Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - by Robin Sloan

THE CALL

IT IS THE NIGHT before the morning on which Kat Potente has scheduled an all-out assault on the centuries-old codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. Her Googler platoon is assembled. Penumbra's posse is invited. It's exciting—I have to admit, it's really exciting—but it's also unnerving, because I have no idea what's next for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. The man himself hasn't said a word, but I feel like Penumbra might be winding this place down. Because, I mean, sure: Who needs the burden of an old bookstore when eternal life is imminent?

We'll see what tomorrow holds. It's going to be a good show, whatever happens. Maybe afterward he'll be ready to talk about the future. I still want to buy a billboard on that bus shelter.

It's a quiet night, with only two customers so far. I browse the shelves, straightening my new acquisitions. I promote The Dragon-Song Chronicles to a higher shelf, then idly flip the first volume over in my hands. The back cover bears a small black-and-white portrait of Clark Moffat in his thirties. He has shaggy blond hair and a bushy beard, and he's wearing a plain white T-shirt, grinning a toothy grin. Below the portrait, it says:

Clark Moffat (1952–1999) was a writer who lived in Bolinas, California. He is best known for the bestselling The Dragon-Song Chronicles, as well as Further Tales of Fernwen, a book for children. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as a communications specialist aboard the nuclear submarine U.S.S. West Virginia.

Something occurs to me. It's something I've never done before—something I've never thought to do, not in all the time I've worked here. I'm going to search for someone in the logbooks.

It's logbook VII I want, the one I smuggled down to Google, because it runs through the mid-eighties and early nineties. I find the raw text on my laptop and command-F a particular description: someone with shaggy blond hair and a beard.

It takes a while, trying different keywords, skimming through false positives. (There are a lot of beards in here, it turns out.) I'm looking at OCR'd text, not handwriting, so I can't tell who wrote what here, but I know some of these must be Edgar Deckle's notes. It would be nice if he was the one who— There.

Member number 6HV8SQ:

The novice takes possession of KINGSLAKE with thanks and good cheer. Wears a white T-shirt celebrating the bicentennial. Levi 501 jeans and heavy work boots. Voice rough with smoke; package of cigarettes, approximately half-empty, visible in pocket. Pale blond hair is longer than has ever been recorded by this clerk. Upon remark, the novice explains: "I want it wizard-length." Monday the 23rd of September, 1:19 in the morning. Clear skies and the smell of the ocean.

That's Clark Moffat. It's got to be. The note is after midnight, which means the late shift, which means "this clerk" is indeed Edgar Deckle. There's another one:

The novice is moving quickly through the Founder's Puzzle. But even more than his speed, it is his confidence that is striking. There is none of the hesitation or frustration that has characterized other novices (this clerk included). It is as if he is playing a familiar song or dancing a familiar dance. Blue T-shirt, Levi 501s, work boots. Hair is longer still. Receives BRITO. Friday the 11th of October, 2:31 in the morning. A foghorn sounds.

It goes on. The notes are concise but the message is clear: Clark Moffat was a savant of the Unbroken Spine. Is it possible … was he the dark moss constellation in the visualization? Was he the one who raced around the Founder's whole face in the time it took other novices to trace out an eyelash or an earlobe? There's probably some way to link specific notes to the visualization and—

The bell tinkles and I jerk my head up out of the endless scrolling text. It's late, and I expect to see a member of the fellowship, but instead it's Mat Mittelbrand, hauling a black plastic case. It's huge, bigger than he is, and it's stuck in the doorway.

"What are you doing here?" I ask, helping to pry it loose. The case's surface is tough and knobby and it has heavy metal buckles.

"I'm here on a mission," Mat says, breathing hard. "This is your last night, right?"

I've been complaining to him about Penumbra's neglect. "Maybe," I say. "Probably. What's all this?"

He tips his case over on the floor, flips the buckles (they make a serious-sounding snap snap), and opens it wide. Inside, cushioned in a bed of gray foam, there's photography gear: crystalline lights with sturdy wire shields, thick collapsible aluminum stalks, and wide coils of bright orange cable.

"We're going to document this place," Mat says. He sets his hands on his hips and peers appreciatively around. "It must be recorded."

