ask you.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Why haven’t I ever looked at the—”

“Do you have a thing for Ashley?”

Well, that’s not what I expected. “What? No.”

“Okay, good. Because I do.”

I blink and stare blankly at Mat Mittelbrand standing there in his tiny, perfectly tailored suit jacket. It’s like Jimmy Olsen confessing that he has a thing for Wonder Woman. The contrast is just too much. And yet—

“I’m going to put the moves on her,” he says gravely. “Things might get weird.” He says it like a commando setting up a midnight raid. Like: Sure, this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous, but don’t worry. I’ve done it before.

My vision shifts. Maybe Mat isn’t Jimmy Olsen but Clark Kent, and underneath there’s a Superman. He would have to be a five-foot-four Superman, but still.

“I mean, technically, we already made out once.”

Wait, what—

“Two weeks ago. You weren’t home. You were here. We drank a bunch of wine.”

My head spins a little, not with the dissonance of Mat and Ashley together, but with the realization that this thread of attraction has been twisting under my nose and I had no idea. I hate it when that happens.

Mat nods, as if that’s all settled now. “Okay, Jannon. This place is awesome. But I gotta go.”

“Back to the apartment?”

“No, the office. Pulling an all-nighter. Jungle monster.”

“Jungle monster.”

“Made from living plants. We have to keep the studio really hot. I might come back for another break. This place is cool and dry.”

Mat leaves. Later, in the logbook, I write:

A cool night with no clouds. The bookstore is visited by the youngest customer it has seen in (this clerk believes) many years. He wears corduroys, a tailored suit jacket, and, under it, a sweater-vest stitched with tiny tigers. The customer purchases one postcard (under duress), then makes his exit to resume work on a jungle monster.

It’s very quiet. I set my chin in my palm and count my friends and wonder what else is hiding in plain sight.

THE DRAGON-SONG CHRONICLES, VOLUME I

THE NEXT NIGHT, another friend visits the store, and not just any friend: my oldest.

Neel Shah and I have been best friends since sixth grade. In the unpredictable fluid dynamics of middle school, I found myself somehow floating near the top, an inoffensive everyman who was just good enough at basketball and not cripplingly afraid of girls. Neel, by contrast, sank straight to the bottom, shunned by jock and nerd alike. My cafeteria tablemates snorted that he looked funny, talked funny, smelled funny.

But we bonded that spring over a shared obsession with books about singing dragons, and we ended up best friends. I stood up for him, defended him, expended prepubescent political capital on his behalf. I got him invited to pizza parties and lured members of the basketball team into our Rockets & Warlocks role-playing group. (They didn’t last long. Neel was always the dungeon master, and he always sent single-minded droids and undead orcs after them.) In seventh grade, I suggested to Amy Torgensen, a pretty straw-haired girl who loved horses, that Neel’s father was an exiled prince, rich beyond measure, and that Neel might therefore make an excellent escort to the winter formal. It was his first date.

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.

Now Neel Shah appears framed in the front door, tall and solid, wearing a snug black track jacket, and he ignores the tall dusty Waybacklist completely. Instead he zeroes in on the short shelf labeled SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY.

“Dude, you’ve got Moffat!” he says, holding up a fat paperback. It’s The Dragon-Song Chronicles, Volume I—the very book we bonded over back in sixth grade, and still our mutual favorite. I’ve read it three times. Neel has probably read it six.

“This is like an old copy, too,” he says, riffling the pages. He’s right. The newest edition of the trilogy, published after Clark Moffat died, features stark geometric covers that make a single continuous pattern when you line all three books up on the shelf. This one has an airbrushed rendering of a fat blue dragon wreathed in sea foam.

I tell Neel he ought to buy it, because it’s a collector’s edition and it’s probably worth more than whatever Penumbra is charging. And because I haven’t sold more than a postcard in six days. Normally I’d feel bad pressuring one of my friends to buy a book, but Neel Shah is now, if not quite rich beyond measure, then definitely competitive with some low-level princes. At around the same time I was struggling to make minimum wage at Oh My Cod! in Providence, Neel was starting his own company. Fast-forward five years and see the magic of compound effort: Neel has, to my best approximation, a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and his company is worth millions more. By contrast, I have exactly $2,357 in the bank and the company I work for — if you can call it a company — exists in the extrafinancial space inhabited by money launderers and fringe churches.

Anyway, I figure Neel can spring for an old paperback, even if he doesn’t really have time to read anymore. While I’m digging for change in the front desk’s dark drawers, his attention turns, at last, to the shadowy shelves dominating the back half of the store.

“What’s all that?” he says. He’s not sure if he’s interested or not. As a rule, Neel prefers the new and shiny to the old and dusty.

“That,” I say, “is the real store.”

Mat’s intervention has made me a bit bolder with the Waybacklist.

“What if I told you,” I say, leading Neel back toward the shelves, “that this bookstore was frequented by a group of strange scholars?”

“Awesome,” Neel says, nodding. He smells warlocks.

“And what if I told you”—I pick a black-bound book from a low shelf—“that every one of these books is written in code?” I open it wide to show a field of jumbled letters.

“That’s crazy,” Neel says. He traces a finger down the page, through the maze of serifs. “I’ve got a guy from Belarus who breaks codes. Copy protection, stuff like that.”

Embedded in that sentence is the difference between Neel’s life, post — middle school, and mine: Neel has guys — guys who do things for him. I don’t have guys. I barely have a laptop.

“I could have him take a look at this,” Neel continues.

“Well, I don’t know for sure that they’re in code,” I admit. I close the book and slide it back onto the shelf. “And even if they are, I’m not sure it’s, like, worth cracking. The guys who borrow these books are pretty weird.”

“That’s always how it starts!” Neel says, thumping my shoulder. “Think of The Dragon-Song Chronicles. Do you meet Telemach Half-Blood on the first page? No, dude. You meet Fernwen.”

The main character of The Dragon-Song Chronicles is Fernwen the scholarly dwarf, who is small even by dwarven standards. He was cast out of his warrior clan at an early age and — anyway, yes, maybe Neel has a point.

“We gotta figure this out,” he says. “How much?”

I explain how it works, how the members all have cards — but now it’s not just idle talk. Whatever the cost to join Penumbra’s lending club, Neel can pay it.

“Find out how much it costs,” Neel says. “You’re sitting on a Rockets & Warlocks scenario here, I swear.” He’s grinning. He switches to his low dungeon-master voice: “Do not wuss out now, Claymore Redhands.”

Oof. He’s deployed my Rockets & Warlocks name against me. It is a spell with ancient power. I concede. I’ll ask Penumbra.

We return to the short shelves and the airbrushed covers. Neel flips through another of our old favorites, a story about a huge cylindrical spaceship slowly approaching the earth. I tell him about Mat’s plan to woo Ashley. Then I ask him how his company is doing. He unzips his track jacket and points proudly to the gunmetal-gray T-shirt underneath.

“We made these,” he says. “Rented a 3-D body scanner, custom-tailored each shirt. They fit perfectly. Like, perfectly.”

Neel is in amazing shape. Every time I see him, I cannot help but superimpose my memory of the chubby sixth-grader, because he has now somehow attained the preposterous V-shape of a comic book superhero.

“It’s good branding, you know?” he says.

The snug T-shirt has the logo of Neel’s company printed across the chest. In tall electric-blue letters it says: ANATOMIX.

In the morning, when Penumbra arrives, I broach the subject of a friend buying entry into the Waybacklist. He shrugs out of his peacoat — it is an epic peacoat, finely made, with wool from the blackest of sheep — and sets himself up on the chair behind the front desk.

“Oh, it is not a matter of purchase,” he says, steepling his fingers, “but rather of intention.”

“Well, my friend is just curious,” I say. “He’s a total bibliophile.” This is not actually true. Neel prefers the movie adaptations of books. He is continuously indignant that no one has ever made movies out of The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

“Well,” Penumbra says, considering, “he will find the contents of these books … challenging. And to gain access to them, he must agree to a contract.”

“So, wait — it does cost money?”

“No, no. Your friend must simply promise to read deeply. These are special books”—he waves a long hand at the Waybacklist—“with special contents that reward close attention. Your friend will find that they lead him to something remarkable, but only if he is willing to work very hard indeed.”

“Like philosophy?” I say. “Math?”

“Nothing so abstract,” Penumbra says, shaking his head. “The books present a puzzle”—he cocks his head at me—“but you know this, my boy, do you not?”

I grimace and admit it: “Yeah. I’ve looked.”

“Good.” Penumbra nods sharply. “There is nothing worse than an incurious clerk.” His eyes twinkle at that. “The puzzle can be solved with time and care. I cannot speak of what waits with the solution, but suffice it to say, many have devoted their lives to it. Now, whether it is something your … friend will find rewarding, I cannot say. But I suspect he might.”

He smiles a crooked smile. I realize that Penumbra thinks we’re using the friend-hypothetical here; that is, he thinks we’re talking about me. Well, maybe we are, at least a little bit.

“Of course, the relationship between book and reader is private,” he says, “so we go on trust. If you tell me that your friend will read these books deeply, in a way that honors their authors, I will believe you.”

I know that Neel definitely will not read them that way, and I’m not sure this is something I want to sign up for, either. Not yet. I am intrigued and creeped out in equal measure. So I simply say: “Okay. I’ll tell him.”

Penumbra nods. “There is no shame in it if your friend is not yet ready for the task. Perhaps it will grow more interesting to him with time.”

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

THE NIGHTS FALL one into the other, and the bookstore grows quieter and quieter. A week goes by without a single customer. On my laptop, I summon up the dashboard for my hyper-targeted ad campaign, and discover that it has delivered, so far, exactly zero impressions. There’s a bright yellow message from Google in the corner of the screen suggesting that my criteria might be too narrow and I might have specified a customer base that does not exist.

I wonder what it’s like in here during the day, during Penumbra’s sun-dappled shift. I wonder if Oliver gets a rush of customers in the evening, after everybody leaves work. I wonder if this silence and solitude might actually be damaging my brain. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to have a job, to sit in this chair, to quietly accrue dollars (not that many) that I can use to pay my rent, to buy pizza slices and iPhone apps. But I used to work in an office; I used to work on a team. Here it’s just me and bats. (Oh, I know there are bats up there.)

Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles?

I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! — but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny gray screen and a bed of angled keys. It looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.

Halfway through the first chapter of Cannery Row, the screen flashes black, freezes, then fades. This happens most nights. The Kindle’s battery is supposed to last, like, two months, but I left mine out on the beach too long and now it only goes for about an hour unplugged.

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?

Finally, I click over to my new favorite: Grumble.

Grumble is a person, probably a human male, a secretive programmer who operates at the intersection of literature and code — part Hacker News, part Paris Review. Mat emailed me a link after he visited the store, guessing that Grumble’s work might resonate here. He was correct.

Grumble manages a bustling pirate library. He writes complicated code to break the DRM on e-books; he builds complicated machines to copy the words out of real books. If he worked for Amazon, he’d probably be rich. But instead he cracked the supposedly uncrackable Harry Potter series and posted all seven e-books on his site, free to download — with a few changes. Now, if you want to read Potter without paying, you suffer fleeting references to a young wizard named Grumblegrits who studies at Hogwarts alongside Harry. It’s not so bad; Grumblegrits gets a few good lines.

But it’s Grumble’s newest project that has me mesmerized. It’s a map of the locations of every science fiction story published in the twentieth century. He’s plucked them out with code and plotted them in 3-D space, so year by year you see humankind’s collective imagination reaching farther: to the moon, to Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, to Alpha Centauri and beyond. You can zoom and rotate the whole universe, and you can also jump into a little polygonal spaceship and cruise around in the cockpit. You can rendezvous with Rama or find the Foundation worlds.

So, two things:

1. Neel is going to love this.

2. I want to be like Grumble. I mean, what if I could make something this cool? That would be a real skill. I could join a startup. I could go work at Apple. I could see and interact with other human beings under the warm glow of the daystar.

Lucky for me, Grumble has, in customary hacker-hero fashion, released the code that powers the map. It’s a whole 3-D graphics engine written in a programming language called Ruby — the same one we used to run the website at NewBagel — and it’s completely free.

So now I’m going to use Grumble’s code to make something of my own. Looking around, I realize my project is standing right in front of me: I’ll learn 3-D graphics by making a model of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. I mean, it’s a tall, skinny box full of smaller boxes — how hard can that be?

To begin, I had to copy the database from Penumbra’s old Mac Plus onto my laptop, which was actually not a trivial task, since the Mac Plus uses plastic floppy disks and there’s no way to get one of those into a MacBook. I had to buy an old USB floppy drive on eBay. It cost three dollars, plus five for shipping, and it felt strange to plug it into my laptop.

But now, with the data in hand, I’m building my model of the store. It’s crude — just a bunch of gray blocks slotted together like virtual LEGOs — but it’s starting to look familiar. The space is appropriately shoe-boxy and all the shelves are there. I’ve set them up with a coordinate system, so my program can find aisle 3, shelf 13 all by itself. Simulated light from the simulated windows casts sharp-edged shadows through the simulated store. If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.

It’s taken three nights of trial and error, but now I’m stringing out long lines of code, learning as I go. It feels good to be making something: a fairly persuasive polygonal approximation of Penumbra’s store is spinning slowly on my screen, and I’m happier than I’ve been since the fall of NewBagel. I’ve got the new album from a peppy local band called Moon Suicide piping through my laptop speakers, and I’m just about to load the database into—

The bell tinkles and I clack the mute key on my laptop. Moon Suicide goes silent, and when I look up, I see an unfamiliar face. Usually I can detect instantly whether I’m dealing with a member of the world’s weirdest book club or a normal late-night browser. But now my spider-sense is jammed.

The customer is short but sturdy, in some thickening limbo of middle age. He’s wearing a slate-gray suit with a white button-down open at the collar. All of that would signal normality if it weren’t for his face: he has a ghostly pallor, a stubbly black beard, and eyes like dark pencil-points. Also, there’s a parcel under his arm, neatly wrapped in brown paper.

His eyes go immediately to the short shelves up front, not the Waybacklist, so maybe he’s a normal customer. Maybe he’s coming from Booty’s next door. I ask, “Can I help you?”

“What is all this? What is the meaning of this?” he sputters, glaring at the short shelves.

“Yeah, I know it doesn’t look like much,” I say. In the next breath, I intend to point out a few of the surprising highlights of Penumbra’s tiny inventory, but he cuts me off:

“Are you joking? Not much?” He throws his parcel down on the desk—whap—and stalks over to the SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY shelf. “What is this doing here?” He holds up Penumbra’s single copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “And this? Are you kidding me?” He holds up Stranger in a Strange Land.

