No one is spared the betrayal of a biographer: not his ostensible subject, and certainly not his truer subject: himself. “All books are autobiographies,” can be found in books in nearly every language, in nearly every age. How else can a man survive having dedicated his one life to the lives of others, to reading them and especially to writing them — isn’t betrayal the only noble choice? […] Which is why I can’t decide about a child — what material will I have to bequeath? […]
Diaspora Jews have inherited not a tradition but a rupture. If we were enslaved, it was to fashion; if we were liberated, it was by wandering the deserts between channels; if we fought wars, they were against our own parents; if we had any true enemies, they were our selves. All generations are condemned to end in death. Only ours was lucky enough to have never lived to begin with.
Yehoshuah Kohen was born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine. The old century was dying, and the new century lurking just beyond the fields, lying in wait in the snowy woods would be no consolation. By the goyim Christians, it was 1870/71. In an heirloom Bible, the family Kohen recorded only FUCK ME BEGIN LATER
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from the Palo Alto sessions: We were born in the year of the microprocessor, LGBT Pride Month, the Day of the Death of Mohammed [June 8, 1971]. M-Unit a retired gender studies professor at UC Berkeley, D-Unit an engineer, Xerox-PARC. Basically he was one of the inventors of personal computing. Which meant, he used to say, he took computing personally. We grew up in a white splancher in Crescent Park [Palo Alto]. A good neighborhood too überaware of its goodness. Lots of cool subdued kids. Lots of cool hippie parents. Kindergarten was at Berkeley. A totally egalitarian viro. M-Unit and D-Unit alternated breakfasts, spelt pancakes, stevia quinoa. We had chore charts, surprise room cleanliness inspections. We collected dinosaur eggs, coprolite, ambered insects, pyrite. We memorized the chart of Mendeleev, which hung on our ceiling. We were picked on at school for our [INCOMPREHENSIBLE — wardrobe?], which was sewn by parental friend [INCOMPREHENSIBLE — Nancy Apt?], the back fabrics of the chinos and buttondowns different from the fabrics in front. We were raised to mistrust brands, to be a proactive consumer, a prosumer. All adults were academics. Primiparousness was the norm.
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Communication is a useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen’s family. Cohen’s was a family [consumed subsumed] by communication [communications/communications systems]: His father, Abraham, was one of the prime innovators of laid many of the most important foundations for worked on a team that helped establish a few vital technical specifications for the internet — before the web, before the technology had any commercial, industrial, or even military? applications. Not many companies can afford a pure research arm, but Xerox, the photocopy giant, could, and endowed PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1970? thousands of miles away from Xerox corporate headquarters (in Rochester, New York). The PARCys, as employees were called, were free to pursue their projects with minimal supervision, but with minimal support. The innovations that came out of their labs, particularly from the Computer Science Division, set the standards for modern computing. Though Xerox invested in developing none of them, though development costs would’ve been prohibitive.
In 1972, the Computer Science Division built the Alto, the world’s first personal computer [IS THIS TRUE?], which featured a wordprocessing program called Wupiwug, which its programmer Hal Lahasky always claimed was a monster from a scifi book by a writer he’d never name, though it was only an acronym for “What U Press Is What U Get,” an indication that the keystrokes a user made were reflected directly onscreen, and not on a teletype printout. [INSERT HERE A LINE ABOUT LANGUAGES: BASIC, LISP.]
Nascent computing displayed its output on a tick of tape. The monitor followed, a face to face the user’s, light hurled at a pane of glass. The last frontier, or what was regarded as the last frontier, was also the first, paper again. The laserprinter both continued and undermined the Xerox tradition: in that it reproduced, but from a nonexistent original, putting to paper the page of the screen (parenthetically, the laserprinter was the only PARC innovation Xerox ever brought to market, in 1977 debuting the 9700, which averaged TK?? pages per minute, and retailed for $??K). (The output of nascent computing was just text, and not its formatting — to Abraham, the two were inseparable.) The problems he had set out to solve involved what today is called “desktop publishing,” or “design”—namely, how to perfectly reproduce a print artifact onscreen, and then, outrageously, how to render it manipulatable, perfectly printable again.
[However, building on phototelegraphy, which had been around since the 19th century, and the shift from wire to wireless facsimile, which occurred just after the turn of the 20th, Xerox’s main interest in documents remained in their reproduction, and in their reproduction through transmission, not in their manipulation. All distances had to be bridgeable, as far as Xerox was concerned — the distance between PARC and Rochester Stamford, CT, to which Xerox moved its HQ in 19?? was not.] While Abraham’s colleagues were focused on [creating the] transmission protocols between computers[, and computers and printers], and constructing the Ethernet — a local area network [explain] that allowed machines, and the people who made them, to communicate with one another virtually — Abraham was alone in his fixation. He spent 14 years at PARC huddled with scanners that still functioned with tubes, surrounded by hunched engineers who’d already been graduated to transistors and circuits.
While the character recognition program was relatively simple to code [WHAT WAS IT CALLED?], as were the modifications to Wupiwug that allowed user modification of the recognized characters, it was the image that proved frustrating. The images scanned well [do scanners work the same way as photocopiers or fax?], but Abraham was never able to code an interface that pleased him. Every graphics program he invented was either too rudimentary, or [the opposite of rudimentary?] intricate. He experimented with raster and vector, with dividing the graphics into 2D “spatches,” into 3D “layers,” but his lack of progress led to a lack of resource availability, and in 1984, with PARC reorganized under new management, Abraham’s unit was mothballed, and he was transferred to another [BUT WHICH?].
He would joke to his son that this was the fate of the Jews — to be stymied by the image.
[[OPENING VERSION 1 BIOGRAPHY: One hundred years before PARC’s inception, Yehoshuah Kohen was born in 1870, in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between Kiev and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine.
Bershad was a textile town, and antisemitism was a familiar thread. Upon returning from a spell at the yeshiva of Koretz, Yehoshuah married Chava Friedgant, the youngest daughter of a family of weavers, and it was weaving that supported Yehoshuah’s life of study and prayer, and the life of their son, Yosef, born 1895. In 18?? however, a pogrom was sparked [a pogrom sparked how?], and burned the Jewish textile warehouse [but only one warehouse?]. Theirs was a tragedy so common to the milieu that it can only become banal by repetition.
Regardless — wagon to Uman, trains to Lvov, Warsaw, Berlin, Hamburg — the family took a steamship to America, bundling with them a single trunk, and Yosef. Ellis Island records attest to an arrival of April 4, 1901. The year of the Edison battery and the transatlantic radio, the death of Queen Victoria and the assassination of McKinley, annus Rooseveltus. The first day of Passover 5661.
They settled on Orchard Street, on the East Side of New York City, where Yehoshuah — now “Cohen”—found a job as an iceman, initially cutting that substance from the East River, before being promoted to assistant deliverer (an innate sense for horses and geography), to chief deliverer (developing English and manners), cut manager, assistant payroll. But when his payroll chief married the daughter of the ice concern’s owner, he left. The man was a fellow immigrant, but from Uzhgorod [, Ungvar in Yiddish], who considered Yehoshuah a peasant[, which he was]. But he was also a natural businessman.
In 1909, with money he’d saved and income from Chava’s lacemaking, Yehoshuah purchased a building in Coney Island, Brooklyn — freezing cellar down below, living quarters up top — from which he’d deliver his ice to every borough, and even unto the wilds of New Jersey, where he buried Chava in 1918 (influenza).
A year later, their only son, the Americanized “Joseph”—who’d spent his late teens working nights for his father while attending Stuyvesant High School during the day, and his early 20s working days while attending City College at night — was married to Eve Leopold, a German American Jewess and fellow student at [City College? whose family, all of whom were involved with industrial refrigerator/freezer manufacturing, disapproved of the match, and attempted to snub Joseph by not taking him into the business, instead granting him a nonexclusive license to retail their products, which he did, to outstanding success, by exploiting the newly emerging home market, introducing puffs of the Russian Pale into American households by van and truck as far afield as Connecticut].
[Yehoshuah died in 1967, Joseph in 1977. Colon cancer — both?]
In 1930, Joseph and Eve had a daughter, Lily (accountant, d. 1998? how?), and, in 1933, a son, Abraham (named for Eve Leopold’s grandfather? great-uncle? Abraham Leopold, a pioneer of gas absorption technology? or aqua ammonia?).
“Abs” was a loving, and beloved, son — in true immigrant fashion, Joseph and Eve would have done anything for him, but in true first-generation American fashion, “Abs” had required nothing, and had accomplished all he had on scholarship: Harvard (bachelor’s in electrical engineering), MIT (SM, electrical engineering), Stanford (PhD, electrical engineering). 12 years of education had cost his parents nothing.
If Abs ever disappointed his parents it wasn’t with any computer coupling, rather with a coupling more personal [more what?]. Joseph and Eve still held out hope that their son would return home after he finished his PhD, and Abs seemed to placate them throughout 1969 by interviewing for positions at IBM, Honeywell, Multics, and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman [was he offered any?]. But he had no intention of taking a job with any East Coast firm. Either because of the women out west, or the war in Vietnam.
Joseph’s pedes plani (flatfeet) had earned his deferral from WWI, and Abs had been too young for conscription into WWII, too II-S (enrolled in essential studies) for Korea, and old enough that by Vietnam he wasn’t fit for anything besides servicing mainframes[, which were the size of jungle temples, and brought napalm from the sky].
On Christmas Day 1969, Abs had accepted the only offer he’d been waiting for[, from the celebrated Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox-PARC]
On New Year’s Eve, 1970, two men wandered San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in a celebratory mood. Abs and Hal Lahasky had been rivals at Stanford, but now that both were newly minted PARCys, the time had come to be friends. Firecrackers were going off in the streets [WERE THEY?]. Love-beaded flower-children danced in the gutters with sparklers [DID THEY?]. The house [DESCRIPTION OF WOOD BOHEMIAN GINGERBREAD TRIM SF HOUSE] belonged to a cousin/friend of Lahasky’s, but the party going on inside it, spilling out onto the porch and the street, was so packed that Abs never met her/him, and lost Lahasky within a moment of arriving [REWRITE/CUT: NO LAHASKY].
Marijuana was being passed around, which Abs was used to, but then, judging by the [crazy bucknakedish people], there was also LSD. He avoided the punch and went for beer. People stood [at a distance from the hifi?] “drinking draft.” That’s what they told him the game was called. You drank the number of drinks of your draft number. Until you hit it, or died. Luckily, also unluckily, the numbers were low. Still, a guy [in a Mao suit?] had to be held standing by, or was trying for a piggyback ride from, a [pretty young] woman.
“Let me help,” Abs said.
“I got it,” she said, and slumped the guy up against a banister. “Chivalry is misogyny.”
Then she turned away just as he said, “And chauvinist on a double word score is 36 points in Scrabble.”
She paused, “Heavy.”
“And a pair of Yahtzee dice can be rolled in 36 combinations.”
“So you’re a [spaz/square]?”
“I’m 36.”
“That’s your draft number?”
“I mean I’m 36 years old.”
“Bummer.” [“far out”?]
A month before, on the first day of December, the Selective Service System — an agency of the US government responsible for staffing the armed forces — [had reached its omnipotent eagle’s talons into a dimestore fishbowl] and chosen 366 blue plastic capsules, each of which had been [impregnated] with a paper slip marked with a number corresponding to a day of 1944, which was a leap year. The first number drawn was 258, and the 258th day of that year was September 14. The last was 160, and the 160th day was June 8. Anyone born on June 8 got the highest draft number, 366, and would be among the last to be inducted, while anyone born on September 14 got the lowest, 1, and would be among the first—the other 364 days of 1944 all drew draft numbers between them.
A subsequent drawing was held with the 26 letters of the alphabet, to determine the order in which the men born on the same day would be called. The guy [in bellbottoms/pirate shirt] groveling at the woman’s [quilt skirt] had a birthday of October 26, which was the seventh number picked. His last name was Negrón, and N was the fifth letter picked, and his first was Witold, and W was the ninth. Witold Negrón had done seven shots [of rum?], then five, then nine. Then pounded a beer[?]. He was going to smuggle himself to Vancouver, and the woman told Abs she was considering tagging along.
Her name was Sari Le Vay, and she was a PhD student of comparative linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley[, at which she’d later teach linguistics and gender studies]. She was just finishing up her classwork but was finding it difficult to begin her dissertation [WHAT WAS ABS’S DISSERTATION? DID HE HAVE TO DO ONE?], she said. Her academic field was not respected, women the world over weren’t respected, the current party Central Committee in Hanoi had the lowest number of women of any socialist or communist governing body worldwide, zero, and beyond all that, it was like America had already slaughtered her boyfriend, whose body was laid out on the stairs. She rolled her own Bali Shag, drank Mohawk ginger brandy, popped bennies. She had opinions on how Bundists treated their wives and Trotsky treated the blacks. Self-determination was not a transitional demand. She’d registered Chicanos to vote in Oakland and dated them. Men and women both.
Out on the porch they pondered space. She had theories beyond MLK and the Kennedys. NASA landed on the moon, but it also controlled monsoon season. Kissinger sabotaged the peacetalks to tilt the election from Humphrey.
“Like this lottery shitcrock,” she said. “Like we’re all equal and even and fair in America and who gets picked to go die is just one big serendipity — I don’t think so. It can’t be an accident that everyone I know numbered low is either a minority or an immigrant. You’re a numbers guy — you check the numbers.”
That’s what Abs did the very next morning [BUT WHAT DID HE DO THE REST OF THE NIGHT?] — he found the numbers in The Stanford Daily [IN HIS APARTMENT OR?]. But they had nothing to do with minorities or immigrants. Though there was something about them still perturbing. Or something about Sari had left him smitten. He got her number out of the phonebook and wrote it down at the top of [a page]. Under it he listed all the draft numbers, in 29 rows for the shortest month, 31 rows for the longest, across 12 monthly columns, making a crippled square of days with 18 extras dangling at bottom [like orphans trying to hang onto a Huey whomping out of Saigon].
He got up and into his [car type?] to find a computer, because the sooner this got done, the sooner he could call her. But Stanford’s lab was closed for New Year’s and PARC wasn’t finished yet and didn’t have any computers. The IBM 360s and SDS Sigmas were still trucking on the interstate. He shouldn’t have shown up at work until [?].
He went back to Perry Lane [his neighborhood?], and took the integers by hand, put together scatters, chi matrices, demarchic distributions. He called up Lahasky to hash it out at the Nut House [WHICH WAS?], even bothered their mutual dissertation advisor [UNINTELLIGIBLE NAME]. The math was just elementary statistics, the advisor’s encouragement was exciting, the rest was galling. [As a computer person] It was galling that the US government had entrusted such an undertaking to anything but computers.
“Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots” was carried by all the major news outlets, in reduced layreader form, over the second week of January [(the days of draft numbers 101, 224, 306, 199, and 194)], though the complete article was published only in July, in a special War Math issue of Science. Abs’s scrawled charts had been typeset, and the epigraph was from the Book of Proverbs: “The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty.” The paper opened by [IN THAT PEDANTIC AUTODIDACTIC SNIDE WAY TECHNOCRATS HAVE OF KNOWING, NEVER THINKING] surveying Biblical and Classical literature pertaining to divination by lots (or cleromancy), before recounting the supplanting of deistic caprice by the laws of nature and rules of logic [erudition supplied by Rabbi Maurice Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am, Palo Alto]. It went on to define differences between the “arbitrary” and the “random” (the former a determination of will/discretion, the latter hypothetically indeterminate, or chance), and the basic principles of sortition (the differences between chance samplings of volunteers and of the general population): [“QUOTE”]
The second section explained the Selective Service regulations for the draft lottery[, the third was tragic, the fourth, a farce]
The third section opened by asserting that in a year with 366 days the average lottery number for each month should be situated in the middle — at 183. But in this lottery the average draft number for the first six months of the year was higher (for people born in January, the average draft number was 201.2), while the ADN for the last six months was lower (for people born in December, the ADN was 121.5). The correlation between one’s date of birth and draft number indicated a regression curve of −.226. An unflawed lottery would’ve maintained a level correlation at zero, a straight flatline throughout the year.
[In sum, the closer you were born to the start of things, the better.]
The paper then pointed out that people are not born with uniform distribution throughout the year[and especially not with uniform distribution in the leap years]. It proved this by parsing datasets from the US Public Health Service to determine that the birthrates in the first quarters of each year between 1900 and 1940 [EARLIEST RECORDS? TO THE WWII DRAFT?] were a mean 12.2 % above average[, confirming that summers between the equinoctes have normally been the busiest periods of conception]. Further[— through a sinister twist that might only be explained through a syncrasy of biochemistry, sex trends, and God — ]an average of 64.2 % of all babies born during the first quarters of 1900–1940 were male. This meant that early year male babies were doubly insured against conscription — firstly by their birthdates, and then secondly by their disproportionate sample size.
All [samples of] men who shared the same birthday were inducted by order of their names, last, middle, and first weighted accordingly, and ranked in the lotteried sequence: an alphabet that began with J and ended with V[for Victory]. This policy spelled discrimination for men who lacked middle names, and made no provision for the grading of men with identical birthdates and names.
It was this nameranking that comprised the lottery’s purest bias, apparently. Equations weren’t required to understand that the scores of Johnsons and McNamaras and Nixons and Mitchells and Hoovers and Helmses in America tended to have middle names while the singularly ethnic Witold Negróns tended not to.
The paper’s fourth section, its conclusion: In preparation for the lottery drawing, Abs wrote, the days and so the months had been encapsulated consecutively. Meaning that the capsules containing the papers with the January dates were assembled first, the February capsules were assembled second, and so on through the calendar, with each month’s encapsulations poured into a handcranked drum, a mechanical bingo spinner [like a wheel for a gerbil or hamster], upon completion. This meant that the January capsules were mixed with the others 11x, the February capsules mixed 10x, and so on, through the November capsules, which were mixed with the others 2x, and the December capsules, mixed only 1x. A final condemnation cited the Selective Service’s own report that the capsules had been poured into the fishbowl from the side of the drum that’d held the earlier days of the year, so that the latter less thoroughly spun days remained atop[floating like a scum].
On the day “Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots” was published in a special War Math issue of Science in July 1970, six months after Sari inspired it Abs proposed to Sari. Theirs being an engagement very preoccupied with numbers — figures, equations — it bears notice that though they were married at Congregation Beyt Am, in Palo Alto, on January 1, 1971, their son and only child was born on June 8.
Witold Negrón, 8th Battalion, 4th Artillery, was mortally wounded in Operation Lam Son 719 between Khe Sanh forward supply base and Tchepone, Laos, March 1971.
[[[[OPENING VERSION 2 BIOGRAPHY: Sari’s parents, Imre and Ilona Le Vay, were Hungarians to the Americans, but Jews to the Hungarians. Above all, though, they were Budapesters, geographically and culturally marooned between Joseph’s [Abs’s father’s] ghetto origins and Eve’s [Abs’s mother’s] haughty ancestry in Cologne.
To them, Joseph was just a [coarse] peddler of frozen water who’d tried to socially elevate himself through his union with a [wealthy snobbish] yecca wife, Eve, who invariably played the same EZ piano arrangement of Mozart’s Variations KV.265 (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”/“Baa Baa Black Sheep”/the ABCs), dabbled in depopulated watercolors (kitchen still-lives, insipid landscapes of the wildlife preserves around JFK), and in lieu of financially solving whatever problems their daughter was having with her monkeywrench son, preferred to waste her fortune on transcontinental flights, to offer her opinions in person.
The Le Vays would have sudden fevers and lymphatic surgeries whose recuperation periods would last the durations of Eve’s visits. They called her “the princess gourmand [Princesse de Guermantes] of the synagogue women’s league.” Or else “the doyenne of the mooing bourgeois [la doyenne de la moyenne bourgeoisie].” They mocked her Shalimar perfumes, her Scherrer suits worn always with the gloves, her inaccurate recitations of Heine that never aspired to more than the first two couplets of Die Lorelei, and were just the malapropic asyntactic expressions of the trait that most provoked them: Eve’s Deutschtum, or the conceit of her Germanness. Though it wasn’t just that she persisted in a vain attachment to that identity, it was that she hadn’t suffered for it — she hadn’t suffered like they had. The Le Vays had cultivated the full European education and with such unflagging intensity the continent had no choice but to plan their genocide so that they embodied its quintessence.
The Le Vays were the conjugation of generations of linguists, etymologists, philologists, and lexicostatisticians who’d been querulously crossreferencing one another ever since their forebears — who on both sides included Lévais and Lévajs — Magyarized their surnames in solidarity with the Kingdom of Hungary following its fraught unification with the Austrian Empire in 1867. [Their grandparents?] had learned how to speak, read, and write all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, and how to speak, read, and at least write about all the Baltic languages too. [Their parents?] were capable of griping about the dissolution of the dual monarchy in its every single tongue, and in the Ural-Altaic, the Finno-Ugric-and-Permic, Samoyedic, and Oghuric — in everything but the Semitic. The stiff leatherskinned and authoritative edition that was their family would go to its death incomplete — the Le Vays the missing volumes.
Imre and Ilona had been doctoral candidates at the University of Budapest, where they’d maligned each other’s talents so publicly that when their professor paid a university janitor [how much?] to shelter them both in the janitor’s dacha [Hungarian equivalent?] outside Sárospatak, the beneficiaries, even with the Nazis at the door, interpreted the gesture as only partly altruistic. If the other part was a joke, though, the professor never laughed. Dr. Péter Simonyi died fighting with the Resistance. He never got to meet the couple’s daughter, born in spring — or witness its nuptials, civil in fall — both 1945.
But then neither did their parents and siblings [how many?]: Imre’s family had perished in Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau, while Ilona’s had been executed and left to the Danube [by the Arrow Cross?].
Following the war, the couple was unable to find employment — despite Imre’s formidable achievement as an Esperantist (his dissertation sought to officialize the artificial language’s first natural phonological evolution, the replacement of the phonemic ĥ with the k), and despite Ilona being one of the great hopes of Hungarian bibliography (her dissertation had proposed conversion mechanisms between the author/title taxonomies then prevalent in Hungary? and the various faceted? international standards). They labored, instead, in the dissident underground, as translators, interpreters: in Russian, vragi naroda—“enemies of the people.”
In 1956, with a popular revolt roiling the boulevards of Budapest, and columns of Soviet tanks about to roll in[, stretching like the lists for arrest they were on], Imre and Ilona took Sari on a train to Szombathely, and telling her they were just visiting her new Gymnasium, slipped across the border[— parted the Iron Curtain — ]for Vienna.
In Vienna they renewed contacts with prewar colleagues, now adjunct émigrés abroad suffering from visa problems and pleionosis. Jobs were arranged, nonetheless [how?], and in 1958 they moved to Saint? Minnesota, initially to teach a discipline called Sovietistics at the Lutheran Bible Institute? and then to Berkeley, to teach Magyar language under the auspices of the Center for Slavic Studies at the University of California [but Hungarian’s not a Slavonic language?].
Sari attended Berkeley for what she then called her bachelorette’s, mistress’s, and PhD degrees, initially studying applied linguistics, though under the guidance of Professor Debora Laklov she chose to do doctoral work in the specialized field of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on the confluence of language and gender [on the genderlects of disclosure? second-language intimate differencing/contextual integrities?]. “Iceman,” to her, was more than an occupation, but not in the sense that it might’ve been to her future father inlaw, while “Icewoman,” which term Eve might’ve used to describe her daughter inlaw, would become similarly reprehensible. “Iceperson” was less deterministic, preferred. Sari’s dissertation, “Male without Prefix, Male without Suffix: Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and the epicene misnomer in international(ist) language(s),” became a chapter in her seminal [no, no] book, Toward a New “Neuter”: what is ideal about the sexist, and what is sexist about the ideal, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.
In September 1973, Sari traveled to a Reassessing Animacy summit at the University of Texas, Austin, leaving Abs with their two year old son, and prompting a visit from Eve. Abs insisted he was managing on his own, but Eve refused to accept this, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to spend time with her grandson who at the time was two years old.
Eve had strict ideas about the proper way to raise a child, but none approached the method by which Abs and Sari split their parenting duties: divvying up the caregiving by tallying, individually, at the end of each day, and together, at the end of each week, and then again monthly, their changings and feedings, playtimes, and sessions of counting and reading, to ensure an utterly equal distribution of responsibilities. Eve was not aware of this Had Eve been aware that her coming to take charge of her grandson would not redound toward Abs’s total time spent with the child, and that, quite to the contrary, he’d have to make up whatever time he’d been relieved of upon Sari’s return, she might never have made the trip.
Eve would usually spend her visits sitting in the den of the splancher on Fulton Street[, bobbining mundillo, or reading only the best new American fiction][— Leon Uris, Herman Wouk — ]while Cohen slept in his playpen, or toddled on the floor. But on this visit she decided that her grandson’s rompers were no better than rags, and that there was no one better than her, there was no one else but her, to dress him appropriately.
As the Le Vay-Cohens had only one car — a Ford Pinto, which Abs had taken to work — and as Eve wasn’t able to ride a bicycle, especially not with a grandson atop, she called for a cab, raided the pantry for supplies, and the note on its door for the address of Sari’s parents, whose atopic dermatitis that’d prevented them from stopping by was surely noncontagious. Eve wasn’t familiar with the greater Bay Area, so might not have expected the hour drive, the traffic, the toll bridge, or the $48 that got her to Hillcrest Road, in Claremont. After the Le Vays assured her she hadn’t been swindled but didn’t offer to contribute to the fare, Eve gave them stringent instructions regarding Cohen’s regimen[— the Le Vays had never been left alone with their grandson before? — ], had them repeat to her his feeding times, on what foods in what portions, which she’d provided in a diaper bag along with diapers, wipes, powders, creams, told them she’d be back in two hours, apologized to the driver for keeping him waiting, and asked to be taken “downtown.” [Why didn’t she ask the Le Vays to recommend a children’s clothingstore?]
She was let off in San Francisco[, paid the driver another extortionate fee], went shopping. It was while exiting a Family Wearables on Page Street and turning onto Market, having purchased a pair of overalls and onesie pajamas, that she walked directly into a VW Combi, described only as “tiedyed,” its drivers never described and so never identified — a hit and run [she was left to bleed to death on the sidewalk].
The body lay at the UCSF Medical Center and, since Eve’s driver’s license listed her residence as New York, and the Le Vays’ address was the only local contact contained in her purse, it was Ilona who got the call, and it was Imre who called Abs[— imagine the amount of energy being used in enthusiasm control]. At UCSF Medical, Abs could identify the body only by pantsuit and purse. After, he went to pick up his son from his inlaws’, and call his wife, who convinced him that an earlier flight could change nothing. Finally, Abs called his father, who broke. Joseph was unable to decide whether to have the body sent back to New York or buried out in California, and Abs was unable to tell his father that there wasn’t much of a body left to bury, and so Eve was cremated, on Sari’s recommendation. [COMPRESS.]
Joseph never recovered from this trauma. Cancer, the family’s remontant curse, developed. Colorectal. Adenocarcinoma of the bowel.
Joseph arranged to sell Cohen Cooling Solutions, Inc., to his employees, liquidate and sell the locations of his two Chilliastic outlets — one in New Jersey, one in Staten Island — to Lowe’s? Walgreens? and to the Staten Island Mall (Sears was built on its ashes), retiring to oncologists’ offices and New York Presbyterian for a colectomy and two rounds of chemotherapy that left him uncured, without options, and so weakened that he stayed most of the time not at his too oppressively large splitlevel in Valley Stream, Long Island, but in that small bungalow he also owned on the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens.
The decline of the iceman was tragic [REWRITE]. Joseph Cohen, with his cold [business sense?] and warm [heart?], had exerted an indelible influence over his son, and over his grandson too, who regarded him as a wizard, with the power to change the elements[, to turn the states]: liquids to solids, to liquids again, to gas.
Joseph Cohen [might’ve been a greenhorn but he had a green thumb, a man] who grew apples from asphalt, berries from tar. An inveterate tinkerer who [FILL ALL THIS IN].
Cohen, who founded his career on memory, on the notion that memory is the future’s greatest commodity,
The time Cohen spent with his grandfather in the last summer of his grandfather’s life comprises Cohen’s only memory of
Summer 1977, Joseph was ailing, and Abs took a leave of absence from PARC, and took his only son, then six years old, to New York. Cohen’s memories of that trip are myriad. The trains submerging and surfacing, the pneumatics of the bus. How whenever he entered and exited a deli it rained [the dripping air conditioning?]. How wherever he was, even at night, it was daytime — neon, the commonest of the noblest gases. His grandfather’s plot: the raspberry and blueberry bushes. The feel of the house — a cottage, remote, damp, decaying, in no way accessible to masstransit [the A train back then too?]. Two bedrooms, a livingroom — a tiny garage in which Joseph kept a white Plymouth Duster and a workbench. Tools were kept in pristine condition, orderly. Mason jars had been saved from neighboring trash, meticulously labeled: “screws,” “nails,” “nuts ’n’ bolts,” “good nuts.”
One morning Cohen only remembers as having been about a week before his birthday a last issue arose? regarding the pending sale of Cohen Cooling Solutions, and Abs insisted on going into Manhattan to handle it himself. Joseph, surprisingly, agreed. He’d never felt healthier. He’d spare his son the job of minding a child so that Abs would have the tougher task of minding the lawyer,? Dubin, a Park Avenue Litvak.
Abs went, and then called from the law office to check in, and since his father’s positive report was convincing he took the opportunity to have dinner with? Ramirez — formerly the cooling business’s supervisor, now the president of its ownership cooperative — and a few friends from Stanford who’d just been hired at Columbia?
That evening Joseph took his grandson for a walk on the beach. The setting both was, and was not, unusual [THIS SENTENCE BOTH IS, LAZY AND RIDICULOUS]. Abs and Joseph had taken Cohen out for a walk along the beach each day of their stay. Cohen liked the air. He liked being under the sky. What impressed Cohen the most was how his grandfather knew the names of all the trees on the way to the beach, and even knew the names of the rocks and stones, and the game was that Cohen would point at one or pick one up and his grandfather would tell him what it was and in doing so would bring it into being, into a better or clearer being [UNLIKE THIS WORSENING AND UNCLARIFYING SENTENCE]. Joseph was also familiar with the shells and related to Cohen how they were the homes of animals, huts of protein and mineral, keratin and calcium carbonate, though they weren’t homes in the human sense in that the ocean creatures didn’t hire architects and contractors but made them themselves, they made them with sweat, he explained, or by sweating, and when they outgrew them, they left to sweat out a larger one, and when they died, they left their shells behind but no other ocean creatures would touch them because, he said, “It is indecent to dwell in a shell you haven’t sweated for.” Cohen remembers his grandfather always trying to take his hand whenever he went to touch something, to take it. “This is the story of the Jews,” Joseph had said. “The story of the Jews in America.” He remembers his grandfather always removing from his hand that something he’d taken and placing it back on the beach, placing it, not letting it fall, exactly where it’d been taken from. “Seagulls are goyim — they pick up and drop, pick up and drop.”
Joseph shocked his grandson by telling him that sand was made out of rocks and stones—“ground down into dust,” he told him, “grinding is their working”—and Cohen was skeptical. Joseph also shocked Cohen by telling him that the clouds were made out of the same stuff the ocean was, water, the same stuff that he and his grandson were made out of, and that water was two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen brought together by covalent bonds, and then he told Cohen to take off his flipflops and wade, and that the water was as old as the earth, billions of years old, and that the water they drank was billions of years old too, all water was, even the water inside him and his grandson. When they purchased a knish from a boardwalk vendor and Joseph requested water and the vendor charged him a nickel, he said to Cohen, “Remember when you drink it this water is billions of years old, that you have stuff billions of years old in you, and that the chances are that the molecules, the atoms you’re drinking, have been in you before and so are now just coming home.” And then Joseph said, “You should never pay for water — you should maybe have to pay for the cup but never for the water.”
Then it was fully night and the stars were in full relief and Joseph pointed out how they too had shapes like clouds, or were as shapeable as clouds. Joseph pointed out Ursas Minor and Major, the bears, and Orion, who could never lose or gain weight because his belt had only a limited number of notches, and the clawing crab, which he said had given its name to the disease he had, Cancer, because the marks it left on the body were like pincer pricks, and then he said, “And that’s the lobster thermidor, and that’s the shrimp scampi.”
He said, “They’re incredible, the constellations, how random they are, how arbitrary — the Chinese think Orion is actually a white cat playing with a purple bird, or else it’s really the Japanese who think that but about the Canis constellations, the dogs.”
Then, though Cohen was only dimly aware, his grandfather continued to invent them: “That constellation,” but Cohen wasn’t able to follow Joseph’s finger, “is the davening rabbi,” and Joseph waved his entire hand and pointed out, “the negligent mechanic — there, there, there, there,” and “the criminal nurse with the catheter needle — just here,” and “the east-west yarmulke, also called the angry beard,” and he encouraged Cohen to find his own and Cohen tried.
Joseph went on to mention Europe, which was “there, then,” and Cohen was aware that his grandfather was talking about a landmass now and not stars.
Joseph had never mentioned Europe before, but Abs had, a bit, and Sari, to be cryptic, would speak in its languages to her parents, “Ma and Pa Le Vay. Ilona and Imre, the elders I.”
“Think of our ancestors,” Joseph said. “They knew the very same stars. As old as water. Older maybe. Then again maybe not. Same stars.”
He said, “Pick one,” and Cohen, when faced with all those fantastical animals and archers, those electricians and plumbers, settled on the shiniest, and Joseph said, “Polaris, the North.”
“Common,” he said. “Never be ashamed of the common. The common is useful. Common understands.”
Joseph said that just as Cohen had a father, he, Joseph, had a father too, he still had one. “Other people are unlucky and have never had a father, but anyone who has ever had a father will have him forever.”
Joseph’s father had been named Yehoshuah, Joseph said, which was just Joshua in Hebrew, though his family had spoken Yiddish and called him Heschel, and his wife, Chava, called him Shy. In America he cut ice, this was before refrigerators, before freezers, he would have to wait for the freeze—“it froze more often back then, it froze more thick”—and then when the ice was sturdy enough he’d venture out onto it, the ice over the river, ice over the bay, and cut it out in blocks, cutting the ground out from under himself, like how the Israelite slaves built the pyramids.
[REPETITION: In Egypt, Joseph said, the Egypt of Europe, his father, Yehoshuah, had been a rabbi — in Bershad. Cohen asked what Bershad meant and his grandfather answered it meant Bershad. It was a city the size of a city block. All of it might fit inside Grand Central, or Port Authority. Yehoshuah didn’t have a congregation, but instead navigated the territory around Bershad delivering rulings on kashrut and fair labor practices, performing weddings and funerals. He’d be gone for days, even a week, at a time, like a traveling salesman, offering women brushes, combs, fertility incantations, fiduciary spells.]
“He had many brothers and sisters,” Joseph said. “In America, people don’t have that many brothers and sisters, even though they have the money to have them. I could never understand. My mother, and Evele, never could.”
Joseph told Cohen that Yehoshuah was the eldest of eight or nine children and Cohen asked how it was that his grandfather didn’t know whether the number was eight or nine and Joseph answered, “Old people have trouble remembering, young people have trouble knowing.”
Cohen was confused and Joseph said, “We left so young I barely knew how many hands I had, let alone how many fingers. Such a rush we didn’t count.”
But Yehoshuah knew the numbers, Joseph said, he was the type who always knew. “If you don’t keep the numbers in your head, they keep them for you on your forearm.”
Joseph said his parents, Yehoshuah and Chava, took him out of Bershad but left their family behind. “Uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters on both sides, cousins — the family was now what is called nuclear.”
[FUCKING REPETITITITIOUS.]
But it was difficult to stay in touch with the rest of the family, Joseph said, especially given all the turmoil. It wasn’t like he could just pick up a telephone, or send a telegram so easily. Rather he could, Joseph said, but it wasn’t like the family was always available to pick up the other end, or reply. The post was unreliable too, especially for packages. Instead, Joseph said, we could only think certain thoughts, and they could only think certain thoughts and, but this was important, “Each half of the family had to know that’s what the other half of the family was doing.” Joseph said, “At least, that’s how my father explained it.”
“He told me he’d picked his own star,” Joseph said, “like Polaris — lots of people pick Polaris, especially if they’re young, especially if they live in the north, in the cold. And he told me that if he was in the mood to communicate with his family he faced this star, not at a certain time or from a certain place, but whenever, wherever, and he talked to that star, or he didn’t even talk, he told me, he just poured himself into it, all his life and frustrations, all his feelings, his dreams, he just poured all of himself into that fire.
“Then he told me,” Joseph said, “that I could do the same thing, that I could just find a star, any star — I could find my own or I could use his star, because any star has the capacity of all of them — and I could invest this star with my emotions, I could make this star the outside pocket for everything inside me, and that the family still over in Europe would have their own stars and would do this same thing too, all of them, all of us, sending and receiving.”
[REMOVE FROM DIRECT QUOTATION]
Joseph told Cohen that these communications would become stored in these stars, turning them into mutual archives, common caches, omnipresent and yet evanescent. From which they could be accessed, not at a certain time or from a certain place—“people have to work, after all”—but at any time, and from any place, and ultimately not just by the relations and friends they were intended for but also by anyone sensitive enough to go seeking. Anything ever communicated to a star, Joseph told Cohen, could be accessed even after the death of its transmitter, and, unlike with the spinning satellites and their transmissions, could be accessed and even altered by the dead themselves, and then he mentioned Oma Eve and encouraged Cohen to speak with her in this way, freely, and then he mentioned himself and encouraged Cohen to speak with him in this way too, freely, once he himself passed, to that light on the other side of the darkness.
“Your father does this kind of thing now with machines, which I don’t have to understand. Because what they do isn’t new to me.”
But returning back to the bungalow, Cohen turned to his grandfather and asked about daylight, pointing out that this system worked only at night, or in darkness, and furthermore he’d studied at school how the sky was always changing around in circles and if in some seasons the stars decided upon were present, in other seasons they were absent, and so access was not as universal as his grandfather had said it was.
Joseph turned to Cohen and said, “Tell it to Polaris.”
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from the Palo Alto sessions: We went to Montessori, both D-Unit and M-Unit were active in the PTA. Basically we won everything at maths and sciences. But math really. Math was really our thing. Age eight was algebra, geometry. Age nine was trig and calc. M-Unit and D-Unit packed us brownbag lunches. Lots of veggies and fruits, pita crisps, bean dips, major beanloads. 1x/weekly an egg, 2x/weekly a yogurt, only if we insisted. Though there were vendingmachines at PARC and the Berkeley Linguistics Department and we would p/matronize them depending on whether D-Unit or M-Unit would pick us up from school. Basically just Fritos at Berkeley. But Twix and Mars bars at PARC. We did not consume them but bought them to sell to fellow students. Our best customers were Ricardo Boyer-Moore, now of Aquarius Initiatives, Bjorn Knuthmorrpratt, founder/CEO thebestof.us. A line taped to the carpet in the den marked how far we had to sit from the TV in order not to be irradiated. We were raised on a halfhour of TV per day we were allowed to choose ourselves though we had to justify our choices daily either in oral argument or writing [ANY OF THOSE WRITINGS STILL AROUND?]. The same policy obtained for the body, if we wanted to be exempt from the vegan dinner diet of our parents [THOSE WRITINGS?]. Rule #1 was do not waste water, only turn the faucet on to rinse, do not keep it on while teethbrushing or facewashing. Rule #2 was the same applied to energy, turn off the lights upon leaving a room, always keep the fridge and freezer doors shut, and memorize not just their insides but the insides of every room so as like to minimize ajarage and not waste electricity. M-Unit and D-Unit told us we could not have a pet until our 10th birthday when they brought home a lemming we named Chomsky. M-Unit lovehated Chomsky [EXPAND?]. But the lemming died and was replaced by a vole because it had an even shorter life expectancy and was largely monogamous, though we could only have one at a time, and the first we named Zuse [EXPAND?] but then it also died and was replaced by a second vole whose name we cannot recall and when that died too D-Unit brought home two computers. M-Unit chose the Tandy 2 so that left for us the IBM 5150. We also had an Alto in parts in the basement. Or we had so many parts of so many Altos D-Unit called the heap of them “Tenor and Bass.” FORTRAN, 1983. PASCAL, 1983. M-Unit was disappointed we were never too proficient at language-languages. Except. Give us a piece of paper, a writing thing.
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1984 was a dystopia. Life had become confusing, especially in the suburbs. There were simultaneously too many options, and too few. Everything was the same and different, at once. The supermarkets had every food and drink conceivable, but Cohen’s home had only certain foods and certain drinks, and his parents shopped at only specialty health stores. The candy Cohen was not permitted to consume came in more varieties than the fresh produce from his parents’ garden, but then the fresh produce had more vitamins than the candy did, which despite its branded array all contained the same ingredients, refined. To further confuse things, if the ingredients of an apple were just apple, it didn’t make any sense that his parents differentiated between organic and nonorganic varieties, or that apples were retailed with labels stuck on them alerting to pesticides and waxy preservatives. Water, the substance within, became particularly perplexing, because it came from the tap until it was delivered in jugs, which were initially plastic, then metal. Television and movies proved bewildering too, in that the same things didn’t just happen in different movies and shows but also in different episodes of the same shows, the same plots were always recycled, and during every commercial break the same sports drinks madness recurred. All the shows and movies began wildly enough — teenagers played with matches, snorted drugs, and appeared to enjoy doing both — but then they’d all end tamely, caged, contained in the frame, and even if the teens died tragically they’d return for a lesson, out of character and after the credits, telling their peers don’t pay attention to pressure, stay away from firearms, pederasts, drunk drivers, just say no, and notify an adult.
Sari wanted her son to attend private school, Abs wanted his son to attend public school. But not just that, Abs wanted his son to become a bar mitzvah, Sari wanted her son to avoid that[, calling the practice “a spiritual circumcision”][CAN’T RECALL: DID PRINCIPAL EVER HAVE AN INITIAL — PHYSICAL–CIRCUMCISION?]. Deliberations ensued. The costs were high, in drama and financials. Palo Alto High School[, staffed by PhD washouts from Berkeley,] would be forsaken for the coeducational, awardwinning [WHAT AWARDS?], $10K/year Harker School, whose infirmary was run by a Yale/Harvard MD DrPh, and whose track & field squad was coached by a medallist in the men’s 400m dash at the Munich Olympics. Which meant that instead of a weekend in middle June hosting the usual round of gaming — the forbidden Karate Champ, Kung-Fu Master, Montezuma’s Revenge, Drugwars, Dunjonquest, Wizardry, but also 1K Chess, and Tetris — it hosted instead the ungameable Sabbath.
