Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I wonder if Kat Potente has been summoned.

She shakes her head. “Not yet,” she says. “But I’d love to do it. I mean, the odds aren’t great. Thirty thousand people work here, there are sixty-four on the PM. You do the math. But it’s growing all the time. People say they might expand it again.”

Now I’m wondering what it would be like if we ran the whole country like this.

“That’s totally what Raj wants to do!” Kat laughs. “After he finds all the OK and TK, of course.” She shakes her head at that; she’s making fun of him a little. “He has a whole plan to pass a constitutional amendment. If anybody could do it…” Pursed lips again. “Actually, it probably wouldn’t be Raj.” She laughs, and I do, too. Yeah, Raj is a little too intense for Middle America.

So I ask, “Who could pull it off?”

“Maybe I could,” Kat says, puffing her chest out.

Maybe you could.

*   *   *

We walk past Kat’s domain: data viz. It’s perched on a low hill, a cluster of prefab boxes set around a small amphitheater where stone steps lead down to a bank of giant screens. We peek down. There’s a pair of engineers sitting on the amphitheater steps, laptops on their knees, watching a cluster of bubbles bounce around on one screen, all connected with wavy lines. Every few seconds the bubbles freeze and the lines snap straight, like the hair sticking up on the back of your neck. Then the screen flashes solid red. One of the engineers mutters a quiet curse and leans in to her laptop.

Kat shrugs. “Work in progress.”

“What’s it for?”

“Not sure. Probably something internal. Most of the stuff we do is internal.” She sighs. “Google’s so big, it’s an audience all by itself. I mostly make visualizations that get used by other engineers, or ad sales, or the PM…” She trails off. “To tell you the truth, I’d love to make something everybody could see!” She laughs as if relieved to say it out loud.

*   *   *

We pass through a glade of tall cypress on the edge of campus—it makes a nice golden dapple on the sidewalk—and come to a low brick building with no marking other than a handwritten sign taped to the dark glass door:

BOOK SCANNER

Inside, the building feels like a field hospital. It’s dark and a little warm. Harsh floodlights glare down on an operating table ringed with long, many-jointed metal arms. The air stings like bleach. The table is also surrounded by books: stacks and stacks of them, piled high on metal carts. There are big books and little books; there are bestsellers and old books that look like they would fit in at Penumbra’s. I spy Dashiell Hammett.

A tall Googler named Jad runs the book scanner. He has a perfectly triangular nose over a fuzzy brown beard. He looks like a Greek philosopher. Maybe it’s just because he’s wearing sandals.

“Hey, welcome,” he says, smiling, shaking Kat’s hand, then mine. “Nice to have somebody from data viz in here. And you…?” He looks at me, eyebrows raised.

“Not a Googler,” I confess. “I work at an old bookstore.”

“Oh, cool,” Jad says. Then he darkens: “Except, I mean. Sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Well. For putting you guys out of business.” He says it very matter-of-factly.

“Wait, which guys?”

“Book … stores?”

Right. I don’t actually think of myself as part of the book business; Penumbra’s store feels like something else entirely. But … I do sell books. I am the manager of a Google ad campaign designed to reach potential book buyers. Somehow it snuck up on me: I am a bookseller.

Jad continues, “I mean, once we’ve got everything scanned, and cheap reading devices are ubiquitous … nobody’s going to need bookstores, right?”

“Is that the business model for this?” I say, nodding at the scanner. “Selling e-books?”

“We don’t really have a business model.” Jad shrugs. “We don’t need one. The ads make so much money, it kinda takes care of everything.” He turns to Kat: “Don’t you think that’s right? Even if we made, like, five … million … dollars?” (He’s not sure if that sounds like a lot of money or not. For the record: it does.) “Yeah, nobody would even notice. Over there”—he waves a long arm vaguely back toward the center of campus—“they make that much, like, every twenty minutes.”

That is super-depressing. If I made five million dollars selling books, I’d want people to carry me around in a palanquin constructed from first editions of The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

“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.”