Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (10 page)

“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

T
HE 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—

NAME
: Clay Jannon

COMPANY
: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

HOST
: Kat Potente

—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:

BOOK SCANNER

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
.