Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  [If I’m remembering correctly, the press had a particular animosity toward Adverks?]

  The press. Depressing. No single server institution not a college or university pinged us more, might even still ping us more, than The New York Times, which alternately praised and damned us, and used us for its research. The technophobes will always be a loyal demographic. We recall someone at The Atlantic tetrating copious reference shelves about Yugoslavia, clicking for the Kosovo casualty stats at this émigré site that turned out to be a project of the State Security Service of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collaborating with the Kremlin. We read the feature, but we never read the corrections.

  Adverks got journalism revved. Reporters accused us of faveranking links to advertisers. No. They accused us of faveranking sites linked to advertisers. No. They covered our every diddly lawsuit, neglected every judgment but their own. They demanded our schematics, without knowing which or for what, they only knew schematics. Environmental impact assessments of the Tetplex. All our IRS 1120s. They demanded full transparency for everyone but their readers who, just by using us, became their competition too. Journalists took our hardware to store the news, our software to lay it out for publication, then they used our email to spit on the rest, and lost their pages, jobs, and pensions. They went cheaper than we ever did, cheaper than free. We just strained, they catered. We will never feature any celebrity pregnancy exposés, for those who do not want them. We will never publicize a guide to the worst foreign vacation spots, for those who do not need one. Libel, defamation, and slander are merely available through us, not originated by us. Protecting copyright must be the responsibility of the host domain and not the engine. We were honored to consult on the redesign of the US Patent and Trademark Office Database, for gratis.

  Truth is, media were worse than we are. Publisher money determines editorial determines content. You have told us this yourself. Certain expectations obtain. In newspapers and magazines especially, conformity is institutionally imposed. Contentproviders are censored until they selfcensor, for which achievement they are elevated to management. There are two warzones just north of us, involving approx 68 million civilians, and approx 140000 US troops. American broadcast and cable news organizations cover all this with a total of six fulltime correspondents. Blood is rarely shown. Footage of mourning parents is preferred to that of their amputated children.

  Tetration is accessed approx 1 billion times per day by approx 600 million users from approx 180 countries in approx 140 languages. The exchange is immediate, and priceless. Rather each user sets the price, by deciding what to tetrate, and what results to click, setting in motion a process by which the vids or pics taken by the surviving member of a family that might or might not have been accidentally bombed can grow to rival and even dominate press accounts of the incident. No doubt you can choose to click strictly conservatively, or liberally, but click independently and you will find blood, limblessness, the carrion of drones, without commercial break or advertorial confusion, just sidebars, banners, sponsored links in gray. We show how foreign children die from our taxes, we are not sure why it matters if we purged from our index a site that staged lynchrims. Which are, true or false, situations in which one human hangs lynched without clothes from a tree while another human stands just below and rims their anus.

  ://

  [How did we get off on that tangent?]

  Remember 2000?

  [If you mean the year.]

  We mean the century. The millennium. 2000. Remember?

  [If I have to.]

  You do. Please. The end of time, the beginning of time. Panic. World historical Orson Welles World War III. The apocalypse. ATMs out of money. Cans of Spam and bottledwater in the basement. Gun sales up 62%. Explain it to us.

  [It’s my fault?]

  Explain, please.

  [It was. Everything was just exaggerated. Hype. A boost to circulation.]

  The computers. Recall what was happening with computers.

  [All the computers were going to crash for being set to the wrong date, I guess.]

  Elaborate.

  [What I read was that computers tell time by two digits for the month, two digits for the day, two digits for the year, but the years were all 20th century, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, second millennium of Christ. At midnight on December 31 or I guess January 1, it would be 01/01/00, and all technology would be blasted back to 1900.]

  Before the filament bulb, gaslight. Horses on the cobbles. Women and Afromericans disenfranchised. All the vaccines would be voided. Polio returns. Confirmative.

  [Alarmism.]

  Media again.

