Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I sense an incompatibility between Kat’s belief in a disembodied human future and her insistence on alcohol consumption, but I let it slide, because I’m going to a party.

*   *   *

It is 10:00 p.m. and I am behind the front desk at Penumbra’s, wearing a light gray sweater over a blue striped shirt and, in a joke I hope I will be able to triumphantly reveal at some point later in the evening, pants of crazy purple paisley. Get it? Because no one will be able to see me below the waist—okay, yes, you get it.

Kat comes online at 10:13 p.m. and I press the green button in the shape of a camera. She appears on my screen, wearing her red BAM! T-shirt as always. “You look cute,” she says.

“You’re not dressed up,” I say. No one else is dressed up.

“Yeah, but you’re just a floating head,” she says. “You have to look extra-good.”

The store melts away and I fall headfirst into the view of Kat’s apartment—a place, I remind you, that I have never visited in person. It’s a wide-open left, and Kat pans her laptop around like a camera to show me what’s what. “This is the kitchen,” she says. Gleaming glass-faced cupboards; an industrial stove; a stick-figure xkcd comic on the refrigerator. “The living room,” she says, sweeping me around. My view blurs into dark pixelated streaks, then re-forms itself into a sprawling space with a wide TV and long low couches. There are movie posters in neat narrow frames: Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, WALL.E. People are sitting in a circle—half on the couches, half on the carpet—playing a game.

“Who’s that?” a voice chirps. My view swivels and I am looking at a round-faced girl with dark curls and chunky black glasses.

“This is an experimental simulated intelligence,” Kat says, “designed to produce engaging party banter. Here, test it.” She sets the laptop down on the granite countertop.

Dark Curls leans in close—eek, really close—and squints. “Wait, really? Are you real?”

Kat doesn’t abandon me. It would be easy to do: set the laptop down, get called away, don’t come back. But no: for a whole hour she shepherds me around the party, introducing me to her roommates (Dark Curls is one of them) and her friends from Google.

She brings me over to the living room and we play the game in the circle. It’s called Traitor, and a skinny dude with a wispy mustache leans in to explain that it was invented at the KGB and all the secret agents used to play it back in the sixties. It’s a game about lying. You’re given a particular role, but you have to convince the group that you’re someone else entirely. The roles are assigned with playing cards, and Kat holds mine up to the camera for me.

“It’s not fair,” says a girl across the circle. She has hair so pale it’s almost white. “He has an advantage. We can’t see any of his tells.”

“You’re totally right,” Kat says, frowning. “And I know for a fact that he wears paisley pants when he’s lying.”

On cue, I tip my laptop down to give them a view, and the laughter is so loud it crackles and fuzzes out in the speakers. I laugh, too, and pour myself another beer. I’m drinking from a red party cup here in the store. Every few minutes I glance up at the door and a dagger of fear dances across my heart, but the buffer of adrenaline and alcohol eases the prick. There won’t be any customers. There are never any customers.

We get into a conversation with Kat’s friend Trevor, who also works at Google, and a different kind of dagger slips through my defenses then. Trevor is reeling out a long story about a trip to Antarctica (who goes to Antarctica?) and Kat is leaning in toward him. It looks almost gravitational, but maybe her laptop is just sitting at an angle. Slowly, other people peel away and Trevor’s focus narrows to Kat alone. Her eyes are shining back, and she’s nodding along.

No, come on. There’s nothing to it. It’s just a good story. She’s a little drunk. I’m a little drunk. However, I do not know if Trevor is drunk, or—

The bell tinkles. My gaze snaps up. Shit. It’s not a lonely late-night browser or anyone I can safely ignore. It’s one of the club: Ms. Lapin. She’s the only woman (that I know of) who borrows books from the Waybacklist, and now she is edging into the store, clutching her ponderous purse like a shield. She has a peacock feather stuck into her hat. That’s new.

I try to focus my eyeballs independently, one on the laptop and one on Lapin. It doesn’t work.

“Hello, good evening,” she says. Lapin has a voice that sounds like an old tape stretched out of shape, always wavering and changing pitch. She lifts a black-gloved hand to straighten the peacock feather or maybe just to check that it’s still there. Then she slides a book out of her purse. She’s returning BVRNES.

“Hello, Ms. Lapin!” I say too loud and too fast. “What can I get for you?” I consider using my spooky prototype to predict the name of her next book without waiting for her, but my screen is currently occupied by—

“What did you say?” Kat’s voice burbles. I mute the laptop.