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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robin Sloan
Read between
February 20 - February 28, 2023
San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong. The city is a tiny square punctuated by steep hills and bounded on three sides by water, and as a result, there are surprise vistas everywhere. You’ll be walking along, minding your own business with a fistful of printouts, and suddenly the ground will fall away and you’ll see straight down to the bay, with the buildings lit up orange and pink along the way. San Francisco’s architectural style didn’t really make inroads anywhere else in the country, and even when you live here and you’re used to it, it lends the vistas a
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A week later, she came hopping through the front door, grinning and silently clapping her hands—it made her seem more twenty-three than thirty-one—and said, “Oh, it was just great! Now listen”—here she got serious—“he wrote another one, about Einstein.” She held out her phone, which showed an Amazon product page for Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. “I saw it on the internet but I thought maybe I could buy it here?” Let’s be clear: This was incredible. This was a bookseller’s dream. This was a stripper standing athwart history, yelling, Stop!
In the unpredictable fluid dynamics of middle school, I found myself somehow floating near the top, an inoffensive everyman who was just good enough at basketball and not cripplingly afraid of girls. Neel, by contrast, sank straight to the bottom, shunned by jock and nerd alike. My cafeteria tablemates snorted that he looked funny, talked funny, smelled funny. But we bonded that spring over a shared obsession with books about singing dragons, and we ended up best friends. I stood up for him, defended him, expended prepubescent political capital on his behalf.
“I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers. You expect me to say that”—yes—“but it’s happened before. It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.” Wait: “Yes we do.” “We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.”
There are many more New Yorkers who don’t pass through the dark doorway, of course. The sidewalks on both sides of Fifth Avenue are full of them, a flux of humanity, tall and short, young and old, cool and uncool. Clots of pedestrians drift past us and block my view. Kat is agog. “It’s so small but there are so many people,” she says, watching the human flow. “They’re … it’s like fish. Or birds or ants, I don’t know. Some superorganism.” Neel cuts in: “Where did you grow up?” “Palo Alto,” she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential,
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All the totems of office ennui have been erected here: the instant coffee machine, the humming half-sized refrigerator, the huge multipurpose laser printer flashing PAPER JAM in red. There’s a whiteboard showing faded generations of brainstorms.
“I just don’t get it,” she says, twisting back around to look up at me. “How can you stand it that our lives are so short? They’re so short, Clay.” To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn’t even connect to the internet back then.
Corvina and Penumbra were fast friends once; I’ve seen photographic proof. Corvina must have been so different then … really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don’t get to be Corvina anymore. Now you’re Corvina 2.0—a dubious upgrade. I think of the young man in the old photo giving a thumbs-up. Is he gone forever?
“Best meeting ever. Completely … structured. You know exactly what’s happening all the time. Everybody brings a laptop—” “Do people even look at one another?” “Not really. Everything that matters is on your screen. There’s an agenda that rearranges itself. There’s a back-channel chat. And there’s fact-checking! If you get up to speak, there are people cross-referencing your claims, supporting and refuting you
Anyway, I said they’re trying to break the code, and of course people perked up at that, because everybody at Google likes codes—” Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.
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.
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
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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.
“Even though Google’s mighty computers didn’t find anything?” Deckle says. “Sure. I mean, come on. I have a computer.” He flicks a finger against the lid of his laptop and it makes the camera wobble. “They’re not magic. They’re only as capable as their programmers, right?”
You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.
CONSOLIDATED UNIVERSAL Long-Term Storage is a long, low span of gray that squats on the side of the highway just outside of Enterprise, Nevada. As I pull into the long parking lot, I can feel its blank mass pressing down on my spirit. It is industrial-park desolation given shape and form, but at least it holds the promise of treasures within. The Applebee’s three miles up the highway is also depressing, but there you know exactly what’s waiting inside.
But after that, it’s simple, because all you have to do is count the notches, which I did: carefully, under a magnifying glass, at my kitchen table, no data centers required. This is the kind of code you learn in a comic book: one number corresponds to one letter. It’s a simple substitution, and you can use it to decode Manutius’s codex vitae in no time.
Wouldn't cryptographic analysis detect a simple key like that?
Penumbra wraps a thin arm around my shoulders, leans in close, and says quietly, “This city of ours—it has taken me too long to realize it, but we are in the Venice of this world. The Venice.” His eyes widen, then press shut, and he shakes his head. “Just like the Founder himself.”
The Peninsula Commute train takes him chugging through a loose necklace of towns: San Mateo, Hillsdale, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, and finally Palo Alto. Traveling up and down the peninsula, Penumbra has come to the conclusion that San Francisco is not actually part of California. The city is pale and windswept; Palo Alto is green and still, with the scent of eucalyptus strong in the air. The sky here is pearlescent blue, not platinum gray.
