I didn't like this one as much as I felt like I should have. Some reasons:
1. Google name-dropping. Okay, so there's a Google bookscanner, but overall, I thought the inclusion of Google as a major plot point was kind of weak, just name-dropping to get attention. Likewise the description of the outlandish Google campus was weird, and odd, but didn't really matter in the long run, it just struck me as fluff.
2. As a software engineer it bugs me when writing computer programs is a vital part of the story, yet it's written like the writer has done no research, not even talking to one software engineer, giving her a copy of the story to read and asking her "Does this sound stupid?" This plagues me even on fun TV shows like Alias, where they run into a computer security system and say things like "1024 bit encryption? This is going to be hard. Really hard. This could take me all afternoon."
That was the case here. I groaned when the girl fixes the unexplained bug in his program in the time it takes him to drink a cup of coffee. Yeah, she's a code geek, but it takes time to get familiar with another person's code and coding style, particularly when he just wrote it himself on the fly and not subject to any kind of code review or coding standard, she's never seen the program nor any of his code before, .
The foray into data visualization was interesting, until it became clear that what the story meant by data visualization has very little to do with what it means in programming terms. If you're modeling the pattern of weirdoes grabbing books off the shelf at a bookstore, you do NOT create a 3-D model of the store to model this. That's just silly. Especially when she enhanced his program by putting a nice woodgrain on the bookshelves, and the fact that it only looked like a face when viewed from the counter, so he had to move the viewpoint to there.
And the fact that they could find a face by graphing all these weirdo variables, as though those have a single and obvious graphical representation. It sounded to me like it would just end up as a random set of scribbles, and the set of scribbles would vary widely if someone else had tried to graph the same thing. If there was an apparent face there, then it's more likely to just be like those visions of the Virgin Mary under overpasses that look to me like any other water stain.
3. If the problem wasn't meant to be solved by data visualization, what was the point of all the sales to create the visualization? Did those old dudes REALLY have nothing better to do with their immortality than to choreograph their book-buying and odd-accessory swapping just so some new recruit can have a test? Considering it's a test that no one but a complete nut-job would ever solve? These guys really need a hobby! If that's the only thing I could think of to do with my immortality then I may as well just die at a normal age to give myself some more purpose.
So... it was an interesting idea, but the nitpicks piled on nitpicks and overall it just didn't work for me.