"So, what, like—a photo shoot?"

Mat shakes his head. "No, that would be selective recording. I hate selective recording. We're going to take a picture of every surface, from every angle, under bright, even light." He pauses. "So we can re-create it."

My mouth hangs open.

He continues, "I've done photo recon on castles and mansions. This store is tiny. It'll only take three or four thousand shots."

Mat's intention is completely over-the-top, obsessive, and maybe impossible. In other words: it's perfect for this place.

"So, where's the camera?" I ask.

On cue, the bell over the front door tinkles again, and Neel Shah comes barreling through with a monstrous Nikon hanging from his neck and a bottle of bright green kale juice in either hand. "Got some refreshments," he says, holding them aloft.

"You two are going to be my assistants," Mat says. He taps the black plastic case with his toe. "Start setting up."

* * *

The bookstore is bursting with heat and light. Mat's lamps are daisy-chained together, all plugged into the one power outlet behind the front desk. I'm pretty sure it's going to blow a fuse, or maybe a whole street-level transformer. Booty's neon sign might be at risk tonight.

Mat is up on one of Penumbra's ladders. He's using it as a makeshift dolly, with Neel pushing him slowly across the span of the store. Mat holds the Nikon steady in front of his face and fires off a shot for each of Neel's long, even strides. The camera triggers the lights, which are set up in all the corners and behind the front desk, and they all go pop pop with every shot.

"You know," Neel says, "we could use these shots to make a 3-D model." He looks over at me. "I mean, another one. Yours was good."

"No, I get it," I say. I'm at the front desk, making a checklist of all the details we need to capture: the tall letters on the windows and their rough, crenelated edges, worn away by time. The bell and its clapper and the curling iron bracket that holds it in place. "Mine looked like Galaga."

"We can make it interactive," Neel says. "First-person view, totally photorealistic and explorable. You could choose the time of day. We can make the shelves cast shadows."

"No," Mat groans from the ladder. "Those 3-D models suck. I want to make a miniature store with miniature books."

"And a miniature Clay?" Neel asks.

"Sure, maybe a little LEGO dude," Mat says. He hauls himself up higher on the ladder and Neel starts pushing him back across the store. The lights go pop pop, leaving red spots in my eyes. Neel is ticking off the advantages of 3-D models as he pushes the ladder: they're more detailed, more immersive, you can make infinite copies. Mat is groaning. Pop pop.

In all the bright noise, I almost miss the ring.

It's just a tickle in my ear, but yes: somewhere in the bookstore, a phone is ringing. I cut through the shelves parallel to the photo shoot, with the lights still going pop pop, and emerge into the tiny break room. The sound is coming from Penumbra's study. I push through the door marked PRIVATE and hop up the steps.

The pop pop of the lights is softer up here, and the ring ring from the phone (next to the old modem) is loud and insistent, produced by some powerful old-fashioned mechanical noisemaker. It keeps ringing, and it occurs to me that my usual strategy for strange phone calls—wait them out—might not work here.

Ring ring.

These days, the phone only carries bad news. It's all "your student loan is past due" and "your uncle Chris is in the hospital." If it's anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.

Ring ring.

Okay, well, maybe it's an inquisitive neighbor calling to ask what the commotion is all about—all the flashing lights. Maybe it's North Face over at Booty's checking to make sure everything's okay. That's sweet. I pick up the phone and announce, with relish: "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore."

"You must stop him," a voice says, without introduction or preamble.

"Um, I think you have the wrong number." It's not North Face.

"I definitely do not have the wrong number. I know you. You're the boy—you're the clerk."

I recognize the voice now. The quiet power. The crisp syllables. It's Corvina.

"What's your name?" he says.

"I'm Clay." But then: "You probably want to talk to Penumbra directly. You should call back in the morning…"

"No," Corvina says matter-of-factly. "Penumbra's not the one who stole our most precious treasure." He knows. Of course he knows. How? Another one of his crows, I suppose. Word must have gotten out here in San Francisco.

"Well, it's really not technically stealing, I don't think," I say, looking down at my shoes as if he's here in the room with me, "because, I mean, it's probably in the public domain…" I trail off. This is not going to get me anywhere.

