Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Clay takes the logbook directly to Kat at Google and she gives him a quick tour while they wait for their appointment to use the book scanner. When they go for lunch on the Google campus, Clay has to join the visitors queue because the food is personalized for employees, a process Kat’s friend Finn calls “Body Hacking” (84).At lunch, they chat with another of Kat’s friends, Raj, who mentions that all of the information stored on the internet constitutes only a fraction of human knowledge and the problem is now how to make Old Knowledge (OK) and Traditional Knowledge (TK) available online. Later, Kat mentions that Raj is part of the PM—or Product Management—at Google, a committee that essentially runs the company and a position to which Kat herself aspires. The building that houses the book scanner “feels like a field hospital,” (88) and the scanner sits in the middle like an operating table. The machine is run by Jad, who apologizes to Clay for putting bookstores out of business. Watching the scanner at work, Clay considers the fact that “Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore” (91). 

Later that day, at Kat’s apartment, Clay and Kat upload the scanned pages to Kat’s laptop and use a program called Hadoop to process them. While the software runs, Clay and Kat have sex. That night, at the store, Clay replaces the replica with the original logbook and uploads the new data to his model of the bookstore. A stronger pattern emerges, creating what appears to be an image of Penumbra’s face among the books of the Waybacklist. Clay is stunned. Just then, Penumbra himself arrives and Clay shows him his discovery. At first, Penumbra is delighted—“you solved it” (95)—but when he discovers how Clay came to find the image hidden in the bookshelves, his pride turns to disappointment and anger. While he knew that Clay had taken one of the old logbooks—the “simulacrum smelled strongly of coffee” (96)—he had no idea what Clay intended to do. He “will have to make a report” (96) and when Clay expresses his confusion, Penumbra responds by accusing him of cheating. “You cheated—would that be fair to say? And as a result you have no idea what you have accomplished” (97). Clay’s guilt softens Penumbra’s anger somewhat and he becomes interested once more in how—and how quickly—Clay managed to solve the puzzle and find the face of the man he calls the Founder. He sends Clay home, but tells him as he is leaving that “Whether you understand it or not, you have done something important today” (97).