Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  “But?”

  “No one went for it. Not the consumer advocacy groups, not the manufacturers. It was invasive, they all said. This was before everything was invasive, 1980 or so, a recession, gas rationing, mandatory sentencing for marijuana. We moved to Chicago. Dad went to work on stenographones, which would transcribe conversations. In the interim he set up an operator interpreting service. It was a number to call for doing business in another country, another language. Both parties would call in and the operator would translate the negotiations live and record them, produce dual language transcripts. Chicago had lots of Polacks, Krauts, Québécois, lots of foreign women seeking work, Dad married every one.”

  “But what did he do in the army?”

  “Radar, sonar. Use your imagination.”

  “Explain?”

  “He used your imagination,” and then Kor laughed, and his laugh was a dialup, a modem communicating with another modem as like another life, the two setting the synack, hissing into parity.

  We have searched and there are records of him at Evergreen and Reed and West Point, but then we are talking about one of the guys who controls the records. A Merlin manipulator, who bluffed us into thinking he could code, and then bluffed us into thinking he could not, even after we had proof.

  Every time we would visit a city together it would turn out he had lived there. He knows Iowa City, Milwaukee, Madison, Americans Central and South, he knows how to fly helicopters. Once, but this was later and we were not there, this was the Tetbook launch in New York, he was with Qui and Cull who told us this, that a man crossed Fifth Avenue and called him Terry. Kor just ignored him and got into the Prius. Once, but this was later in the midst of our depression, he told us that his dead mother had been bipolar until Prozac. But Prozac had not been available until the early 80s and earlier he had said his mother had died of a stroke in the 70s and with his father still in Saigon he was sent to live with a cousin in Utah.

  Stop us if we are getting too warm or hot. Or if our buns are sticking melted to the patty.

  But if nothing else is factual, Scrutor was, and Matosz. Scrutor was based in Santa Clara, and in or outside Salt Lake. It was an attempt to regulate online but without the appearance of regulation. Whatever the government does is spying, but if businesses do it for them it is research. Basically Scrutor was a paleo archive, as like a steam or internal combustion searchengine. It was tasked with storing a copy of every url, but because of the state of the tech Scrutor had to do everything manually, as like we had to do the Diatessaron, with the difference being that Scrutor was financed by TendR and an outfit called Keiner Sequirities. It was VC money and not book profits that afforded all that manual labor, American manual labor. Mormon kids just off their missions knocking at virtual doors and ringing virtual doorbells, visiting urls on a regular schedule, on a regular rotation, only to store images of them, not active or interactive live versions, just records, screengrabs, captures.

  In 96, just after Kor resigned as like VP, his immediately previous position, the project was abandoned. Scrutor had documented approx two million copies of approx one million urls, a fraction but an appreciable fraction. About six gigabytes of content downloaded. Their printed matter, not the index but the documentation itself, would have stretched for about 60 miles, Palo Alto to San Franciso and back.

  Scrutor we had been apprised of but Matosz was new to us. According to Kor, Matosz had been a division of Scrutor and the only reason he was a VP of Scrutor was that Matosz did not officially exist. Scrutor was guano wasteful, pointless. It had no crawlers, no bots, just Mormon boys with creepy fingers.

  Matosz, though, did the same work as like Scrutor did, just automatically. Without Mormons, no brakes, no hands. This meant, booley, that Matosz was formulating an algy. This meant they were, had been, our competitor.

  Throughout this explanation Kor was very clear about having received clearance from the Scrutor family to tell us about Matosz, that it was defunct. He was very clear about everything in Utah and outside Utah being not just finished for him but for everyone, tanked. Though he would not say how they tanked, so we asked him why and he answered that he was big on honesty, and big on loyalty. Then he admitted he did not understand the algys. His role was managerial. He wore the interoffice communications hat, the intraoffice communications hat, the cheer up the mahatma engineer who is getting divorced because he is never home hat, laceless Keds. None of the Scrutor family had truly understood search, he said. He was loyal and honest and that meant telling the truth no matter what, he said. By last quarter 95 they were paying hosts $10 a whopping pop to image and report all their new domains upon registration. With approx 14000 new sites appearing each week, approx 56000 a month, the only businesses that can lose that type of money are governments.

