In a former life, Robert Cringely must have been a writer of Edwardian ghost stories.

Everybody writes about Google, but only Cringely has managed to raise the game of speculating about Google’s "master plan" into terror-inducing literary art.

His writing is part detective novel ("The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages…"), part serialized pulp fiction ("Game over. And next week I’ll take it one more step…"), part global conspiracy theory ("…as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business…"), and mostly sheer terror and scary stuff ("…as a result, Google becomes overnight a major phone company, a major video entertainment provider, a major player in home automation, and even medical telemetry…")

Mark Evans says his "brain hurts" when he read Cringely. Personally, my spine tingles with fear of the mysterious, much terrifying Google Ghost haunting all the industries of the world!

Given the mind-blowing Google projects he describes in his last three columns, here, then here, and lately here, I wouldn’t be surprised if he decides to top the storyline along the lines of "Google employees are really lizards from outer space; I just narrowly escaped the Googleplex with proof…" or "My team of archeologists have just cracked the ancient Incan myth fortelling the coming of The Great Search Beast, and I can now share with you what humanity must do to survive…"