I’m not sure what to say, because I’m not sure what’s going on.

He stalks back up to the front desk, still holding both books. He slaps them down on the wood. “Who are you, anyway?” His dark eyes are flashing, challenging.

“I’m the guy who runs the store,” I say, as evenly as I can muster. “Do you want to buy those or what?”

His nostrils flare. “You don’t run this store. You’re not even a novice.”

Ouch. Sure, I’ve only been working here a little over a month, but still, there’s not much to it—

“And you don’t have any idea who really does run this store, do you?” he continues. “Has Penumbra told you?”

I’m silent. This is definitely not a normal customer.

“No.” He sniffs. “I guess he hasn’t. Well, more than a year ago, we told your boss to get rid of this junk.” He taps the Hitchhiker’s Guide with each word for emphasis. The cuffs of his suit jacket are open at the last button. “And not for the first time.”

“Listen, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” I will remain calm. I will remain civil. “So, seriously, do you want to buy those?”

He surprises me by digging a crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of his pants pocket. “Oh, absolutely,” he says, and tosses the money onto the desk. I hate it when people do that. “I want evidence of Penumbra’s disobedience.” Pause. His dark eyes glitter. “Your boss is in trouble.”

What, for peddling science fiction? Why does this guy hate Douglas Adams so much?

“And what’s that?” he says sharply, pointing to the MacBook. The model of the store is stretched across the screen, rotating slowly.

“None of your business,” I say, tilting it away.

“None of my business?” he sputters. “Do you even know— You don’t.” He rolls his eyes as if he is suffering through the worst customer service experience in the history of the universe. Then he shakes his head and composes himself. “Listen carefully. This is important.” He pushes the parcel across the desk with two fingers. It’s wide and flat and familiar. His eyes level on me and he says, “This place is a shit show, but I need to know I can trust you to give this to Penumbra. Put it in his hands. Don’t put it on a shelf. Don’t leave it for him. Put it in his hands.”

“Okay,” I say. “Fine. No problem.”

He nods. “Good. Thank you.” He scoops up his purchases and pushes the front door open. Then, on his way out, he turns. “And tell your boss that Corvina sends his regards.”

In the morning, Penumbra has barely made it through the front door before I am recounting what happened, saying it too fast and out of order, I mean, what was that guy’s problem, and who is Corvina, and what’s this package, and seriously, what was his problem—

“Calm yourself, my boy,” Penumbra says, lifting his voice and his long hands to quiet me. “Calm yourself. Slow down.”

“There,” I say. I point at the parcel like it’s a dead animal. For all I know, it is a dead animal, or maybe just the bones of one, laid out in a neat pentagram.

“Ahhh,” Penumbra breathes. He wraps his long fingers around the parcel and lifts it lightly from the desk. “How wonderful.”

But of course it’s not a box of bones. I know exactly what it is, and I’ve known since the pale-faced visitor stepped into the store, and somehow the truth of it is freaking me out even more, because it means that whatever’s happening here is more than just one old man’s eccentricity.

Penumbra peels back the brown paper. Inside, there’s a book.

“A new addition to the shelves,” he says. “Festina lente.”

The book is very slim but very beautiful. It’s bound in brilliant gray, some kind of mottled material that shimmers silver in the light. The spine is black, and in pearly letters it says ERDOS. So the Waybacklist grows by one.

“It has been quite some time since one of these arrived,” Penumbra says. “This requires a celebration. Wait here, my boy, wait here.”

He retreats through the shelves into the back room. I hear his shoes on the steps that lead up to his office, on the other side of the door marked PRIVATE through which I have never ventured. When he returns, he carries two foam cups stacked one inside the other and a bottle of scotch, half-empty. The label says FITZGERALD’S and it looks about as old as Penumbra. He pours a half inch of gold into each cup and hands one to me.

“Now,” he says, “describe him. The visitor. Read it from your logbook.”

“I didn’t write anything down,” I confess. In fact, I haven’t done anything at all. I’ve just been pacing the store all night, keeping my distance from the front desk, afraid to touch the parcel or look at it or even think about it too hard.

“Ah, but it must go into the logbook, my boy. Here, write it as you tell it. Tell me.”

I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen:

“The store was visited by a presumptuous jackass—”

“Er — perhaps it would be wisest not to write that,” Penumbra says lightly. “Say perhaps that he had the aspect of … an urgent courier.”

Okay, then: “The store was visited by an urgent courier named Corvina, who—”

“No, no,” Penumbra interrupts. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Before you write, I will explain. He was extremely pale, weasel-eyed, forty-one years old, with a thick build and an ill-advised beard, wearing a suit of smooth wool, single-breasted, with functioning buttons at the cuffs, and black leather shoes that came to sharp points — correct?”

Exactly. I didn’t catch the shoes, but Penumbra has got this one nailed.

“Yes, of course. His name is Eric, and his gift is a treasure.” He swirls his scotch. “Even if he is too enthusiastic in the playing of his part. He gets that from Corvina.”

“So who’s Corvina?” I feel funny saying it, but: “He sends his regards.”

“Of course he does,” Penumbra says, rolling his eyes. “Eric admires him. Many of the young ones do.” He’s avoiding the question. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he lifts his eyes to meet mine. “This is more than a bookstore, as you have no doubt surmised. It is also a kind of library, one of many around the world. There is another in London, another in Paris — a dozen, altogether. No two are alike, but their function is the same, and Corvina oversees them all.”

“So he’s your boss.”

Penumbra’s face darkens at that. “I prefer to think of him as our patron,” he says, pausing a little on each word. The our is not lost on me, and it makes me smile. “But I suspect Corvina would agree wholeheartedly with your characterization.”

I explain what Eric said about the books on the short shelves — about Penumbra’s disobedience.

“Yes, yes,” he says with a sigh. “I have been through this before. It is foolishness. The genius of the libraries is that they are all different. Koster in Berlin with his music, Griboyedov in Saint Petersburg with his great samovar. And here in San Francisco, the most striking difference of all.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, we have books that people might actually want to read!” Penumbra guffaws at this, and shows a toothy grin. I laugh, too.

“So it’s no big deal?”

Penumbra shrugs. “That depends,” he says. “It depends how seriously one takes a rigid old taskmaster who believes that everything must be exactly the same everywhere and always.” He pauses. “As it happens, I do not take him very seriously at all.”

“Does he ever visit?”

“Never,” Penumbra says sharply, shaking his head. “He has not been to San Francisco in many years … more than a decade. No, he is busy with his other duties. And thank goodness for that.”

Penumbra lifts his hands and waves them at me, shooing me away from the desk. “Go home now. You have witnessed something rare, and more meaningful than you know. Be grateful for it. And drink your scotch, my boy! Drink!”

I swing my bag up onto my shoulder and empty my cup in two stiff gulps.

“That,” Penumbra says, “is a toast to Evelyn Erdos.” He holds the sparkling gray book aloft, and speaks as though addressing her: “Welcome, my friend, and well done. Well done!”

THE PROTOTYPE

THE NEXT NIGHT, I enter as usual and wave hello to Oliver Grone. I want to ask him about Eric, but I don’t quite have the language for it. Oliver and I have never talked directly about the weirdness of the store. So I start like this:

“Oliver, I have a question. You know how there are normal customers?”

“Not many.”

“Right. And there are members who borrow books.”

“Like Maurice Tyndall.”

“Right.” I didn’t know his name was Maurice. “Have you ever seen somebody deliver a new book?”

He pauses and thinks. Then he says simply: “Nope.”

As soon as he leaves I am a mess of new theories. Maybe Oliver’s in on it, too. Maybe he’s a spy for Corvina. The quiet watcher. Perfect. Or maybe he’s part of some deeper conspiracy. Maybe I’ve only scratched the surface. I know there are more bookstores — libraries? — like this, but I still don’t know what “like this” means. I don’t know what the Waybacklist is for.

I flip through the logbook from front to back, looking for something, anything. A message from the past, maybe: Beware, good clerk, the wrath of Corvina. But no. My predecessors played it just as straight as I have.

The words they wrote are plain and factual, just descriptions of the members as they come and go. Some of them I recognize: Tyndall, Lapin, and the rest. Others are mysteries to me — members who visit only during the day, or members who stopped visiting long ago. Judging by the dates sprinkled through the pages, the book covers a little over five years. It’s only half-full. Am I going to fill it for another five? Am I going to write dutifully for years with no idea what I’m writing about?

My brain is going to melt into a puddle if I keep this up all night. I need a distraction — a big, challenging distraction. So I lift my laptop’s lid and resume work on the 3-D bookstore.

Every few minutes I glance up at the front windows, out into the street beyond. I’m watching for shadows, the flash of a gray suit or the glint of a dark eye. But there’s nothing. The work smooths away the strangeness, and finally I’m in the zone.

If a 3-D model of this store is actually going to be useful, it probably needs to show you not only where the books are located but also which are currently loaned out, and to whom. So I’ve somewhat sketchily transcribed my last few weeks of logbook entries and taught my model to tell time.

Now the books glow like lamps in the blocky 3-D shelves, and they’re color-coded, so the books borrowed by Tyndall light up blue, Lapin’s green, Fedorov’s yellow, and so on. That’s pretty cool. But my new feature also introduced a bug, and now the shelves are all blinking out of existence when I rotate the store too far around. I’m sitting hunched over the code, trying in vain to figure it out, when the bell tinkles brightly.

I make an involuntary chirp of surprise. Is it Eric, back to yell at me again? Or is it Corvina, the CEO himself, come at last to visit his wrath upon—

It’s a girl. She’s leaning halfway into the store, and she’s looking at me, and she’s saying, “Are you open?”

Why, yes, girl with chestnut hair cropped to your chin and a red T-shirt with the word BAM! printed in mustard yellow — yes, as a matter of fact, we are.

“Absolutely,” I say. “You can come in. We’re always open.”

“I was just waiting for the bus and my phone buzzed — I think I have a coupon?”

She walks straight up to the front desk, pushes her phone out toward me, and there, on the little screen, is my Google ad. The hyper-targeted local campaign — I’d forgotten about it, but it’s still running, and it found someone. The digital coupon I designed is right there, peeking out of her scratched-up smartphone. Her nails are shiny.

“Yes!” I say. “That’s a great coupon. The best!” I’m talking too loud. She’s going to turn around and leave. Google’s astonishing advertising algorithms have delivered to me a supercute girl, and I have no idea what to do with her. She swivels her head to take in the store. She looks dubious.

History hinges on such small things. A difference of thirty degrees, and this story would end here. But my laptop is angled just so, and on my screen, the 3-D bookstore is spinning wildly on two axes, like a spaceship tumbling through a blank cosmos, and the girl glances down, and—

“What’s that?” she says, one eyebrow raised. One dark lovely eyebrow.

Okay, I have to play this right. Don’t make it sound too nerdy: “Well, it’s a model of this store, except you can see which books are available…”

The girl’s eyes light up: “Data visualization!” She’s no longer dubious. Suddenly she’s delighted.

“That’s right,” I say. “That’s it exactly. Here, take a look.”

We meet halfway, at the end of the desk, and I show her the 3-D bookstore, which is still disappearing whenever it spins too far around. She leans in close.

“Can I see the source code?”

If Eric’s malevolence was surprising, this girl’s curiosity is astonishing. “Sure, of course,” I say, toggling through dark windows until raw Ruby fills the screen, all color-coded red and gold and green.

“This is what I do for work,” she says, hunching down low, peering at the code. “Data viz. Do you mind?” She gestures at the keyboard. Uh, no, beautiful late-night hacker girl, I do not mind.

My limbic system has grown accustomed to a certain (very low) level of human (female) contact. With her standing right next to me, her elbow poking me just the tiniest bit, I basically feel drunk. I’m trying to formulate my next steps. I’ll recommend Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Penumbra has a copy — I’ve seen it on the shelf. It’s huge.

She’s scrolling fast through my code, which is a little embarrassing, because my code is full of comments like Hell, yeah! and Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

“This is great,” she says, smiling. “And you must be Clay?”

It’s in the code — there’s a method called clay_is_awesome. I assume every programmer writes one of those.

“I’m Kat,” she says. “I think I found the problem. Want to see?”

I’ve been struggling for hours, but this girl — Kat — has found the bug in my bookstore in five minutes flat. She’s a genius. She talks me through the debugging process and explains her reasoning, which is quick and confident. And then, tap tap, she fixes the bug.

“Sorry, I’m hogging it,” she says, swiveling the laptop back to me. She pushes a lock of hair back behind her ear, stands up straight, and says, with mock composure, “So, Clay, why are you making a model of this bookstore?” As she says it, her eyes follow the shelves up to the ceiling.

I’m not sure if I want to be completely honest about the deep strangeness of this place. Hello, nice to meet you, I sell unreadable books to weird old people — want to get dinner? (And suddenly I am gripped with the certainty that one of those people is going to come careening through the front door. Please, Tyndall, Fedorov, all of you: Stay home tonight. Keep reading.)

I play up a different angle: “It’s sort of a history thing,” I say. “The store’s been open for almost a century. I think it’s the oldest bookstore in the city — maybe the whole West Coast.”

“That’s amazing,” she says. “Google’s like a baby compared to that.” That explains it: this girl is a Googler. So she really is a genius. Also, one of her teeth is chipped in a cute way.

“I love data like this,” she says, nodding her chin toward my laptop. “Real-world data. Old data.”

This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I’ve tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it — what cocktail of characteristics comes together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it’s mostly in the face — not just the eyes but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all.

Kat’s micromuscles are very attractive.

She says, “Have you tried doing a time-series visualization?”

“Not yet, not exactly, no.” I do not, in fact, even know what that is.

“At Google, we do them for search logs,” she says. “It’s cool — you’ll see some new idea flash across the world, like a little epidemic. Then it burns out in a week.”

This sounds very interesting to me, but mostly because this girl is very interesting to me.

Kat’s phone makes a bright ping and she glances down. “Oh,” she says, “that’s my bus.” I curse the city’s public transit system for its occasional punctuality. “I can show you what I mean about the time-series stuff,” she ventures. “Want to meet up sometime?”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I do. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I’ll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait — is that weird? It’s an expensive book. Maybe there’s a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That’s stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?)

Kat is still waiting for me to answer. “Sure,” I squeak.