  The check came, and Kor reached for it.

  “What else to do with ourselves but search?” he said, examining it, “I mean, being human?” and that was what attracted us, not a shift or sudden gearchange but a simultaneity, a symbiosis, of practical and theoretical, finance in the mists.

  It struck us as like very mature at the time.

  “Freud thought our cultural pasts lived in our present minds, while Jung thought it was not just our individual cultural pasts that lived there but every past and present too. Now, though, our innerlives have become exteriorized online, creating the first truly universal unconscious or subconscious. Think of the burdens we have been relieved of, think of the traumas transferred out. Bestial instincts, barbarous urges. The appetites of criminals. That is why search is important. It is the last direct connection to our primal darkness. It is the last link of light between evil and our awareness of a better self. It must be respected, protected,” he said, or to that effect. It is a pity we cannot do his voice.

  “Search is a conduit,” he later said, “all notions are related through it, somehow, but some notions are only related through it.”

  “That is also one definition of intelligence,” he said. Kor would later give us other definitions of intelligence.

  We took the check from him and from out of our pocket, we have never had a wallet, the Diners Club card Carbon had given us, for interviewing purposes only.

  “Please,” he said. “My treat.”

  “Carbon pays.”

  The waiter came, took the card.

  “But you know who is responsible for paying Deepcast?” Kor asked.

  “We do,” we said. “We are.”

  Kor went into his fannypack for a napkin and asked, “But you know who owns Deepcast?”

  “We do not.”

  “James Bates, second cousin of John.”

  We nodded but not at this. That a VC firm required one of its investments to retain the services of another of its investments did not shock us as like what weighted the middle of the napkin or rather paper Kor held, apparently a tax filing for Deepcast. It was a rod, and Kor was confirmative, it was platinum. He told us it was exactly 14.8 ounces and that with platinum now trading at $1515 per ounce, the price of this rod was precisely equal to the fee owed to Deepcast.

  “Hire me, let me take care of it,” he said. “Consider it this way, you get a President who pays for himself.”

  We shook on it, and our signature on the receipt felt as like gratuity.

  ://

  After the backgammon board has been set up, before anyone has moved or even rolled the die yet. After everything has been problematized toward the left of an equal sign, before anything has been solved on the right. Moments of tantric potency. Potentiality held in reserve. This was our situation. We were funded and had a new den mother. Who was about to move us into a new office den with enough capacity to hibernate everything online 100x over. Beyond, Moe was already poised to scale toward 1002, toward 2100.

  [What year are we in again?]

  Worst. Year. Ev. Er.

  [Which?]

  97 through 98. But also not. Rather it was Beta. It was perpetual Beta.

  [Yo
u’re at the Tetplex, the office?]

  The core of it. A bay tract by the sloughs. Sedge, rush. Muck. City land. Palo Alto. The building we were in then, former garaging for the Department of Public Works, has since been cleared for parking. We bought the rest of the acreage from NASA Ames, adjacent marsh. Expansion in 2001 through 02, fitness center, kindercare center, yurt. Major renovations in 08 and 10.

  [All the servers at the time were onsite?]

  They were. Kor would not put Moe in his own barn or silo unsupervised. That was the issue. At first.

  [What?]

  But we are not sure what was first. It was hiring Kor, then the Tetplex core, The Lesstel. But they all overlapped, they lapped. Even a few things we had not been apprised of.

  [Namely?]

  Sometimes secrecy is secrecy but other times it is just that we have octalfortied the fact that other people as like you do not have access to everything we know and think. Many people have this problem, most of them not trying to hide anything. They just assume everyone can read their minds as like a book. We presume you understand this.

  Point is, we found ourselves up to the waist in wetwork. Blackops, glomars, skunks. We moved to the marsh and suddenly stunk. This was what it meant to be managed. To compromise, and to be compromised, to dwell amid decay. Amid the pervasive waft of methane as like everyone in the office were locked in a continuous fit of farting.

