Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

The bookstore is closed. Penumbra is gone, recalled by his boss, Corvina, to the secret library that is actually the headquarters of the bibliophile cult known as the Unbroken Spine. Something is going to be burned. The library is in New York City, but nobody knows where—not yet.

Oliver Grone is going to climb in through the fire escape and run the store for at least a few hours every day to keep Tyndall and the rest all satisfied. Maybe Oliver can learn a little more about the Unbroken Spine along the way.

As for me: I have my quest. The arrival time on the other end of Penumbra’s train—of course he would take the train—is still two days in the future. Right now he’s chugging through the middle of the country, and if I work fast, I can head him off at the pass. Yes: I can intercept him and rescue him. I can set things right and get my job back. I can find out what exactly is going on.

*   *   *

I tell Kat about all of it, as I am becoming accustomed to doing. It feels like loading a really hard math problem into a computer. I just key in all the variables, push return, and:

“It won’t work,” she says. “Penumbra is an old man. I get the feeling this thing has been part of his life for a long time. I mean, it basically is his life, right?”

“Right, so—”

“So I don’t think you’ll get him to just … quit. Like, I’ve been at Google for, what, three years? That’s hardly a lifetime. But even now you couldn’t just meet me at the train station and tell me to turn around. This company is the most important part of my life. It’s the most important part of me. I’d walk right past you.”

She’s right, and it’s disconcerting, both because it means I’ll need a new plan and because, while I can recognize the truth in what she’s saying, it doesn’t actually make any sense to me. I’ve never felt that way about a job (or a cult). You could stop me at the train station and talk me into anything.

“But I think you should absolutely go to New York,” Kat says.

“Okay, now I’m confused.”

“This is too interesting not to pursue. What’s the alternative? Find another job and spend forever wondering what happened to your old boss?”

“Well, that’s definitely plan B—”

“Your first instinct was right. You’ve just got to be more”—she pauses and purses her lips—“strategic. And you’ve got to take me with you.” She grins. Obviously. How can I say no?

“Google has a big New York office,” Kat says, “and I’ve never been there, so I’ll just say I want to go meet the team. My manager will be fine with that. What about you?”

What about me? I have a quest and I have an ally. Now all I need is a patron.

*   *   *

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader. Neel Shah has plenty of friends—investors, employees, other entrepreneurs—but on some level they know, and he knows, that they are friends with Neel Shah, CEO. By contrast, I am, and always will be, friends with Neel Shah, dungeon master.

It is Neel who will be my patron.

His home serves double duty as his company’s headquarters. Back when San Francisco was young, Neel’s place was a wide brick firehouse; today, it’s a wide brick techno-loft with fancy speakers and superfast internet. Neel’s company spreads out on the firehouse floor, where nineteenth-century firemen used to eat nineteenth-century chili and tell nineteenth-century jokes. They’ve been replaced by a squad of skinny young men who are their opposite: men who wear delicate neon sneakers, not heavy black boots, and when they shake your hand, it’s not a meaty squash but a limp slither. Most of them have accents—maybe that hasn’t changed?

Neel finds programming prodigies, brings them to San Francisco, and assimilates them. These are Neel’s guys, and the greatest of them is Igor, who is nineteen and comes from Belarus. To hear Neel tell it, Igor taught himself matrix math on the back of a shovel, ruled the Minsk hacker scene as a sixteen-year-old, and would have proceeded directly to a perilous career in software piracy if Neel hadn’t spotted his 3-D handiwork in a demo video posted on YouTube. Neel got him a visa, bought him a plane ticket, and had a desk waiting at the firehouse when he arrived. Next to the desk there was a sleeping bag.

Igor offers me his chair and goes in search of his employer.

The walls, all thick timber and exposed brick, are covered with giant posters of classic women: Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, all printed in shimmering black-and-white. Monitors continue the theme. On some screens, the women are blown up and pixelated; on others, they’re repeated a dozen times. Igor’s monitor shows Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, except half of her is a sketchy 3-D model, a green wire-frame that slinks across the screen in sync with the film.