Book of Numbers: A Novel (51 page)

We lay on the foldout sofa and refused all fuel and hydration and so lost weight and were convinced also our mind. Aunt Nance asked us whether our actions or inactions were a protest for or against any particular cause, and we yelled that she had asked us that already, but she had not, she said, and M-Unit said that it had not been her either, and we believed them.

We stayed offline completely. Qui and Cull visited and talked about investments they were considering and offered us tips because we had no investments. They had purchased for us a Muppet at auction. A rare authenticated Elmo.

They took turns operating it as like to cheer us but we just turned the talk to Moe and so ultimately it was a puppet telling us he had gone missing but that Kor was pulling every string to have him found. Kor would pull everything unraveled.

El Moe. We believed in losing our mind.

M-Unit left small plastic UFOs of salad and small tetrapak milks outside the door. Aunt Nance slid under it a book,
The Little Adventurer
Atlas of Sexual Orientation
. They kept calling us to deck the tree with dreidels. They had never gotten a tree before. We never got up from the foldout. Merry Chanukah and Christmas.

New Year. Remember the New Year. Cull had apparently met his father and stepstepmother playmate at a reception Timex was holding for the Hong Kong Secretariat. Qui had apparently at the suggestion of his brothers chartered the USS Chesapeake to take all the delinquents who had beaten him up in the Philadelphia schools and strand them in Rehoboth. JBates had purchased a former US military bunker sunk under the Mojave Desert and refurbished it to withstand polarity shifts, comet impacts, 50 megaton nuclear blasts. All Carbonites and friends of Carbon had been invited to hunker down.

M-Unit and Aunt Nance were having a party. A scholastic coven bash. They were busy unfolding rental tables and chairs on the fully enclosed, fully heated glass porch out back, which was a renovation we had paid for to mark no occasion, and also they had put in a request. $28735 had seemed a fortune then. M-Unit and Aunt Nance were rearranging the market greens so intricately it was as like they had not only marketed and mixed them but had grown them too. They were clattering platters and chasing chestnuts across the talavera. At 20:00 or so half the Berkeley feminist department showed. The half that M-Unit was still friendly with. We cracked our window to snoop, let the cold in. Cracked into the conversation.

Some shrink from Stanford, who might only have been the spouse of someone, wanted to talk to us. Everyone else wanted to talk disaster. They were drinking as like everything was going to y2Krash and so were convinced that everything was going to y2Krash even though the aughts were already being lived in Lahore. In Karachi. Delhi, Mumbai. On the darkside of the dateline, light not from fission or fusion rising over a new event horizon. They drank port and Aunt Nance passed a joint and M-Unit abstained not because we were around but because it was hash. Which, she said, always confused her libido and destrudo.

Though M-Unit and Aunt Nance had liberalized in this house to the point of finally owning a TV, they kept it off in favor of the hearth clock. They did not want to witness the carnage, but they still might have wanted others to experience it. Newt Gingrich, Exxon and Mobil, which
had just become ExxonMobil, the WTO, HMOs, supporters of Prop 187, President Clinton even though he was against Prop 187. Time measured nothing but a failure to change. Someone told Aunt Nance her son was destroying the culture and someone else said he was destroying the human and Aunt Nance replied it was M-Unit who deserved the compliment. The shrink said he would talk to us about it. His was the only male presence, and someone said only males would confront in that way, and someone else said that historically psychoanalysis itself was nothing but the sublimation of masculine confrontation. But neither this nor the waist squeezes of his spouse were stopping him from hauling in from the porch. It was the clock that was stopping him. A crowd of tenured feminists counting, 4, 3, 2, 1. Icons of the triumph of the male orgasm, signifying the cessation of coitus and the onset of death. Popped corks, the froth, the smoke, the fireworks in the sky toward the Bay.

But as like everyone was still alive at a Pacific Standard hour into the first day of the year 2000 they had no way to avoid clearing dishes. They cleared and we lost them from our window. Then M-Unit was at our door. We did not want scraps. But she was offering the phone instead. We had a call from Russia, Soviet Russia. We did not want to take any calls, but Gushkov and Lebdev were insistent. M-Unit thrust the phone at us and paced hiccupping in the hall as like we were getting doomsday news from the Kremlin, and Aunt Nance waddlingly joined her and steadied her wobble against her and burped.

The Soviets had volunteered to work prowl for the Eve, to maintain site vigilance, expecting nothing, but poised. y2K itself was not the threat, it was whether or how it would rally the hackers. Denial of service attacks so broadly distributed they had to be Martian, Venusian, ping surfeit of a stratospheric bandwidth, untraceable, or fribbly to trace. But the Soviets had none of that to report, all they were wondering was the last time we ourselves had visited.

“Do you mean visited the u or checked in tetside?”

