Book of Numbers: A Novel (52 page)

Moe always referred to white Americans as like Pakistanis and conversely referred to Pakistanis as like white Americans. Continue.

[Krishna would complete an ectype and leave the Remomori lab at night and return by morning to find it had been taken for testing with the search capability, and so he would complete another and never again leave the lab. At midnight the time of this posting but last month or six weeks and two days ago a car came. Last century! Last millennium of users! Not just a car but a Caterham Rover K Series MG × 1.4 liter engine 16 valve double camshaft six speed gearbox operated by an adventurous capitalist for a firm called Kinere
took Krishna to a motorist inn. This inn did not have an identifiable name but everyone called it the Lesstel. 816 West Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale. (408) 734-4607. Outside except for the no name was typal for motorists. Parklot without lines or curb barriers. Rebar on shuffleboard court. Gluetraps and for opossums. Structure itself built out of Lego. Inside was all computers! This cannot be stressed enough people, computers are not furniture! Everyone inside the room was Paki. They had buzz haircuts or dreads and eczematicous and pimple conditions for which the best treatment is the distillation of trees ashoka and peepal. The Pakis who worked with Krishna did not introduce him but were polite and divergent from how they were typal because they had broken the ectype. They had brought the memvice to this room for testing and had not told Krishna about it until they had broken his work. Until they were unable to fix it and they had tried but they had just made it worse. All the doors of the room were open, except the exterior door to the patio vendingmachine, and through them were other open rooms with other computers not furniture in them but staffed by Mormons from Karachi and Lahore. They were writing on their computers code and Krishna had to presume it was programming for this memdevice that was not being accomplished by his employer. Also sensitive papers were taped to the walls. Transfer protocols that even to a lowly but high engineer were comprendable. The Pakis Krishna worked with were called by him the OPs standing for “Orson” and “Parley” but were called “Willcox” and “Bobblehead” by their coresidents in the motorist inn who ordered them to close the doors. They did. Orson and Parley closed the doors. Papers blown to the floor appeared to deal with normalization, entity extraction, morphgraph
analytics, and how to search unstructured txt in Arabic, Persian, and the terrorist language of Urdu. The OPs instructed Krishna to fix the unit and he tried because of vanity but the tools were inappropriate and he told the OPs and so the OPs offered to get him the tools and Krishna told the OPs that anything they expected him to repair had to be brought back to the lab. But they would not let Krishna go with the memdevice and advised him instead to go back to the lab and assemble his tools and return with them. Krishna was driven back to the lab by the adventurous capitalist from Kinere and assembled what he required. The same Caterham was taken the yellow of rancid ghee. Which despite his pleas he was prohibited from driving. Krishna was returned to the motorist inn of Legos and installed with his tools in another room and Pakis who were foreign to him brought the broken device and required him to not only fix it but also to modify it so that within the searchable storage there would be a further detachable subdrive that would not only be protected from the rest but also if detached would destroy the rest in the manner of Kali. The hero of this epic worked and was not given leave to depart homeward. But home was not an option in other terms because his employers whoever they were had installed in it a surveillance billboard. All the windows were shut around Krishna and no conversation was had. The food they brought was poisoned to nosh. The only noshable food was from the vendingmachine, around which was the only conversation. Though the Pakis never spoke with him but strictly with each other. Krishna intuitioned how unimportant he was. How unappreciated a menial. Hard was not crucial. Soft was crucial and was failing. The Pakis were being utilized to write the code for the device. That itself was obvs. But the program was not
working. That also was obvs. The only explanation for such an apparatus being custom made by an organization not his employer was that it was for the government of Cali America a memdevice. Further and beyond that its propositioned ability to store information to be shared and searched within a system of closure pointed to the involvement of a number of different agencies. Krishna attempted to demagnetize from his mind who set the founding protocols. ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, Defense Advanced etc. etc. Agency. Search clients and find entities that do not endorse collaboration. CIA. NSA. That would explain the tribulation involved. The faces Krishna encountered arguing over popcorn on the patio. THIS WAS A HORRID SECRET KRISHNA HAD FOUND! HE KNEW HE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO HIDE IT! HE KNEW HE WOULD POST IT AND NOW THIS IS HIS POST! THIS WAS OMINOUS IN THE SUPREME! The algorithm promulgated by the employer of Krishna in this life was being modified to search across the archives of all different agencies so that the intel would be comparable and contrastable. Each agency to a dedicated drive?? Each of them copying to a clastic subdrive and autodestroying its original in case of capture or a seizure emergency for an agent in the field???? But because success and not coopteration has been the priority in Cali America the agencies must have been unwilling to adopt the protocol or methods of processing the archives of others out of vanity. The Pakis all of whom must have been TS/SI COMINT must have had to create one. A single. A standard. The agencies are noncompatible. They are jealous and envious and prise success and abdere their specs. IC. Intelink. “They are at throats,” that was all that was explained to Krishna after
inquiring how are you doing to this Paki compforensics specialist name of “Hinckley.”]

Never skip the parentheticals. “(To the OPs we were Krishna but Vik Ram was how we introduced ourselves to ‘Hinckley.’)”

[Krishna constructed this interpretation while building the Kalidevice because he was not able to make deficiencies. And this oppressed him, how pride is as instrinsical to a creator of things as amorality and aethicality are instrinsical to the thing created. That is how you become irrelativistic and monotheistic. Make the thing until the thing makes you, which is not a cycle but a spiral. And so he took what he had become and on a holiday celebrating the death of the natives of Cali America departed. He went to a farm to imagine the farms he was not working on and attempted to purchase a castration in rupees. He said the gonads were a folk remedy, he said they were glands to rub on the body of an unmarriageable sister in order to obtain for her a mate, and that if he would have had an unlucky brother he would have paid to clitorectomize a cow. The farmers even with his rupees in their rags treated him strangely. All he had inquired was whether a cow would be able to milk on one leg. He fled the farm. He was pursued and so trusted no one because everyone was a verifiable .gov. He had reached out to friends before through the quasigovernmental mails but no one reached back and so he had no friends. He too became a map refused, no key. And that is what it means to be an emigre of color. You are a cipher no one cares to crack or can crack. No one even recognizes you as a cipher. The Contra Costa sheriff speedgunned my 1988 Dodge Caravan doing 73 in a 55 and so as not to get properly shot I stopped, but was let go with just a $214 fine and that was the worst because that meant Kali had not yet contacted the authorities. I tried to
contact the New York Times, CNN, Time. But my calls were not returned to the only payphone left in Alameda County. Charlie Rose was not at home. The metal of the billboard played Hot Talk 560AM KSFO to my teeth fillings and adjusted warmer the climate temperatures. I stayed off email. Traveled by moon and avoided the clouds and the mandir. The agents of darkness even in the showers of the El Camino Y lurked. By the sex novelties dispenser at Capital Launderland were staked. The lottery telemetry was openly rigged. Pumps did not give my Caravan the gallons they asserted. The suffering of my stomach due to nacho poison grew. I fell in the cheese and so fell lowly in the varnas. It was not again my ulcer. It was my body being left by “my jiva.” I became a programmer to code the access to what is in this post that had been in my head and also my mind. Then I denigrated even lower and became a user by opening this account and posting this very content to survive. Beta is not samsara. Incarnation. Transmigration. Beta is not even one single punarjanma transcarnation of samsara because everything ends but the cycle does not. The cycle only goes so fast until it is the same as slow and the same as still and withholding. Moksha. Find our exchange attached and below, downloadable as .tet files but also plaintxt because this is the inside of me, guts. Peace out. tetrak -tetrail= IMPORT-PATH –cpp_out=DST_DIR –jv_out=DST_DIR –pyth _out=and just forever gibberish.]

That is not gibberish. That is the sourcecode. Programming compiled. In executable file format. But then also in a document of language, tuples forever. At midnight PST Moe had posted all of this online, and to seal it exfiltrated the fulgence of our algys.

[Give away the algys, give away the business?]

Confirmative. This was everything, the whole company.

