Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (25 page)

“Mat’s pretty good at this, huh?” I say, peering around at the otherworldly effect.

Neel nods. “He’s amazing.”

Mat hands me a giant sheet of glossy white poster board and tells me to hold it steady. He’s capturing the front desk up close, getting deep into the grain. The poster board is reflecting so subtly that I cannot detect its effect on the wood, but I assume it is making a crucial contribution to the brightness and evenness of the light.

Mat starts shooting again, and the big lights are just calmly beaming now, so I can hear the camera go
click click
. Neel is standing behind Mat, holding a light with one hand, slurping his second kale juice with the other.

As I stand holding the poster board, I think:

Corvina doesn’t really care about Penumbra. This is about control, and he’s trying to turn me into his instrument. I’m grateful for the geographical distance between us; I’d hate to experience that voice in person. Or maybe he wouldn’t bother with persuasion in person. Maybe he’d show up with a gang of black-robes. But he can’t, because we’re in California; the continent is our shield. Corvina caught on too late, so his voice is all he’s got.

Mat pushes in even closer, apparently going for molecular detail on the front desk, the place where I’ve spent so much of my life recently. I’m presented, for a moment, with a nicely framed portrait: compact curled-up Mat, sweating, holding his camera up to his eye, and big broad Neel, smiling, holding the light steady, slurping his kale juice. My friends, making something together. This requires faith, too. I can’t tell what this poster board is doing, but I trust Mat. I know it’s going to be beautiful.

Corvina’s got it wrong. Penumbra’s schemes didn’t fail because he’s a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina’s right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra’s schemes failed because he didn’t have enough help. Maybe he didn’t have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat—until now.

Corvina said:
You must stop Penumbra.

No, just the opposite. We’re going to help him.

*   *   *

Dawn comes, and when it does, I know not to expect Penumbra. He is headed not to the store that bears his name, but to Google. In just about two hours, the project that Penumbra and his brothers and sisters have toiled over for decades, for centuries, is coming to fruition. He’s probably eating a celebratory bagel somewhere.

Here in the store, Mat packs the lights back into their gray foam sarcophagus. Neel takes the bent-up white poster board out to the trash can. I coil up the orange cables and straighten the front desk. Everything looks the same; nothing has moved. And yet, something is different. We took photos of every surface: the shelves, the desk, the door, the floor. We took photos of the books, all of them, the ones in the front and the Waybacklist, too. We didn’t capture the pages inside, of course—that would be a project of a different scale. If you’re ever playing Super Bookstore Brothers, navigating a 3-D simulacrum of Penumbra’s bookstore with pink-yellow light coming in the front windows and a foggy particle effect rising in the back, and you decide you want to actually read one of the beautifully textured books: too bad. Neel’s model might match the store’s volume but never its density.

“Breakfast?” Neel asks.

“Breakfast!” Mat agrees.

So we leave. That’s it. I turn off the lights and pull the door tight behind me. The bell makes its bright tinkle. I never did get a key.

“Let me see the photos,” Neel says, grabbing at Mat’s camera.

“Not yet, not yet,” Mat says, tucking it under his arm. “I need to grade them. This is just raw material.”

“Grade them? Like A-B-C?”

“Color grading—color correction. Translation: I need to make them look awesome.” He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you worked with movie studios, Shah.”

“He told you?” Neel spins to look at me with wide eyes: “You told him? There are
documents
!”

“You should stop by ILM next week,” Mat says calmly. “I’ll show you some stuff.”

They’re both far up the sidewalk now, halfway to Neel’s car, but I’m still standing at the wide front windows with their big gold type:
MR. PENUMBRA’S
in beautiful Gerritszoon. It’s dark inside. I press my hand onto the fellowship’s symbol—two hands, open like a book—and when I take it away, there’s an oily, five-fingered print left behind.

A REALLY BIG GUN

I
T’S FINALLY TIME
to break a code that has waited five hundred years.

Kat has requisitioned Google’s data visualization amphitheater with its massive screens. She’s moved tables from the lunch tent into position down in front; it looks like mission control, picnic-style.

