A place out west. Google buys the countryside. Here’s how it must have happened: excavators rode at full night with bronze shovels to dig the foundation, strew sleepy flowers with black grass in the concrete mix, stretched out boundaries of leather circumscribing the whole of Napa Valley. How else could we have loved them so much to entrust our world of things to the internet? See the hills marked with stringy reeds like a hoof scrape. The earth used to thunder under bulls fleeing their horseback priest. Google sowed rows of bytes, tables, disks, a Structured Query Language, plants that thrive in cool places hidden from the glare of the sun. They know what happens to lovestruck magicians who don’t complete construction. Walls grow round. Blue-tiled furrows form rows with stacked black boxes. Bare covering is enough—a dry metal parasol can call this job complete. The Cloud. The densest cumulonimbus dragged down and anchored to the hill. As if it weren’t the god king’s wife who favors love dreams like this, but Jove himself. The Cloud is a warehouse, unmarked. The kingdom made electric