She scribbles her email address on one of Penumbra’s postcards: katpotente@—of course—gmail.com. “I’ll save my coupon for another time,” she says, waving her phone. “See you later.”

As soon as she leaves, I log in to check my hyper-targeted ad campaign. Did I accidentally check the box that said “beautiful”? (What about “single”?) Can I afford this introduction? In pure marketing terms, this was a failure: I did not sell any books, expensive or otherwise. Actually, I’m a dollar in the hole, thanks to the scribbled-on postcard. But there’s no reason to worry: from my original budget of eleven dollars, Google has subtracted just seventeen cents. In return, I have received a single ad impression — a single, perfect ad impression — delivered exactly twenty-three minutes ago.

Later, after an hour of late-night isolation and lignin inhalation have sobered me up, I do two things.

First: I email Kat and ask her if she wants to get lunch tomorrow, which is a Saturday. I might sometimes be faint of heart, but I do believe in striking while the iron is hot.

Then: I google “time-series visualization” and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

The idea is to animate through the borrowed books over time instead of just seeing them all at once. First, I transcribe more names, titles, and times from the logbook into my laptop. Then I start hacking.

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. I cannot program in any of these languages, because they’re all too hard.

But Ruby, my language of choice since NewBagel, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry. Billy Collins by way of Bill Gates.

But, of course, the point of a programming language is that you don’t just read it; you write it, too. You make it do things for you. And this, I think, is where Ruby shines:

Imagine that you’re cooking. But instead of following the recipe step-by-step and hoping for the best, you can actually take ingredients in and out of the pot whenever you want. You can add salt, taste it, shake your head, and pull the salt back out. You can take a perfectly crisp crust, isolate it, and then add whatever you want to the inside. It’s no longer just a linear process ending in success or (mostly, for me) frustrating failure. Instead, it’s a loop or a curlicue or a little scribble. It’s play.

So I add some salt and a little butter and I get a prototype of the new visualization working by two in the morning. Immediately I notice something strange: the lights are following one another.

On my screen, Tyndall will borrow a book from the top of aisle two. Then, in another month, Lapin will ask for one from the same shelf. Five weeks later, Imbert will follow — exactly the same shelf — but meanwhile, Tyndall has already returned and gotten something new from the bottom of aisle one. He’s a step ahead.

I hadn’t noticed the pattern because it’s so spread out in space and time, like a piece of music with three hours between each note, all played in different octaves. But here, condensed and accelerated on my screen, it’s obvious. They’re all playing the same song, or dancing the same dance, or — yes — solving the same puzzle.

The bell tinkles. It’s Imbert: short and solid, with his bristly black beard and sloping newsboy cap. He hoists his current book (a monstrous red-bound volume) and pushes it across the desk. I quickly scrub through the visualization to find his place in the pattern. An orange light bounces across my screen, and before he says a word, I know he’s going to ask for a book right in the middle of aisle two. It’s going to be—

“Prokhorov,” Imbert wheezes. “Prokhorov must be next.”

Halfway up the ladder, I feel dizzy. What’s going on? No daredevil maneuvers this time; it’s all I can do to keep my balance as I pull slim, black-bound PROKHOROV off the shelf.

Imbert presents his card—6MXH2I — and takes his book. The bell tinkles, and I am alone again.

In the logbook, I record the transaction, noting Imbert’s cap and the smell of garlic on his breath. And then I write, for the benefit of some future clerk, and perhaps also to prove to myself that this is real:

Strange things are afoot at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

MAXIMUM HAPPY IMAGINATION

“… CALLED SINGULARITY SINGLES,” Kat Potente is saying. She’s wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in it, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she’s a cartoon character — all of which are appealing alternatives.

Singularity Singles. Let’s see. I know (thanks to the internet) that the Singularity is the hypothetical point in the future where technology’s growth curve goes vertical and civilization just sort of reboots itself. Computers get smarter than people, so we let them run the show. Or maybe they let themselves …

Kat nods. “More or less.”

“But Singularity Singles…?”

“Speed-dating for nerds,” she says. “They have one every month at Google. The male-to-female ratio is really good, or really bad. Depends who—”

“You went to this.”

“Yeah. I met a guy who programmed bots for a hedge fund. We dated for a while. He was really into rock-climbing. He had nice shoulders.”

Hmm.

“But a cruel heart.”

We are in the Gourmet Grotto, part of San Francisco’s gleaming six-floor shopping mall. It’s downtown, right next to the cable-car terminus, but I don’t think tourists realize it’s a mall; there’s no parking lot. The Gourmet Grotto is its food court, probably the best in the world: all locally grown spinach salads and pork belly tacos and sushi sans mercury. Also, it’s belowground, and it connects directly to the train station, so you never have to walk outside. Whenever I come here, I pretend I’m living in the future and the atmosphere is irradiated and wild bands of biodiesel bikers rule the dusty surface. Hey, just like the Singularity, right?

Kat frowns. “That’s the twentieth-century future. After the Singularity, we’ll be able to solve those problems.” She cracks a falafel in two and offers me half. “And we’ll live forever.”

“Come on,” I say. “This is just the old dream of immortality—”

“It is the dream of immortality. So?” She pauses, chews. “Let me put it a different way. This is going to sound strange, especially because we just met. But, I know I’m smart.”

That’s definitely true—

“And I think you’re smart, too. So why does that have to end? We could accomplish so much if we just had more time. You know?”

I chew my falafel and nod. This is an interesting girl. Kat’s utter directness suggests homeschooling, yet she is also completely charming. It helps, I guess, that she’s beautiful. I glance down at her T-shirt. You know, I think she owns a bunch that are identical.

“You have to be an optimist to believe in the Singularity,” she says, “and that’s harder than it seems. Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”

“Sounds like a Japanese game show.”

Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.”

Okay: “World government … no cancer … hover-boards.”

“Go further. What’s the good future after that?”

“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”

“Further.”

“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”

“Further.”

I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.”

Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes? My imagination is almost physically straining. Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing.

“Personally, I think the big change is going to be our brains,” Kat says, tapping just above her ear, which is pink and cute. “I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers. You expect me to say that”—yes—“but it’s happened before. It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.”

Wait: “Yes we do.”

“We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.”

Yes, as a matter of fact, I think the idea of romance just occurred to me last night. (I don’t say that out loud.)

“Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”

Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

“But I think the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.”

I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. “So what’s the next upgrade?”

“It’s already happening,” she says. “There are all these things you can do, and it’s like you’re in more than one place at one time, and it’s totally normal. I mean, look around.”

I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all leaning into phones showing them places that don’t exist and yet are somehow more interesting than the Gourmet Grotto.

“And it’s not weird, it’s not science fiction at all, it’s…” She slows down a little and her eyes dim. I think she thinks she’s getting too intense. (How do I know that? Does my brain have an app for that?) Her cheeks are flushed and she looks great with all her blood right there at the surface of her skin.

“Well,” she says finally, “it’s just that I think the Singularity is totally reasonable to imagine.”

Her sincerity makes me smile, and I feel lucky to have this bright optimistic girl sitting with me here in the irradiated future, deep beneath the surface of the earth.

I decide it’s time to show her the souped-up 3-D bookstore, now with amazing new time-series capability. You know: just a prototype.

“You did this last night?” she says, and cocks an eyebrow. “Very impressive.”

I don’t say that it took me all night and part of this morning. Kat probably could have cooked it up in fifteen minutes.

We watch the colored lights curl around one another. I rewind it, and we watch again. I explain what happened with Imbert — the prototype’s predictive power.

“Could have been luck,” Kat says, shaking her head. “We’d need to look at more data to see if there’s really a pattern. I mean, you might just be projecting. Like the face on Mars.”

Or like when you’re absolutely sure a girl likes you, but it turns out she doesn’t. (I don’t say that out loud, either.)

“Is there more data we can add to the visualization? This only covers a few months, right?”

“Well, there are other logbooks,” I say. “But they’re not really data — just description. And it would take forever to type it into the computer. It’s all handwriting, and I can barely read my own…”

Kat’s eyes light up: “A natural language corpus! I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the book scanner.” She grins and slaps the table. “Bring it to Google. We have a machine for this. You have to bring it to Google.”

She’s bouncing in her seat a little, and her lips make a pretty shape when she says the word corpus.

THE SMELL OF BOOKS

MY CHALLENGE: get a book out of a bookstore. If I am successful, I might learn something interesting about this place and its purpose. More important: I might impress Kat.

I can’t just take the logbook, because Penumbra and Oliver use it, too. The logbook is part of the store. If I ask to take it home, I’ll need a good reason, and I can’t really imagine a good reason. Hey, Mr. Penumbra, I want to go over my sketch of Tyndall in watercolors? Yeah, right.

There’s another possibility. I could take a different logbook, an older one — not IX but VIII or even II or I. That feels risky. Some of those logbooks are older than Penumbra himself, and I’m afraid they might fall apart if I touch them. So the most recently retired logbook, VIII, is the safest and sturdiest bet … but it’s also the closest at hand. You see VIII every time you slide the current logbook back onto the shelf, and I’m very sure Penumbra would notice its absence. Now, maybe VII or VI …

I’m crouching down behind the front desk, poking logbook spines with one finger to test their structural integrity, when the bell above the door tinkles. I spring up straight — it’s Penumbra.

He unwinds the thin gray scarf around his neck and makes an odd circuit around the front of the store, rapping his knuckles on the front desk, casting his eyes across the short shelves and then up to the Waybacklist. He makes a quiet sigh. Something is up.

“Today is the day, my boy,” he finally says, “that I took over this bookstore, thirty-one years ago.”

Thirty-one years. Penumbra’s been sitting at this desk for longer than I’ve been alive. It makes me realize how new I am to this place — what a fleeting addition.

“But it wasn’t until eleven years later,” he adds, “that I changed the name on the front.”

“Whose name was up there before?”

“Al-Asmari. He was my mentor and, for many years, my employer. Mohammad Al-Asmari. I always thought his name looked better on the glass. I still do.”

“Penumbra looks good,” I say. “It’s mysterious.”

He smiles at that. “When I changed the name, I thought I would change the store, too. But it hasn’t changed that much at all.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, many reasons. Some good, some bad. It has a bit to do with our funding … and I have been lazy. In the early days, I read more. I sought out new books. But now, it seems, I’ve settled on my favorites.”

Well, now that you mention it … “Maybe you should think about getting some more popular stuff,” I venture. “There’s a market for independent bookstores, and a lot of people don’t even know this place is here, but when they discover it, there’s not a lot to choose from. I mean, some of my friends have come to check it out, and … we just don’t have anything they want to buy.”

“I did not know people your age still read books,” Penumbra says. He raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression they read everything on their mobile phones.”

“Not everyone. There are plenty of people who, you know — people who still like the smell of books.”

“The smell!” Penumbra repeats. “You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell.” He smiles at that — then something occurs to him, and he narrows his eyes. “I do not suppose you have a … Kindle?”

Uh-oh. It feels like it’s the principal asking me if I have weed in my backpack. But in a friendly way, like maybe he wants to share it. As it happens, I do have my Kindle. I pull it out of my messenger bag. It’s a bit battered, with wide scratches across the back and stray pen marks near the bottom of the screen.

Penumbra holds it aloft and frowns. It’s blank. I reach up and pinch the corner and it comes to life. He sucks in a sharp breath, and the pale gray rectangle reflects in his bright blue eyes.

“Remarkable,” he says. “And to think I was still impressed by this species”—he nods to the Mac Plus—“of magic mirror.”

I open the Kindle’s settings and make the text a little bigger for him.

“The typography is beautiful,” Penumbra says, peering in close, holding his glasses up to the Kindle’s screen. “I know that typeface.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it’s the default.” I like it, too.

“It is a classic. Gerritszoon.” He pauses at that. “We use it on the front of the store. Does this machine ever run out of electricity?” He gives the Kindle a little shake.

“The battery’s supposed to last a couple of months. Mine doesn’t.”

“I suppose that is a relief.” Penumbra sighs and passes it back to me. “Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage. So I suppose it is a good thing we have”—and here he winks at me—“such a generous patron.”

I stuff the Kindle back into my bag. I’m not consoled. “Honestly, Mr. Penumbra, if we just got some more popular books, people would love this place. It would be…” I trail off, then decide to speak the truth: “It would be more fun.”

He rubs his chin, and his eyes have a far-off look. “Perhaps,” he says at last. “Perhaps it is time to muster some of the energy I had thirty-one years ago. I will think on it, my boy.”

I haven’t given up on getting one of those old logbooks to Google. Back at the apartment, in the shadow of Matropolis, sprawled out on the couch, sipping an Anchor Steam even though it’s seven in the morning, I tell my tale to Mat, who is poking tiny bullet holes in the skin of a fortresslike building with pale marbled skin. Immediately he formulates a plan. I was counting on this.

“I can make a perfect replica,” he says. “Not a problem, Jannon. Just bring me reference images.”

“But you can’t copy every page, can you?”

“Just the outside. The covers, the spine.”

“What happens when Penumbra opens the perfect replica?”

“He won’t. You said this is, like, from the archives, right?”

“Right—”

“So it’s the surface that matters. People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they’ll believe you.” Coming from the special-effects wizard, this is not unconvincing.

“Okay, so all you need is pictures?”

“Good pictures.” Mat nods. “Lots of them. Every angle. Bright, even light. Do you know what I mean when I say bright, even light?”

“No shadows?”

“No shadows,” he agrees, “which is, of course, going to be impossible in that place. It’s basically a twenty-four-hour shadow store.”

“Yep. Shadows and book smell, we’ve got it all.”

“I could bring over some lights.”

“I think that might give me away.”

“Right. Maybe a few shadows will be okay.”

So the scheme is set. “Speaking of dark deeds,” I say, “how’s it going with Ashley?”

Mat sniffs. “I am wooing her in the traditional way,” he says. “Also, I am not allowed to talk about it in the apartment. But she’s having dinner with me on Friday.”

“Impressive compartmentalization.”

“Our roommate is nothing but compartments.”

“Does she … I mean … what do you guys talk about?”

“We talk about everything, Jannon. And do you realize”—he points down to the pale marbled fortress—“she found this box? She picked it out of the trash at her office.”

Amazing. Rock-climbing, risotto-cooking PR professional Ashley Adams is contributing to the construction of Matropolis. Maybe she’s not such an android after all.

“That’s progress,” I say, raising my beer bottle.

Mat nods. “That’s progress.”

