Places

Liminal Campus, Mountain View

The Mountain View campus where the methodology is built — a building that wears foo-dogs at the gate and pretends the foo-dogs are decoration.

Jackie Vs. AI Anna Vs. AI Megan Vs. AI

The Liminal campus sits on a service road off Shoreline, four glass-and-cedar buildings around a central pond, the kind of architecture that means we won the talent war in 2017. At the gate, two stone foo-dogs (see liminal_gate_with_foo_dogs) — male on the left with a globe under his paw, female on the right with a cub. Tan commissioned them from a workshop in Quanzhou and took a photograph in front of them on Liminal's tenth-anniversary blog post. The caption read: Guardians.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

In Jackie Ch2, the campus is where Susan goes when she says I'll be back by six. Jackie has been there twice for the family-day picnic and remembers the koi in the pond and the kombucha tap and that one of the foo-dogs has a chip out of its ear. In Ch11, when the wind-fire wheels ignite under the bicycle, the campus is the destination. He gets to the gate. The foo-dogs are still there. They are still pretending to be decoration.

In Anna, the campus is the surface above the daycare. Nine floors down is where she is. Nine floors up, the cafeteria is serving sweetgreen bowls and the all-hands is hearing about Q1 momentum. The vertical distance is the whole book. In Megan, the campus is a set of public records — building permits, fire-code filings, the badge-access logs she eventually obtains — that, read together, describe a basement that exceeds the listed square footage by 40,000 square feet.

Locale

The campus is original to the Chronicles, but its specifics are drawn from the actual Mountain View tech-corridor vernacular: the cedar slats borrowed from Norman Foster, the central pond borrowed from the Googleplex, the engineered-creek landscape that pretends to be Northern California while actually being a parking-lot drainage system. The foo-dogs are the tell. The foo-dogs are real stone, real Quanzhou, real lineage — and real foo-dogs guard real thresholds. Tan commissioned guardians for a building that cannot be guarded by guardians, because the thing inside it is being made by the people who commissioned the guardians.

Mei (Ch7) walks past one of the foo-dogs with a tea tray. She bows slightly to it. The foo-dog, which is stone, returns the bow in a way only Mei sees.

Key Ideas

The vertical lie. A campus that is shorter than its floor count is a campus that is hiding floors. Megan finds the floors in the fire-code filings.

Foo-dogs as decoration. The methodology's whole hiding strategy in one image: take the symbol of guardian-of-the-threshold and place it at a threshold being violated. Trust nobody to look at the symbol.

Mei's bow. The world the foo-dogs come from is still operating. The campus does not know this.

What family-day picnic means. The strategy of letting employees' children play on the lawn above the basement where children are being trained. Liminal did not invent this strategy; it inherited it.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Locale

Key Ideas

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Further Reading