I don’t like where—
“None. Zero. He has maintained that store where you’re standing — barely — and accomplished absolutely nothing else of note. And this, the last and greatest of his schemes — it will not succeed, either. You just said so yourself. It is foolishness, and it will fail, and what then? I worry about him, Clay, truly — as his oldest friend.”
I know he’s using a Jedi mind trick on me right now. But it’s a really good Jedi mind trick.
“Okay,” I say, “I get it. I know Penumbra’s a little weird. Obviously. What am I supposed to do?”
“You must do what I can’t. I would delete the copy you stole. I would delete every copy. But I’m too far away, so you must help me, and you must help our friend.”
Now it sounds like he’s standing right beside me:
“You must stop Penumbra, or this final failure will destroy him.”
The phone is back in its cradle, even though I am not totally conscious of having hung up. The store is quiet; there’s no more pop pop from the front. I cast my eyes slowly around Penumbra’s study, at the wreckage of decades of digital dreams, and Corvina’s warning starts to make sense. I think of the look on Penumbra’s face as he was explaining his scheme to us in New York, and it makes even more sense. I look across at the photo again. Suddenly it’s not Corvina who’s the wayward friend — it’s Penumbra.
Neel appears at the top of the stairs.
“Mat needs your help,” he says. “You have to hold a light or something.”
“Okay, sure.” I take a sharp breath, push Corvina’s voice out of my head, and follow Neel back down into the store. We’ve raised a lot of dust, and now the lamps are making bright shapes in the air, punching through spaces in the shelves, catching feathery motes — microscopic scraps of paper, bits of Penumbra’s skin, of mine — and making them shine.
“Mat’s pretty good at this, huh?” I say, peering around at the otherworldly effect.
Neel nods. “He’s amazing.”
Mat hands me a giant sheet of glossy white poster board and tells me to hold it steady. He’s capturing the front desk up close, getting deep into the grain. The poster board is reflecting so subtly that I cannot detect its effect on the wood, but I assume it is making a crucial contribution to the brightness and evenness of the light.
Mat starts shooting again, and the big lights are just calmly beaming now, so I can hear the camera go click click. Neel is standing behind Mat, holding a light with one hand, slurping his second kale juice with the other.
As I stand holding the poster board, I think:
Corvina doesn’t really care about Penumbra. This is about control, and he’s trying to turn me into his instrument. I’m grateful for the geographical distance between us; I’d hate to experience that voice in person. Or maybe he wouldn’t bother with persuasion in person. Maybe he’d show up with a gang of black-robes. But he can’t, because we’re in California; the continent is our shield. Corvina caught on too late, so his voice is all he’s got.
Mat pushes in even closer, apparently going for molecular detail on the front desk, the place where I’ve spent so much of my life recently. I’m presented, for a moment, with a nicely framed portrait: compact curled-up Mat, sweating, holding his camera up to his eye, and big broad Neel, smiling, holding the light steady, slurping his kale juice. My friends, making something together. This requires faith, too. I can’t tell what this poster board is doing, but I trust Mat. I know it’s going to be beautiful.
Corvina’s got it wrong. Penumbra’s schemes didn’t fail because he’s a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina’s right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra’s schemes failed because he didn’t have enough help. Maybe he didn’t have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat — until now.
Corvina said: You must stop Penumbra.
No, just the opposite. We’re going to help him.
Dawn comes, and when it does, I know not to expect Penumbra. He is headed not to the store that bears his name, but to Google. In just about two hours, the project that Penumbra and his brothers and sisters have toiled over for decades, for centuries, is coming to fruition. He’s probably eating a celebratory bagel somewhere.
Here in the store, Mat packs the lights back into their gray foam sarcophagus. Neel takes the bent-up white poster board out to the trash can. I coil up the orange cables and straighten the front desk. Everything looks the same; nothing has moved. And yet, something is different. We took photos of every surface: the shelves, the desk, the door, the floor. We took photos of the books, all of them, the ones in the front and the Waybacklist, too. We didn’t capture the pages inside, of course — that would be a project of a different scale. If you’re ever playing Super Bookstore Brothers, navigating a 3-D simulacrum of Penumbra’s bookstore with pink-yellow light coming in the front windows and a foggy particle effect rising in the back, and you decide you want to actually read one of the beautifully textured books: too bad. Neel’s model might match the store’s volume but never its density.
“Breakfast?” Neel asks.
“Breakfast!” Mat agrees.
So we leave. That’s it. I turn off the lights and pull the door tight behind me. The bell makes its bright tinkle. I never did get a key.
“Let me see the photos,” Neel says, grabbing at Mat’s camera.
“Not yet, not yet,” Mat says, tucking it under his arm. “I need to grade them. This is just raw material.”
“Grade them? Like A-B-C?”
“Color grading — color correction. Translation: I need to make them look awesome.” He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you worked with movie studios, Shah.”
“He told you?” Neel spins to look at me with wide eyes: “You told him? There are documents!”
“You should stop by ILM next week,” Mat says calmly. “I’ll show you some stuff.”
They’re both far up the sidewalk now, halfway to Neel’s car, but I’m still standing at the wide front windows with their big gold type: MR. PENUMBRA’S in beautiful Gerritszoon. It’s dark inside. I press my hand onto the fellowship’s symbol — two hands, open like a book — and when I take it away, there’s an oily, five-fingered print left behind.
A REALLY BIG GUN
IT’S FINALLY TIME to break a code that has waited five hundred years.
Kat has requisitioned Google’s data visualization amphitheater with its massive screens. She’s moved tables from the lunch tent into position down in front; it looks like mission control, picnic-style.
The day is beautiful; a sharp blue sky is dotted with wispy white clouds, all commas and curlicues. Hummingbirds hover down to investigate the screens, then zip back out across the bright open lawns. There’s music in the distance; the Google brass band is practicing an algorithmically generated waltz.
Down below, Kat’s handpicked code-breaking squad is setting up. Laptops are coming out, each one encrusted with a different collection of colorful stickers and holograms, and the Googlers are plugging into power and fiber optics, flexing their fingers.
Igor is among them. His brilliance at the bookstore earned him a special invitation: today, he’s allowed to play in the Big Box. He’s leaning in to his laptop, his skinny hands a bluish blur, and two Googlers are watching wide-eyed over his shoulder.