Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

The first thing I do is change the palette. Earth tones, please.

Now: I’m dealing with too much information here. I only want to see who borrowed what. Kat’s analysis was smart enough to tag names and titles and times in the text, and the visualization knows how to plot those, so I link data to display and I see something familiar: a swarm of colored lights bouncing through the shelves, each one representing a customer. These, though, are customers from years ago.

It doesn’t look like much—just a colorful mess migrating through the Waybacklist. Then, on a hunch, I connect the dots, so it’s not a swarm but a set of constellations. Every customer leaves a trail, a drunken zigzag through the shelves. The shortest constellation, rendered in red clay, makes a tiny Z, just four data points. The longest, in dark moss, curves around the whole width of the store in a long jagged oval.

It still doesn’t look like much. I give the 3-D bookstore a push with the trackpad and set it spinning on its axes. I stand up to stretch my legs. On the other side of the desk, I pick up one of the Dashiell Hammetts, untouched by anyone since I noticed them that first day in the store. That’s sad. I mean, seriously: shelves full of gibberish get all the attention while The Maltese Falcon gathers dust? It’s beyond sad. It’s stupid. I should start looking for a different job. This place will drive me nuts.

When I come back to the desk, the bookstore is still spinning, whirling like a carousel … and something strange is happening. Once every rotation, the dark moss constellation snaps into focus. For just a moment, it makes a picture and—it can’t be. I smack my hand on the trackpad, slow the model to a halt, and bring it back around. The dark moss constellation makes a clear picture. The other constellations fit, too. None of them are as complete as the dark moss, but they follow the curve of a chin, the slope of an eye. When the model is lined up straight, as if I were peering in from the front door—very close to where I’m sitting right now—the constellations come to life. They make a face.

It’s Penumbra.

*   *   *

The bell tinkles and he walks into the store trailed by a long coil of fog. I’m tongue-tied, with no idea how to begin. I’m faced with two Penumbras at once: one, a mute staring wire-frame on my laptop screen, and the other, an old man in the doorway just starting to smile.

“Good morning, my boy,” he says cheerily. “Did anything of note transpire in the night?”

For a moment, I strongly consider closing my laptop’s lid and never speaking of this again. But no: I’m too curious. I can’t just sit at my desk and let this web of weirdness spin out around me. (That describes a lot of jobs, I realize, but this is potentially a special kind of magick-with-a-k weirdness.)

“What do you have there?” he asks. “Have you begun work on our website?”

I swivel my laptop around to show him. “Not exactly.”

Half-smiling, he holds his glasses at an angle and peers down at the screen. His face goes slack, and then he says, quietly: “The Founder.” He turns to me. “You solved it.” He claps a hand to his forehead and his face splits into a giddy smile. “You solved it already! Look at him! Right there on the screen!”

Look at him? Isn’t this— Oh. I realize now, with Penumbra leaning in close, that I have made the common mistake of assuming that all old people look the same. The wire-frame portrait on the screen has Penumbra’s nose, but its mouth is a tiny curving bow. Penumbra’s is flat and wide, built for grinning.

“How did you do it?” he continues. He’s so proud, like I’m his grandson and I just hit a home run, or cured cancer. “I must see your notes! Did you use Euler’s method? Or the Brito inversion? There is no shame in that, it clears away much of the confusion early on…”

“Mr. Penumbra,” I say, triumph in my voice, “I scanned an old logbook—” Then I realize this carries a larger implication, so I stutter and confess, “Well, I took an old logbook. Borrowed it. Temporarily.”

Penumbra crinkles his eyes. “Oh, I know, my boy,” he says, not unkindly. He pauses. “Your simulacrum smelled strongly of coffee.”

Right, so: “I borrowed an old logbook, and we scanned it”—his face changes and suddenly he’s concerned, like instead of curing cancer, maybe I have it—“because Google has this machine, it’s superfast, and Hadoop, it just goes—I mean, a thousand computers, like that!” I snap for emphasis. I don’t think he has any idea what I’m talking about. “Anyway, the point is, we just pulled out the data. Automatically.”

There’s a tremor in Penumbra’s micromuscles. Close-up like this, I’m reminded that he is, in fact, very old.

“Google,” he breathes. There’s a long pause. “How curious.” He straightens. He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND. Talking mostly to himself, he says, “I will have to make a report.”