Book of Numbers: A Novel (44 page)

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.

://

[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.”