But it’s not just Penumbra’s scheme anymore. This has gotten much bigger than that. Look at all these people — look at Kat. She’s back up at the front of the amphitheater, typing furiously into her phone. She pushes it back into her pocket and squares to face her team.
“Hold up a second,” she shouts, waving her arms in the air. “Hold it!” The code-breaking roulette slowly spins to a halt. On one screen, the letters of MANVTIVS are twisting in space, all rotating at different speeds. On another, some sort of super-complicated knot is trying to untie itself.
“The PM is doing us a big favor,” Kat announces. “Whatever you’ve got running, tag it CRITICAL. We’re going to farm that code out to the whole system in about ten seconds.”
Wait — the whole system? As in, the whole system? The Big Box?
Kat is grinning. She’s an artillery officer who’s just gotten her hands on a really big gun. Now she looks up at her audience — the fellowship. She cups her hands around her mouth: “That was just the warm-up!”
There’s a countdown splashed across the screens. Giant rainbow numbers go 5 (red), 4 (green), 3 (blue), 2 (yellow) …
And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything. You can’t check your email. You can’t watch any videos. You can’t get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google’s computers around the world is dedicated to this task.
Make that a really, really big gun.
The screens go blank, pure white. There’s nothing to show because too much is happening now, more than you could ever display on a bank of four screens, or forty, or four thousand. Every transformation that can be applied to this text is being applied. Every possible error is being accounted for, every optical eigenvalue is being inveigled. Every question you can ask a sequence of letters is being asked.
Three seconds later, the interrogation is complete. The amphitheater is quiet. The fellowship is holding its breath — except for the oldest, the man in the wheelchair, who’s drawing a long, rattling wheeze in through his mouth. Penumbra’s eyes are shining and expectant.
“Well? What have we got?” Kat says.
The screens are bright, and they hold the answer.
“Guys? What have we got?”
Silence from the Googlers. The screens are blank. The Big Box is empty. After all that: nothing. The amphitheater is silent. Across the lawn, one of the brass band’s snare drums goes rat-a-tat.
I find Penumbra’s face in the crowd. He looks utterly stricken, still staring down at the screens, waiting for something, anything, to appear. You can see the questions piling up on his face: What does this mean? What did they do wrong? What did I do wrong?
Down below, the Googlers are wearing sour expressions, whispering to one another. Igor is still bent over his keyboard, still trying things. Sparks of color flash and fizzle on his screen.
Kat comes slowly up the steps. She looks dejected and disheartened — worse than when she thought she’d been passed over for the PM. “Well, I guess they’re wrong,” she says, waving weakly at the fellowship. “There’s no message here. It’s just noise. We tried everything.”
“Well, not everything, right—”
She looks up hotly. “Yes, everything. Clay: we just dialed in the equivalent of, like, a million years’ worth of human effort. It came up empty.” Her face is flushed — angry, or embarrassed, or both. “There’s nothing here.”
Nothing.
What are the possibilities here? Either this code is so subtle, so complex, that the most powerful computational force in the history of the world can’t crack it — or there’s nothing here at all, and the fellowship has been wasting its time, all five hundred years of it.
I try to find Penumbra’s face again. I search the amphitheater, casting my eyes up and down the mass of the fellowship. There’s Tyndall, whispering to himself; Fedorov, sitting in a pensive lump; Rosemary Lapin, smiling faintly. And then I spot him: a tall stick figure wobbling across Google’s green lawns, almost to the stand of trees on the other side, moving fast, not looking back.
And this, the last and greatest of his schemes — it will not succeed, either.
I start to jog after him, but I’m out of shape, and how is he so fast, anyway? I huff and puff across the lawn, toward the spot where I saw him last. When I get there, he’s gone. Google’s chaotic campus rises up all around me, rainbow arrows pointing every way at once, and here the walkways curve off in five different directions. He’s gone.
It is foolishness, and it will fail, and what then?
Penumbra is gone.
THE TOWER
LITTLE BITS OF METAL
MATROPOLIS HAS TAKEN OVER the living room. Mat and Ashley have hauled the couch away, and to navigate around the room you follow a narrow channel between the card tables: the winding Mittelriver, complete with two bridges. The commercial district has matured, and new towers push past the old airship dock, nearly touching the ceiling. I suspect Mat might build something up there, too. Soon Matropolis will annex the sky.
It’s past midnight, and I can’t sleep. I still haven’t been able to reclaim my circadian rhythm, even though it’s been a week since our late-night photo shoot. So now I am lying on the floor, drowning deep in the Mittelriver, dubbing The Dragon-Song Chronicles.
The audiobook edition I bought for Neel was produced in 1987 and the distributor’s catalog did not specify that it still comes on cassette tapes. Cassette tapes! Or maybe it did specify that, and I just missed it in the excitement of the bulk order. In any case, I still want Neel to have the audiobooks, so I bought a black Sony Walkman for seven dollars on eBay and I am now playing the tapes into my laptop, rerecording them, shepherding them one by one into the great digital jukebox in the sky.
The only way to do this is in real time, so basically I have to sit and listen to the first two volumes in their entirety again. But that’s not so bad, because the audiobooks are read by Clark Moffat himself. I’ve never heard him speak, and it’s spooky, knowing what I know about him now. He has a good voice, gravelly but clear, and I can imagine it echoing in the bookstore. I can imagine the first time Moffat came through the door — the tinkle of the bell, the creak of the floorboards.
Penumbra would have asked: What do you seek in these shelves?
Moffat would have looked around, taken the measure of the place — noticed the shadowy reaches of the Waybacklist, certainly — and then he might have said: Well, what would a wizard read?
Penumbra would have smiled at that.
Penumbra.
He has vanished, and his bookstore stands derelict. I have no idea where to find him.
In a flash of genius, I checked the domain registration for penumbra.com, and sure enough: he owns it. It was purchased in the primordial era of the web by Ajax Penumbra and renewed in 2007 with an optimistic ten-year term … but the registration only lists the store’s address on Broadway. Further googling yielded nothing. Penumbra casts only the faintest digital shadow.
In another, somewhat dimmer flash of genius, I tracked down silver-haired Muriel and her goat farm, just south of San Francisco in a foggy cluster of fields called Pescadero. She hadn’t heard from him, either. “He’s done this before,” she said. “Gone away. But — he does usually call.” Her smooth face made a little frown and the microwrinkles around her eyes darkened. When I left, she gave me a little palm-sized wheel of fresh goat cheese.