I was just hanging around the Bingcave, my secret hideout located in the tunnels that wind below Bing Manor. Alfred, my trusty butler, who has been with me since my parents were taken from me in that tragic robbery in a Frisco alleyway so long ago, was upstairs, doing his last buttling of the day. I was about to go over 65 million points in Fruit Ninja when the Bing Signal went off. I answered.
“Bingman, thank God I reached you,” said Commissioner Borden. The voice at the other end of the Bingphone was highly agitated. I wasn’t surprised. Jim doesn’t call during Downton Abbey unless something in this crazy burg has gone very wrong indeed. He told me what he wanted me to do, and my heart filled with fear. Holy Schmidt, Bingman! I thought. This time I was truly headed off into the unknown.
“The Google Mystery Barges have been sitting in the Bay for several years now,” the Commissioner went on. “We don’t know what they’re doing there. They’re under construction, off and on. And they’re massive. The company says they’re going to be some kind of museum dedicated to technology. We’re not so sure. Right now, nobody can get in or out. Rumors are that they’ve seeded the waters around these hulking, multistory container ships with robot squids designed to seek out all heat-bearing life forms, terminate them, and harvest their stem cells for an ongoing experiment that Sergey Brin is conducting on whether a meatless hamburger constructed out of genetic material can be made as tasty as a quarter pounder with cheese.”
“Horrible,” I said.
“Actually, I hear they’re not so bad. But whatever this is, Bingman, it’s gone far enough. We have to be able to stop this thing … if it’s not too late.”
I suited up. Hopped in the Bingmobile. And headed for the Bay.
The Google Barges were hard to miss. They are anchored off Treasure Island, which lies between San Francisco and the East Bay. What are they? I asked myself as I stared across the water at the mysterious behemoths. Military installations preparing to offload a cyborg army programmed to complete the company’s occupation of San Francisco? The beginnings of a spaceship that will one day carry the best and the brightest of the Valley (along with a select group of venture capitalists and their pet bloggers) to a secretly fabricated planetoid of the company’s own devising, a new Eden now hiding behind the moon? A massive laboratory where the next generation of human — Homo googlus — is at this moment being cooked up in a soup of DNA and molten silicon?
The night was still and dark, and the water was cold. Thank goodness my cape is heated. I entered the Bay near the old bridge and made it to the staging platform at the far end of a barge. The guards were all congregated on the back deck. Their Androids were talking with one another. It was kind of creepy, a large group of people sitting in total silence as their hardware communicated. Sometimes I think I was born into the wrong century.
I shinnied up an armature that framed the side of the gargantuan superstructure towering above me in the night like Saruman’s spire from Lord of the Rings II, which also was rumored to have a party space on the roof. And then I found myself before a huge portal. A quick scan revealed this was, indeed, the only door in, the only door out. On the other side was the answer I — and all the world — had been seeking. I pushed gently on the door, half expecting to be liquidated by a bank of phasers. I was not. The door simply disappeared as if it had never been there. And I stepped into the vast space that lay beyond.
Coming in our next issue: The mystery of the Google Barges is revealed.
Stanley Bing’s new book, The Curriculum, will be published by HarperCollins in April. Follow him at stanleybing.com and on Twitter at @thebingblog.
This story is from the March 17, 2014 issue of Fortune.
