Book of Numbers: A Novel
Page 25
How a single user regarded a thing would be comptrasted by what things existed. Not only that but the comptrasting of the two would be automated. Each time each user typed out a word and searched and clicked for what to find, the algy would be educated. We let the algy let its users educate themselves. So it would learn, so its users would be taught. All human language could be determined through this medium, which could not be expressed in any human language, and that was its perfection. The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be. We would equate ourselves with that.
Now let us propose that everyone out of some psychosis suddenly tetrated for “mouse,” but chose results pertaining only to “device for menu traversal and interface,” or if everyone tetrated for “rat,” but chose results pertaining only to “snitching to the authorities.” Auxiliary metonymic or synecdochic meanings would become primary, while the displaced primaries might have their meanings reinvested in alternative terms.
It took approx millions of speakers and thousands of writers over hundreds of years in tens of countries to semantically switch “invest” from its original sense, which was “to confer power on a person through clothing.” Now online it would take something as like one hundred thousand nonacademic and even nonpartisan people in pajamas approx four centiseconds each between checking their stocks to switch it back.
The connection is basically the point. Or the motion between two points is the connection. Basically nothing exists except in motion. Nothing exists unless transitive, transactional. Unless it joins. Unless its function is its bridging.
This is what we meant by mentioning the blankspots on the recordings, the empties. The gaps, the missing gaps. What is omitted from our recordings is all that links. Relations.
The algy itself was base 4, though not in the normative sense but in the way it expanded, the way it optimized by expansion, extending, stretching, from describing the world to prescribing the world, from connotative to denotative, mapping to manifest becoming. We had four criteria. Or better four questions. Four basic foundational questions the answers to which were transfinite to infinite.
Is what is being searched for a prescription, as like a name or title? “Vishnu,” say, or “Carbon Capital”? Or is what is being searched for a description? As like “an engineer,” or “someone who can build our systems,” a “venture capital firm,” or “some entity that can finance us”? Could this description and/or prescription instead be linguistically proximal, to a most perfect result? Which is to say is the name transliterated scifi style, as like “vYshnOO,” or are we dealing with a typo, as like “caBRon capitOl,” “n gineer,” or “fin anceus”? Finally, and this is arduous, could the searchterms be in any way conceptually proximal, to a most perfect result? “Not Krishna but other god but Indian human,” “person whose job it is to build things,” “entity whose job it is to roll bank/bankroll,” and so on into subquestions pertaining to whose concept of “god” or “job” are we using? What is the sample size by which, and what is the scale by which, proximity is being defined? Our ideas of “job/god,” and/or your ideas of “god/job”—how to make them, how to make anything, mergeable?
We searched among the numbers for a name. Not among the numerals but the integers, which name the distances between.
A quadratic is a square or pertaining to squares, to both the object to be squared and the subject of squaring. Quadratic algys output in a duration proportional to the square of the size of their input. Applicable to algys simple, not complex. Used for kinding and sorting. The relationship of any 2D curve to any curved 3D form, whether spheroid, ellipsoid, cylinder, or cone, is quadric. The same as like the relationship between the value fluctuations of our respective portfolios. The Babylonians squared all shapes with quadratic equations, the Hindus and Buddhists with cubic equations, because they understood the worth of negatives. Angling with quartics had to wait for Europe, polynomials.
The deadline we had set for a name decision was our birthday, 1996. The day approached and we still had no storms in the brain, only in the algy, and Qui and Cull would not even respond to their own names let alone to suggestions.
The names Cubic, Cubics, Cubix, Cubiks, Cubicks, and even Q-bics were all already taken, both as like company names and dotcoms. All registered to a military contractor who bounced our emails.
The name Quartical did not test well with father and stepstepmother de Groeve who kept dangling a watchmaking future in front of Cull as like a hypnotizing pendulum and neither did Quadration impress the parents O’Quinn who kept reminding Qui he could always get back in touch with Microsoft while his brothers insisted that brogrammers genius as like he was should be getting paid by the codeline or even by the character.
Salvatrice Trapezzi would read the news, each new incorporation filing, for Affine, for Infdex, but if they had $10 million in capital we had 120 million documents identified. The narrative plot of online is that as like the number of sites that made the web increased, the number of hosts or domains that made the net did not, and it was just at this point in time that their stasis or even decrease was being felt, with capitalism and so democracy too in thrall to just a handful of corporations. We had to be one of that handful. The forefinger, which starts words, the pinky, which ends them. The ringfinger, which is bound to shift and second functions, as like in programming to code parentheses and brackets. The middle finger, we would be the middles if lucky. Not the first, not the last, but the strongest.
Raffaella proposed Etude, and Perspective.
We were partial to E-tude, with a hyphen, or Perspektiv, with a k. Also, Indagator.
Salvatrice: 2gether, GathR.
Heather: FrisB, Boomerang, Poprank, Rankpop, Demogz, Dmogz, Yoyo, JoCo, Juggle, Buggle.
Cull was suggesting CoCull (which is Latin or Greek for a cowl), or CullCo (bastard Latin or Greek, “to inculcate”). Qui went for CoQui (which is a frog or toad native to Puerto Rico), and QuiCo (bastard Spanish, “to glut”).
Nobody could spell Diatessaron. But even if they could and we used that there was still the fear, but an unsubstantiated fear, of Stanford suing us.
But by trying to think words all we were thinking were numbers. As like language was a problem and we were solving for name. We were always returning to math. Operations. All the ways two numbers can be manipulated are essentially the same. They are just depths, or nests, recursions. Addition, a quantity that has been followed, or succeeded, by another, is contained within multiplication, a quantity that has been added to itself × number of times, while multiplication is contained in exponentiation, a quantity that has been multiplied by itself × number of times. Practically, all computers can do is just add and comptrast, though theoretically, the number of potential operations is illimitable, and the sums generated grow too large for a human to compute, even too long for a human to write.
The operation after exponentiation is called tetration, the fourth order of magnitude, a quantity exponentiated by itself. Also called iterated exponentiation, hyper-4. By the time we got to Stanford this question of what to call the operation had been answered, not so the question of how to calculate and notate its results. The mathpeople were all cur about Cs, or complex numbers, which are numbers represented by × + iy, where × and y are real numbers and i the imaginary unit equal to the square root of negative one. Essentially this number does not exist. But its speciousness enables the modeling of chaos. The systematizing of chaos and the differencing of that from the random and arbitrary, which given even an infinite or eternal timescale or space might never evince determination or design. Applies to morphogenesis, phyllotaxis, biochirality, and fractalization, how leaves and shells are proportioned, how the human face is proportioned, econometrics, oscillating chemical reactions, dynamics of liquids and gas. This is a ridiculous explanation but. Encryption techniques. Quantum mechanics. Ridiculous but.
Because it is only in the tetration of complex numbers that results become so large and long as like to allow f
or the identification of repetition, of pattern. Of deepest nested recursion. Once every C would be tetrated all the disciplines would be united in singularity and day would be night and night would be day and no inbox would ever again give evidence of anything but an integrated self. We have read through your email, sorry.
Anyway, at Stanford every mathperson we hated because they were also a compsciperson was cur about how exactly to calculate that—the repetition, the pattern—so they kept writing code
}
void setBit(u_char byte, u_char bit, bool v)
{x[byte] = setBitOnByte(x[byte], bit, v);}
void setBit(u_char b, bool v)
{setBit(b/8, b%8, v);}
bool getBit(u_char byte, u_char bit) const
{return getBitOnByte(x[byte], bit);}
bool getBit(int b) const
{return getBit(b/8, b%8);}
ALInteger operator ~() const
{
writing programs whose tetrating kept overloading the computers, segmentation faults as like fatal, choking on kernels.
The lawyer did not appreciate this either.
The lawyer was Mendel Gutshteyn, who had handled the estate of D-Unit. He was an émigré who had met D-Unit at shul, the Hasidics shul. He had read a kaddish at the shiva. He had a grody plateglass office on Geary Boulevard in the Richmond.
Tetration Inc., the name, was to represent our automaticity, to symbolize our selfgeneration. The way we would equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves, by sprawling out in our search through the prolific irrational until we found recurrence, redundance. Cull signed and Qui signed and then we did too, but just before we slashed the date Gutshteyn stopped and reminded us. It was 06/10, not 06/06. We had lived in advance, we had been living ahead. We had miscalculated and missed our birthday.
It is unfortunate that you will have to transcribe this.
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LONDON
Ohlone.
[How is that spelled?]
O H L O N E. Forget pixels, write it in blood.
[Ohlone.]
He was a madman, a full stack fucking madman, apologies. Make sure our voice is in the red. Boost, decompress. Ohlone, fuck, Ohlone. This is evidence, this is proof. We are not sure in what order to tell it.
[From beginning to end. Leave it to me to disentangle.]
But what we knew before or what we knew after?
[Doesn’t matter to me. You’re the one who thinks thought has an order.]
Indian. His name was Ohlone. His name was but was not Muwekma Ohlone. Mohlone. Moe. Any index of knowledge is also an index of ignorance, except that knowledge is finite and ignorance is not. The myths could fill a book, though no one would want to read it. They could be algyed. An algy for the most popular myths. For the myths mostly true. The myths mostly false. Legend and lore ranked by our or his need for their indemnity.
Goa was clear as like Portuguese to us. Goa State, Konkan Region, Western India. But we did not know the degree of poverty involved, the no electricity conditions, or that the water for shitting and pissing was downstream from the nonpotable drinkingwater for livestock, which was downstream from the bathingwater for humans, which was downstream from the also nonpotable drinkingwater for humans, which, all that, was just downstream from the water for shitting and pissing of the neighboring slum. We did not know how or even if to credit that then. The water that caused hep A and E. The insect vectors that bred fevers that blinded and deafened. It was either 1 OR 0, or 1 AND 0. True and also false.