THE PEACOCK FEATHER

I’M MAKING PROGRESS of my own: Kat invites me to a house party. Unfortunately, I can’t go. I can never go to any parties, because my shift at the store starts at precisely party o’clock. Disappointment twists in my heart; the ball is in her court, she’s bouncing me a nice easy pass, and my hands are tied.

too bad, she types. We are chatting in Gmail.

Yes, too bad. Although, wait: Kat, you believe that we humans will one day outgrow these bodies and exist in a sort of dimensionless digital sublime, right?

right!!

I’ll bet you wouldn’t actually put that to the test.

what do you mean?

This is what I mean: I’ll come to your party, but I’ll come via laptop—via video chat. You’ll have to be my chaperone: carry me around, introduce me to people. She’ll never go for this.

omg brilliant! yes let’s do it! you have to dress up, though. and you have to drink.

She goes for it. But: Wait, I’m going to be at work, I can’t drink—

you have to. or it will hardly be a party now will it?

I sense an incompatibility between Kat’s belief in a disembodied human future and her insistence on alcohol consumption, but I let it slide, because I’m going to a party.

It is 10:00 p.m. and I am behind the front desk at Penumbra’s, wearing a light gray sweater over a blue striped shirt and, in a joke I hope I will be able to triumphantly reveal at some point later in the evening, pants of crazy purple paisley. Get it? Because no one will be able to see me below the waist — okay, yes, you get it.

Kat comes online at 10:13 p.m. and I press the green button in the shape of a camera. She appears on my screen, wearing her red BAM! T-shirt as always. “You look cute,” she says.

“You’re not dressed up,” I say. No one else is dressed up.

“Yeah, but you’re just a floating head,” she says. “You have to look extra-good.”

The store melts away and I fall headfirst into the view of Kat’s apartment — a place, I remind you, that I have never visited in person. It’s a wide-open left, and Kat pans her laptop around like a camera to show me what’s what. “This is the kitchen,” she says. Gleaming glass-faced cupboards; an industrial stove; a stick-figure xkcd comic on the refrigerator. “The living room,” she says, sweeping me around. My view blurs into dark pixelated streaks, then re-forms itself into a sprawling space with a wide TV and long low couches. There are movie posters in neat narrow frames: Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, WALL.E. People are sitting in a circle — half on the couches, half on the carpet — playing a game.

“Who’s that?” a voice chirps. My view swivels and I am looking at a round-faced girl with dark curls and chunky black glasses.

“This is an experimental simulated intelligence,” Kat says, “designed to produce engaging party banter. Here, test it.” She sets the laptop down on the granite countertop.

Dark Curls leans in close — eek, really close — and squints. “Wait, really? Are you real?”

Kat doesn’t abandon me. It would be easy to do: set the laptop down, get called away, don’t come back. But no: for a whole hour she shepherds me around the party, introducing me to her roommates (Dark Curls is one of them) and her friends from Google.

She brings me over to the living room and we play the game in the circle. It’s called Traitor, and a skinny dude with a wispy mustache leans in to explain that it was invented at the KGB and all the secret agents used to play it back in the sixties. It’s a game about lying. You’re given a particular role, but you have to convince the group that you’re someone else entirely. The roles are assigned with playing cards, and Kat holds mine up to the camera for me.

“It’s not fair,” says a girl across the circle. She has hair so pale it’s almost white. “He has an advantage. We can’t see any of his tells.”

“You’re totally right,” Kat says, frowning. “And I know for a fact that he wears paisley pants when he’s lying.”

On cue, I tip my laptop down to give them a view, and the laughter is so loud it crackles and fuzzes out in the speakers. I laugh, too, and pour myself another beer. I’m drinking from a red party cup here in the store. Every few minutes I glance up at the door and a dagger of fear dances across my heart, but the buffer of adrenaline and alcohol eases the prick. There won’t be any customers. There are never any customers.

We get into a conversation with Kat’s friend Trevor, who also works at Google, and a different kind of dagger slips through my defenses then. Trevor is reeling out a long story about a trip to Antarctica (who goes to Antarctica?) and Kat is leaning in toward him. It looks almost gravitational, but maybe her laptop is just sitting at an angle. Slowly, other people peel away and Trevor’s focus narrows to Kat alone. Her eyes are shining back, and she’s nodding along.

No, come on. There’s nothing to it. It’s just a good story. She’s a little drunk. I’m a little drunk. However, I do not know if Trevor is drunk, or—

The bell tinkles. My gaze snaps up. Shit. It’s not a lonely late-night browser or anyone I can safely ignore. It’s one of the club: Ms. Lapin. She’s the only woman (that I know of) who borrows books from the Waybacklist, and now she is edging into the store, clutching her ponderous purse like a shield. She has a peacock feather stuck into her hat. That’s new.

I try to focus my eyeballs independently, one on the laptop and one on Lapin. It doesn’t work.

“Hello, good evening,” she says. Lapin has a voice that sounds like an old tape stretched out of shape, always wavering and changing pitch. She lifts a black-gloved hand to straighten the peacock feather or maybe just to check that it’s still there. Then she slides a book out of her purse. She’s returning BVRNES.

“Hello, Ms. Lapin!” I say too loud and too fast. “What can I get for you?” I consider using my spooky prototype to predict the name of her next book without waiting for her, but my screen is currently occupied by—

“What did you say?” Kat’s voice burbles. I mute the laptop.

Lapin doesn’t notice. “Well,” she says, gliding up to the front desk, “I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but, I think it might be Par-zee-bee, or perhaps, perhaps Pra-zinky-blink—”

You have got to be kidding me. I try my best to transliterate what she’s saying, but the database comes up empty. I try again with a different set of phonetic assumptions. Nope, nothing. “Ms. Lapin,” I say, “how do you spell it?”

“Oh, it’s P, B, that’s a B, Z, B, no, sorry, Y…”

You — have got — to be kidding — me.

“B again, that’s just one B, Y, no, I mean, yes, Y…”

The database says: Przybylowicz. That’s just ridiculous.

I race up the ladder, pull PRZYBYLOWICZ so violently from the shelf that I almost make its neighbor PRYOR pop out and drop to the floor, and return to Lapin, my face set in a mask of steely annoyance. Kat is moving silently on the screen, waving to someone.

I have the book wrapped up, and Lapin has her card out—6YTP5T — but then she glides over to one of the short shelves up front, the ones with the normal books. Oh, no.

Long seconds pass. She works her way across the shelf marked ROMANCE, the peacock feather bobbing when she tilts her head to read the spines.

“Oh, I think I’ll get this, too,” she says finally, returning with a bright red Danielle Steel hardcover. Then it takes her approximately three days to find her checkbook.

“So,” she wavers, “that’s thirteen, let’s see, thirteen dollars and how many cents?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirteen … dollars…” She writes with agonizing slowness, but I have to admit, her script is beautiful. It’s dark and looping, almost calligraphic. She presses the check flat and signs it slowly: Rosemary Lapin.

She hands it to me, finished, and at the very bottom there’s a line of tiny type that informs me she’s been a member of the Telegraph Hill Credit Union since — oh, wow — since 1951.

Jeez. Why am I punishing this old woman for my own weird ways? Something softens inside of me. My mask melts and I give her a smile — a real one.

“Have a good night, Ms. Lapin,” I say. “Come again soon.”

“Oh, I’m working as fast as I can,” she says, and smiles a sweet smile of her own that makes her cheeks puff out like pale plums. “Festina lente.” She slips her Waybacklist treasure and her guilty pleasure into her purse together. They poke out at the top: matte brown and shiny red. The door tinkles, and she and her peacock feather are gone.

The customers say that sometimes. They say: Festina lente.

I lunge back down toward the screen. When I unmute the speaker, Kat and Trevor are still chatting happily. He’s telling another story, this one about an expedition to cheer up some depressed penguins, and it is apparently hilarious. Kat is laughing. There is so much bubbly laughter coming out of my laptop speakers. Trevor is apparently the cleverest, most interesting man in the whole city of San Francisco. Neither of them is on camera, so I assume she is touching his arm.

“Hey, guys,” I say. “Hey, guys.”

I realize they’ve muted me, too.

All at once I feel stupid, and I am sure this whole thing has been a terrible idea. The point of a party at Kat’s apartment is that I tell a funny story and Kat touches my arm. This exercise in telepresence, on the other hand, does not have a point, and everyone is probably laughing at me and making faces at the laptop just off-camera. My face is burning. Can they tell? Am I turning a strange shade of red on the screen?

I stand and step away from the camera’s gaze. Exhaustion floods into my brain. I’ve been performing hard for the past two hours, I realize — a grinning puppet in an aluminum proscenium. What a mistake.

I put my palms on the bookstore’s broad front windows and look out through the cage of tall golden type. It’s Gerritszoon, all right, and it’s a scrap of familiar grace in this lonely place. The curve of the P is beautiful. My breath fogs the glass. Be normal, I tell myself. Just go back and be normal.

“Hello?” a voice pipes out of my laptop. Kat.

I slide back into place behind the desk. “Hi.”

Trevor is gone. Kat is alone. In fact, she’s somewhere completely different now.

“This is my room,” she says softly. “Like it?”

It’s spartan, not much more than a bed and a desk and a heavy black trunk. It looks like a cabin on an ocean liner. No: a pod on a spaceship. In the corner of the room, there’s a white plastic laundry basket, and scattered around it — near-misses — I see a dozen identical red T-shirts.

“That was my theory,” I say.

“Yeah,” Kat says, “I decided I didn’t want to waste brain cycles”—she yawns—“figuring out what to wear every morning.”

The laptop rocks and there’s a blur and then we are on her bed, and her head is propped up on her hand, and I can see the curve of her chest. My heart is suddenly beating very fast, as if I’m there with her, stretched out and expectant — as if I am not sitting here alone in the dim light of this bookstore, still wearing paisley pants.

“This was pretty fun,” she says quietly, “but I wish you could have come for real.”

She stretches and presses her eyes shut like a cat. I can’t think of a single thing to say, so I just put my chin on my palm and look into the camera.

“It would be nice if you were here,” she murmurs. Then she falls asleep. I am alone in the bookstore, looking across the city at her sleeping form, lit only by the gray light of her laptop. In time it, too, falls asleep, and the screen goes dark.

Alone in the store after the party, I do my homework. I’ve made my selection: I gently pull logbook VII (old but not too old) off the shelf and get Mat his reference images: wide shots and close-ups, snapped with my phone from a dozen angles, all showing the same wide, flat rectangle of battered brown. I snap detail shots of the bookmark, the binding, the pale gray pages, and the deeply embossed NARRATIO on the cover above the store’s symbol, and when Penumbra arrives in the morning, my phone is back in my pocket and the images are on their way to Mat’s inbox. There’s a little whoosh as each of them goes.

I’ve left the current logbook up on the desk. I’ll do that from now on. I mean, why put it on the shelf all the time? Sounds like a recipe for back strain if you ask me. With luck, this choice will catch on and cast a new shadow of normalcy in which I can crouch and hide. That’s what spies do, right? They walk to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread every day — perfectly normal — until one day they buy a loaf of uranium instead.

MAKE AND MODEL

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW, I spend more time with Kat. I see her apartment unmediated by screens. We play video games. We make out.

One night we try to cook dinner on her industrial stove, but halfway through we judge the steaming sludge of kale a failure, so instead she pulls a neat plastic tub out of the refrigerator, full of spicy couscous salad. Kat can’t find any spoons, so she serves it up with an ice-cream scoop.

“Did you make this?” I ask, because I don’t think she did. It’s perfect.

She shakes her head. “It’s from work. I bring food home most days. It’s free.”

Kat spends most of her time at Google. Most of her friends work at Google. Most of her conversations revolve around Google. Now I am learning that most of her calories come from Google. I think it’s impressive: she’s smart and enthusiastic about her work. But it’s also intimidating, because my workplace is not a gleaming crystal castle full of smiling savants. (That’s how I imagine Google. Also, lots of funny hats.)

There’s a real limit to the relationship I can build with Kat in her non-Google hours, simply because there aren’t that many of them, and I think I want more than that. I want to earn entrance into Kat’s world. I want to see the princess in her castle.

My ticket to Google is logbook VII.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Mat and I painstakingly construct the logbook’s body double. The surface is Mat’s specialty. He starts with a sheet of new leather and stains it with coffee. Then he brings a pair of vintage golf cleats down from his attic aerie; I squeeze my feet into them and march back and forth across the leather for two hours.

The logbook’s guts require more research. In the living room late at night, Mat works on his miniature city while I sit on the couch with my laptop, googling widely, reading detailed book-making tutorials out loud. We learn about binding. We track down vellum wholesalers. We find dusky ivory cloth and thick black thread. We buy a book block on eBay.

“You’re good at this, Jannon,” Mat tells me when we set the blank pages into glue.

“What, book-making?” (We do this on the kitchen table.)

“No, learning things on the fly,” he says. “It’s what we do at work. Not like the computer guys, you know? They just do the same thing every time. It’s always just pixels. For us, every project is different. New tools, new materials. Everything’s always new.”

“Like the jungle monster.”

“Exactly. I had forty-eight hours to become a bonsai master.”

Mat Mittelbrand hasn’t met Kat Potente, but I think they would get along: Kat, who believes so deeply in the human brain’s potential, and Mat, who can learn anything in a day. Thinking about that, I feel suddenly sympathetic to Kat’s point of view. If we could keep Mat going for a thousand years, he could probably build us a whole new world.

The fake logbook’s crowning detail, and the toughest challenge, is the embossing on the cover. The original has the word NARRATIO pressed deep into the leather, and after zoomed-in scrutiny of the reference images, I discover that this text, too, is set in good old Gerritszoon. That’s bad news.

“Why?” Mat asks. “I think I have that font on my computer.”

“You have Gerritszoon,” I cluck, “suitable for emails, book reports, and résumés. This”—I point to the blown-up NARRATIO on my laptop screen—“is Gerritszoon Display, suitable for billboards, magazine spreads, and, apparently, occult book covers. See, it has pointier serifs.”

Mat nods gravely. “The serifs are pointy indeed.”

Back at NewBagel, when I designed menus and posters and (may I remind you) an award-winning logo, I learned all about the digital font marketplace. Nowhere else is the bucks-to-bytes ratio so severe. Here’s what I mean: An e-book costs about ten dollars, right? And it’s usually about a megabyte’s worth of text. (For the record, you download more data than that every time you look at Facebook.) With an e-book, you can see what you paid for: the words, the paragraphs, the possibly boring expositions of digital marketplaces. Well, it turns out a digital font is also about a megabyte, but a digital font costs not tens of dollars but hundreds, sometimes thousands, and it’s abstract, basically invisible — a thin envelope of math describing tiny letterforms. The whole arrangement offends most people’s consumer instincts.

