Continua. The Bookmark Chronicles, Volume Two: Fighting Algorithms Across Time
A ninth-grader types the same two words into her school library's catalog three times and gives up. The book she needs is on the shelf, forty feet away. For her, the search puts it eleventh.
This spring a new layer sits on the Halvorsen High catalog: Signal Health, powered by Alderlight. Alex runs the same search and gets a different order. On Zoe's login the four covers recommended for her are all girls in distress. "Why are mine all sad girls on floors?" she asks.
Nine days later Zoe is called out of chemistry for a "wellbeing check-in." The counselor cannot tell her why; the system only suggested it. Zoe has borrowed nine of the thirty-nine books that came back to the shelves in February, after months on a cart behind the desk, and she cannot show that this is the reason.
A public records request brings back three hundred and forty pages, with nothing withheld. None of them records what anybody was shown, because nobody made that record.
Lay the bookmark in a book at the page where somebody stopped reading, say a date out loud, and you are standing beside that reader. You go in your own body and your own clothes. People can see you, and if they hurt you, you bring it home. You understand every language and speak only the ones you already know. What the record holds stays as it is. And the copy you used comes home with every page white.
Two Nights in São Paulo. Three More Journeys.
SÃO PAULO, AUGUST 1973: Nadia holds the bookmark for the first time and takes Zoe, Carlos and Alex into the composing room of O Estado de S. Paulo, where a censor with a red pencil strikes out an editorial. The paper may not leave the space empty, so it prints verses of a national epic in the hole, ending with the word continua. None of them speaks Portuguese, and none has papers.
MOSCOW, MARCH 1940: In the locked special storage department of a library, Milo, Zoe and Grace watch a man cut the same photograph out of eleven copies of an album, working from a typed slip nobody has signed. Before dawn they join a line of women at the window where families came to ask the secret police about the arrested.
SEATTLE, JANUARY 1936: Milo goes alone and tells no one. On a street off East Madison, a government surveyor writes down a woman's new roof, and the realtor in his car talks him into a D in four minutes, because of who lives there.
PRAGUE, NOVEMBER 1974: Alex holds the bookmark for his first journey and takes Zoe to a typist's flat, where a banned novel is typed fourteen copies at a time and its author signs every title page by hand, while the police search the building. In the morning the typist's son shows them the file his school typed about him, which he was never meant to see.
Back home, Nadia photographs the same twelve searches at the same terminal every Monday and calls nothing evidence until she can show it. When a man from Alderlight comes to explain the system, Zoe asks him what the wellbeing score reads, and has him write it down and sign it.
Book Two of The Bookmark Chronicles. Each volume stands alone.
Perfect for readers of M. T. Anderson's Feed and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and for anyone who has wondered what a search box decides not to show them.