  Stations were losing the air and so were scrambling to fill it, reclaim it. The more they claimed with their filler the less they would lose. Chat shows. Nonstop cable news. Every channel demonizing the computer as like it was not a tech who invented TV too, it was an emcee, it was an anchor. Online was about to take the ozone from TV and TV was out to avenge itself. That was the scoop. To survive, TV had to go after revenge in advance. A common fantasy in the West, a religious tenet in the East. Preemption. But to destroy a thing can also mean to destroy yourself in the process. All you have to do is respect the inevitable.

  This was not mysticism, however. This was what happened.

  Basically, media were just reiterating the partyline of nonstarter nonentity startups, rewriting marketing eblasts from the inbox. The news they broke came from the publicists, who were employed by the businesses, which had been founded to remediate, y2K.

  The remediation outfits had hired only the worst programmers in the Valley, inferiors, ulteriors. But they had also hired the best PR staff in this language, and so in every language, virtuosos of suasion. They scared global conglomerates into retaining their y2Kludging services, they frightened the big clogged artery hearts of the big three producers. ABC, CBS, NBC. The PR wunderkinds billed by the assignment, but the coder poseurs were paid by the parameter. They made an Altoid, a Tic Tac, a mint. There has never been or will be again such a splenda syzygy of business and calendar. Opportunity costs opportunity.

  Point being, all that clock resetting zeroing quandary, if it affected any hardware it was only the mainframes, bulky IBM corrugated boxwork due for replacement regardless. For any software the update was only a flourish. A line. A line they took their time with. It would have been cheaper to begin from square one than to have hired nonentity hacks to nonsolve a nonproblem in a nonexistent timecrunch. If the nuclear warheads launched anyway, at least existence would have ended in the black.

  [You weren’t taken in for even a moment?]

  We tried to be, gave it our best. But, basically, zero.

  [So why weren’t you speaking out to debunk it all?]

  Spring 99.

  Second round funding had been obtained, $20, $22 million, the bulk courtesy of Carbon and Keiner Sequirities. This was money to pay off the Tetplex, continue expanding the Tetplex, develop adforce, identify potentials for a DCent outcampus. A DCenter. A datacenter. A project tacitly promised to our Goan bro. Topology by Moe, infrastructure by Moe, his pick of hinges, and any red he had ever dreamed in for the sprinkler system.

  But the VCs had their own project in mind. One was a Sapp. A StorApp, a StoragApp. Properly a Storage Appliance.

  We are not sure how to tell it.

  Basically, there was this company, Moremory, y2K profiteers. They were deving memory, drives. Nonvolatile drives. Imagine a downscaled shrunk portable DCent, your very own warehouse of servers, to keep with the mops in the broomcloset.

  The idea was that when everything crashed, all your files would still exist for any future civilization, if, that is, they would have the wherewithal to reboot compatible computing.

  Functionally, there is no difference between the device we have described and any other midrange moderately tricked out external hard disk. Except that this was an early one and would be marketed directly to rectards and rectarded businesses with a guarantee in graffiti font al
ong its side: “y2Keeper.”

  Its design resembled an Incan timekeeping disc or, honestly, a thermostat.

  But then everything about the Moremory Sapp was basically stupey, überstupey. As like it was conceived without a modem, and so would never go online. No doubt this was why Moremory was finding the device so appealing. The very thing that made it cheap to produce, the very thing it lacked, was its major safety feature. No online access meant security, reducing if not eliminating chances of infection. Which was sure to be important to any Sapp owners trying to survive the millennial calamity, who would have no computers, and no telecom, only a scorched plastic orb containing all their spreadsheets.

  But the more proximal disaster, the true compocalypse for us, was how many of them were selling. Units moved, retail, wholesale. The severity appealed. The expensive severity.

  Moremory was owned 14% by Carbon and 6.8% by Keiner, making them partners to each other before partners to us. Operands were operating venal. Keiner proposed a product, Carbon brought it to us and we balked, but then Carbon balked, and the termsheet Keiner submitted turned it into a precondition for funding. Dustin ran interference but his superiors had run the numbers, leaving us no support or alternative but to walk.