But what we can verify is the motivation, the drive. We will never have that, not as like he did. We will never understand what exactly it took to beat that system, a system not even imaginable by an upper middleclass or upperupper middleclass Jewishish kid from middle Palo Alto. We were physics homework, papiermâché models of meiosis, mitosis, we set magnesium on fire. We were Math Masters of the Month. We blueribboned at the fairs. If we hacked it was for the thrill of it, the attention. We were overparented, underautonomized, überwestern.
Our major challenges in life were college acceptance, peer group acceptance, leveraging our abilities into a slot on the Forbes.com listicle, and incubating or at least simulating emotional intimacy. Though our life has had its positives and negatives, even a negative number has more magnitude than zero, and no one was more a zero than Ohlone.
He won India. Ohlone. He won the game of India and he did it by surviving, siblings stillborn and dead in childhood, parents survived only by him and their tapeworms. An orphan. He never mentioned his siblings or parents beyond confirming their deaths and their tapeworms. The orphanage put him to work. They had a type of half school, half factory, all slavery. This was not beachy Goa, not Arabian Sea Goa, but far inland slammed against the Ghats. He would escape to the resorts to scavenge. Holidays living off the wastes of hippie tourists.
A billion people in that country, millions more than any continent deserves, and annually sitting for the admission exam to the IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, which was this Nehru scheme, there are something as like two, three hundred thousand students all the same age, of whom something as like only two, three thousand are finally accepted and that, even a humanities grad can figger a .01% acceptance rate. Harvard go fuck yourself, Yale go fuck yourself. Stanford, sit and spin. Factor into that equation the number of graduates that merit fully sponsored #H1B work visas for the States, no more than a few, the best few, 10% of the .01%, and even a humanitarian can stack up the odds.
.001% of the total.
Two people, three people, in each class.
Ohlone placed second overall the year of his exam. Or so Ohlone claimed. Do not request the year. He also claimed that his disappointment was due to his not having eaten anything that day and that the first place high score boy, Vikram somethingrajan or swami, who always had something to eat, whose cousin serviced the grading machines, had cheated.
He called all cheaters that, “fucking Vikrams, Joshua Cohen,” “fuck that Vikram in his tokenhole, Joshua Cohen,” he would always use our full name.
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But again, we did not know any of this—we knew diddly. We were still trying to master the unicycle or sneaking into matinees of The Terminator or Dune and Ohlone who was only a decade or so older was wasting no time in achieving Valhalla.
But to understand Ohlone you have to understand—what is your fluency with remotes?
[I know how to use them. What you said about the germs.]
You know how they work?
[You zap like a beam. Not a laser but like a laser, a beam.]
So, Paz, this crap company out in Santa Cruz, does not exist anymore. Paz does not. Santa Cruz still exists, unfortunately. Ohlone, this was his first job in America. First serious adult engineering job, that is. It did not make him into who he became, it broke him into who he became. It was a disaster. White slavery but for an Indian.
Paz was set on creating the universal remote control, the universal remote, the unimote, the unmote. We can relate to this concept, admittedly, but some things that work in theory do not work in practice, as like some things that work in practice, do not work, for in
Throughout the history of this technology, though, each device had to have its own controller. This was the Nazi standard for remote zeppelins. This was the American policy too, for remote submarines. Each device would follow its leader, bound to its controller by proprietary signals and waves. Call it the Führer principle, or just call it monotheism, or monogamy, under Eisenhower and the rise of the home electronics industry, this was law. Though even the most wealthy
or most attuned 1940s and 50s consumer still had to make do with a cabled control that would tangle the pets and trip the children, all just to work the radio, predominantly.
And this was the situation through the 60s, until the market penetration of ultrasonics, or the control of TVs by audio frequencies too high for anthroperception. Then came our decade, the 70s, by the middle of which major advances had been made in infrareds, or the control of TVs by visual frequencies too low for anthroperception. This was the break, the redshift. Standards, as like the universe, only expanded.
Now you cannot think about online. In the midst of the 70s nobody thought the future was going to be this nothingness, this immateriality that stores everything and the software that links everyone to it and one another. At the time that was fiction, pulp sciencefiction to everyone but the tech insane and US army researchers. The rec pop was out shopping for fridges and freezers, dishwashers, TVs, and so it was booley that the hope for the next new advance would be for a device that connected them all, for that one single item of hardware that connected each average user to all of his or her domestic possessions.
Back then the future, the only future, was the remote. The remote, its hope, was the original online.
Around 1980, each home electronics brand went about developing its own remote, one remote that would control its every product, which was easy or relatively easy and even costeffective because all it meant was that all the controls for all its products would all be contained on a single slab. A remote would be divided into trays keyed by function: the TV controlled in row 1 with volume and channel, the videocassette recorder controlled in row 2 with Play, Stop, Rewind, Fast-Forward, in row 3 the button for the stereo cueing the synth muzak, in row 4 the switch lighting the sex candle—together comprising a multifunction remote no larger than unifunction remotes because everything was getting smaller and reduced except the options, the expectations.