The Torah, like a computer’s memory, is divided into compartments, parts, one to be read for each weekend of the year. Cohen read from the portion called Shelach Lecha, though he didn’t read from the scroll itself, but from a book. Rather, he didn’t read at all, but had memorized the verses phonetically from a cassette recording prepared by Lay Cantor Tawny Fienberg of Congregation Beyt Am. Though the Torah is divided into portions, one to be read for each weekend of the year, the divisions aren’t marked in the scroll itself, and neither do the verses feature any punctuation. It was the rabbis who compiled the Talmud who established, yet refused to physically separate, the sections, and so consubstantially commanded the reader, who reads aloud, with mentally tracking all classes and clivities of that separation, from section breaks and sentence breaks to, within the sentence, the pauses of phrases. The units the rabbis defined became referred to by their incipit, or opening clauses, and even today Cohen can remember the opening clause of his and chant it with the traditional cantillation: veyidaber adonay el Moshe leymor, shelach lecha anashim, veyaturu et eretz Canaan.
Cohen didn’t study for his admission exam to the Harker School[— on which he attained a score more perfect than anything achievable in Tetris — ], but he couldn’t help but study for the bar mitzvah: Hebrew was the first subject that gave him trouble, and he could never decide whether it was that trouble or the language itself that fascinated[, and kept him from coding modifications to Tetris that allowed two elements to fall at once, that allowed two elements to fall at different speeds, that previewed the next two or more to fall and allowed the player to exchange them, and that expanded and contracted the playing surface both vertically and horizontally, and flipped it 360°, both by player whim and parametrically]. To be sure, Cohen wasn’t frustrated by the Hebrew language, but by its alphabet. Cohen never learned to read, speak, or write Hebrew fluently, and certainly never learned any grammar. His interest and experience were cut from semantic context, purely characterological. While bar mitzvah preparation required an emphasis on the letter as phoneme, to be reproduced orally, subsequent to that event the graphic or glyphic aspects prevailed, an approach that denied the letters their aggregation into syllables, the syllables into words, and favored instead their pictogrammatical or ideogrammatical identities, as if Hebrew were an Asian language in which each sign was a pantomime of arms and legs, ascenders and descenders, bars and stems and ties, in kabbalistic permutation. This pursuit of a symbolic or representative Hebrew was what inspired Cohen to develop his own written language, an unpronounceable language that would never be named, but that would serve as his sole mode of expression for an entire year after his bar mitzvah, until the summer of 1985.
[GET PRINCIPAL TO ELABORATE ON HIS MOTHER’S BOYCOTTING OF HIS BAR MITZVAH.]
[GET PRINCIPAL’S FATHER’S REACTION.]
Cohen’s initial impulse in creating his own language was to avoid what he considered the central paradox of all languages, both human and computational.
This paradox could be expressed in two ways:
1.) In human language an increase in the number of characters (or letters) means a decrease in the size of their utile aggregates (or words), until an alphabet gets so large that to be utile its letters must have their functions foreshortened, and returned to the primacies of the glyph, whose basic constituent is the stroke. English has an alphabet of 26 letters, and the average wordlength is an unwieldy 4.5 letters, while the Asian languages each have hundreds of characters that function as standalone pictograms (images of the things they mean), standalone ideograms (images of the ideas they mean), and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pictoideo combinations and phonetically radicalized aggregates.
2.) In computer language the opposite of all this is true, in that a decrease in the number of characters (the On or 1 and Off or 0 of binary code) means an increase in the size of their aggregates (strings or lines), so that though any given computer program must be made of millions or billions of positive integers separated by negativities in one unrearrangeable sequence, what is rendered is perfect, and perfectly understandable.
Human language sought precision, BUT became less widely translatable. Computer language found precision, AND became more widely translatable.
Cohen’s father’s coding meant nothing to Cohen’s mother, while his father couldn’t understand his mother’s specialist linguistic jargon — this resulted in “strife.” Things only got worse if they had to give directions, on masstransit, in Spanish.
Cohen was appalled by the fact that human processing unlike computer processing was not and would never be universally standardized. He resented that human languages could merely describe a program, they couldn’t execute one, and had to resort to metonymy, analogy, simile, metaphor.
Contraction from expansion, expansion from contraction: It was Cohen’s ultimate conclusion that human language had to be computerized — for each user individually. It occurred to him that his language’s proportionality should not be between the sum of its characters and the relative length/shortness of its aggregates, but rather between his parents’ interest in him and his own interest in privacy.
This led him to develop the following resolutions: 1.) His language had to be written, not spoken, because the intimate intricacy of his expressions would be lost to time (the time required by human processing), and 2.) It had to engage that processing in a way that convinced his parents he wasn’t frustrating their ability to comprehend, or respond — instead he was encouraging their interpretation (what his mother called “active communication”).
What Cohen decided he needed was an alphabet of a single letter — something familiar, something recognizable[— a grapheme for the wall of his puerile silicon cave]. The letter he needed had to have a shape that allowed for representational or symbolic variance — many points, many limbs.
After auditioning and discarding the Hebrew letters Shin, Mem, and Ayin (), Cohen settled on the
. [The fourstroked digraphed double
, which evolved from the
—the dubya, the last ligature remaining in this language.]
A normal , as it would be read in this language, would indicate Cohen himself, in the nosistic or firstperson plural [a note: Cohen always speaks plurally — at what point to mention that?], but rotated 90° to
, it would indicate Cohen’s relationship with his father, rotated another 90° to
, it would indicate Cohen’s relationship with his mother, and rotated yet another 90° to
, it would indicate Cohen’s relationship to the both of them[, and to everyone and everything else?]. All pages of this writing had, at their fundament, a variationally turned
,
,
, or
—all expressions founded on the kinship of possession. But, notably, each glyph also served as a chronometer, a timeline of a pastless futureless single day, with each of the four prongs divided into six hours, for a total of 24:
Primary rotations of the had secondary modifications:
indicating the happy/sad continuum,
the sleepiness/wakefulness continuum,
hunger/thirst, and
health/infirmity, with the intensity of whichever condition being expressed by the location of the primary’s junction with the secondary:
indicating very happy,
moderately happy,
signifying apathy or a median mood,
indicating moderately sad,
very sad, and the same scaling applying to the rest:
very sated with food/drink,
moderately sated with food/drink,
again the baseline,
moderately hungry/thirsty,
very hungry/thirsty.
At the refined culmen of his language’s development Cohen was operating at 28 fully rotationary levels of physical, mental, and even psychological elaboration [NO NEED TO ELABORATE], supplemented with a variety of auxiliary markers providing spatial context to the foundationally temporal and intensitive: a solid circle indicating school, an open circle, home [NO NEED BUT REPRODUCE AND ANNOTATE AN EXAMPLE].
Above would be a typical day, translating to: Cohen [] at 24:00 [timemark] at home [open circle] was hyperawake [junction marking the
, or secondary sleepiness/wakefulness continuum, at its alert extremity], at 06:00 was tossing between waking and sleeping [
marked at midpoint], at 08:00 found himself at school [solid circle] and indifferent to alimentation [
at midpoint], though at noon had forced himself or been forced to eat/drink until he was full [
at its satiated extremity implying an intervening lunch], by 16:00 was back home again and feeling moderately unwell [
, junction at third apex] and moderately depressed about it [
, also at third apex], by 22:00 was 25 %/1 prong more awake than the median or 25 %/1 prong less awake than he’d been last midnight, but by this midnight, he was undisturbably asleep [implying, perhaps, that a homeopathic soporific had been administered to him in the interval — Cohen’s was a language of elision and duction by absence].
A single expression, then, might easily fill a page. But if a page of Cohen’s language was laborious for his parents to decode, it was doubly laborious for them to reply to, especially by hand, and as the wordprocessing programs of the period weren’t yet capable of typesetting such convoluted hierarchies, Cohen had to code his own, and he did, producing versions for the IBM PC, Tandy, and the Commodores 64 and Amiga. Upon distributing this unnamed or unnameable free langware to his parents in summer 1985, he gave up the language entirely, and never wrote in it again. [Cohen’s mother never installed her writer.] [While Cohen’s father installed his
writer, he found his son had failed to equip it with the marks expressing approval (‘-), and disapproval (-’).]
Cohen’s most significant initial coding, however, appeared under the auspices of another letter — C. [SHITTY TRANSITION] That language—developed in the late 1960s and early 70s at AT&T Bell Labs—reprogrammed his life, involving him more deeply with the concept of the algorithm. [EXPLAIN ALGORITHMS] At the time C was best learned from a book, and books were best available in libraries. But the Harker School’s library also contained the only two computers it made available to students. It was there that Cohen could be found on most mornings, before school began, and on most evenings, after school ended, and, increasingly, skipping class, at all times between — waiting for a no show, or for a scheduled user to quit a session prematurely. According to school policy, each student could use a single computer for only an hour each per day. The slotting sheet was clipboarded at the edge of the circulation desk, and the librarianship behind the desk was responsible for enforcement. Cohen convinced the librarianship to let him automate the slotting, and they agreed, allowing him exclusive use of Computer 2 until the program was completed.
But Cohen stalled, complained, stalled and endured the complaints of his fellow students waiting, until the librarianship approached him offering condolences for his failure and gently requesting that he move aside and let other students take their turns, at which point Cohen unveiled a palindromer and an anagrammatizer — which rearranged the letters of any input, not semantically yet, but sequentially, a program he called “Insane Anglo Warlord,” an anagram of its dedicatee, “Ronald Wilson Reagan”—and finally, two different schedulers, one that would run on the librarianship’s computer, and was merely a database of times and student names, and the other a gameified version, which would run on the two student computers and allow users about to complete their sessions to compete for more time by answering a battery of SAT questions, with the user answering the most correctly in a two minute span declared the winner and awarded a session extension related to their score.
Cohen’s life beyond a computer terminal was minimal. He joined no athletics teams and only one extracurricular — The Tech-Mex Club [WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WAS MEXICAN ABOUT IT?] — which he dropped out of after one meeting. He chewed tinfoil once—“it tingled the tongue”—he did whippets once—“it was on TV”—both alone. He never smoked and throughout highschool was convinced that caffeine was alcoholic. He [WHEN?] shoplifted [WHERE?] topical benzoylperoxide acne treatments his mother had told him were cancerous. His father noticed the creams in his room and gave him empty toothpaste tubes to squeeze them into for storage. He read through the Achs (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), (Avram) Davidson, and avoided romantic attachments [EXPAND?].
Any other justification for leaving the house, besides school, had to be computer-related. He’d ride his bicycle two hours to rummage the dumpsters behind the Santa Clara Intel plant, riding back with a backpack of faulty chips he’d use to assemble computers that wouldn’t work [WHY NOT?], and then he’d upclock his own machine and participate in overheated rating wars in area diners [TO UPCLOCK IS TO RESET THE CYCLE, AND/OR TO MODIFY THE PIEZOELECTRIC CRYSTAL, OF A CPU’S CLOCK, SO THAT THE COMPUTER, NOW PROCESSING AT A SPEED NOT ENDORSED BY ITS MANUFACTURER, CAN FIGHT BATTLES ROYALE WITH OTHER COMPUTERS SIMULTANEOUSLY EXECUTING THE SAME MATH PROBLEM SET: THE VIRGIN WARRRIOR WHOSE OVERDRIVEN HOTROD SOLVED FASTEST OR JUST DIDN’T MELT DOWN GOT GLORY AND TAPIOCA PUDDING?].
In winter 1986, with Cohen a sophomore, Harker invested in a networked computer system of IBM ATs, and a program called N-rollment, which integrated student information and grades. Cohen, irate at having been banned from library computers for session abuse [EXPLAIN?], waited for the viceprincipal [NAME?] to leave her office, went in and inserted into her computer a diskette containing a program he’d coded, which instructed the computer to log the viceprincipal’s keystrokes. The next opportunity he had, he entered her office again, saved the strokelog to diskette. At home he managed to identify two strings, one of twelve characters, the other of eight, that, being “vpdernfurstl” and “hearken1,” didn’t seem to have any function in an administrative memo.
A week after the end of the quarter, the day after grades were due, Cohen skulked into school by explaining to a janitor he was a member of the jv beach kabaddi or innertube waterpolo team who hadn’t cleaned out his locker. He picked the lock on the library, whose main computer was patched into the network, hacked into N-rollment as vpdernfurstl, pword hearken1, registered his Social Studies and Language Arts teachers as students in their own classes, failed them and had reportcards sent to their home addresses.
Further, as Cohen had determined that viceprincipal? Dern-Furstl? used the same logname and pword for all of her access, he was also able to hack Paymate and have all the staff’s paychecks mailed to an erotic wares outlet in Redwood City.
Viceprincipal? Dern-Furstl? was contacted, and she contacted the PTA for recommendations on whom to consult on a sensitive computer issue in midsummer, was referred to Abs Cohen, who, just from the phonecall, had his suspicions [WOULDN’T SHE HAVE HAD THEM TOO, IF SHE’D BEEN APPRISED OF THE LIBRARY SCHEDULING STUNTS?]. Abs came into school, went through the viceprincipal’s computer, and found the strokelogger [WHICH HAD BEEN KEPT INSTALLED FOR FUTURE NEFARIOUSNESS?], recognized a few things in the rogue code that seemed familiar from mealtime conversations, and, without hesitation, fingered his son as the culprit.
Cohen was suspended, and threatened with expulsion, unless he developed a network security system. The school, essentially, gave him a job—“Harker prided itself on fostering creativity, they made us their IT guy for nothing.” Cohen set about synthesizing a number of security protocols already on the market, “but too sophisticated for any school, too expensive for even a WASPy private school to license.” His only truly original contribution he called Doublestroke, a 1987–88 keylogger logger, a program that could detect programs that kept track of keystrokes and, rather than purging them, shuttled them false clists, or character lists, that, if used to gain access to the network, gave access instead to a decoy in which the intruder could be studied.
Abs was so proud of Doublestroke that he tried to license it to Symantec, but Symantec became ambivalent after the patent provisional admitted that he wasn’t its author, rather his son was, a minor. Finally they outright refused after they received a letter from a lawyer claiming the trapware they’d been considering was the legitimate property of the Harker School. Cohen had boasted too much. Ultimately Doublestroke was sold, not licensed but sold, to Prev in 1988. The price was $8000. Split two ways, and less the lawyer’s commission.
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from the Palo Alto sessions: We had so much anger back then, so much rage, which psychoanalysis might claim comes from our parents or from the parent of society, the crass materialism of the 80s assaulting through media that was matched in its destructive violence only by the counteroffensive of our domestic life. The strict discipline, the rules and regs. The bylaws. But our rebellion against them was not a slacking. We were much too young for the hippie thing and much too old for the punk thing. School had every demographic. Cliques were Bimbos, Himbos, Nerdlings, Geekers, Dorklords, Fagwads, and Whegroes but we complied with none of them. We were not even dweebazoids though we could have been if we had not been resistant, basically, to all category and class.
We felt more as like hardware, mauve, taupe, beige, boxcolored, putting in an intense amount of interior hot effort only so that our exterior, our skin, would appear jointless, seamless, cold. We felt more as like software, writeable, rewriteable, if not compatible, we would adapt. Point is, we had secrets, we hid. Our rebellion thing was that we were aware of it, our compatibility or adaptability thing was that we worked through that awareness, though both impulses might be genetic and if so in regard to work ethic it could be cur to examine dopamine levels in the striatum of the brain, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior insula.
But our ultimate repression or suppression was just so überwestern. It was that we were doing all this work in the service of not doing any work and, if we accomplished that goal, that would be our revolt. It is überwestern to be conscious that this was what we were doing and to feel bad about it, to try not to feel bad about it, to feel bad about feeling bad, to try not to feel bad about trying not to feel bad. It was as like we were getting revenge, but on ourselves. This attempt toward automation. Or better toward autognosis.
Hardware, software. Both used to come packaged, not readily unpacked. Now everything installs itself, feeds and grooms itself, selfexplains. But we were not that 1D propellerhead tech d00d you want us to be who needs to hack the drives of Gorbachev before he can POP3 his cherry. Before this all was math. After just math. When we applied we were pure. When we were pure we applied.
We refrained from accessing records of past GPAs and class ranks and comptrasting them w/r/t college admissions. Our personal statements, which M-Unit helped write, mentioned only our facility with numbers. The recommendations D-Unit got for us did too. We were going to restart and core dump ourselves of computers.
Let Trey Kerner [?] who still played the arcades bust open the Pac machs to change our high scores manually, let Mat Plokta [?] brag at school about reprogramming the barcoder at the GalaMart to read the Marlboro Reds and Olde English 40s as like $1 discounted each, only $1 to keep it plausible, we had higher scores and sums in mind.
Acceptance envelopes came daily from Cal Tech and the Ivies and even phonecalls as like the one that asked for Mr. Cohen and we answered that we were speaking and the voice told us that we had won the Reverse Turing Award. Cowon. [FOR WHAT? W/ WHOM?] This was spring 1989 and we accepted the prize on behalf of D-Unit and even made the travelplans for him to attend the banquet ceremony in Washington DC. We wanted a direct flight from SFO, we wanted a corner room at the K Street Sheraton.
That day we were admitted on full tuition to MIT, and D-Unit went to get the prize on his own and while on a visit to the Mall, the National Mall, had a mild myocardial infarction. A heartattack. 04/20. M-Unit visited him in the hospital in DC. “The unshittiest,” Aunt Nance said. “Of the shit hospitals.” GW. She had come over to take care of us. Dr. Nancy Apt. Berkeley, Econopsychology. We had always known her as like our aunt, though we also knew her only sisters were the MFs of the Bay Marxist Feminist Coalition. She moved in and never left. She was on the foldout in the den between D-Unit on the memoryfoam in the kitchen and M-Unit in the parental bedroom. Then she was in the bed too and sharing it with M-Unit and D-Unit might have joined them, he had always been invited to join them before. But now he was too weak. He was weak as like the memoryfoam he dragged all grumptious into the hall.
Aunt Nance was basically applying all her knowledgebase in conflict/resolution, to mediate. Between D-Unit and his physical health. M-Unit and her mentals. Aunt Nance was invigilating bloodpressure, the betablockers and nitrates, the inhibitors and statins. Transitioning herself from babysitter supportive friend and lover, to babysitter lifepartner wife. Nurse practitioner UN peacekeeper dean. She negotiated both halves of the parental chores, and our third half. Cooked noncholesterol taro callaloo and tzimmes, and took us to the Army/Navy surplus in Campbell to get outfitted for Stanford.
For graduation she gave us a Nintendo with Zelda and Zelda II and Metroid, and though we had outgrown all that we were gracious. But then one night it along with the 16″ Zenith had been relocated to their bedroom and M-Unit who had cried about Nintendo being a brain pollutant was now giggling playing a Donkey Kong, with Aunt Nance Player 2ing her. Parent child role reversal. Precipitated by Kreem Kush, a midgrade cannabis hybrid. The next morning when they went with D-Unit to a cardiologist checkup we retaliated by wiring their clockradio into the console flap where the cartridges go until the Zenith picked up KQED and the LED 12:00, and though the system was unusable they were back before we had figgered how to set the alarm. After that M-Unit acted busy with her scholarship, ignoring us except for that once she remarked on how our leaving would mean D-Unit would have his own room.
Do not interrupt. Let us tell how it was. Two plus one does not always equal a threesome. Recall the isosceles fallacy, how the midpoint P is outside the triangle. Some nights D-Unit who was not enjoyed by the Is, the parents of M-Unit, would drop us at their house, and in the mornings collect us, and M-Unit would be doing yoga out on the lawn and Aunt Nance would be recycling winebottles and composting joints. Just to get away we went to second Ghostbusters, second Back to the Future, third Karate Kid, and went on fieldtrips to the Artificial Intelligence Center in Menlo Park because no one else ever did and Calonis, the robot that led us around, seemed lonely.
Computer scientists make good husbands for polyamorous increasingly lesbian feminists because of how functional they are, how booley, steady and quiet as like fans.
No, do not say that. Rewind, record over. Take two. Compscientists make good first husbands. It is true how silent they are. Cooling fans.
08/22, what we considered that early in our life to be early in the morning. We had finished packing ourselves doublebagged into trashbags we cinched altogether and rolled down the hall. D-Unit was already waiting outside in the Ford. But we had octalfortied our dorm assignment and had to get the address from the letter magneted to the fridge. Off the kitchen the door was open to the bathroom and in the tub a man was sleeping and on the tile were wrappers and in the toilet a condom. We neglected to mention that M-Unit and Aunt Nance had thrown us a goingaway party the night before.
On the way we asked D-Unit who that man had been and D-Unit answered, “Him — he is the Laureate.”
Solow. [?] Stigler. [?] Anyway. Jewish.
All we can tell you.
D-Unit had slept in the Ford. Or garage.
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[A NOTE RE: STANFORD. HOW IT WAS FOUNDED IN 18?? BY THE RAILROAD MAGNATE? LELAND STANFORD, WHO HAD TAXPAYERS PAY FOR THE RAILROADS HE PROFITED FROM, AND HOW THE WAY TRAINS CONNECTED THE EAST AND WEST COASTS OF THE COUNTRY WAS VERY PROTO ONLINE.]
[CF. TETRATION NATION, JAMIE GLEICHE (MACMILLAN, 2010), SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TETRATION, MATTHEW KJARR (HACHETTE, 2008).]
The only thing Cohen liked about Stanford was the architecture. [Though he never appreciated the main campus itself — the Mission revivals of darkening porticoes and lightening arches, the dull pious sandstone cloistered below bright terracotta — ]He was in all likelihood the only freshman ever grateful for having been assigned to Stern, a student residence facility constructed just after WWII in a style that, when Cohen moved in, was all over the TV news — sternly, brutally, Soviet. It was as if an Eastern Bloc tower had been cut up and scattered, a floor at a time, across a landscape of encina, bristlecone, gum tree, and asphalt. The Wall in Berlin was being chipped at, and smashed, but Cohen’s dorm had been built already broken, and whereas the prefab slabs of concrete halfway across the world were smeared with peacenik graffiti, the local décor tended toward posters offering $10/hour to participate in sensory deprivation studies and ads for cheap student sublets.
Cohen’s dormroom was small and blank and the smallness appealed to him, because it meant less to clean, but the blankness, the scuffed emptiness, provoked. He couldn’t understand why the school provided each student with a bed and chair and desk, but didn’t continue that determinism into wall decoration. Beyond that, he couldn’t understand why his was the building’s only single, and suspected it was because he had just enough personality to be left alone, but either too many or too few personalities to have a roommate. Or else, he suspected, the registrar or bursar’s office regarded his unit as vacant — because he wasn’t even enrolled — he hadn’t accepted, hadn’t been accepted, to begin with.
Cohen’s neighbors were roommates, a double—Cullen de Groeve and Owmar O’Quinn [INTRODUCE LATER]. On one of their walls was a map of the Bay Area, on another was a batik likeness of Einstein, and so after a visit to the Salvation Army on Veterans Boulevard that’s how Cohen furnished his own, with an MTA map of New York City, and an 8×10 glossy photo of “Dick Feynman,” whom he wouldn’t have recognized without the autograph, “To promising physicist [sic], best wishes, Dick Feynman.”
Cohen’s major was math. Class was Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, while Wednesdays were seminars rotating around a diffuse array? range? of topics — logic, number theory, algebraic and symplectic geometries — followed by research group: he worked in probability before the possibilities of game theory lured him [WITH WHAT/HOW?]. [“We worked on statistics. Decidability, duction. Pattern recognition, precision and recall. Allocations, nomials. If you want to get granular, ergodicity, Gaussian distributions and masked Markovistics, processes and models. If you want to get übergranular, asymptotic properties of the entropy of stationary data sources with applications to data compression.”]
Cohen applied that education to his own private scheduling but found his interests and commitments difficult to reconcile with classtime and his major’s requirements. He’d be awake for days, “jagging” lists of things to do, then doing the things on the lists, “jagging” lists of the solids he ate and the liquids he drank, lists of his urinations and bowel movements, of his Carson and Family Ties catchup consumption on the TV nextdoor, and his inability to sleep, as publicized by his nextdoor neighbors, who, wall and door aside, effectually became his roommates, caused the other students in Stern to presume he had an addiction to amphetamines, and caused two upperclassmen who presumed he was dealing amphetamines to try and get him to pledge AEPi [until what?] — which resulted, in turn, in the alternate personas Cohen assumed/adopted: speed addict, speed dealer, and eventually, a third persona, speed pharmacologist, which itself became, soon enough, the fourth, the inventor of a new speedy drug whose name he kept changing [to/from what?], and whose substance he refused to sell to anyone.
Cohen, who hadn’t yet resigned himself to not having an identity, would assimilate the identities of others: He was also a horticulturist Buddhist (he kept bonsai junipers), a retired skateboarder forced out of the competition circuit by knee injury (he affected a limp), a manically verbigerant mediaphile — in which he spoke only in the dialogue of female characters from John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies — and a brand ambassador, in which he would monthly choose a new product, an edible or drinkable, a wearable or widget, and would buy it and use it publicly and remark on how great it was to everyone around him in inordinate terms such as, “Powerade is deliciously refreshing, dude,” or, “Powerade is refreshingly delicious, dude,” enough so that people began assuming—he never disabused them—that he was a paid spokesperson, an influential marketing covertly to students.
[“]The roommates[”] were in on this, and would help with the ruse: Cullen de Groeve’s parents were [astoundingly?] wealthy executives for Timex, living in Hong Kong, and so always had new gadgets they’d give Cullen, who’d give them to Cohen to show around [de Groeve’s father had been an engineer with Casio and Seiko who’d sequelized the calculator watch before being hired as senior vicepresident, manufacturing/supply chain, with a mandate to bring Timex into the digital future, while his second stepmother, who’d been Playboy’s Miss December 1976, handled the company’s Asian press relations]. Owmar O’Quinn was a scholarship case from [which?] Philadelphia projects[— his father worked Sanitation, his mother for Corrections — ]who out in California had to support himself working for a market research business, Concentives, as a mystery shopper, browsing through regional shoppingcenters, falsely p/matronizing their stores as a fake consumer in order to collect information and make report on the behavior of retail staff: whether they offered assistance, or attempted to upsell him, whether they offered free wrapping or shipping or respected feigned allergies and lactose intolerances. To maintain his cover, In each store O’Quinn was supposed to buy a small product, an item under $5, and though the $5 and under items he bought were usually just sneaker shoelaces or sweatbands, energy bars or weightlifting shakepowders, he also managed to shoplift, advantaging the eccentric costumes he’d designed for himself to conceal goods more expensive and so more likely to garner bids on the secondary market, though the fragrances he stockpiled, in the unlikely event of a girlfriend. He’d dress as a woman, or affect a traditionally black African American manner of speaking — O’Quinn being half black African American, and half Irish — in a bid to remain unrecognizable to the staff on repeat visits.
The merchandise O’Quinn lifted, like de Groeve’s gizmos, served as props in Cohen’s campaigns.
[A SENTENCE OR TWO RE: THE EVOLUTION OF “STARTUP CULTURE”? BECAUSE WITHOUT IT THIS’LL SEEM WEIRD?] “Startup” culture hadn’t even begun yet — it was online that enabled that, and launched a billion geosocial sex apps and digital currencies [developed in rented frathouses fetid with ass and backyarded with lenticular pools]. Before then, students and even faculty were content to collaborate on products the university would own and market: CAD modelers for the automotive industry, analysis and trading platforms, system emulators, military simulators. With the university’s computers prioritized for class projects, personal projects had to be pursued on personal computers — inadequate, DOS incompatible, RAM/ROM inexpansible, intramural. In 1989 [or 90?], the year online debuted, Cohen, O’Quinn, and de Groeve had only one unit among them — de Groeve’s: a Gopal Ovum 1000, which retailed for $4800[, which today would be over $9300?].
[“It was this 16 bit at 2.8 MHz 1.125 MB 256 KB round white cow egg. Fugly. We do not mean to fellate our competition by confessing that our future partners executed their juvenilia on its equipment. As like Gopal does everything else by itself, from its chips to the antitampering sixpointed screws that entail an antitampering sixpointed screwer, let it administer its own fellatio. All the rich kids at Stanford had a Gopal, all the kids at Stanford were rich, RAMateurs, ROMateurs, who craved the shelter of an impermeable shell OS and whose only other computing requirements were to sound and look cool with 32 oscillators, 640 × 200 resolution. Anyway, we were not in competition with them then or now, and never will be. Gopal already had over $2 billion in annual revenue but our dominance was math, we knew bigger numbers, we knew the biggest. We tasted our dominance even while economizing on a daily diet of one pineapple nectar and one pita sliced midsagittally into devaginated halves and spooned with marshmallow fluff.”]
Both de Groeve and O’Quinn were compsci majors and by the end of first semester had cowritten a program for Concentives that enabled the mystery shopping company to automatically tabulate upsell results and implement a general rating system, both by mall and by franchises of chains among malls. However, they were still having a problem with standardizing, not to mention automating, the evaluations of the written portion of each assessment and, having related the particulars to Cohen as they packed for the holidays, left — de Groeve to Hong Kong, O’Quinn to Philadelphia. Cohen remained in his dorm throughout winter break, and by the time his roommates returned for second semester he’d engineered a solution. The roommates were stunned. Cohen had broken through their wall, and not just figuratively, but literally. Requiring their stash of written assessments and unable to find his copy of their key amid his mess, he’d borrowed a sledgehammer from maintenance and bashed a crude passage into the plaster shared between their rooms.
In Cohen’s estimation, deriving and automating [automatizing?] ratings from written assessments was merely an extension of listing, a matter of sourcing an urlist of keywords, which could be accomplished either by management designating approved verbiage for reportorial use (“topdown”), homogenizing and so narrowing the expression of the reports, or by culling the reports themselves for the verbiage (“bottomup”), relying on the reporters to provide a heterogeneous and so wider expression. [Obviously?] this latter option was preferable, but it could be implemented only if the assessments were made searchable.
Cohen had written a [descriptor algorithm?], pen on quadrille paper, which totalized the frequency of term use both across the entire spectrum of reportage — by all reports, by all reports within mall, by all reports within type (“apparel,” “appliances”), by all reports within chain (“McDonald’s,” “Burger King”) — and within the oeuvre of each individual reporter. This approach generated ratings both of the stores and the shoppers or pseudoshoppers themselves, whose written assessments were rife with [ambiguous proportions?]: “very”/“extremely” being positive values when applied to “helpful,” but negative values when applied to “unhelpful,” not to mention the double negatives (“not unhelpful”), which were only halfway positive, and the double positives (“too helpful”), which were only halfway negative.
De Groeve and O’Quinn coded the algorithm in C++ [INSERT JOKE? “THE ONLY GRADE ANY OF US RECEIVED THAT SEMESTER”?]. Cohen would have nothing to do with the programming besides suggesting that the better language to use might be Perl, in which each line is prefaced with a dollar sign — a “$” [CLARIFY USAGE/DIFFERENCES, BETWEEN CODING AND PROGRAMMING, AS NOUN AND VERB].
Cohen completed his freshman year without visiting home, which was only [#] miles away, and without even taking his finals, which were only [#] yards away. That summer he turned down an offer from de Groeve and O’Quinn to live in an apartment with them in San Francisco’s Mission District and hone the program, now officially called Repearter, for Concentives, and instead opted to stay in his single, and accept recruitment [WHY?] into a panoply of university projects [WHY RECRUITED?]: memory and cognitive studies (on efferent discharge, synaesthesia, subitization), and a psych manifestation team that trained participating students to embody certain characteristics of certain psychiatric syndromes and comorbidities to test the ability of trainee shrinks to identify factitious disorders (as team members included both “authentics”—those with genuine syndromes/comorbidities — and “healthies”—those without — and as admission to the team required screenings by mental health professionals, whose findings were not revealed to anyone, no team member was aware of which they were, or were supposed to have been, until the collation of the professional and trainee diagnoses that marked the study’s conclusion).
Cohen’s sophomore year was, if possible, even more disastrous. He was generally regarded as the most promising [undergraduate?] mathematician at Stanford, and yet he was failing all of his classes except for a course in information theory. He wandered the campus perpetually, somnambulistically, and his attempts to count the numbers of windows and doors in each of the buildings, and his unwillingness to move from Stern into another dorm [WHICH?] he was assigned, were all taken as indicative of drug dependence.
The hole hammered into his wall[— over which he hung an ersatz family shrine featuring a Chinese New Year’s card wishing a lucky Year of the Horse 4688, which depicted the de Groeve parents dressaged from jodhpurs to helmets on horseback atop Victoria Peak above Pok Fu Lam and bay, and an unframed group portrait of Philadelphia’s own Local 3, which union did not identify but unequivocally represented O’Quinn’s brothers — ]was rumored to have been the result of a methamphetamine lab explosion. With de Groeve and O’Quinn informing him that even the faculty had been gossiping about his hallucinogen abuse, Cohen went into Math 234/Stat 374, Major Deviations, obstructing and so invalidating a toss of either fair or loaded dice [“TO DETERMINE WHETHER STOCHASTIC PROCESSES WITH DIFFERENT TRANSITION MATRICES PRODUCE THE SAME STATE DISTRIBUTION”], and introduced himself to the professor as Inigo Zweifel, which was the professor’s own name.
Cohen’s second sophomore semester was spent further investigating indeterminacy [EXPAND], in an office repurposed from the dormroom in Toyon Hall assigned to de Groeve and O’Quinn, who at the time were finalizing Repearter for Concentives in their Mission District apartment, commuting to campus only for classes. Cohen had refused his share of the $20000 the roommates were paid to deliver the program, but counterproposed nothing except this office. It was filled with decks of creased playingcards, Thoth tarots, lotto tickets and scratchers labeled by purchase date and location, snapped pasternbones and yarrowstalks, all of which kept him from his cryptography problemsets for aleatory variables. Library books on Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Muism [KOREAN SHAMANISM AND NOT A TYPO], overdue and never due because stolen. [Breaking into 208 Sequoia? to protest the student incident report Professor Zweifel lodged with the ombuds?] He acquired a black magicmarker and a white dryerase board, which he [back in his quarters] installed incorrectly — with the board’s scrubbable surface facing the wall, so the corkwood backing facing out — meaning that anything he’d write on it would be permanent, so he waited, and was patient.
There was a knock at the door and Cohen ignored it but the knocks kept coming. He went to the door and asked who it was and the voice on the other side answered, “Acting Dean of Student Affairs Kyle.”
Cohen was sure he was being expelled but then Acting Dean of Student Affairs Kyle asked, “Are we speaking with Mr. de Groeve or Mr. O’Quinn?”
Cohen answered, yelling, that he was speaking with both of them.
“Will you open up, please?”
Cohen yelled they were both undressed.
“We have been trying to get in touch with Mr. Joshua Cohen. We understand he is a friend of yours.”
Cohen confirmed.
“Mr. Cohen is not in his dorm and famously not in class — will you at least pass along a msg?”
Cohen pressed his mouth up against the door, said nothing.
“Please tell him to be in touch with his mother. An emergency family situation.”
[DIALOGUE VERBATIM FROM PRINCIPAL — REWRITE ALL W/ SINGULAR PRONOUN AND W/ CONTRACTIONS.]
[ID TIME AND LOCATION AT TOP? OR BOTTOM?]
Cohen unlocked and turned the knob. His father had had another heartattack, in the sauna at the Belmont Hills JCC, 04/01/91.
Two ceremonies were held — a funeral, which Sari planned at Alta Mesa cemetery without a rabbi and without having notified any extended family or friends and, a month later, a memorial service at Abs’s favorite restaurant, Prime Asian Tacos II, held by his former colleagues, who were furious with Sari.
Cohen was barely sentient throughout the funeral, having taken [only now] the first drugs of his life — two Valium, the prescription courtesy of Nancy [Apt].
For the memorial, Cohen took four Valium and, approaching the restaurant’s sombreroed dragon that served as a makeshift lectern to read a selection from the Tibetan Book of the Dead [WHAT SELECTION?], passed out, and hallucinated his father being mauled to death by a dragon in a sombrero. He came to in a cramped untidy condo [WHERE HIS FATHER HAD BEEN LIVING?], in the midst of Abs’s shiva, and when the mourners had finished their prayers[, they left] — they left Cohen alone[, and there he stayed].
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from the Palo Alto sessions: Toward the end D-Unit had been working on the touchscreen. Do not interrupt, we do not digress. Tactiles. Haptics. It must have been that he was forced into this, or the PARC touchscreen group had been short an engineer and asked him and he could not refuse, D-Unit could never refuse. But his true cur, toward the end, was printing, still printing, but not in 2D anymore, in 3D, and he would have printed in 4D if he could, but no one could, least of all a Xerox employee. His condo was filled with attempts, cracked half shapes and crumbling forms, in plastic, metal, glass, ceramic, foam, powders, pellets, waxes. It was a lot to go sorting through, a lot to determine which was a model and which a modeler, which was a machined part and which a part of a machine that machined the part, from a photofabricator, laser sinterer, deposit fuser, and we spent our time totally consumed with this sorting and did not return to Stanford.
We did not drop out, we just stopped going in, never answered the letters that came from the profs and deans who knew where we were living [HOW?] and then the letters stopped coming or just the box got too congested because we stopped going outside, never answered the phonecalls that came in either from the profs and deans who knew where we were living [HOW?] and then the calls stopped coming or we stopped getting them because the line was too busy and even now, we read once online, Stanford still lists us as like being on leave.
We just hung around the condo and avoided the computers, mutant x86ish PCs D-Unit had clunked himself, monitors surrounded by boxes of Kleenex and spritzers of Windex, keyboards surrounded by pressurized air containers, for blowing out the dust from between the keys, and the other periphs he clunked himself too as like joysticks and steeringwheels and the double mice he called rats surmounted with babywipes and kleengel antiseptics.
D-Unit must have abhorred the touchscreen. All that work to splenda an image only to let the user foul it up with sweaty fingers. Printing their grimy genes. Sacrificing clarity for convenience.
Basically this is the problem.
No matter how much we wipe our hands, no matter how much we disinfect — any way we can remember D-Unit just ruins the resolution.
We had not known that D-Unit had been condoliving at The Clingers ever since we left the house. D-Unit had never told us and we are not even sure whether M-Unit or Aunt Nance had known. Of the mail we took in, what surprised us the most were the catalogs for exotic gamemeats and kits for homebrewing. Of the msgs on the voicemail we checked, what surprised us the most were the appointment confirmations from gun ranges and attendance requests from Hasidics seeking a minyan.
Either this was the true D-Unit, free from having to split everything with M-Unit and so free to psychically compensate by evincing a split within himself, or this was a newly single engineer in the midst of übercrisis. We will never have confirmation. Unit 26 at The Clingers. Apostrophe, possessive.
We were alone with the computers and we tried to avoid them. We tried to convince ourselves we were above them, beyond them, we were pure and they were applied, we could work with just our head and they could work only with processors and electricity though still they required our head to give them tasks. But the truth, we realized, was that we were afraid of them, we were scared of getting into trouble again and to be honest being left alone with that many computers in one condo was as like being abandoned as like a pedophile in a sandbox during recess. Bad analogy, but appropriate.
But again this is the problem without resolution. We could say we were not able to help ourselves and were bored and so broke. Or we could say we were just cur about D-Unit. This career vegan who after his wife left him for a woman stuffed his freezer with enough cuts of venison to make deer, this atheistic azionistic Jew who after his separation scrawled on the wall by the Xerox photocopier/fax the tollfree number for transmitting a prayer to be printed in Jerusalem and stuffed into a crevice of the Kotel. The Western Wall. Überwestern.
We turned on a computer and went through its files. We turned them all on and investigated. They were networked, so we stayed on one and went through them all. There was a genealogy he was investigating. There were recipes in a.doc called EZ_Meals_for_the_Single_Cook, there were inspirational anecdotes collected in another.doc called therabbinicapproachtodivorce. Another we remember was a scientific study on midlife, or secondlife, lesbianism.
On the floor by the CPU chassis was a flaking mass that, we had always thought, was just another faulty tridimensional printjob, and in a sense it was, because it was a cardboard box and we were always kicking it. But then we kicked it once and it spilled over and we, leaving off reading about the process of gittin, or Jewish divorce documents, but you know that, or the pseudoscientific relationship between lesbianism and premature menopause and the resultant excess of stress hormone and dearth of estrogen that affects the amygdala, got up out of the swiveler to examine the damage and what it was, it was the future.
It is inconceivable now. Not just that we had not experimented before, but that this was the way access was packaged. That access was packaged at all. Now everything just loads, streams, flows, automatically, but back then software was indistinguishable from hardware. A program came on a disc. A round rainbowized flatness that came in a box. Remember. There was a handbook, there was a manual. Containing instructions to heed, for installation. The program had to be registered, there was a warranty, there was a terms of service that had to be agreed to and signed, and both had to be sent through the mail. The old mail. Remember. But D-Unit had taken care of this. We cannot conceive of having missed this but have no rationale. The icons were there all along, there in plain day on the desktop. Press us, press us.
The net, the web. One a way of talking, the other what was said. We would have hacked if D-Unit had not stored all his IDs and pwords in memory. We dialed and the hiss came through and we came through the ascending levels of hiss as like progressively being swallowed by a cobra. We were connected, had msgs, mail, the new mail.
D-Unit had CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, America Online, and though we forget which one we used, it was a service. Mortifying. Commercial. D-Unit was an early adopter for a rec, having opened his accounts in 89, though also a late adopter for a tech given that we are describing 91 and serious presdigitals had been dinking around with modems and phone exchanges not even in their offices but at their homes from the 80s, the 70s.
The D-Unit we knew had always been a hardware guy, meaning that he regarded software as like unserious, or pretentious, as like the gynolinguistic pedagogy of his wife. He had spent his life around machines and if he at least tolerated the code that programmed them it was because it came on discs that came packaged in envelopes, in boxes. The D-Unit we knew never had any patience for the service economy, but was fundamentally a maker, a producer, consumed by stuff and things. To him, legit computing could only be accomplished in a workplace with other professionals, in the flesh and on a schedule, time and space were physically shared. The engineers replaced the tubes, replaced the transistors and circuits, by hand, the boss had a desk with only a paperweight on it and could not even type. The home was the home, the office was the office, and to bring a hugenormous mainframe back into the house, even in a better color than mental ward offwhite, was as like committable an offense as like bringing back into the house another lover to introduce to your child and spouse.
We are not implying that D-Unit was a company suit, we are just trying to convey that for him the home office dichotomy was a quasireligion, just as like his parents had kept glatt kosher and his grandparents had kept the Sabbath. He would never have read the Rationalists in the lab, he would never have soldered on the toilet.
He would have been appalled by all this realization of the virtual, communication becoming transactional, customers exchanging money for air. He would have considered it a scam, as like having to pay an admission fee at libraries, or having to pay a multinational corporation for admission to his brain. A multinational corporation that made its money licensing his knowledge to others, and, in turn, by commodifying, commodizating, their thoughts. He would never have listened to the movements of the fourth Bartók quartet out of the order of their intention, he would never have looked at the Rubens Calvary except in person.
