I really have gotten myself involved in a cult.
“Mr. Tyndall,” I say flatly, “where is it? Where is this library?”
Tyndall shakes his head. “Don’t know. Just a novice. Now never will, never will … unless.” He looks up. There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and he says it again: “Can you run the store?”
I cannot run the store, but I can use it. Thanks to Tyndall, I know Penumbra is in trouble somewhere, and I know it’s my fault. I don’t understand how or why, but it was undeniably me that sent Penumbra packing, and now I’m truly worried about him. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people—Scientology for scholarly seniors. If that’s true, then Penumbra is already deep in its clutches. So, enough poking around and gently guessing: I am going to raid Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for the answers I need.
But first I have to get inside.
It’s the middle of the next day, and I am standing on Broadway, shivering, contemplating the plate-glass windows, when Oliver Grone is suddenly standing beside me. Jeez, he’s quiet for such a big dude.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
I eye him carefully. What if Oliver has already been inducted into this cult?
“Why are you standing out here?” he asks. “It’s cold.”
No. He’s like me; he’s an outsider. But maybe he’s an outsider with a key.
He shakes his head. “The door’s never been locked. I always just walk in and take Mr. Penumbra’s place, you know?”
Right, and I take Oliver’s. But now Penumbra is missing. “Now we’re stuck out here.”
“Well. We could try the fire escape.”
Twenty minutes later, Oliver and I are using climbing muscles honed in Penumbra’s shadowy stacks. We have a utility ladder purchased at a hardware store five blocks away, and it’s set up in the narrow alley between the bookstore and the strip club.
A skinny bartender from Booty’s is back here, too, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket, sucking on a cigarette. He eyes us once, then returns to his phone. He appears to be playing Fruit Ninja.
Oliver goes first while I hold the ladder, and then I climb up after him on my own. This is all foreign territory. I had abstractly understood that this alley existed, and that there was a fire escape in it, but I still don’t understand where the fire escape connects to the store. There’s a whole back part of Penumbra’s where I do not often tread. Beyond the bright front shelves and the dark reaches of the Waybacklist, there’s a tiny break room with a tiny table and a tiny bathroom, and beyond that, the door marked PRIVATE that leads to Penumbra’s office. I take this injunction seriously, just as I took rule number two (regarding the sanctitude of the Waybacklist) seriously, at least until Mat got involved.
“Yeah, the door leads to a flight of stairs,” Oliver says. “They go up.” We are both standing on the fire escape, which makes a high metallic whine when either of us shifts our weight. There’s a wide window, old glass set into scratched and pitted wood. I pull and it doesn’t budge. Oliver bends down, makes a quiet grad-student grunt, and it flies open with a pop and a shriek. I glance down at the bartender in the alley. He’s ignoring us with the discipline of one whose job often requires it.
We hop through the window frame and into the darkness of Penumbra’s second-floor study.
There is grunting and shuffling and a loud whispered ouch, and then Oliver finds a switch. Orange light blooms from a lamp set on a long desk, revealing the space around us.
Penumbra is a much bigger nerd than he lets on.
The desk is loaded down with computers, none of them manufactured later than 1987. There’s an old TRS-80 connected to a squat brown TV. There’s an oblong Atari and an IBM PC with a bright blue plastic case. There are long boxes full of floppy disks and stacks of thick manuals, their titles printed in boxy letters:
TAKING A BITE OUT OF YOUR APPLE
BASIC PROGRAMS FOR FUN AND PROFIT
VISICALC MASTER CLASS
Next to the PC there is a long metal box topped with two rubber cups. Next to the box is an old rotary phone with a long, curving handset. I think the box is a modem, possibly the world’s most ancient; when you’re ready to go online, you plug the handset into those rubber cups, as if the computer is literally making a phone call. I’ve never seen one in person, only in snarky can-you-believe-this-is-how-it-used-to-work blog posts. I’m floored, because this means Penumbra has, at some point in his life, tiptoed into cyberspace.