The day is beautiful; a sharp blue sky is dotted with wispy white clouds, all commas and curlicues. Hummingbirds hover down to investigate the screens, then zip back out across the bright open lawns. There’s music in the distance; the Google brass band is practicing an algorithmically generated waltz.

Down below, Kat’s handpicked code-breaking squad is setting up. Laptops are coming out, each one encrusted with a different collection of colorful stickers and holograms, and the Googlers are plugging into power and fiber optics, flexing their fingers.

Igor is among them. His brilliance at the bookstore earned him a special invitation: today, he’s allowed to play in the Big Box. He’s leaning in to his laptop, his skinny hands a bluish blur, and two Googlers are watching wide-eyed over his shoulder.

Kat is making the rounds, conferring with Googlers one by one. She smiles and nods and pats them on the back. Today, she’s a general, and these are her troops.

*   *   *

Tyndall, Lapin, Imbert, and Fedorov are all here, along with the rest of the local novices. They’re sitting up on the lip of the amphitheater, all in a row along the highest stone step. More are arriving. Silver-haired Muriel is here, and so is Greg the ponytailed Googler. He’s standing with the fellowship today.

Most of the fellowship’s members are in late middle age. Some, like Lapin, look pretty old, and a few are older still. There’s an ancient man in a wheelchair, eyes lost in shadowed sockets, his cheeks pale and wrinkled like tissue paper, pushed by a young attendant in a neat suit. The man croaks a faint greeting to Fedorov, who clasps him by the hand.

Finally, there’s Penumbra. He’s holding court at the amphitheater’s edge, explaining what’s about to happen. He’s smiling and waving his arms, pointing down at the Googlers at their tables, pointing over to Kat, over to me.

I haven’t told him about the call from Corvina, and I don’t plan to. The First Reader doesn’t matter anymore. What matters are the people here in this amphitheater and the puzzle up on those screens.

“Come over here, my boy, come over here,” he says. “Meet Muriel properly.” I smile and shake her hand. She’s beautiful. Her hair is silver, almost white, but her skin is smooth, with just the lightest lace of microwrinkles around her eyes.

“Muriel runs a goat farm,” Penumbra says. “You should take your, ah, friend, you know”—he tilts his head down toward Kat—“you should take her down. The tour is wonderful.”

Muriel smiles lightly. “The spring is the best time,” she says. “That’s when we have baby goats.” To Penumbra she says, mock-scoldingly, “You’re a good ambassador, Ajax, but I wish I could get you down there more often.” She winks at him.

“Oh, the store has kept me busy,” he says, “but now, after this?” He waves his hands and opens his face wide with a little who-knows-what-could-happen frown. “After this, anything is possible.”

Wait a second—is there something going on there? There couldn’t be anything going on there.

There might be something going on there.

*   *   *

“Okay, quiet down, everybody. Quiet down!” Kat shouts from the front of the amphitheater. She looks up to address the crowd of scholars gathered on the stone steps: “So, I’m Kat Potente, the PM for this project. I’m glad you’re all here, but there are a few things you should know. First, you can use the Wi-Fi, but the fiber optics are for Google employees only.”

I glance across the assembled mass of the fellowship. Tyndall has a pocket watch connected to his pants with a long chain, and he’s checking the time. I don’t think this is going to be a problem.

Kat glances down at a printed-out checklist. “Second, don’t blog, tweet, or live-stream anything you see here.”

Imbert is adjusting an astrolabe. Seriously: not a problem.

“And third”—she grins—“this isn’t going to take long, so don’t get too comfortable.”

Now she shifts to address her troops: “We don’t know what kind of code we’re dealing with yet,” she says. “We need to figure that out first. So we’ll be working in parallel. We’ve got two hundred virtual machines ready and waiting in the Big Box, and your code will run in the right place automatically if you just tag it
CODEX
. Everybody ready?”

The Googlers all nod. One girl straps on a pair of dark goggles.

“Hit it.”

The screens leap to life, a blitzkrieg of data visualization and exploration. The text of
MANVTIVS
blinks bright and jagged, set in the squared-off letters favored by code and console. This isn’t a book anymore; it’s a data dump. Scatter plots and bar charts unfurl across the screens. At Kat’s command, Google’s machines crunch and recrunch the data nine hundred different ways. Nine thousand. Nothing yet.

The Googlers are looking for a message—any message—in the text. It might be a whole book, it might be a few sentences, it might be a single word. Nobody, not even the Unbroken Spine, knows what’s waiting there, or how Manutius encrypted it, and that makes this a very hard problem. Luckily, the Googlers love very hard problems.

Now they get more creative. They make crosses and spirals and galaxies of color dance across the screens. The graphs grow new dimensions—first they become cubes and pyramids and blobs, then they sprout long tentacles. My eyes swim as I try to follow along. A Latin lexicon flashes across one screen—an entire language examined in milliseconds. There are n-gram graphs and Vonnegut diagrams. Maps appear, with letter sequences somehow translated into longitudes and latitudes and plotted across the world, a dusting of dots through Siberia and the South Pacific.

Nothing.

The screens flicker and flash as Googlers try every angle. The fellowship is murmuring. Some are still smiling; others are starting to frown. When a giant chessboard appears on one screen with a pile of letters on every square, Fedorov sniffs and mutters, “Ve tried det in 1627.”

Is that why Corvina believes this project won’t succeed—because the Unbroken Spine has literally tried it all? Or is it simply because this is cheating—because old Manutius never had any bright screens or virtual machines? If you follow them, those two lines of reasoning close together like a trap, and they lead you straight down to the Reading Room, with its chalk and its chains, and nowhere else. I still don’t believe the secret to immortality is going to pop up on one of those screens, but jeez, I want Corvina to be wrong. I want Google to crack this code.

“Okay,” Kat announces, “we just got another eight hundred machines.” Her voice rises and carries across the lawn: “Go deeper. More iterations. Don’t hold back.” She walks from table to table, consulting and encouraging. She’s a good leader—I can see it in the Googlers’ faces. I think Kat Potente has found her calling.

I watch Igor bang his head against the text. First he translates each line of letters into a molecule and simulates a chemical reaction; on-screen, the solution dissolves into a gray sludge. Then he makes letters into tiny 3-D people and sets them up in a simulated city. They wander around bumping into buildings and forming crowded clumps in the street until Igor destroys it all with an earthquake. Nothing. No message.

Kat hikes up the steps, squinting into the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. “This code is tough,” she admits. “Like, crazy tough.”

Tyndall sprints around the amphitheater’s edge and leaps over Lapin, who squeaks and shields herself. He grabs Kat’s arm. “You must compensate for the phase of the moon at the time of writing! The lunar offset is essential!”

I reach over and detach his shivering claw from her sleeve. “Mr. Tyndall, don’t worry,” I say. I’ve already watched a line of half-eaten moons parade across the screens. “They know your techniques.” And Google is nothing if not thorough.

While the screens flash and blur down below, a team of Googlers wanders through the fellowship—young people with clipboards and friendly faces, asking questions like: When were you born? Where do you live? What’s your cholesterol?

I wonder who they are.

“They’re from Google Forever,” Kat says, a bit sheepishly. “Interns. I mean, it’s a good opportunity. Some of these people are so old and still so healthy.”

Lapin is describing her work at Pacific Bell to a Googler holding a skinny video camera. Tyndall is spitting into a plastic vial.

One of the interns approaches Penumbra, but he waves her away without a word. His gaze is fixed on the screens below. He’s utterly absorbed, his blue eyes wide and shining like the sky above. Unbidden, Corvina’s warning echoes in my head:
And
this, the last and greatest of his schemes—it will not succeed, either.

But it’s not just Penumbra’s scheme anymore. This has gotten much bigger than that. Look at all these people—look at Kat. She’s back up at the front of the amphitheater, typing furiously into her phone. She pushes it back into her pocket and squares to face her team.

“Hold up a second,” she shouts, waving her arms in the air. “Hold it!” The code-breaking roulette slowly spins to a halt. On one screen, the letters of
MANVTIVS
are twisting in space, all rotating at different speeds. On another, some sort of super-complicated knot is trying to untie itself.

“The PM is doing us a big favor,” Kat announces. “Whatever you’ve got running, tag it
CRITICAL
. We’re going to farm that code out to the whole system in about ten seconds.”