Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Tomorrow, Deckle will bring a spare key sealed in an envelope addressed to me and deliver it to the Northbridge concierge. Neel and I will find a way to manufacture the GrumbleGear, Kat will make her appearance at Google’s New York office, and Penumbra will meet with a handful of black-robes who are sympathetic to his cause. When night falls, I will take scanner and key and make my way to the secret library of the Unbroken Spine, where I will liberate MANVTIVS—along with one other.

But that’s all tomorrow. Right now Kat has retired to our room. Neel has docked with a group of New York startup dudes. Penumbra is sitting at the hotel bar alone, nursing a heavy tumbler of something golden, lost in thought. He cuts a strange figure in this place: older than everyone else in the lobby by several decades, the top of his head a pale beacon in the calibrated gloom.

I’m sitting alone on one of the low couches, staring at my laptop, wondering how we can get ourselves in front of a laser cutter. Neel’s friend Andrei gave us leads on two different Manhattan hacker spaces, but only one had a laser cutter, and it’s booked solid for weeks. Everybody’s making something.

It occurs to me that Mat Mittelbrand might know someone, somewhere. There’s got to be a special-effects shop in this city that possesses the tool we need. I tap out a distress signal on my phone:

Need a laser cutter ASAP in new york. Any ideas?

Thirty-seven seconds elapse, and Mat texts back:

Ask grumble.

Of course. I’ve spent months browsing the pirate library, but never posted anything. Grumble’s site features a bustling forum where people request particular e-books and then complain about the quality of what they receive. There’s also a technical subforum where people talk about the nuts and bolts of book digitization; this is where Grumble himself appears, answering questions with brevity, precision, and all-lowercase letters. This subforum is where I’ll ask for help:

Hi everybody. I’m a silent member of the Grumblematrix, speaking up for the first time. Tonight I find myself in New York City, in need of an Epilog laser cutter (or similar) as required by the instructions for the GrumbleGear 3000. I intend to carry out a clandestine scan ASAP, and the target is one of the most important books in the history of printing. In other words: this might be bigger than Potter. Any help?

I take a breath, check three times for typos, then submit the post. I hope the Festina Lente Company’s pirate patrol isn’t reading this.

*   *   *

Rooms at the Northbridge are a lot like the white shipping containers on Google’s campus: long and boxy, with hookups for water, power, and internet. There are narrow beds, too, but those are clearly a reluctant concession to the frailties of wetware.

Kat is sitting cross-legged on the floor in her underwear and red T-shirt, leaning in to her laptop. I’m on the lip of the bed above her with my Kindle drawing power from her USB port—um, not a euphemism—reading The Dragon-Song Chronicles for the fourth time. She’s finally perking up again after the disappointment of the PM, and, twisted around to look at me, she says, “This is really exciting. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Aldus Manutius.” His Wikipedia entry is open on her screen. I recognize the look on her face—it’s the same one that shows up when she talks about the Singularity. “I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.”

I have to be honest: “I’m not sure books are the key to anything. I mean, come on. This is a cult. It really is.” She frowns at that. “But a lost book written by Aldus Manutius himself is still pretty important, no matter what. After this, we can get Mr. Penumbra back to California. We’ll run the store on our own. I’ve got a marketing plan.”

None of that registers with Kat. She says, “There’s a team in Mountain View—we should tell them about this. It’s called Google Forever. They work on life extension. Cancer treatment, organ regeneration, DNA repair.”

This is getting silly. “Maybe a little cryogenics on the side?”

She glances up at me defensively. “They’re taking a portfolio approach.” I run my fingers through her hair, which is still damp from the shower. She smells like citrus.

“I just don’t get it,” she says, twisting back around to look up at me. “How can you stand it that our lives are so short? They’re so short, Clay.”

To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn’t even connect to the internet back then.