"Clay," Corvina says, smooth and dark, "you must stop him."

"I'm sorry, but I just don't believe in your … religion," I say. I would probably not be able to say this to his face. I'm clutching the black curve of the phone tight to my cheek. "So I don't think it matters if we scan an old book. Or if we don't. I don't think it's, like, of any cosmic importance whatsoever. I'm just helping my boss—my friend."

"You're doing exactly the opposite," Corvina says quietly.

I don't have any response to that.

"I know you don't believe what we believe," he says. "Of course you don't. But you don't need faith to realize that Ajax Penumbra is on the razor's edge." He pauses to let that sink in. "I've known him longer than you have, Clay—far longer. So let me tell you about him. He's always been a dreamer, a great optimist. I understand why you're drawn to him. All of you in California—I used to live there. I know what it's like."

Right. The young man in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. He's smiling at me across the room, giving me a big thumbs-up.

"You probably think I'm just the cold New York CEO. You probably think I'm too severe. But, Clay—sometimes discipline is the truest form of kindness."

He's using my first name a lot. Mostly it's salesmen who do that.

"My friend Ajax Penumbra has tried many things in his life—many schemes—and they have always been so elaborate. He has always been just on the cusp of a breakthrough—in his own mind, at least. I've known him for fifty years, Clay—fifty years! And in that time, do you know how many of his schemes have succeeded?"

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.

Kat is making the rounds, conferring with Googlers one by one. She smiles and nods and pats them on the back. Today, she's a general, and these are her troops.

* * *

Tyndall, Lapin, Imbert, and Fedorov are all here, along with the rest of the local novices. They're sitting up on the lip of the amphitheater, all in a row along the highest stone step. More are arriving. Silver-haired Muriel is here, and so is Greg the ponytailed Googler. He's standing with the fellowship today.

Most of the fellowship's members are in late middle age. Some, like Lapin, look pretty old, and a few are older still. There's an ancient man in a wheelchair, eyes lost in shadowed sockets, his cheeks pale and wrinkled like tissue paper, pushed by a young attendant in a neat suit. The man croaks a faint greeting to Fedorov, who clasps him by the hand.

Finally, there's Penumbra. He's holding court at the amphitheater's edge, explaining what's about to happen. He's smiling and waving his arms, pointing down at the Googlers at their tables, pointing over to Kat, over to me.

I haven't told him about the call from Corvina, and I don't plan to. The First Reader doesn't matter anymore. What matters are the people here in this amphitheater and the puzzle up on those screens.

"Come over here, my boy, come over here," he says. "Meet Muriel properly." I smile and shake her hand. She's beautiful. Her hair is silver, almost white, but her skin is smooth, with just the lightest lace of microwrinkles around her eyes.

"Muriel runs a goat farm," Penumbra says. "You should take your, ah, friend, you know"—he tilts his head down toward Kat—"you should take her down. The tour is wonderful."

Muriel smiles lightly. "The spring is the best time," she says. "That's when we have baby goats." To Penumbra she says, mock-scoldingly, "You're a good ambassador, Ajax, but I wish I could get you down there more often." She winks at him.

"Oh, the store has kept me busy," he says, "but now, after this?" He waves his hands and opens his face wide with a little who-knows-what-could-happen frown. "After this, anything is possible."

Wait a second—is there something going on there? There couldn't be anything going on there.

There might be something going on there.

* * *

"Okay, quiet down, everybody. Quiet down!" Kat shouts from the front of the amphitheater. She looks up to address the crowd of scholars gathered on the stone steps: "So, I'm Kat Potente, the PM for this project. I'm glad you're all here, but there are a few things you should know. First, you can use the Wi-Fi, but the fiber optics are for Google employees only."

I glance across the assembled mass of the fellowship. Tyndall has a pocket watch connected to his pants with a long chain, and he's checking the time. I don't think this is going to be a problem.

Kat glances down at a printed-out checklist. "Second, don't blog, tweet, or live-stream anything you see here."

Imbert is adjusting an astrolabe. Seriously: not a problem.

