Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

“Oh, the store has kept me busy,” he says, “but now, after this?” He waves his hands and opens his face wide with a little who-knows-what-could-happen frown. “After this, anything is possible.”

Wait a second—is there something going on there? There couldn’t be anything going on there.

There might be something going on there.

*   *   *

“Okay, quiet down, everybody. Quiet down!” Kat shouts from the front of the amphitheater. She looks up to address the crowd of scholars gathered on the stone steps: “So, I’m Kat Potente, the PM for this project. I’m glad you’re all here, but there are a few things you should know. First, you can use the Wi-Fi, but the fiber optics are for Google employees only.”

I glance across the assembled mass of the fellowship. Tyndall has a pocket watch connected to his pants with a long chain, and he’s checking the time. I don’t think this is going to be a problem.

Kat glances down at a printed-out checklist. “Second, don’t blog, tweet, or live-stream anything you see here.”

Imbert is adjusting an astrolabe. Seriously: not a problem.

“And third”—she grins—“this isn’t going to take long, so don’t get too comfortable.”

Now she shifts to address her troops: “We don’t know what kind of code we’re dealing with yet,” she says. “We need to figure that out first. So we’ll be working in parallel. We’ve got two hundred virtual machines ready and waiting in the Big Box, and your code will run in the right place automatically if you just tag it CODEX. Everybody ready?”

The Googlers all nod. One girl straps on a pair of dark goggles.

“Hit it.”

The screens leap to life, a blitzkrieg of data visualization and exploration. The text of MANVTIVS blinks bright and jagged, set in the squared-off letters favored by code and console. This isn’t a book anymore; it’s a data dump. Scatter plots and bar charts unfurl across the screens. At Kat’s command, Google’s machines crunch and recrunch the data nine hundred different ways. Nine thousand. Nothing yet.

The Googlers are looking for a message—any message—in the text. It might be a whole book, it might be a few sentences, it might be a single word. Nobody, not even the Unbroken Spine, knows what’s waiting there, or how Manutius encrypted it, and that makes this a very hard problem. Luckily, the Googlers love very hard problems.

Now they get more creative. They make crosses and spirals and galaxies of color dance across the screens. The graphs grow new dimensions—first they become cubes and pyramids and blobs, then they sprout long tentacles. My eyes swim as I try to follow along. A Latin lexicon flashes across one screen—an entire language examined in milliseconds. There are n-gram graphs and Vonnegut diagrams. Maps appear, with letter sequences somehow translated into longitudes and latitudes and plotted across the world, a dusting of dots through Siberia and the South Pacific.

Nothing.

The screens flicker and flash as Googlers try every angle. The fellowship is murmuring. Some are still smiling; others are starting to frown. When a giant chessboard appears on one screen with a pile of letters on every square, Fedorov sniffs and mutters, “Ve tried det in 1627.”

Is that why Corvina believes this project won’t succeed—because the Unbroken Spine has literally tried it all? Or is it simply because this is cheating—because old Manutius never had any bright screens or virtual machines? If you follow them, those two lines of reasoning close together like a trap, and they lead you straight down to the Reading Room, with its chalk and its chains, and nowhere else. I still don’t believe the secret to immortality is going to pop up on one of those screens, but jeez, I want Corvina to be wrong. I want Google to crack this code.

“Okay,” Kat announces, “we just got another eight hundred machines.” Her voice rises and carries across the lawn: “Go deeper. More iterations. Don’t hold back.” She walks from table to table, consulting and encouraging. She’s a good leader—I can see it in the Googlers’ faces. I think Kat Potente has found her calling.

I watch Igor bang his head against the text. First he translates each line of letters into a molecule and simulates a chemical reaction; on-screen, the solution dissolves into a gray sludge. Then he makes letters into tiny 3-D people and sets them up in a simulated city. They wander around bumping into buildings and forming crowded clumps in the street until Igor destroys it all with an earthquake. Nothing. No message.

Kat hikes up the steps, squinting into the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. “This code is tough,” she admits. “Like, crazy tough.”

Tyndall sprints around the amphitheater’s edge and leaps over Lapin, who squeaks and shields herself. He grabs Kat’s arm. “You must compensate for the phase of the moon at the time of writing! The lunar offset is essential!”