Book of Numbers: A Novel (56 page)

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 . If we had a juicer emergency and Myung was off they would dispatch a young woman replacement to take us for produce in an ethanol Corvette C5 metallic pearl with baseballglove seats tan as like her, and later after she had returned us to Sierra Vista or Pacifica they would call to yell at us for having sat in the back and not recognized Natalie Portman. Cull or Qui was fucking her and the other was fucking Rogue from
X-Men,
Anna Paquin, and they both were doing the same recurring characters on
Stargate SG-1,
but not at the same time.

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 . No Moe. The most intense, most deep dig anyone undertook was you interrupting our mediacoached byte about our tech enabling you to take control of your life to say “nobody has any control” and so we understood, you were not doing what you preferred to do either, but also, though we realized this only later because your quote stalked us after we wrapped, Moe himself had always said that.

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.