So of course people try to pirate fonts. I am not one of those people. I took a typography course in school and for our final project, everyone had to design their own typeface. I had grand aspirations for mine — it was called Telemach — but there were just too many letters to draw. I couldn’t finish it in time. It ended up capitals-only, suitable for shouty posters and stone tablets. So trust me, I know how much sweat goes into those shapes. Typographers are designers; designers are my people; I am committed to supporting them. But now FontShop.com tells me that Gerritszoon Display, distributed by FLC Type Foundry of New York City, costs $3,989.

So of course I will try to pirate this font.

A connection zigzags through my brain. I close the tab for FontShop and go instead to Grumble’s library. It’s not only pirated e-books here. There are fonts, too — illegal letters of every shape and size. I page through the listings: Metro and Gotham and Soho, all free for the taking. Myriad and Minion and Mrs Eaves. And there, too, is Gerritszoon Display.

I feel a pang of remorse as I download it, but really just a tiny pang. FLC Type Foundry is probably somehow a subsidiary of Time Warner. Gerritszoon is an old font, its eponymous creator long dead. What does he care how his typeface is used, and by whom?

Mat sets the word above a carefully traced outline of the bookstore’s symbol — two hands, open like a book — and with that, we have our design. The next day at ILM, he carves the whole thing out of scrap metal using a plasma cutter — in Mat’s world, a plasma cutter is as customary as a pair of scissors — and finally we press it into the false-weathered leather with a fat C-clamp. It sits silently embossing on the kitchen table for three days and three nights, and when Mat releases the clamp, the cover is perfect.

So finally, it is time. Night falls. I take Oliver Grone’s place at the front desk and begin my shift. Tonight I will claim my ticket to adventure in Kat’s world. Tonight I will make the switch.

But it turns out I would make a terrible spy — I can’t seem to calm myself down. I’ve tried everything: reading long works of investigative journalism; playing the computer version of Rockets & Warlocks; pacing the Waybacklist. I can’t stay focused on anything for more than three minutes.

Now I’ve resigned myself to sitting at the front desk, but I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

Finally, it’s quarter to six. The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet. I’m completely exhausted because I’ve spent the whole night vibrating.

The real logbook VII is stuffed into my messenger bag but way too big for it, so it bulges out and looks, to my eye, like the most ludicrously incriminating thing in the world. It’s like when one of those huge African snakes swallows an animal whole and you can see it wiggling around in there, all the way down.

The fake logbook is standing with its stepsiblings. When I slid it into place, I realized it left a telltale streak in the dust on the shelf’s edge. First I panicked. Then I ventured deep into the Waybacklist, scooped dust off the shelves there, and sprinkled it in front of the fake logbook until the depth and grade of the dust matched perfectly.

I have a dozen explanations (with branching subplots) if Penumbra spots the difference. But I have to admit: the fake logbook looks great. My touch-up dust is ILM-caliber. It looks real and I don’t think I’d give it a second glance and, whoa, the bell tinkles over the front door—

“Good morning,” Penumbra says. “How was the night?”

“Fine good great,” I say. Too fast. Slow down. Remember: the shadow of normalcy. Crouch there.

“You know,” Penumbra says, peeling off his peacoat, “I have been thinking. We should retire this fellow”—he taps the Mac Plus on the head with two fingers, a gentle thwack thwack—“and acquire something more up-to-date. Nothing too expensive. Perhaps you can recommend a make and model?”

Make and model. I’ve never heard anyone talk about computers that way. You can have a MacBook in any color you want, as long as it’s bare metal. “Yeah that’s great,” I say. “Sure I’ll do some research Mr. Penumbra maybe a refurbished iMac I think they’re just as good as the new ones.” I say it all in one breath, already heading for the door. I feel sick.

“And,” he says gingerly, “perhaps you could use it to construct a website.”

My heart is bursting.

“The store should have one. It is past time.”

It’s done, my heart has exploded, and a few other small organs may have ruptured, too, but I am committed to this course — I am committed to Kat Potente’s corpus:

“Wow that’s awesome we should totally do that I love websites but I’ve really got to go Mr. Penumbra see you later.”

He pauses, then smiles a lopsided smile. “Very well. Have a good day.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m on the train to Mountain View, clutching my bulging bag to my chest. It’s strange — my transgression is so slight. Who cares about the whereabouts of an old logbook from an obscure used bookstore for sixteen measly hours? But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m one of the two people in the world Penumbra is supposed to be able to count on, and it turns out I can’t be trusted.

All of this, just to impress a girl. The train’s rumble and sway put me to sleep.

THE SPIDER

THE RAINBOW SIGN next to the train station that points the way to Google’s campus has faded a bit in the Silicon Valley sun. I follow the pale arrow down a curving sidewalk flanked by eucalyptus trees and bike racks. Around the bend, I see wide lawns and low buildings and, between the trees, flashes of branding: red, green, yellow, blue.

The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it’s Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

Kat meets me at a blue security checkpoint, requests and receives a visitor badge with my name and affiliation printed in red, and leads me into her domain. We cut through a broad parking lot, the blacktop baking in the sun. There are no cars here; instead, the lot is packed full of white shipping containers set up on short stilts.

“These are pieces of the Big Box,” Kat says, pointing. A semi truck is arriving at the far end of the lot, roaring and hissing. Its carriage is painted bright red-green-blue, and it’s towing one of the white containers.

“They’re like LEGO blocks,” she continues, “except each one has disk space, tons of it, and CPUs and everything else, and connections for water and power and internet. We build them in Vietnam, then ship them wherever. They all hook up automatically, no matter where they are. All together, they’re the Big Box.”

“Which does…?”

“Everything,” she says. “Everything at Google runs in the Big Box.” She points a brown arm toward a container with WWW stenciled across the side in tall green letters. “There’s a copy of the web in there.” YT: “Every video on YouTube.” MX: “All your email. Everybody’s email.”

Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore.

Wide walkways curve through the main campus. There’s a bike lane, and Googlers whiz by on carbon-fiber racers and fixed gears with battery packs. There’s a pair of graybeards on recumbents and a tall dude with blue dreadlocks pedaling a unicycle.

“I reserved some time on the book scanner at twelve-thirty,” Kat says. “Lunch first?”

The Google mess hall comes into view, wide and low, a white pavilion staked out like a garden party. The front is open, tarp pulled up above the entryways, and short lines of Googlers poke out onto the lawn.

Kat pauses, squinting. Calculating. “This one,” she says finally, and tugs me over to the leftmost line. “I’m a pretty good queue strategist. But it’s not easy here—”

“Because everyone at Google is a queue strategist,” I suggest.

“Exactly. So sometimes there’s bluffing. This guy’s a bluffer,” she says, jabbing the Googler just ahead of us in line with her elbow. He’s tall and sandy-haired and he looks like a surfer.

“Hey, I am Finn,” he says, holding out a blocky, long-fingered hand. “Your first visit to Google?” He says it Gew-gell, with a little pause in the middle.

It is indeed, my ambiguously European friend. I make small talk: “How’s the food?”

“Oh, fantastic. The chef is famous…” He pauses. Something clicks. “Kat, he must use the other line.”

“Right. I always forget,” Kat says. She explains, “Our food is personalized. It has vitamins, some natural stimulants.”

Finn nods vigorously. “I am experimenting with my potassium level. Now I am up to eleven bananas every day. Body hacking!” His face splits into a wide grin. Wait, did the couscous salad have stimulants?

“Sorry,” Kat says, frowning. “The visitor line is over there.” She points across the lawn, and I leave her with the body-hacking Euro-surfer.

So now I’m waiting next to a sign that says EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES alongside three dudes in khakis and blue button-downs with leather phone holsters. Across the grass, the Googlers all wear snug jeans and bright T-shirts.

Kat is talking to someone else now, a slender brown-skinned boy who’s joined the line just behind her. He’s dressed like a skater, so I assume he has a PhD in artificial intelligence. A lance of jealousy spikes down behind my eyes, but I’m prepared for it; I knew it would come, here in the crystal castle where Kat knows everyone and everyone knows her. So I just let it pass, and I remind myself that she brought me here. This is the trump card in these situations: Yes, everyone else is smart, everyone else is cool, everyone else is healthy and attractive — but she brought you. You have to wear that like a pin, like a badge.

I look down and realize my visitor badge actually says that—

— so I peel it off and stick it a little higher up on my shirt.

The food is, as promised, fantastic. I get two scoops of lentil salad and a thick pink stripe of fish, seven sturdy green lines of asparagus, and a single chocolate-chip cookie that has been optimized for crispiness.

Kat waves me over to a table near the pavilion’s perimeter, where a quick breeze is rustling the white tarp. Little slices of light dance across the table, which has a paper covering marked out with a pale blue grid. At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper.

“This is Raj,” she says, waving a forkful of lentil salad (which looks just like mine) at the skater PhD. “We went to school together.” Kat studied symbolic systems at Stanford. Did everybody here go to Stanford? Do they just give you a job at Google when you graduate?

When Raj speaks, he seems suddenly ten years older. His voice is clipped and direct: “So what do you do?”

I hoped that question would be outlawed here, replaced by some quirky Google equivalent, like: What’s your favorite prime number? I point at my badge and concede that I work at the opposite of Google.

“Ah, books.” Raj pauses a moment, chewing. Then his brain slots into a groove: “You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite — in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known.”

Raj is not blinking, and possibly not breathing.

“So where is it, right? Where’s the OK? Well, it’s in old books, for one thing”—he uncaps a thin-tipped marker (where did that come from?) and starts drawing on the graph-paper tablecloth—“and it’s also in people’s heads, a lot of traditional knowledge, that’s what we call TK. OK and TK.” He’s drawing little overlapping blobs, labeling them with acronyms. “Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.”

I wonder what Raj has in his lunch.

“Vitamin D, omega-3s, fermented tea leaves,” he says, still scribbling. He makes a single dot off to the side of the blobs and smooshes the marker down, making the black ink bleed. “That’s what we’ve got stored in the Big Box right now,” he says, pointing to the dot, “and just think how valuable it is. If we could add all this”—he sweeps his hand across the OK/TK blobs like a general planning conquest—“then we could really get serious.”

“Raj has been at Google a long time,” Kat says. We’re wandering away from the mess hall. I snagged an extra cookie on the way out, and I’m nibbling on it now. “He’s pre-IPO and he was PM for ages.”

The acronyms at this place! But I think I know this one. “Wait”—I’m confused—“Google has a prime minister?”

“Ha, no,” she says. “Product Management. It’s a committee. It used to be two people, then it was four, now it’s bigger. Sixty-four. The PM runs the company. They approve new projects, assign engineers, allocate resources.”

“So these are all the top executives.”

“No, that’s the thing. It’s a lottery. Your name gets drawn and you serve on the PM for twelve months. Anybody could be chosen. Raj, Finn, me. Pepper.”

“Pepper?”

“The chef.”

Wow — it’s so egalitarian it’s beyond democracy. I realize: “It’s jury duty.”

“You’re not eligible until you’ve worked here for a year,” Kat explains. “And you can get out of it if you’re working on something super-super-important. But people take it really seriously.”

I wonder if Kat Potente has been summoned.

She shakes her head. “Not yet,” she says. “But I’d love to do it. I mean, the odds aren’t great. Thirty thousand people work here, there are sixty-four on the PM. You do the math. But it’s growing all the time. People say they might expand it again.”

Now I’m wondering what it would be like if we ran the whole country like this.

“That’s totally what Raj wants to do!” Kat laughs. “After he finds all the OK and TK, of course.” She shakes her head at that; she’s making fun of him a little. “He has a whole plan to pass a constitutional amendment. If anybody could do it…” Pursed lips again. “Actually, it probably wouldn’t be Raj.” She laughs, and I do, too. Yeah, Raj is a little too intense for Middle America.

So I ask, “Who could pull it off?”

“Maybe I could,” Kat says, puffing her chest out.

Maybe you could.

We walk past Kat’s domain: data viz. It’s perched on a low hill, a cluster of prefab boxes set around a small amphitheater where stone steps lead down to a bank of giant screens. We peek down. There’s a pair of engineers sitting on the amphitheater steps, laptops on their knees, watching a cluster of bubbles bounce around on one screen, all connected with wavy lines. Every few seconds the bubbles freeze and the lines snap straight, like the hair sticking up on the back of your neck. Then the screen flashes solid red. One of the engineers mutters a quiet curse and leans in to her laptop.

Kat shrugs. “Work in progress.”

“What’s it for?”

“Not sure. Probably something internal. Most of the stuff we do is internal.” She sighs. “Google’s so big, it’s an audience all by itself. I mostly make visualizations that get used by other engineers, or ad sales, or the PM…” She trails off. “To tell you the truth, I’d love to make something everybody could see!” She laughs as if relieved to say it out loud.

We pass through a glade of tall cypress on the edge of campus — it makes a nice golden dapple on the sidewalk — and come to a low brick building with no marking other than a handwritten sign taped to the dark glass door:

Inside, the building feels like a field hospital. It’s dark and a little warm. Harsh floodlights glare down on an operating table ringed with long, many-jointed metal arms. The air stings like bleach. The table is also surrounded by books: stacks and stacks of them, piled high on metal carts. There are big books and little books; there are bestsellers and old books that look like they would fit in at Penumbra’s. I spy Dashiell Hammett.

A tall Googler named Jad runs the book scanner. He has a perfectly triangular nose over a fuzzy brown beard. He looks like a Greek philosopher. Maybe it’s just because he’s wearing sandals.

“Hey, welcome,” he says, smiling, shaking Kat’s hand, then mine. “Nice to have somebody from data viz in here. And you…?” He looks at me, eyebrows raised.

“Not a Googler,” I confess. “I work at an old bookstore.”

“Oh, cool,” Jad says. Then he darkens: “Except, I mean. Sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Well. For putting you guys out of business.” He says it very matter-of-factly.

“Wait, which guys?”

“Book … stores?”

Right. I don’t actually think of myself as part of the book business; Penumbra’s store feels like something else entirely. But … I do sell books. I am the manager of a Google ad campaign designed to reach potential book buyers. Somehow it snuck up on me: I am a bookseller.

Jad continues, “I mean, once we’ve got everything scanned, and cheap reading devices are ubiquitous … nobody’s going to need bookstores, right?”