"And third"—she grins—"this isn't going to take long, so don't get too comfortable."

Now she shifts to address her troops: "We don't know what kind of code we're dealing with yet," she says. "We need to figure that out first. So we'll be working in parallel. We've got two hundred virtual machines ready and waiting in the Big Box, and your code will run in the right place automatically if you just tag it CODEX. Everybody ready?"

The Googlers all nod. One girl straps on a pair of dark goggles.

"Hit it."

The screens leap to life, a blitzkrieg of data visualization and exploration. The text of MANVTIVS blinks bright and jagged, set in the squared-off letters favored by code and console. This isn't a book anymore; it's a data dump. Scatter plots and bar charts unfurl across the screens. At Kat's command, Google's machines crunch and recrunch the data nine hundred different ways. Nine thousand. Nothing yet.

The Googlers are looking for a message—any message—in the text. It might be a whole book, it might be a few sentences, it might be a single word. Nobody, not even the Unbroken Spine, knows what's waiting there, or how Manutius encrypted it, and that makes this a very hard problem. Luckily, the Googlers love very hard problems.

Now they get more creative. They make crosses and spirals and galaxies of color dance across the screens. The graphs grow new dimensions—first they become cubes and pyramids and blobs, then they sprout long tentacles. My eyes swim as I try to follow along. A Latin lexicon flashes across one screen—an entire language examined in milliseconds. There are n-gram graphs and Vonnegut diagrams. Maps appear, with letter sequences somehow translated into longitudes and latitudes and plotted across the world, a dusting of dots through Siberia and the South Pacific.

Nothing.

The screens flicker and flash as Googlers try every angle. The fellowship is murmuring. Some are still smiling; others are starting to frown. When a giant chessboard appears on one screen with a pile of letters on every square, Fedorov sniffs and mutters, "Ve tried det in 1627."

Is that why Corvina believes this project won't succeed—because the Unbroken Spine has literally tried it all? Or is it simply because this is cheating—because old Manutius never had any bright screens or virtual machines? If you follow them, those two lines of reasoning close together like a trap, and they lead you straight down to the Reading Room, with its chalk and its chains, and nowhere else. I still don't believe the secret to immortality is going to pop up on one of those screens, but jeez, I want Corvina to be wrong. I want Google to crack this code.

"Okay," Kat announces, "we just got another eight hundred machines." Her voice rises and carries across the lawn: "Go deeper. More iterations. Don't hold back." She walks from table to table, consulting and encouraging. She's a good leader—I can see it in the Googlers' faces. I think Kat Potente has found her calling.

I watch Igor bang his head against the text. First he translates each line of letters into a molecule and simulates a chemical reaction; on-screen, the solution dissolves into a gray sludge. Then he makes letters into tiny 3-D people and sets them up in a simulated city. They wander around bumping into buildings and forming crowded clumps in the street until Igor destroys it all with an earthquake. Nothing. No message.

Kat hikes up the steps, squinting into the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. "This code is tough," she admits. "Like, crazy tough."

Tyndall sprints around the amphitheater's edge and leaps over Lapin, who squeaks and shields herself. He grabs Kat's arm. "You must compensate for the phase of the moon at the time of writing! The lunar offset is essential!"

I reach over and detach his shivering claw from her sleeve. "Mr. Tyndall, don't worry," I say. I've already watched a line of half-eaten moons parade across the screens. "They know your techniques." And Google is nothing if not thorough.

While the screens flash and blur down below, a team of Googlers wanders through the fellowship—young people with clipboards and friendly faces, asking questions like: When were you born? Where do you live? What's your cholesterol?

I wonder who they are.

"They're from Google Forever," Kat says, a bit sheepishly. "Interns. I mean, it's a good opportunity. Some of these people are so old and still so healthy."

Lapin is describing her work at Pacific Bell to a Googler holding a skinny video camera. Tyndall is spitting into a plastic vial.

One of the interns approaches Penumbra, but he waves her away without a word. His gaze is fixed on the screens below. He's utterly absorbed, his blue eyes wide and shining like the sky above. Unbidden, Corvina's warning echoes in my head: And this, the last and greatest of his schemes—it will not succeed, either.

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.