Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Kat agrees to meet Clay for lunch and their discussion turns to the Singularity, “the hypothetical point in the future where technology’s growth curve goes vertical and civilization just sort of reboots itself” (58). While Clay is dubious, for Kat, the Singularity also represents the possibility of immortality and the chance to accomplish things not possible within a normal human lifespan. She thinks the most exciting thing about the future is the way our brains will change and argues that while the hardware of our physical brains hasn’t changed in thousands of years, the way our brains operate—the software—has. She attributes these changes in part, to writers. “They say that Shakespeare invented the internal monologue” (61), she says, but thinks that “now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system” (61). To change the subject, Clay shows her his updated model of the bookstore and the pattern of borrowing he has discovered. Kat is very excited by this and suggests they need more data, which Clay should provide by bringing the store’s logbooks to Google.