Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

“Right.” I didn’t know his name was Maurice. “Have you ever seen somebody deliver a new book?”

He pauses and thinks. Then he says simply: “Nope.”

*   *   *

As soon as he leaves I am a mess of new theories. Maybe Oliver’s in on it, too. Maybe he’s a spy for Corvina. The quiet watcher. Perfect. Or maybe he’s part of some deeper conspiracy. Maybe I’ve only scratched the surface. I know there are more bookstores—libraries?—like this, but I still don’t know what “like this” means. I don’t know what the Waybacklist is for.

I flip through the logbook from front to back, looking for something, anything. A message from the past, maybe: Beware, good clerk, the wrath of Corvina. But no. My predecessors played it just as straight as I have.

The words they wrote are plain and factual, just descriptions of the members as they come and go. Some of them I recognize: Tyndall, Lapin, and the rest. Others are mysteries to me—members who visit only during the day, or members who stopped visiting long ago. Judging by the dates sprinkled through the pages, the book covers a little over five years. It’s only half-full. Am I going to fill it for another five? Am I going to write dutifully for years with no idea what I’m writing about?

My brain is going to melt into a puddle if I keep this up all night. I need a distraction—a big, challenging distraction. So I lift my laptop’s lid and resume work on the 3-D bookstore.

Every few minutes I glance up at the front windows, out into the street beyond. I’m watching for shadows, the flash of a gray suit or the glint of a dark eye. But there’s nothing. The work smooths away the strangeness, and finally I’m in the zone.

If a 3-D model of this store is actually going to be useful, it probably needs to show you not only where the books are located but also which are currently loaned out, and to whom. So I’ve somewhat sketchily transcribed my last few weeks of logbook entries and taught my model to tell time.

Now the books glow like lamps in the blocky 3-D shelves, and they’re color-coded, so the books borrowed by Tyndall light up blue, Lapin’s green, Fedorov’s yellow, and so on. That’s pretty cool. But my new feature also introduced a bug, and now the shelves are all blinking out of existence when I rotate the store too far around. I’m sitting hunched over the code, trying in vain to figure it out, when the bell tinkles brightly.

I make an involuntary chirp of surprise. Is it Eric, back to yell at me again? Or is it Corvina, the CEO himself, come at last to visit his wrath upon—

It’s a girl. She’s leaning halfway into the store, and she’s looking at me, and she’s saying, “Are you open?”

Why, yes, girl with chestnut hair cropped to your chin and a red T-shirt with the word BAM! printed in mustard yellow—yes, as a matter of fact, we are.

“Absolutely,” I say. “You can come in. We’re always open.”

“I was just waiting for the bus and my phone buzzed—I think I have a coupon?”

She walks straight up to the front desk, pushes her phone out toward me, and there, on the little screen, is my Google ad. The hyper-targeted local campaign—I’d forgotten about it, but it’s still running, and it found someone. The digital coupon I designed is right there, peeking out of her scratched-up smartphone. Her nails are shiny.

“Yes!” I say. “That’s a great coupon. The best!” I’m talking too loud. She’s going to turn around and leave. Google’s astonishing advertising algorithms have delivered to me a supercute girl, and I have no idea what to do with her. She swivels her head to take in the store. She looks dubious.

History hinges on such small things. A difference of thirty degrees, and this story would end here. But my laptop is angled just so, and on my screen, the 3-D bookstore is spinning wildly on two axes, like a spaceship tumbling through a blank cosmos, and the girl glances down, and—

“What’s that?” she says, one eyebrow raised. One dark lovely eyebrow.

Okay, I have to play this right. Don’t make it sound too nerdy: “Well, it’s a model of this store, except you can see which books are available…”

The girl’s eyes light up: “Data visualization!” She’s no longer dubious. Suddenly she’s delighted.

“That’s right,” I say. “That’s it exactly. Here, take a look.”

We meet halfway, at the end of the desk, and I show her the 3-D bookstore, which is still disappearing whenever it spins too far around. She leans in close.

“Can I see the source code?”

If Eric’s malevolence was surprising, this girl’s curiosity is astonishing. “Sure, of course,” I say, toggling through dark windows until raw Ruby fills the screen, all color-coded red and gold and green.

“This is what I do for work,” she says, hunching down low, peering at the code. “Data viz. Do you mind?” She gestures at the keyboard. Uh, no, beautiful late-night hacker girl, I do not mind.