Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I tell Tyndall, and his reaction is better than Lapin’s, but I’m not sure if he’s excited about the pending revelation or if this is just how he responds to everything. Maybe if I told him that Starbucks was introducing a new latte that smelled like books he’d say the same thing:

“Fabulous! Euphoric! Essential!” His hands are up on his head, working their way into tangles of curly gray. He’s walking around his apartment—a tiny one-room studio out near the ocean, where you can hear the foghorns murmuring to one another—going in quick circles, his elbows brushing the walls and knocking framed photos into odd angles. One of them clatters to the floor, and I reach down to pick it up.

It shows a cable car at a crazy angle, completely packed with passengers, and up at the front, in a neat blue uniform, it’s Tyndall himself: younger and skinnier, with hair that’s black instead of gray. He’s wearing a broad grin, hanging half-out of the car, waving at the camera with his free arm. Tyndall the cable car conductor; yes, I can see it. He must have been—

“Magnificent!” He’s still orbiting. “Unspeakable! When? Where?”

“Friday morning, Mr. Tyndall,” I tell him. Friday morning, at the bright glowing center of the internet.

*   *   *

I don’t see Kat for almost two weeks. She’s busy organizing everything for the Great Decoding, and busy with other Google projects, too. The Product Management is an all-you-can-eat buffet, and she’s hungry. She hasn’t replied to any of my flirty emails, and when she texts me, her messages are two words long.

Finally, we meet on Thursday night for a desultory date over sushi. It’s cold, and she’s wearing a heavy houndstooth blazer over a thin gray sweater and a shiny blouse. There’s no sign of her red T-shirt anymore.

Kat gushes about Google’s projects, all revealed to her now. They are making a 3-D web browser. They are making a car that drives itself. They are making a sushi search engine—here she pokes a chopstick down at our dinner—to help people find fish that is sustainable and mercury-free. They are building a time machine. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

With each new mega-project she describes, I feel myself shrink smaller and smaller. How can you stay interested in anything—or anyone—for long when the whole world is your canvas?

“But what I’m really interested in,” Kat says, “is Google Forever.” Right: life extension. She nods. “They need more resources. I’m going to be their ally on the PM—really try to make their case. It might be the most important work we can do, in the long run.”

“I don’t know, the car sounds pretty awesome—”

“Maybe we’ll give them something to work with tomorrow,” Kat continues. “What if we find something crazy in this book? Like, a DNA sequence? Or the formula for some new drug?” Her eyes are shining. I have to hand it to her: she has a real imagination for immortality.

“You’re giving a medieval publisher a lot of credit,” I say.

“They figured out the circumference of the earth a thousand years before they invented printing,” she sniffs. Then she pokes a chopstick at me: “Could you figure out the circumference of the earth?”

“Well—no.” I pause for a moment. “Wait, could you?”

She nods. “Yeah, it’s actually pretty easy. The point is, they knew their stuff back then. And there’s stuff they knew that we still haven’t rediscovered. OK and TK, remember? Old knowledge. This might be the ultimate OK.”

After dinner, Kat won’t come back to the apartment with me. She says she has email to read, prototypes to review, wiki pages to edit. Did I really just lose out to a wiki on a Thursday night?

I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.

THE CALL

IT IS THE NIGHT before the morning on which Kat Potente has scheduled an all-out assault on the centuries-old codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. Her Googler platoon is assembled. Penumbra’s posse is invited. It’s exciting—I have to admit, it’s really exciting—but it’s also unnerving, because I have no idea what’s next for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The man himself hasn’t said a word, but I feel like Penumbra might be winding this place down. Because, I mean, sure: Who needs the burden of an old bookstore when eternal life is imminent?

We’ll see what tomorrow holds. It’s going to be a good show, whatever happens. Maybe afterward he’ll be ready to talk about the future. I still want to buy a billboard on that bus shelter.

It’s a quiet night, with only two customers so far. I browse the shelves, straightening my new acquisitions. I promote The Dragon-Song Chronicles to a higher shelf, then idly flip the first volume over in my hands. The back cover bears a small black-and-white portrait of Clark Moffat in his thirties. He has shaggy blond hair and a bushy beard, and he’s wearing a plain white T-shirt, grinning a toothy grin. Below the portrait, it says: