Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Jad holds it under the floodlights. “This is a beautiful book,” he says. He runs long fingers across the embossing on the cover. “What is it?”

“Just a personal diary.” I pause. “Very personal.”

He gently opens the logbook and clips the front and back of the cover into a right-angled metal frame. No spines broken here. Then he places the frame on the table and locks it down with four clicky brackets. Finally, he gives it a test wiggle; the frame and its passenger are secure. The logbook is strapped in like a test pilot, or a crash-test dummy.

Jad scoots us back away from the scanner. “Stay behind this,” he says, pointing to a yellow line on the floor. “The arms are sharp.”

His long fingers go tap-tap behind a bank of flat monitors. There’s a low, gut-rumbling hum, then a high warning chime, and then the book scanner leaps into action. The floodlights start strobing, turning everything in the chamber into a stop-motion movie. Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. It’s mesmerizing. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.

At each flash of the lights, two giant cameras set above the table swivel and snap images in tandem. I sidle up next to Jad, where I can see the pages of the logbook stacking up on his monitors. The two cameras are like two eyes, so the images are in 3-D, and I watch his computer lift the words right up off the pale gray pages. It looks like an exorcism.

I walk back over to Kat. Her toes are on the yellow line and she’s leaning in close to the book scanner. I’m afraid she’s going to get stabbed in the eye.

“This is awesome,” she breathes.

It really is. I feel a pang of pity for the logbook, its secrets all plucked out in minutes by this whirlwind of light and metal. Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore.

THE FOUNDER’S PUZZLE

IT’S LATER, around eight, and we are in Kat’s spaceship-pod bedroom, at her white spaceship-console desk. She’s sitting on my lap, leaning in to her MacBook. She’s explaining OCR, the process by which a computer transforms swoops of ink and streaks of graphite into characters it can comprehend, like K and A and T.

“It’s not trivial,” she says. “That was a big book.” Also, my predecessors had handwriting almost as bad as mine. But Kat has a plan. “It would take my computer all night to process these pages,” she says. “But we’re impatient, right?” She’s typing at warp ten, composing long commands I do not understand. Yes, we are definitely impatient.

“So we’ll get hundreds of machines to do it all at once. We’ll use Hadoop.”

“Hadoop.”

“Everybody uses it. Google, Facebook, the NSA. It’s software—it breaks a big job into lots of tiny pieces and spreads them out to lots of different computers at the same time.”

Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat Potente, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!

She stretches forward, her palms planted on the desk. “I love this.” Her eyes are set firmly on the screen, where a diagram is blossoming: a skeletal flower with a blinking center and dozens—no, hundreds—of petals. It’s growing fast, transforming from a daisy to a dandelion to a giant sunflower. “A thousand computers are doing exactly what I want right now. My mind is not just here,” she says, tapping her head, “it’s out there. I love it—the feeling.”

She moves against me. I can smell everything sharply all of a sudden; her hair, shampooed recently, is up against my face. Her earlobes stick out a little, round and pink, and her back is strong from the Google climbing wall. I trace my thumbs down her shoulder blades, across the bumps of her bra straps. She moves again, rocking. I push up her T-shirt and the letters, squished, reflect in the laptop screen: BAM!

*   *   *

Later, Kat’s laptop makes a low chime. She slides away from me, hops off the bed, and climbs back onto her black desk chair. Perched there on her toes, her spine curving down into the screen, she looks like a gargoyle. A beautiful naked-girl-shaped gargoyle.

“It worked,” she says. She turns to me, flushed, her hair dark and wild. Grinning. “It worked!”

*   *   *

It’s way past midnight, and I’m back at the bookstore. The real logbook is safely on its shelf. The fake logbook is tucked into my bag. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. I’m alert, I’m feeling good, and I’m ready to visualize. I pull the scanned data out of the Big Box; it takes less than a minute over bootynet. All the little tales anyone has ever scratched into that logbook stream back into my laptop, perfectly processed.

Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

This sort of thing never works perfectly at first. I pipe the raw text into the visualization and it looks like Jackson Pollock got his hands on my prototype. There are splotches of data everywhere, blobs of pink and green and yellow, all harsh arcade-game hues.