“Good morning,” Penumbra says. “How was the night?”
“Fine good great,” I say. Too fast. Slow down. Remember: the shadow of normalcy. Crouch there.
“You know,” Penumbra says, peeling off his peacoat, “I have been thinking. We should retire this fellow”—he taps the Mac Plus on the head with two fingers, a gentle thwack thwack—“and acquire something more up-to-date. Nothing too expensive. Perhaps you can recommend a make and model?”
Make and model. I’ve never heard anyone talk about computers that way. You can have a MacBook in any color you want, as long as it’s bare metal. “Yeah that’s great,” I say. “Sure I’ll do some research Mr. Penumbra maybe a refurbished iMac I think they’re just as good as the new ones.” I say it all in one breath, already heading for the door. I feel sick.
“And,” he says gingerly, “perhaps you could use it to construct a website.”
My heart is bursting.
“The store should have one. It is past time.”
It’s done, my heart has exploded, and a few other small organs may have ruptured, too, but I am committed to this course — I am committed to Kat Potente’s corpus:
“Wow that’s awesome we should totally do that I love websites but I’ve really got to go Mr. Penumbra see you later.”
He pauses, then smiles a lopsided smile. “Very well. Have a good day.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m on the train to Mountain View, clutching my bulging bag to my chest. It’s strange — my transgression is so slight. Who cares about the whereabouts of an old logbook from an obscure used bookstore for sixteen measly hours? But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m one of the two people in the world Penumbra is supposed to be able to count on, and it turns out I can’t be trusted.
All of this, just to impress a girl. The train’s rumble and sway put me to sleep.
THE SPIDER
THE RAINBOW SIGN next to the train station that points the way to Google’s campus has faded a bit in the Silicon Valley sun. I follow the pale arrow down a curving sidewalk flanked by eucalyptus trees and bike racks. Around the bend, I see wide lawns and low buildings and, between the trees, flashes of branding: red, green, yellow, blue.
The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it’s Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.
Kat meets me at a blue security checkpoint, requests and receives a visitor badge with my name and affiliation printed in red, and leads me into her domain. We cut through a broad parking lot, the blacktop baking in the sun. There are no cars here; instead, the lot is packed full of white shipping containers set up on short stilts.
“These are pieces of the Big Box,” Kat says, pointing. A semi truck is arriving at the far end of the lot, roaring and hissing. Its carriage is painted bright red-green-blue, and it’s towing one of the white containers.
“They’re like LEGO blocks,” she continues, “except each one has disk space, tons of it, and CPUs and everything else, and connections for water and power and internet. We build them in Vietnam, then ship them wherever. They all hook up automatically, no matter where they are. All together, they’re the Big Box.”
“Which does…?”
“Everything,” she says. “Everything at Google runs in the Big Box.” She points a brown arm toward a container with WWW stenciled across the side in tall green letters. “There’s a copy of the web in there.” YT: “Every video on YouTube.” MX: “All your email. Everybody’s email.”
Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore.
Wide walkways curve through the main campus. There’s a bike lane, and Googlers whiz by on carbon-fiber racers and fixed gears with battery packs. There’s a pair of graybeards on recumbents and a tall dude with blue dreadlocks pedaling a unicycle.
“I reserved some time on the book scanner at twelve-thirty,” Kat says. “Lunch first?”
The Google mess hall comes into view, wide and low, a white pavilion staked out like a garden party. The front is open, tarp pulled up above the entryways, and short lines of Googlers poke out onto the lawn.
Kat pauses, squinting. Calculating. “This one,” she says finally, and tugs me over to the leftmost line. “I’m a pretty good queue strategist. But it’s not easy here—”
“Because everyone at Google is a queue strategist,” I suggest.
“Exactly. So sometimes there’s bluffing. This guy’s a bluffer,” she says, jabbing the Googler just ahead of us in line with her elbow. He’s tall and sandy-haired and he looks like a surfer.
“Hey, I am Finn,” he says, holding out a blocky, long-fingered hand. “Your first visit to Google?” He says it Gew-gell, with a little pause in the middle.
It is indeed, my ambiguously European friend. I make small talk: “How’s the food?”
“Oh, fantastic. The chef is famous…” He pauses. Something clicks. “Kat, he must use the other line.”
“Right. I always forget,” Kat says. She explains, “Our food is personalized. It has vitamins, some natural stimulants.”
Finn nods vigorously. “I am experimenting with my potassium level. Now I am up to eleven bananas every day. Body hacking!” His face splits into a wide grin. Wait, did the couscous salad have stimulants?
“Sorry,” Kat says, frowning. “The visitor line is over there.” She points across the lawn, and I leave her with the body-hacking Euro-surfer.
So now I’m waiting next to a sign that says EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES alongside three dudes in khakis and blue button-downs with leather phone holsters. Across the grass, the Googlers all wear snug jeans and bright T-shirts.
Kat is talking to someone else now, a slender brown-skinned boy who’s joined the line just behind her. He’s dressed like a skater, so I assume he has a PhD in artificial intelligence. A lance of jealousy spikes down behind my eyes, but I’m prepared for it; I knew it would come, here in the crystal castle where Kat knows everyone and everyone knows her. So I just let it pass, and I remind myself that she brought me here. This is the trump card in these situations: Yes, everyone else is smart, everyone else is cool, everyone else is healthy and attractive — but she brought you. You have to wear that like a pin, like a badge.
I look down and realize my visitor badge actually says that—
NAME: Clay Jannon
COMPANY: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
HOST: Kat Potente
— so I peel it off and stick it a little higher up on my shirt.
The food is, as promised, fantastic. I get two scoops of lentil salad and a thick pink stripe of fish, seven sturdy green lines of asparagus, and a single chocolate-chip cookie that has been optimized for crispiness.
Kat waves me over to a table near the pavilion’s perimeter, where a quick breeze is rustling the white tarp. Little slices of light dance across the table, which has a paper covering marked out with a pale blue grid. At Google, they eat lunch on graph paper.
“This is Raj,” she says, waving a forkful of lentil salad (which looks just like mine) at the skater PhD. “We went to school together.” Kat studied symbolic systems at Stanford. Did everybody here go to Stanford? Do they just give you a job at Google when you graduate?