We should also say that he always insisted on matinees at the Aquarius Theater.
But that D-Unit who was totally capable of achieving his own access instead chose to subscribe to a cruft of rectarded netservices whose chief goal was to keep their users within the walled garden by providing a sense of community, along with local news and weather, only so as like not to lose them to the wilds of the web — that this was his choice meant he was depressed. We read his emails first, the first emails we ever read, and confirmed, depression. Online was not a hobby for him, but an attempt to spend himself unsad. Companionship at 14400 bits/second, 2400 baud, $6/hour on evenings and weekends, $3/hour on weekday days.
Venturing into the online activities of abco, abco33, batchelor, and cuddlemaven did not bring him or them to life, but brought us to become them or him, which prevented any mischief. Initially. While the rest of userdom was liberated by alias to chatrape girls or cybercheat on husbands, to meddle in any way as like D-Unit or his selves was to transgress a commandment. Respect the name. Respect thy parents even unto their proxy reputations. Initially.
D-Unit had posted to boards about the Dodgers, about seismology. To a room called Bay Singles, a place for people to flirt while discussing the dangers of meeting people online. To a room called Bay Singles: Jewish, a place for Jews to flirt while discussing the dangers of meeting goyim online. He also gave advice at Querytek, and at 1-900-Trouble. The desperation was overwhelming. He had helped a woman fix her modem by telling her to restart it. He had also accessed pornography. We would prefer not to discuss it.
It was ultimately the census that broke us, a room in which amateurs made recommendations for a digitization of the census and in a thread titled “1990 Last Paper Census??” D-Unit had posted a warning about the ease of data manipulation and uploaded a paper about accusations of electronic voting fraud in the 1972 presidential elections. The thread then split into two, one a discussion of Nixon, the other a discussion of the history of data manipulation, beginning with the punchcard and its tabulator and ending, as like all discussions end, with the Holocaust.
D-Unit had been attacked for defending the deathcamp totals. The thread had been dormant for eight or nine months. We posted nonetheless. We posted as like abco33, then created our own avatar and agreed with ourselves. Posted as like abco33 again, with thanks for our support. Then we argued about the Dodgers, a team we knew nothing about, a sport we knew nothing about, and were informed that, in baseball, there was always next season.
In Bay Singles, batchelor had explained his situation to troglodyke_Y, a selfidentified lesbian who had collapsed midway through and written, “what else 2,” number 2, “expect from women?” then admitted he was a man. In Bay Singles: Jewish, cuddlemaven had explained the same or a very similar situation, which had garnered a single response, “abs?” and so still as like cuddlemaven we took the thread offboard and emailed the responder directly, wondering why s/he had thought it was “us,” and the party who turned out to be a retired PARCy responded, “abraham cohen is deceased. whoever you are you are being reported for violation of your ToS,” and so that account, the CompuServe, died too.
We flamed the PARCy with emails, as like other avatars, as like the same avatars but registered with other services. batchelor but now @Prodigy, cuddlemaven but now @GEnie. We even went trolling for him among the dossy BBSes and subscribed to leetish listservs and wrote posts or comments or whatever they were called then to autogenerate and hex all the sysops down. It was an addiction, because the self is an addiction. We placed orders just through chatting, with paraphiliac feeders who lived in the Bay and were willing to drop takeout Asian fusion at the foot of our stairs with no strings attached, or else we explained and this we regret that we had cancer and so normcores took pity on us too and delivered pallets of cane sodas for nothing, never taking the bill or coins we left wedged under the mat. Our deliverers did not even want to meet us, certainly not after we insisted that we did not want to be met in our condition, and this let us assert was ultimately more important than the start of ecommerce, this was more as like the start of freecommerce, though not even that claim can justify our behavior.
We joined all the religious fora because back then the only pages that existed, smut aside, were about two things, basically: one being the absolute miracle of the very existence of the pages, as like some business celebrating the launch of some placeholder spacewaster site containing only contact information, their address in the real, their phone and fax in the real, and two being the sites of people, predominantly, at this stage, computer scientists or the compscientifically inclined openly indulging their most intimate curs, their most spiritual disclosures, as like experimental diabetes treatment logs and conversion diaries patiently explaining ontological discrepancies between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhisms, interspersed with kitten and puppy photos, a Christmas tree growing at syrupspeed from starred tip to rootless trunk until filling the window.
We tracked what we could, as like much as like we could. We trafficked, unable to stop. We had to know everything, to not just know everything but to have it, to keep it all under wraps, under banner. We correlated pages with profiles, crossreferenced profiles based on similarity of subject, of style or time of expression, but each time a connection was made, another connection appeared, and the number of sites grew too large, and so the number of their links grew too big, and so the database we were producing went onerous.
This is how history begins: with a log of every address online in 1992. 130 was the sum we had by 1993, by which time the countingrooms we were monitoring had projected the sum as like quarterly doubling. 623, approx 4.6 % of which were dotcom. 2738, approx 13.5 %. There were too many urls to keep track of, so we kept track of sites. There were too many sites to keep track of, so we kept track of host domains that only monitored or made public their numbers of registered sites, not their numbers of sites actually setup and actually functional, and certainly not their names or the urls, the universal resource locators of their individual pages, but what frustrated more than the fact that we could not dbase all the web by ourselves was the fact that none of the models we engineered could ever predict its expansion.
Computers had grown smaller by the release, shrinking to lapsize, and were shrinkable further until the limit, the entropy point, at which it became feasible to make a computer handsize, fingersize, too small to be humanly usable. The web had reached something of the same limitpoint but from the opposite direction, it had become too big for any one user to feasibly navigate. We identified only two ways to bring about realignment. Either to limit its size, which was censorship, or to map it and make that map searchable. The future was and will always be ahead of us, but also behind us, and to the sides. The future is the client, the past is just something to find.
The wallpaper of the condo was testpattern CMYK, cyan magenta yellow key black stripes curving shoddy toward their tangency at a monoxide detector whining the sinewave of its battery drained. We covered it all with lists printed on printers and legal pads, lists of sites and sitemaps described, but it was only with the phoneline conked and the electricity just after that we were finally able to get to work. Before we were too close to the screen. Too near to the potentials to equate them.
It was harrowing just going outside. The other condo units shone dusk to dawn and phones rang in the sky. We had octalfortied that sound and the look of gravel and hedges. At the foot of the stairs our mailbox had lacked the bandwidth for all the bills from PG&E and PacBell, four figures of bankruptcy. The condo was accessed by a staircase as like a fire escape, and the storage enclosure under the stairs contained a cage, and the cage contained a putrefied pet skeleton. It might have been a hedgehog. We went back inside. Just swiveled. It had taken a year and a half, 1993, for us to realize that the chair we sat in was adjustable. Which was helpful because either the desk was too low or we were taller than D-Unit.
Or else it was AOL that finally cut us off. Because that too was billed separately. We cannot recall precisely. And we had no clue that D-Unit owned a hedgehog.
Point is, we were returned from practice to theory and paper. It is unfortunate that you will have to transcribe this.
[SARI CONTACT?]
[CONDO MGMT?]
://
Tetration’s genesis The Clinger’s, Abs’s condo complex at 100 Muralla Way, Pacifica, CA, consisted of 26 identical units, all of them two bedroom condos below second floor one bedroom condos, with the exception of Cohen’s, which was a second floor one bedroom condo above the maintenance shed.
Visitors had to navigate ruptured mulchbags, rusting rakes, shovels, and a wheelbarrow to access the outdoors staircase, which [suspiciously] resembled a fire escape. But if visitors were infrequent with Abs alive, with his son in residence they
Only once a month, from July 1993 through July 1995, just after Cohen had completed each month’s second update of his site, diatessaron.stanford.edu, and clicked Send on the month’s second email — addressed to 92 recipients (01/94), addressed to 736 recipients (12/94) — would a rental minivan show up, and two men — still boyish—would hazard the stairs, and knock at the door.
Summer 1993 was a decisive time for both de Groeve and O’Quinn. They had [been] graduated from Stanford, offers were on the table from Microsoft, graduate school beckoned, and
Diatessaron, hosted at[?]/by[?] the Stanford domain due to the entreaties of recent graduates de Groeve and O’Quinn, was a site comprised of two pages [EXPLAIN THE DIATESSARON NAME]. One listed [≥400 ≤600] sites ordered by main url alphabetically within category. The other listed [≥400 ≤600] the same sites ordered by domain or host alphabetically within category. All listings were suburled, meaning that each site’s pages were listed individually, until that policy had to be abandoned for practical considerations [REMINDER OF EXPLOSIVE GROWTH OF ONLINE], summer 1994.
Its categories remained fairly consistent throughout: Tech, Math, Science, and the omnivorous Arts & Culture & Oriental Culture & Recreation/Miscellaneous/Food & Drink/Gaming, each of which contained White Pages (personal sites), Yellow Pages (business sites), Blue (governmental), Red (academic), the colors being the highlighting around the links and so the governmental and even the academic were unreadable.
Access to [the] Diatessaron was free — it was not equipped to process payments online — neither was there a fee for the [daily? weekly?] email, which was a hyperlinkdump of all the sites that’d appeared since the previous email, both alphabetized and crossclassified by url within host/domain. Admission to this elist, however, required each prospective recipient to file at least eight unique site identifications and descriptions, while to remain on the elist required filing a further two IDs and Descris if not uniquely then [biweekly? bimonthly?]. The updating, and the compiling of the email, were funded by subscriptions to a print directory, published [irregularly], which didn’t just reproduce the site in intransitive hardcopy, but synthesized it too. This was “The Rainbow Pages” (O’Quinn). Or “The Online Phonebook” (de Groeve). It contained both halves of an updated Diatessaron, but unlike the site it interpolated the emails by bolding, or italicizing, or underlining, depending on who was doing the wordprocessing/design — de Groeve favoring bold, O’Quinn favoring italics, Cohen the underliner — all the urls that’d appeared since the previous edition.
All this for just $12, postage not included, or a 12 volume subscription, postage included (domestic only), for $100.
But then why pay for something available for nothing online?
Because of the incentives—“Why pay for something available for nothing online?” was a note Cohen wrote for the original edition, and his question was answered by the features that followed: coprographic site correspondence reprinted under the rubric “Dear Admin,” the swift merciless judgments of “Editorz Pickz ’N’ Prickz,” which de Groeve and O’Quinn issued under the collaborative cybernym “Dr. Oobleck Tourette OB/GYN,” a centerfold with interview column called “Femailer Daemon,” and the regular but vague and so never fulfilled promise fonted above each page in Helvetica: “all members get h&jobs.”
The backcover, initially, was an ad for The Clinger’s — whose management had not requested it and had no site to publicize and rejected a proposed trade for rent reduction — and folded behind it was a subscription envelope preaddressed but not prestamped to a PO box in Pacifica. Checks were accepted, but not creditcards: “If sending ca$h please fold discretely” [sic or not?]. [“Being in business meant reordering our lives: the file could be sent to the printer, but not via email [[then how?]]. The proofs had to be approved, and even that could only be accomplished in person. On distro days whoever rented the minivan, drove it, or so ‘Cull’ and ‘Qui’ insisted after they had an accident when whoever was not registered was driving[[?]]. We had to be at the printer in Oakland by 08:00, in order to load up the books — in our prime we were selling just over 2000 copies per volume — to get to Bay Stationery by 10:30, in order to pick up the packaging, to get to our unit by 11:00 or so to print out the labels and pack the books, to get to the Pacifica PO by 13:00, when it was relatively empty just after lunch. At the PO we would check the box, collect the checks and cash, stop at the Wells Fargo to deposit it all, and if we still had time stop for agave shakes and mock duck pockets at Bigestion. We had to be dropped off at our unit by 16:00 at the latest if our partners were to regas the van and have it back in its lot by 16:30 to avoid the night fee. ‘Qui’ and ‘Cull’ would then bicycle home. They were still living across from the The Irish Phoenix on Valencia.”]
[First quarter?] revenue was about $16—after the sunk costs sunk in, after Cohen paid his partners back for helping bail him out of utilities debt — before the threeway split. But by summer 1994, they were making enough to pay for the hiring of two employees, the daughters of Raffaella and Salvatore “Super Sal” [Trappezi/Trapezzi?], the bookkeeper and superintendent, respectively, of The Clinger’s. [“Salvatrice would have been about 20 then, and Heather about 16.] [[They would become employees #1 and #25 of Tetration, after Heather insisted on skipping the intermediary numerals in favor of 25, the number of Barry Bonds, the leftfield lefthanded slugger of the Giants, apparently, and so even today Tetration has 24 fewer employees than the personnel ops spreadsheets would indicate.”]]
Salvatrice, then 20, and Heather, 16, were paid $8/hour for data entry. Salvatrice would check the synop@diatessaron.stanford.edu email, verify “first level uniquity,” as a new site was called inhouse, or “second level uniquity,” as a new url was called inhouse, and copypaste to the DDbase appropriately. Heather, who was still a junior at Oceana High School, would report after school and relieve her sister. It was her job to update the dual subDDbases, crediting subscribers and prospectives with finds. The Trapezzi girls were diligent workers, and if they ever exasperated Cohen it was only because they failed to understand that the work they were doing could be done anywhere and at any time. Though the business’s first major purchases were two computers Cohen set up in the Trapezzis’ unit, Salvatrice persisted in arriving at Unit 26 at 09:00 promptly, and Heather in arriving at 17:00, on Mondays through Fridays [I AM TYPING OUT A SCHEDULE]. They couldn’t be persuaded to use anything other than the same mongrel workstation of Abs’s design [SUCK MY FUCKING BALLZZZ].
But neither Cohen nor de Groeve nor O’Quinn was content with being a publisher. Semesters came and went and gradschool was deferred. The Microsoft offers were off the table. With the Trapezzi girls now taking care of the business — entering data, updating the site and the emails, regularly checking for deadlinks, even taking over the print edition’s layout and negotiations with the printers, and then hiring employees #26–30, Heather’s classmates, to canvass the Bay soliciting subscribers — Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn spent 1995 developing the algorithm.
This equation would become the foundation of Tetration. It was mapped out on paper by Cohen, and [coded] by his partners in two [programming] languages, Python and Java.
Its first iteration found application as an internal searchengine, which allowed the Trapezzis to find any link by name, category, domain, date listed, and user contributor.
Its second iteration was embedded in the site itself, though its appearance there was unfindable—it was not for external use. At this stage — mid-1995—the algorithm was set to track any link to Diatessaron, to follow it back to its origin page and determine whether it was listed or not. If not, the page would now be listed, and would be linked from Diatessaron, though none of this would happen automatically but rather required approval and manual inclusion, due to “a Biblical swarm of quashless bugs” that caused the algorithm to confuse incoming and outgoing urls of the same name but at [different domains], resulting in a failure to relate individual urls with their [hosting sites], “and that does not even take into account the equifails as like disk crash.”
This type of autosearch — in which an algorithm, conceived of as a “bot,” or “drone,” would “crawl,” or “creep,” “crustaceate,” or “spider”—required an increase in computing power, which, at the time, was expensive. July 1995, they took the site offline and sold their contributor elist [FOR HOW MUCH AND TO WHOM? I AM WRITING ABOUT A MAN WHO SOLD A LIST!!!!] to a new emarketing firm called Schlogistics, whose CEO, Randy Schloger, would marry Heather Trapezzi. With that income and the proceeds [HOW MUCH MONEY AGAIN? BECAUSE I MOTHERFUCKING CARE!!!!@#$%] from the last four editions of the Diatessaron, Cohen, de Groeve, and O’Quinn bought three Ultra Enterprises and three Intel Pentiums, both loaded [right word?] with Linux, which they racked [right word?] in the maintenance shed below Cohen’s unit. The Trapezzis refused to accept any rent for the shed [but weren’t they just the management, not ownership?], so Cohen drafted an agreement on the back of a Shell gas station receipt [though at which point did he or anyone else get a car?], giving the accommodating couple a 1 % stake in whatever resulted, subsequently turning them into multimillionaires, which is why today “ ‘Super’ Sal Trapezzi” is still listed on Tetration’s About page, and even in SEC filings, as “Head Janitor 4 Life.”
Raffaella Trapezzi set about cleaning out the shed, and Super Sal, assisted by Salvatrice’s husband, insurance adjuster Ronnie Giudice (later the impresario behind Ronnie G’s Best Braciole, which had?number locations by?date), constructed makeshift desks, bolting extra warped unit doors atop sawhorses. Following Cohen’s specifications they lightproofed the one window with flypaper, soundproofed the entirety by covering the walls with layers of bubblewrap atop vivisected eggcartons, and partitioned it in particleboard, with Cohen requesting that his own cubicle in the very center be boarded from floor to ceiling to create an enclosed shaft [how would he have gotten in and out?], though he was never to be found there [because there was no way to get in or out?], and preferred to work upstairs, in Unit 26, which he called “The Brumbellum,” “The Brain,” and later “The Fourth and a Half Estate,” and then “Getit D-Unit.”
By early 1996, they were set — they had everything but a name.
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from the Palo Alto sessions: It was as like a dream. Or hallucination. As like when the comp digirecorder shuts off when its condenser mic does not detect our speaking voice for 1, 2, 3, 4 seconds and so the recording will become nothing but an artificially compressed memory omitting the time in which life is lived, the times of blankness between the redlit sesshs just lost and irretrievable. That is how we perceive that existence today, as like a vast unrecorded emptiness. We were not sleeping and not awake. We were convinced that we were writing everything wrong and had gotten everything uncombobulated, that we were writing the algy as like it were the businessplan, and writing the businessplan as like it were the algy. The algy a sequence of specific commands executing specific operations, the bplan a sequence of nonspecific goals and objectives or just subjective projections that would execute only if we failed to convince the VCs, or worse, if we succeeded at failing them totally. The algy used sequences of numbers to represent functions, the bplan used sequences of letters to represent the dysfunctionality of its intended readership, manipulating prospective investors according to sociocultural filters and career trajectories, levels of greed and their enabling inadequacies, significant degrees of gullibility too, or just plain unadulterated stupeyness.
We had set a full functionality deadline of September 1996 but we were behind schedule by April so we revised for December, but then it was May and we were behind the revised schedule. If stage 2 completion was unfeasible we would redefine and make that completion stage 1 so that everything was feasible. The aim was not to be workable. Not to be presentable. But to achieve seamless genius, no raphe. Only the rec investors say done is better than perfect. The techs say perfect is better than done. We were blessed, in that we had no rec investors and were the tech itself. We were always prodding, nudging one another subtle with our fists. Cull would say, “Cunts do not drip on deadline.” Qui would say, “It is too difficult to coordinate the squirts.” We talked as like this even with the girls around, and the girls were always around, The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters nerfing it up and tossing the frisbee indoors and the only way to get rid of them was to send them out on errands, or if they had a date. “No that is not the correct surge protector, and no we do not have exact change.” Qui and Cull asked all of them out and the answer was, “But you never change your pants.”
Never. We shared even the undies, just took what was folded atop the unit washer/dryer. We were all the same size back then. Fruit of the Loom was the best for extended sedation. No socks. Raffaella cooked but if she ever went aggro against our herbivorism and tried to convert us to sausage we sent The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters to forage. Cull and Qui both ordered Greek salads but Egyptian Fuel was a mile closer, though OrganoMex had faster response times despite being 2.2 miles farther away. Smoothies were the optimum delivery system but we were never quite satisfied with our formulas for determining whether the time it took for us to make them was more or less precious than the money it cost to order them and anyway Raffaella did not have a blender. Qui and Cull stopped driving back approx twice a week to San Francisco but still had to drive approx once a week to Stanford whenever our testsite would crash its servers and no one else could fix them or could apologize both so well and disingenuously. To make up the time Cull would ignore stopsigns and stoplights and Qui would ignore even the roads and once drove straight out of the parkinglot and through the condo quad and ruined the sprinkler system and so had to waste a weekend helping Super Sal and Ronnie G dig up the heads and replace them. We were so fritzed that once when we had to go to Stanford ourselves to tender our regrets for once again crashing their servers and to try and retrieve the latest corrupted version of their financial aid site, we forget because we were passed out whether it was Qui or Cull driving the car, but one of them was passed out with us and the other got lost in Monta Loma or Castro City and sleepdrove instead to the old apartment they shared in the Mission and even sleepwent to the door but the key he had did not work and the new tenants woke us up by giving us directions with a crowbar. For models of how best to present this period consult any national intelligence whitepaper on the behaviors of terrorist cells or besieged messianic cults.
Still, the hours were no longer than at any other startup. The hours were no longer than life. Cull and Qui would code and crash and then we would recode until crashing. We would work on it as like online would work on us, which meant perpetually. In the beginning it was a site, and then it was a program to be embedded in other sites, and then it was a program to be tabbed in a browser. But would we license it. Or sell it outright. Or just diversify it all as like our own company. Which would require which systems. Requiring funding of what amount and engineering by whom. Was search even patentable. How to recognize a question. The appropriate time to incorporate. How to recognize an answer. We had a title but no name. We were the founding architect of nothing.
We kept failing, our own computers kept crashing and kept crashing the servers at Stanford and then Stanford threatened to banish us from the servers but Qui and Cull appealed to Professor [?] Winhrad who intercessed and then we failed again and lost some of their admin and even some faculty email and then they threatened us again and Cull and Qui appealed again and Professor [?] Winhrad intercessed again and then they put us on probation, gave us a second chance squared, after which, hasta la vista, baby.
We had a problem but it was not us and yet neither were we the solution. Our problem was time and not because we did not have enough but because we had too much of space.
We had so much of this space and all of it kept growing but by the time we could crawl even a portion of it everything had grown again so that we could not have kept up even by walking or running. But that is not how to understand it.
If the internet is the hardware and the web is the software
If the net is the mind and the web is the body or the software the body and the hardware the mind
Think about it as like knots. Shoelaces. If you tie them but the knot is no good you can either tie another knot atop it or just undo it all and start over. But if you have never experienced a good knot in your life all you can do is do the both of them. Tie another knot and start over. Or think about it as like shaving your face. If you use a razor you might miss a hair or not cut it completely but if you use a tweezers and tweeze each hair you can bald your face to even the follicles. But then the rash. You cannot do both. Forget it. Or as like losing a wallet. You can retrace your steps or you can, forget it. Or as like losing a button. You can either retrace your steps and try and find it or you can just sew on a fresh one. But to do both you have to have two broken shirts or two broken pants and the needle, the thread. You have to realize the order. People wrapped themselves in skins that fell off them before they invented a needle and thread to sew them better before they invented a button device to clinch them better, and all the fits just worked. But imagine if everything was the reverse and you had to invent a clincher before inventing the equipment to sew an animal skin before even inventing the animal. That was search invented by how to search. Invented by how to tailor the results to the user. Not to mention that “button,” in another context, could refer not to a clothes clasp but to a key pressed to launch a weapon. Not to mention that in still other contexts “needle” could mean “annoy,” or “bother,” and “thread” might not be a literal string or twine but figurative as like a “drift” or “stream” whose speed is measured in “knots,” “a train of thought” just “flowing,” until it was “brought to heel.” The choice was to both needle the thread and thread the needle. Through its eye. In one ear, out the other. To know the polysemy of tongues. We had to code a searchengine to check our own code for a searchengine. That should tell you everything.
Or better, understand this by what we are, by what we have postulated as like our axiomatic expression. Separate, divide. Categories, classifications, types. Genus, species. Clades. It is history, it is historical. The world was discovered, the world was explored, and it was all so round and immense that it confused us. We reacted by formalizing ourselves into becoming botanists, zoologists, and so the plants and animals became formalized too, the botanists and zoologists arranged them. But they arranged them by how they looked, how they sounded, where they lived, when they lived, by character. How our humanity, taxonomized at the top of the pyramid or tree, perceived them. But then the universe that could not be seen and could not be heard was discovered and explored. Cells were observed. Mitochondria. Genes. DNA. It appeared that not all the animals and plants were as like they appeared. A whale was biologically closer to a panda than to a herring. Turtles were biologically different than tortoises but they both were closer to being ostriches than snakes.
Point is, what was important was not the organism itself but the connections among the organisms. The algy had to make the connections. We figgered if we could index all the tech links, and apply to each a rec link, whatever terminology we mortally employ, we could engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections.
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 for 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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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.
But then the next innovation would be about, we are not sure, 82, 84, when the idea gradually became to make a remote that would work across brands, to make it not just compatible panbrand with regard to TV formats — NTSC (America, Mexico, Canada, Japan), and PAL (South America, Europe, China, half of Africa), even SECAM (Soviet Union, half of Africa) — and videocassette recorder formats — VHS, Betamax — but also to clunk it scalable to any and every product/standard conceivable. This was the goal of the independent remote designers, the mavs who inspired by the phenomenon of the corded telephone becoming cordless were trying to do the same for other devices, trying to get all the entertainment wires, all that wirelessness, to fit onto the tiniest number of the tiniest chips that could sit comfortably or not on the tiniest slab that could be manufactured at the tiniest cost so that it would not matter when it was lost, and it would be, between the cushions of the sofa.
We might stress that since their very inception cordless phones, by which we mean phones just without cord, not portable or mobile much beyond their base station chargers, had been compatible with most if not all telecom providers. The chips were the enablers, limited pellets of silicon that served an apparently unlimited range of functions, as like a single snackfood delivering the tastes of chocolate, vanilla, pork rind, popcorn, pretzel, and chip in every bitesized bite.
Ironic that this gadget, so simple to imagine, turned out to be so difficult to develop. It takes a whole lot of labor to keep the customer lazy, but the price of this was higher. Adjusting for inflation it was a height between the costs of launching satellites into orbit and laying the transatlantic cables. Both of which had worked. This, however, was all false starts. Snafus. Unfixes. Incompletes. Approx a dozen design firms going raped ape over plurassigns, simclicking. Approx 100 engineers, couched in advanced degrees, all dedicated to improving the couch experience — what a way to trash a life.
The most soulwasting project in the history of tech. The stupiest and most wasteful expenditure of money, time, intelligence, and energy project in tech history.
E. Ver.
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Now initially the way the unimote business went was custom, bespoke, and so never very profitable. High end always begins high pricetag, given the R&D and STailing, the specs tailoring altering by device, with features always being taken in and out, given the manufacturing costs, and the vendor percentage, which can cut into margins considerably.
An A/V vendor with more overhead than sky has would sell a home entertainment system of mixed brands, the best of each brand because one does TVs better, and another does speakers better, to a decent earner with the spouse equivalent and the two point fives and the four floors mortgaged out in the parklands, ready to blow an unexpected bonus on better picture than from an ocean vista and better sound than from a splash in the waves. The vendor would then contract with one of the many indie design outfits staffed by disgruntled engineers hired away from home entertainment equipment manufacturers for their familiarity with the proprietary wireless frequencies used by different brands, who would cobble together a remote that conjoined the features of all the devices of all the brands, devoted.
But even if this could take weeks, for the designer and manufacturer, or a month, for the consumer, and even if again the costs were crazy all around and for the consumer could be equal to, for a full domestic theater remotegration, or remote integration, the expense of finally having that missing point five of a child, what was beyond all that, what left that dissuasion far and distant behind and rendered the devoted remote business not remotely remunerative or even feasible, was that its products always broke, even if just dropped on the carpet, or sat on by a sitter, or else from having been handled roughly by the post. But because this was Western suburban consumption in which everything including life itself was held to its warranty, the customer would call the A/V vendor and the A/V vendor would have to provide service, would have to jeep out and try fixing the remote on location, not because the post was untrustworthy but because it was both cheaper and kept the customer satisfied if the vendor did not have to package the remote off to the designers again, for them to repair it, or to the manufacturers again, for them to furnish a replacement.
Half the complaint calls that came in were from customers with units so broken the vendors were at a loss, but the other half were from customers just wondering about proper usage, and so alternate tollfree numbers were set up and operators were underpaid in India, every Indian who had never been accepted to engineering school following the troubleshooting/FAQ script — Does the unit have batteries? Does your unit have separate or joint On/Off buttons? If separate, are you pressing the correct one? Or both simultaneously? If joint, are you sure the device is not already Off? Or On? Are you operating the remote within 28 feet or 8.5 meters of the equipment you wish to control? Are you pointing the remote correctly, in the direction of the equipment you wish to control? The lines busy, the holds long, clients calling from their carphones in traffic, put on hold for longer than traffic, only to be disconnected, getting picked up on only to yell about how previous calls had been dropped.
But it is not our intention to survey the history of subcontinental customer service.
Not that the topic is ungermane or uncur.
Now, 1988. Out of Santa Cruz nowhere, Paz — this business that before this could not get arrested, that could not even get picked up on radar — announced they had a unimote ready to launch.
But whether they did or not, and they did not, this was marketing genius. The competition was saying, “Works with any device.” Paz said, “Works with every device.” The competition was saying, “Generic.” Paz said, “Universal.” Though as like any tech can tell you, there is nothing more frustrating, nothing more generic, than the universal.
Paz, having been late to the party, reinvented the party by spinning early and wizard. Advertising in the trades before they even had a prototype. Issuing a statement about production commencing on an unfinished product. Imposing internal discipline by external publicity. Setting deadlines by the press release. Nothing so motivates the engineers, who if they fail will not only be fired but will also have to explain to their families and friends how a device so intensely anticipated, as like it had always existed, never did.
A good artist ships. A great artist lies about shipping and no one notices. Paz even made a TV commercial, what better way to target their audience, which aired in select markets in central California. The remote used in the spot was a dummy, just a plastic prop, and so each TV in it had to be controlled by its own remote operated out of frame.
It was with this commercial that Paz shifted their businessmodel from hype to fraud: they announced they were accepting preorders.
Basically, the original recipe Paz product, we forget what it was called, was billed as like not just programmable but easily programmable, capable of storing up to 10 favorite channels, including cable, the commercials always mentioned, as like insinuating that it was more difficult to go changing to and from the channels of cable. But only a few tubers ever dialed in their orders and after nothing was delivered they called again demanding refunds the engineers paid out of their own salaries, that was how guilty they were and how stressed and tense with management and ownership becoming more involved with infomercializing baldness tonics, denture whiteners, and shammies.
At the time a cruft of Paz engineers used to hang out at Kompfs in Sunnyvale, exit 394 off the 101, a ragbone junkshop of spare parts and spare time the dimensions of a dumpster. They had hung there as like kids or had worked there as like kids, which was the same thing, hanging, working, acquiring their trade by mend and patch and now they were broken and had to be unwound again. They had lost all confidence in their project. In their methods even. Which were all reversals and backmods. In both their profession and selves.
To compensate for having failed to do a thing as like negligible and yet unnegligible as like making a remote that was universally programmable, to compensate for having wasted their talents on infrared transducers and ridiculous niggling 4 and 8 bit microprocessors, issues of command segregation, firmware retention — whether the uremote should be programmable manually, whether it could be made to autoscan specs just from aiming its interface whether at the target device or its branded remote, whether the uremote should include a coupling to a computer, and how that coupling could best be accomplished — and to buck one another up for having missed out on making a fortune with Microsoft, even IBM, or Hewlett-Packard, they chatted up Kompf, traded homophobic Kirk and Yoda jokes, “To boldly go where gone before no man has,” and rummaged for versions of themselves among all the rusted desuete electronics in stock, only in order to modify them, to control them remotely.
Now this was entertainment. Taking an antique coil toaster and electric kettle and slapping sensors on them only so that toast and hot water might be made with a click from across the room. Just for the fun of it, or the consolation. But then, as like always happens, the hobby hypertrophied, with the engineers proceeding to attempt the same hack with nonelectric devices. Forget digital vs. analog. Mechanical. Machinal. To remotely control a pedal sewingmachine from Podolsk or a Kashmiri abacus required motorization.
There was a clock there, at Kompfs, something European, we would not know which make exactly. An archaic dusty clock that had stood throughout its grandparenthood until fashions changed and its coffinsize casement was axed for firewood and the mechanism with all its gears was taken out and pinned to the wall, and the current challenge was to somehow remotecontrol its winding, and the decision was made to use say the Zenith TV remote, we would not know exactly, with say the Power button the winder, the button that would control the motor, which would be powered, as like all remotes, by battery.
Whatever interval separated their meetings is a mystery to us, but when the Paz engineers returned, whenever they returned, they were shocked.
Not only had the clock been outfitted with a motor triggered by sensor that was controlled by the Power of the Zenith TV remote, but the Channel up and down buttons had been assigned to respectively speed and slow that motor to affect the winding rate, and the Volume up and down buttons had been assigned to trigger the strikers wrapped in scaled amounts of gauze, effectually raising and lowering the volume of the chimes. Finally, ingeniously, the Mute button did not mute the chimes, but engaged the wound power of the clock to recharge the 9 volt or lithium cells, and so energy was conserved. Though not in the engineering.
The Paz engineers, who had assumed this clock mod would take days or even weeks, asked Kompf who was responsible and were answered the guy who had been browsing in the back while they had been discussing the challenge.
None of them had registered his presence and Kompf though this is not surprising could not even remember his name, could only describe him against type. An Indopak, but unshaven, untucked, and maloccluded as like he was grinning about it, who would drop by not infrequently to source parts and talk failures and deternatives.
Kompf, whose nationality was a German accent though we have never been able to decide if he was also a Jew, was universally recognized at least on the newsgroup he moderated, genysym.grimoire, as like the expert authority on defunct tech, and discredited alternative energies. He blogged treatises on the wunderwaffen and the remotecontrolled but not unmanned kamikaze vehicles. On orgone, the power generated by the orgasm. Odic force, the power generated by the will of Norse gods. Shakti, Prana. This guy the engineers were cur about was, apparently, the best informed about such and other hermetic matters that Kompf had ever met, offline. Do not think we would know anything about Tesla on our own, do not think we would know whether Torres-Quevedo was one person or two people. One.
The Paz engineers asked how to get in touch with the guy and Kompf said the guy had told him that either he had just turned down a job or been turned down for a job at Raytheon. The engineers asked around but nobody at Raytheon would admit to not being able to differentiate among their myriad subcontinentals, and in that viro, the engineer hab, for someone capable of such leisure robotics to be essentially anonymous was so preposterous that the Pazzers suspected that the guy they were after did not exist and that Kompf was just pranking them, or involving them in some elaborate scavenger hunt whose rules they did not understand.
But then one night or we are just imagining night one of the engineers, a Gregory Rundle L E or Rundel E L, who before Paz had worked at Samsung and after Paz would work at Samsung but demotedly, got a call from Kompf, at the office or home the same, “Your guy just came and went all flustered, requesting a recommendation letter.”
Apparently Kompf had asked what it was for but the guy said nothing beyond, “Just a letter of reference in re: evident engineering prowess and loyalty to America.” Kompf asked for his name and the guy answered he would fill that in himself and gave an address out in the 95030s that was certainly not residential. Other fusses. The letter had to come in two copies: To Whom It May Concern, and To the Honorable James A. Baker III, US Secretary of State.
Kompf typed up the letters chockfull they had to have been of praise but also conjecture.
Greg Rund EL or LE picked them up in their unsealed envelopes and took them to the address, but having brought no other offering was made to surrender the bag of macaroons he was snacking on along with a lock of his receding hair to whatever gods they had then at that Hindu mandir in Milpitas.
The Indian, who prayed there daily, was propitiated.
He was unemployed and his visa was expiring, he explained to Greg. He was amassing testimonials for his deportation proceedings in the event he was unable to find a job.
Greg then offered him a job. The interview was strictly a formality, except for the negotiation of terms, including but this might be baseless the stipulation that half his salary be transferred, concurrent with paycheck issuance, directly to the orphanage that had raised him. We do not think that orphanage ever existed. But as like with tax law, it is for others to know.
Health benefits were exercised immediately, prescriptions were obtained and cortisone shots for carpal tunnel.
He was made Associate VP of Engineering for a business that had eight other Associate VPs of Engineering.
Paz, 1989.
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But this was beyond even him: a remote that could be programmed by purchaser alone, a remote intended to be friendly enough so that even a mentally rectarded pet child could instruct it in less than 12, 10, 8—in less than 6 steps per gadget in the widest variety of TV and VCR functionality, in the configurations of stereos and surround sounds.
It was the very breadth of that variety that inspired what we later called the Law of Moe, which states that if universality were ever possible in space and so in time, life would become utterly impossible for everyone but the patentholder.
Though Moe had other, related, formulations: “Not even the globe is global, not even the galaxy is universal, Joshua Cohen.”
Also: “The longer the search, the wider the find, Joshua Cohen.”
In each interim between his team of Pazzers designing a mod feature and testing it out, as like a Power button that turned On and Off every product made by four brands, 8 or 16 or 256 new products would be brought to market, and another consortium of bargain brands from Japan would establish another competing remote lab to coadunate proprietary specs. The Pazzers had to match each progressive advance, but even if the success rates were equal, the operations were not, and if the Pazzers were adding, the Japbrands were multiplying, and if the Pazzers were multiplying, the Japbrands were exponentiating, and this situation of a small team of good scrappy engineers vs. a big evil capitalist universe was not a fictional media property as like a ninja telenovela available on the equipment the engineers were attempting to control, but was instead real and actual and hopeless, and no intenser degree of application or polytheistic divine intervention would have helped them, or anyone, keep up.
Innovation does not wait for standards, it sets them. To innovate is to be incompatible. But business was bad. Then business was übervikram.
By 1990 Moe had clunked a multiverse of universal demos, a semiversal for audio, a hemiversal for video, a demiversal for TV, meaning that each worked on approx 50 % of each product, crossmodel and panbrand, half that percentage programmed by scanning, the other half by manual programming so serious as like to require a code glossary of function assigns grouped by model and brand that was illegal for Paz to have even compiled let alone to publish and monetize.
There was a Sharp remote with a timer mode, which allowed users to set the VCR recording of future TV shows, a JVC remote with an edit mode, which allowed users to edit recordings, both of which just a gen later would be claimed by and would enrich everyone but their inventor, and also a crossbreed Panasonic/Magnavox remote with the commsense function, which sensed commercials by their distinctive mixrates, turned channels to another show, and returned to the original show only once its commercials were over. Ultimately, Moe invented, he would always claim, or he only modified, he would never claim, 108 remotes, 108 versions of what was supposed to have been a single remote. An Amote. We just remembered what it was called, the Paz A M O T E, and some said “ah mote” and others said “ay mote,” and 108 is just a Hindu euphemism for “many,” or “much,” 108 the sum of the Upanishads, the amount of gopi or cowherds of unconditional love, the number of the beads of the mala, so the breaths of the japa, the names of each ceaseless god.
Moe needed that practice, which is Buddhist too, that counting, that numerical mantra. He needed a break. Even another job would have been a break. He was leveled. Everyone else was on permanent vacation. Always off, working remotely, taking meetings in Porsches in the middle of carwashes. Out in back of the office, his parkingspot had been taken, the entire lot was taken by a trailer that quarantined a furtive clan of Indonesian pribumi assigned to different projects. No windows. His paychecks came from Spazz, and then from Spazz Telecommunications, and with each the signature changed. We are not sure if the orphanage got its share. We are not sure in general about the orphanage. New managers were brought in and they were always on the phone. With new ownership. With parole officers.
Rund, Greg, who had returned to Samsung, got Moe a Samsung offer, generous. Other coworkers who had quit tried luring him to Canon, Nikon, Sony, and offered him equity in GPS tritels that would be so clovered by the millennium that even the receptionists would be able to platinize their lawnmowers. But Moe had not come to America just to work for Korea. Or to give suburban paleface parents driving directions between stripmalls.
Fall 1990, Moe was the sole engineer still assigned to the Amote. His manager was the son or nephew of new owner/CEO Nicodemo Merlino, who was never in the office, but then neither was the nephew or son.
Except the night before Christmas Eve, they both burst in, sweating, rushing through and clutching at cabinets and leaving a papertrail out to the lot, too panicked to notice their last legitimate employee, or so Moe would later hope.
The FBI, we are fairly sure it was the FBI that arrested the Merlinos burning files in a trashcan atop the one remaining handicapped space with enough accelerants as like diesel fuel and insecticides in the trunks of their Mercedii to torch the rest of their workplace too. All the Indonesians were taken into custody. All the descrambling illegal cableboxes they had been assembling in the trailer were seized. The Merlinos were accused of trafficking, were already out on bail posted by the virtually unindictable Emmanuel Figlia, San Jose mafia, by the time Moe finally emerged from hiding.
He with a handful of his remotype Amoti had squatted secret above his cubicle in a corner of the dropceiling, its panel browned from leaky HVAC.
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Now we are about, 1997. Skip ahead. Tetration was through with academia, or else academia was through with Tetration, our domain needed hosting and everything, as like our posture, needed support. Based on reviews, our own reviews, we chose Grupo Escudo, Santa Clara. This was how it went before we groundbroke on our own DCents. Datacenters.
We took their least expensive barbedwire enclosure and stuffed it with our production serverack, the Ultra and Pentium IIs, a cruft of external driveage. Basically it was a maximum security humane society in heat. Locks were not provided. Next on one side was the cage for eBay, next on the other the cage for Hotmail, all of us were still just unprofitable toddlers in hefty mental diapers, but only we were not growing to scale.
That was why, in fugly winter, Cull and Qui were in Las Vegas for the consumer electronics show. The CESS. The notion was to go and license our algy, or corner someone to buy it flatout. Preferably one of the portal boys, some pitboss of the winners circle. We would have granted sublicensable transferable interminably renewable rights in every territory, we would have swallowed any nuggety lump sum. Our combined assets were then approx $8K: $4K from Professor Winhrad as like to say a faretheewell from Stanford, the rest what was left of the Diatessaron profits, along with the Christmas windfalls, the $800 courtesy of the de Groeve parents, still less, always less, than the $60 the O’Quinn parents had scraped.
We had decided not to go along out of thrift, or so we had told Cull and Qui, but the truth was that perfecting our algy had to take precedence over any bachelor industry spree spent parsing the activities of Datum Millennium from the activities of Millennium Data, Datamex, Datamax, Datatec, Datatek, Datatron, Datatronic, Datary, Dataria, whichever it was that had paid women to stalk the tradeshow floor wrapped head to foot as like mummy zombies in wires urging attendees, on average 92.4 % men, to Go Wireless, and then stripping down to nipples, no pubes.
It was in Vegas, baby, that Cull and Qui met with Microsoft, Netscape, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Captoraptor, Peruser, and Moe, a guy whose name had not always been Muwekma Ohlone.
He had a crappy berth beyond reception, where even the newest Motorola demophones had no service. Where typically the coordinators stuck lunatics and hobos. Not businessmen. We have been there since at least once and this was what we encountered.