“Is that the business model for this?” I say, nodding at the scanner. “Selling e-books?”

“We don’t really have a business model.” Jad shrugs. “We don’t need one. The ads make so much money, it kinda takes care of everything.” He turns to Kat: “Don’t you think that’s right? Even if we made, like, five … million … dollars?” (He’s not sure if that sounds like a lot of money or not. For the record: it does.) “Yeah, nobody would even notice. Over there”—he waves a long arm vaguely back toward the center of campus—“they make that much, like, every twenty minutes.”

That is super-depressing. If I made five million dollars selling books, I’d want people to carry me around in a palanquin constructed from first editions of The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

“Yeah, that’s more or less right”—Kat nods—“but it’s a good thing. It gives us freedom. We can think long-term. We can invest in stuff like this.” She steps closer to the scanner’s bright table with its long metal arms. Her eyes are wide and glinting in the light. “Just look at it.”

“Anyway, sorry,” Jad says to me quietly.

“We’ll be fine,” I say. “People still like the smell of books.” And besides, Jad’s book scanner isn’t the only project with far-off funding. Penumbra’s has a patron of its own.

I dig the logbook out of my bag and hand it over. “Here’s the patient.”

Jad holds it under the floodlights. “This is a beautiful book,” he says. He runs long fingers across the embossing on the cover. “What is it?”

“Just a personal diary.” I pause. “Very personal.”

He gently opens the logbook and clips the front and back of the cover into a right-angled metal frame. No spines broken here. Then he places the frame on the table and locks it down with four clicky brackets. Finally, he gives it a test wiggle; the frame and its passenger are secure. The logbook is strapped in like a test pilot, or a crash-test dummy.

Jad scoots us back away from the scanner. “Stay behind this,” he says, pointing to a yellow line on the floor. “The arms are sharp.”

His long fingers go tap-tap behind a bank of flat monitors. There’s a low, gut-rumbling hum, then a high warning chime, and then the book scanner leaps into action. The floodlights start strobing, turning everything in the chamber into a stop-motion movie. Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. It’s mesmerizing. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.

At each flash of the lights, two giant cameras set above the table swivel and snap images in tandem. I sidle up next to Jad, where I can see the pages of the logbook stacking up on his monitors. The two cameras are like two eyes, so the images are in 3-D, and I watch his computer lift the words right up off the pale gray pages. It looks like an exorcism.

I walk back over to Kat. Her toes are on the yellow line and she’s leaning in close to the book scanner. I’m afraid she’s going to get stabbed in the eye.

“This is awesome,” she breathes.

It really is. I feel a pang of pity for the logbook, its secrets all plucked out in minutes by this whirlwind of light and metal. Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore.

THE FOUNDER’S PUZZLE

IT’S LATER, around eight, and we are in Kat’s spaceship-pod bedroom, at her white spaceship-console desk. She’s sitting on my lap, leaning in to her MacBook. She’s explaining OCR, the process by which a computer transforms swoops of ink and streaks of graphite into characters it can comprehend, like K and A and T.

“It’s not trivial,” she says. “That was a big book.” Also, my predecessors had handwriting almost as bad as mine. But Kat has a plan. “It would take my computer all night to process these pages,” she says. “But we’re impatient, right?” She’s typing at warp ten, composing long commands I do not understand. Yes, we are definitely impatient.

“So we’ll get hundreds of machines to do it all at once. We’ll use Hadoop.”

“Hadoop.”

“Everybody uses it. Google, Facebook, the NSA. It’s software — it breaks a big job into lots of tiny pieces and spreads them out to lots of different computers at the same time.”

Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!

She stretches forward, her palms planted on the desk. “I love this.” Her eyes are set firmly on the screen, where a diagram is blossoming: a skeletal flower with a blinking center and dozens — no, hundreds — of petals. It’s growing fast, transforming from a daisy to a dandelion to a giant sunflower. “A thousand computers are doing exactly what I want right now. My mind is not just here,” she says, tapping her head, “it’s out there. I love it — the feeling.”

She moves against me. I can smell everything sharply all of a sudden; her hair, shampooed recently, is up against my face. Her earlobes stick out a little, round and pink, and her back is strong from the Google climbing wall. I trace my thumbs down her shoulder blades, across the bumps of her bra straps. She moves again, rocking. I push up her T-shirt and the letters, squished, reflect in the laptop screen: BAM!

Later, Kat’s laptop makes a low chime. She slides away from me, hops off the bed, and climbs back onto her black desk chair. Perched there on her toes, her spine curving down into the screen, she looks like a gargoyle. A beautiful naked-girl-shaped gargoyle.

“It worked,” she says. She turns to me, flushed, her hair dark and wild. Grinning. “It worked!”

It’s way past midnight, and I’m back at the bookstore. The real logbook is safely on its shelf. The fake logbook is tucked into my bag. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. I’m alert, I’m feeling good, and I’m ready to visualize. I pull the scanned data out of the Big Box; it takes less than a minute over bootynet. All the little tales anyone has ever scratched into that logbook stream back into my laptop, perfectly processed.

Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

This sort of thing never works perfectly at first. I pipe the raw text into the visualization and it looks like Jackson Pollock got his hands on my prototype. There are splotches of data everywhere, blobs of pink and green and yellow, all harsh arcade-game hues.

The first thing I do is change the palette. Earth tones, please.

Now: I’m dealing with too much information here. I only want to see who borrowed what. Kat’s analysis was smart enough to tag names and titles and times in the text, and the visualization knows how to plot those, so I link data to display and I see something familiar: a swarm of colored lights bouncing through the shelves, each one representing a customer. These, though, are customers from years ago.

It doesn’t look like much — just a colorful mess migrating through the Waybacklist. Then, on a hunch, I connect the dots, so it’s not a swarm but a set of constellations. Every customer leaves a trail, a drunken zigzag through the shelves. The shortest constellation, rendered in red clay, makes a tiny Z, just four data points. The longest, in dark moss, curves around the whole width of the store in a long jagged oval.

It still doesn’t look like much. I give the 3-D bookstore a push with the trackpad and set it spinning on its axes. I stand up to stretch my legs. On the other side of the desk, I pick up one of the Dashiell Hammetts, untouched by anyone since I noticed them that first day in the store. That’s sad. I mean, seriously: shelves full of gibberish get all the attention while The Maltese Falcon gathers dust? It’s beyond sad. It’s stupid. I should start looking for a different job. This place will drive me nuts.

When I come back to the desk, the bookstore is still spinning, whirling like a carousel … and something strange is happening. Once every rotation, the dark moss constellation snaps into focus. For just a moment, it makes a picture and — it can’t be. I smack my hand on the trackpad, slow the model to a halt, and bring it back around. The dark moss constellation makes a clear picture. The other constellations fit, too. None of them are as complete as the dark moss, but they follow the curve of a chin, the slope of an eye. When the model is lined up straight, as if I were peering in from the front door — very close to where I’m sitting right now — the constellations come to life. They make a face.

It’s Penumbra.

The bell tinkles and he walks into the store trailed by a long coil of fog. I’m tongue-tied, with no idea how to begin. I’m faced with two Penumbras at once: one, a mute staring wire-frame on my laptop screen, and the other, an old man in the doorway just starting to smile.

“Good morning, my boy,” he says cheerily. “Did anything of note transpire in the night?”

For a moment, I strongly consider closing my laptop’s lid and never speaking of this again. But no: I’m too curious. I can’t just sit at my desk and let this web of weirdness spin out around me. (That describes a lot of jobs, I realize, but this is potentially a special kind of magick-with-a-k weirdness.)

“What do you have there?” he asks. “Have you begun work on our website?”

I swivel my laptop around to show him. “Not exactly.”

Half-smiling, he holds his glasses at an angle and peers down at the screen. His face goes slack, and then he says, quietly: “The Founder.” He turns to me. “You solved it.” He claps a hand to his forehead and his face splits into a giddy smile. “You solved it already! Look at him! Right there on the screen!”

Look at him? Isn’t this— Oh. I realize now, with Penumbra leaning in close, that I have made the common mistake of assuming that all old people look the same. The wire-frame portrait on the screen has Penumbra’s nose, but its mouth is a tiny curving bow. Penumbra’s is flat and wide, built for grinning.

“How did you do it?” he continues. He’s so proud, like I’m his grandson and I just hit a home run, or cured cancer. “I must see your notes! Did you use Euler’s method? Or the Brito inversion? There is no shame in that, it clears away much of the confusion early on…”

“Mr. Penumbra,” I say, triumph in my voice, “I scanned an old logbook—” Then I realize this carries a larger implication, so I stutter and confess, “Well, I took an old logbook. Borrowed it. Temporarily.”

Penumbra crinkles his eyes. “Oh, I know, my boy,” he says, not unkindly. He pauses. “Your simulacrum smelled strongly of coffee.”

Right, so: “I borrowed an old logbook, and we scanned it”—his face changes and suddenly he’s concerned, like instead of curing cancer, maybe I have it—“because Google has this machine, it’s superfast, and Hadoop, it just goes — I mean, a thousand computers, like that!” I snap for emphasis. I don’t think he has any idea what I’m talking about. “Anyway, the point is, we just pulled out the data. Automatically.”

There’s a tremor in Penumbra’s micromuscles. Close-up like this, I’m reminded that he is, in fact, very old.

“Google,” he breathes. There’s a long pause. “How curious.” He straightens. He has the strangest expression on his face — the emotive equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND. Talking mostly to himself, he says, “I will have to make a report.”

Wait, what kind of report? Are we talking about a police report? Grand theft codex? “Mr. Penumbra, is there a problem? I don’t understand why—”

“Oh, yes, I know,” he says sharply, and his eyes flash at me. “I see it now. You cheated — would that be fair to say? And as a result, you have no idea what you have accomplished.”

I look down at the desk. That would be fair to say.

When I look back up at Penumbra, his gaze has softened. “And yet … you did it all the same.” He turns and wanders into the Waybacklist. “How curious.”

“Who is it?” I ask suddenly. “Whose face?”

“It is the Founder,” Penumbra says, running a long hand up along one of the shelves. “The one who waits, hiding. He vexes novices for years. Years! And yet you revealed him in — what? A single month?”

Not quite: “Just one day.”

Penumbra takes a sharp breath. His eyes flash again. They are pulled wide and, reflecting the light from the windows, they crackle electric blue in a way I’ve never seen. He gasps, “Incredible.” He takes a breath, a deeper one. He looks rattled and exhilarated; actually, he looks a little crazy. “I have work to do,” he says. “I must make plans. Go home, my boy.”

“But—”

“Go home. Whether you understand it or not, you have done something important today.”

He turns and walks deeper into the dark and dusty shelves, talking quietly to himself. I gather up my laptop and my messenger bag and I slip out the front door. The bell makes just the barest tinkle. I glance back through the tall windows, and, behind the curving golden type, Penumbra has disappeared.

WHY DO YOU LOVE BOOKS SO MUCH?

WHEN I RETURN THE NEXT NIGHT, I see something I’ve never seen before, something that makes me gasp and stop in my tracks:

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is dark.

It looks all wrong. The store is always open, always awake, like a little lighthouse on this seedy stretch of Broadway. But now the lamps are doused and there is a tidy square of paper stuck to the inside of the front door. In Penumbra’s spidery script, it says:

I don’t have a key to the store, because I’ve never needed one. It’s always been a handoff — Penumbra to Oliver, Oliver to me, me to Penumbra. For a moment I am furious, full of selfish rage. What the hell? When will it open again? Wasn’t I supposed to get an email or something? This is a pretty irresponsible thing for an employer to do.

But then I get worried. This morning’s encounter was well beyond the pale. What if it got Penumbra so worked up that he suffered a tiny heart attack? Or a massive heart attack? What if he’s dead? Or what if he’s weeping to himself in a lonely apartment somewhere, where his family never visits him because Grandpa Penumbra is weird and smells like books? A flood of shame washes through my blood and mixes with the anger and they swirl together into a heavy soup that makes me feel sick.

I walk to the liquor store on the corner to get some chips.

For the next twenty minutes, I stand on the curb, dumbly munching Fritos and wiping my hand on my pants leg, not sure what to do next. Should I go home and come back tomorrow? Should I look Penumbra up in the phone book and try to call him? Scratch that. I know without checking that Penumbra will not be in the phone book, and besides, I don’t actually know where to find one of those.

I’m standing there, trying to imagine some clever course of action, when I see a familiar figure come gliding up the street. It’s not Penumbra; he doesn’t glide. This is — it’s Ms. Lapin. I duck behind a trash can (why did I just duck behind a trash can?) and watch her scoot toward the store, gasp when she reaches a range at which she can detect its dereliction, then swoop in close to the front door, where she stretches up on tiptoe to inspect the CLOSED (AD LIBRIS) sign, nose pressed to the glass, no doubt auguring deep meaning in those three words.

Then she glances furtively up and down the street, and when the pale oval of her face swivels this way, I see a look of tight-drawn fear. She turns and glides back the way she came.

I drop my Fritos in the trash can and follow her.

Lapin breaks away from Broadway and picks a path toward Telegraph Hill. Her velocity is steady, even as the landscape rises underneath her; she’s the little eccentric that could. I’m huffing and puffing, quick-stepping a block behind her, struggling to keep up. The nozzle head of Coit Tower rises on the hill high above us, a spindly gray cutout against the deeper darkness of the sky. Midway along a narrow street that curves up around the contour of the hill, Lapin disappears.

I sprint to the spot where she last stood and there I find a skinny stone staircase set into the hillside, running like an alleyway between the houses, cutting steeply upward under a scrim of branches. Lapin is somehow already halfway up.

I try to call out after her—“Ms. Lapin!”—but I’m too winded and it comes out as a wheeze. So I cough and grunt and lean into the hill and follow her up.

It’s quiet on the staircase. The only light comes from tiny windows set high in the houses on either side; it spills out into the branches above, heavy with dark plums. Up ahead, there’s a loud rustle and a chorus of squawks. In another moment a flock of wild parrots, roused from their perches, comes barnstorming down the tree-lined tube into the open night air. Wingtips brush the top of my head.

Up ahead, there’s a sharp click and a creak and then a crack of light widens into a square. My quarry’s shadow passes through it, and then it closes tight. Rosemary Lapin is home.

I make it to the landing and sit on a step to catch my breath. This lady has serious stamina. Maybe she’s light, with bones like a bird. Maybe she’s slightly buoyant. I look back down the way we came, and through the lace of black branches I can see the lights of the city far below.