  As like we expanded Kor would take us to inspect the perimeter, out to the point that our clogs would just sink. “Freedom is water,” he used to say. He meant that it has the behavior of water. How it takes any shape, because it cannot make its own.

  We have to be the shapers of freedom, Kor would tell us, as like our concrete shored up the basin. On the rain days. The fog days. “Tetration is the air.”

  We planted public land with capital and harvested it private. We bought from the city, bought from the county, took credits and abatements both state and Fed for setting aside a nook for a rookery. We sheltered the least tern and brown pelican. Eggs of smelt and tidewater goby.

  We took a disused building and renovated it, built a building nextdoor, each to its use, different floors in the different buildings, different sectors on the different floors, each to its use, quintessential Kor. Multitasking, polypronged productivity initiatives throughquarter. The lefthand ignorant of the right, as like in typing tutorials to develop finger independence. Compartments, compartmentalization. Cubicles. Tetricles.

  Businesses predicated on unicity had to function by secernment. Employees now had to swipe in and out. They had security clearances. Even we had to swipe, but we always lost our card, and anyway later the Tetplex switched to facial/vocal recogs, connating cepstra and isometries. Even we had a clearance level and though it was the highest we were not assuaged. It was still a level, it was measurable.

  Previously we had all been not just on the same page but the same page itself. We were inured to our proximities. The engineer who started a project, finished it. Delegation was for rectards, and the techs were treated as like they treated themselves, if only they were the boss, everything would be splenda. But now we had been severed, dissevered, cleaved apart. Disarticulated, boxed. This and not any speculation was the worst bubble of the Valley. Specialization, which made a speciality of nothing but boredom, the integrative duty descriptions, which institutionalized that boredom, the windy command catenations, the recirculated air of assessment, filling the corridors of every office and the cavities of every engineer until the only way to remain sane was to pop.

  Previously we had all been down in the niggly bits. Qui and Cull and the original Tetrateers #s 26 through 33. We will go through them alphabetically, rather in hiring order. Gushkov, Lebdev, émigrés who never appreciated us mixing up which one was from Kiev and which from Akademgorodok. Posek the Jaw, Japanese Jew. Syskin the Chew, Chinese Jew. Roland who was Roland. Toole, the youngest living person with an Erdős number of 2. Tiiliskivi, who had epilepsy and was allergic to wood. Yazyjy, who at 18 was our youngest hire and was still wearing his varsity badminton sweatband from the U of Jordan, Amman.

  Now what we had to do was relevate. Move up the foodchain, evolve. Qui was responsible for supervising the writing of external code, userside, what you get when you use us. Cull was responsible for supervising the writing of external code, tetside, what we get when you use us, and how we use you and ourselves, backend. We were above and between them. And Mondays and Fridays we were at lunch with our Chief Engineer.

  We met Moe at The Jaggery, Kokum If U Got Um, Daal Central, and the Seed Factory. We talked Tetration. Mnemosystems, mnemotechnics, sperance. How to not just bring users to sites or sites to users but how to store all of online ourselves.

  How to store online, not how to shop it.

  We would begin with the concept of existing space vs. new space, proceed into talking through the entailments of each w/r/t data and electricity, racked mountables per cabinet, and cabinets per corridor, seismal dampering, algidities, praxeological redundancies. W/r/t electricity and data.

  Then Moe would end at least the work component of our powwow by reviewing.

  About how it would be more energy efficient and so less expensive to install latitant 12 volts in each server so that if only a few of them conked he would not have to crank all the backup ancillary power, but how Kor who knew fuckall had kyboshed that as like unstable. About how seamless it would be for him to father the conversion of AC to DC inside the motherboard itself and not outside and so attenuating the supply, but how Kor knew he was fucking Moe by kyboshing that too.

  Moe lamenting the oversight, the underlistening. Moe lamenting his Tabernacle ideal.