[But is there even a bit of fact in what Moe was getting at?]

To have faith, to require faith, is an admission of lost power.

Credence fills the vacuum of control.

The post was hosted by a Konkani news portal,
Vavraddeancho Ixtt,
or
Friend of the Workers
. It was 02:30 on the West Coast with everyone still partying so 05:30 on the East Coast with everyone just slithering in from partying. All of Europe was still sleeping it off. The portal was able to handle our traffic, oblivious at Indian midday.

Until we were going after its domain as like remorseless, with a hack hash salt concat at md6 spread across four computers. But getting all impatient with the processing we instead set up a dummysite and account for a travel industry tipsheet we invented called the
Wwwayfare Gazette,
typed up a reprint request for a current
Vavraddeancho Ixtt
article about millennial festivities for Westerners in Goa and emailed it to every @v-ixxt.com addy on the masthead, routing it through the same proxies Moe had used, which the Soviets had already tracked through Delaware and Canada and into the UK and certainly, given Moe, gone further. The email linked to our dummysite, which was just a download of a virus we had been studying, petulant malware from Pyongyang. We had been getting homologous viruses also from Seoul, though such masking practice was the traditional dragon dance of the Chinese.

Among the Eastern cultures the only way to truly earn a contagion is to purposefully pass it along.

The editor in chief clicked at 16:50 IST, Goa, and that got us his access, and we wrecked it. We wrecked that mother joint down.

Then we restored all Tetration sourcecode from autobackup and inserted the url and even copypasted snippets of the post txt to index, searching for page mirrors or any other reflective body with same or similar txt, found nothing. If there was a translation into Konkani or any other language that scripts Devanagari or Kannada either there were no repercussions or the agencies got it. TetHindi had not yet been deved. Neither Tetranslate. This was just 01/01. This was still 2000.

Then we decached and rode mod on the algy to block anything with the algy itself from being transclused in future results. Not buried,
blocked. If this were just a year later regardless of whether the intel agencies had or had not found a way to play nice together and share, this would have been diametrically impossible. This was the last time possible.

Aunt Nance was a backgammon game up over Super Sal who had dropped by to recaffeinate the Soviets. The shrink was over in the estuary phonecall niche talking on the phone to his spouse.

The sociologists had left.

Our brain was making no sense as like sociology, which is just egalitarian anthropology plus math. We had median nerve palsy in the wrists and yet every keystroke was excruciating because though we had been typing without break our nails had been gnawed to festering paronychia. It was the time all tech shows twice a day and after a reset, 12:00, but the noon one, and we were just about to go live again. Super Sal lost another game and got up to flip the calendar page and we were all just, how quaint, a page.

Outside it was storming. Not winterwise but as like the academics had been correct, the world was ending after all, the universe was over, despite all our work or because of it.

The black cumulus of a helicopter descended, but just before wrecking in the marsh, it hovered. It floated above the reeds bent low. Kor jumped out to make a splash all formally disheveled in a forktailed tux, bowtie snapped, burst cummerbund. He marched straight in to fold us around his belly and squeeze. His shirt was stiff from having been sweated through and then drying and then being sweated through again. He wiped his forehead with a towelette embossed with the grizzly Great Seal of the State of California. He greeted the Soviets humanely too. Even embraced Aunt Nance.

We were about to tell him what happened. But then he grabbed our robe, dragged us toward his office and through the curtain to sit on the futon he on one side and we on the other of M-Unit asleep. Then he told us what happened, and touched our neck, our robe fallen open. He said Moe had been found. Just now. Dead. Committed suicide in Canada. Hanged by a belt from Montreal.

No one would be contacting us but if they did, no comment. No one contacted us. Ever. Never.

Then Kor woke M-Unit, had his copter take her and Aunt Nance on a rainy turn around the Marin Headlands, snow up on Tamalpais. The shrink drove himself. But before, the pilot came inside menacing in how strong he was, and in asking a question called us Sir, in the military style. He asked to use the bathroom.

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[You never cornered Kor to substantiate Moe’s claims?]