Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I reach over and detach his shivering claw from her sleeve. “Mr. Tyndall, don’t worry,” I say. I’ve already watched a line of half-eaten moons parade across the screens. “They know your techniques.” And Google is nothing if not thorough.

While the screens flash and blur down below, a team of Googlers wanders through the fellowship—young people with clipboards and friendly faces, asking questions like: When were you born? Where do you live? What’s your cholesterol?

I wonder who they are.

“They’re from Google Forever,” Kat says, a bit sheepishly. “Interns. I mean, it’s a good opportunity. Some of these people are so old and still so healthy.”

Lapin is describing her work at Pacific Bell to a Googler holding a skinny video camera. Tyndall is spitting into a plastic vial.

One of the interns approaches Penumbra, but he waves her away without a word. His gaze is fixed on the screens below. He’s utterly absorbed, his blue eyes wide and shining like the sky above. Unbidden, Corvina’s warning echoes in my head: And this, the last and greatest of his schemes—it will not succeed, either.

But it’s not just Penumbra’s scheme anymore. This has gotten much bigger than that. Look at all these people—look at Kat. She’s back up at the front of the amphitheater, typing furiously into her phone. She pushes it back into her pocket and squares to face her team.

“Hold up a second,” she shouts, waving her arms in the air. “Hold it!” The code-breaking roulette slowly spins to a halt. On one screen, the letters of MANVTIVS are twisting in space, all rotating at different speeds. On another, some sort of super-complicated knot is trying to untie itself.

“The PM is doing us a big favor,” Kat announces. “Whatever you’ve got running, tag it CRITICAL. We’re going to farm that code out to the whole system in about ten seconds.”

Wait—the whole system? As in, the whole system? The Big Box?

Kat is grinning. She’s an artillery officer who’s just gotten her hands on a really big gun. Now she looks up at her audience—the fellowship. She cups her hands around her mouth: “That was just the warm-up!”

There’s a countdown splashed across the screens. Giant rainbow numbers go 5 (red), 4 (green), 3 (blue), 2 (yellow) …

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything. You can’t check your email. You can’t watch any videos. You can’t get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google’s computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

Make that a really, really big gun.

The screens go blank, pure white. There’s nothing to show because too much is happening now, more than you could ever display on a bank of four screens, or forty, or four thousand. Every transformation that can be applied to this text is being applied. Every possible error is being accounted for, every optical eigenvalue is being inveigled. Every question you can ask a sequence of letters is being asked.

Three seconds later, the interrogation is complete. The amphitheater is quiet. The fellowship is holding its breath—except for the oldest, the man in the wheelchair, who’s drawing a long, rattling wheeze in through his mouth. Penumbra’s eyes are shining and expectant.

“Well? What have we got?” Kat says.

The screens are bright, and they hold the answer.

“Guys? What have we got?”

Silence from the Googlers. The screens are blank. The Big Box is empty. After all that: nothing. The amphitheater is silent. Across the lawn, one of the brass band’s snare drums goes rat-a-tat.

I find Penumbra’s face in the crowd. He looks utterly stricken, still staring down at the screens, waiting for something, anything, to appear. You can see the questions piling up on his face: What does this mean? What did they do wrong? What did I do wrong?

Down below, the Googlers are wearing sour expressions, whispering to one another. Igor is still bent over his keyboard, still trying things. Sparks of color flash and fizzle on his screen.

Kat comes slowly up the steps. She looks dejected and disheartened—worse than when she thought she’d been passed over for the PM. “Well, I guess they’re wrong,” she says, waving weakly at the fellowship. “There’s no message here. It’s just noise. We tried everything.”

“Well, not everything, right—”

She looks up hotly. “Yes, everything. Clay: we just dialed in the equivalent of, like, a million years’ worth of human effort. It came up empty.” Her face is flushed—angry, or embarrassed, or both. “There’s nothing here.”

Nothing.

What are the possibilities here? Either this code is so subtle, so complex, that the most powerful computational force in the history of the world can’t crack it—or there’s nothing here at all, and the fellowship has been wasting its time, all five hundred years of it.