Continua: Fighting Algorithms Across Time

Continua. The Bookmark Chronicles, Volume Two: Fighting Algorithms Across TimeThe book is on the shelf, forty feet away. The search puts it eleventh, on the second page.In January it came up second. This spring the Halvorsen High library catalog has a new layer, Signal Health, and it decides what comes first. A ninth-grader named Tess searched three times and never found the book at all.In the same weeks the school board cuts sixteen hours a week from the only library technician, on a consent agenda nobody discusses.Zoe Williams, Nadia Osman, Alex Nguyen and their friends want to know who decided. They file a public records request and get back three hundred and forty pages, answered in full, nothing held back. Not one page says what the system showed anybody, because no record of it was ever made. Nobody broke a rule. Nobody decided.The bookmark they carry takes them to the moment a reader put a particular copy down, and spends the copy to get there. It takes them to rooms where you could see what had been taken out.A Night in a Newsroom. Three More Rooms.SÃO PAULO, AUGUST 1973: Nadia, Zoe, Carlos and Alex spend a night and a day in the composing room of a great newspaper, where a censor with a red pencil reads every page proof, and where, an article is cut, the paper prints verses of a national epic in the hole. None of them speaks Portuguese, and every word they say to each other can be heard.MOSCOW, 1940 OR AFTER: In a restricted library department, a man lays a straightedge down the gutter of a bound volume and cuts out the page with a photograph of four men on a canal bank, without once looking at the picture.MOSCOW, JUNE 1941: Milo goes alone to a reading room where librarians have been ordered to paste paper over the faces of people who no longer officially exist.PRAGUE, NOVEMBER 1974: In an apartment, forbidden books are typed a dozen carbon copies at a time, and every copy is signed by hand.Each of those gaps could be seen by somebody standing in the room. The one at Halvorsen High leaves no mark at all, and the only way to show it is to measure it, carefully, every Friday, and to be honest about what the measurements cannot prove.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.