  They proposed a drive to be equipped with our algys, which would render all files searchable, findable, for posterity or holocaust. Take the price and tetrate twice. STrapp was the workingname. A Storage Tetrating Appliance, a “y2Kreeper.”

  Kor was going pro on this but we were neutral, but neutral for us means con.

  We still had a cruft of algy tweaks on Adverks.

  We were trying to arch a system that enabled bloggers to embed ads on their blogs so that if a user clicked through to vendor and made a purchase the directing blog domain/host and/or the bloggers themselves would garner a share of the proceeds.

  Further, we were trying to figger how to divide that share, whether by a set percentage or a percentage escalating in proportion to clickthrough from among the total of all purchases per quarter.

  [Slow it down, one thing at a time—are you explaining Adverks or this storage device?]

  The risks of assetizing and/or equitizing preferences. The costs/benefits of rendering recommendations transactional. Exploitation. Anthropreneurism. We are just trying to explain our mind. Summer 99.

  We had been falling asleep in whichever was our office, whose AC had been set to autoadjust and would wake us up to Monday, 08:00. We had just signed into a terminal and clicked up an Adverks algyshell and there was a crash, there was an offline crash and then our phone rang. We did not pick up and then it stopped but then there was ringing by the next terminal, to our left or right, and then to our left and right, but then they stopped and our phone went again and though we were sure it was not for us we picked up. Tiiliskivi was on the line reporting a meltdown, apparently Kor was melting, down.

  “Why?” was what we had to offer, basically.

  But Tiiliskivi just stuttered, “This is not Yazyjy?”

  No, but now we had to assume it was his phone, his terminal, his office.

  We quit the algyshell and refreshed our email.

  Yes, we had email back then, we had emails, from Gushkov, from Lebdev, all subject: BLDNG 2 FLR 1 STAT, CAPSLOCK CAPSLOCK EMOEGENCY.

  That was a floor below a building over. We took the stairs, and counted the stairs, one step demote Tiiliskivi, the next demote Yazyjy. For violation of the Tetplex ToS, 82:6: discussing anything w/ colleagues before discussing w/ us.

  The meetingroom, still unfinished, was plastered over with contractor tarp. Extra swivelers had been hauled in but there was no table yet to center, just carpetlessness. Down the corridor was a banging. Dustin and the Carbonites were pacing as like they had to use the toilet. Keiner the VC exec was consoling two females presumably affiliated with Keiner the firm. They were crying and he comforted them without touching or being touched.

  The Soviets, Gushkov and Lebdev were the Soviets, were by the bathroom door and trying to slip the lock with their new black Amex Centurion cards, contorting paperclips and attempting to pick and then switching, as like whoever of them was not engaged debriefed us.

  Apparently, Moe had shut himself inside the bathroom unresponsive. The gender neutral bathroom, because it had the only flushable toilet on this floor.

  Then the water in the watercooler was rippling, the plants were rustling, as like Tetrateers and guests backed away into cubes. We were hooked by a beltloop and brought along too.

  Kor was charging down the corridor toppling processors, wielding a hammer and screwdriver as like to chisel the law into the door.

  Super Sal was rushing just behind him flailing either in a protest of access methodology or merely trying to retake his tools.

  [What happened? Moe picked a fight with the VCs or with Kor?]

  Basically, Kor had called a VC meeting, had not invited us but had invited Moe. This was the first we had been informed about any of this. Apparently, Moe had been under the impression that the purpose of the meeting was to examine his plans for the DCent, which, for him, was culminant. Anyone else would have resented the lack of notice, but he was primed. He had been primed since birth. His first birth. This was why he had endured the quibbly servers and Tetplex delays, this was what he had been mounting and sealing and soldering and suffering for through every karmic deferral, countless reincarnations counted as like retroincarnations until the bodies released their egos. All existence had been just a mobilization for this, the mindful manifestation of his sadhana, his purpose, this slideshow presentation.

