Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

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.”