Sad fat bald Kompfy dinkaround tinkerers peddling their chemtrail detectors, subaqueous treasure wands. Redates, a company specializing in putting the innards of newer and better products into the skins of older and worser products, and in making the innards and skins compatible. They rotarized touchtones, and remediated a VHS cassette with a lid that lifted not to tape but to a DVD player, the customer inserted the disc, depressed the lid, inserted the cassette into the VCR, everything converted. Marketed to senior centers, retirement communities. E-fterlife, a company marketing a gravemarker embedded with a screen, which looped clips with optional audio from the life of the departed. A keyboard below the screen let visitors type msgs, for public display or privately protected by PIN.
A somber zone. Basically a cemetery.
Moe had not been told to bring his own décor, or else the coordinators were fresh out of foldingtables. No chair. Just a poncho laid on the floor as like in a silk road Levantine antique and spice bazaar. Moe sat on the poncho and presented. A bulky creditcard he was hoping Visa/Mastercard would pick up with a graphic window that showed the balance owed on the account. It was the same size as like the beeper he was flogging, which featured a bloaty red button for 911.
Another of his offerings had some elegance, some grace. It was an attempt to redress the greatest undiscussed blight of globalization, namely that not all computers around the world can recognize or even detect all attached devices. An auxiliary keyboard made in Russia or Ukraine and so completely in Cyrillics might not be compatible with a Taiwanese PC clone whose OS was a pirated Farsi edition of Windows 95. To remedy this, Moe had designed a box, a small white apparatus cubed as like a craps die at bottom, rounded as like a roulette pill at top, to dongle between whatever periphs and plugnplays, Chilean lasergun, Brazilian joypaddle, and the computer itself, and that would render the devices usable on it.
Software configs and coalescing manufacturing parameters would make all this hardware obsolete by 1999, but still it was admirable. Few devices get even a year between usable and admirable.
But the one ware Moe had brought to the show that alone entitled him to Valhalla was just a proposal, and is fundamentally too involved to explain to a rec, given that even for a tech, even now, it is still too unicorn dreamy. Especially given the physics. Engineers tend to change their arch levels and switch their packets if ever confronted by timewarps and wormholes. The only way they can face the quantum is with the munchies.
Basically our lives are not reversible and yet physics is, the laws of physics holding true whether time moves forward, as like we perceive it to move, or backward, as like can only be observed through equation. The only exception to this reversibility is courtesy of mechanics, thermodynamics. Ice can be turned to water, which can be turned to gas, but every change of state requires a transfer of energy. The energy that does not or cannot effect each change is dispersed. But where and when is the problem. Or else it is lost. But energy cannot be lost is the problem. The solution to both is entropy.
Yawn.
FYI: Yawning, as like laughing and crying, is only socially contagious.
Now physical entropy is the measurement of that available but unutilized energy. If with more time comes more change, and if with more change comes more entropy, it follows that entropy is perpetually increasing. Booley. This makes entropy a statistical property. Measuring change and waste, change and scatter. Information accrues with each transaction, because each transaction itself becomes information. Order increases but only as like disorder. The universe tends toward chaos.
Computationally, statistical entropy can be reduced with an increase in parity, the more input equals output, the more output equals input. In principle every operation can be done and undone, executed and unexecuted, with the same booley, the same algys, circuits and gates, nothing different regardless of direction.
Physically, though, is the difference. Computers work on electricity, on battery. Each bit processed dissipates energy, kT In 2. Even just trashing a.doc creates corresponding entropy or drag somewhere or somewhen on the system.
That was what Moe was up against. His pig flying to the end of the rainbow goal was reversibility, specifically to perfect a type of inverter gate that allowed any operation passing forward through it to pass backward again, as like a one lane but two way freeway, along with the charge recovery circuits that would serve as like a tollbooth but a freeway tollbooth that instead of charging the input to go through, converted it to output, to charge, turned it around as like input again. To put it more directly, he was trying for a computer capable of turning all the work that was ever done on it, as like typing, or just clicking around online, into energy, with 1:1 transmission, without any entropy, no loss. To put it most directly, he was trying for a totally reversible computing, to be powered not merely with human effort, but with the absolute minimum of human effort, solely by its processing.
Reversibility, an Eastern conceit.
Imagine two bows that share a single string that can shoot a single arrow headed and fletched at both ends in two opposite directions at equal speed simultaneously. Imagine an archer who thrives entirely off his aim, and who can sustain himself physically by aiming forever, but who with the gradual release of his grip will gradually die.
To be clear, all this is possible only on paper or modeled on a computer charged or socked into an outlet. But in life, this might only be possible in Vegas. Moe was proposing a new paradigm of DCent, a facility not as like the one we were renting but open, as like to balance with access the way all other systems were, are still, autarkically closed. It would be a place full of fully reversible processors, routers, a local server, drives, operating all by themselves. A business of, by, and for computing, and the most anyone would have to do would be to make a contribution. This was conservation, this was ecology, more. This was a second nature requiring a god and not a man. The hope itself was selfsufficient.
He would call this facility the Tabernacle of Isentropic Synergy, or the Dedicated Hub Tabernacle of Collaborative Coopteration. Which, no doubt, is guano, batshit crazy, but also as like Stockholm or Oslo material, the ambition level that gets a man inducted into Boulder, Colorado, the ultimate frisbee hall of fame.
The presentation that Moe had taped to the floor around his poncho explained that some California Indian archive, but Indian as like Native American and not Indian Indian, some repository of historical manuscripts concerning indigenous life in California, did not have the funds to digitize itself, and the state would not help, the state was going broke too. His plan was to raise enough capital to pay the elderly or handicapped along with any cur volunteers to digitize its documents, its reams of scholarly paleography, notes on diet, trapping practices, fornication customs, birth and death folkways, and tralatitions of oral religious lore, for input into the computers of his Tabernacle, which would proceed to sort and kind them, to analyze them and other tribal and municipal records to enable any future research, though the research was not the point, the point was that all of this processing would generate not just enough electricity to power the Tabernacle but also to output heat and light, which would be distributed at no cost to the descendants of the archived on local reservations, and then to illegal Mexicans and the Afromerican poors, ultimately to everyone, globally.
Moe already had a location scouted out in San Mateo, as like an offisite scanning office, while for the inaugural Tabernacle itself he was set on one of the populous ancestral counties, either Sonoma or Mendocino, so as like to maintain maximum proximity and so transmission fidelity between the natives, who would upload their cultures themselves, and the downloadable power their cultures would generate. We will conclude only by noting that with classic Moe counterintuity the cardboard model of the Tabernacle that held down the hem of his poncho was not in any indigenous reed and grass wikiup style but was apparently an adobe or pueblo, and beyond that the little tiny people on the cardboard sidewalk whose purpose it was to humanistically scale the rendering were just green plastic soldiers as like toys.
It was Qui who told us none of this then, in his call to Unit 26 not from the room he had with Cull at the Desert Inn but from the Bellagio. We had been waiting for a report on their summit with AOL, waiting to be told we were being procured, and so it was serling that the first figure out of his mouth was not the $12 million we expected.
Serling. Rod. Twilight Zone. Strange.
Instead, Qui explained, first they had met a guy, his name was Ohlone, then they had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, then AOL was not offering because it was deving its own search, Microsoft was doing this, Netscape was doing that, and Yahoo. Then they had dinner, which was grilled cheese again and soupflavored soup.
After which this Ohlone guy just happened to bump into Cull again in the sportsbook at the Bellagio. Cull had just gotten on line, not online, but in a cloggy human queue. He was waiting to put his name down for a nonsmoking table, but this Ohlone kept a seat by the VIP screens, Qui said, Cull said, and was just headed over to lay down a bet. A major race was slated next. Moe had handicapped all the relative weight calculations by jockey, means of speed at distance weighted by recency on turf and dirt. There was some tendonitis afflicting the favorite being covered up, and then he mentioned something about an unfamiliar strain of alfalfa in the paddocks. He had reduced the semiofficial odds from 37.9:1 to 16.2:1. Cull basically figgered he had to trust an Indian about a horse, and so inquired what stakes the guy was in for and then doubled them, handed over all his cash to be wagered for him, parimutuel.
All that after just a chance meeting and one lunch Guinness and two bottles of Zinfandel with dinner.
Qui explained that while Cull had been gambling he had been in the toilet. Not doing number one. Number two. He had not been fast, but he was at least faster than Filly Up, who finished sixth. Of 10. Qui found Cull tangling with the rope dividers between the smoking and non sections. The Indian had never come back. Cull would not tell Qui how much he lost. But then Qui insisted, and Cull obliged him, though he would not tell us how much. But then we insisted. It was more than gas money. More as like horse or used Humvee money.
“But only $2468 of it was from the common account,” Qui said.
“We told you not to gamble with money from common,” we said. “And the rest was from what?”
“Cull and I took in $220 in stud.”
“Which you also lost?”
“This Ohlone dude is doing fascinating shit with circuit adiabatics.”
“And with adiabatic prostitutes he is paying with our money, certainly.”
“The phone just told me to insert another quarter,” a pause for him to pat himself down. “No more quarters.”
“No more drinking,” we said.
Just before the call was severed he said, “All beverages are complimentary.”
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The Vegas news had interrupted us while crunching solitary in Unit 26 in front of a terminal in front of an algyshell, which is a programming interface, just window and cursor. Lines of language lined, a Cullion lines of code, a Quinnion lines of code, which we had been purging of breakless switches, ampersandless arguments, (is) instead of (==), (_dict_) instead of (_slots_). But now all our code that had been right was suddenly wrong. Which left only our code that had been wrong as like right, though what there was of it was just dropped colons and closed bracketing omissions, unfindable. The conditionals that operated, and the conditionals we had implemented to obscure the operations, seemed interchangeable to us, and then even the spaces that gaped between the characters and the characters themselves seemed interchangeable, because no space is ever blank, so everything is flawed.
We had to sit down though we were already sitting and so we just got up and moved to the next terminal. Its comp was hibernating, suspended. The glass of it was motey. Then the glass had our face, as like we were touchlessly communing with it, and then calming to its mode. Outwardly neutral. But inwardly still volatile and cycling.
find (Indian)
find ($$$$)
if (amount of $$$$ Indian has left < amount of $$$$ that was ours)
then# beat him down
else (he can bring us our $$$$ within start=datetime end=datetime with interest compounded daily for range at rate_float)
else (we would derive > satisfaction from having him beaten to death). Let The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters bury his corpse under some soddy landscaping job outside some McMansion in Montara.
We decided, this Indian would be the victim of the first nonsimulated living breathing execution of our algy.
But all we had to go on was the name. Not even its spelling, just phonetically.
We took the comp out of hibernation and tetrated variations: “A Loan,” “Aloan,” “A Lone,” “Alone.”
Just imagine what results were returned to us. But then add “Indian.”
Qui and Cull returned from Vegas. But we had no use for their apologies or tears or promises of payback or all the swag souvenirs they brought us of Engadge tshirts and Isruptious hats and Acer tshirts and hats and drinkcozies and Compaq tshirts and hats and drinkcozies and flyswatters and the Continental Airlines plastic wings pin designating us as like Captain.
All we had use for were the data.
We wanted to know whether anyone had found any email or phone for this Elone or Ilone before we had. We wanted to know whether the Vegas cops had outstripped our algy.
But Qui and Cull had never even called the cops, and so our algy was spared.
Then we called CESS, the electronics show organizers. But they would not relay exhibitor info over the phone and suggested we consult the official commemorative catalog. But we already had. We had an unlisted Indian situation.
We clenched, we had been waiting to clench. Everything Cull and Qui were telling us was a repetition. Either the Indian was this master who absently mixed up his horses, or grifted, or both. He made interactive creditcards. He made crappy dongles. But he was also working on a vanguard type of total computing in which what went in and what went out were sustainably equilibrated. Reversibility in computing was as like letting a bet ride through every race without ever winning or losing but also without paying a vig. As like a sex act between two bodies that never aged and whose minds were equipped with the Undo/Redo functions.
Cull and Qui hit the showers. We went back to getting aggro about the inprogress site of the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose only unbroken link on its linkpage was to a url broker trying to sell virtual reservations to every tribe, apache to zuni.com. We decamped for the unmoderated engineer hunting grounds, WbStrZ.org, Netikit.org, @omic@araxy, 73h.wh157l3bl0w3r. We read about nodes and electrodes, capacitive coupling, bistability.
We posted msgs with handles as like ISOLone and VegaSageV with offers to hire an engineer for a reversible experiment that made a weeny affirmative action claim about especially welcoming applications from Native Americans. Just by reading and msging we were feeling proximal already, if not linguistically or conceptually proximal, then mystically, religiously, as like in searching for him we were feeling that tingle of being searched for ourselves.
Super Sal woke us up at the terminal by saying, “The Chief is on Line 2.”
We took the call, assuming we had been preemptively found, but then Line 2 introduced itself as like, “This is only the acting chief of the council of business elders.” He was just returning the voicemail we had left after tetrating “Indian+O’Lune” had brought us to the tribal site of the Ohlone, or to be politically PC the Muwekma Ohlone, descendants of the original inhabitants of the Bay, since dispossessed, halfassedly genocided.
But none of the members of the Ohlone tribe were called Ohlone, the chief said. Or they all were called Ohlone. They were the Costeños, “coastal people,” to the Spanish. The Ohlone, “people of the west,” to the Miwok. The Muwekma, “people of the Miwok,” to themselves. People of the Miwok, people of the west. Western Miwok. Überwesterners.
The chief told us we were eligible for a lowprice genetic test that might establish our membership in up to 18 federally recognized tribes. Or our money back. And our money back. Reparations might be attainable.
Finally, a TendR VC cur about our having applied for and received US Patent 5835905B, “Method for relevance prediction,” rang back with two asks:
Firstly, would we explain the parallelism formulas governing Fig. 4D? And secondly, would we explain why we were getting so publicly inquisitive about this character Ohlone?
We answered that our partners had met him in Vegas and got cur about him but never got his contact, and the VC said, “Next time write an algy that can, with all respect, call bullshit. Anyway, Muwekma Ohlone. That is an alias. Legally his name is Vishnu Vaidya.”
Our terms, then, became clarified.
“He tried to get us involved in a scheme for invertible computing,” the VC said and we said, “Reversible.”
The VC then reminisced about a snazzy anorak he used to own, lined on one side in cotton, for the theater, the other in water repellent Tyvek, for hiking home.
“He is Indian?” we said.
“With a dot,” the VC said. “Not a feather.”
“Vaidya?” we said.
“But he came to us with that bullshit inversible scheme calling himself Vishnu Fernandes.”
“With a z?”
“Fernandes with an s,” the VC said. “But then how the fuck would a dot Indian get that name?”
“From Portugal.”
“You can say that again.”
“From Portugal.”
Then the VC told us all that montage about the remotes and the mafia, backtracking, and how the Vishnu identity had been disclosed during diligence on his reversible papers, backtracking. “The suspicion,” the VC said, “was that he stopped being Vishnu because of all that cablebox fraud and being foreign especially was trying to not get arrested.”
We thanked him and he said, “No prob, just keep our name out of it.”
But we told him we did not understand why and he said, “If you hire him, you can forget about our support.”
We hung up.
The VC. His name was Bretton Cleaver.
We tetrated again using “Vishnu Vaidya,” and appended “the Bay,” because back then to trim by coordinate consilience or zipcode was a Vedic fantasy.
The results stack came back paltry.
One result was a gambling site, one comment below many and most of them gibber, “nice turnout last time. chuck u left yr asthma inhaler will bring,” left by the uname Vishuponafern at the bottom of a thread called “Poker In The Rear.”
The READ THIS FIRST post advised that getting in on a game was contingent on responding correctly to a riddle: “Four men sit around playing blackjack. The first man gets up, leaves, and lives. The second man gets up, leaves, and lives. The third man gets up, leaves, and lives. The fourth man gets up, leaves, and expires. Explain without accusing anyone of homicide.”
The last line of the riddle was hyperlinked to a moderator/admin email, and we clicked it and replied: “They were playing on an airplane to determine who got the last three parachutes, or on a boat to determine who got the last three lifejackets, or else the guy with the lowest or busted hand had a brain aneurysm,” and the moderator responded immediately with an invitation.
At the Wells Fargo we withdrew the sub $6K still in the account without telling Cull or Qui, went out searching the way our ancestors searched, with the only other cards we ever had, with our name on them and the title embossed, Founder, Tetration.
The game was held outside Portola, on a foreclosed duderanch this Amazon lady from Amazon.com had bought just to flip, an egregious driveway to a villa, cardtable and saddlechairs the only furnishings. Already we were down in the hole thanks the taxi.
We went with the Fresca, left the other players to their single malt doubles. Let them read us or try to.
Vishnu Vaidya, Vishnu Fernandes, Muwekma Ohlone — Moe — he came in late, a groundless current bursting from this just heinous flasher trenchcoat. His teeth were all caried crowded funk mesiodental, his tongue as like a pinkslip splotched white.
He stunk, reeked to tell the truth foul.
The game was Texas hold em, 2/4 no limit, which dealt from the top suggests the obfuscation at stake because to win most of time is to fold em. We were better than most but worse than him, tight.
Moe had half the table buying in seconds by the second full deal rotation, and immediately post antemeridian the other half just left.
By last Fresca it was just us and a scruffy cruft of simoleoned emotionals, who played not too strong not too weak, but unpredictably predictably reckless. The type to wait out, let them cope, come senses or tantrum.
But Moe did not wait, shuffling a pocket pair as like a toolbar. He did not even take off the trench.
His play had been tame wild until it suddenly became wild tame, without bluff, which was the bluff, but not. Basically any bid to define strategy yielded tactics, any attempt to refine his decisions into levels or stages, degrees of the mind, was the biggest mistake an opponent could make. Rather the biggest mistake after not cashing out or not being Moe himself. Or boozing between pots. Moe might have been Hindu but for poker he had Buddha face. He bet low on big hands either because they were not big enough or just to keep us or him still cur. He went all in 44 times. He was little blind holding A-J just anteing up until the J-6-4 flop had him going in as like gangbusters, which left only this dotcomster comedian still in the game miraculously seeing not raising, the turn was 10, which meant a straight or flush could still be in the cards because both the J and 10 were of some manly finance suit, some clubs or spades flushed straight away in an ace cascade and fuck you, Yahoo from Yahoo.com, $8K for an ace high on the river two pair.
Moe quit approx $10K up at the end of the night that was morning, while we had managed, just, to make exactly $3.379K, though that was nothing because he still had not acknowledged — you will not laugh? Promise?
He still had not acknowledged us.
Our self.
Not until we were both outside amid spring 97.
Moe popped his collar. “So we are square?”
We said, “The name is Tetration.”
“We are money square, that is my meaning. Tell your Tetration bros — I have lent back to you what I have borrowed from them.”
We stopped our slog through the driveway clay and dung hung in the air. “You think you let us win in there?”
“I think I let you win a profit.”
“What about the DAS Capital associate or that Gaymer GM who folded on queens over eights?”
“It was queens over nines.”
“Eights or nines.”
He poked his ignition key between our ribs and said, “What about we settle this in Los Angeles, Joshua Cohen?”
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The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want. As like Los Angeles, as like a drive to Los Angeles. But we were helpless. We were in a dustbrown dump of a soccer parent van with a fluorescent red bindi decal on the hood and a back bay lending library of leaflets and pamphlets as like “Cellphone Brain Tumors Exposed!” and “Beware the Monoculture: the PC virus and the viruses that can bring down the system!” A lot stub from Vegas was wedged between spring coils in a gash in the upholstery. The talkradio was tuned to Republican. Moe drove not toward I5 but stayed on the 101. He chainsmoked a figment cigarette, just bringing fingers to lips and pinching the lips and breathing in, breathing out, windows fogging. It was dewy and cold and he could not figger the defroster. We will repeat that. He was a trained genius engineer who could not figger the defroster, so he rolled down his window to the breezes, route scenics.
He knew everything about us, knew everything about Tetration. He referred to Cull and Qui as like our “bros,” and to us as like his “rakhi bro.” Everyone at the game had called him Moe, and that was the only name he ever mentioned having. Moe picked among his toothcrowd with our businesscard.
His driving was not erratic if we followed his thoughts, because his driving followed his thoughts and veered and passed. Cut off. He was telling us about India, which had invented online. The Vedas, the Upanishads. He rehashed the Ramayana, stalled, the Mahabharata, stalled. Rather, he said, Hinduism had invented the cosmology that had been plagiarized online. The net, the web, just a void and in the void a wilderness, a jungle of hardware sustaining a diversity of software, of sites, of all out of order pages, a pantheon to be selectively engaged, an experience special to each user. Each click was a dedicated worship, an act of mad propitiation that hazarded destruction.
Altogether, never altogether, online comprised a religion of bespoke blue plural gods that could also be goddesses that could also be customized in any alternative to gender and blueness, not a religion but a flux of cults, temporary sects, routing allegiances, provider alliances. The user as like the Hindu can ping whatever divinity is best convenient for whatever purpose, can ping the deity of the specific moment or location, or the one pertinized to a particular task, without any core theology, without any central control, anything goes.
What guaranteed this access was search. No one understood search as like an Indian.
We stopped at a tarpit outside Paso Robles and Moe got out and pumped gas and went into the conmart and returned with a carton of menthol cigarettes, buckled up, then unbuckled and conmarted again and returned with a tank of gin in plastic. He put his incisors to the carton, a pack, bit a menthol and struck a strike anywhere match anywhere, breathed in and out and swore he had quit. He uncapped the gin to wash down two whitepink pills whose pharmcalls we noted, M575, do the detectivework, go sleuth it. When he swallowed it was with the Gayatri, that mantra that clears the astral nerve tubes. We have no clue how to drive. We have never had a license.
We got into LA around 18:00 and went to get some dinner. After our steaks he gave us a pill. We took another after our sundae. The steaks were gushing in that rare to raw style that homophobe kitchens hash out to men on dates who request medium. The icecream was brownbutter lardon nut brittle berry. We had never eaten as like that in our lives, but had no guilt.
Though we had two, but only one each, martinis. Because Moe was taking us along to his regular game, and we had to stay upright to knock it over.
“You go in and just ask the reception for Rosebud,” Moe said, “who will tell you the room. Come in calm and be yourself. Sit how you are told to sit and get your cash out. Pretend you might have met them all before but you cannot remember. Pretend with me just the same.”
The waiter offered cappuccino, espresso, and Moe said, “You are awake enough?”
We said, “Are you asking us or just the waiter?”
Moe said, “You are awake enough. Check, please.”
Modafinil retails as like Provigil in the States, but the whitepinks we had taken were some Canadian version, Alertec. A eugeroic, a nootropic, which IT twerks and the Green Berets prefer to amphetamine and methylphenidate because it is nonaddictive.
Moe insisted on paying for dinner, as like he had paid for the gas, and we got back into the van and drove and stopped and he lit up a menthol for us from the dash.
“That mansion,” he said, and through the smirched windshield was a mansion. “You will get out here at the Liquor Locker and walk slow down Sunset, so I will have time to park and go in before you. We do not know each other. Remember.”
“But that is not a lie,” we said and got out on the street.
Then Moe leaned over and unrolled the window. “Trust me,” he said. “I always know a rakhi bro. I can sense our wheels turning back through the samsara, Joshua Cohen.”
He waved all the honking cars around him and said to us, “But if they ask, only if they ask, tell them you are the guy who runs the game out in Venice Beach.”
Moe crept into the lane and we went on slow for blocks, doing the base vs. adjusted probabilities for holding an 8/8. Preflop against one player was 2 %, 2.9 %, and by increasing by one player per block we had mentally calculated for up to six, a situation in which there was a 16 %, 16.3 % chance that one of them had a larger pair.
Then we spit our autograph onto the sidewalk and crossed the street and up the drive. We had been prepared for everything except the Chateau Marmont.
We dropped Rosebud and were shown down speedbump carpet halls and opened a door to the celebrity 1990s. We are not sure we should be more specific.
But suffice to say someone as like Keanu was in the room, someone as like Johnny Depp, a Damon and an Affleck, the wrong Wahlberg, who could have been wasted from a protracted wager sessh or just from more of better drugs than we had.
The one who was Affleck or Damon was yelling at the one he was not for leaving the door unlocked, while the other was yelling that the last to leave the room had been the butler. The Wahlberg was approaching as like to bounce us out, but we were recognized.
Moe recognized—“You are that guy,” he said. “We met him out in Brentwood, Johnny?”
Then Depp claimed we were familiar.
“Not Brentwood,” we said. “You came to our Venice game.”
With that Damon and Affleck relaxed and put their arms around us but also they were frisking us and the Wahlberg said, “This guy is famous?”
Keanu said, “For losing.”
Seats were rearranged to give us next hand first position, or not rearranged because the only seat available was the bed and so the table was nudged in our direction. Action heroes nudged it, and put us in the chips. We were dealt and folded and lost to establish credibility at first. But then we were betting middlingly, after tipping our hands to Moe using chipstacks to signal our facecards. Ten of $10 whites a jack, ten of $20 reds a queen, ten of $100 blacks a king, nine of the white or black an ace just to miff it, cutting a red stack for a warning sign if his raising verged on patterny. A crude system but comptrasted with manual collusion as like finger taps, effective.
Pathogenic duvet, walls venereal with mold, polluted cash, but we never washed, we never even had the urge to wash. No bend or crease or soil would spoil our royalty. The bartender was knocking and Keanu was trying to undo the chain with his mind alone until he folded and the Wahlberg helped carry in the bar trolley. Moe kept ordering gin and tonics but we held with martinis despite the bowtied guy repeatedly belaboring our options up or down and dry or wet, dirty with a twist, and smirking because we ordered them with vodka.
We had to get drunk enough so that our loss was convincing, but not too drunk so that we betrayed our cheat, just running out the clock until a watch was on the line. Moe won but did not have the wrist to wear a Bulgari Ellipsocurvex Tourbillon. Two pairs of courtside tickets to the Lakers next season. If Jerry Buss had been there Moe might have won the Lakers.
Keanu was busted. The Wahlberg was broke. There was no air, only smoke. There were no glasses that had not been used as like ashtrays. Everyone was yawning that they were due at a party. We were not invited to the party.
Moe had left his van in Marmont Parking but was in no shape to drive it and would not let the bellhop call us a cab. He did not trust anyone that any venue would call to pick up two men who had just won their karma at duplicitous cards.
He led us down the strip to hang outside a bar until two guys, all gelspiked hair and cacti muscles and torus piercings through Celtic tatts, got dropped off by a cab.
Moe yanked us in and across the backseats and directed the driver in a mellifluous Hindi, “He will take us to women,” he translated for us. But we stopped at this sportslounge with a grungy chalet debased out back as like it had slid down from the hills and the driver said something and Moe shook his head and responded something else and said to us, “He misunderstood that we wanted prostitutes,” but we said nothing again and he said, “If we maintain this luck we will have no need for prostitutes,” and then he spoke to the driver who banged a sharp U, let us off in the lot of a stripclub.
Moe said something to the driver and translated for us, “I told him to come in with us, we will treat him.” But as like the driver declined, Moe pressed, saying something about it not being a hassle or condescension. Or about how we would pay not just for the cover charge but also for the dances and lost time. Moe got out of the cab and removed from his jeans his naugahyde wallet spilling a wad of bills across the asphalt and as like we stooped to reclaim them from the wind more $100s fell loose from the pouch of his lumberjack plaid, and Moe gathered them up himself and offered them to the driver.
The driver then declined again by delivering a canonical poem in Hindi until Moe got soberer and solemn and held his hands to his heart and then hugged the guy and kissed his lips. Moe must have told the driver he had to take the money because the driver finally agreed and accepted the bills smoothing them as like to soothe them into a roll to fold into his pocket and the total was definitely more than $2K.
With the cab turning around we stood separate from Moe in another slotted emptiness of lot and asked him what the driver had said. “He said his wife is to have her surgery tomorrow.”
The cab slipped back onto the boulevard and sped through a yellow. We asked, “What type of surgery?”
But Moe was already grinning past the bouncer. We caught up with him and inside the club he flipped his trench over his head and spread it into the frill of a spooked dinosaur and hopped around yelling, “Cardiac cardiac cardiac cardiac.”
The club was loud and crowded gagging from the smell of bowlingalley antifungal footspray and was called 98.6°, if we did not already mention it. It was 360° all around us that hot, in Fahrenheit.
The coatcheck girl offered to check the trench by asking, “Am I taking it? Or not?” Moe said, “I was hoping you would just give me the hanger,” and she said, “Lick my cock,” and Moe said, “Why?” and she asked, “What about you?” But we kept our jacket and msgrbag too and the girl shrugged, “Whatever, I dance next.”
A bar and stools up front, banquettes toward the back, all the walls except the curtained one behind the middle stage mounted with TVs as like old and bulky bodied as like the audience, riveted to a replay of the NBA quarter or semifinals, the Dow, the NASDAQ ticker, NASCAR, Seattle or Portland up, the Dow down, the NASDAQ down, NASCAR at the finish. At the completion of each circuit a fresh young flatscreen showed the Hollywood clipnews.
Six girls took their turns twirling germs around two stainless steel poles. We cannot recall anything about them except how blatantly diverse they all were as like in an ad for democracy. One white, one black, two in the middle, two Asians. The martinis were watery and on the cutting, the bleeding edge of expensive, but we drank them and were crashing, we were core failure crashing.
Moe stubbed a menthol out on the table and covered the burn with the acrylic placard, No Smoking. Then he shrugged out of his trench and went for a lapdance. Then he came back for a second pack he had stashed behind the placard, left again for a double Asian lapdance. The trench hung on the chair in a manner suggesting it was skin that had been flayed from its owner. We were teetotaler nonsmoking veganfuckatarians, feminists, proponents of female bodyhair, enemies of glass ceilings, of the mirrored ceiling above us, supporters of equal pay for equal work that extended to a fair wage for domestic chores for the stay at home parent. That was the milk we were raised on. We hated strobes and fucking hated being recalled to the genre distinctions between hiphop and rap. But this must not be construed as like racism. We had never been to a stripclub before. The flesh was live, not just live on the monitors.
Our share, all our poker money from the Moe split, was in our msgrbag, which would not leave our neck. We had not been able to count it all exactly.
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Moe returned to the table with the coatcheck girl and picked up his trench and huddled into it and sat again to take out some bills. He paid her this fistful of cash she was fanning us with as like it was our turn and though we only shook our head it was as like she was angry with us not for denying her but for being ourselves, and so she left, and we were left to correlate an increase in stiletto height with an increase in length of stride.
Moe was kicking at the denominations that had spilled to the tile, he was kicking the $50s and $20s into a mound and then leaning as like to fall and stuffing them back into his pockets.
Then he took out something black, contoured round and smooth as like a lingam, and he pointed it at us and we put up our hands. “Either I rob you or we rob this joint together,” he said.
Then he laughed and set the remote down on the table and tugged the trenchflaps around to his lap and dug through unloading the other pockets.
The exterior pockets held cash but the interiors held remotes, a different failed successful remototype in each pocket, rather no type because all universal. Also packs of batteries. AAs. AAAs.
Moe lined some remotes on the table and some on his lap but a bigger one was in his hand and he pressed at a button and nothing. Or anything that happened was just not discernible to us, because we had been transported to another time so faraway that the future must miss us and the present was only the waveparticle excitement of the past.
Moe repocketed the biggie then and picked up a smaller one instead and pressed a button but nothing or just the undetectable happened again, and so he repocketed it and went for a third, which had come from a breast slit, a fourth, which had come from a hip slit, a model even smaller than the models preceding it, and with a strand of DYMO plastic label tape peeling: the Amote 2niversal.
Moe pressed, and up on the TVs stockcar crashes changed to the sitcom Friends, pressed again and changed foulshot recaps to the sitcom Seinfeld. Pressed yet again and the stereo system hiphop got louder to rap. Pressed the TVs that were muted unmuted. A movie about a woman who fell in love with her vacuum or how much plasma a papertowel absorbed or how baby gentle this roll of toiletpaper was or else it was a commercial.
We took another remote, took another that worked and we worked it more too, in a History Channel war documentary, and the girls onstage below the switching were caught in the crossfire, the changing flame colors and shrieks of the laughtracks, and they slowed their dancing toward the screens, they stopped their dancing and then the hugenormous penitentiary brawny bouncer who was the only untelevised personality not fixed on the girls or the screens was waving a truncheon as like to smack the plastic from our hands.
We turned to leave just as like he was clearing the other remotes from our table and cracking a few between boot and floor.
Outside he was saying, “Gimme those fucking things!” because this was something a bouncer would say and because we were drunk and menthol was burning our lips it was Moe who said, “These are the property of the federal government,” and the bouncer said something as like, “Fuck you, gimme,” and Moe said, “We are fieldtesters and this is the field.” But it was a full parkinglot of the cheaper SUVs and the type of sportscars that are just sedans with spoilers attached and the bouncer yelled in essence, “Do not make me call the police,” and Moe yelled, “Do not make me call Al Gore.”
A fight but with blood would have erupted had we not dragged Moe away, and walked off down the strip.
We were the only pedestrians in the universe, pointing randomly, pressing buttons randomly. Most of the bars and restaurants we passed had projectors flinging shows onto walls, and they were not affected, and most of the karaoke monitors were not affected either, and because the streetlight never changed and click as like we might we were unable to change it we waited long to cross at the crosswalk, so long that a homeless pixel had the time to get near with its shoppingcart of recyclables and Moe pointed his remote and pressed and said, “You are dead,” and the homeless said, “Tell me about it,” and Moe pressed again and said, “You are alive,” and the homeless said, “Give me a cig,” fundamentally.
Then the light changed and we crossed and once we got residential it was just splenda. Moe fell and in helping him up we fell too and Moe helped us up and led us down Cienaga. We are not going to pretend we know LA. We had four years at Montessori but we are not going to pretend we know Spanish. But La Cienaga was as like a swamp or drowning. We have not had a drink since. We are yoga practitioners and reformed adherents of the revered Master Classman. We are Stage IV terminal bardo. We are clean. We maintain a monastery in Noto.
We took Holloway or Hollow Way the street might have been down to Hacienda, we recall Hacienda. Bungalows and cottages in the mission style or as like the Moors had wandered off from the studios and conquered the rest of Hollywood. The residents of all the terracotta around us were not the poors who are never asleep, yet neither were they the rich who are never awake, instead they were the middles who were always getting stuck in the middle and paused between. We put ears to their sills, eyes to their drafts, cupped at their panes, peeked through their bubbles, passed unscathed through their walls and with our remotes went flicking their switches ghostly.
Moe messed with one guy in a groundfloor unit by flipping his Indiana Jones to either softcore porn or a nature show about the beach and how undressed a girl had to be to enjoy it. We were arguing which but the guy blocked our vista and gave us another show by getting up from his beanbag and searching the shag on all fours for his own remote, and not being able to find it, crawled over and rechanged the channel and sat back down but Moe pressed again, and it was either softcore again or just a show about the harmful effects of pederasty on coral, we did not stick around to find out. Instead Moe flipped a neighboring woman onto some frequency, no way of telling whether it was some special mod or just a glitch, but we got her from an MTV or VH1 grind into fuzz, pure flakey rain she could not get out of, we could not get her out. On the next house his channel up/down did not work, or did not work with the consistency of our volume and picture, so this matching monogrammed robe couple had their domestic soundtrack shrieks blared as like we hued and tinted the picture, turning all the whites and blacks to yellow.
We cut across a yard and Moe got snagged in a mesh for volleyball and dropped his remote and then we got snagged too by our msgrbag and dropped our remote and we both scrambled around just searching. But we decided to screw it and keep moving only as like a siren drove past, though the loss enraged Moe who said, “It is just a false alarm, people panicking that they have lost their entertainment.”
But maybe he or we had dropped our remotes earlier or maybe later in a pool, point is we had the big remotes in our hands, basically the biggest ones and the only buttons they had that worked anything approaching universally were the Powers and because one click that would turn off an on TV would also turn on an off TV, we canceled each other, we canceled the couples, in darkness or colorbar light. We plugged and unplugged from a distance removed. Then either a scream from a resident or a scream from a speaker but whichever it was it would fade, their echo would fade, or just blend into the next as like we bolted. Garagedoors opened but nothing would be inside except kittylitter and a hose. Nothing would be inside except bulk granola bars and a Chevrolet Blazer. We buttoned them closed and bolted. Our msgrbag was gashed and leaking cash and Moe was dropping cash too and the gusts blew the bills across the patios and lawns and we chased them. We ran past a mailbox shouting about how much we hated mailboxes, with their weeny flags, obnoxious. We ran past a villa whose mat was mounded with advertising circulars shouting about how much we hated advertising circulars and the sprinklers turned on and soaked us or maybe we fell into a Jacuzzi or maybe only Moe did. Then an autolight switched on and we crouched in a hedge until it switched off and we emerged but it detected our motion again and pitbulls barked for our throats.
Toward the back of the property was a sleepy casita and Moe went to wake its screens but his remote did not work so we tried ours and ours did not work and Moe fumbled for batteries and replaced his and nothing and replaced ours too and again nothing either, and so we leaned against the trunk of a palm and kept smacking the remotes against the palm, and sliding open their back casings and taking out their batteries and shaking the water out of the casings and replacing the batteries again. New ones or two old in the other direction, plus to minus and minus to plus, sliding the covers back until clicking.
But the moon could not be raised and the sun could not be lowered and the night could not be rewound and the day could not be fastforwarded. The sky was still dark to the west but getting light to the east and the casita was just the alleyed trash vestibule for a dump of apartments decorated with archways and turrets and CO2 emissions, the Alhambra, it was called, or the Alcazar. We crept into the courtyard and people were stirring and so their TVs were stirring too. We clicked and off they went.
But then this was cur, unexpected. The TVs that were on would turn off but the TVs that were off would not turn on, at least not the ones we discerned through the screened windows that were both off and on at once because toward the west they reflected and shone and toward the east they absorbed and were shadows.
We had become crashers, blackeners, goodnight monitors. We pounded for that last surviving function of our last surviving button, pounding harder and faster to keep up with the wakers, putting them back to their sleeps as like dreaming.
We were in a fit, rolling along a lattice fence and slamming that only button in its only function, shutting the apartments down, shutting the city down, snapping and zipping everything up, putting everything off off off off, forever.
We came to a caretaker cabaña whose window had no shade and through the window was all junk hefty wood rung around with cola sweat and not retro or vintage but just sad floral print upholstery stained with seepage from the foam noodle containers, but over and above it all as like lording was this new expensive polymeliac idol screen showing news, which nobody was paying any attention to but a wheelchair.
Or whatever was in the wheelchair was still asleep or just dead as like the body on the news we could see, we could hear it — a body as like of a child, crisp and bleeding and wailing in stereo, and yet before we could be told who this was, or how this was, before we could be told when and where this was — we clicked it, we cut it.
“Shiva,” Moe said, he said we were Shiva, but only the two of us together were, the ear that hears the ear, the allseeing infrared third eye of the consort of death.
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[recfile 58 hello hello.]
Testes testes 1 2 3. Do re mi. Pop goes the sibilance. Red leather yellow leather. Aluminum linoleum. L M N O P.
Do not leave your Tetbook unattended. We repeat, do not leave your Tetbook unattended.
[So we were dealing with how you got involved with Carbon Capital.]
It was fairly straightahead, at least it was at the sniffing of asses. Basically no one wanted to fund us. No one even wanted to discuss our funding, which we to be honest took personally as like a presentation issue. We were unwashed, which was borderline normal. Malnourished, insomniac, rude, all borderline normal too. But also we could not explain what we did, or could not explain how there was money in it.
Keep in mind this was a time of major seeding, major sowage. Sums were being strewn to the breezes, and reaped. But every firm had responded firmly the same. Profitability implausible. Not just for us but for any of our partners. Everything was still vertical then. Not horizontal but vertical. We would drive traffic away just when the wisdom was insisting on users being kept inportal or at least onsite. Domains had to be protected, hosts prioritized, content would never be mutual. The VCs still considered sites as like stores or casinos. Do not let them out, the users. Do not let them leave to consume or even peruse the products and/or services of competitors. But in our model coming would be going as like going would be coming. No difference ever countenanced, because we were just the conduit. Expose the users to all competitors because the exposure itself will be the shop of life, where users become their own products and/or services. That would be our gamble.
Basically it was Moe who made us profitable, but accidentally. This we have to stress, it was never his intention.
He was an artist, an engineer, no rapacious dick tasseler graduated from B School to a Series A. He could count cards, up to four decks, but he could never even balance his checkbook. It was just something he said. Something for us both to regret.
[I don’t understand — regret what? And how do you make money accidentally?]
Backtracking. We were just heading back to the Bay from LA whingeing to Moe about our lack of offers. No bids on purchase. No bids on license. All rejections were accompanied by referrals to consultants. But then we had no money for consultants. Every VC hinted that things would be different if we had advertising. Paid banners up top, paid sidebars. But we were against any advertising. Unclean, violative.
Moe, who had no appetite for businesstalk, stayed hungover autopilot silent. He got off at the right exit but in the wrong direction, permuting the 680 into the 280 as like we were going to his place. We were going to our place, though, to drop us off. Backtracking was, though all of San Jose was, ponderous. But then we passed a billboard.
[What billboard?]
That is the point, it changed. We cannot recall what exactly it was at the time. Some local place. Some fuel place with a family zoo and swings and slides and a ballpit. Moe said, “Did you ever notice that on billboards on the highway they never advertise for crazy shit as like a pit a hundred miles away?” and we said yes, “but that every ad is made for parents passing fast and having to make quick decisions pertaining to where to stop for bathrooms or gas or balls for kids to swim in?” and we said yes, again. “The point is just what is expeditious and convenient, what you need, and where you need it,” and we were with him all the way.
It was as like there was a redwood tree always just in front of our fender and though we were speeding we would not have hit it otherwise. Inexplicable. No one would have even grazed the thing but leave it to Moe when we told him this, weeks later, when we told him we were algying a version, months later, and went with him to Gutshteyn to patent the thing just the two of us and partner him to Tetration, to downplay his involvement. Summer 97.
[Adverks?]
Confirmative. Everyone was still thinking about onvertising, online advertising, as like a phonebook. As like the Diatessaron. Whitepages in the middle, yellowpages all around based on whatever, on whoever, would pay. But then to take the terms a user searched for and respond to them with ads, to respond to them individually and with only the ads that pertinated alongside our free results, which would inadvertently demonstrate the supremacy of our free results, that was total Moe. Wasted nothing. Perpetual motion. Reversible.
Leave it to Moe, captain machine, general mechanics, to deliver such sagacity from just a billboard.
[Adverks — this was what lured Carbon Capital?]
Dusty. For serious, Dusty.
He was hayseed localish, with a family just a generation or two off the thistle farm, tightwad inspectors for the USDA, Dustbowl grim.
But Dusty did well.
His address, but his treemail address, growing up, had been the splitlevel of a nulliparous uncle and aunt in Fresno, the last on the culdesac that still zoned him into the charter school district, which then scholarshipped him to Berkeley, which then shipped him out east to intern the P/E desk at Credit Suisse, but basically his significant other at the time left an email out on his computer and Dusty read it and uncovered an auxiliary relationship the SO tried to rationalize as like research for an NYU cosplay or furry fetish social science study, immaterial.
Dustin now that we are remembering. Something stupey as like Smith. Point is, he moved back to the Bay, started grappling at a dojo, started a grainsifting shift at a coop, landed a desk at Carbon. The lowest desk all the exes would land on, with all the prospectuses that Carbon was about to pass up but still was cur about only because a rival might be stupey enough to go for them, and so the public might be too, if the businesses went public. He was not allowed to make decisions, but had to take responsibility for misdecisions and chances missed. The worst job a VC can have, to be the CV, meaning that if someone else ever makes bank on a prospect snubbed, get ready to update the résumé.
So Tetration settles on his pile, meaning the partners had already passed and after this last review Tetration was reduce reuse recycled.
But Dustin was a gamer. Dustin understood. It is not just math and science that are relational. We are sure the same must hold in its way for the humanities in which something in one context means something else in another. In gaming, in the fantasy realms especially, each avatar has a quest and improves his or her chances of success in that quest by alliances. Trolls are short but smorgs are tall, so a troll can squeeze undetected into a tubehive but cannot reach the tubehive and so must be boosted by a smorg. Once inside the central lair it takes a human male to slay the ouroboros. The human male wants to save the human female, the smorg wants the scepter, the troll wants only an ouroboros tooth whose magic powers can save the shire. Elves can also help, with archery. Also wizards.
Each quest is different. And though each quester might not want to participate in the relative subquest of the other, participation is necessary for the ultimate quest of each to attain completion. Each roam from the goal must also be an incentive. Do not aid the smorg just to be aided by the smorg. Rather, trust destiny, trust fate. Help the human male rescue the human female because it is she the prophecy refers to, Princess Wyvern, whose power is her ring, which before her capture she had entrusted to the Norns, who had entrusted it to a Teut, who is currently imprisoned by a Hun who, immaterial.
That is how Dustin talked about it with us, with his superiors. Each search would find its own result, but along the way the terms of the search would be generating other results and each would have its price. The main search would never be lost, and the subsidiary searches would always be strictly demarcated. They would be intersections, byways.
Diligence was due, and so we were called in to demo the algy.
Way back then Carbon was still used to prospectives hauling in their own gear to show and tell, that is the deep history we are talking, the buggy whip era.
But we just had a memorystick.
Carbon founding CEO was John Bates, JBates, most famous for having basically invented silicon, which comprises as like a quarter of the earth and so he basically invented the earth. There was a massive hunk of that element in the middle of his desk and clear crucibles lined along the mantel in which crystals were being grown out of hubris, unwaferable ingots and boules. He was as like a semiconductor himself and though a digital oracle to the media not many know of his analog activities administering the shipping enterprises that allowed the political and business elites of Greece to float approx 80 times the GDP of their country through Cypriot accounts. He wore gray slacks and a white dress shirt with a gray number 14 ironed on the back, the atomic number of his tetravalent metalloid.
We loaded Tetration.com onto his Gopal N-Ovum, a machine that without his investment would not exist. We searched for the Carbonites and found their site, in the version just updated. Then we let the Carbonites try it themselves, and all the searches they called for were for “marathon training” and “knife collecting,” “arbitrage” and “the euro,” and other topics they knew preoccupied their boss. Sites were found and we were raptured, because this was the first time, the first presentation, in which nothing had crashed.
Then JBates searched himself and found a distinguished benefactors page for the Claremonts mentioning his donation of auditoria, and a page for the Hellenic League of America mentioning him as like the recipient of the Ribbon of Daedalus. There were profiles in Wired and The Wall Street Journal, and a flash animation of him as like the devil with horns pitchforking Gopals and gulping them whole, which he played for us twice.
Apparently, he was also the volunteer tech for the Sacramento County Historical Society, and had even designed his own GeoCities page—“The contents of this page do not reflect, refract, diffract, or diffuse the opinions of the Sacramento County Historical Society”—which documented his genealogy with particular emphasis on the life and career of one Ioannis Baetylus, who came to America in the early to mid 18somethings, came west in the mid to late 18somethings, and pioneered cyanide leaching at the gold rush around Coloma and the silver boom of the Comstock Lode, which left him rich, then paralytic, then dead.
And it was the corresponding ad that sealed the deal for us, as like tetrating “Baetylus” solicited a banner for a deal on Mediterranean cruises from the newly launched triparian.com, just contracted with by The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters, which in turn derived thirdparty sidebars for Kodak.
JBates signed the check that day.
This was still the age of signing checks so we had to take it to the Wells Fargo and wait in line as like everyone else to fill out a slip and deposit it.
But then also he handed us two caveats.
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[Let me guess — no Moe?]
Not quite.
[Compulsory bathing?]
AMOR, AROM, MARO, MORA, OMAR, ORAM. Administration. Management. Organization. Responsibility. The Reign Of Multiple Acronyms, ROMA. The Regency Of Authoritarian Maturity, ROAM. Carbon demanded a Culpable Adult Reliable Bureaucrat Overlord Normalizer and had us sign an agreement to the effect that we would hire a suitable executive by a suitable date that was as like now, as like yesterday. An exec subject to our nomination but their approval. This was a lesson, indubitably. Let the others canvass but always retain veto power yourself. Saves the upperhand party the time and energy of vetting, saves the lowerhand party from trashing the basement and themselves.
According to the agreement we signed not only did we have to conduct this search for a Tetration chief with the help of headhunters, the choice of which was up to Carbon, but also the fee for this cannibalism was our responsibility. Organization. Administration. Management.
Never let a firm with only 4 % equity suggest anything, especially not a lawyer. Gutshteyn learned on the job, was taught even the finer sartorials by Mintz, Mintz, Parce, & Hashing LLP. The education was relentless. For Gutshteyn, for us.
Deepcast, that was the name of the headhunting group. Carbon had to hire and pay them whether they got a scalp or not and would bill us once our earnings had reached a certain threshold.
Which threshold pertained to caveat two, which disagreement we still
Or our order has gotten all mixy because we must have disagreed before any check or chief casting
Maybe it is unimportant?
Maybe skippable?
[What? Deepcast?]
Adverks. Its algys were copatented between us and Moe. But Carbon wished to have the patents transferred to Tetration. We and Moe were against it but had no leverage. Cull and Qui ensured we had no leverage, after Carbon had informed them that if Adverks was our only profitability, then it had to be ours, in the inclusionary plural. We yielded.
[Carbon was afraid of Adverks going out on its own as a separate business? They didn’t trust you or Moe?]
Both, 100 %. But stop. Bear this. Everything will be related.
We fantasized about being able to type all the qualities we desired in a corporate boss into a searchengine that would just spit out the result, his/her title and brief, spew a figurehead to that Aeron throne that tilted precarious atop the nominal cap of the company pyramid. CAO, Chief Amnesia Officer, CBO, Chief Borderline Intellectual Functioning Officer, CCO, Chief Catatonia Officer, Chief DSM IV. Qualities as like Facey, Gladhandy, A Suit, No One. Quantity, 1. We settled on President. Start Immediately.
But if there was no extant tech to auto this, there was another model. A game, a lark, a larp. Basically. A live action roleplay.
The Deepcast Group kept mailing us prospect dossiers through treemail and we would read them and group accordingly. All the candidates were presented as like Hogwarts alumni, veterans of Gondor and Gandalf the Whites, but that was just sheer cloakery. They were more as like B and C class asuras and rakshasas. More level six stridlers, vikrams disguised. Some had intense lanthanide reserves of experience, others just the faintest lilypulse of texpertise. And their armor and weapons training varied wildly.
In choosing our President we had to cloak ourselves, which meant doing laundry. We were set up on dates in the depths of fusion pits, grills in the round, cushioned across from liminal lusers trying to impress us by having saki or soju made special, a rare hybrid breed of tuna or salmon flown in. Or by bringing their own lapsang souchong, ordering the kitchen to resmoke the duck, ordering in Cantonese to show that they knew, that we knew, that the waitstaff was not from Kyoto. There was the woman who explained to us how menus were assembled, with a very expensive item listed just above a cheaper item but the cheaper item would have a higher profit margin as like $50 for Wagyu beef followed by $24 for General Tso chicken, the cost of which was nothing. Then there was that other woman who brought her capuchin monkey along for the meal and ordered another placemat to place on the floor by our booth so the monkey could practice its pilates. Once we got the same fortunecookie as like our prospective, “Confucius say, market penetration should begin with dessert.”
We realized then that our decision was becoming more complicated. All the toolbars we were interviewing were more obnoxious than anyone tech. They were not smart, just articulate, mouth vectored, conventionally staffable. Wharton quants accredited by Brooks Brothers, displaying their lobbying aptitude to such a degree that we had to remind them we were not Congress. Copula function approaches to default correlation were not math, because debt was not a science. We realized then that if we were being forced to take this for serious, we would hold out for what we lacked, not a connoisseur of cryptoasian gastronomies but a bonafide compliterate vizier on the ultima thule tier.
But then Deepcast sent
Rather it was Carbon that had Deepcast send us Kor
Though who sent Kor to Carbon we do not wish to guess
Or perhaps you will or perhaps through Balk, though Balk is not
We had become frustrated, not by our regular gluten and alcohol abstention, but by the mimicry of the rectards interviewed. Some of them skimped on their entrees while others skipped appetizers and dessert altogether, and as like we declined wine and beer, they did too and in doing so betrayed their weakness, politeness. That was why it was refreshing that Kor suggested a bikeride but would not divulge anything regarding distance, duration, or route. Kori Dienerowitz.
All he told us was to meet him by the Searsville marker, which we were not familiar with, and was not online, and already enough of a ride to get to. We took 84 up and around Bear Gulch, back around Skyline to 84 in a loop. Kor rode a special titanium bike made for titans, fitted with large allterrain tires and an xxtralarge seat of the same circumference made by a guy from Texas and intended for obese motorcyclists. A business Kor was invested in.
Our gut reaction had been he would never keep up, but then he did, and we were impressed until he was at our side going up a slope and then passing us going down and keeping the lead. We were still impressed, but ailing. It was Mountain Home or Sand Hill and then across the freeway into Woodside, Atherton. We were pedaling ourselves to dehydrated death unhelmeted in cutoff denims and a polo on a lesbian basketed greenmarket bike borrowed from M-Unit and Aunt Nance, just following or trying not to lose that fat ass cracked between the two pieces of maximally stretched pink spandex below a helmet reminiscent of the heads of the aliens in Alien. All the way to this café, Au Natchl. Which was his choice but only because it would have been ours. We, heaving, were the ridiculous party. The only thing he said to our gasping, “Never make excuses for your equipment.”
We got the counterfeit chorizo scramble, soy replacement fries, etrog juice, chia chai.
He went for his bellyworn fannypack, unzipped a plasticbagged cheeseburger.
Warm. Hot. Jack in the Box. Soggy bun stuck melted to patty.
Basically, as like he usually told it, the paramount tragedy in the life of an army brat was that the family never stayed put in any one locale for enough time for him to develop at football. Individual skills were developed, team skills were not. Kor had attended four different highschools before joining the army. Rather he had been forced to apply to, and been accepted by, West Point. He was unable to make the football team. But then he exercised, gained weight, gained glutes, adductors, abductors, and tautened the hamstring. Then he made the football team. This was an unprecedented feat as like Vietnam. 1968, Tet Offensive. His position was linebacker. But then he played a game and broke his coccyx. Then he was rehabilitating, on leave, dropped out. He moved in with his mother in Eugene. His mother moved to Seattle but left him the RV. All he did was follow football. Not teams or players. He followed the coaches. He felt at last as like he was living for himself and his goal was to become either a coach or referee. Which required psychology, kinesiology, early childhood education. He swapped sports for the liberal arts, infiltrated the humanities. Though discrimination was another explanation for the trade. West Point did not exactly embrace his sexuality. Granted that he explained it this way belatedly, only after being named gay business leader of the year. 2004.
He enrolled at Reed College and then transferred to Evergreen. He was a reformed cadet jock undercover amid the counterculture, studying gay athletic history, carpentry, blacksmithing. He bounced around communes that raised their babies as like they raised their eggplants or rabbits in hutches, collectively. Then at some point whether being pursued by or pursuing some lover or job he rode his motorcycle to Bogotá, Colombia.
He related all this to us vaguely, in a way that implied not squander but wonder, the sense that were he to be honest about what he had done at our age, no one would ever credit it, we would be ashamed of ourselves. Still we were relieved that it was not just us, that other customers were reduced by him too, by his size. The customers and staff at Au Natchl. He patronized the waiter, matronized the busboy, corrected their Spanish, and as like to the question of what he had been doing in Bogotá, Kor answered, “Trying to stay young.”
But then you will have to suss all this out for yourself. Doubt, struggle, coast. Trust, coast, struggle. Pedal to turn the wheels until the wheels are turning the pedals. Miss the landscape regardless. At a certain point, motion alone becomes truth.
“How did you get into tech?”
“My father retired from the army in 76,” Kor said. “Founded his own outfit. He was fed up with my being a bum. He paid my way back to the States and hired me at son rates.”
“To do what?”
“Time travel. Meaning I arranged meetings for him in the future, and paid the bills from the traveling, the past.”
“For serious though?”
“The airplane recorders, the blackboxes that record flight data and cockpit activity, keeping the info on anything that goes wrong, just in case everything goes wrong. Dad had adapted them for car use and was trying to get Detroit onboard. Then it was the Japanese, the Korean chaebol. 200x the number of people die in car crashes than in plane crashes annually. Dad was sure this was it, his ticket.”
“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.
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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.
[You’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 horizontal 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.
True Beta, 1.0, is life. Is human. Opening all the windows, opening all the doors, knocking down the firewalls to let the bugs out. Some butterflies, some moths.
All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever. We as like a species will just shrink and wear.
We were tired in our minds, the software. Exhausted in our bodies, the hardware. A wreck even before a crash. Fit only to be sunk for a reef.
We were wasted far from April, and too near August. The softlaunch would go hard. Cull was complaining about “link flaccidity,” “conflab.” Qui kept muttering about “chaingangs,” “intimacc: ing.” We had selfdiagnosed shingles. We had selfdiagnosed everyone. Prodrome, aura, ache, postdrome, migraines have four phases. 1998 did too.
We could not remember where our office was, we could not remember when we had been in it last and so we just chaired a terminal in whatever room in whatever sector on whatever floor of whatever building until its assignee would return and we would move on. We were lucky in that not many would lay claim and displace their Founder. On every terminal surface were Diet Snapple bottles, churro wrappers, and the glomerations of wet tissues that in drying resembled little tiny furrowed desiccated mouse brains. Everything smelled of semen, and the Trapezzis aside, our one female employee who was also our second Afromerican had quit.
We glitched, we grated, broken links would not be purged, debroken links would not be reprised, header text was weighted too heavily, or comptrastingly had light relevance to body and/or anchortext. That being the basic text that was linked, 80 % of which accurately described the nature of the link, as like Visit Tetration, which linked to tetration.com, meaning that 20 % inaccurately described the nature of the link, as like Visit Tetration, which on a blog maintained by an Adverks rep fired for time theft linked to fagsuck.com.
We were disturbed, not at the vengeance but at having to recalibrate our favor/disfavor ratios.
Spamsites abounded. Phisheries, grouseries.
The address given for Au Natchl was that of a competing organobistro on the Alameda de las Pulgas. The phonenumber of the kasha joint was that of a salon also on Castro, called Kashas, possessive, not possessive.
Hatespeech, we slaved on that. Racists were rectarded but had figgered how to post. The issue of how to keep a search for “negro” not pejorative but historical. The issue of how to keep a search for “jew” a noun and not a verb.
How to keep a tetration for “penis” or “vagina” clinical, not porny. How to keep the user from being misinterpreted or worse, misadvertised to.
Also we were hacked. Malevolent techs were cur. We went chasing down their viruses, their worming. Crackbabies, the first people who had ever seemed immature to us, broke into our systems and we caught them. We set traps and caught them and spanked them hired. Tetrateer #36 Mark Garnisht seemed fetal, zygotic, immaterial.
We debugged but they were as like exterminators. They smoked out cocoons. Squashed roaches and ants one line at a time. But because they were hackers we had to ensure that in fumigating they were selective with their poisons.
That was our life. Work was. Fail reports, patch recommends, distro to uside or tetside accordingly. This might explain our response or nonresponse to The Lesstel. An external off the record subsection of Tetration. We were crunching, we had deadlines to die for, we were busy, the truth was busy. 04/01/98, which we missed. 06/08/98, which we missed. And so if in the midst of this frantic T minus countdown just to make launch by 07/01, by 08/01, Kor approached us to mention that he was going to czar a special discretionary security unit, what were we supposed to reply. We are not asking a question.
Kor took us into his confidence. He said the cyberattacks were slowing us down. We were not equipped to keep up both with them and our algys simultaneously. Sitting by ourselves had sapped our force posture. Construction crews were ubiquitous, employees were being hired without adequate background checks and assigned duties without adequate monitoring, external threats would become internal, inevitably. The best action course would be to diversify our vigilance, at least until the Tetplex was finished with enough capacity and safeguards in place to reinstall this unit. The VCs had already granted approvals, operating under the principle that all intel we uncovered on new viruses and worms along with all patches we developed would belong to Carbon, which would split any revenue generated, 60/40 in their favor. No worries, Kor said, this would not require any Tet or Adverks teams to be reassigned, he would be staffing this himself. Then, and this was sneaky pirate of him but we did not register it then, he asked if we had any names in our Rolodex for him to vet. We did not answer. We did not even break screen. It shames us still that we just shook our head and smirked, “Rolodex.”
The Byx B&B Inn was summarily converted into the Lesstel, a motel, a notel, no telling. Its addy and moribund phone have since been seared into our memory, synaptic burns between axon and neuron. 816 West Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale, (408) 734-4607. Just off the 101. It was a bleak strip of grimy pink stucco over cinderblock all vacancy rooms that had gone out of business with telegraphy, but now it would house a copy of our systems, along with a terminal or two. We admit that we gave it no thought, we had already given all our thought away.
It was owned by a bank, we cannot recall which, and Kor ensured it was purchased not by Tetration or even Carbon but by a shell, Accommodations Made, Inc. The bank had repossessed it from its owner, Ian Byxby, who, immaterial.
We are not sure who did the setup for Kor, because, again, we were not present. They were not staff, that is certain. They were tenants at full occupancy. We do not know how they were paid, or what, by whom. We do not know whether room and board were included. We imagine a vestibular ice machine on the fritz, a drained pool the color of chlorine to fall into.
We had octalfortied it clean from our drives by the time it was recalled to us. But we will return to this, we promise.
://
[After that invitation phase, what were your expectations for admitting all users? What was your experience after the site had gone live?]
Understand that Tetration as like every other searchengine, basically, was predicated on the assumption that establishing a presence online was analogous to the first word or first step of a baby. Infants, toddlers, do not want to just lie around unvisited in their earliest sites, they want to grow and move and communicate, they want to connect with and be connected to others. Apparently, however, this was not always the case, and people who had put up sites would routinely request that we delist them. It was not our meniality to answer such requests, but they were answered, by others, and for each instance of Kor mentioning a user registering an inappropriate content or intellectual property infringement objection, we are certain there were hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of petitions for us to remove from results pics or vids of users with their exes, not even compromising pics or vids, just distressing, or distressing exspouse blogposts. The legit objections went to Legal. The rest just got form mail. You will excuse us. Please. We presumed that everyone wanted to be public. But not just that, we presumed everyone also wanted to be popular.
This principle was fundamental, due to the algy. Which we had made to order, and only to order, not to resolve any dramatizing ambivalence about the public self.
[You’re sure it was the math that convinced you? It wasn’t that you had your own taste for fame?]
Psychoanalysis again, überfaulty. Fame is just measurement, proportion, a weight, a number. But then everything is a number. There is no way to separate sums from our experience, and if there is a way then even that separation itself can be summed. You. We are sure you have difficulty doing double digit multiplication or converting the quotient of simple division into a fraction or percentage. Regardless, you still exist in this system. You contribute to many fractions and many percentages. Unwillingly perhaps, but then you become counted among the unwilling. Your appetites, attractions, desires.
Anyway, you write, and what you write cannot be judged by any individual. The criteria become quantifiable only in the mass. Genre or medium criteria. Social, ethnic standards. All in perpetual flux. Which, with time, delineate metric. But now take out of the equation all the history of books, take out of the equation all of history. Without precedent there is no metric, no expectation. Now all you can rely on is what is marketed to you, retailed to your senses, and, also, on the instincts inside. The animal. Tell us, then, what will be unleashed? Imbue the users with the anonymity of animals, what will become popular?
[The same lowbrow lowest common denominator junk of offline TV and film, but on a screen that folds? Unreadable ebooks instead of unreadable books?]
404. Abort. Retry. Fail.
[Brands? Whatever’s advertised?]
AOL, Yahoo, Disney. CNN too. No doubt they were popular sites. Still are. Among the most visited. But still never among the most uniquely visited. Users just type the urls into a browser, or click a bookmark. No searching, no finding, no cur.
We mean something else, something novel, neolatrous. The popularity that cannot be purchased, only earned, or bestowed. The fantasies in aggregate, the figments in common. Not heuristic or empirical for all users always, but rational. Statistics. The number of links, not outgoing, but incoming. The maximal repetition rate of a minimal set of terms. That is how rank is determined. If two parents love each other, and get others to love what they make, then nine seconds, nine minutes or hours later, another meme is born.
Name us someone famous.
A celebrity, someone A-list.
[You think I’m in touch? Why not just list your friends?]
Do not snob us. Natalie Portman.
Surely Natalie Portman still trends.
[But why her? Don’t you think you’re every bit the celebrity she is?]
We met her once.
Or she met us.
Point being, she was popular, the terms of her were. “Natalie” alone, not much. “Portman” alone, very much. In her fullest iteration, though, “Natalie Portman” was unstoppable.
But not in any of the ways you might predict.
She was not Natalie Portman+actress, she was not Natalie Portman+celebrity, she was not even Natalie Portman the symbol, rather “she,” the “she” in quotes, more than anyone else, more totally than any other famous person or brand, so simultaneously served as like signifying and signified, in M-Unit language, that there was no use in defining designata.
Or, to put it directly, we were at a loss for what to do about, quotes again, “her” results, given that approx 82 % of all tetrations of, quotes one last time, “her” name, were accompanied by smut, and approx 24 % not accompanied by smut resulted in clickthrough to dubious sites rising rapidly through the rankings.
Everything was, you will forgive us, her vagina, her anus. Rather they were just the ideas, the conceptions, always better represented in the vernacular. Pussy, asshole. The pussy and asshole of Natalie Portman.
Tetrations for Natalie Portman topless, bottomless. Natalie Portman sex scene. Natalie Portman blowjob scene. The mouth of Natalie Portman. Semen, whatever the prevailing slang for semen, on her lips, on her teeth. “Natalie Portman 34B” OR “Natalie Portman 32B” OR “Natalie Portman 32B..34B” OR “Natalie Portman ~breasts ~boobs ~tits | jugs | knockers | honkers — pitchers — doors — cars filetype: jpg, mpg.”
This was the most craved escape in, or from, our universe. This was the most craven. Users tetrating for things they admitted were frauds, “natalie portman fake horse rape,” “natalie portman fake gangbang snuff.” Users tetrating, “how do i fuck natalie portman?” “natalie portman will u fuck me?”
The bias crap intruding, reinforcing. Hate kinks becoming our new normal. Questions we would never consider answering, even online. “why does natalie portman date fags?” “how big a nigger cock can natalie portman fit in her little jew hole?”
This was the basic lesson of the launch. On 09/01/1998, 06:00 UTC, we welcomed the public to itself, and this was how it returned the greeting.
The tetraffic altered pronto. It skewed. Hashtag understatement. The datasets we crunched concluded that our info w/r/t relations as like they were conducted offscreen had become comptrastingly tenuous.
Admitting users without registration was getting us abusers, and that was wounding. They moved into the neighborhood to find the doors open, not closed, and their temptation became our agony. They burned their crosses out on our lawn, then broke into the premises and got into bed with our family. It was Moe who offered the domestic analogy.
We had to move against the very users who with their every greedy purchase sustained us, who with every tetration for a pacifier or mobile or stroller to add to their cart, had multiple, exponential, spic MILF cumpilation tetrations. Same user. Same IP. This must have been, for anyone who shared that computer or head, dissociative, fragmenting.
Just a moment ago we ourselves had been concerned for the site, but now were concerned, or pretended to be, for people. We sat alongside Cull and Qui at our terminals and it was as like we each became our own business or employee, NSFWing constantly. We sifted and sieved, labeled and rated clickbait, as like online engendered through vulgarity, and diversified by hate, until the only consensus left was obscenity. For which we each had our own definition. Our own indefinability of its primacy. Our first mutual culture was becoming our last, a default devolution to simian sex and violence, which our algys were staging amid the personalized commercial identities of food, clothing, and shelter.
A person would consult linear algebra about how to terminate a pregnancy in a way that appeared accidental. Their spouse would seek advice on infidelity from differential calc. How to hide a body. How to acidwash all DNA traces off a body and hide it. This had not occurred to us as like risky before, the advice received no better than the deeds. We reasoned that our users were researching for a novel or screenplay. We rationalized that everyone in America along with half of the rest of globe was writing a novel or screenplay. Rather than passing prurient IPs onto the authorities, we filtered their sites, blocked them if illegal. Though a censored online could not represent existence. But an uncensored online should not. We told ourselves we were saving users from themselves. But we were also saving ourselves. We were soothed by recalling that even our online was not genuine, authentic. If the average user had limited access to childporn, we had no access whatsoever to the NSA, CIA, FBI, the IIA of NATO, though we guess we might have hacked them. We were soothed until we recalled that the life we were living was also not total, not full. The life we were living was empty.
[Wait — what you’re saying is that Tetration is or was engaged in active censorship of nonillegal sites?]
In what country — America? Or in China?
Bottomline, the point now is our feelings. Again, as like for the rest, we will get to it.
[So, your feelings?]
Do not condescend, we will return to this. For now, though, we were manic.
[How?]
We had selaccess from our office, but office is whatever. We had selaccess to an encrypted algy that tetrated without filter. We toggled between modes, between online as like it was, and online as like we were changing it. Flagged pages flew incessant. We never delegated, every decision was our own. This site was evil, that site was borderline evil, this was satire, that was parody. Making distinctions to make the rubric, delivering verdicts to write the lex. We tried to establish gradients and hierarchies, to formalize a protocol to reprieve this automatic. But nothing would equate, because nothing was equatable. Art was porn and porn was art and every joke was defamation, libel. We were stuck in a recursion, going loopy, doomed. Obsessive compulsives always have to match obsessive with compulsive.
[The pressure you were under was because of the politics, or guilt? Or just the workload?]
The pressure was us on us. If we experienced guilt it was not from violating any ethics or morals but the magnitude of the second eigenvalue. Tetrate it. Do not. Deploying emotions without matrices distressed us. Human intervention was the crime. Lack of system was the crime. This is all about our eternal failure to have deved a viable semantic algy that translates, interprets, and reads between the lines to appreciate intent.
[What about the launch itself?]
No party we recall. No circus bread or smoky mirrors. Just a press release by Kor. There was no call to fly in New York journalists only to demo a product already numinous at no cost.
[Your role was limited?]
The servers, we mean the Tetplex servers, were crashing. We were not handling the site queries let alone the media requests. Every time Kor opened his mouth our volume doubled. Every time we crashed Moe would hectically sweat as like the white crept up his sideburns and the wrinkles from the stress and tension rung wild around his mouth in the yelling of four languages to the 10 engineers he had hired for diversity, but diversity of expertise, because all of them were Jains. Cull and Qui would have to intervene while we rollerbladed the parkinglot. Doing grinds, fahrvergnügening. The AP took a photo that was faceplanted all over the press and the gist of the accompanying article was Tetration.com will keep your online inline, which was neither very funny nor accurate despite. Point being, that line in the piece was taken verbatim from our About page.
[Remember the publication?]
Does not matter. Just gossip, rumor, coupons.
[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.
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[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 along 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.
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[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 salient.
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.
We returned to our office, the office of Posek and Syskin, or Roland and Toole, to mull alone for a jag until we were found, within that standard deviation between Thursday and Friday.
We were the only ones around, but then a nose poked as like a talkingpoint just above our felt divider. Kor entered, squeezing, and while he pondered what of nothing but us and our terminal to sit down on, we told him we agreed, but told ourselves we regretted it.
[Why?]
Because he was not coming to persuade us, he said. Which is überindicative Kor, the confidence that his own conviction is enough to convince anyone of virtually anything.
We have that in common, us and Kor, and perhaps you too.
[So what was he trying to wrangle out of you?]
After the weekend. Hindu month of Shravana, late August. It was a mandir sessh but we forget which. A holiday. A major. A biggie. Putrada Ekadashi, when you pray to Vishnu if you are single for a wife, if you are a couple for a son. Or Janmashtami, when you celebrate the natality of Krishna as like the eighth avatar of Vishnu. Fasting. Insomnia.
Kor wanted to make an offering, to Moe, and of all things, he wanted the billboard.
The billboard Moe had passed every day or even twice a day for two years now to avoid traffic and tolls between home and the Tetplex.
The billboard that had inspired Adverks.
On our previous and only visit, on our way back from remotely controlling LA, the billboard that had inspired Adverks had advertised some local petting zoo or playland, then we recall Moe mentioning fashion, an ad featuring the model Lena Söderberg or someone resembling the model Lena Söderberg, and though we would just be inventing its next iteration it was comptrastingly bland as like for a mayoral campaign, or just for itself, Imagine Your Ad Here. This iteration had been especially enraging, to Moe, who must have taken the detour past this billboard only to feed that rage, or else to provide fodder for his interstitial work banter, because he would always be delivering us updates about it, verging into diatribes about the lazy wasteful Americanness he had taken it to represent.
But then just earlier that spring, toward the end of the fiscal year and the start of all our trouble, a new ad had finally gone up.
As like it was a sign.
It was a billboard, which now promoted a languageschool.
Kor had sent us out with the Schloger nephew who was interning for us that summer and was president of the mountain climbing club at Cornell, and Ronnie G who had a catering business, but a landscaping truck, and we drove all the lanes of tar that become Calaveras Boulevard as like they cross the 880 in Milpitas.
To recap: Ronnie Giudice, husband of Salvatrice Trapezzi. Randy Schloger, husband of Heather Trapezzi, uncle of the intern.
We drove along the chains of Verizons and AT&Ts and the Wells Fargos and the odd weird indie Thai restaurants that buffered the parkinglots that buffered the stacks of big box stores that would never be properly malled. We passed Best Buy and Walmart and an intersection of Mexican laborers, as like the access road wandered toward the freeway again, in that stunned and desperate way a dying coyote approaches a dumpster.
And then we stopped. At the last stoplight before the coiled ramps and cars. We were pinched between Ronnie G at the wheel and the Schloger intern nephew, and we were feeling their pressure, and feeling their doubt. Just after the light was the rear of a landfill. A planting of wan sapling evergreens and a fence at the rear of a commercial landfill. Then, attached to the fence and between the evergreens was a blue that was not the sky.
Rather, it was the Bay, billboarded up in the air in dramatic panorama, and though the Golden Gate Bridge was arching across it, the calibration or transfer was off and the result was less golden and more a silver gray as like ash, while the Bay itself was the color of all the weeds outside the frame. Bottomline, though, what was truly distinctive about the image was that in the oozing middle of the Bay, and half on one side of the bridge, half on the other, but also just erected through it, the Statue of Liberty was photoimposed in malfunctioning printer and monitorscalding electric blue screen of death.
The face of Liberty was not her face or even the face of a woman but the face of a genderless and racewise indistinct person neither old nor young and not even just one person but a composite. The blended American in flubbed retouch.
In the raised hand was still the torch but the other cradled what appeared to be a Dynabook. The earliest but unproduced tablet computer from Xerox-PARC.
The English text was “Study English With Us And Live Your Dreams (Both Conversational And Technical),” above text in every other language and a 1-800 number but no online presence just yet.
The Schloger intern nephew whistled as like Ronnie G gunned his truck. “Not going to be a problem,” he said.
The Schloger intern nephew set the ladder in the grass and said, “That German is whack, that Chinese is whack. The thing is falling down anyway.”
As like they had been stealing billboards all their lives.
We suggested it would be easier to razor and roll the thing but Ronnie G and the Schloger intern nephew insisted on detaching the billboard from the aluminum bracket full and complete in its plywood frame.
We trucked off with it propped between flatbed and cab.
It just occurred to us that it would have been easier to buy it.
Moe had a slanted rhombus shanty house at the edge of the Asian diaspora, Centerville, Fremont. Which explains why he spent time at the mandir. Nothing explains how he spent his money. We reversed into the driveway and honked and Kor came out to the stoop and across the tanned brown lawn. Ask us how he got inside. Ask us how he was sweating.
The doorway dimensions would not accommodate the billboard, and the garage was sealed at every threshold by a keypad whose combos were, Kor had found them to be, uncrackable. We were considering giving it a go just to show him up, but the Schloger intern nephew was already up on the stoop holding the billboard aslant and Ronnie G was revving his chainsaw. He sawed clean through the frame and bridge and even through Liberty, the paper chunking into papers and the paste that bound them brittling away to exfoliate ragged sooty rainbows. Every one of the ads was still there, apparently, providing backing, providing weight, as like each next ad had just been stuck atop the prior, as like for the benefit of the prior, to stick, bubble, lump, and make whole by the concealment, because now in their surfacing all that remained of whoever had or had not been elected, of Lena Söderberg or her double, and of that foundational inspiration of happy healthy parentless California children playing around a sandbox and monkeybars, was just a mass of acidburnt skin peeling twisted.
Kor directed the halves inside and had the Schloger intern nephew lean them between the walls as like to obstruct the window. They took up so utter much of the room that we and Ronnie G had to keep to the hall, and then he went outside to wipe down his truck.
We felt around for a lightswitch. A burro blanket was tacked to the wall and the plaster around it scummed with swatches of the deserty hues, evidence of a previous occupant deciding on, then abandoning, an upgrade. The linoleum was stripped. In the kitchen was a spork/knife, soysauce. The fridge was not plugged in. The efficiency tag was still on the range. The bathroom had just gone paperless. The bedroom was so unfurnished it did not even have a computer.
Circling back, Kor and the Schloger intern nephew had angled the billboard halves to fit in a diptych as like an altar. They had lined the baseboards along the hall with banded stacks of sacrificial cash, a $10K advance on the STrapp.
Not much, and not even generous as like an insult.
Anyway, Moe concluded his holiday fast as like he always did, with a japa prayer to Vishnu, Krishna, Devki, Devkikrishna, and froyo. Frozey yozey. Frozen yogurt. Moe was a freak for froyo. Every cup was a different system error blend. Kiddie cereals, gummis, dodol. He never used a scooper but his hand, two fingers. Not just for toppings, for gorging.
Before he even finished, though, he called the Tetplex. However by the time the Trapezzi Sisters had determined which office extension we were currently using, which was the office extension of the Soviets, Gushkov and Lebdev, Qui and Cull had patched in too. We listened to the licking. All that was hearable was inveigling and slurps, ambient clank of van.
We were trying not to announce ourselves just yet but must have been respiring because Moe without a swallow said, “Do you know what is rectarded?”
We said we did not know what was rectarded specifically.
He said, “STrapps.”
We agreed.
He wanted to know why not task, insert engineer here. He wanted to know why not task, here insert another.
But all we had to give him was what the VCs had given us, a flatterjob. No one else had his artistry, we said, no one else had his tenacity, that was what we told him, and it was while blowing that down the phone that we might have had the sense, we might have but did not, that this insistence on Moe was if not stupey then stupey suspicious.
Finally, Moe said he would do this suckalicious STrapp. But under four conditions.
One. He would never again be forced into a project. Two. He would not be listed in the patent filings for or be associated in any way with any STrapp product. Three. He did not want to report to Kor directly and if he had to report at all it would be to Carbon or Keiner and strictly via email. Four. He wanted Kor to personally restore the billboard to its original location, and replace the locks on his house and the bedroom alarmclock that was broken.
Kor unmuted his speaker just then and joined the call, assented to the first, assented to the second, and got Moe to compromise on the third by agreeing to his emailing the VCs but insisting he work out of the Moremory facility, though with total independence. Four Kor had to reject or rather accept as like a provocation.
We did not recall an alarmclock. Kor did not recall breaking one.
://
[Kor’s always been manipulative?]
Psychology is for trophy spouses and corpses. Even now you are wasting our time.
[But he always gets his way?]
Kor had gotten Moe, the one human responsible for making us profitable, relegated to the Moremory incubator just to hatch this hunk of STrapp, while without telling anyone he had Cull and Qui out on a nationwide fieldtrip searching for a location for a tentative DCent. We ourselves would not be tapped into this until the next genexec in September. The general executive meeting. September.
They were visiting visnes with an appetence for data. Our founding partners were in LA, meaning outside LA. New York, meaning New Jersey. They were in Illinois. Maryland/Virginia. Assessing the expediencies of the Texas/Iowa border. Data occupy no space but place matters in proximal terms. The closer the users to servers the closer the users to being served. Come for the speed, stay for the algy. If we supplied speed, preference would be won.
They were back for the October genexec. On the agenda was a discussion of two new cartopositioning sites and which one we would either have to dev against and compete with or compete with others to acquire. Penultimate item was the formation of planteams to improve our foreign semantics, which devolved into a wonky procon debate of Cyrillic rootzones, рф. Then Qui and Cull stood bashfully offering their surveys of the renewable energy compatibility, but just gray drab dull inclemency, of Celilo, Washington/Oregon.
Moe did not attend this meeting either, but should have. The drive should have been going into production already.
[You were in touch with him? I mean — what were you doing all this time?]
That was just about the time of the letter, which had been addressed to us and brought by post. A globally synched humanbased delivery system.
Point is, a letter had been delivered but not to The Clingers, where we still had the condo, neither to Sierra Vista, where we had rented this vinylsided cyanobacterially roofed crashpad to be maximally proximal to the Tetplex, nor c/o the Tetplex whose treemail has always been envelopes of anthrax flour and lipsticked postcards from deathrow, but c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance. M-Unit, who had called Super Sal who had called us to his phone, was apologizing for the snailish delay. The letter had been posted to their previous Palo Alto addy and so had to be fwd: d to their current Berkeley addy. Also, they had been away. M-Unit had never told us she was going, but insisted she had. They had mediated Eritrea, sabbaticalized Ghent.
We told M-Unit, drag to trash, it was just another beardy luddite demanding a ransom on our sanity. Though if she were feeling in her citizen mood, she might dial the FBI or the CDC.
Either way, we said, she would have to get used to our new profile, inure herself to philatelic harassment and Safeway bags of ricin left on the porch.
M-Unit countered with accusations of Chomskyism, or megalomania, and said that any fellow creature who had gone through the trouble of postage was due an audience, respect.
“Open it yourself.”
“We do not open mail that is not for us,” M-Unit said.
Aunt Nance, on the study extension, “But you steamed that Dutch envelope of mine, just for an offer to lecture on Baathist Clientelism at The Hague.”
“We do not get involved in conversations that do not involve us,” M-Unit said.
What Aunt Nance humped downstairs and unsealed was a normcore AAA roadmap to Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia. A handwritten line joined Fort Meade to McLean, from the middle of which another line went south to drown in the Potomac and make a T.
M-Unit offered that the postmark was San Jose, CA, 95126.
But the return addy was Pruristac, which does not exist except as like a midden of shellfish shells, a lost original Ohlone settlement on the margin of Pacifica.
[So Moe or someone impersonating Moe sent you some roadmap of the nation’s capital? Why through the post, though — he’d never heard of email?]
He had.
This was toward November. That cold warm clouding toward November. Fog in advection, wet light deresolutioning into darkness by noon. The Bay getting to resemble itself on the billboard.
Everyone was feeling this weather as like confirmative of STrapp fail and so a Keiner renege on the balance of our funding. That at least was the chatter in the corridor and at the end of the corridor the office of Kor was empty. Kor was never around. The claim was the common coryza. Or a stomach flu. Everyone chattered and wheezed.
The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside.
[Wait, hold up — I’m not seeing the connection. What does all this have to do with a map?]
The office of Kor, we had always avoided going inside. A showercurtain hung over the threshold, indicating a total availability to staff. We approached that clearish nylon sheet, and handled it carefully because the rod was not bolted but wedged between jambs and so would fall if tugged. The shelving units were empty then, as like they were waiting for their contents. Groundbreaking shovels from the African techschools we would finance, Taiwanese Olympic pingpong team jerseys, putters that decided the Masters, the key to the city of Sderot. Nothing Kor had any relationship to, just fealty from admirers, dignitary tribute, rubberplant, spiderplant, fern, ficus.
We picked up his phone and called Moremory in Cupertino, asked for Moe, who was not available.
We asked for Kor, and the lobby bot without any sardonics replied that Kor was available only at the number we were calling from.
November the policy changed.
[Fucking stop — you’re going to have to slow the fuck down and explain this to me. You suspected Kor of hanging around Moremory to crack whip on Moe and make sure the product shipped?]
November the policy changed. The new deal was no meetings. Kor had sent the email, which Cullqui fwd: d approvingly, and Quicull fwd: d disapprovingly, but we had also received the missive directly from Kor. We responded to such redundancies with an email reminding them of their founder status, which, if it had no other perk, at least signed a blank check re: scheduling. Cullqui replied all complaining about our tone, cc: ing Kor, bcc: ing Moe. Quicull replied all complaining back, cc: ing Moe, bcc: ing the Soviets.
We neglected to mention that we had taken to regarding them not as like friends anymore but a conformant unit, which we called Cullqui if they sided with Kor, and Quicull if they sided with us. We called them that mentally, then increasingly aloud.
We found ourselves unable to control our impatience and so went into the shared Tetcal and filled a convenient blankness, which turned out to be Thanksgiving.
The meeting would be a Culloquium, a Quiocullum, calendared for Founders Only, and for everyone else not a founder to worry about. Its only agenda would be to assert that it was still our prerogative to have one. A meeting or agenda. Cull and Qui canceled tofurkey carving with Roland, Toole, Posek, Syskin, and their consociate SOs. We had not been invited to that potluck. M-Unit and Aunt Nance spent their holidays of Puritan hegemony at the Korean spa.
The building 1 meetingroom had just been finished. It was paneled in slabs of gleaming serpentine that approx 140 million years ago had erupted from the mantle of the earth to become the crust of the Pacific that deformed it into greenness and receded, as like California rose. The mineralizations matched across the slabs, their quartz as like polished static. Everything, carpeting to knobs to handles, gave shocks. The table was sequoia, a crosssectioned stump obtained sustainably from a tree timbered dead outside Yosemite, the rings showing evidence of approx 620 years of fires and storms, after which we always lost count. Its glossy varnish was set with saddlethemed leather chairs.
Qui showed, and he stood, until Cull showed, and they sat, opposite each other, and so we sat too, but because the table was round all us CoFos were at opposites. CoFounders.
We opened by announcing Tetrateer of the Quarter, Salvatrice, who had just had a baby. Super Sal had Tetblasted about it, which was next item, a zero tolerance policy for all vanity Tetblasts.
Qui and Cull said nothing, so we declared a moment of silence to reflect on the genocide of the precolumbian peoples.
Kor, who would ordinarily facilitate our meetings, had introduced a practice of docking the pay of any Tetrateer who interrupted him, prorating the sum by time lost to interruption weighted by employee number. So, as like he lumbered through the door leveling our concentration, we figgered he owed us, despite his position. He had on jorts so short they were as like nonexistent below a long pouchy baja emblazoned with the Tetgram. We hated that insignia, TT, and hated its font, Fellahin Serif, designed by, immaterial. We hated “Your Site Never Dies, It Just Loses Rank,” “Never Hesitate 2 Tetrate,” “We Work 4 Free,” and “Tetriffic,” and hated the office contests too, Best Varint Reduction, Best Alt Use of Staplers, both of which we would have won except, immaterial. All were Kor initiatives.
Our President sat straining against the pommel of his saddle. We tried to decide whether his ruminant gumchewing meant that he was, or was not, expecting a meal.
We ceded the floor, and the single dryerase wall, to our CoFos, who had reconsidered their recommendation of DCentering Celilo, apparently, and were now unanimously in support of DC. Rather Maryland/Virginia. Celilo would never be feasible, they explained. Even if the Columbia River would scale, hydroelectrically, if the Columbia Gorge would be scaled, anemoelectrically, and regardless of all subsidies and tax credits.
They were revising their projection of average DCent power consumption to exceed 20–22 megawatts/quarter, an amount unsustainable on renewables alone. An amount unsustainable even if American forces would annex and refine all the fossils in Iraq.
The goal for now, they said, had to be to serve our Beltway customers, whether from a base among the Amish farms of Mechanicsville, MD, equidistant to two Mirant coal plants, or Newport News, VA, by a Dominion Resources coal plant that supplied NASA Langley, which had granted them a tour.
Throughout this report of our CoFos, something was nagging at us, something was off. It was Heather who had just had the baby, not Salvatrice. Anyway they both had off. They were stuffed together with the rest of the Trapezzis making gravy.
All our other employees, even our employees who had only just pilgrimed to our coast on probationary visas, were away and giving their thanks.
Kor chewed as like he was mouthing grace. Outside our meetingroom the Tetplex was all barren open plan bullpen and deserted pods, halogen for no one, and the hum of things unused but still plugged in.
Which explains why he was not spotted, this courier, why he was not stopped, this rider from across the Bay.
Someone, Moe or someone, must have let him into the lobby.
He must have wheeled straight through. Taken the stairs. Stepped them with his bike. The elevators, biometric now, at the time would have required a swipecard.
Our door was ajar and he was dizzy skidding through. Hispanic, Latino. Indo. Chaingrease on his denim and the wrong cuff was rolled. The smell of his sweat was of frying. He tried to slot his bike between the hinges, then leaned against the handlebars and huffed.
Rather, he was struggling with his backpack. A cinch string backpack. He shrugged to get loose of it and twisted in his windbreaker, writhing the pack around to his front until its toggle was in his teeth and he was biting to slacken the strings, to extricate a clipboard. He shoved it at us with both hands but without a pen.
As like we had a pen, or would steady him.
But Kor snatched the clipboard away, read our name from its sheet and asked, “You order food delivery?” and asked the courier, “What do we owe?”
The courier though was bent over sucking air, delivering us a seizure, or tugging out what appeared to be the lining of his cincher, but was a trashbag. He tried to unziptie its ziptie and then just slashed through the black shiny plastic with his nails.
Kor waved the clipboard and yelled, “Oye ese, what are you doing? Quién te ha enviado?”
But the courier was oblivious, he was on his knees, wriggling partially out of the bag and dripping this slimy rank squircle, a device shaped as like a square circle. This panicked Kor, who wound up with the clipboard and smacked him on the back and everything just spewed. The device flew across the room amid an acidulous piñata confetti of huevos rancheros and arros con upchuck, semidigested plaintain rounds and frijole flak and cola. For serious unmelted chunks of cola ice soaking the carpet a darker fawn than we had paid for.
Kor tossed the clipboard at the courier, lifted him by the pits as like he yelled, “Lo siento, lo siento, no se lo digas a mi jefe, no hacer que me despidan,” but we do not speak Spanish. Kor crashed him into his bike, which he crashed into the door, frontwheel bucking, rearing through, pedals scraping processors already slated for service toward the stairs.
Barf treadmarks down two flights to the lobby.
Qui had tipped his chair into a fort and huddled behind it. Cull was atop the table on his mobilephone with 911, which kept asking the Tetplex addy, and he kept shrieking the answer, Tetration.com. The only addys he ever retained were online. In frustration he threw the unit, clunky and weighty and totally state of the art then with its extra sharp retractable antenna fully out, not at anyone specifically, but at the ceiling, which scattered it down the hall as like components.
Even now that nick is there. Up on the ceiling between mediate track fixtures since replaced, and though all the furnishings are different too. We told Super Sal to tell his migrants not to touch it, and Kor just let it pass. We can praise him for that at least.
Now, the delivery. The bloodcolored package in the corner.
This was the STrapp, the y2Kreeper, the only model that existed or that we had ever encountered and yet we recognized it, which in other circumstances would have been the certification of smart design. But this was just a sloppy handpacked brick, contouring at its extremities into hooded vents influenced by snakes. Its middle was split, though the split was ragged as like it had been done manually and not manufacturally standard. This midunit gash exposed a motor, rotor, stator windings, readwrite headstack and magnet, spinless disk. Two stray sopping coils were centered. A slick conjoined pair of wiry wrinkly spheroids.
Then Kor was just next to us flicking the dense retch from his hands, wiping his face with his baja. He leaned over and bared a patch of his ass, white, round, reddening. But the sodden orbs were redder, rounder, and hairy. He picked them up and let them dangle.
By December the Tetplex had contracts with every able vet of Gulf War I as like security guards, and we had gone on leave. Discussing this meeting was never discussed. Except, through the US Postal Service again, c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance again, Kor sent us the results of the analysis. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. It was bull scrotum, they concluded. Gouged into the circuitry were two balls in a sack.
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[You get yourself all crazed about office politics, Moe’s been hijacked to put this drive together and then what he turns in has a penis inside? Am I with you? Because if I am, then I don’t understand.]
Not penis, the testes.
Please, we did not understand it either. Rather we did, but wrongly, on the novitiate plane. In the way we can understand that all humanity is inviolably one but still not realize who our friends are. Or that the guy carting his recyclables down La Cienaga is God.
The suddenness with which life can scale expectation. How the most essential secret is how to live among lesser secrets never disclosed. How what we hide best from ourselves is not our own ignorance but how that ignorance sustains us. How trust can become another method of control, how even the future of openness is closed.
We were swiveling around in a postlaunch tizzy pretending we had transcended Beta and attained nirvana. But then Moe went and changed the OS on us, he changed the platform. As like to say, you think you have passed through all the realms already, Buddha boy, think again. You think you have broken the cycle of rebirth and redeath and are now exempt from its traumas, think again.
Moe was showing us that no one was pure, because he was showing us the sign of Kali. Of Kali Yuga. Meaning the final phase. The very last. Extinction, the postscript. Which makes all that karma and feedback loop of the soul stuff fairly moot.
For Hindus, the world goes through four stages. In the first stage, the world was ruled by gods, and in the second, the gods fought, in the third, the world was ruled by humans, and in the fourth, ours, the humans are fighting, terminally. In the beginning, purity is signified by a fourlegged bull. With each subsequent stage, the bull loses a leg. The time of demon Kali is the time of the onelegged bull, which will never again chase its own tail. At the end, the bull with only one leg to stand on will be slaughtered, and along with it, the world.
[You got all that from Moe shoving bull testicles into a searchequipped storage device?]
Confirmative. We wish we had kept it. The STrapp, not the scrotum. But by the time that had occurred to us it was gone.
[Kor?]
But we certainly kept the post. Though Kor must have a copy of it too.
Here. This memcard. Here. Just a STrapp on a chain.
[What post? What’s the deal with this memcard? I’m just trying to make sure you don’t lose me.]
To take content down from online is almost impossible now and anyway even if taken down in terms of accessibility the content itself almost always remains, it just stays clouded. Nubified. Nephed. But back then it was possible to destroy it.
By comptrast, to take a person down has always been easy. People take down themselves.
For example, the itching. For instance, the scratching. We basically spent all our time disambiguating whether we were scratching at itches or itching at scratches, our migraines extended to seize even our abdominals, our skin tasted as like salt. We had come down with a bad case of psychosomia. Though after tetrating for our symptoms of rashes, fevers, chills, and fatigue, we found that we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitis. Comorbid cutaneous infections fungal, bacterial, viral, mule. Chronic circadian rhythm disorder. Tendonitis. Carpal tunnel. Our fingers would go numb and then our hands would go numb and then our entire arms would flail as like rashy dying parasites.
The prime salience was, we were home again, though not at Muralla Way or even Sierra Vista. Rather this had been the home of Ma and Pa Le Vay, the elders I, whose generation had been able to afford two floors with a baud of yard, Claremont Hills, Berkeley. M-Unit and Aunt Nance had moved in after moving them to that assisted living facility close by and even resembling the university. To be clear, neither Ilona nor Imre Le Vay were dead yet, but now one is, though we have never determined which.
It did not help that the relationship between M-Unit and Aunt Nance was healthy. We were unhealthy while they thrived. They cuddled in the lounger covered with shawls reading conlang morphologies and the Asian syllabaries used only by women as like hiragana and nüshu. They had friends, academic friends, gardening group friends, LGBTQ youth counseling center friends. We just had them, and their shared study the Jamaican eldercare aides had used for changing into and out of their scrubs, second floor. Propped along the bookcases were photos of two Hungarians we barely felt any relation to being amicably restrained by middleaged husky Jamaicans. Aunt Nance had hung her diplomas on the wall along with a gonfalon that explained all the different types of dispute resolution. One type was legally binding settlement, another type was also settlement but not legally binding, the third was about getting each party to understand the other emotionally, while the fourth was just about getting each party to recognize the existence of the other.
We lay on the foldout sofa and refused all fuel and hydration and so lost weight and were convinced also our mind. Aunt Nance asked us whether our actions or inactions were a protest for or against any particular cause, and we yelled that she had asked us that already, but she had not, she said, and M-Unit said that it had not been her either, and we believed them.
We stayed offline completely. Qui and Cull visited and talked about investments they were considering and offered us tips because we had no investments. They had purchased for us a Muppet at auction. A rare authenticated Elmo.
They took turns operating it as like to cheer us but we just turned the talk to Moe and so ultimately it was a puppet telling us he had gone missing but that Kor was pulling every string to have him found. Kor would pull everything unraveled.
El Moe. We believed in losing our mind.
M-Unit left small plastic UFOs of salad and small tetrapak milks outside the door. Aunt Nance slid under it a book, The Little Adventurer Atlas of Sexual Orientation. They kept calling us to deck the tree with dreidels. They had never gotten a tree before. We never got up from the foldout. Merry Chanukah and Christmas.
New Year. Remember the New Year. Cull had apparently met his father and stepstepmother playmate at a reception Timex was holding for the Hong Kong Secretariat. Qui had apparently at the suggestion of his brothers chartered the USS Chesapeake to take all the delinquents who had beaten him up in the Philadelphia schools and strand them in Rehoboth. JBates had purchased a former US military bunker sunk under the Mojave Desert and refurbished it to withstand polarity shifts, comet impacts, 50 megaton nuclear blasts. All Carbonites and friends of Carbon had been invited to hunker down.
M-Unit and Aunt Nance were having a party. A scholastic coven bash. They were busy unfolding rental tables and chairs on the fully enclosed, fully heated glass porch out back, which was a renovation we had paid for to mark no occasion, and also they had put in a request. $28735 had seemed a fortune then. M-Unit and Aunt Nance were rearranging the market greens so intricately it was as like they had not only marketed and mixed them but had grown them too. They were clattering platters and chasing chestnuts across the talavera. At 20:00 or so half the Berkeley feminist department showed. The half that M-Unit was still friendly with. We cracked our window to snoop, let the cold in. Cracked into the conversation.
Some shrink from Stanford, who might only have been the spouse of someone, wanted to talk to us. Everyone else wanted to talk disaster. They were drinking as like everything was going to y2Krash and so were convinced that everything was going to y2Krash even though the aughts were already being lived in Lahore. In Karachi. Delhi, Mumbai. On the darkside of the dateline, light not from fission or fusion rising over a new event horizon. They drank port and Aunt Nance passed a joint and M-Unit abstained not because we were around but because it was hash. Which, she said, always confused her libido and destrudo.
Though M-Unit and Aunt Nance had liberalized in this house to the point of finally owning a TV, they kept it off in favor of the hearth clock. They did not want to witness the carnage, but they still might have wanted others to experience it. Newt Gingrich, Exxon and Mobil, which had just become ExxonMobil, the WTO, HMOs, supporters of Prop 187, President Clinton even though he was against Prop 187. Time measured nothing but a failure to change. Someone told Aunt Nance her son was destroying the culture and someone else said he was destroying the human and Aunt Nance replied it was M-Unit who deserved the compliment. The shrink said he would talk to us about it. His was the only male presence, and someone said only males would confront in that way, and someone else said that historically psychoanalysis itself was nothing but the sublimation of masculine confrontation. But neither this nor the waist squeezes of his spouse were stopping him from hauling in from the porch. It was the clock that was stopping him. A crowd of tenured feminists counting, 4, 3, 2, 1. Icons of the triumph of the male orgasm, signifying the cessation of coitus and the onset of death. Popped corks, the froth, the smoke, the fireworks in the sky toward the Bay.
But as like everyone was still alive at a Pacific Standard hour into the first day of the year 2000 they had no way to avoid clearing dishes. They cleared and we lost them from our window. Then M-Unit was at our door. We did not want scraps. But she was offering the phone instead. We had a call from Russia, Soviet Russia. We did not want to take any calls, but Gushkov and Lebdev were insistent. M-Unit thrust the phone at us and paced hiccupping in the hall as like we were getting doomsday news from the Kremlin, and Aunt Nance waddlingly joined her and steadied her wobble against her and burped.
The Soviets had volunteered to work prowl for the Eve, to maintain site vigilance, expecting nothing, but poised. y2K itself was not the threat, it was whether or how it would rally the hackers. Denial of service attacks so broadly distributed they had to be Martian, Venusian, ping surfeit of a stratospheric bandwidth, untraceable, or fribbly to trace. But the Soviets had none of that to report, all they were wondering was the last time we ourselves had visited.
“Do you mean visited the u or checked in tetside?”
“Either,” they said. “Both.”
“A month, six weeks, way back in 99—why?”
“Get online,” they said.
We got up and grogged past M-Unit and Aunt Nance and down the hall to the Mistress Bedroom, eased down onto the physioball and powered the IBM clone. A crappy bullshitty unit, constipated processor, swollen registry, bloated drives, just fragged. Loaded every program ever at booting, a tertillion.docs on the desktop, and half of them named Test. Our patience tested as like the Soviets jittered. M-Unit drifted up and shrugged a robe around us. We had, we neglected to mention, never dressed.
The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. Aunt Nance said she was glad we were feeling better, and wondered whether we would give her a brief tutorial, did not have to be now, it was just that she had never been able to get online.
The Soviets, though, the Soviets said that if we had no access we had to come oncampus.
“Tell Kor,” we basically told them.
“With respect,” we will not try the accent but maybe the vocab and syntax, “with for your situation, respect, we come only because is crucial.”
The cruciality was this. Apparently we, meaning an entity or entities with our ID, had logged into Tetsys at quarter to midnight PST, using an IP from a Delaware eCafé called My Cup Runneth Dover the Soviets had gotten through to enough to determine that it was a proxy for an IP from a Canadian eCafé called Mountiebank Delectables, which we had to suspect was a proxy too by the first, last, yet never just only general law of conspiranoia, which everyone will always refer to, but no one will ever quote.
They, our assailants, had all our tetokens, wardwords, passhibbols, and skelkeys, which meant they had all access, which they used to mod.
“How mod?”
The only change detected, the only change detected so far, was so minor and negligible and immediately remediable as like to render its quiddity alone of major concern.
It was a redirect. All tetraffic was diverted.
“To what?”
All they would tell us was to redirect ourselves to the Tetplex.
Which did not compute, nothing computed. How recy of a hack it basically was, yet how techy the hacker had to have been to execute it.
Then they said it was Moe, which diverted.
They requested permission to take the site offline. “Be smart, this must to do.”
Permission granted.
://
[Moe’s revenge part 2—where were all the searches going?]
He who insists on having the end before the beginning will still only have the beginning. Who said that? Vagary might be requisite to life. What about that? Enough. Let us speak.
M-Unit sat lapped atop Aunt Nance, a mesosociologist sat lapped atop a social anthropologist, the shrink was at the wheel and because his spouse had staged a tantrum yelling that we would all be arrested for driving under the influence she had called for a cab and waited moping on the lawn while the car swerved out of the garage. We rode in the seat alongside.
Validate hate if deprived of love.
Breathe greedy.
[When you’re through quoting bumperstickers you’ll tell me?]
We terminaled, and because Gushkov was already logged into Tetsys but because two confirms were required for keyswap we had Lebdev log and so were able to regain our access, the only way to begin ending a compromise. We were us again, if just in that.
We set about checking the site, currently extant only tetside. The hpage loaded uncorrupted, but everything searched for detoured to this post.
Before even reading it, though, we screenshot and duped it external. Manipulables must be preserved.
Then, as like Aunt Nance cut us a slice of napoleon leftover from the Eve feast of the Soviets, we read.
[A post Moe wrote?]
Though in a sense we wrote it too.
[How?]
Give us your Tetbook.
[It’s yours.]
You will read it.
[No problem.]
Krishna.tet. Save it, read it into record. This memcard is ours, but after this it will not be ours, or yours, because truth belongs equally to all and none. Go.
[Now?]
Better. We will hold it for you, the Tetbook. That is better for us both. We will scroll along and try not to shake.
[Why don’t you read and we’ll do the scrolling?]
Go on. We do not have the breath.
[Om! Krishna Gonzalez, son of a bitch and a workers hero engineer, was an engineer born himself and so in this caste that is the greatest in the world he was rised! That it was the greatest caste in the world he was rised to believe! Equal to a Brahmin he believed! At the time of his life the four castes were everything and at the top was hard engineer, below that soft engineer, below that the users, and beyond that at the very bottom the untouchable. The hard engineers the bodies made, which allowed the soft engineers to put their minds into them and the users to operate them and the untouchables had no electricity and were pariah. “Harijan.” “Dalit.” This was the world at the time of the life of Krishna until the age his parents died. He was so deprised he wandered. He was all alone in the age of the world and so to a new country he wandered, Cali. But Krishna Gonzalez found that though the jobmarket was good, the market for making friends with his fellow jobbers was bad especially with the Pakistanis who all had friends from schooling and athletic associations and even this one Pakistani who asked hello how are you doing at the bank and Krishna answered we are doing fantastic when after the transaction Krishna got a sourdough prune danish and beer and they met in the parkinglot where the Pakistani was on smokebreak Krishna greeted him this time but the Pakistani did not recognize him. Also the fellow Indians who had Cali flagged were demissive and cared only about property mortgages and voted the Democrat until they owned and then voted the Republican but just to prevent other Krishnas from downgrading neighborhood economies. They were in favor of quotas. No one to have the opportunities they had. He went on a date with one who was not born in Delhi but in Cali for which he had to beg, the date, and she who worked the cashier at a carwash spent the full time at the dinner theater whingeing about a psychiatric disorder that caused her to go into a druggist and buy a product no matter what and come out again and just in the closest trash toss it immediately, and that was her syndrome that shamed her but also made her feel chosen and proud, she bought things and then not out of shame or chosen proudness but just automatically threw them out, profligia or prodigia was the official psychological diagnosis. Her family who was from Delhi did not comprend either. They wanted her to marry not just any Indian but a certain salary fitness type and she said this was wrong and everyone said this but in personal practice was racist and she would not visit him at his home because at the time it was black Oakland. Krishna should have trashed her on the corner! Krishna should have bought her from her family and tossed! It was not that she or anyone else in Cali had no caste and were premissive but what they had was backward. Role inversal. Krishna went to the movies but not with her and what Calis worshipped were the actors and actresses and not the innovators of celluloid or even of charged couple devices and complementary symmetry metal oxide semiconductors. Famous for praise were the demons who sang and played or the devils who just pretended but not the craftspeople who made the sarod and shehnai, who without microphonics or camera crews went out to the trees to split the wood and the special keywood and mined the metal for the strings and pedals to make a piano, not to mention the inventors of ragas and talas. Famous for praise the painters and sculptors and the architects of museums in the images of banks but not the crushers of berries for the paint or the weavers of leaves for the paper or the collectors of the rodent manes for the brush, not to mention the technicians of quarrying equipment or surveyors. They in Cali celebrated the users of sites above the programmers of code for the sites and them celebrated even above the engineers who designed and erected the machines that do everything and on which everything is done. Krishna dispaired of this but not enough and so was himself tempted to tend his checking account at the very expense of the puranas. It was while in this dispair that a cloud visited Krishna and this cloud was blacker than Oakland and out of it emerged with the tongue out not the female but male gaysexual Kali. The Lord God Kali.]
That was a link to a universal gods directory. Continue.
[Kali the destroyer had a commission for Krishna and it was by this commission that Krishna would fall in caste and be turned upsidedown to become worse than a Lockwood Gardens project shelter leper. Kali the destroyer ordered Krishna to propound a memory device so that with it everything would be rememberable. But though Krishna did not want to agree because for him memory was not a static device of plastic but of volatile flesh and with magics of transmission, he also did not want to earn the disfavor of an armed and dangerous transgender Kali. Also the business that employed Krishna in this life, this business operating the site that roots to this post, encouraged. All his friends who were not friends but just jobbers gave him their kudos and bravery. Krishna accepted. In the spirit of the team. He was locked behind a great gate in the unwashed corner of a startup called Remomori. In Coppertino. A Pakistani handed him specs and instructed him to put them in a betelnut. To erect a betelnut to contain both the specs and also everything, this was what the Pakistani instructed. The specs revealed to Krishna were incredible. They were not what had been stipulated by Kali. Though the memvice was supposed to be equipped with the search functionality of his employer Krishna doubted that anyone familiar with that functionality was familiar with the storage specs because if they had been the storage was so incredible they would have told him. They did not tell him lamentably. Also his employers or their adventurous capitalists had mentioned that the memvice was not to have a modem, but this was to have a modem though not one equipped for the internet but for an intranet, internals. Normally this would make no sense or be a software issue but for Krishna the exposure to this was hard. He was tasked with propounding this feature himself, but then the task kept changing and so the feature kept changing until it had to be both a modem to access and also a server for a proprietary web. Also according to the Pakistani its weight had to be less than 2.2 lbs and its dimensions less than 16″ × axis by 5″ y axis by 7.25″ z axis, meaning mobile. Physically portable. But still durable because it had to be made of this polypropylene copolymer material, waterproof, crushproof, falloffcliffproof, able to withstand temperatures up to 210° F/98.88repeating° C, which is an impertinence, Fahrenheit. In case of its use in situations of not just no signal or current but combat. It had to have an average of 48 hours of rechargeable batterylife. It had to maintain full search functionality while offline and full online functionality while on battery. But what made this combo difficult was memory. The size the Pakistani was stipulating. RAID, redundant array, independent disks. Four drives, removable. 2TB capacity. Blocklevel striping, distributed parity. Each drive fortified by a server blade too. Removable too. Krishna was up to his “pupik” in dualcore processors and working toward double distribution. To ensure that failure of one would not be failure of all, which is drivers and serves aside an important lesson for the citizens of Cali.]
Moe always referred to white Americans as like Pakistanis and conversely referred to Pakistanis as like white Americans. Continue.
[Krishna would complete an ectype and leave the Remomori lab at night and return by morning to find it had been taken for testing with the search capability, and so he would complete another and never again leave the lab. At midnight the time of this posting but last month or six weeks and two days ago a car came. Last century! Last millennium of users! Not just a car but a Caterham Rover K Series MG × 1.4 liter engine 16 valve double camshaft six speed gearbox operated by an adventurous capitalist for a firm called Kinere took Krishna to a motorist inn. This inn did not have an identifiable name but everyone called it the Lesstel. 816 West Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale. (408) 734-4607. Outside except for the no name was typal for motorists. Parklot without lines or curb barriers. Rebar on shuffleboard court. Gluetraps and for opossums. Structure itself built out of Lego. Inside was all computers! This cannot be stressed enough people, computers are not furniture! Everyone inside the room was Paki. They had buzz haircuts or dreads and eczematicous and pimple conditions for which the best treatment is the distillation of trees ashoka and peepal. The Pakis who worked with Krishna did not introduce him but were polite and divergent from how they were typal because they had broken the ectype. They had brought the memvice to this room for testing and had not told Krishna about it until they had broken his work. Until they were unable to fix it and they had tried but they had just made it worse. All the doors of the room were open, except the exterior door to the patio vendingmachine, and through them were other open rooms with other computers not furniture in them but staffed by Mormons from Karachi and Lahore. They were writing on their computers code and Krishna had to presume it was programming for this memdevice that was not being accomplished by his employer. Also sensitive papers were taped to the walls. Transfer protocols that even to a lowly but high engineer were comprendable. The Pakis Krishna worked with were called by him the OPs standing for “Orson” and “Parley” but were called “Willcox” and “Bobblehead” by their coresidents in the motorist inn who ordered them to close the doors. They did. Orson and Parley closed the doors. Papers blown to the floor appeared to deal with normalization, entity extraction, morphgraph analytics, and how to search unstructured txt in Arabic, Persian, and the terrorist language of Urdu. The OPs instructed Krishna to fix the unit and he tried because of vanity but the tools were inappropriate and he told the OPs and so the OPs offered to get him the tools and Krishna told the OPs that anything they expected him to repair had to be brought back to the lab. But they would not let Krishna go with the memdevice and advised him instead to go back to the lab and assemble his tools and return with them. Krishna was driven back to the lab by the adventurous capitalist from Kinere and assembled what he required. The same Caterham was taken the yellow of rancid ghee. Which despite his pleas he was prohibited from driving. Krishna was returned to the motorist inn of Legos and installed with his tools in another room and Pakis who were foreign to him brought the broken device and required him to not only fix it but also to modify it so that within the searchable storage there would be a further detachable subdrive that would not only be protected from the rest but also if detached would destroy the rest in the manner of Kali. The hero of this epic worked and was not given leave to depart homeward. But home was not an option in other terms because his employers whoever they were had installed in it a surveillance billboard. All the windows were shut around Krishna and no conversation was had. The food they brought was poisoned to nosh. The only noshable food was from the vendingmachine, around which was the only conversation. Though the Pakis never spoke with him but strictly with each other. Krishna intuitioned how unimportant he was. How unappreciated a menial. Hard was not crucial. Soft was crucial and was failing. The Pakis were being utilized to write the code for the device. That itself was obvs. But the program was not working. That also was obvs. The only explanation for such an apparatus being custom made by an organization not his employer was that it was for the government of Cali America a memdevice. Further and beyond that its propositioned ability to store information to be shared and searched within a system of closure pointed to the involvement of a number of different agencies. Krishna attempted to demagnetize from his mind who set the founding protocols. ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, Defense Advanced etc. etc. Agency. Search clients and find entities that do not endorse collaboration. CIA. NSA. That would explain the tribulation involved. The faces Krishna encountered arguing over popcorn on the patio. THIS WAS A HORRID SECRET KRISHNA HAD FOUND! HE KNEW HE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO HIDE IT! HE KNEW HE WOULD POST IT AND NOW THIS IS HIS POST! THIS WAS OMINOUS IN THE SUPREME! The algorithm promulgated by the employer of Krishna in this life was being modified to search across the archives of all different agencies so that the intel would be comparable and contrastable. Each agency to a dedicated drive?? Each of them copying to a clastic subdrive and autodestroying its original in case of capture or a seizure emergency for an agent in the field???? But because success and not coopteration has been the priority in Cali America the agencies must have been unwilling to adopt the protocol or methods of processing the archives of others out of vanity. The Pakis all of whom must have been TS/SI COMINT must have had to create one. A single. A standard. The agencies are noncompatible. They are jealous and envious and prise success and abdere their specs. IC. Intelink. “They are at throats,” that was all that was explained to Krishna after inquiring how are you doing to this Paki compforensics specialist name of “Hinckley.”]
Never skip the parentheticals. “(To the OPs we were Krishna but Vik Ram was how we introduced ourselves to ‘Hinckley.’)”
[Krishna constructed this interpretation while building the Kalidevice because he was not able to make deficiencies. And this oppressed him, how pride is as instrinsical to a creator of things as amorality and aethicality are instrinsical to the thing created. That is how you become irrelativistic and monotheistic. Make the thing until the thing makes you, which is not a cycle but a spiral. And so he took what he had become and on a holiday celebrating the death of the natives of Cali America departed. He went to a farm to imagine the farms he was not working on and attempted to purchase a castration in rupees. He said the gonads were a folk remedy, he said they were glands to rub on the body of an unmarriageable sister in order to obtain for her a mate, and that if he would have had an unlucky brother he would have paid to clitorectomize a cow. The farmers even with his rupees in their rags treated him strangely. All he had inquired was whether a cow would be able to milk on one leg. He fled the farm. He was pursued and so trusted no one because everyone was a verifiable.gov. He had reached out to friends before through the quasigovernmental mails but no one reached back and so he had no friends. He too became a map refused, no key. And that is what it means to be an emigre of color. You are a cipher no one cares to crack or can crack. No one even recognizes you as a cipher. The Contra Costa sheriff speedgunned my 1988 Dodge Caravan doing 73 in a 55 and so as not to get properly shot I stopped, but was let go with just a $214 fine and that was the worst because that meant Kali had not yet contacted the authorities. I tried to contact the New York Times, CNN, Time. But my calls were not returned to the only payphone left in Alameda County. Charlie Rose was not at home. The metal of the billboard played Hot Talk 560AM KSFO to my teeth fillings and adjusted warmer the climate temperatures. I stayed off email. Traveled by moon and avoided the clouds and the mandir. The agents of darkness even in the showers of the El Camino Y lurked. By the sex novelties dispenser at Capital Launderland were staked. The lottery telemetry was openly rigged. Pumps did not give my Caravan the gallons they asserted. The suffering of my stomach due to nacho poison grew. I fell in the cheese and so fell lowly in the varnas. It was not again my ulcer. It was my body being left by “my jiva.” I became a programmer to code the access to what is in this post that had been in my head and also my mind. Then I denigrated even lower and became a user by opening this account and posting this very content to survive. Beta is not samsara. Incarnation. Transmigration. Beta is not even one single punarjanma transcarnation of samsara because everything ends but the cycle does not. The cycle only goes so fast until it is the same as slow and the same as still and withholding. Moksha. Find our exchange attached and below, downloadable as.tet files but also plaintxt because this is the inside of me, guts. Peace out. tetrak — tetrail= IMPORT-PATH — cpp_out=DST_DIR — jv_out=DST_DIR — pyth _out=and just forever gibberish.]
That is not gibberish. That is the sourcecode. Programming compiled. In executable file format. But then also in a document of language, tuples forever. At midnight PST Moe had posted all of this online, and to seal it exfiltrated the fulgence of our algys.
[Give away the algys, give away the business?]
Confirmative. This was everything, the whole company.
[But is there even a bit of fact in what Moe was getting at?]
To have faith, to require faith, is an admission of lost power.
Credence fills the vacuum of control.
The post was hosted by a Konkani news portal, Vavraddeancho Ixtt, or Friend of the Workers. It was 02:30 on the West Coast with everyone still partying so 05:30 on the East Coast with everyone just slithering in from partying. All of Europe was still sleeping it off. The portal was able to handle our traffic, oblivious at Indian midday.
Until we were going after its domain as like remorseless, with a hack hash salt concat at md6 spread across four computers. But getting all impatient with the processing we instead set up a dummysite and account for a travel industry tipsheet we invented called the Wwwayfare Gazette, typed up a reprint request for a current Vavraddeancho Ixtt article about millennial festivities for Westerners in Goa and emailed it to every @v-ixxt.com addy on the masthead, routing it through the same proxies Moe had used, which the Soviets had already tracked through Delaware and Canada and into the UK and certainly, given Moe, gone further. The email linked to our dummysite, which was just a download of a virus we had been studying, petulant malware from Pyongyang. We had been getting homologous viruses also from Seoul, though such masking practice was the traditional dragon dance of the Chinese.
Among the Eastern cultures the only way to truly earn a contagion is to purposefully pass it along.
The editor in chief clicked at 16:50 IST, Goa, and that got us his access, and we wrecked it. We wrecked that mother joint down.
Then we restored all Tetration sourcecode from autobackup and inserted the url and even copypasted snippets of the post txt to index, searching for page mirrors or any other reflective body with same or similar txt, found nothing. If there was a translation into Konkani or any other language that scripts Devanagari or Kannada either there were no repercussions or the agencies got it. TetHindi had not yet been deved. Neither Tetranslate. This was just 01/01. This was still 2000.
Then we decached and rode mod on the algy to block anything with the algy itself from being transclused in future results. Not buried, blocked. If this were just a year later regardless of whether the intel agencies had or had not found a way to play nice together and share, this would have been diametrically impossible. This was the last time possible.
Aunt Nance was a backgammon game up over Super Sal who had dropped by to recaffeinate the Soviets. The shrink was over in the estuary phonecall niche talking on the phone to his spouse.
The sociologists had left.
Our brain was making no sense as like sociology, which is just egalitarian anthropology plus math. We had median nerve palsy in the wrists and yet every keystroke was excruciating because though we had been typing without break our nails had been gnawed to festering paronychia. It was the time all tech shows twice a day and after a reset, 12:00, but the noon one, and we were just about to go live again. Super Sal lost another game and got up to flip the calendar page and we were all just, how quaint, a page.
Outside it was storming. Not winterwise but as like the academics had been correct, the world was ending after all, the universe was over, despite all our work or because of it.
The black cumulus of a helicopter descended, but just before wrecking in the marsh, it hovered. It floated above the reeds bent low. Kor jumped out to make a splash all formally disheveled in a forktailed tux, bowtie snapped, burst cummerbund. He marched straight in to fold us around his belly and squeeze. His shirt was stiff from having been sweated through and then drying and then being sweated through again. He wiped his forehead with a towelette embossed with the grizzly Great Seal of the State of California. He greeted the Soviets humanely too. Even embraced Aunt Nance.
We were about to tell him what happened. But then he grabbed our robe, dragged us toward his office and through the curtain to sit on the futon he on one side and we on the other of M-Unit asleep. Then he told us what happened, and touched our neck, our robe fallen open. He said Moe had been found. Just now. Dead. Committed suicide in Canada. Hanged by a belt from Montreal.
No one would be contacting us but if they did, no comment. No one contacted us. Ever. Never.
Then Kor woke M-Unit, had his copter take her and Aunt Nance on a rainy turn around the Marin Headlands, snow up on Tamalpais. The shrink drove himself. But before, the pilot came inside menacing in how strong he was, and in asking a question called us Sir, in the military style. He asked to use the bathroom.
://
[You never cornered Kor to substantiate Moe’s claims?]
Balk not. Virtue is a patience.
[What?]
That was a joke, laugh. Balk, Thor Ang. You might be familiar. Tetrate him if not.
[I’m familiar with him, with b-Leaks, which relates to all this how?]
You will know. We will scroll away into just a squircle parcel for the dirt, but you will know. You must, you will, understand that. That is your privilege. Do not concess the process. All time in its time.
Moe had liquidated through the mesh. He had vaped himself. The balance of his direct deposit Chase Bank checking account had been transferred and all future payments to it had been set to autotransfer to a savings account registered to the Goa Orphanage of Achievement Trust, Oriental Bank of Commerce, funds that had remained untapped until their seizure by the India Reserve, whose inquiry determined that no such orphanage existed. No images were provided to us and since the Americans refused to take the body from Canada because it was not clear that Vishnu Fernandes was a citizen and India refused to take it from Canada because it was not clear that Vishnu Fernandes ever existed, or was Vishnu Vaidya, or was a citizen, he, Mohlone, whoever, was cremated in Montreal. All this according to Kor who brought us the cremation report along with the files of the Vishnus obtained from various Bay Area hospitals pertaining to treatment for dissociative identity, formerly multiple personality disorder, and depression. Brought them to us in Berkeley, audience denied.
[That’s all the investigation you did?]
The Soviets scootered out together to the addy. The Lesstel.
They reported just a pukka blacksite all condemned boarded up. Not even a vendingmachine.
On Kor edict Tetration bought the house of Moe from Chase Bank, which gave access to the garage, from which we were sent just tranches of scrawled papers and matchbooks and coasters, random arbitrary disintegrated µCs, disassembled shields, linear regulators, crystals, interferometers, junctions and loops we had such limited bandwidth for that we did nothing to stop M-Unit from trashing them out. Kor had picked them all over beforehand infallible.
And then just a year ago, approaching a decade after the demise of Moe, Kor organized our quantum computing syndicate with Stanford, with its tech all pilfered from the garage, with its elementary particle inspired by Moe having tried, for our sake, to give practical form to his reversible computing theories.
Moe had been inventing the tetbit, as like Kor calls it now, a bit capable of two expressions, superposited, subatomic.
In the way computing works today, a bit can represent EITHER 1 OR 0. But in future computing based on the work of Moe, each tetbit would represent BOTH 1 AND 0. This would speed everything up by a factor of confounding while redimensionalizing all storage. But still this system would always be entropic, which is to say it would use electricity, which is to say it would use electricity without ever regenerating it.
It takes a lot of electricity to keep an elementary particle stable. The kind of electricity whose unsustainable generation might even destroy the planet.
All because of a collapse of significance. As like everything collapsed.
And so it was a compromise. Moe had been compromised, by having normalized his natural madness. He put aside his Tabernacle for quantum pragmatics. And he did it for us.
Moe was a computing genius who is not even remembered for his only realized genius contribution. To advertising.
Tetration donated his house for asylum, some quasigovernmental initiative providing transitional accommodation for political refugees as like hijra fleeing the Pakistani Taliban and last we checked in it was apportioned to some Lhotshampa activist from Bhutan.
We have no clue what became of the billboard.
[So you just closed the books on him? Put Moe behind you?]
If we ourselves did not press to your specs it was grief, bandhu. We were physically pressed worse than ever before now.
Our friend, our partner. Our Injuneer bloodbrother. Had deleted himself. Was erased from our life. We craved contact to such a degree that with every hack aggressed against us subsequently our initial instinct was to hope it was Moe. Schizoid Moe. That his jiva has returned to defeat the Pakis. Jiva is the soul.
[You’re feeling what now? Guilty?]
What we feel now was what we felt then but now it has become even worse. We were turned into a child. Unappreciated, depreciated, not fledged. Dwelling still with M-Unit.
We pretended we had never seen or even heard of a computer.
Cull and Qui inquired about what they might do to assist us and M-Unit decreed we would enjoy studying papermaking and so they dispatched who they claimed was a papermaking artisan to Berkeley who entered the study and took her breasts out.
We did not bury our face into them.
To be more open, we would not have preferred a man.
To be as like most open, at this juncture we are basically sexless.
Point being, the letter with the map keyed so uninterpretable, the bull balls chiming as like temple bells, everything Moe ever did was instruction.
Moe was instructing us in how to open, how to be open, as like a lotus getting pollinated, or the cloaca of the gharials that once dined on corpses in the Ganges, the one hole they have for pissing, shitting, fucking, laying eggs, and that might also help with respiration and mobility. A single twoway orifice. Lubed. Ironically never a totally accessible lesson.
Comptrasted with Moe we were closed.
Shut down, broke down, pent.
Users give themselves away
by giving away their only asset, he said
the self in exchange
for selves, he said, but then
[What users?]
There are no users, he said, just, or
No winners or losers
There are no somethings
No victims
He had some line about the first world beginning with educating everyone into accountability, but ending and becoming the last world if that were ever accomplished.
No victims, just users.
[You’re still quoting Moe?]
Strain to record everything. In America, even the smallest portions were too big for him, except with “frozey yozey.” His favorite places were always selfserve and charged flatrates for small and large cupsizes, regardless of the amount of yogurt and toppings. Moe would stagger in vast crockery to fill, and the staff was unequipped to charge in excess of the maximum. It was not as like anything was returnable, melting probiotics crammed back into dispenser, the carob chunks replaced. It was because of this that all the places switched to retailing by weight. Spring 1998. This was always our prime directive at Tetration. Our actions were the higher law, the lower law either adapted or was abolished.
Summer 98, walking in SF from what had become so suggestively called SoMa onto Ellis Street to pay a visit to his ghee guy, he was stopped by an officer for resembling an AfroMexican suspected of a burglary. In answer to questioning Moe said he lived everywhere, worked nowhere, when asked his name he asked the officer when. Hauled in, he told the entirety of Southern District Station how he owned them, their holsters, their weapons and ammo, and that though they certainly owned them too, as like fellow taxpayers, the injustice was that while he, Moe, had no authority even proportional to his burden over how such things were used, they did, police authority was total. Moe had been picked up on a public street, in public air, under public weather, at public twilight. Nonproprietary, unlicensable, the commons. He did not require the courts, he claimed, the gods had already ruled in his favor. Still he called us and we called Gutshteyn, who met us. No charges were ever filed. As like we left, the arresting cop said, “Still not satisfied with the system, fucko, even you can run for mayor.” Moe said, “I wish just to run for mayor of your brain.”
If you meet the Buddha along the way
destroy him
by obtaining his confidences
and then making them available publicly.
Fuck Kali
the headseverer
[Are you feeling OK?]
Whatevs. Or whatever your wife would say.
[Why don’t we break?]
No, no. Here, take your Tetbook back, here. No. Keep the memcard, the stick. No. Eject it and return it.
://
[Feel or Jesus tell you yet? Or Myung? Fucking Kori Dienerowitz’s flown into Dubai. He just ambushed me down on the beach.]
Rovery. Ranting. Rambling gamblers gambol in the brambles. With ferry fare fairly free travelers trip with fashionable frequency twixt two temples on the Terekhol.
