In the 2015 film Ex Machina, Nathan created the search engine company Bluebook.
Bluebook is presented as the world’s dominant internet search engine, and Caleb Smith works for the company as a programmer. Caleb is selected in an employee contest to visit Nathan’s secluded estate, where Nathan reveals his experiment involving Ava, an advanced humanoid artificial intelligence.
Nathan explains that Bluebook’s enormous store of user data helped him develop Ava’s mind. Rather than treating search activity as simple information retrieval, he uses it as a record of human impulses, language, preferences, and behavior. This makes the company central to the film’s themes of surveillance, data collection, and technological power.
The name is sometimes confused with Google because Bluebook fills a similar cultural role in the film. However, Google is only a real-world comparison, not the fictional company’s name. Nathan’s surname is Bateman, and he is played by Oscar Isaac; Caleb is played by Domhnall Gleeson, while Ava is played by Alicia Vikander.