Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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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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