Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

EPILOGUE

SO WHAT’S GOING to happen after that?

Neel Shah, dungeon master, will succeed in his quest to sell his company to Google. Kat will make a pitch to the PM, and they’ll go for it. They will acquire Anatomix, rebrand it Google Body, and release a new version of the software that anybody can download for free. The boobs will still be the best part.

After that, Neel will finally be rich beyond measure, and he will come into the fullness of his patronage. First, the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts will get an endowment, an office, and an executive director: Tabitha Trudeau. She will fill the firehouse floor with drawings, paintings, textiles, and tapestries, all the work of female artists, all scavenged from Con-U, and then she will begin to give out grants. Big ones.

Next, Neel will lure Mat Mittelbrand away from ILM, and together they will start a production company that uses pixels, polygons, knives, and glue. Neel will buy the movie rights to The Dragon-Song Chronicles. After the Anatomix acquisition, he will immediately hire Igor back from Google and install him as lead programmer at Half-Blood Studios. He will be planning a trilogy in 3-D. Mat will direct.

Kat will climb the ranks of the PM. First she’ll bring Google the decoded memoir of Aldus Manutius, which will become the cornerstone of a new Lost Books project. The New York Times will blog about it. Next, the acquisition of Anatomix and the popularity of Google Body will give her even more momentum. She’ll have her picture printed in Wired, a whole glossy half page, standing under the huge data visualization screens, hands on her hips, blazer hanging loosely over her bright red BAM! T-shirt.

I will realize then that she never stopped wearing it after all.

Oliver Grone will complete his doctorate in archaeology. He will find a job immediately, and not with a museum, but with the company that operates the Accession Table. He will be given the task of recategorizing every marble artifact made before 200 B.C., and he will be in heaven.

I’ll ask Kat out on a date, and she will accept. We’ll go see Moon Suicide play live, and instead of talking about frozen heads, we’ll just dance. I will discover that Kat is a terrible dancer. On the steps in front of her apartment, she’ll kiss me once, light on the lips, and then disappear into the dark doorway. I’ll walk home and send her a text message along the way. The message will consist of a single value, one that I have deduced on my own after a long struggle with a geometry textbook: 25,000 miles.

There will be an organizational fracture at the base of the Unbroken Spine. Back in New York, the First Reader will threaten doom and disappointment for any more who disobey. To make his point, he will, in fact, burn Penumbra’s codex vitae—and that will be a terrible miscalculation. The black-robes will be appalled, and finally, they will vote. All of the bound will gather in their bookish barrow and raise their hands one by one, and Corvina will be stripped of his position. He will remain CEO of the Festina Lente Company — where profits are up, way up — but down below, there will be a new First Reader.

It will be Edgar Deckle.

Maurice Tyndall will travel to New York to begin writing his codex vitae, and I will suggest that he petition to replace Deckle as the guardian of the Reading Room. That office could use a little life.

Even though its vessel will be destroyed, the contents of Penumbra’s codex vitae will be safe, and I will offer to help him publish it.

He will demur: “Perhaps someday, but not yet. Let it remain secret for now. After all, my boy”—his blue eyes will narrow and twinkle—“you might be surprised at what you find there.”

Together, Penumbra and I will establish a new fellowship — actually, a little company. We’ll talk Neel into investing some of his Google-gotten gains, and it will turn out that Fedorov has millions in HP stock, so he’ll chip in some of that, too.

Penumbra and I will sit and talk many times about what sort of enterprise might suit us best. Another bookstore? No. Some kind of publishing company? No. Penumbra will admit that he is happiest as a guide and a coach, not a scholar or a code-breaker. I will admit that I just want an excuse to put all my favorite people in a room together. So we’ll form a consultancy: a special-ops squad for companies operating at the intersection of books and technology, trying to solve the mysteries that gather in the shadows of digital shelves. Kat will supply our first contract: designing the marginalia system for Google’s prototype e-reader, which is thin and light, with a skin that’s not plastic but cloth, like a hardcover book.

After that, we’ll have to make it on our own, and Penumbra will be an absolute pro in pitch meetings. He’ll put on a dark tweed suit and polish up his glasses, wobble into conference rooms at Apple and Amazon, look around the table, and say quietly, “What do you seek in this engagement?” His blue eyes, his jostling grin, and (frankly) his advanced age will leave them stunned, charmed, and utterly sold.

We’ll have a narrow office down on sun-blasted Valencia Street, wedged between a taqueria and a scooter repair shop, furnished with big wooden desks from a flea market and long green shelves from IKEA. The shelves will be lined with Penumbra’s favorites, all rescued from the store: first editions of Borges and Hammett, airbrushed editions of Asimov and Heinlein, five different biographies of Richard Feynman. Every few weeks, we’ll cart the books out into the sunlight and hold a pop-up sidewalk sale, announced on Twitter at the last minute.

It won’t only be me and Penumbra at those big desks. Rosemary Lapin will join us as employee number one. I’ll teach her Ruby, and she will build our website. Then we’ll poach Jad away from Google, and I’ll put Grumble on retainer, too.

We’ll call the company Penumbra, just Penumbra, and the logo, designed by me, will be set — of course — in Gerritszoon.

But what about Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore? For three months, it will stand empty with a FOR LEASE sign in the windows, because nobody will know what to do with that tall, skinny space. Then, finally, someone will figure it out.

Ashley Adams will show up at the Telegraph Hill Credit Union’s small business office dressed in carbon and cream, carrying a letter of recommendation from the bank’s oldest living client. She will describe her vision with the polish and poise of a PR professional.

It will be her last act as a PR professional.

Ashley will dismantle the shelves, refinish the floor, put in new lights, and transform the bookstore into a climbing gym. The break room will become a locker room; the short shelves up front will become a row of iMacs where climbers can get online (still via bootynet). Where the front desk once sat, there will be a shiny white counter where North Face (a.k.a. Daphne) will get a new gig making kale shakes and risotto balls. The walls up front will be a riot of color: bright murals painted by Mat, all based on zoomed-in details from the bookstore. If you know what to look for, you’ll see them: a line of letters, a row of spines, a bright curving bell.

Back where the Waybacklist once rose, Mat will direct a team of young artists in the construction of an enormous climbing wall. It will be a mottled field of green and gray dotted with glowing gold LEDs and traced with branching lines of blue, and the handholds for climbers will be sturdy white-capped mountains. Mat will build not merely a city this time, but a whole continent, a civilization tipped on its side. And here, too, if you know what to look for — if you know how to draw the lines between the handholds — you might just see a face peering out of the wall.

I will buy a membership and start climbing again.

And finally, I will write down everything that happened. I’ll copy some of it from the logbook, find more in old emails and text messages, and reconstitute the rest from memory. I’ll get Penumbra to look it over, then find a publisher and set it out for sale in all the places you find books these days: big Barnes & Nobles, bright Pygmalion, the quiet little store built into the Kindle.

You will hold this book in your hands, and learn all the things I learned, right along with me:

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now — strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.