[OK — but what’s Kor doing, besides fucking this up? What have you not told me?]
About what? Can you name us another multinational corporation tech or rec assetized at north of $90 billion that has not done a favor or two for the governments of every country in which it operates, just hoping not to provoke conflict with the foreign policy of the country in which it is based and the majority of its investors hold citizenship?
[It’s time that you came clean.]
What did we say? We are never without a system. We are telling according to plan. What did we leave off with?
[Moe, the hanging, you still have to finish that, hold on, “… destroy him by obtaining … the self in exchange …”]
We hate our voice. We hate the babiedness in it, the infantile spanked whine, pedolalia. A lacking something sound. An always disagreeing with something sound. To rewind, to replay, the loathing just procreates. As like to be reborn, which is also to redie.
The alternative is to avatar, replicate the self, which
Moe used to say, whatever happens in life always remember that the worst tragedy is already behind us, the end of immortality with the beginning of sex. Once there had been singlecelled organisms capable of eternally replicating by dividing, by splitting, and the replications gradually sought protective symbiosis in colonies that civilized into multicellular organisms. But then an evolutionary drive to succeed emerged among them, and ultimately compelled them to mate with others of their kind in order to eliminate mutation and competition in the propagation of the very best of their kind. Though with each reproduction the essence of the progenitors was becoming less and less evident in their progeny, who grew into separate lifeforms entirely, conscious of their mortality and aware that their only consolation for that and for having their own offspring who would be so different and ungrateful was the fact that reproduction was sex for them, and sex for them was pleasurable.
But then to be able to enjoy the sex without receiving that propagation benefit, that might be the next phase in evolution, homosexuality, which Moe never pursued, or bisexuality, which we
Moe thought future humans would become as like the ardhanari or Hindu intergender gods, but with larger and thicker skulls that would shield their brains from being microwaved by wifi.
Another thought Moe had was that because humans were now able as like a species to digest lactose past childhood, in the future they would be able to breastfeed themselves too and survive through adulthood on that alone.
Telephone poles always made him pensive. With everything going mobile, he worried about what would happen to them.
Maybe they would become effigies. Maybe they would be worshipped.
The cardinal difference between Buddhist and Hindu incarnation doctrines is that Buddhism does not believe in a soul, but in a mind that transfuses our successors, and in a body that decomposes as like biosphere. Hinduism, however, believes in the soul, which determines
Moe related the situation of the individual Buddhist to the situation of a computer that lacked a memory. Which would not be a computer at all, but
Dire, our condition was dire. M-Unit brought in the Stanford shrink, who was cur about investing in a Tetration IPO, the Stanford shrink brought in homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, aromachologists, who were cur about our investing in their research. Pulse electromagnetic field therapy. Enerpathic and liquid mineral stimulation of adrenals. Entheogen solutions for aboulia and immunocompromise. Bhang, ayahuasca, venoms.
We fake slept through Aunt Nance, weak without her sarcasm, consulting a chelationist for advice on how to treat her joint inflammation. Then we were asleep.
We had dreams. We will not discuss them.
Mat Plokta and Trey Kerner chased us through an arcade while calling us “cholesterol.” They threatened to beat us until we turned into “testosterone.” Then we were in this stadium cafeteria that was not at Stanford, but it was, there were tons of students and every time anyone recognized and was recognized by anyone else, both of them grew taller, wider, everyone scrambled for their friends, which was awkward, as like everyone grew, they bumped one another, bumped heads. We had to dodge their shoes, we were friendless, we reached up to their shoelaces. Next we dreamt that Moe would not let us play a game that involved arranging very small cards, facedown, on the squares of a chessboard, we asked him why, he said, “Because it is unfair, you are a computer.” We asked him to at least explain the rules, he said, “You either obey me, or you obey me while pretending to understand me.” Next we had a dream about a taco, D-Unit was the vendor, it was a bull taco with guac and salsa and yellow shredded cheddar wires, and just before we bit into it D-Unit snatched off a papertowel and placed it atop our head as like a yarmulke. He said a blessing, but he said it in BASIC, or LISP.
Then there was this low rumble, and a whiny grating. The sofabed shook, the entire room shook. It was the garagedoor, below us, grinding along its track, opening, closing, remotely. M-Unit and Aunt Nance drove off.
They had their volunteering to do, counseling the families of queer minors, coaching tolerance, coaching love.
We got up, folded the sofabed, folded the robe. This was all robotic, this was the fanaticism of the robotic. We went downstairs and dredged the drawers for the phonebook. Flipped through to Places of Worship. We skimmed the entries, recognized the addy, the number associated. We must have put on clothes, because we had our rollerblades on and were blading to the rabbis.
We rolled out of the BART station at Powell Street and through the Tenderloin, from Market, to Turk, to Laguna, and Bush Street. We did not know what we were doing, but then we did not know what D-Unit had been doing either, praying with the Hasidics, or praying to the Hasidics, driving the 20 minutes, 40 minutes in traffic, each way, just to make a minyan. He did not believe in anything. But he believed in showing up.
It was a grand old slammed to shit synagogue, littered, tagged, bird shit and bird nests around the decalogue windows. We knocked until a Fujian janitor was at the door telling us to come back at no time we comprehended, and so we coasted around until dusk or so, the momentary jolt of passing under lamps and having them flash on.
The far curb was all comppeople peers of peer age with incomplete facial hair, chip earrings, 3D glasses type glasses. They hung apart from the hippie men bald but with gray ponytails, hippie women gray to the knees. We crowded between them into a foyer smogged with incense. The signage was Sinitic. Half the people might have been half Jewish. This had definitely stopped being a synagogue.
There were bins by the inner door, and the hippies took pillows and bowed to sit, and then with all the pillows taken sat on mats, and then with the mats gone, the floor. The way they bowed, we would never be that flexible, the way they realigned their spines, we would never have that posture, how they stretched and rolled around. The comppeople stayed by the walls. Deployed the meld effect.
We rolled to brake against a pillar posted with reiki ads and bulk offers on rhizomes and herbs. We have tried to impart this, how receptive we were, how divestable.
This was not the state in which to meet the Master Classman.
Tetsugen Kenneth Classman, the Master, Zen roshi to the Valley. Something had brought us to him, and whatever that something was we would venerate it. He was born in the Bronx, 1946. His parents were unionists, tailors, Jews, in that order. They were Left, very Left, though we have never been sure of the Trotskyist distinctions. He went to U of Chicago. Philosophy. But the war or the antiwar movement was already escalating, and he got involved with SDS. That he dropped out is clear, not so what forced him underground with the Yippies in San Francisco, with trips above to study at the SF Zenter with Shunryu Suzuki, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1970, just before or after they called his draft number. He stowed away on a ship to Japan, to resume his studies at Sōji-ji, and Eihei-ji, a Sōtō summit brought him to China, from which he hiked across the border to Laos, Cambodia, smuggled US military defectors across the border from Vietnam and resettled them in Bangkok. We have been told he was caught and turned informant, or that he had worked for the MI Corps in another unspecified capacity and was pardoned. We have been told he was never even caught. Bottomline. He repatriated and established a vet soup kitchen, 74, vagrant bakery, 76, the inevitable gentrification of the Haight. Possession of LSD for personal use, 1980. Multiple counts of unlawful assembly and obstruction, for organizing nonpermit marches protesting CDC apathy toward HIV/AIDS, 1984.
Founded Zend0, 2002, now the #2 Buddhist nonprofit according to do-n-donor.com. Transcendental Unlocking, a potential cultivation method extremely popular in Hollywood, ongoing. Dynastatic Shikantaza, or ScreenSits, the focal training intensives that became serious industry schmoozles, ongoing. Four books of koan, Selfhelp for the Helplessly Selfless I–IV. Two cookbooks. Cowritten. All. A bikram fitness regime, Chakra Till You Dropa. Udderly Yummy, his organic dairy collective. 2010 revenue $18.2 million. Not quite Zen activites. We are shaky only on the arrest dates and Nam, the rest is kosher.
Physically, we never remembered if he had a beard. Or if he did, which one. He worked all the angles onstage, but it was as like he dwelt in stillness and the stage instead moved for him. Nothing disturbed his wraps, which were not black monastic capes, rather papal dictator satin and Thinsulate polar fleece.
He kept saying the group would do a guided meditation but then kept talking through it.
“Unplug yourself, and boot belief. Let faith fail, and blankness.”
“Concess nothing, process all. You become the deadline.”
His devotees, true to the school, laughed, as like they were practicing laughing. This alone was going to have to suffice as like both meditation and guidance.
The Master Classman beamed, and his beams were for us, rather we realized that everyone else was claiming them too, for serious reaching out their hands and clapping down around the experience, everyone was clapping onehanded.
“Zen is mystic Buddhism,” he said, basically. “Zen is the elite, it influences the current, and sets trends in the wind.”
“Now you have become the teachers. But it is not just one student who is telling you this, today everyone is a student and is telling. Our wisdom has always been dependent on the wisdom of our teachers, but now, everything depends. We are not in the Valley, and yet you are the Valley. We are just Buddhists. You are the Zen of Zen.”
“The world of email is the world of attachment, the world of sites is the world of design, the speaker is speaking, the monitor is monitoring, screens impede and cannot be lifted.”
“A peasant, out plowing the field with his ox, died, and was born again, but online. That was his world. He did not know anything else, or have any memories of any existences prior. But this is the world in which all the peasants around you live currently. They are living online, but they think it is offline. They will wander unsettled until they are taken offline again. But even this will be just another design, or attachment.”
Then, just to our side, we noticed Rolf Schadborg. He was working for Treap then, who were no competition, but was about to breakaway and found Quineisha.com, which would resolve the crosscultural timelag by bringing urban street fashions out to white suburban sprawl while still at the peak of their freshness.
He was surrounded by other Treapsters, terminal jockeys from Go, from Flooz, who would not have jobs in another month or so, or week, or day, or their mobilephones were about to ring with the news, the market flux, the dotcom snap and crackle. Or maybe they did not have jobs already and that was how they were able to be here, the 200 million vicepresidents of Pets.com, which was about to lose $200 million.
Techs, dejected, susceptible, who, whatever they were up to then, went later into bitcoins, their investment and exchange, anticounterfeit bots combating minting. Startups as like Urrgency, Eastern Union.
Any one of them might have introduced us to the Master Classman. Reintroduced us. Because he must have been prepped for us. Because neither of us would have recalled the last time we met, in our prior incarnations as like ginkgo trees or leaves or beetles.
The Master Classman finished. Rather he had been dramatizing the precept of mandative inertia and the techs had interpreted that lull for his finishing, and they mobbed him, pressed around him as like magnetized. He had this stickiness to him, this retention.
We bladed circles around their glomerate.
The Master Classman bowed to them and blessed them, bent again to Schadborg, light whispers, heavy guruing.
It was out grinding curbside that he appeared to us. Appeared. From nothingness into flesh. Not kitschy as like flickering from a cheap desaturated color Obi Wan transported to the Starship Enterprise effect, but manifestation. We had been crying. He had that ability to out of nothing cry along. He said that we were sick and our sickness was of knowing. Also of not knowing. Ignorance was making us ill. Our willful disregard. He told us to sit and we sat. This was at a fundraiser in Menlo Park. He told us to stand and we stood. This was at another fundraiser in Los Gatos. He introduced us to his acolytes, including the rabbi of the Bush Street congregation, which after the retirement of its Jews rented its facility to the Master Classman. The rabbi offered a parable about a forest getting lost in itself, and then an anecdote about D-Unit.
We were with the Master Classman all the way, even to Noto. We went to Noto, no away msg.
[You just packed up and left?]
First trip. First trip out of the country.
[But where to exactly?]
Noto Peninsula. Ishikawa Prefecture. Honshū. Japan.
[When?]
Spring 2000. April, do not quote us, or do, but we stayed through the summer, September.
[A monastery or what?]
Zen. Sōtō. Order of the rice sorters. Sect of the jeweled mirror in which all substances and images merge.
[That’s why you went, to count the grains?]
We are going to barf. Pass the bowl.
[Wait, which?]
Pass.
://
[So you can’t tell me what made you drop it all and go monastic? And you won’t tell me what’s up with your health, the vomiting, the Doc Huxtable injectables?]
Balk not.
[Thor Balk again — what does he have to do with you finding religion? Or with the Master Classman?]
What the windbroken pineneedle has to do with the earthworm halved by a hoe. What the dragon howling in the wasted cedar has to do with the grains that fill a kalpa. Nothing. Gibber. The Master Classman was full of that on our arrival. He was very proud of the nature too, but that was fair, we had not expected the nature. We will try for local scenics. It was a monastery. A kakuchi. Pagodas with tiers all stacked, pagoda atop pagoda atop pagoda. Mountains we were told not to wonder which. Waters we were told not to wonder whether the bay or sea or ocean. The nearest neighbors were just jungle and beach. Closer to the beach was a decommissioned nuclearplant. For two months or so we went unrecognized. For 10 weeks we donned a diaper robe to toddle around behind the diaper robes and bibs of vivider colors. Sandals, timekeepers. Clickclack as like keys. The Master Classman was in and out, being driven to and from the airport in Komatsu. Approx two hours away, though not in sandals.
We were allotted our own eight mat hut. It was weatherized and had electric. We took a vow of silence, which was pointless, we took a vow of celibacy, pointless. We were never very capable at being a novice. It required a backengineer, a reversal. This might have bothered the Master Classman, but he was off pursuing abandonment.
Neglect the monk who seeks approval, true approval is neglect. Just a basic Western psych thing, not a koan.
All the monks who supervised our zazen and cooked and served and cleaned up from our meals lived two to each four mat cell, two cells in each hut. They had no electricity, no doubleglazed windows or vents, certainly no private tile bathrooms. They worked, not prepping for rice season or raising livestock, or making indigenous handicrafts, lacquerwork, halite pottery, but readying the guest facilities surrounding ours, doing repairs, vacuuming. We would sit for zazen in the zendo, and then the jikijitsu, who supervised our training, would bash the gong with the butt of his drill and go away to fix sinks and toilets and outlets.
The snows melted, the river thawed and flooded. The grounds were muddy, and even the monster trucks stuck.
Execs showed, from Vitol, Glencore, Trafigura, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, just in time for the sakura. They were unavoidable, they were chatty, quadlingually chatty. The Master Classman took over zazen, two sesshin a day. He taught “greedy breathing.” He taught a technique called “median digit lust mudra.” But we would skip one or both or the sesshin, to kinhin along the river to the top of a hill and just sit there lotused and yet even there one of the newbies panting and thornpricked and searching for phone reception would inevitably solicit up to us as like we were the shike, asking us if we were going to Burning Man, or Davos, asking us how this experience comptrasted with Burning Man, or Davos, wondering if we would recommend a regression ashram or matha or yeshiva, seeking advice on a pesky archival digitalization issue, seeking advice on synching emails across multiple devices. They would request our presence on philanthropy boards dedicated to eradicating autism. They would make confessions about having autistic children, estranged wives, about how they had come out here to forge closer relationships to family they had left back home, or to recover from mysterious diseases, affluenza. They were men, and under the direction of the Master Classman they did manly bonding things to also get closer to one another, carrying bronze keman and umpan and even gravemarkers extreme distances, samurai fights with rubber katana, sumo fights in rubber fatsuits, waterfall trustfalls. At night girls tramped in full geisha regalia from kimonos to whiteface would be jeeped in from Suzu and Wajima, and we would be awake and out early enough in the morning on kinhin to catch them leaving, and half of them were boys. We refused the ones that came to us, and then an oshō, a priest, showed up at our screen with one or two and an emoticon frown insisting we were getting him in trouble by refusing. We let them stay, the boy and girl, and so as like not to get them fired we performed sexually, but incompletely. So much for our celibacy. So much for our silence.
The oshō kept visiting, having taken notice of our conflict. Anything we say now is flattery, but he recognized us for pure, for attending-intending-to-pure. He took us under his instruction, explaining the writings, the Shōbōgenzō of Dōgen, and even the sutras by which Damo had explained India to Asia, the Prajnaparamita, the Avatamsaka, the Lankavatara. He explicated the Sanskrit, which he could only partially read, but in this language, which he could only partially speak. A child of his had suffered worse than we had and the writings had spared him, had spared the oshō. He got that we were not here for recharging, or hermitage pampering. He confided in us, his ricecloth-wiping-mirror-retaining-reflection. Our essence was communicated, he said, not just by our sexual tact, but by the fact that though we experienced shame we never stopped anyone from their duties, from laundering our koromo, from beating our mats of dust. We understood. Tipping would only insult.
The oshō, who had served at this or another kakuchi before the loss of his child had him joining the Master Classman, snuck to our cell for tutorials. We sat, no zafu, no zabuton, sat smack in our center and zoned. It was as like programming, but deprogramming. Our heads were monitors, our arms extended to hands extended to fingers, our legs and feet and toes were power. If any code inputted on our upper display, the middle converted it to output, which the lower expelled. The ultimate result was not clarity, kensho, or revelation, satori, but just the flinchless acceptance of a thwack, open palm, back of palm, rod of cypress.
The Master Classman disapproved, or so we thought because he sent an unsui to collect us, and though we were not supposed to think or refrain from thinking, this was what we thought, let it pass. He mentioned nothing about our informal sesshin, however.
He just reminded us of the schedule for the impending tech retreat. The Valley visiting the valley.
Then he handed us a parcel. Our luck has not been strong with parcels.
It was an SFO dutyfree plasticbag containing a Canada Post box stuck with customs stickers and addressed to Kor at the Tetplex, which contained a permit to transfer human cremains from the ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux du Québec, taped around a canister containing Moe, or what was left of him.
[Fuck — but this was legit?]
Every field for name in the documentation had been filled that way, just Moe.
[Are ashes even matchable for DNA?]
The lid was sealed. Glued.
[Kor was using Classman to make his peace with you or what?]
We shook it. There were contents.
[Or did Classman get this together on his own just to fuck with you?]
He who insists on having the end before the beginning. Vagary might be requisite to life.
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[You’re hanging around a monk monastery in rural Japan with your burnt friend in a thermos?]
Sitting lotused for the welcome meal with staff from Gopal, Dell, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Verizon, Sprint. Threading rice on hairs. Not boring. Unbearable.
[Or just with what might be your burnt friend in a thermos?]
This was living Buddhism, with the bone confetti of a Hindu saint just at our side in a container that resembled a water tumbler. Everyone was cur about why we got our own special water tumbler.
Moe had hated Buddhism, incidentally. He would always remark, if any Tetrateer mentioned meditating or practicing yoga, that they had the wrong tradition. It was Hinduism, not Buddhism, which was relevant. The contemporary was about multiplicity, not the unicity of void. The void was the easiest thing, or nonthing, to commodify. Or commoditize. Tetrate which term is currently popular. Do not.
All around us the talk was of popping, of bursting, who was going out of business, who had already gone. The atmosphere was that everyone present would survive, had been karmically intended to survive. What might once have been the will of the JudeoChristian God had become sexier, wiser, as like a destiny or fate. But our face must have disagreed with them, because we were asked, by the Gopal people, whether we felt our being here was preordained, and we answered no, and then the Gopal people asked how else to explain how we got here, and we answered we flew United.
Point is, that meal made it clear to us that 1.0, the first online generation, was over. The stocks had dissolved, if the businesses themselves were frauds shares of them were doubly fraudulent, hallucinations of hallucinations. Now that enlightenment had arrived in the form of the NASDAQ Composite in spiral, gratitude was called for, they were calling for a reevaluation of priorities. Young companies, they said, young execs as like us, had to respect their elders, learn what the market was teaching. We had to put off going public, stay lean, buckle down, attain profitability through ubiquity. If we did that, they said, we might just be the ones inheriting the lineage, becoming the online manifestation of IBM, the second bodhisattva emanation of Xerox.
Haiku, only haiku, got us through dessert, because now the kakuchi was serving dessert, mochi and red bean tarts.
The risen bubble
subsides in seven ripples.
Sun and moon in none.
The talk turned to antitrust law and the Microsoft precedent. Citigroup being fined for misleading investors.
Crane and carp make peace.
No violence can equal
bubbles drowning air.
The execs were talking Gautama Buddha and the differences between renunciation and moderation but as like they related to diet and exercise, the middle of the Middle Way. The affinities between Buddhism and capitalism. How compatible they were, how adaptable. If mindbody was a product, meditation was an unparalleled interface. Access was intuitive, direct. Divestment of material possessions would become simpler than ever online, even temporary, reversible, everything we owned would live on “the cloud.” “Aesthetic ecology,” “cultural conservation.” But put them and “the cloud” in quotes.
In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialize and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched. Also reducing domestic mess, the many devices on which we might ever decide to read or listen or watch would become integrated, merged, fewer.
We would not be bound to our possessions, nor would we ever be forced to produce them ourselves. Between the time we are recounting and now, everyone at that meal, drinking gunpowder tea but also café au lait, would go on to outsource and offshore their Buddhisms. Even us, betraying. Our Tetheld and Tetbook processors are made in Dalian, Guangzhou, the batteries and casings in Thailand, Malaysia. Our design sensibility was to buy design sensibility off Nokia, which we did by buying Nokia. But that was later.
Some tech obsolesces, some has been engineered to obsolesce, all is basically nonrecyclable. Moe was manic about that recursion, the tech afterlife, the device eschatology. When products die, they are exported back to where they were made, to the nativity of the East, to India. This being the true cosmic cycle, the pdas and comps and printers illegal to dump in the West instead leaching their mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, barium, into the foreign groundwaters, and rewarding the same populations that manufactured them with silicosis and neurotoxicity, just enough to numb against irony. Meantime corporate atrocities are offset by quarterly donations. 10 % of gross to related causes.
[Atrocities aside, disingenuousness too, aren’t we way offtopic?]
Moe. His hatreds, his dichotomies. To him, hardware was Hindu, each machine an integrated system, software was Buddhist, repetitive series of flawed instructions. The net was Hindu, the underlying protocol, the web was Buddhist, undesigned empty sites, framed nothingness with noodly chanting.
[You agreed with him?]
We had to agree. Except about JudeoChristianity, which Moe loved, but in that same exoticism way. The way you love cancer patients, not relations or friends. He felt for the irony, the cynicism, the turning the other cheek while turning a buck, the imperative to monetize, capitalize, whether a material or intangible asset, the mania for advantaging, for leveraging one into the other. The regard for worth, exchange value. Valuta, the catallactics.
Transactions, he had a sweet tooth for transactions.
We are trying to remember the last time we met.
Not at the Seed Factory. He would always order the candied cashews, which though they are definitively seeds
Not in the lot. Harassing the Trapezzi Sisters into giving his van a spongebath.
Maybe we just passed in a hall, or maybe only he was passing but
[Just hold up. You mentioned cancer?]
There were tumors among the monks, there had been tumors. Environmental radiation from the neighboring plant. We did not mention. You did.
[I didn’t mean the monks. Can we talk about it?]
We would prefer to talk about every other omission, as like your own. The porn and the pill consumption rivaling ours, by prescription at least. Your career before this and after. We would prefer to talk about your wife.
://
[Prompt?]
Please.
[“… The atmosphere was that everyone present would survive, had been karmically intended to survive. What might once have been the will … they said, we might just be the ones inheriting the lineage, becoming the online manifestation.…”]
The meal. After the meal the monks clattered the trays, and the jikijitsu gonged for a calligraphy workshop, but we grabbed the putative ashes of Moe, set out on our regular kinhin along the river.
The canister, even the canister had a taint at bottom, Made in China. We stuck it down in the pouch of our rakusu.
The route of our kinhin was always pine-tree-slicing-serpent-belly-river, the bridge to the cemetery to the hill between the mountains to the south, the hyperboloid coolingtowers of the nuclearplant and the evacuation drill beach to the north, out to the flies-aggravating-mouth-tidalpool, and then around again, returning. But this time we were interrupted. The Master Classman. He was the gate itself.
He asked to accompany us, which was to accompany the current. He asked if the people from, he mentioned an acronym, DBA, had mentioned his proposal. Wind shattered everything into acronyms. The current switched. He talked about DCents, talked siting, the top six concerns, top four concerns, energy costs, cooling. He was familiar with our specs. We sped up and put trees between us. Transmissions lost efficacy with spatial gain. Information over distance weakened as like a voice, an echo. All that buffered us was green.
He caught up on the hilltop, laid out his proposal as like the vista. There were realestate opportunities, he said, also religious preservation opportunities. There was a chance to ensure a bold future for the kakuchi, by investing in the surrounding grounds. Someone was going to do it, and a monk was a someone, if he had to be. If Tetration purchased certain lots from the Ishikawa Bureau of Land Development, and DCentered them, contracting with TBA, or TBD, or breeze, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would surely accelerate efforts to convert the nuclearplant to geothermals. Electricity would be green, cheap, and just below us, a mangly contamination of oxidized pumps and pipes, a single siren spinning mute light. The whole peninsula would benefit, Kanazawa especially. The Master Classman too, who would receive a fee for the brokerage.
He told us to meditate on it. For serious he told us. We were still atop the hill but facing the mountains. Then he was gone, smacks of rain and righteous sandals.
The massive trees were dripping, had us missing Palo Alto. A scurry through the branches had us recalling that primates were the only mammals whose behavior did not predict tsunamis. Only mammals besides humans. Fact, no fact ever contradicted a tree.
We made our way down to the beach. The descent steepened us into feeling as like we could leap and begin again, we could just jump and land, splash stars or sand. Startover. The tideline was vast with trash, wet reactor core trash, washing in and out and in. But just beneath us on the slope and tangled in shrub was a runningshoe, a neon and 10 other types of fading yellow runningshoe, gel midsole/heel, meshed vamps crisscrossed with kelp and logo bolts, all phylon pronating lacelessness. This is immaterial. It was just us out in the rain above a single runningshoe. A moment. Not kensho, not satori, this was just being conscious, aware. This was our maturity. Our disabuse. A discarded runningshoe out in the midst of nature was our nature. We held a culm of bamboo, reached for the shoe, struggled to unshrub it and slid, but it was as like a misty vine binding all the culms hauled us up and steady again. We reached into our rakusu for the cylinder, fitted it down into the shoe and under the tongue and then, aiming for the rainy waves, we chucked it, and whether it even made the waves is immaterial.
We had the oshō drive us to the station, took a train for Kanazawa. The Ishikawa Bureau of Land Development informed us that all Shinto shrines were owned by the prefectural government. Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist temples and monasteries were the property of their respective sects, all except the kakuchi we were cur about. In 1992, Sōtōshu Shumucho, the official body of the sect, had deaccessioned the kakuchi, and put it up for auction, citing reservations about its proximity to the new nuclear powerplant in Shika. It was purchased by a company of gaijin, Americant Unholding, S.H., which traded on its history and shukyo hojin, religious nonprofit, status but staffed it with unaccredited monks and even laypeople and operated it as like a tourist enterprise, eliciting complaints from Sōtō roshi in Fukui and Hyōgo. But the Sōtōshu Shumucho practiced detachment, the prefecture refused to get involved. Americant Unholding, S.H., was registered in Tokyo. We took a train to Tokyo.
The current owner was the half Japanese, half Sacramento exwife of the Master Classman, a cosmetic surgery nurse with her own taxes in arrears. She had won the kakuchi in the divorce in 96, kept the Master Classman as like director out of mawkishness and torpor, but given how paltry and sporadic the transfers had become was now convinced he was skimming. We called Gutshteyn collect from her pebble garden, got Carbon or Keiner to recommend a local lawyer to negotiate purchase and structure the deal. We installed the oshō and shike in cocharge with the sole stipulation that they let the Master Classman stay on as like an unsui. Basically, the Master would become the student, but he refused and so had to be escorted off the premises. Immaterial. After our death kakuchi ownership will revert to its board in perpetuity, immaterial. We emailed Kor who rented a plane for us and already in midair we decided we would purchase one too, a better one, and an airport. You are still wondering about the source of the ashes. Whether Classman or Kor. But we are too. Fall 2000.
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Buddhist calendars are lunisolar and delay their approach to our secular time, adding extra months only every approx 20 years. Hindu calendars are lunisolar too but keep up with ours in realtime, adding days to weeks as like necessary, adding weeks to months as like necessary, each with their own unbooley appellative. The fundamental unit of the Hindu clock is the breath. In Buddhism it is the thought, or nonthought, because time is actualized only in its absence.
The turn of the century procrastinated, lagged, as like we did. 2001 was the millennium returned. The cable channels had transmitted the fall of Wall, and of the Soviet sputnik satellites, by satellite. The towers went down pure online.
[Speak for yourself.]
We do.
[OK, fuck it, where were you when?]
We were with you, that is the salience. We were the pressed suit and tie plunging curbward and the rubbled pit janitor crying refresh. We were every impatient pick at the groin while the footage was still loading. Every on the clock officewide click.
[But what about you physically?]
It was 06:00 on a Tuesday morning, physically. We had been awake all night. We had a foreboding. That something would prevent the delivery, that something would prevent the enjoyment, of a never plugged in 1984 Bally Midway Spy Hunter arcade console. Not the standup but the sitdown fully immersive cockpit version. Which was finally delivered to us, but not fully enjoyed, at noon.
[Fuck you, but I was always a fan of the pinball version.]
But the tower events were not just online, they were all communications. More sites, more gadgets, more wars. More of the government seeking to resolve domestic policy abroad and in the process merely finding new markets for us and not even requesting a kickback, at least not directly. All this was just collateral damage.
Kor called it, called each new product launch, “Bringing democracy to the Arabs.”
But the for serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die, and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail.
Nothing had indicated this. There were no predictions. Take a small elite cadre trained to dev a plan, keep it quiet, then go big on release. The results had to be instructive.
Buying out blogging platforms, to neutralize or plagiarize into the one your wife uses. Turning the toil of others our own or just profit. We were good at it and glad we were good at it. We found we had this penchant for business and happiness.
In our absence we had accumulated approx 24000 emails in our inbox unchecked or we are assuming unchecked and we went about responding to each one. Unfortunately we will not be able to make the bart mitzvot of the son and daughter twins of the chief compliance or compilance officer of tendR that anyway was held weeks ago, months ago. Unfortunately we must also decline your invitation to audition Menumancer or MassTransicle. Because apparently in our absence we already bought it.
We replied to all, and shut the account. We never had another.
Though for a while if there was an email we had to send we would just open a new account and send it and the footer would disclaim no one responded to this account. Then opening new accounts got to be a hassle so we created an app, but this was later, that just let us send msgs, clancular, from any idle pda. But then we stopped. Entirely.
Backtracking. While we were gone Qui and Cull had become our Acting CoCEOs, but though Qui offered to relinquish the position and Cull offered to share it, we let them have it, we put a stop to their acting. They were our CoCEOs fullstop, and we were The Shuffler of Titles, trying Chairman, Deskman, Founder Person, but rejecting them all, realizing none was required. Everyone had equal vote but so did Kor.
Backtracking. He, Kor, went pressuring us to do press, and rehab our rep, which at this point had become as like Howard Hughes with a Unabomber haircut. But instead of replying to any interview requests we interviewed for hire. Assistants.
We asked them to imagine the mythological web or net of Indra, woven of precisely 600 monkeypubes warped horizontally and 600 monkeypubes wefted vertically. Now calculate the number of nodes, meaning how many times the pubes intersect, along with the number of voids, meaning how many openings dehisce between intersections. Next we asked what is in the middle of China. The answers were 360K, 359.4K, and in the middle of China is “i.”
The only candidate who got that was Korean, Myung. So we gave her the vitamin test. No math was involved. We just had her grade our vitamins. Then we had her script the commencement addresses we gave for our honorary degrees at Stanford Business and Caltech Engineering. Myung responded with material about how our religious search was enriching our online search. How finding ourselves was finding our users. We surveyed Asia, waggled at American overregulation and undereducation, but closed with, “We are ecstatic to be home.”
[No — you were ecstatic for your IPO.]
08/01/04, we were public. Do you know what we initially traded at per share?
[I’ve had enough of trick questions.]
We ask because we do not know what we initially traded at per share.
[2004, my friend, Cal, invested in you and was after me to put money in too.]
Did you?
[No, unfortunately — my conflicts of interest have never been that lucrative.]
But they were for everyone else. M-Unit, Aunt Nance. Deans, profs. The no perchloroethylene drycleaner. The cleftpalate waitress at Au Natchl. Recs never met or octalfortied. All invested. Tetration split, divided, dividended, it was as like a cell before sex and better than sex, or a god whose potency only increased with each embodiment. Parents of Cull who were already flush got a fourth pied à terre in Copley Square, parents of Qui got a Rittenhouse manse with a dumbwaiter. They had never been so excited.
Our CoFos, their homes were our offices, and our offices were their homes. They were our family, and we, for in
There were a lot of opportunities around then. All of them small with ombré hair atop heads shaped as like Reuleaux or Meissner tetrahedra, spheres squeezed to the smallest volume while still retaining a constant width.
The percentage of their bodies that was fat was the percentage of corporate income we paid in taxes, approx 10 %, until we got that down to approx 2.6 % by transferpricing through Tetration Ireland Limited, a subsidiary of Tetration Ireland Holdings, Bermuda.
We purchased a lot, hired and fired starchitects, designed La Trovita Lando ourselves, exterior, interior, domotics. Started, finished. Got involved in litigation over unfair use of plans, settled, decided it was unfinished, started again. We lived on the property in a trailer throughout.
10 figures we had, and a portapotty without a permit. La Domo, what existed, became warehouse, storage.
Guitars and drumsets once owned by the Keiths, Richards, Moon. A prototype Moog, KRS-One turntable. Some plaster cast suitcase, sculpture. Some goat embalmed and varnished clear with glitter, sculpture or installation unclear. Who the artists were we had not been apprised prior to bidding. We resisted independent appraisals. A Rothko, another Rothko basically identical, anything modern but as like the old modern. We managed and still manage our money ourselves, liaisoning with M-Unit and Aunt Nance who retired. They run our interference, run blitzes, scrimmaging against the memorabilists, antiquarians. 50 % of a T206 Honus Wagner baseball card but under the terms of our custody split Kor has his turn to hold onto it.
We have a first folio Shakespeare, the Schlechter Schneider Stradivarius, a Bruegel. Did we show you?
[Nope, disconfirmative.]
2005, the last we transacted with the Arabian Peninsula. We had keynoted a cyberterror exchange at UCLA, and a visiting Dhofari Omani general approached to sell us straight from the tomb in Salalah a toe of the prophet Job. Though there are at least four other tombs asserting sole possession of the prophet, who anyway never existed. But it was definitely a toe, a middle, which we later had carbondated to approx four centuries after the Book of Job was composed.
Why did you not get us to show you?
[Because you never offered.]
Malibu surfshack, Aspen cabin, duplex coop in Manhattan, 740 Park, close by the museums but still far from getting zoning approval for a rooftop livestock enclosure.
We purchased a defunct volcanic island at the edge of the Revillagigedos, approx 170 nautical miles S/SW off Isla Clarión, as like a tax shelter. Though we refused to decide on a name until the Mexican government retracted its claim.
[This was the scandal?]
We would have been better off owning a planet instead, even with the extraterrestrial banking laws so undefined.
[I hope you’re not expecting me to interrupt?]
You have to realize how stealth we were, especially in comptrast with our CoFos. Cull and Qui were more out, more liable, giving the commentariat interactive tours of their spreads, for serious prime acreage. Kor appeared less but made his appearances count. Plying Congress with the next quarter tech haruspexus, and writing opeds on our stewardship of the Fourth Amendment.
2006, he flew us to New York. Our new offices were opening up, in his mind it was time we opened up too. Intimately. To reporters.
You remember our sitdown. Debacular, catalaminous. We wore clothing appropriate but approved. We prepped, Myung had prepped us, but then we withheld, which is as like writing up a profile but never publishing it.
Click “About.” Click “Tetstory.” We had committed that official history to memory, revisionism Kor had commissioned this PR firm with the secondlongest client roster ever to keep short for us. Moe is mentioned but popup window note minorly, as like a mascot engineer who died discreetly after a prolonged illness while on Canadian vacation.
Not journalists, they were pingers. All, what sports do you do to relax. What causes, what candidates. Relationships, marriage, for in
The outlets that cited sources had to factcheck, but all the gotchablogs had to do was go through our trash. wwjcdo.com and jocohenspiracy.com did that literally, and the biohazard receptacles we were renting were no deterrent. He uses quilted papertowels. Flagrant. He tossed out a jar of lysine with two capsules left inside. Even this must have its meaning.
tetricity.com and tetspionage.com at least tried to cover the industry, by letting disgruntled unable to hack it exTetrateers announce forthcoming projects that either did not exist or we never intended to dev. Accuracy subordinated to rate of update, style.
But b-Leaks was different. Approx 100000 hits from approx 88000 unique IPs per day and that was just through us. Their credibility was documented, unredacted documents. b-Leaks was a dump.
Basically, the second Count of Revillagigedo, scourge of pirates and viceroy of New Spain, namesake of the inarguably Mexican archipelago, bequeathed a neighboring anonymous uninhabited island to the dukedom of Medina Sidonia, in appreciation of its having insured the voyages of Bodega y Quadra, which searched Alaska for the Northwest Passage and attempted to capture Captain Cook, though no Passage was found and Cook, who had been unable to find it himself, was already dead in Hawaii. 18th century, late.
Immediately after our purchase of the isle in 2008, Mexico contacted the State Department.
They sought to nullify the deal, by asserting that the grandees of Medina Sidonia had never held title to the property but were merely its “gobernadores,” “guardianes.” Ceremonial positions. Ruling rights and privileges neither intended nor implied. We had Myung email the deed to State, a fancy scroll expressly granting sovereignty. The specific inheriting marchioness we had transacted with had scanned it for us but insisted on holding onto the original out of curatorial sentiment. State relayed to us that Mexico had requested the original but that the marchioness had left Ibiza for equestrian season and was currently unreachable. Based on an expert evaluation of the scan, however, the deed appeared to be forged. No paper analysis required, period Spanish would never have spelled it “cuando,” but “quando.”
According to satellite, the Mexican Armada, or what can pass for it, sent two Huracáns to blockade the only usable inlet on the isle. We introduced ourselves to the head of Tetration Mexico, fired him, hired another, and then went out to a reception to help reelect Representative Eshoo for the 14th District, and to solicit the intervention of the emcee, Senator Feinstein, who had not been previously apprised of the situation and would make no guarantees.
We had Myung write a report and email it with the scan attached to the senator. The senator was never in contact. But her aide fwd: d the email to a friend who was a Congressional page, as like in the spirit of incredulity or humor, compensatory reactions to insecurity, basically. That Congressional page then fwd: d to her boyfriend, in the same inane vindictive spirit, and that boyfriend to another friend, a fellow PhD candidate in media studies at Brown, who clicked it to the b-Leaks general account, and b-Leaks posted everything.
Charges of undue influence were rampant. In exchange for assistance we would publicly endorse a cyber coordination act, which would include a stipulation that authorized an executive sequestration of online in declared states of national emergency. We would support an online infringement and counterfeit act, which would empower attorneys general to blacklist sites perceived as like fraudulent. The aide and page resigned and Senator Feinstein disclaimed ever having extended preferential treatment. Mexico took control of the island, and set up an observatory, no staff. The marchioness has yet to refund our money.
Myung wrote our statement, Kor edited. “We have never sought or expected preferential treatment.”
This was how we became familiar with Balk.
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Thor Ang Balk. The product of the inadvisable coupling of a Norwegian and a Swede. But childhood is over, and whatever he did before pressing the button on b-Leaks we missed. Virtuous hacking and masturbation, epitomizing the righteousness of the social welfare state. We heard of him at the same time you did, and saw the photos. The US beating hooded Arabs photos. We clicked, zoomed in to resolve them unblurry. Then the intel memos he leaked from Afghanistan. Renditions. Detentions. Waterboardings. Torture.
His residence was Copenhagen, but Denmark had no grounds to prosecute him, and extradition was not an option. He had not broken any laws. He was a naturalized EU citizen, he had never even visited the contiguous 48. Still, enough other countries with militaries in the region or just with violations of the Geneva Conventions to conceal were angry or feeling the pressure, so he went fugitive. Rather there was a warrant out for his arrest for something sexual, nasty sexual. The consensus was confusing. He had raped someone, or he had not and the charges were trumped up. He was a free speech hero or international threat or both and either being persecuted for that or a pervert. Point is, he shopped around and got asylum. At present his residence is a compquipped closet in the Russian embassy in Iceland.
This is nothing new to you.
Balk not.
[What’s your take on him personally?]
Transpaque, oparent. So transparent as like to be opaque, we cannot tell what he is made of, if anything at all. Gray noise. So loud and quiet at once, ideology becomes a substitute for mood. Point is, if it had not been him, it would have to be another. It still will be, even with mirror servers and AES256 bit key encryptions. b-Leaks is not a person but an organization, and not even that, but a brutalist.org, a discipline of releasement. Upload shame, download liberty. A coordinate to confide in. A platform for all spills. Imagine a shrink practicing group therapy on the UN. Imagine if your wife and mother collaborated on a blog. In complanguage, Balk himself is merely a statement, a conditional. If then else and else if then. Representative of the modern choice. Whether to disclose yourself to no one or to everyone, exclusively.
We have avoided being so principled all our life. Balk lives shut into what would have been a luxury cell at the Lubyanka, eating consulary blini and drinking vodka without ice, waiting for soldiers and diplomats and intel and military contractor types to get bored or depressed and blow their whistles. They are his friends, as like penpals. They are his only friends. Along with his intermediary and hausfrau, Anders Maleksen, his laptop, a treadmill. Sometimes Balk works on the laptop while working out on the treadmill. Sometimes he even uses our site. We have no such information about Anders Maleksen.
[That’s your take or the official Tetration line?]
The official Tetration line we are through with. Our terms of service we are through with. We Work 4 Free. But we do not. Balk does. For him there is no platinum parachute retirement.
Balk is basically open and we are basically closed. As like Kor says, “Open is not what open does. Closure is for closers.”
Throughout 2010, Cull and Qui were deving Autotet. This would be their last contribution to the business. We worked on it as like an advisor only. Comptrasted with them we felt as like the old dude.
Both our CoFos had married and reproduced, yet we were the ones getting draggy. Juncle Josh, their kids would climb all over our stacks, we were Juncle Josh. A graybeard wandered out of the Bible. Out of their Bible for Children ebook.
Basically, Autotet is an app that searches without having been instructed to find, collecting terms from Tetmail and Tetset, from all our products and services, and then generating a unique online experience for each user, by directing them to pertinent sites they have never before and might never otherwise have visited. It has what you want/need before you need/want it, delivering you in advance.
Such a thing can only be used transactionally, to sell and buy, we were all clear about that, Qui and Cull were.
In Tetmail or Tetset you used to ask your mother how her pottery had been going, and an ad immediately appeared to the side asking you to buy some vases, or two for one, but always something massproduced, commercial. Tetrating “spouse/user with online addiction disorder” would get results alongside counseling offers covered by Kaiser Permanente. But that was in the past. Before gays could marry widely and Afromericans could be President.
With Autotet, each tetration has a secondary function, or dreamlife. The terms you pick become the accidental expressions of an automated dream. Say that you once typed in a chat or mentioned even on a call having enjoyed “chain bookstores in Paris and London.” On any subsequent visit you pay to Charing Cross Road your pda will ask, “Remember Foyles?” or the next you are shopping for clichés on the Rue de Rennes it will ask, “Remember FNAC, only.6 miles ahead?” but in French, if you prefer, or Basque, in which the distance would be.96 kilometers. The display would announce a sale on select stock of the langue anglaise section, “Act in the next 20 minutes and get an additional 10 % off,” and it would even do this in celebrity voices, or yours, which you have instructed the semantic sampling feature to reproduce just by calling normally. You will be able to remind your greatgreatgreatgreatgrandchildren to get a parka, if ever again the temperature falls below a preset 42° F/5.5 °C.
Autotet predicts what you will do based on what you have done. Not predicts, but determines. Destines, fates. Entraps your future in your past.
This doubling, this doubling was also his nightmare. Moe, we mean, it would have been. His hope for recursion. For reversibility. Input to output to input again. The only entropy the intel we have accrued on you. Per lustration. Posterous.
[You’re gloomier than Balk, then — you’re saying we don’t even have to be surveilled, because with proper incentive we all bare ourselves voluntarily?]
Biochemically, neurologically, confirmative. We want to see and be watched, to listen and be heard, and even a cave needs to be famous, if only among caves, or to the fighters it hides, to the fighters who storm it, if only to itself. Our appetite for secrets is our appetite for fame. How many we keep is how much we lack. Then we divulge around the fire. Then we only have others to live for.
The exposure of bombing targets and dronestrike locations merely reveals, by the inaction inspired, how alienated we have become from our governance. Balk is just facilitating the inevitable breakdown of yet another system we were forced to respect, however fraudulent it is, or was. He is ultimately just proving arithmetic, the arithmocracy. That what happens to us happens to you, our institutions, all things civil.
The desert, octalfortied.
Imagine all the grains, the tribimillion grains that make up the ergs, the barchans, the dunes. Imagine the dune on which Arabic numerals were first traced. Not ////, killed, but 4, murdered. We have always had the suspicion that this abbreviating method was invented because of the wind, because of our brief time before everything is blown away from us.
[So Kor — I assume we’re avoiding Kor because of this. He wouldn’t be pleased that you’re putting this on record, would he?]
Confirmative.
[But if Kor himself were telling his side, that would be OK with you, even though you’d disagree with it?]
Let him provide his own account. Better that he does before the law compels it out of him.
[What do you mean?]
That we will not be around to testify. With all respect to the shareholders of this and any other court, by then we will have been assigned to another judge.
[Does that mean what I take it to?]
Difficulties. Extenuations.
Except Myung. We were never involved.
Let her determine her own involvement. No. Let her decide her own pseudonymity. No.
Leave everything, trust nothing, and as like D-Unit would say, may you always be able to convince everyone but yourself.
[Of what?]
All.
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Tibet was next. Recall Tenzin Gyadatsang, the dissident.
[Gyadatsang? Wasn’t he a poet, though, also?]
Is. Poet, playwright, activist.
Persecution does not always come with a job description.
The past is the well
the future is the bucket
the present is the rope
we have taken to hang ourselves.
[Next you’re supposed to say it rhymes in the original.]
or
the present is the rope
reappropriated to the gallows
[All dissident verse is the same.]
All oppression is too.
[And all roses are red? All violets are blue?]
A FedEx arrived at La Trovita Lando, mailed from generic LA. All it contained was a book, xuan paper, corrugated covers, staplebound, limited edition, #168/200, Editions Nirvanasa, Varanasi, India, 2010. That frontmatter was all we understood of it. The language of the rest appeared to script in Devanagari but turned out to be Tibetan. We were typing everything into Tetrans, whose Tibetan is now fluent. “Rope Poems” had to be the title because “Tenzin Gyadatsang” was a bad title. Though “Rope Poems” was such a good name for a poet that we were considering taking the name “Tenzin Gyadatsang” to mean “Upholder-of-Buddhist-Doctrine Enemy-of-the-Chinese,” aliases both. “Nirvanasa” did not mean what we assumed it did, but “exile.”
We even typed the poems out into Tetrans. We got their meaning, but their significance eluded.
we are srivatsa srivatsa
we are our border
we eye and ear and knot and knot!
we pray for an equality of not independence!
knot mouth
mouth knot
[So what’s the explanation?]
Nothing. We got treemail all the time. Fan portraits of us in acrylics and oils. Fan R&B operas of our life. We researched Tenzin and he was poetry famous. There had not been a note. He had not requested us to write a foreword, or afterword, or note. We put it aside.
But were haunted by it every time we went past it to the toilet. So we went to another toilet.
[What does this have to do with Balk?]
A week or even month later, which are just %ds, or placeholders for the true integer/interval, poetry was making news. After the jump and keep scrolling, there was a link under the Global rubric, UPI, or Reuters.
Tenzin Gyadatsang, the alias of poet Lhundup Jamyang Tenzin Gyatso, had been in Hungary. He was attending a Writers of Conscience summit to accept a citation, a consolation type Nobel.
On his way back to Tibet, the Chinese detained him. He had been flying, of course, through Beijing. The trial was over before lunch. He was in prison just after lunch. He missed lunch. No lunch since for Lhundup Jamyang Tenzin Gyatso.
He was being accused of having abused the privilege of travel abroad by plotting, alongside EU resident Nepali citizen subversives who had visited him in Budapest, to undermine the Party if not to overthrow The Great Firewall of China itself, through the staging of illegal performance art and lhamo flashmobs in Ngawa. To mark the second anniversary of the 2008 Tibetan Unrest, which resulted in %d jailings, and %d definite deaths. There was no mention of the evidence against him, no mention of how that evidence had been obtained.
[What about who sent the book?]
We preferred to regard it as like a coincidence, as like someone organizing some Free Tibet gala had misjudged our tolerance for unintelligible sherpa verse.
[Why?]
That was the question, booley. Because if in fact it was not a coincidence, then only why would answer who.
[A hint?]
We had been sent the book as like a notice. That whatever happened to Tenzin Gyadatsang, we would be responsible. Us. That, at least, was our translation of the translation.
[But what cause would anyone have to blame you?]
In the beginning it was casual. Clandestine, no chalance. North Korea, Russia, and China especially were always gambiting with us. The Liberation Army had agents stationed at the factories we had then in Shenzhen snarfing viruses into our circuits directly. Unit 61398, the advanced persistent threats, the APTs, Chinese cyberwar special forces. They targeted us and Symantec and decontractors as like L3 and SciApp and ComPsyience, basically everyone who has ever loaded Minesweeper or done over $20 billion of business with the last Department of Defense, with that hardcore softconfig management attack that just seclused itself as like an SSL, minesweeping the sourcecode, reprogramming the sourcecode, immense infectious worms from Shanghai wriggling their havoc from the Valley to the Beltway.
Or pick a country. Any country. Iran. They will not let Tetration in, they will let Tetration in but the president wants only certain features. The Majlis, which is parliament but also for all practical purposes the directorship of Telecom Iran, wants certain other features. Nobody is being more specific or can be more specific until the ayatollah farts, meantime fucking South Korea is demanding users register for all our services under their legal names, fucking Russia is demanding we remove all content that purportedly glorifies homosexuality, suicide, and drugs or face the prospect of getting interdicted, and here in the Emirates they are insisting we not just block the amateur dickpics or vids but also immolate their posters, and we will not even try to account for the presumed offenses to Mohammed that lately result in up to a dozen other nations rioting in our lobbies and flipping us on and off all switchy.
But no matter what it was, the government, by which we mean the American, would help. That was why we paid all that tax we did not dodge. The Department of Homeland Security CERT, the Computer Emergency Readiness or Reaction, we cannot recall which, Team, would fund groups of independent techs who otherwise would never have swiveled on the same transport layer together, to crack a rollback or reneg, to crush the red hackers, the black hats, the pointy sabots, the Baltic and Balkan hacktivists, the Trojan horses and the elephants of Carthage. Even State, which did not have to do us any personal favors after our tantrums over what was not Mexico, what never was Mexico, would regularly intervene for Tetration abroad.
In return we complied with requests. A government or agency, by which we mean the courts, would petition a tetrequest panel to crook a set of Tetmail or Tetset msging activity or tetraffic from a particular IP within a range of geolocations and/or dates. Whatever they served us, a subpoena, order, or warrant, would determine what they would get. Might determine. Requestwise, say we received approx 4000/month, approx 48000/year, involving between 30000 and 32000 accounts, approx 80 % of the requests domestic, we would comply with approx 60 % and contest the rest. Anything too broad we would challenge and narrow, and any users affected would be informed unless we were explicity gagged. Internationals had similar recourse. Dependent on reciprocity agreements. Treaties of mutual aid. Say that Monday an identity went astray in Jerusalem and wound up associated with another #tet, on Tuesday the investigating detective filed a request with the Israel Ministry of Justice, which went Wednesday to the US Department of Justice, on Thursday a US attorney went to a judge, and Friday they got in touch, we disabled the account and surrendered its deets, the wicked were punished, the lost identity restored, and then it was the Sabbath and we rested. This was our patriotism. This was the cost/benefit of success. Legal required its own tower at the Tetplex, and a single nerve fiber between our prefontal cortex and temporal lobe. We had doctors for everything else.
[Which was what exactly? Not cancer but neurological?]
Judicial, strictly judicial. Stay focused.
Because even allies hack, and if China can take a shit in our systems, cadging an individual account is just a wipe.
If the Tibetan winner of the 2010 Poetry Wreath of the City of Szombathely amasses approx 8660KB of data while on his winning trip, even the mistresses of the Politburo will be able to access it, be sure of it. Images of ruined impregnable castles and the beautiful blue Danube. Threads of seditious txt. All of which had only been sent to other Tetmails.
The account we had tetrated and were snooping through had been opened with us just recently, as like the week before in Hungary recently, tengy@tetmail.com. It had not been accessed by anyone outside Hungary up until four days before the arrest. Then there was a guest ostensibly from the Philippines. A blatant Chinese hab.
Though even if we had been broken into that still did not explain how we had become a dedicated reader of stanzas about wells and buckets without pulleys, prior to the arrest.
Sitting at La Trovita Lando, turning pages, it was as like all that white space surrounding the incomprehensible strained to fill us in.
This had to have been a bilateral hack, we realized. The Chinese had to have broken into the account of the poet, but then another party, either already ensconced in our systems or ensconcing itself through its pursuit of the Chinese break, must have confirmed this and decided to alert us by posting us this poetry.
Which was not the least explicable aspect of it all. Because the least explicable aspect of it all was that despite having access to our systems, this party did nothing to try to crash or even change them, according to the Soviets.
Meaning that whoever did this was pure, was Moe pure. Meaning political, religious, truther.
Balk.
[Then what? Suddenly the migraines came back and you were vomiting blood?]
182 days in prison, to date, one hour outside every two nights in an exercise yard 12 × 12 m2, 1100 calories/day, 1 liter of water/day, no phone, no email, no writing materials, no books or even Chinese media of any type, two one hour conjugal visits every six months, 44268 signatures on eight petitions, 3468 days left in his sentence. cn, the Not-People-Way however you pinyin it, disproportionate, unfair, Bu Ren Tao, not any way to treat a homicider let alone a weibos junkie, a lurker at an obfsproxy tor to the Forbidden City. A poet. Tenzin.
“We have always evaluated access requests on a case by case basis, forever endeavoring to be of service to our nation, while remaining convinced that our best service consists of protecting the privacy of our users worldwide.” Ladies, gentlemen, Kori Dienerowitz.
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[Can you recall a time the government filed a request with Tetration and you didn’t cooperate? You refused?]
Next. Felix Ranklin. @clitmechanic, #clitmechanic1992. None other.
[You wouldn’t hand over his what? Did they threaten to contempt you?]
You misunderstand. We had no inkling of this Ranklin even as like a user. We had never come into contact with any clitmechanic, 92 or not. He did not exist to us, least of all as like human.
Anyway final decision regarding contesting requests falls to Kor. The government just settled the case.
[Did they? Am I that out of touch?]
The countersuit. No one can discuss.
[You can?]
Also 2010, last year. Just at the break of spring US citizen Felix Ranklin was apprehended at the condo he shared with his paraplegic widowed mother in Dover, Delaware, the FBI barging in and custodying the pimplepopper and impounding his as like decrepit Gopal Pro. They summarily charged him, an 18 year old fryer at a reststop Burger King, with a count each of conspiracy to support/inflict terror, and asserted that his computer had been surfeited with plans for the DIY recreation of Kinepouch and Kinestik, basically binary explosives of ammonium nitrate/nitromethane, blank applications for materiel, unsubmitted queries for shocktubes, blastingcaps, and the jetfuel hydrazine, for commercial/industrial purposes. But instead of reporting that among all that there were no logistics even circumstantially interpretable as like indicating achieved capability nevermind an impending attack, the agents chose to grossly emphasize other sites he had visited regarding Asperger syndrome, subthreshold pervasive development disorder, dyslexia, and “macroclitorides,” which are female sex organs whose protruding tips have been so naturally or artificially engorged as like to resemble “micropenises.”
Fall, we flew to DC. The Smithsonian. We were being fêted. Again we were working for free. Doing a favor for the homeland. At Smithsonian request we had donated our earliest server unit to them, the rig from The Clingers and later from Grupo Escudo, but scoured of its stuck gum and nosepicked patina. They had requested our attendance too. Kor required our attendance. You give them a server, they give you a banquet. The ante is upped and you have to reciprocate with a $2 million contribution, deductible.
We had not appeared in public in six months or even spoken to Kor in two, approx. We had been having trouble eating. Our weight was down to levels totally pre IPO. The blogs, ratetion.com, jculate.com, speculated a theological relapse. They wrote we had gone Brahman again or were changing our gender. We were studying the Zohar with a talking donkey at the gates of Dagestan.
Other intuitions were closer.
We had to be photographed, Kor said. In public, he said.
Also there was a new Congress to meet. There is always a new Congress to meet.
We stayed at the, we feel the urge to say the Watergate, at the Mandarin Oriental. Überproximal. Our skin was dry, our mouth was dry, we had nausea and the swells. We were only trying to get away with not wearing a tie and so were experimenting with other neck adornments as like a deluxesize button or bolo but the swells, the neck, and then we cut ourselves shaving but never healed.
Kor was arriving from fill in the blank. Again. We had not been in touch. From Orlando, why not, native city of the Ranklin mother.
We supposed it was him at the door, Kor. We flushed, rinsed, and opened, towel to our chin. But it was Myung, and Jesus and Feel, and with them was another man the proportions of all of them. He was built as like IKEA. Faelid, dalofaelid furniture. White laminate. With blonde and blue. Anders Maleksen, the msging face and adjutant hausfrau of Balk.
Maleksen had just approached our detach, which had directed him to Myung who had directed him to us. He would only speak to us. They would only let him speak to us if escorted. As like it would take all of them to keep us from being accosted by a 220 lbs 6′4″ home gym colder than the Arctic Circle.
If Maleksen had said anything, he would have had an impenetrable accent. He left a bulging manila envelope on the bed, and left. No answering our questions, no regards. No purpose but ensuring our possession of the envelope.
Inside was a Russian model of external solidstate hybrid drive, essentially a nextgen Sapp. It reminded us of a detonator or gaming buzzer.
We dismissed our detach. We never travel with a computer but we always travel with Myung. After she set us up with her computer we dismissed her too. She was about to shut the communicating door, but then we must have been a mess, because she warned us as like we were a n00b about viruses and timeline, slammed. We were due to leave for the event, imminently. With Kor or without.
We plugged, loaded. The drive was split into tranches. One just contained a.pdf of the Ranklin indictment. The other was a double, a carboncopy of the Gopal Pro the FBI had seized. Felix Ranklin, the defendant at that very moment on trial, had duped a clone, a backup not just of files or whatever but of histories too. Either that or b-Leaks had done it for him, filching his browsing, his cache, off the Hoover racks.
A Korean American, Myung, had loaned us a Taiwanese Tetbook, unfolded a Japanese chair, a cherrywood tatami zaisu, and left us alone with the Ranklin desktop.
Everything except the suite and the city outside was Oriental, Mandarin.
Bottomline, nothing stored on the Ranklin computer pointed to his manufacture of dynamite, or plotting of massdeath. Not anything in Tetmail, which he used to email his instructors at Dover High, re: assignments. He was stupey diligent. Not anything in his Tetset squares, which registered only his participation in the Robotics Team, Variety Show, Escoffier Club, Anti-Bullying Initiative. He was stupey active. Not in his.docs, which were all school reports labeled as like How_Controlled_Burning_Aids_Forests.doc.
But with all the visits to all the sites of the demolition and blasting services firms, firecrackers and fireworks suppliers, tunneling and quarrying listservs, thousands unique, and tens if not hundreds of thousands multiple, Ranklin had never downloaded anything. Maybe he sensed it was wrong. At least maybe wronger than the glansular XXX. Which he did download. Lots of macrohard clitorides, microsoft penises. But in terms of smoking guns we found nothing. We found nothing besides an application for dynamite purchase, and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Both only half completed.
[Meaning Ranklin was careful not to save anything incendiary?]
Meaning all of it was tetraffic, metadata winnowed to minilife, and the only way the FBI would have been aware of any of it was if they had filed a request and we had decided to oblige them.
[You’re implying that in violation of policy someone on the inside was volunteering suspicious tetraffic to law enforcement?]
Not someone. Rather Ranklin had been using Autotet. His Gopal Pro had synched multiple mobile devices he must have spent his entire Burger King fortune on. He had gone nosing into explosives, basically, and our algys lit the fuse by suggesting the rest.
[You’re implying that Autotet has a monitoring and reporting function?]
All who read us are read.
[But by humans or just machines?]
Myung was at the door again, with Kor and Nicky, the casual encounter partner of Kor. A textbook innocent bystander. Panamanian, drove towtrucks and helped motorists who locked their keys in their cars, you get the type. He got their keys out of their cars.
Kor never brought him with on travel and yet the Smithsonian was an exception. Nicky was a Lincoln buff and keen to tour.
Point being, the banquet.
Kor ordained a stroll. We tripped at curbs, barely kept it together. Kor went praising the monuments as like they were monuments to him. He granted approval to the duraturf, validated the marble horses.
It was lost on no one but Nicky that the server we were donating had last been modified by Moe.
He should have been with us in the greenroom, Moe, should have been onstage. He was. Hardware, the body left behind. And software is God, wandering, doubted, bloodless, able only to describe itself. Everything else from that vantage was niggly rectarded. Hi-res to the point of lo-res, distorted, overundercalculated. The vicepresident of America smiled, but it was not at us, it was at how guano crazy he had to be to assent to existence. Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.
We were too small for a too big suit and our braided leather belt was extraneous. We had pronged an extra hole but it was too wide and the buckle kept slipping. We hate all belts. They stop us from being seamless.
Kor was the one who spoke. He had our PR rewrite Myung. Just for the record, Tetration employs struggling writers. We, for serious, give back. We would never have worked with any of them otherwise. Lax procrastors, writing their thrillers on the clock.
We got all woozy, after. Sweated over our salad, steadied ourselves by holding the breadplate. Held the airplane filet but we were grounded. Getting too close to the ground. We managed to arrange our napkin nicely before basically asking as like a baby asks to go to the bathroom. We had already made number one but then made number two balled in a corner halfway. The only reason we mentioned Nicky is because he found us on his way out for a cigarette. He had quit but it was difficult to stay quit while drinking. This was between us. Our head was also between us.
We sent him to get Jesus, Feel. Myung would tender Kor an excuse. E coli, salmonella. No hospital. Rest. We had passed out, this was the Smithsonian, in an alcove below a case displaying what we had taken for a basket but was we swear the headdress of Soto, grand chief of the Pomo tribe.
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[Let’s take a break. We can order up a bite, and I can tell you how I got my hand all mauled.]
Ibrahim Albadi.
[Who?]
Your friend from the elevator. From the hall. Franchisee, British Petroleum. Owns every BP station in Marseille. Or many of them. An Omani, flew through Roissy CDG on Etihad Airways Flight 340 with his Yemeni first wife.
[First wife?]
He loves her.
[He was beating the hell out of her.]
Do not let your fantasy jeopardize our book. He loves her very much.
[My fault for bringing it up …]
[… But it’s been a fucking ordeal, OK? This whole thing. This whole fucking desert of a summer. And now I’m supposed to what, assure you I wasn’t the one picking the fight with a polygamist polyabusing Arab? I have on the one hand, which might be broken, Rach, whose emails I haven’t responded to because of how busy we’ve been to where I’m sure she’s convinced I’m avoiding her because I don’t want to get divorced. But I want to get divorced, that’s the truth, I honestly do. And not just to please Lana with the tongue and museum patience who if I’m going to be single again might be the only thing left. The only person left. Which is my fault. All of it’s been my fault, OK. So it’s not like I don’t understand what you’re doing, that you’re treating me like I treated them, controlling the contexts, omitting, withholding — until what? Until I’m finally ready? Or I find out on my own and resent you? You’re seriously going to act like I hadn’t already guessed the cancer you’ve been keeping in reserve like a fucking birthday surprise? Don’t talk to me like I’m a child, but like another suffering fucking adult too flawed to have a child, the same as you. I was 10 years old when the diagnosis angel visited my house — my mother — ]
Noto, not the kakuchi but the reactor, might have been a contributing factor, because though we were screened for radiation and certified normal immediately after, the effects
Diet and lifestyle pressures might also have been responsible, the rolling deadline stress and tension weakening immunity, and though we tried antioxidizing ourselves through veggie and especially fruit juicing, all that did was elevate our fructose too, and promote cell senescence if not
[My father — ]
D-Unit was always clunking around the basement with toxicish components. Though he died before the current state of genetics research and we have not involved M-Unit, we ourselves do not possess any of the BRCA2/PALB2 germline mutations on the q arm of chromosome 13, or any of the ATMs or ataxia telangiectasia mutations either, of any genes on the q arm of chromosome 11.
We hate that science is not fully conclusive. That this might be gibber within a year or even six months. That this might be gibber and we will be dead. It is not fair that we will die before science has concluded.
[My mother said it was unfair of my father to leave her still alive, before he got around to replacing the stormwindows. For him it was his lungs, then liver.]
Or else, and we admit that of all the idiopathies this is the stupiest, but the summer just before DC, Cull and Qui invited us along with their children WynWyn and Varian and a cruft of friends to fly a dronekite in Shoreline Park, and after we managed to smash it our CoFos called a toiletbreak and took half the kids with them and left the other half with us. Immaterial. Or one took the kids to the toilets and the other went to collect all the smithereens of the dronekite. Immaterial. Anyway they were gone and stayed gone and we fell asleep on a bench. We had been falling asleep a lot at the time, and were lucky no one strayed into the lake, but instead WynWyn or Varian picked up a bug and let it crawl around our face. A caterpillar. As like a caterpillar. They must have prodded it or just flicked it into our mouth, a black hairy wriggler struggling to get all its legs aligned down our throat as like we woke choking and spitting and yelling until everyone cried. Our CoFos came back with the others and assumed the crying was our fault.
Point is, we still cannot shake that sensation, of a larva tracking its goo through our system, squeezing toward our darker warmer recesses to spin its cocoon, pupating, bugging up our relays and switches and sticking together our tickertape guts, only to emerge as like a monster moth, fluttering around inside us, wings beating our heart, pincering our stomach and sucking dry our gallbladder. No butterfly. A moth. There are no butterflies at the end of this.
%d after returning alone with Myung from DC we consulted with Dr. Majer Gupta, Stanford Oncology, who examined. A scan of 10/01/10 noted a tumorous growth, basically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, localization ectopic/head, 2cm. That was resected 11/02, in a Whipple or pancreatoduodenectomy performed by Gupta. A scan of 12/04 demoed metastasis, pancreas removed in its entirety by Dr. Nikhil Mehta, Stanford Oncology, 12/10. A scan of 01/28/11 demoed multiple metastases to the peritoneum, carcinomatosis. If this was the future, chemo might have worked. If this was the future, radiation might not both cause and cure cancer. Pancrealipase for enzyme replacement, AKA Zenpep®, a drug derived from pig pancreas, just the type of trivia our readers will enjoy, and metoclopramide for gastroparesis, AKA Reglan®, which is responsible for the tremors, why we cannot type, why our handwriting is even worse than the crushed arachnid egg shit it was, why we were unable to write this ourselves, why you are writing this instead.
We intend to discontinue both medications, both ineffective, effective immediately. Also the alternative treatments, cow colostrum, sheep placenta, enemas/bowel cleanses. Doc Huxtable provided them. His specialty was to keep us just energetic enough to mention him, while fasting. Call him Dr. Zaius, evil orangutan, Planet of the Apes. Call him the ineffable name of Dr. Who. All we know is we do not know his name, only that José Canseco called after our Whipple to get us to participate in a charity teeball event but we declined and said we were injured. Canseco recounted his own chronic pain, we responded by pretending to similar ailments, and then this guy with a syringe briefcase just showed up at our house.
Recommendations for next stage care include the retrial of an experimental macrophage protein vaccine that has failed us once already and is still a year or two away from being adapted to fail better. Prayer, estate planning. Remission rate w/ treatment, 26 %. Remission rate w/out treatment, 0 %. Median survival, 8.2 months from diagnosis. Time elapsed since diagnosis, going on 12 months.
Neither Aunt Nance nor M-Unit are or can be privy.
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It was while we recovered at La Trovita Lando after the utter removal of our pancreas that b-Leaks was back in touch. An encrypted torchat from Anders Maleksen to Myung. The salutation was just SORRY FOR YOUR CANCER, which we had not spoken to Myung about, and now we had a chat to answer, other things to answer for too. Of course she knew, but now she knew and left in tears. The chat proceeded to outline 12 new domestic and international arrests based on Tetmail and Tetset monitoring that, because the intel was obtained illegally, were made to appear as like accidental arrests, fortuitous. Drug and weapons busts. Two new cases of Autotet entrapment. The feature actually recruiting, actually aiding and abetting, by autosuggesting the user from browsing into action, with the sense that only then was a human involved, an agent cracking knuckles to type probable cause. The affidavits were sealed. But our site was already a search warrant. All this was January. February.
Balk threatened to post, and he would have, except nothing was conclusive. He had all of the onus, none of the gun. No evidence, no proof. He threatened to disclose our disease unless we provided that. But never once were we forced into this. Or we were but under terms we set ourselves. Balk never anticipated anything not online, and that is why this is a book. Everyone will get their chance to post and post about our documents.
Refusing to dwell we collapsed again, but now in the room at La Domo reserved for the possessions of D-Unit, reserved for his books, which had been intermixed with ours, and from the floor we noticed our name, and concentrated on it until Myung found us, and that is why this is a book, will be, because it was as like D-Unit who had read everything about Jews had read your first book too and neither of us were privy.
Myung contacted our agent and publisher.
We could keep going on forever, until. We could relate the joint hurt and weakness, the swelling, the lounger and dustbunnied powerstrip tangling with the IV drip, Family Feud on mute. But time. The time on the TV topleft and the Tetbook topright, diverging by a minute, two minutes, drifting. We would not drift. We would not be left behind. But we had not programmed solo in a rec decade, tech century. Programming now had become too reliant on tools, plugnplay in a blackbox. The work now was just puzzlefitting, snapping into place sharpnesses of mirror, curation. Making your own app required only a rectardedness of will that was virtually the will to enrich us, because we had already coded all the templates. All you had to do was pop in the snippets, insert the peon widgets. We owned the platforms, we owned the portals. We ruled. We were the inventors of language and would not be criticized by, or in, subsequent fluencies.
We had not played with the sourcecode since diapers, which we were wearing once again. But we sat down in it. Into the shit and piss and swivel sweat. We are trying to avoid a scatological snark about backdoors. We were a child again. A romper kid among the algyshells, Python, C++, Java, and Simping, that language we came up with in 2004–05, to improve metadata granularity and named, given that Java was the largest of the not yet sunken islands of Indonesia, after the smallest of them, Simping. Beachy granularity. If we would have been able to keep that exalted boulder just off Baja, not Mexico, that was what we would have named it, once the original submerged.
It was there that we searched and found the inexistent. b-Leaks had already defined the terms. It was an easy autoreporting function, clumsily glocal, obvious. At least obvious to the person who had written all the rest of the code and had his days free, weeks free, and months to live, to go through by the line. What it did was autoreport all tetraffic to what had to be a DCent, not ours. To two of them, neither ours. The same or similar functions obtained for Tetmail and Tetset. The reporting was realtime, but really. With the mass of data being shuttled proxying was pointless. The IPs were bareassed with just a mask instead, but that mask elasticated away from Utah and Texas and Alaska and Hawaii locations to uncover straight intranet, the Intelinks, the systems that prop up the intrawebs of the CIA, through the Operations Center Analysis Group, the NSA, through the National Computer Security Center, and USCYBERCOM of US Strategic Command. And so we figgered, stop there, cease, desist, better not to trace any further, better not to hack or even, what else, report it. We had been surrendering our users directly to the government, but the way we were doing it was consistent with our principles, at least. Automatically.
Kor did not code this snippet. Or not by himself.
Even the simplest program must accomplish two things. It has to make something happen, and then it has to store the making of that something happen to memory. The event, and then its memorial. Its marks, signs, indicia. But this function ensured that the reporting was not stored. That it was forgotten, by us, as like it had never transpired. All of our amnesia had been ordered by a single conciliable command/statement, which though it could negate everything, could not negate itself. That command was
The motor inn lived on but totally DCentered, its buzzy neon dimmed and its rooms cleared out to separate coasts, underground, in caves, and becoming listening stations, watching stations, wiretap archives, no vacancy spy quarters greenlit in mass SIGINT.
We are just going to spell it out for you, because this is not paranoia, this is not the Nixon Administration.
This foreign function amid all our familiar grammar and syntax had to have been the work of the white Pakistanis Moe had posted about. The same white Pakistanis for whom Moe created a STrapp, which if we still had the prototype and searched through its firmware we would surely find similar functions. Meaning that all our millennial consumers convinced they were entrusting their information to an overpriced blinking beeping storage device were also entrusting it to American intelligence. And American intelligence was so dedicated to protecting that data, or consumers, or itself, that it might even have invented y2K.
We bled for Moe and from our bowels, pivoting on the porcelain cryptchatting Balk. We did not tell him what we found, just that we had been searching. Bull droppings, he said. Balk gave us until September to go to the press, but given the recondity of the material we proposed this prose and so extended the deadline. We made no changes to source, but only signed off, signed out, signed our deal, signed with you. Pivoting London, Paris, Dubai.
We did not need to meet British staff to discuss removing the UK Only option from the hpage. We did not need to meet with French staff to discuss the.fr launch of Autotet. Perhaps a small part of us, the small part whose metastized cancer will be our death, perhaps, wanted a last reminder of our successes. Mostly though, the mostly functional portion, we wanted to escape Palo Alto. We could not have spoken in Palo Alto. We could not have been so
Sincerely yours,
Very Truly Yours,
as like our lawyers are always writing.
Dictated but not read.
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We had hoped to have this time alone with you. No Kor. Two days in Berlin, two days in Moscow-Skolkovo, two days in Seoul-Teheran-ro. With Dubai and Paris and London, enough. If you ever find yourself at a loss for recalling how we left it, remember. This is how we left it. We had not even told the local offices about our trip until the night we departed for London, meaning that Kor would have been told by the morning we arrived in Paris. We had not expected him to free himself immediately. He had meetings arranged, with lobbyists, consultancy chiefs. Myung had made sure to schedule by his schedule.
No wonder no antitrust motions have ever tractioned, parenthetically. We used to drive ourselves conspiranoiac over Tetration being cut up by the Feds, never suspecting we would be the one cut up instead, in a substitute sacrifice. Death is the only monopoly. Nothing can compete, parenthetically.
The purpose of our visit to Dubai was to scout a location for yet another DCent, but this was never the purpose. We did not have to be present to scout, but that we were present made Kor cur. But what is more fucked than the fact that no court will ever find him guilty of having violated the Fourth Amendment, and/or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, what is more fucked than even his violation of plentitudinous international conventions, is how blatantly his new mode of pursuit transgresses a basic commandment. He bought the same jet we bought. No asking permission, no asking forgiveness. He did not even use his own money. Thou shalt not covet the jet of thy boss. Commandment 10.5.
Our intention in visiting Berlin was to inaugurate a freshly completed DCent, but again, not. Regardless of whether we would snip a projected ribbon with a pair of digiscissors, the DCent would function, the champagne and flecky charcuterie atop square pumpernickel hors d’oeuvres would still be served. Moscow, we had not figgered that yet. We would have gotten Cossack furs and danced outside the Kremlin with Tetbooks on our heads. Seoul. We would have found a garden with lotus ponds and a comfortable pavilion.
Out in the desert everyone suddenly has more to conceal or has to work harder to conceal it. Nothing, no one, has more clearance than the desert. Kor had just landed and we were both crisis panicking. He called the suite at the Burj and we ignored his calls, and then he knocked himself but Jesus or Feel told him we were snorkeling, or scubaing. Myung told him we were in DCent sessh with the Dubai clan, and that was true, partially. Lavra and Gaston were honestly paddleboarding. You were out on the beach. Disgusting to imagine Kor all slouched out roasted pink and stinking of sunscreen carcinogens.
The sheikh himself came back with an estimate. He would sell us 2 km2 or 200 desert hectares assessed cheaply at $10 million USD, and provide construction according to our specs at $200/m2 for up to 180000 m2, an entire DCent for $46 million, a bargain.
Exclusive electricity and water contracts would go to the official Emirati provider, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, administered by the prince whose friendship you enjoyed.
That was two nights ago now.
While you defended Israel we were calling the other Emirates, which had never even been on the map.
We called the princes of Sharjah and Fujairah, both Mohammeds, both cousins of your Dubai friend. We sought to deal, individually, offered to pay the Dubai assessment to each, explained that Sharjah and Fujairah synergized better with our goals. Dubai was so 2000. In the 2020s the minor Emirates would flower.
They would become as like Switzerlands, we said, but for the future money, which is information. They would become datahavens with new laws, or no laws, they would overcharge the Saudis for fiber.
If our DCent experience was satisfactory, we might even consider opening a local Tetplex. Employee shuttlebuses shimmering by a wadi.
Yesterday. We pilled, went down to visit Kor in his suite and dismissed a nude twink fauxgrammer who had apparently taken up residence. Sand was pooled on the carpet. Kor was in flipflops and towel. In towels. He had burned himself.
But it was us who was acting wild. We launched into our new fascination with servers, talked geography, talked topography, dune and diaspore preservation, lizard dwindling, photovoltaics comptrasted with thermals, grid parity, Filipino labor working 6/12 and if or how to negotiate fair shifts and a living wage.
To be convincing we had buried ourselves in the deets and become as like a god who knows it all. But then a god would know how to create a replacement pancreas, how to make the islets and acini and insulin and glucagon and all that raging hormone and chymey digestive enzyme. The pancreas, being endocrine and exocrine, is the server of the body. Just now, just now that came to mind.
At this point Kor got dressed.
We told him about the Mohammeds. Sons of their Emirs, promotable sheikhlings on the Economic and Industrial Development committees of the Council, deputy generals of the armed forces, of the UAE. They were willing to match the Dubai price. Pay attention and they might even go lower.
Sharjah and Fujairah were the Emirates to bet on, we said. In every crash Dubai had evinced a withering. It was all prefab infrastructure afloat on silica, grainy towers slipping through the fingers, whole entire reinvestment zones and innovation districts just salty Gulf bubbles rolled up on the shore, the roads between them paved with oil borrowed from the Emirates that pumped. Sharjah and Fujairah pumped. Dubai had no oil, just reserves. Sharjah and Fujairah would survive no matter what.
All the billionaires we have ever met stand clasping their hands behind their back. Only Kor holds his hands that way while sitting.
He was basically disgusted.
“Stop micromanaging,” he said. “Stop all this cockmonkey nano pico femto attomanaging.” He asked us what reduction came after atto. Then he asked us to have a seat.
“So you flew all the way the fuck out here just to save dough with a petty Emirate? What the fuck is going on with you?”
We answered with the further reductions, “Zepto, yocto, nothing.”
“You sound the way you look,” he said. “Shit.”
Then he broke out a bag of sourdough white, tipped a jar of mild salsa, pooling the gunk atop each slice, mozzarella, parmesan, prosciutt. Mexican pizzas, mezzas, two, and two minibar colas.
We should have abstained, should not have abstained, unsure as like which would have maintained the normal. We delivered the mezza to our mouth and chewed.
Kor asked, “This is Negam territory, no?” Referring to Monica Negam, who directs our DCents in Africa.
We swallowed and said, “You,” not basically, verbatim.
Kor asked, “You ping Susan Rim?” Referring to Seo Woo-Rim, who directs our DCents in Asia.
We said, “This is us delegating. You.”
“What?”
“You are going to go to Sharjah and Fujairah on our behalf.”
“Why?”
“Because the Emiratis expect the works with extra cheese.”
“You are telling me? With how you screwed us already, just by making this trip alone? It was enough of an effort to massage the fauxgrammers. To keep your autobiographer or whoever minding his manners.”
We had a sip of cola and laid our trump. We said we were only trying to do something nice for him, “Korele, stop making this something we regret.”
We told him that one of the Council negotiators had turned out to be a comrade vintage military freak who quartermastered the army depot in Ajman, collected vehicles and crafts, historical armaments. At our suggestion he was sending a helicopter. A mint condition Mil-24, a Soviet combat rattletrap, a cramping buggy Hind. Kor would be traveling to Sharjah and Fujairah in style.
But not just that, Kor would be permitted to fly the thing, and beyond that he would even be allowed, but this was not our suggestion, to fire a rocket or two along the way. Into the desert. At a dune. Oryx, ibex, gazelle, whatever leaps.
You will go suss both deals and return same day, we said to Kor, basically.
We would stay behind, not to spook Dubai. This Sharjah and Fujairah trip would be pleasure, justifiable.
Just after Kor went coptering off we put all nonessential personnel on our jet and flew them Stateside.
Then we took his for Abu Dhabi.
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Josh, Balk not. We will give you our passport. Tomorrow you will go to Abu Dhabi International and buy a ticket on one airline with our passport for anywhere, Aeroflot has significant discounts to Moscow, then buy another ticket on another airline with your passport for anywhere, Korean Air to Seoul always gets tetpraisals of four stars. But remember, two different tickets to two different destinations on two different airlines leaving from two different terminals under two different passports. Pay everything in cash. You will have to backtrack and take out cash. Next. Check into one with one passport, go through security, go through immigration, go for the veggie kabob, no booze, then go back out and take the shuttle to the other terminal, check into the other with the other passport, security, immigration, another veggie kabob, no booze, then back out and take a taxi to Al Bateen Executive Airport, executive terminal 2, arranging to arrive by 10:00. We have hired a plane. Not a Gulfstream as like none were available but be assured it will be serviceable and staffed with a competent twoperson crew. They will fly you to Berlin. Upon landing, customs or whatever might assume you are us but in the event they request a passport, they will certainly not scan it. Jets make an impression, even if they are not Gulfstreams. Backtracking. Destroy our passport between the airports. Correction. Shred inflight and flush. Keep your own for a souvenir or an escape plan. Immaterial. In Berlin you will be met. And though you will not know this someone, they will know you. Someone with a car we presume. They will reimburse your tickets and expenses and drive you to a house apportioned to your use by an anonymous donor to Balk whose identity even we do not have. Neither do we have the addy. Not city or state. Do not interrupt us. Or country. You will stay until you finish our book.
Backtracking. You will have to transcribe our recordings yourself. Use no online or offline computational transcription service or product, and never employ assistants, secretaries, humans. Backtracking. Avoid your Tetmail account, never check it again from this or any other computer. Backtracking. Same goes for all other accounts, including Tetset. Backtracking. Do not transfer the recording or manuscript files to any other computer or take any other computer online. Backtracking. Give us your Tetbook. Help us off with our belt. It has the prong. To strap the strap. Shaking, there. Steady, there. We have just disabled your modem. You cannot take this Tetbook online. Upon completion, destroy it. Backtracking. Upon completion, print one copy and only one copy of the manuscript on a new and/or old printer that has never been and/or cannot be taken online. Load the printer driver by hard software and couple to the printer by wire. Transfer one copy of the recordings to either our agent or publisher not by stick but with a crossover wire with two male ends. Deliver a paper manuscript.
You will note that if you have not delivered a manuscript by 24:00 EDT, 04/01/2012, our contract autonullifies and you are forbidden from publishing in any media or way any work you might have completed. In that event Balk himself will contact you to take receipt of the recordings, an unedited transcript of which b-Leaks will post online. Regardless, the recordings must be retained, either by our agent and/or publisher or b-Leaks, and made available to press or court as like testimony, in a manner that mitigates their dissemination/reproduction. Once authenticity has been established we request they be destroyed. We are ashamed of our voice and would not wish its immortality on anyone. Upon what we are confident will be the print publication of a finished book, $14 million assetized to our shell Firstborn Equity, B.M., held in escrow by Bank Hapoalim, Tel Aviv, will be disbursed to b-Leaks accounts. This understanding will prevent b-Leaks from pursuing the matter independently, and will further incentivize its support of your work. Upon publication, the remainder of our estate will be entrusted jointly to M-Unit and Aunt Nance, all instructions pertaining to which along with suggestions for almsgiving have been arranged with Mendel Gutshteyn, Esq., 5290 Geary Boulevard, the Richmond.
We are going to find Ohlone. We will be taking Tetjet Two with Jesus and Feel, who will return to the States without us. We will be alone. We will be lost. Kor will have not even uncovered our routes by the time you are settled and we, all crossed. The crossing we seek does not countenance the passport. Moe never hanged himself with a belt from Montreal. But if he did it was only to return as like another.
We make this declaration while in full possession of our mental faculties for in
Online has expanded since first we spanned it. There is a Vishnu Fernandes who sets up pennyante eTailer sites for as like tool and die and silk wholesalers in Goa, just some bad oneclick carting better subcontracted to robots. There is another just an entry on the rolls maintained by the Department of Social Welfare, Goa. A Vishnu Fernandes who appears to be a teacher at one institution, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a student at another, Kohinoor College of Tourism Management. Yet another in some orphanage in Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi, adoptable. We go. Moe claimed life open and we claimed life closed but neither is feasible because there are cows in the road. You can go and then smack. There is a cow. In the river of the road. You have to wait. You wait to cross.
Basically at that point it ends.
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