“Either,” they said. “Both.”

“A month, six weeks, way back in 99—why?”

“Get online,” they said.

We got up and grogged past M-Unit and Aunt Nance and down the hall to the Mistress Bedroom, eased down onto the physioball and
powered the IBM clone. A crappy bullshitty unit, constipated processor, swollen registry, bloated drives, just fragged. Loaded every program ever at booting, a tertillion .docs on the desktop, and half of them named Test. Our patience tested as like the Soviets jittered. M-Unit drifted up and shrugged a robe around us. We had, we neglected to mention, never dressed.

The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. Aunt Nance said she was glad we were feeling better, and wondered whether we would give her a brief tutorial, did not have to be now, it was just that she had never been able to get online.

The Soviets, though, the Soviets said that if we had no access we had to come oncampus.

“Tell Kor,” we basically told them.

“With respect,” we will not try the accent but maybe the vocab and syntax, “with for your situation, respect, we come only because is crucial.”

The cruciality was this. Apparently we, meaning an entity or entities with our ID, had logged into Tetsys at quarter to midnight PST, using an IP from a Delaware eCafé called My Cup Runneth Dover the Soviets had gotten through to enough to determine that it was a proxy for an IP from a Canadian eCafé called Mountiebank Delectables, which we had to suspect was a proxy too by the first, last, yet never just only general law of conspiranoia, which everyone will always refer to, but no one will ever quote.

They, our assailants, had all our tetokens, wardwords, passhibbols, and skelkeys, which meant they had all access, which they used to mod.

“How mod?”

The only change detected, the only change detected so far, was so minor and negligible and immediately remediable as like to render its quiddity alone of major concern.

It was a redirect. All tetraffic was diverted.

“To what?”

All they would tell us was to redirect ourselves to the Tetplex.

Which did not compute, nothing computed. How recy of a hack it basically was, yet how techy the hacker had to have been to execute it.

Then they said it was Moe, which diverted.

They requested permission to take the site offline. “Be smart, this must to do.”

Permission granted.

://

[Moe’s revenge part 2—where were all the searches going?]

He who insists on having the end before the beginning will still only have the beginning. Who said that? Vagary might be requisite to life. What about that? Enough. Let us speak.

M-Unit sat lapped atop Aunt Nance, a mesosociologist sat lapped atop a social anthropologist, the shrink was at the wheel and because his spouse had staged a tantrum yelling that we would all be arrested for driving under the influence she had called for a cab and waited moping on the lawn while the car swerved out of the garage. We rode in the seat alongside.

Validate hate if deprived of love.

Breathe greedy.

[When you’re through quoting bumperstickers you’ll tell me?]

We terminaled, and because Gushkov was already logged into Tetsys but because two confirms were required for keyswap we had Lebdev log and so were able to regain our access, the only way to begin ending a compromise. We were us again, if just in that.

We set about checking the site, currently extant only tetside. The hpage loaded uncorrupted, but everything searched for detoured to this post.

Before even reading it, though, we screenshot and duped it external. Manipulables must be preserved.

Then, as like Aunt Nance cut us a slice of napoleon leftover from the Eve feast of the Soviets, we read.

[A post Moe wrote?]

Though in a sense we wrote it too.

[How?]

Give us your Tetbook.

[It’s yours.]

You will read it.

[No problem.]

Krishna.tet. Save it, read it into record. This memcard is ours, but after this it will not be ours, or yours, because truth belongs equally to all and none. Go.

[Now?]

Better. We will hold it for you, the Tetbook. That is better for us both. We will scroll along and try not to shake.

[Why don’t you read and we’ll do the scrolling?]

Go on. We do not have the breath.

