Book of Numbers: A Novel (37 page)

Still, the hours were no longer than at any other startup. The hours were
no longer than life. Cull and Qui would code and crash and then we would recode until
crashing. We would work on it as like online would work on us, which meant perpetually.
In the beginning it was a site, and then it was a program to be embedded in other sites,
and then it was a program to be tabbed in a browser. But would we license it. Or sell it
outright. Or just diversify it all as like our own company. Which would require which
systems. Requiring funding of what amount and engineering by whom. Was search even
patentable. How to recognize a question. The appropriate time to incorporate. How to
recognize an answer. We had a title but no name. We were the founding architect of
nothing.

We kept failing, our own computers kept crashing and kept crashing the
servers at Stanford and then Stanford threatened to banish us from the servers but Qui
and Cull appealed to Professor [?] Winhrad who intercessed and then we failed again and
lost some of their admin and even some faculty email and then they threatened us again
and Cull and Qui appealed again and Professor [?] Winhrad intercessed again and then
they put us on probation, gave us a second chance squared, after which, hasta la vista,
baby.

We had a problem but it was not us and yet neither were we the solution.
Our problem was time and not because we did not have enough but because we had too much
of space.

We had so much of this space and all of it kept growing but by the time we
could crawl even a portion of it everything had grown again so that we could not have
kept up even by walking or running. But that is not how to understand it.

If the internet is the hardware and the web is the software

If the net is the mind and the web is the body or the software the body
and the hardware the mind

Think about it as like knots. Shoelaces. If you tie
them but the knot is no good you can either tie another knot atop it or just undo it all
and start over. But if you have never experienced a good knot in your life all you can
do is do the both of them. Tie another knot and start over. Or think about it as like
shaving your face. If you use a razor you might miss a hair or not cut it completely but
if you use a tweezers and tweeze each hair you can bald your face to even the follicles.
But then the rash. You cannot do both. Forget it. Or as like losing a wallet. You can
retrace your steps or you can, forget it. Or as like losing a button. You can either
retrace your steps and try and find it or you can just sew on a fresh one. But to do
both you have to have two broken shirts or two broken pants and the needle, the thread.
You have to realize the order. People wrapped themselves in skins that fell off them
before they invented a needle and thread to sew them better before they invented a
button device to clinch them better, and all the fits just worked. But imagine if
everything was the reverse and you had to invent a clincher before inventing the
equipment to sew an animal skin before even inventing the animal. That was search
invented by how to search. Invented by how to tailor the results to the user. Not to
mention that “button,” in another context, could refer not to a clothes
clasp but to a key pressed to launch a weapon. Not to mention that in still other
contexts “needle” could mean “annoy,” or
“bother,” and “thread” might not be a literal string or
twine but figurative as like a “drift” or “stream” whose
speed is measured in “knots,” “a train of thought” just
“flowing,” until it was “brought to heel.” The choice was to
both needle the thread and thread the needle. Through its eye. In one ear, out the
other. To know the polysemy of tongues. We had to code a searchengine to check our own
code for a searchengine. That should tell you everything.

Or better, understand this by what we are, by what we have postulated as
like our axiomatic expression. Separate, divide. Categories, classifications, types.
Genus, species. Clades. It is history, it is historical. The world was discovered, the
world was explored, and it was all so round and immense that it confused us. We reacted
by formalizing ourselves into becoming botanists, zoologists, and so the plants and
animals became formalized too, the botanists and zoologists arranged them. But they
arranged them by how they looked, how they sounded, where they
lived, when they lived, by character. How our humanity, taxonomized at the top of
the pyramid or tree, perceived them. But then the universe that could not be seen and
could not be heard was discovered and explored. Cells were observed. Mitochondria.
Genes. DNA. It appeared that not all the animals and plants were as like they appeared.
A whale was biologically closer to a panda than to a herring. Turtles were biologically
different than tortoises but they both were closer to being ostriches than snakes.

Point is, what was important was not the organism itself but the
connections among the organisms. The algy had to make the connections. We figgered if we
could index all the tech links, and apply to each a rec link, whatever terminology we
mortally employ, we could engineer the ultimate. The connection of connections.

How a single user regarded a thing would be comptrasted by what things
existed. Not only that but the comptrasting of the two would be automated. Each time
each user typed out a word and searched and clicked for what to find, the algy would be
educated. We let the algy let its users educate themselves. So it would learn, so its
users would be taught. All human language could be determined through this medium, which
could not be expressed in any human language, and that was its perfection. The more a
thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be. We would equate ourselves with
that.

Now let us propose that everyone out of some psychosis suddenly tetrated
for “mouse,” but chose results pertaining only to “device for menu
traversal and interface,” or if everyone tetrated for “rat,” but
chose results pertaining only to “snitching to the authorities.” Auxiliary
metonymic or synecdochic meanings would become primary, while the displaced primaries
might have their meanings reinvested in alternative terms.

It took approx millions of speakers and thousands of writers over hundreds
of years in tens of countries to semantically switch “invest” from its
original sense, which was “to confer power on a person through clothing.”
Now online it would take something as like one hundred thousand nonacademic and even
nonpartisan people in pajamas approx four centiseconds each between checking their
stocks to switch it back.

The connection is basically the point. Or the motion
between two points is the connection. Basically nothing exists except in motion. Nothing
exists unless transitive, transactional. Unless it joins. Unless its function is its
bridging.

This is what we meant by mentioning the blankspots on the recordings, the
empties. The gaps, the missing gaps. What is omitted from our recordings is all that
links. Relations.

The algy itself was base 4, though not in the normative sense but in the
way it expanded, the way it optimized by expansion, extending, stretching, from
describing the world to prescribing the world, from connotative to denotative, mapping
to manifest becoming. We had four criteria. Or better four questions. Four basic
foundational questions the answers to which were transfinite to infinite.

Is what is being searched for
a prescription,
as like a name or
title? “Vishnu,” say, or “Carbon Capital”? Or is what is
being searched for
a description
? As like “an engineer,” or
“someone who can build our systems,” a “venture capital
firm,” or “some entity that can finance us”? