Book of Numbers: A Novel (32 page)

, also at third
apex], by 22:00 was 25%/1 prong more awake than the median or 25%/1 prong less awake
than he’d been last midnight, but by this midnight, he was undisturbably asleep
[implying, perhaps, that a homeopathic soporific had been administered to him in the
interval—Cohen’s was a language of elision and duction by absence].

A single expression, then, might easily fill a page. But if a page of
Cohen’s language was laborious for his parents to decode, it was doubly laborious
for them to reply to, especially by hand, and as the wordprocessing programs of the
period weren’t yet capable of typesetting such convoluted hierarchies, Cohen had
to code his own, and he did, producing versions for the IBM PC, Tandy, and the
Commodores 64 and Amiga. Upon distributing this unnamed or unnameable free langware to
his parents in summer 1985, he gave up the language entirely, and never wrote in it
again. [Cohen’s mother never installed her
writer.] [While
Cohen’s father installed his
writer, he found his son had failed to equip it with the marks expressing
approval (‘-), and disapproval (-’).]

Cohen’s most significant initial coding, however, appeared under
the auspices of another letter—C. [SHITTY TRANSITION] That language—
developed in the late 1960s and early 70s at AT&T Bell
Labs
—reprogrammed his life, involving him more deeply with the concept
of the algorithm. [EXPLAIN ALGORITHMS] At the time C was best learned from a book, and
books were best available in libraries. But the Harker School’s library also
contained the only two computers it made available to students. It was there that Cohen
could be found on most mornings, before school began, and on most evenings, after school
ended, and, increasingly, skipping class, at all times between—waiting for a no
show, or for a scheduled user to quit a session prematurely. According to school policy,
each student could use a single computer for only an hour each per day. The slotting
sheet was clipboarded at the edge of the circulation desk, and the librarianship behind
the desk was
responsible for enforcement. Cohen convinced the
librarianship to let him automate the slotting, and they agreed, allowing him exclusive
use of Computer 2 until the program was completed.

But Cohen stalled, complained, stalled and endured the complaints of his
fellow students waiting, until the librarianship approached him offering condolences for
his failure and gently requesting that he move aside and let other students take their
turns, at which point Cohen unveiled
a palindromer and an
anagrammatizer—which rearranged the letters of any input, not semantically
yet, but sequentially, a program he called “Insane Anglo Warlord,” an
anagram of its dedicatee, “Ronald Wilson Reagan”—and
finally
, two different schedulers, one that would run on the
librarianship’s computer, and was merely a database of times and student names,
and the other a gameified version, which would run on the two student computers and
allow users about to complete their sessions to compete for more time by answering a
battery of SAT questions, with the user answering the most correctly in a two minute
span declared the winner and awarded a session extension related to their score.

Cohen’s life beyond a computer terminal was minimal. He
joined no athletics teams and only one extracurricular—The Tech-Mex Club
[WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WAS MEXICAN ABOUT IT?]—which he dropped out of after one
meeting. He chewed tinfoil once—“it tingled the
tongue”—he did whippets once—“it was on
TV”—both alone. He never smoked and throughout highschool was
convinced that caffeine was alcoholic. He [WHEN?] shoplifted [WHERE?] topical
benzoylperoxide acne treatments his mother had told him were cancerous. His father
noticed the creams in his room and gave him empty toothpaste tubes to squeeze them
into for storage. He read through the Achs (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), (Avram)
Davidson, and avoided romantic attachments [EXPAND?].

Any other justification for leaving the house, besides school, had
to be computer-related. He’d ride his bicycle two hours to rummage the
dumpsters behind the Santa Clara Intel plant, riding back with a backpack of faulty
chips he’d use to assemble computers that wouldn’t work [WHY NOT?],
and then he’d upclock his own machine and participate in overheated rating
wars in area diners [TO UPCLOCK IS TO RESET
THE CYCLE, AND/OR TO
MODIFY THE PIEZOELECTRIC CRYSTAL, OF A CPU’S CLOCK, SO THAT THE COMPUTER, NOW
PROCESSING AT A SPEED NOT ENDORSED BY ITS MANUFACTURER, CAN FIGHT BATTLES ROYALE
WITH OTHER COMPUTERS SIMULTANEOUSLY EXECUTING THE SAME MATH PROBLEM SET: THE VIRGIN
WARRRIOR WHOSE OVERDRIVEN HOTROD SOLVED FASTEST OR JUST DIDN’T MELT DOWN GOT
GLORY AND TAPIOCA PUDDING?].

In winter 1986, with Cohen a sophomore, Harker invested in a networked
computer system of IBM ATs, and a program called N-rollment, which integrated student
information and grades. Cohen, irate at having been banned from library computers for
session abuse [EXPLAIN?], waited for the viceprincipal [NAME?] to leave her office, went
in and inserted into her computer a diskette containing a program he’d coded,
which instructed the computer to log the viceprincipal’s keystrokes. The next
opportunity he had, he entered her office again, saved the strokelog to diskette. At
home he managed to identify two strings, one of twelve characters, the other of eight,
that, being “vpdernfurstl” and “hearken1,” didn’t
seem to have any function in an administrative memo.

A week after the end of the quarter, the day after grades were due, Cohen
skulked into school by explaining to a janitor he was a member of the jv beach kabaddi
or innertube waterpolo team who hadn’t cleaned out his locker. He picked the lock
on the library, whose main computer was patched into the network, hacked into N-rollment
as vpdernfurstl, pword hearken1, registered his Social Studies and Language Arts
teachers as students in their own classes, failed them and had reportcards sent to their
home addresses.

Further, as Cohen had determined that viceprincipal ? Dern-Furstl? used
the same logname and pword for all of her access, he was also able to hack Paymate and
have all the staff’s paychecks mailed to an erotic wares outlet in Redwood
City.

Viceprincipal ? Dern-Furstl? was contacted, and she contacted the PTA for
recommendations on whom to consult on a sensitive computer issue in midsummer, was
referred to Abs Cohen, who, just from the
phonecall, had his
suspicions [WOULDN’T SHE HAVE HAD THEM TOO, IF SHE’D BEEN APPRISED OF THE
LIBRARY SCHEDULING STUNTS?]. Abs came into school, went through the
viceprincipal’s computer, and found the strokelogger [WHICH HAD BEEN KEPT
INSTALLED FOR FUTURE NEFARIOUSNESS?], recognized a few things in the rogue code that
seemed familiar from mealtime conversations, and, without hesitation, fingered his son
as the culprit.

Cohen was suspended, and threatened with expulsion, unless he developed a
network security system. The school, essentially, gave him a job—“Harker
prided itself on fostering creativity, they made us their IT guy for nothing.”
Cohen set about synthesizing a number of security protocols already on the market,
“but too sophisticated for any school, too expensive for even a WASPy private
school to license.” His only truly original contribution he called Doublestroke,
a 1987–88 keylogger logger, a program that could detect programs that kept track
of keystrokes and, rather than purging them, shuttled them false clists, or character
lists, that, if used to gain access to the network, gave access instead to a decoy in
which the intruder could be studied.

Abs was so proud of Doublestroke that he tried to license it to Symantec,
but Symantec became ambivalent after the patent provisional admitted that he
wasn’t its author, rather his son was, a minor. Finally they outright refused
after they received a letter from a lawyer claiming the trapware they’d been
considering was the legitimate property of the Harker School. Cohen had boasted too
much. Ultimately Doublestroke was sold, not licensed but sold, to Prev in 1988. The
price was $8000. Split two ways, and less the lawyer’s commission.

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from the Palo Alto sessions:
We
had so much anger back then, so much rage, which psychoanalysis might claim comes from
our parents or from the parent of society, the crass materialism of the 80s assaulting
through media that was matched in its destructive violence only by the counteroffensive
of our domestic life. The strict discipline, the rules and regs. The bylaws. But our
rebellion against them was not a slacking. We were much too young for the hippie thing
and much too old for the punk thing. School had every demographic. Cliques were Bimbos,
Himbos, Nerdlings, Geekers, Dorklords, Fagwads, and Whegroes but we complied with none
of them. We were not even dweebazoids though we could have been if we had not been
resistant, basically, to all category and class.

We felt more as like hardware, mauve, taupe, beige, boxcolored, putting in
an intense amount of interior hot effort only so that our exterior, our skin, would
appear jointless, seamless, cold. We felt more as like software, writeable, rewriteable,
if not compatible, we would adapt. Point is, we had secrets, we hid. Our rebellion thing
was that we were aware of it, our compatibility or adaptability thing was that we worked
through that awareness, though both impulses might be genetic and if so in regard to
work ethic it could be cur to examine dopamine levels in the striatum of the brain,
ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior insula.

But our ultimate repression or suppression was just so überwestern.
It was that we were doing all this work in the service of not doing any work and, if we
accomplished that goal, that would be our revolt. It is überwestern to be
conscious that this was what we were doing and to feel bad about it, to try not to feel
bad about it, to feel bad about feeling bad, to try not to feel bad about trying not to
feel bad. It was as like we were getting revenge, but on ourselves. This attempt toward
automation. Or better toward autognosis.