Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (11 page)

“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

I
T’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?

W
HEN 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:

CLOSED (AD LIBRIS)

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.