On the wall behind the desk there’s a world map, very big and very old. On this map there is no Kenya, no Zimbabwe, no India. Alaska is a blank expanse. There are gleaming pins pushed into the paper. Pins poke London, Paris, and Berlin. Pins poke Saint Petersburg, Cairo, and Tehran. There are more—and these must be the bookstores, the little libraries.
While Oliver rummages through a stack of papers, I power up the PC. The switch flips over with a loud thwack and the computer rumbles to life. It sounds like an airplane taking off; there’s a loud roar, then a screech, then a staccato sequence of beeps. Oliver jerks around.
“What are you doing?” he whispers.
“Looking for clues, same as you.” I don’t know why he’s whispering.
“But what if there’s weird stuff on there?” he says, still whispering. “Like porn.”
The computer musters a command-line prompt. This is okay; I can figure this out. When you work on websites, you interact with far-off servers in ways that have not really changed much since 1987, so I think back to NewBagel and tap in a few exploratory instructions.
“Oliver,” I say absently, “have you done any digital archaeology?”
“No,” he says, doubled over a set of drawers. “I don’t really mess with anything newer than the twelfth century.”
The PC’s tiny disk is full of text files, inscrutably named. When I inspect one, it’s a jumble of characters. So that either means it’s raw data, or it’s encrypted, or … yes. This is one of the books from the Waybacklist, one of the books that Lapin called a codex vitae. I think Penumbra transcribed it into his PC.
There’s a program called EULERMETHOD. I key it in, take a deep breath, press return … and the PC beeps in protest. In bright green text, it tells me there are errors in the code—lots of them. The program won’t run. Maybe it never ran.
“Look at this,” Oliver says from across the room.
He’s leaning over a thick book on top of a filing cabinet. The cover is leather, embossed just like the logbooks, and it says PECUNIA. Maybe it’s a private logbook for all the really juicy details of the book business. But no: when Oliver flips it open, the book’s purpose is revealed. It’s a ledger, each page cut into two wide columns and dozens of narrow rows, each row carrying an entry in Penumbra’s spidery script:
FESTINA LENTE CO. $10,847.00
FESTINA LENTE CO. $10,853.00
FESTINA LENTE CO. $10,859.00
Oliver flips through the pages of the ledger. The entries go month by month, and they go back decades. So there’s our patron: the Festina Lente Company must connect to Corvina somehow.
Oliver Grone is a trained excavator. While I was playing hacker, he’s been finding something useful. I follow his lead, moving around the room step-by-step, looking for clues.
There’s another low cabinet. On top: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a wrinkled Publishers Weekly from 1993, a Burmese take-out menu. Inside: paper, pencils, rubber bands, a stapler.
There’s a coatrack, empty except for a thin gray scarf. I’ve seen Penumbra wear it before.
There are photos in black frames on the far wall, next to the stairs that lead down. One shows the store itself, but it must be decades old: it’s black-and-white, and the street looks different. Instead of Booty’s next door, there’s a restaurant called Arigoni’s, with candles and checkered tablecloths. Another photo, this one in Kodachrome color, shows a pretty middle-aged woman with bobbed blond hair hugging a redwood tree, one heel ki
cked up, beaming at the camera.
The last photo shows three men posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. One is older, with the look of a professor: a sharp hook of a nose and a wry, winning grin. The other two are much younger. One is broad-chested and thick-armed, like an old-school bodybuilder. He has a black mustache and a steeply receding hairline, and with one arm he’s giving the camera a thumbs-up. His other arm is draped around the shoulders of the third man, who’s tall and skinny, with— Wait. The third man is Penumbra. Yes, he is long-ago Penumbra, with a halo of brown hair and flesh on his cheeks. He’s smiling. He looks so young.
