What about me? I have a quest and I have an ally. Now all I need is a patron.
Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader. Neel Shah has plenty of friends — investors, employees, other entrepreneurs — but on some level they know, and he knows, that they are friends with Neel Shah, CEO. By contrast, I am, and always will be, friends with Neel Shah, dungeon master.
It is Neel who will be my patron.
His home serves double duty as his company’s headquarters. Back when San Francisco was young, Neel’s place was a wide brick firehouse; today, it’s a wide brick techno-loft with fancy speakers and superfast internet. Neel’s company spreads out on the firehouse floor, where nineteenth-century firemen used to eat nineteenth-century chili and tell nineteenth-century jokes. They’ve been replaced by a squad of skinny young men who are their opposite: men who wear delicate neon sneakers, not heavy black boots, and when they shake your hand, it’s not a meaty squash but a limp slither. Most of them have accents — maybe that hasn’t changed?
Neel finds programming prodigies, brings them to San Francisco, and assimilates them. These are Neel’s guys, and the greatest of them is Igor, who is nineteen and comes from Belarus. To hear Neel tell it, Igor taught himself matrix math on the back of a shovel, ruled the Minsk hacker scene as a sixteen-year-old, and would have proceeded directly to a perilous career in software piracy if Neel hadn’t spotted his 3-D handiwork in a demo video posted on YouTube. Neel got him a visa, bought him a plane ticket, and had a desk waiting at the firehouse when he arrived. Next to the desk there was a sleeping bag.
Igor offers me his chair and goes in search of his employer.
The walls, all thick timber and exposed brick, are covered with giant posters of classic women: Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lana Turner, all printed in shimmering black-and-white. Monitors continue the theme. On some screens, the women are blown up and pixelated; on others, they’re repeated a dozen times. Igor’s monitor shows Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, except half of her is a sketchy 3-D model, a green wire-frame that slinks across the screen in sync with the film.
Neel made his millions in middleware. That is to say, he makes software that’s used by other people who make software, mostly video games. He sells tools that they need the same way a painter needs a palette or a filmmaker needs a camera. He sells tools they cannot do without — tools they will pay top dollar for.
I’ll cut to the chase: Neel Shah is the world’s leading expert on boob physics.
He developed the first version of his breakthrough boob-simulation software while he was still a sophomore at Berkeley, and shortly after that he licensed it to a Korean company that was developing a 3-D beach volleyball game. The game was terrible but the boobs were phenomenal.
Today, that software — now called Anatomix — is the de facto tool for the simulation and representation of breasts in digital media. It’s a sprawling package that lets you create and model, with breathtaking realism, the entire universe of human boobs. One module provides variables for size, shape, authenticity. (Breasts aren’t spheres, Neel will tell you, and they’re not water balloons. They’re complicated structures, almost architectural.) Another module renders the breasts — paints them with pixels. It’s a particular kind of skin, with a quality that’s luminous and very hard to achieve. Something called subsurface scattering is involved.
If you are in the business of simulating a boob, Neel’s software is the only serious option. It does more than that — thanks to Igor’s exertions, Anatomix can now render the entire human body, with perfectly calibrated jiggle and luminosity in places you didn’t realize you had either — but boobs are still the company’s bread and butter.
Really, I think Igor and the rest of Neel’s guys are just in the translation business. The inputs — pinned to the walls, glowing on every screen — are specific world-historic movie babes. The outputs are generalized models and algorithms. And it’s gone full circle: Neel will tell you, in strictest secrecy, that his software is now being used in movie postproduction.
Neel comes quick-stepping down the spiral staircase, waving and grinning. Below his molecule-tight gray T-shirt, he’s wearing deeply uncool stonewashed jeans and bright New Balances with puffy white tongues. You can never escape the sixth grade entirely.
“Neel,” I explain when he pulls up a chair, “I need to go to New York tomorrow.”
“What’s up? A job?”
No, the opposite of a job: “My elderly employer has disappeared and I’m trying to track him down.”
“I am so not surprised,” Neel says, eyes narrowing.
“You were right,” I say. Warlocks.
“Let’s hear it.” He settles in.
Igor reappears and I relinquish his chair, standing to make my case. I tell Neel what has emerged. I explain it like the setup for a Rockets & Warlocks adventure: the backstory, the characters, the quest before us. The party is forming, I say: I have a rogue (that’s me) and a wizard (that’s Kat). Now I need a warrior. (Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?)
Neel’s eyes light up. I knew this would be the right rhetorical strategy. Next, I show him the 3-D bookstore, with the wrinkled and mysterious Founder angling into view.
He lifts his eyebrows. He’s impressed. “I didn’t know you could code,” he says. His eyes narrow and his biceps pulse. He’s thinking. Finally, he says, “You want to give this to one of my guys here? Igor, take a look—”
“Neel, no. The graphics don’t matter.”
Igor leans over anyway. “I tink it looks nice,” he says good-naturedly. On the screen behind him, Cleopatra bats wire-frame eyelashes.
“Neel, I just need to fly to New York. Tomorrow.” I give him the knowing eye of friendship. “And Neel … I need a warrior.”
He scrunches up his face. “I don’t think so … I have a lot of work to do here.”
“But this is a Rockets & Warlocks scenario. You called it. How many times did we invent something like this? Now it’s real.”
“I know, but we have a big release coming up, and—”
I make my voice low: “Do not wuss out now, Nilric Quarter-Blood.”
That’s a stab in the belly with a rogue’s poison dagger and we both know it.
“Neel … reek?” Igor repeats wonderingly. Neel glowers at me.
“The plane has Wi-Fi,” I say. “These guys won’t miss you.” I turn to Igor: “Will they?”
The Babbage of Belarus grins and shakes his head.
When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I’d actually meet one, but that’s only because I didn’t realize wizards were going to walk among us and we’d just call them Googlers. Now I’m in a hot girl wizard’s bedroom and we’re sitting on her bed, trying to solve an impossible problem.
Kat has convinced me that we’ll never be able to catch Penumbra at Penn Station. There’s too much surface area, she says — too many ways Penumbra can get off the train and up to the street. She has math to prove this. There’s an 11 percent chance we’ll spot him, and if we fail, he’ll be lost for good. What we need instead is a bottleneck.
The best bottleneck, of course, would be the library itself. But where does the Unbroken Spine make its home? Tyndall doesn’t know. Lapin doesn’t know. Nobody knows.