Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Neel Shah, dungeon master, will succeed in his quest to sell his company to Google. Kat will make a pitch to the PM, and they’ll go for it. They will acquire Anatomix, rebrand it Google Body, and release a new version of the software that anybody can download for free. The boobs will still be the best part.

After that, Neel will finally be rich beyond measure, and he will come into the fullness of his patronage. First, the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts will get an endowment, an office, and an executive director: Tabitha Trudeau. She will fill the firehouse floor with drawings, paintings, textiles, and tapestries, all the work of female artists, all scavenged from Con-U, and then she will begin to give out grants. Big ones.

Next, Neel will lure Mat Mittelbrand away from ILM, and together they will start a production company that uses pixels, polygons, knives, and glue. Neel will buy the movie rights to The Dragon-Song Chronicles. After the Anatomix acquisition, he will immediately hire Igor back from Google and install him as lead programmer at Half-Blood Studios. He will be planning a trilogy in 3-D. Mat will direct.

Kat will climb the ranks of the PM. First she’ll bring Google the decoded memoir of Aldus Manutius, which will become the cornerstone of a new Lost Books project. The New York Times will blog about it. Next, the acquisition of Anatomix and the popularity of Google Body will give her even more momentum. She’ll have her picture printed in Wired, a whole glossy half page, standing under the huge data visualization screens, hands on her hips, blazer hanging loosely over her bright red BAM! T-shirt.

I will realize then that she never stopped wearing it after all.

Oliver Grone will complete his doctorate in archaeology. He will find a job immediately, and not with a museum, but with the company that operates the Accession Table. He will be given the task of recategorizing every marble artifact made before 200 B.C., and he will be in heaven.

I’ll ask Kat out on a date, and she will accept. We’ll go see Moon Suicide play live, and instead of talking about frozen heads, we’ll just dance. I will discover that Kat is a terrible dancer. On the steps in front of her apartment, she’ll kiss me once, light on the lips, and then disappear into the dark doorway. I’ll walk home and send her a text message along the way. The message will consist of a single value, one that I have deduced on my own after a long struggle with a geometry textbook: 25,000 miles.

*   *   *

There will be an organizational fracture at the base of the Unbroken Spine. Back in New York, the First Reader will threaten doom and disappointment for any more who disobey. To make his point, he will, in fact, burn Penumbra’s codex vitae—and that will be a terrible miscalculation. The black-robes will be appalled, and finally, they will vote. All of the bound will gather in their bookish barrow and raise their hands one by one, and Corvina will be stripped of his position. He will remain CEO of the Festina Lente Company—where profits are up, way up—but down below, there will be a new First Reader.

It will be Edgar Deckle.

Maurice Tyndall will travel to New York to begin writing his codex vitae, and I will suggest that he petition to replace Deckle as the guardian of the Reading Room. That office could use a little life.

Even though its vessel will be destroyed, the contents of Penumbra’s codex vitae will be safe, and I will offer to help him publish it.

He will demur: “Perhaps someday, but not yet. Let it remain secret for now. After all, my boy”—his blue eyes will narrow and twinkle—“you might be surprised at what you find there.”

*   *   *

Together, Penumbra and I will establish a new fellowship—actually, a little company. We’ll talk Neel into investing some of his Google-gotten gains, and it will turn out that Fedorov has millions in HP stock, so he’ll chip in some of that, too.

Penumbra and I will sit and talk many times about what sort of enterprise might suit us best. Another bookstore? No. Some kind of publishing company? No. Penumbra will admit that he is happiest as a guide and a coach, not a scholar or a code-breaker. I will admit that I just want an excuse to put all my favorite people in a room together. So we’ll form a consultancy: a special-ops squad for companies operating at the intersection of books and technology, trying to solve the mysteries that gather in the shadows of digital shelves. Kat will supply our first contract: designing the marginalia system for Google’s prototype e-reader, which is thin and light, with a skin that’s not plastic but cloth, like a hardcover book.