Dishes clink and clatter inside. I knock on Ms. Lapin’s door.

There’s a long conspicuous silence. “Ms. Lapin?” I call. “It’s Clay, from, uh, from the bookstore. The clerk. I just wanted to ask you about something.” Or maybe about everything.

The silence stretches out. “Ms. Lapin?”

I watch a shadow break the bar of light below the door. It hovers there — then the lock rattles and Ms. Lapin peeks out. “Hello,” she says sweetly.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit — low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books. It is small but not uncomfortable; the air smells strongly of cinnamon and weakly of pot. There is a high-backed chair that faces a tidy fireplace.

Lapin is not sitting in the chair. She is instead backed into the corner of her ship’s-galley kitchen, as far as she can get from me while still being in the same room. I think she would climb out the window if she could reach it.

“Ms. Lapin,” I say, “I need to get in touch with Mr. Penumbra.”

“How about some tea?” she says. “Yes, some tea, and then you’ll be on your way.” She fiddles with a heavy brass teapot. “Busy night for a young one, I suppose, plenty of places to go, people to see—”

“Actually, I’m supposed to be working.”

Her hands shake on the stovetop. “Of course, well, plenty of jobs to be had, don’t fret—”

“I don’t need a job!” More gently, I say, “Ms. Lapin, really. I just need to get in touch with Mr. Penumbra.”

Lapin pauses, but only barely. “There are so many professions. You could be a baker, a taxidermist, a ferryboat captain…” Then she turns, and I think it’s the first time she’s ever looked straight at me. Her eyes are gray-green. “Mr. Penumbra has gone away.”

“So when is he coming back?”

Lapin says nothing, just looks at me, then slowly turns to tend the teapot, which has started to shudder and hiss on top of her tiny stove. A glittering compound of curiosity and dread oozes into my brain. Time to go for broke.

I pull out my laptop, which is probably the most advanced piece of technology that has ever crossed the threshold of Lapin’s lair, and set it up on a stack of heavy books, all from the Waybacklist. The shiny MacBook looks like a hapless alien trying to blend in with the quiet stalwarts of human civilization. I crack it open — glowing alien guts revealed! — and cue the visualization as Lapin crosses the room with two cups in two saucers.

When her eye catches the screen and she recognizes the bookstore in 3-D, she crash-lands the saucers onto the table with a clatter. Clasping her hands together beneath her chin, she bends in low and watches the wire-frame face take shape.

She squeaks, “You found him!”

Lapin spreads a wide scroll of thin, almost translucent paper on the table, now cleared of books. It’s my turn to gape: it is a view of the bookstore, rendered in gray pencil, and it, too, shows a web of lines connecting spaces on the shelves. But it’s incomplete; in fact, it’s barely started. You can see the curve of a chin and the hook of a nose, but nothing else. Those lines, dark and sure, are surrounded by the fuzz of eraser marks — a layered history of ghost lines that have been drawn and removed many times.

How long, I wonder, has Lapin been working on this?

Her face tells the tale. Her cheeks are trembling, like she’s on the verge of tears. “That is why,” she says, glancing back at my laptop. “That is why Mr. Penumbra went. Oh, what have you done? How did you do that?”

“Computers,” I tell her. “Big ones.”

Lapin makes a sigh and finally surrenders to her chair. “This is terrible,” she says. “After all that work.”

“Ms. Lapin,” I say, “what were you working on? What is this all about?”

Lapin closes her eyes and says, “I am forbidden to speak of it.” She sneaks a peek with one eye. I am quiet, open-faced, trying to look as harmless as possible. She sighs again. “But Mr. Penumbra did like you. He liked you a great deal.”

I don’t like the sound of the past tense here. Lapin stretches for her tea but can’t quite reach it, so I lift the cup and saucer and hand them to her.

“And it feels good to talk about it,” she continues, “after so many years of reading, reading, reading.” She pauses and sips her tea. “You will speak of this to no one?”

I shake my head. No one.

“Very well,” she says. She takes a deep breath. “I am a novice in a fellowship known as the Unbroken Spine. It is more than five hundred years old.” Then, primly: “As old as books themselves.”

Wow. Lapin, just a novice? She must be eighty years old.

“How did you get started?” I venture.

“I was one of his customers,” she says. “I had been going to the store for, oh, six or seven years. I was paying for a book one day — I remember this so clearly — when Mr. Penumbra looked me in the eye and said, ‘Rosemary’”—she does a good Penumbra impression—“‘Rosemary, why do you love books so much?’

“And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’” She’s animated, almost girlish now: “‘I suppose I love them because they’re quiet, and I can take them to the park.’” She narrows her eyes. “He watched me, and he didn’t say a word. So then I said, ‘Well, actually, I love books because books are my best friends.’ Then he smiled — he has a wonderful smile — and he walked over and got on that ladder, and climbed higher than I’d ever seen him climb.”

Of course. I get it: “He gave you a book from the Waybacklist.”

“What did you call it?”

“Oh, the — you know, the shelves in back. The code books.”

“They are codex vitae,” she says, pronouncing it precisely. “Yes, Mr. Penumbra gave me one, and he gave me the key to decode it. But he said it was the only key he would ever give me. I would have to find the next on my own, and the next after that.” Lapin frowns a little. “He said it wouldn’t take long to become one of the unbound, but it’s been very difficult for me.”

Wait: “The unbound?”

“There are three orders,” Lapin says, and ticks them off on thin fingers: “Novice, unbound, and bound. To become one of the unbound, you solve the Founder’s Puzzle. It’s the store, you see. You go from one book to another, decoding each one, finding the key to the next. They’re all shelved in a particular way. It’s like a tangle of string.”

I get it: “That’s the puzzle I solved.”

She nods once, frowns, and sips her tea. Then, as if suddenly remembering: “You know, I was a computer programmer once.”

No way.

“Back when they were big and gray, like elephants. Oh, it was hard work. We were the first to do it.”

Amazing. “Where was this?”

“Pacific Bell, just down on Sutter Street”—she waves a finger toward downtown—“back when the telephone was still very high-tech.” She grins and flutters her eyelashes theatrically. “I was a very modern young woman, you know.”

Oh, I believe it.

“But it’s been such a long time since I used a machine like that. It never even crossed my mind to do what you did. Oh, even though this”—she waves a hand at the heap of books and papers—“has been such a chore. Struggling from one book to the next. Some of the stories are good, but others…” She sighs.

There’s a clatter of footfalls outside, a bright chorus of squawks, and then a fast knocking at the door. Lapin’s eyes go wide. The knocking doesn’t stop. The door is vibrating.

Lapin pushes herself up out of her chair and turns the knob and there is Tyndall, eyes wide, hair wild, standing with one hand on his head, the other poised in mid-knock.

“He’s gone!” he cries, careening into the room. “Called to the library! How can it be?” He’s pacing in quick circles, repeating himself, a coil of nervous energy coming unspun. His eyes glance over to me, but he doesn’t stop or slow down. “He’s gone! Penumbra is gone!”

“Maurice, Maurice, calm down,” Lapin says. She steers him into her chair, where he collapses, squirming and fidgeting.

“What will we do? What can we do? What must we do? With Penumbra gone…” Tyndall trails off, then cocks his head toward me: “Can you run the store?”

“Wait, hold on,” I say. “He’s not dead. He’s just — didn’t you just say he’s visiting a library?”

The look on Tyndall’s face tells a different tale. “He’s not coming back,” he says, shaking his head. “Not coming back, not coming back.”

That compound — more dread than curiosity now — is spreading into my stomach. It’s a bad feeling.

“Heard it from Imbert, who heard it from Monsef. Corvina is angry. Penumbra will be burned. Burned! This is the end for me! The end for you!” He waves a finger at Rosemary Lapin. Now her cheeks are trembling.

I don’t understand this at all. “What do you mean, Mr. Penumbra will be burned?”

Tyndall says, “Not the man, the book — his book! Just as bad, even worse. Better flesh than page. They will burn his book, just like Saunders, Moffat, Don Alejandro, the enemies of the Unbroken Spine. He, him, Glencoe, the worst — he had a dozen novices! All of them abandoned, lost.” He looks at me with damp, desperate eyes, and blurts, “I was almost finished!”

I really have gotten myself involved in a cult.

“Mr. Tyndall,” I say flatly, “where is it? Where is this library?”

Tyndall shakes his head. “Don’t know. Just a novice. Now never will, never will … unless.” He looks up. There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and he says it again: “Can you run the store?”

I cannot run the store, but I can use it. Thanks to Tyndall, I know Penumbra is in trouble somewhere, and I know it’s my fault. I don’t understand how or why, but it was undeniably me that sent Penumbra packing, and now I’m truly worried about him. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people — Scientology for scholarly seniors. If that’s true, then Penumbra is already deep in its clutches. So, enough poking around and gently guessing: I am going to raid Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for the answers I need.

But first I have to get inside.

It’s the middle of the next day, and I am standing on Broadway, shivering, contemplating the plate-glass windows, when Oliver Grone is suddenly standing beside me. Jeez, he’s quiet for such a big dude.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

I eye him carefully. What if Oliver has already been inducted into this cult?

“Why are you standing out here?” he asks. “It’s cold.”

No. He’s like me; he’s an outsider. But maybe he’s an outsider with a key.

He shakes his head. “The door’s never been locked. I always just walk in and take Mr. Penumbra’s place, you know?”

Right, and I take Oliver’s. But now Penumbra is missing. “Now we’re stuck out here.”

“Well. We could try the fire escape.”

Twenty minutes later, Oliver and I are using climbing muscles honed in Penumbra’s shadowy stacks. We have a utility ladder purchased at a hardware store five blocks away, and it’s set up in the narrow alley between the bookstore and the strip club.

A skinny bartender from Booty’s is back here, too, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket, sucking on a cigarette. He eyes us once, then returns to his phone. He appears to be playing Fruit Ninja.

Oliver goes first while I hold the ladder, and then I climb up after him on my own. This is all foreign territory. I had abstractly understood that this alley existed, and that there was a fire escape in it, but I still don’t understand where the fire escape connects to the store. There’s a whole back part of Penumbra’s where I do not often tread. Beyond the bright front shelves and the dark reaches of the Waybacklist, there’s a tiny break room with a tiny table and a tiny bathroom, and beyond that, the door marked PRIVATE that leads to Penumbra’s office. I take this injunction seriously, just as I took rule number two (regarding the sanctitude of the Waybacklist) seriously, at least until Mat got involved.

“Yeah, the door leads to a flight of stairs,” Oliver says. “They go up.” We are both standing on the fire escape, which makes a high metallic whine when either of us shifts our weight. There’s a wide window, old glass set into scratched and pitted wood. I pull and it doesn’t budge. Oliver bends down, makes a quiet grad-student grunt, and it flies open with a pop and a shriek. I glance down at the bartender in the alley. He’s ignoring us with the discipline of one whose job often requires it.

We hop through the window frame and into the darkness of Penumbra’s second-floor study.

There is grunting and shuffling and a loud whispered ouch, and then Oliver finds a switch. Orange light blooms from a lamp set on a long desk, revealing the space around us.

Penumbra is a much bigger nerd than he lets on.

The desk is loaded down with computers, none of them manufactured later than 1987. There’s an old TRS-80 connected to a squat brown TV. There’s an oblong Atari and an IBM PC with a bright blue plastic case. There are long boxes full of floppy disks and stacks of thick manuals, their titles printed in boxy letters:

Next to the PC there is a long metal box topped with two rubber cups. Next to the box is an old rotary phone with a long, curving handset. I think the box is a modem, possibly the world’s most ancient; when you’re ready to go online, you plug the handset into those rubber cups, as if the computer is literally making a phone call. I’ve never seen one in person, only in snarky can-you-believe-this-is-how-it-used-to-work blog posts. I’m floored, because this means Penumbra has, at some point in his life, tiptoed into cyberspace.

On the wall behind the desk there’s a world map, very big and very old. On this map there is no Kenya, no Zimbabwe, no India. Alaska is a blank expanse. There are gleaming pins pushed into the paper. Pins poke London, Paris, and Berlin. Pins poke Saint Petersburg, Cairo, and Tehran. There are more — and these must be the bookstores, the little libraries.

While Oliver rummages through a stack of papers, I power up the PC. The switch flips over with a loud thwack and the computer rumbles to life. It sounds like an airplane taking off; there’s a loud roar, then a screech, then a staccato sequence of beeps. Oliver jerks around.

“What are you doing?” he whispers.

“Looking for clues, same as you.” I don’t know why he’s whispering.

“But what if there’s weird stuff on there?” he says, still whispering. “Like porn.”

The computer musters a command-line prompt. This is okay; I can figure this out. When you work on websites, you interact with far-off servers in ways that have not really changed much since 1987, so I think back to NewBagel and tap in a few exploratory instructions.

“Oliver,” I say absently, “have you done any digital archaeology?”

“No,” he says, doubled over a set of drawers. “I don’t really mess with anything newer than the twelfth century.”

The PC’s tiny disk is full of text files, inscrutably named. When I inspect one, it’s a jumble of characters. So that either means it’s raw data, or it’s encrypted, or … yes. This is one of the books from the Waybacklist, one of the books that Lapin called a codex vitae. I think Penumbra transcribed it into his PC.

There’s a program called EULERMETHOD. I key it in, take a deep breath, press return … and the PC beeps in protest. In bright green text, it tells me there are errors in the code — lots of them. The program won’t run. Maybe it never ran.

“Look at this,” Oliver says from across the room.

He’s leaning over a thick book on top of a filing cabinet. The cover is leather, embossed just like the logbooks, and it says PECUNIA. Maybe it’s a private logbook for all the really juicy details of the book business. But no: when Oliver flips it open, the book’s purpose is revealed. It’s a ledger, each page cut into two wide columns and dozens of narrow rows, each row carrying an entry in Penumbra’s spidery script:

Oliver flips through the pages of the ledger. The entries go month by month, and they go back decades. So there’s our patron: the Festina Lente Company must connect to Corvina somehow.

Oliver Grone is a trained excavator. While I was playing hacker, he’s been finding something useful. I follow his lead, moving around the room step-by-step, looking for clues.

There’s another low cabinet. On top: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a wrinkled Publishers Weekly from 1993, a Burmese take-out menu. Inside: paper, pencils, rubber bands, a stapler.

There’s a coatrack, empty except for a thin gray scarf. I’ve seen Penumbra wear it before.

