Book of Numbers: A Novel (36 page)

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 [email protected] 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.

THIS IS JUST POINTLESS FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCKQW

FU

Q=013847IE;A bv,.ghhgty qp83ur j ;j ‘’
1aa0;2s9l38ddytvnm,.//bhgddk4f7j\|^%5g6h{}

://

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.