Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

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.”