I crack open the frame and pull out the photo. On the back, in Penumbra’s script, there’s a caption:
Two novices & a great teacher
Penumbra, Corvina, Al-Asmari
Amazing. The older man must be Al-Asmari, and that makes the one with the mustache Corvina, who is now Penumbra’s boss, CEO of Weird Bookstores Worldwide, which might be the Festina Lente Company. It’s got to be this Corvina who summoned Penumbra back to the library to be punished or fired or burned or worse. He’s hale and hearty in this photo, but he must be as old as Penumbra now. He must be a cruel skeleton.
“Look at this!” Oliver calls again from across the room. He is definitely better at detective work than I am. First the ledger, and now this: he holds up an Amtrak timetable, freshly printed. He spreads it out on the desk, and there it is, boxed by four sharp strokes—our employer’s destination.
Penn Station.
Penumbra is going to New York City.
EMPIRES
THE SCENARIO as I see it goes like this:
The bookstore is closed. Penumbra is gone, recalled by his boss, Corvina, to the secret library that is actually the headquarters of the bibliophile cult known as the Unbroken Spine. Something is going to be burned. The library is in New York City, but nobody knows where—not yet.
Oliver Grone is going to climb in through the fire escape and run the store for at least a few hours every day to keep Tyndall and the rest all satisfied. Maybe Oliver can learn a little more about the Unbroken Spine along the way.
As for me: I have my quest. The arrival time on the other end of Penumbra’s train—of course he would take the train—is still two days in the future. Right now he’s chugging through the middle of the country, and if I work fast, I can head him off at the pass. Yes: I can intercept him and rescue him. I can set things right and get my job back. I can find out what exactly is going on.
———
I tell Kat about all of it, as I am becoming accustomed to doing. It feels like loading a really hard math problem into a computer. I just key in all the variables, push return, and:
“It won’t work,” she says. “Penumbra is an old man. I get the feeling this thing has been part of his life for a long time. I mean, it basically is his life, right?”
“Right, so—”
“So I don’t think you’ll get him to just … quit. Like, I’ve been at Google for, what, three years? That’s hardly a lifetime. But even now you couldn’t just meet me at the train station and tell me to turn around. This company is the most important part of my life. It’s the most important part of me. I’d walk right past you.”
She’s right, and it’s disconcerting, both because it means I’ll need a new plan and because, while I can recognize the truth in what she’s saying, it doesn’t actually make any sense to me. I’ve never felt that way about a job (or a cult). You could stop me at the train station and talk me into anything.
“But I think you should absolutely go to New York,” Kat says.
“Okay, now I’m confused.”
“This is too interesting not to pursue. What’s the alternative? Find another job and spend forever wondering what happened to your old boss?”
“Well, that’s definitely plan B—”
“Your first instinct was right. You’ve just got to be more”—she pauses and purses her lips—”strategic. And you’ve got to take me with you.” She grins. Obviously. How can I say no?
“Google has a big New York office,” Kat says, “and I’ve never been there, so I’ll just say I want to go meet the team. My manager will be fine with that. What about you?”
What about me? I have a quest and I have an ally. Now all I need is a patron.
———
Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader. Neel Shah has plenty of friends—investors, employees, other entrepreneurs—but on some level they know, and he knows, that they are friends with Neel Shah, CEO. By contrast, I am, and always will be, friends with Neel Shah, dungeon master.
It is Neel who will be my patron.
His home serves double duty as his company’s headquarters. Back when San Francisco was young, Neel’s place was a wide brick firehouse; today, it’s a wide brick techno-loft with fancy speakers and superfast internet. Neel’s company spreads out on the firehouse floor, where nineteenth-century firemen used to eat nineteenth-century chili and tell nineteenth-century jokes. They’ve been replaced by a squad of skinny young men who are their opposite: men who wear delicate neon sneakers, not heavy black boots, and when they shake your hand, it’s not a meaty squash but a limp slither. Most of them have accents—maybe that hasn’t changed?