  After Moe finished presenting Kor applauded and said they were tabling on the absence of table the DCent for later. For now Moe had to focus on this thing called a Sapp.

  Rather, he had to turn it into a STrapp. To make it searchcapable. That was the agenda in its entirety. In this, Kor was the decider.

  Moe was speechless initially.

  The rationale was revenue, Keiner said. An outcampus server could wait, but a tetrating storage device could not. It was y2K sensitive. And y2K was sensitive.

  Waiting, Dustin said, is what servers do.

  The decision, not as like the commissioned product, made itself.

  Moe yelled in Hindi, and if you recall your Mahabharata or Ramayana, how the bowstring is said to snap and the arrow is said to wail through the air as like the god Rama slays the king of the monkeys, that was the yell with which Moe fled the meeting.

  Or basically.

  Out in the hall, the Keinerites kept crying about an “asshole Sikh,” which at least the Carbonites refuted. Moe was an asshole, but never a Sikh.

  We squatted by the bathroom door attempting to mediate. We suggested to Kor and the VCs that Moe would only have to supervise the STrapp, not dev it himself. We suggested that if the future solvency of Tetration required Moe to temporarily transform his role, it was only fair to define a time commitment and profitshare fraction. But there was no response from the other side of the door and from this side there was just Keiner who clicked his dentures, “Every now and then, boy, you have to STrapp one on.”

  It took until noon, and the exchange of hammer and screwdriver for fire extinguisher, for Kor to bust the door.

  But Moe was gone. The bathroom was voided. There was no window to slip through, there were no tiles or insulation panels pried, staff had been present around the clock and yet. He must have gone for the ducts again and shimmied.

  It was so hot that summer that even the flies were in heat. Anyone in building 2 who had to piss just went outside in or around a contractor bucket but for shitting they had to go to building 1 until Super Sal had reinstated the door.

  ://

  [The way Moe reacted, wasn’t he just protecting his pride?]

  Moe was only four below us on the corporate totempole. He barely tolerated working with others on his own designs, and now he was being bullied to work on theirs. The DCent was his maya project and not the STrapp. But more to the point, more sa
lient.

  He must also have been disappointed, as like his reaction to this treatment had set him back transmigrationally, rather set in front of his atman soul further benchmarks of deaths and undeaths he had to meet before ever again being admitted to a meeting with VCs. We are saying this for serious, positing that if the situation had been less spiritual he would have contacted us or returned our contact, he would not have gone off the rez.

  [But didn’t you intercede with Kor—I mean, aren’t you the boss?]

  But Moe was also our friend.

  And he reminded us of D-Unit. In that they both were engineers who put metal to metal welding the devices on which we just used and were used and typed, and if that idolization had always insecured us, what insecured us now was how that idolization was causing our lenience. We were accused of being lenient. By our two other cofounding partners, whom we pinged preliminary to Kor, though Kor must have pinged them both already.

  This was a test, Cull and Qui argued, a popquiz even a rectard would have anticipated. Moe was being sent to discipline school, a postgrad class in detention. The subjects were teamwork, reciprocal priorities. How respect for authority can confer authority itself.

  Qui had never wanted to deal with phrasal identification and relation through bit vectors, Cull had never wanted to waste himself on interteam/intrateam Tetmail. They pointed out that our own ambitions had not always pertained to Adverks algys.

  Moe was a genius, we said, but they said that in business a genius was replaceable. Moe would have to prove himself as like a prerequisite to being turned loose on his own server Taj Mahal.

  Today Tetration has 12 resident beekeepers, four affineurs, two ongoing emoji valency experiments, and a lab dedicated solely to honing a 3D printer that itself can be 3D printed. Today we are able to afford a Moe, but at the time we had no budget for integrity.