Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

Автор книги: Joshua Cohen

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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.