There are photos in black frames on the far wall, next to the stairs that lead down. One shows the store itself, but it must be decades old: it’s black-and-white, and the street looks different. Instead of Booty’s next door, there’s a restaurant called Arigoni’s, with candles and checkered tablecloths. Another photo, this one in Kodachrome color, shows a pretty middle-aged woman with bobbed blond hair hugging a redwood tree, one heel kicked up, beaming at the camera.

The last photo shows three men posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. One is older, with the look of a professor: a sharp hook of a nose and a wry, winning grin. The other two are much younger. One is broad-chested and thick-armed, like an old-school bodybuilder. He has a black mustache and a steeply receding hairline, and with one arm he’s giving the camera a thumbs-up. His other arm is draped around the shoulders of the third man, who’s tall and skinny, with— Wait. The third man is Penumbra. Yes, he is long-ago Penumbra, with a halo of brown hair and flesh on his cheeks. He’s smiling. He looks so young.

I crack open the frame and pull out the photo. On the back, in Penumbra’s script, there’s a caption:

Amazing. The older man must be Al-Asmari, and that makes the one with the mustache Corvina, who is now Penumbra’s boss, CEO of Weird Bookstores Worldwide, which might be the Festina Lente Company. It’s got to be this Corvina who summoned Penumbra back to the library to be punished or fired or burned or worse. He’s hale and hearty in this photo, but he must be as old as Penumbra now. He must be a cruel skeleton.

“Look at this!” Oliver calls again from across the room. He is definitely better at detective work than I am. First the ledger, and now this: he holds up an Amtrak timetable, freshly printed. He spreads it out on the desk, and there it is, boxed by four sharp strokes — our employer’s destination.

Penn Station.

Penumbra is going to New York City.

EMPIRES

THE SCENARIO as I see it goes like this:

The bookstore is closed. Penumbra is gone, recalled by his boss, Corvina, to the secret library that is actually the headquarters of the bibliophile cult known as the Unbroken Spine. Something is going to be burned. The library is in New York City, but nobody knows where — not yet.

Oliver Grone is going to climb in through the fire escape and run the store for at least a few hours every day to keep Tyndall and the rest all satisfied. Maybe Oliver can learn a little more about the Unbroken Spine along the way.

As for me: I have my quest. The arrival time on the other end of Penumbra’s train — of course he would take the train — is still two days in the future. Right now he’s chugging through the middle of the country, and if I work fast, I can head him off at the pass. Yes: I can intercept him and rescue him. I can set things right and get my job back. I can find out what exactly is going on.

I tell Kat about all of it, as I am becoming accustomed to doing. It feels like loading a really hard math problem into a computer. I just key in all the variables, push return, and:

“It won’t work,” she says. “Penumbra is an old man. I get the feeling this thing has been part of his life for a long time. I mean, it basically is his life, right?”

“Right, so—”

“So I don’t think you’ll get him to just … quit. Like, I’ve been at Google for, what, three years? That’s hardly a lifetime. But even now you couldn’t just meet me at the train station and tell me to turn around. This company is the most important part of my life. It’s the most important part of me. I’d walk right past you.”

She’s right, and it’s disconcerting, both because it means I’ll need a new plan and because, while I can recognize the truth in what she’s saying, it doesn’t actually make any sense to me. I’ve never felt that way about a job (or a cult). You could stop me at the train station and talk me into anything.

“But I think you should absolutely go to New York,” Kat says.

“Okay, now I’m confused.”

“This is too interesting not to pursue. What’s the alternative? Find another job and spend forever wondering what happened to your old boss?”

“Well, that’s definitely plan B—”

“Your first instinct was right. You’ve just got to be more”—she pauses and purses her lips—“strategic. And you’ve got to take me with you.” She grins. Obviously. How can I say no?

“Google has a big New York office,” Kat says, “and I’ve never been there, so I’ll just say I want to go meet the team. My manager will be fine with that. What about you?”

What about me? I have a quest and I have an ally. Now all I need is a patron.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader. Neel Shah has plenty of friends — investors, employees, other entrepreneurs — but on some level they know, and he knows, that they are friends with Neel Shah, CEO. By contrast, I am, and always will be, friends with Neel Shah, dungeon master.

It is Neel who will be my patron.

His home serves double duty as his company’s headquarters. Back when San Francisco was young, Neel’s place was a wide brick firehouse; today, it’s a wide brick techno-loft with fancy speakers and superfast internet. Neel’s company spreads out on the firehouse floor, where nineteenth-century firemen used to eat nineteenth-century chili and tell nineteenth-century jokes. They’ve been replaced by a squad of skinny young men who are their opposite: men who wear delicate neon sneakers, not heavy black boots, and when they shake your hand, it’s not a meaty squash but a limp slither. Most of them have accents — maybe that hasn’t changed?

Neel finds programming prodigies, brings them to San Francisco, and assimilates them. These are Neel’s guys, and the greatest of them is Igor, who is nineteen and comes from Belarus. To hear Neel tell it, Igor taught himself matrix math on the back of a shovel, ruled the Minsk hacker scene as a sixteen-year-old, and would have proceeded directly to a perilous career in software piracy if Neel hadn’t spotted his 3-D handiwork in a demo video posted on YouTube. Neel got him a visa, bought him a plane ticket, and had a desk waiting at the firehouse when he arrived. Next to the desk there was a sleeping bag.

Igor offers me his chair and goes in search of his employer.

The walls, all thick timber and exposed brick, are covered with giant posters of classic women: Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, all printed in shimmering black-and-white. Monitors continue the theme. On some screens, the women are blown up and pixelated; on others, they’re repeated a dozen times. Igor’s monitor shows Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, except half of her is a sketchy 3-D model, a green wire-frame that slinks across the screen in sync with the film.

Neel made his millions in middleware. That is to say, he makes software that’s used by other people who make software, mostly video games. He sells tools that they need the same way a painter needs a palette or a filmmaker needs a camera. He sells tools they cannot do without — tools they will pay top dollar for.

I’ll cut to the chase: Neel Shah is the world’s leading expert on boob physics.

He developed the first version of his breakthrough boob-simulation software while he was still a sophomore at Berkeley, and shortly after that he licensed it to a Korean company that was developing a 3-D beach volleyball game. The game was terrible but the boobs were phenomenal.

Today, that software — now called Anatomix — is the de facto tool for the simulation and representation of breasts in digital media. It’s a sprawling package that lets you create and model, with breathtaking realism, the entire universe of human boobs. One module provides variables for size, shape, authenticity. (Breasts aren’t spheres, Neel will tell you, and they’re not water balloons. They’re complicated structures, almost architectural.) Another module renders the breasts — paints them with pixels. It’s a particular kind of skin, with a quality that’s luminous and very hard to achieve. Something called subsurface scattering is involved.

If you are in the business of simulating a boob, Neel’s software is the only serious option. It does more than that — thanks to Igor’s exertions, Anatomix can now render the entire human body, with perfectly calibrated jiggle and luminosity in places you didn’t realize you had either — but boobs are still the company’s bread and butter.

Really, I think Igor and the rest of Neel’s guys are just in the translation business. The inputs — pinned to the walls, glowing on every screen — are specific world-historic movie babes. The outputs are generalized models and algorithms. And it’s gone full circle: Neel will tell you, in strictest secrecy, that his software is now being used in movie postproduction.

Neel comes quick-stepping down the spiral staircase, waving and grinning. Below his molecule-tight gray T-shirt, he’s wearing deeply uncool stonewashed jeans and bright New Balances with puffy white tongues. You can never escape the sixth grade entirely.

“Neel,” I explain when he pulls up a chair, “I need to go to New York tomorrow.”

“What’s up? A job?”

No, the opposite of a job: “My elderly employer has disappeared and I’m trying to track him down.”

“I am so not surprised,” Neel says, eyes narrowing.

“You were right,” I say. Warlocks.

“Let’s hear it.” He settles in.

Igor reappears and I relinquish his chair, standing to make my case. I tell Neel what has emerged. I explain it like the setup for a Rockets & Warlocks adventure: the backstory, the characters, the quest before us. The party is forming, I say: I have a rogue (that’s me) and a wizard (that’s Kat). Now I need a warrior. (Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?)

Neel’s eyes light up. I knew this would be the right rhetorical strategy. Next, I show him the 3-D bookstore, with the wrinkled and mysterious Founder angling into view.

He lifts his eyebrows. He’s impressed. “I didn’t know you could code,” he says. His eyes narrow and his biceps pulse. He’s thinking. Finally, he says, “You want to give this to one of my guys here? Igor, take a look—”

“Neel, no. The graphics don’t matter.”

Igor leans over anyway. “I tink it looks nice,” he says good-naturedly. On the screen behind him, Cleopatra bats wire-frame eyelashes.

“Neel, I just need to fly to New York. Tomorrow.” I give him the knowing eye of friendship. “And Neel … I need a warrior.”

He scrunches up his face. “I don’t think so … I have a lot of work to do here.”

“But this is a Rockets & Warlocks scenario. You called it. How many times did we invent something like this? Now it’s real.”

“I know, but we have a big release coming up, and—”

I make my voice low: “Do not wuss out now, Nilric Quarter-Blood.”

That’s a stab in the belly with a rogue’s poison dagger and we both know it.

“Neel … reek?” Igor repeats wonderingly. Neel glowers at me.

“The plane has Wi-Fi,” I say. “These guys won’t miss you.” I turn to Igor: “Will they?”

The Babbage of Belarus grins and shakes his head.

When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I’d actually meet one, but that’s only because I didn’t realize wizards were going to walk among us and we’d just call them Googlers. Now I’m in a hot girl wizard’s bedroom and we’re sitting on her bed, trying to solve an impossible problem.

Kat has convinced me that we’ll never be able to catch Penumbra at Penn Station. There’s too much surface area, she says — too many ways Penumbra can get off the train and up to the street. She has math to prove this. There’s an 11 percent chance we’ll spot him, and if we fail, he’ll be lost for good. What we need instead is a bottleneck.

The best bottleneck, of course, would be the library itself. But where does the Unbroken Spine make its home? Tyndall doesn’t know. Lapin doesn’t know. Nobody knows.

Intensive googling reveals no website and no address for the Festina Lente Company. There are no mentions in newspapers, magazines, or classified ads going back a century. These guys don’t just fly under the radar; they’re subterranean.

But it has to be a real place, right? — a place with a front door. Is it marked? I’m thinking about the bookstore. On the front windows, there’s Penumbra’s name, and there’s that symbol, the same one that’s on the logbook and ledger. Two hands, open like a book. I have a picture of it on my phone.

“Good idea,” Kat says. “If a building has that symbol anywhere — on a window, carved into stone — we can find it.”

“What, by conducting a complete sidewalk survey of Manhattan? That would take, like, five years.”

“Twenty-three, actually,” Kat says. “If we did it the old-fashioned way.”

She pulls her laptop across the sheets and shakes it to life. “But guess what we have in Google Street View? Pictures of every building in Manhattan.”

“So subtract the walking time, and now it’ll only take us — thirteen years?”

“You’ve got to start thinking differently,” Kat clucks, shaking her head. “This is one of the things you learn at Google. Stuff that used to be hard … just isn’t hard anymore.”

I still don’t understand how computers can help us with this particular species of problem.

“Well, what about hu-mans-and-com-pu-ters,” Kat says, her voice pitched like a cartoon robot, “work-ing-to-ge-ther?” Her fingers fly across the keyboard and there are commands I recognize: King Hadoop’s army is on the march again. She switches her voice back to normal: “We can use Hadoop to read pages in a book, right? So we can use it to read signs on buildings, too.”

Of course.

“But it will make mistakes,” she says. “Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand.”

“So we’re down to five days instead of five years.”

“Wrong!” Kat says. “Because guess what — we have ten thousand friends. It’s called”—she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen—“Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians.”

She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable.

“What do I keep telling you?” Kat says. “We have these new capabilities now — nobody gets it.” She shakes her head and says it again: “Nobody gets it.”

Now I make my voice into a cartoon robot, too: “The-Sin-gu-la-ri-ty-is-near!”

Kat laughs and moves symbols around on her screen. A big red number in the corner tells us that 30,347 workers are waiting to do our bidding.

“Hu-man-girl-very-beau-ti-ful!” I tickle Kat’s ribs and make her click the wrong box; she shoves me with her elbow and keeps working. While I watch, she queues up thousands of photos of Manhattan addresses. There are brownstones, skyscrapers, parking structures, public schools, storefronts — all captured by the Google Street View trucks, all flagged by a computer as maybe, possibly, containing a book made from two hands, although in most cases (actually, in all but one) it’s just something that the computer has mistaken for the Unbroken Spine’s symbol: two hands in prayer, an ornate Gothic letter, a cartoon drawing of a twisty brown pretzel.

Then she sends the images off to Mechanical Turk — a whole army of eager souls lined up at laptops around the world — along with my reference photo and a simple question: Do these match? Yes or no?

On her screen, a little yellow timer says the task will take twenty-three minutes.

I can see what Kat is talking about: this really is intoxicating. I mean, King Hadoop’s computer army was one thing, but this is real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians.

“Oh, hey, guess what?” Kat says suddenly, a jolt of excitement animating her face. “They’re going to announce the new Product Management soon.”

“Wow. Good luck?”

“Well, you know, it’s not completely random. I mean, it’s partially random. But there’s also, like — it’s an algorithm. And I asked Raj to put in a good word for me. With the algorithm.”

Of course. So this means two things: (1) Pepper the chef will, in fact, never be chosen to lead the company; and (2) if Google doesn’t put this girl in charge, I’m going to switch to some other search engine.

We stretch out side by side on Kat’s squishy spaceship bed, our legs interlaced, commanding more people now than there are in the town where I was born. She is Queen Kat Potente with her instant empire and I am her loyal consort. We won’t command them all for long, but hey: nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment — maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

The laptop makes a low chime, and Kat rolls over to tap at the keyboard. Still breathing hard, she grins and lifts the laptop onto her belly to show me the result of this great human-computer concord, this collaboration between a thousand machines, ten times as many humans, and one very smart girl:

It is a washed-out picture of a low stone building, not really more than a big house. Blurry figures are caught crossing the sidewalk in front of it; one of them has a pink fanny pack. The house has iron bars over small windows and a dark shadowed entryway under a black awning. And etched into the stone, gray against gray, there it is: two hands, open like a book.

It’s tiny — they aren’t any bigger than real hands. You’d probably miss it, just walking by on the sidewalk. The building is on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park, just down the street from the Guggenheim.

The Unbroken Spine is hiding in plain sight.