So I add some salt and a little butter and I get a prototype of the new visualization working by two in the morning. Immediately I notice something strange: the lights are following one another.
On my screen, Tyndall will borrow a book from the top of aisle two. Then, in another month, Lapin will ask for one from the same shelf. Five weeks later, Imbert will follow — exactly the same shelf — but meanwhile, Tyndall has already returned and gotten something new from the bottom of aisle one. He’s a step ahead.
I hadn’t noticed the pattern because it’s so spread out in space and time, like a piece of music with three hours between each note, all played in different octaves. But here, condensed and accelerated on my screen, it’s obvious. They’re all playing the same song, or dancing the same dance, or — yes — solving the same puzzle.
The bell tinkles. It’s Imbert: short and solid, with his bristly black beard and sloping newsboy cap. He hoists his current book (a monstrous red-bound volume) and pushes it across the desk. I quickly scrub through the visualization to find his place in the pattern. An orange light bounces across my screen, and before he says a word, I know he’s going to ask for a book right in the middle of aisle two. It’s going to be—
“Prokhorov,” Imbert wheezes. “Prokhorov must be next.”
Halfway up the ladder, I feel dizzy. What’s going on? No daredevil maneuvers this time; it’s all I can do to keep my balance as I pull slim, black-bound PROKHOROV off the shelf.
Imbert presents his card—6MXH2I — and takes his book. The bell tinkles, and I am alone again.
In the logbook, I record the transaction, noting Imbert’s cap and the smell of garlic on his breath. And then I write, for the benefit of some future clerk, and perhaps also to prove to myself that this is reaclass="underline"
Strange things are afoot at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
MAXIMUM HAPPY IMAGINATION
“… CALLED SINGULARITY SINGLES,” Kat Potente is saying. She’s wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in it, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she’s a cartoon character — all of which are appealing alternatives.
Singularity Singles. Let’s see. I know (thanks to the internet) that the Singularity is the hypothetical point in the future where technology’s growth curve goes vertical and civilization just sort of reboots itself. Computers get smarter than people, so we let them run the show. Or maybe they let themselves …
Kat nods. “More or less.”
“But Singularity Singles…?”
“Speed-dating for nerds,” she says. “They have one every month at Google. The male-to-female ratio is really good, or really bad. Depends who—”
“You went to this.”
“Yeah. I met a guy who programmed bots for a hedge fund. We dated for a while. He was really into rock-climbing. He had nice shoulders.”
Hmm.
“But a cruel heart.”
We are in the Gourmet Grotto, part of San Francisco’s gleaming six-floor shopping mall. It’s downtown, right next to the cable-car terminus, but I don’t think tourists realize it’s a mall; there’s no parking lot. The Gourmet Grotto is its food court, probably the best in the world: all locally grown spinach salads and pork belly tacos and sushi sans mercury. Also, it’s belowground, and it connects directly to the train station, so you never have to walk outside. Whenever I come here, I pretend I’m living in the future and the atmosphere is irradiated and wild bands of biodiesel bikers rule the dusty surface. Hey, just like the Singularity, right?
Kat frowns. “That’s the twentieth-century future. After the Singularity, we’ll be able to solve those problems.” She cracks a falafel in two and offers me half. “And we’ll live forever.”
“Come on,” I say. “This is just the old dream of immortality—”
“It is the dream of immortality. So?” She pauses, chews. “Let me put it a different way. This is going to sound strange, especially because we just met. But, I know I’m smart.”
That’s definitely true—
“And I think you’re smart, too. So why does that have to end? We could accomplish so much if we just had more time. You know?”
I chew my falafel and nod. This is an interesting girl. Kat’s utter directness suggests homeschooling, yet she is also completely charming. It helps, I guess, that she’s beautiful. I glance down at her T-shirt. You know, I think she owns a bunch that are identical.
“You have to be an optimist to believe in the Singularity,” she says, “and that’s harder than it seems. Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”
“Sounds like a Japanese game show.”
Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.”
Okay: “World government … no cancer … hover-boards.”
“Go further. What’s the good future after that?”
“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”
“Further.”
“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”
“Further.”
I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.”
Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”
I’m trying hard to imagine an average day in the year 3012. I can’t even come up with a half-decent scene. Will people live in buildings? Will they wear clothes? My imagination is almost physically straining. Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing.
“Personally, I think the big change is going to be our brains,” Kat says, tapping just above her ear, which is pink and cute. “I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers. You expect me to say that”—yes—“but it’s happened before. It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.”
Wait: “Yes we do.”
“We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.”
Yes, as a matter of fact, I think the idea of romance just occurred to me last night. (I don’t say that out loud.)
“Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
“But I think the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.”
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. “So what’s the next upgrade?”
“It’s already happening,” she says. “There are all these things you can do, and it’s like you’re in more than one place at one time, and it’s totally normal. I mean, look around.”
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all leaning into phones showing them places that don’t exist and yet are somehow more interesting than the Gourmet Grotto.