Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

“Every day you learn something amazing,” Kat says, “like, there’s a secret underground library in New York City”—she pauses and gapes for effect, and it makes me laugh—“and you realize there’s so much more that’s waiting. Eighty years isn’t enough. Or a hundred. Whatever. It’s just not.” Her voice goes a little ragged, and I realize how deep this current runs within Kat Potente.

I lean down, kiss her above the ear, and whisper: “Would you really freeze your head?”

“I would absolutely, positively freeze my head.” She looks up at me and her face is serious. “I’d freeze yours, too. And in a thousand years, you’d thank me.”

POP-UP

WHEN I WAKE UP in the morning, Kat is gone, already headed for Google’s New York office. On my laptop, there’s an email waiting—a message relayed from Grumble’s forum. The timestamp says 3:05 a.m., and it’s from—holy shit. It’s from Grumble himself. The message says simply:

bigger than potter huh? tell me what you need.

My pulse pounds in my ears. This is awesome.

Grumble lives in Berlin, but he seems to spend most of his time traveling, doing special scanning ops in London or Paris or Cairo. Maybe sometimes New York. Nobody knows his real name; nobody knows what he looks like. He might be a she, or even a collective. In my imagination, though, Grumble is a he, not much older than me. In my imagination, he works solo—shuffling into the British Library in a puffy gray parka, wearing the cardboard components of his book scanner like a bulletproof vest under his clothes—but he has allies everywhere.

Maybe we’ll meet up. Maybe we’ll become friends. Maybe I’ll become his hacker apprentice. But I have to play it cool, or he’ll probably think I’m from the FBI or, worse, the Festina Lente Company. So I write:

Hey Grumble! Thanks for replying, man. Big fan of your

Okay, no. I lean on the delete key and start again:

Hey. We can get the cameras and the cardboard, but we can’t find a laser. Can you help? P.S. Okay admittedly J. K. Rowling is a pretty big deal … but so was Aldus Manutius.

I hit send, smack my MacBook shut, and retreat into the bathroom. I think about hacker heroes and frozen heads while I scrub shampoo into my hair under the hot industrial blast of the Northbridge’s shower, obviously designed for robots, not for men.

*   *   *

Neel is waiting for me in the lobby, finishing a bowl of plain oatmeal and slurping a shake made from blended kale.

“Hey,” he says, “does your room have a biometric lock?”

“No, just a card key.”

“Mine’s supposed to recognize my face, but it wouldn’t let me in.” He frowns. “I think it only works for white people.”

“You should sell your friend some better software,” I say. “Expand into the hospitality business.”

Neel rolls his eyes. “Right. I don’t think I want to expand into any more markets. Did I tell you I got an email from Homeland Security?”

I freeze. Does this have anything to do with Grumble? No, that’s ridiculous. “You mean, like, recently?”

He nods. “They want an app to help them visualize different body types under heavy clothing. Like, burkas and stuff.”

Okay, whew. “Are you going to do it?”

He grimaces. “No way. Even if it wasn’t a gross idea—which it is—I’m doing too much already.” He slurps his shake and makes a bright cylinder of green zoom up the straw.

“You like it,” I say lightly. “You love having a finger in eleven different pots.”

“Sure, fingers in pots,” he says. “Not, like, whole bodies in pots. Dude, I don’t have partners. I don’t have business development people. And I don’t even do the fun stuff anymore!” He’s talking about code—or may be boobs, I’m not sure. “Honestly, what I really want to do is, like, be a VC.”

Neel Shah, venture capitalist. We’d never have dreamed that in sixth grade.

“So why don’t you?”

“Um, I think you might overestimate how much money Anatomix throws off,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “This isn’t exactly Google over here. To be a VC, you need a lot of C. All I’ve got is a bunch of five-figure contracts with video game companies.”

“And movie studios, right?”

“Shh,” Neel hisses, casting his eyes around the lobby. “Nobody can know about those. There are some very serious documents, dude.” He pauses. “There are documents with Scarlett Johansson’s signature on them.”

*   *   *

We take the subway. Grumble’s next message came through after breakfast, and it said:

theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms.

It is probably the coolest message that has ever appeared in my inbox. It’s a dead-drop, and Neel and I are headed there now. We are going to supply a secret passphrase and get a special-ops book scanner in return.

The train rumbles and sways through its tunnel below the East River. The windows are all dark. Neel is lightly gripping the bar overhead and he says:

“You sure you don’t want to get into business development? You could head up the burka project.” He grins and lifts his eyebrows, and I realize he’s serious, at least about the BD part.