Neel finds programming prodigies, brings them to San Francisco, and assimilates them. These are Neel’s guys, and the greatest of them is Igor, who is nineteen and comes from Belarus. To hear Neel tell it, Igor taught himself matrix math on the back of a shovel, ruled the Minsk hacker scene as a sixteen-year-old, and would have proceeded directly to a perilous career in software piracy if Neel hadn’t spotted his 3-D handiwork in a demo video posted on YouTube. Neel got him a visa, bought him a plane ticket, and had a desk waiting at the firehouse when he arrived. Next to the desk there was a sleeping bag.
Igor offers me his chair and goes in search of his employer.
The walls, all thick timber and exposed brick, are covered with giant posters of classic women: Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, all printed in shimmering black-and-white. Monitors continue the theme. On some screens, the women are blown up and pixelated; on others, they’re repeated a dozen times. Igor’s monitor shows Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, except half of her is a sketchy 3-D model, a green wire-frame that slinks across the screen in sync with the film.
Neel made his millions in middleware. That is to say, he makes software that’s used by other people who make software, mostly video games. He sells tools that they need the same way a painter needs a palette or a filmmaker needs a camera. He sells tools they cannot do without—tools they will pay top dollar for.
I’ll cut to the chase: Neel Shah is the world’s leading expert on boob physics.
He developed the first version of his breakthrough boob-simulation software while he was still a sophomore at Berkeley, and shortly after that he licensed it to a Korean company that was developing a 3-D beach volleyball game. The game was terrible but the boobs were phenomenal.
Today, that software—now called Anatomix—is the de facto tool for the simulation and represent at ion of breasts in digital media. It’s a sprawling package that lets you create and model, with breathtaking realism, the entire universe of human boobs. One module provides variables for size, shape, authenticity. (Breasts aren’t spheres, Neel will tell you, and they’re not water balloons. They’re complicated structures, almost architectural.) Another module renders the breasts—paints them with pixels. It’s a particular kind of skin, with a quality that’s luminous and very hard to achieve. Something called subsurface scattering is involved.
If you are in the business of simulating a boob, Neel’s software is the only serious option. It does more than that—thanks to Igor’s exertions, Anatomix can now render the entire human body, with perfectly calibrated jiggle and luminosity in places you didn’t realize you had either—but boobs are still the company’s bread and butter.
Really, I think Igor
and the rest of Neel’s guys are just in the translation business. The inputs—pinned to the walls, glowing on every screen—are specific world-historic movie babes. The outputs are generalized models and algorithms. And it’s gone full circle: Neel will tell you, in strictest secrecy, that his software is now being used in movie postproduction.
Neel comes quick-stepping down the spiral staircase, waving and grinning. Below his molecule-tight gray T-shirt, he’s wearing deeply uncool stonewashed jeans and bright New Balances with puffy white tongues. You can never escape the sixth grade entirely.
“Neel,” I explain when he pulls up a chair, “I need to go to New York tomorrow.”
“What’s up? A job?”
No, the opposite of a job: “My elderly employer has disappeared and I’m trying to track him down.”
“I am so not surprised,” Neel says, eyes narrowing.
“You were right,” I say. Warlocks.
“Let’s hear it.” He settles in.
Igor reappears and I relinquish his chair, standing to make my case. I tell Neel what has emerged. I explain it like the setup for a Rockets & Warlocks adventure: the backstory, the characters, the quest before us. The party is forming, I say: I have a rogue (that’s me) and a wizard (that’s Kat). Now I need a warrior. (Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?)
Neel’s eyes light up. I knew this would be the right rhetorical strategy. Next, I show him the 3-D bookstore, with the wrinkled and mysterious Founder angling into view.
He lifts his eyebrows. He’s impressed. “I didn’t know you could code,” he says. His eyes narrow and his biceps pulse. He’s thinking. Finally, he says, “You want to give this to one of my guys here? Igor, take a look—”
“Neel, no. The graphics don’t matter.”
Igor leans over anyway. “I tink it looks nice,” he says good-naturedly. On the screen behind him, Cleopatra bats wire-frame eyelashes.