[Om! Krishna Gonzalez, son of a bitch and a workers hero engineer, was an engineer born himself and so in this caste that is the greatest in the world he was rised! That it was the greatest caste in the world he was rised to believe! Equal to a Brahmin he believed! At the time of his life the four castes were everything and at the top was hard engineer, below that soft engineer, below that the users, and beyond that at the very bottom the untouchable. The hard engineers the bodies made, which allowed the soft engineers to put their minds into them and the users to operate them and the untouchables had no electricity and were pariah. “Harijan.” “Dalit.” This was the world at the time of the life of Krishna until the age his parents died. He was so deprised he wandered. He was all alone in the age of the world and so to a new country
he wandered, Cali. But Krishna Gonzalez found that though the jobmarket was good, the market for making friends with his fellow jobbers was bad especially with the Pakistanis who all had friends from schooling and athletic associations and even this one Pakistani who asked hello how are you doing at the bank and Krishna answered we are doing fantastic when after the transaction Krishna got a sourdough prune danish and beer and they met in the parkinglot where the Pakistani was on smokebreak Krishna greeted him this time but the Pakistani did not recognize him. Also the fellow Indians who had Cali flagged were demissive and cared only about property mortgages and voted the Democrat until they owned and then voted the Republican but just to prevent other Krishnas from downgrading neighborhood economies. They were in favor of quotas. No one to have the opportunities they had. He went on a date with one who was not born in Delhi but in Cali for which he had to beg, the date, and she who worked the cashier at a carwash spent the full time at the dinner theater whingeing about a psychiatric disorder that caused her to go into a druggist and buy a product no matter what and come out again and just in the closest trash toss it immediately, and that was her syndrome that shamed her but also made her feel chosen and proud, she bought things and then not out of shame or chosen proudness but just automatically threw them out, profligia or prodigia was the official psychological diagnosis. Her family who was from Delhi did not comprend either. They wanted her to marry not just any Indian but a certain salary fitness type and she said this was wrong and everyone said this but in personal practice was racist and she would not visit him at his home because at the time it was black Oakland. Krishna should have trashed her on
the corner! Krishna should have bought her from her family and tossed! It was not that she or anyone else in Cali had no caste and were premissive but what they had was backward. Role inversal. Krishna went to the movies but not with her and what Calis worshipped were the actors and actresses and not the innovators of celluloid or even of charged couple devices and complementary symmetry metal oxide semiconductors. Famous for praise were the demons who sang and played or the devils who just pretended but not the craftspeople who made the sarod and shehnai, who without microphonics or camera crews went out to the trees to split the wood and the special keywood and mined the metal for the strings and pedals to make a piano, not to mention the inventors of ragas and talas. Famous for praise the painters and sculptors and the architects of museums in the images of banks but not the crushers of berries for the paint or the weavers of leaves for the paper or the collectors of the rodent manes for the brush, not to mention the technicians of quarrying equipment or surveyors. They in Cali celebrated the users of sites above the programmers of code for the sites and them celebrated even above the engineers who designed and erected the machines that do everything and on which everything is done. Krishna dispaired of this but not enough and so was himself tempted to tend his checking account at the very expense of the puranas. It was while in this dispair that a cloud visited Krishna and this cloud was blacker than Oakland and out of it emerged with the tongue out not the female but male gaysexual Kali.
The Lord God Kali
.]

That was a link to a universal gods directory. Continue.

[Kali the destroyer had a commission for Krishna and it was by this commission that Krishna would fall in
caste and be turned upsidedown to become worse than a Lockwood Gardens project shelter leper. Kali the destroyer ordered Krishna to propound a memory device so that with it everything would be rememberable. But though Krishna did not want to agree because for him memory was not a static device of plastic but of volatile flesh and with magics of transmission, he also did not want to earn the disfavor of an armed and dangerous transgender Kali. Also the business that employed Krishna in this life, this business operating the site that roots to this post, encouraged. All his friends who were not friends but just jobbers gave him their kudos and bravery. Krishna accepted. In the spirit of the team. He was locked behind a great gate in the unwashed corner of a startup called Remomori. In Coppertino. A Pakistani handed him specs and instructed him to put them in a betelnut. To erect a betelnut to contain both the specs and also everything, this was what the Pakistani instructed. The specs revealed to Krishna were incredible. They were not what had been stipulated by Kali. Though the memvice was supposed to be equipped with the search functionality of his employer Krishna doubted that anyone familiar with that functionality was familiar with the storage specs because if they had been the storage was so incredible they would have told him. They did not tell him lamentably. Also his employers or their adventurous capitalists had mentioned that the memvice was not to have a modem, but this was to have a modem though not one equipped for the internet but for an intranet, internals. Normally this would make no sense or be a software issue but for Krishna the exposure to this was hard. He was tasked with propounding this feature himself, but then the task kept changing and so the feature kept changing until it had to be both a modem
to access and also a server for a proprietary web. Also according to the Pakistani its weight had to be less than 2.2 lbs and its dimensions less than 16″ × axis by 5″ y axis by 7.25″ z axis, meaning mobile. Physically portable. But still durable because it had to be made of this polypropylene copolymer material, waterproof, crushproof, falloffcliffproof, able to withstand temperatures up to 210° F/98.88repeating° C, which is an impertinence, Fahrenheit. In case of its use in situations of not just no signal or current but combat. It had to have an average of 48 hours of rechargeable batterylife. It had to maintain full search functionality while offline and full online functionality while on battery. But what made this combo difficult was memory. The size the Pakistani was stipulating. RAID, redundant array, independent disks. Four drives, removable. 2TB capacity. Blocklevel striping, distributed parity. Each drive fortified by a server blade too. Removable too. Krishna was up to his “pupik” in dualcore processors and working toward double distribution. To ensure that failure of one would not be failure of all, which is drivers and serves aside an important lesson for the citizens of Cali.]