  We will be sincere, we will be veracious. We never entirely credenced anything Moe said about his Tabernacle of Reversibility. Rather we would have credenced his ability to build it, had it been buildable by anyone other than the intelligent designer of the universe. Though if anyone could compete with that supreme engineer it was Moe, which was why our time together was never merely collegial. This was the one scintilla of transcendence we had to have in our life in order to tolerate the rest of it. This was, or used to be, the purpose of lunch.

  Moe talked about Guadapada, Govinda Bhagavatpada, Adi Shankara, dharana and dhyana. He talked about his own mental sorbency and respiratory practices, “But only in America the more you practice respiring the more shitty you get at it.”

  We as like rookie Buddhists had been encumbered by counting our breaths when we should not have been counting them and not counting our breaths when we should have been counting them, and Moe took up his glass and poured water in our mouth and told us to breathe it out of our nostrils and then poured water in our nostrils and told us to breathe it out of our mouth and after lavaging as like that a number of times we had no chance of being encumbered.

  “Is that a Hindu breathing technique?” we asked as like we wiped ourselves up.

  Moe answered, “That is a Hindu technique for getting thrown out of a restaurant. But now you are breathing and the numbers have stopped.”

  Moe always said that the cycle of in and exhalation was a reduplication of the cycle of birth and death or samsara, which could be improved only by an improvement of karma, which depended on our guarantee of an autonomous engineering division for Tetration, and our marriage to either another human or tree, as like humans without love can marry in India. On our returns to the Tetplex Moe would try to set us up with a tree. But being unable to find any eligible baobab or even tulsi shrub he would say that this was just the Indian tradition, and that the contemporary American equivalent might be betrothal to a discarded curbside microwave. And though a Westinghouse was not our type we appreciated the sentiment.

  Wednesdays were for management. We met outside by the estuary, way before we had a commissary. Kor would have us sit in a T, but there were not enough of us to form one. He would present a chart or graph of a T for us to emulate. We had to be broad in our disciplines, as like the horizon
tal bar of the letter. But also we had to be deep in our passions, as like the vertical bar of the letter. Then we all brought out the blenders and made disciplined passionate smoothies. Our favorite we called Fierce Enemy of Yeast. Ice crushed, not cubed. Size medium, with two straws for maximum suction.

  It was seleccess then. Select access, invitation only. The site. Our focusgroupies were an even distribution of recs, as like The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters, and techs out on disability leave whom Dustin conscripted from the Market Street coop. Then we admitted the Stanford students, the cardinals of the ordinal trees, the full roster of Ubicomp 101, Professor Winhrad. We assigned them all proprietary unames and pwords tied to dedicated IPs. But they were careful what they tetrated for. They were too careful, which is a solecism now.

  Ours was a testmarket tetrating wholly for wholesome things, educational things, nothing real, nothing real and sebaceous. They tetrated for Stanford, the SF Centre Nordstrom closing times, meteorology 94301, 94303.

  They knew we were tracking them, we knew they knew we were tracking them, and they knew we did they did too. Knowledge sheds prejudice with increase in sample size. It was expectancy effect, assumed bias, and they tetrated for “expectancy effect,” “assumed bias,” as like they were trying to impress us or applying for jobs. The most telling thing, though, was that at the most improbable but also probable times as like between 02:12 and 04:16 at night they tetrated for themselves, repeatedly, despite knowing that nothing was there.

  Beta. To the West Beta justifies mess, excess, otiosity, sloth, and only the East understands it for what it is, the basic prime condition. To be unable to finish or be done with a thing is not to be blocked. It is to recognize no safety but in process, no security but in flux.

  That is why ours was not true Beta, but false. Ours was the Beta of appearances, but we understood this only later.

  In a true Beta there are no distinctions between recs and techs, user and provider. In a true Beta everyone must be both. Our false Beta, our Beta 2.0, was just another instance of a business putting its customers to work, a Beta by approval, a Beta that surveilled. This was Kor 100%. His justification. The public can never be fully employed under capitalism, but they can be fully capitalized in the sense of being employed without salary or benefits, just cred.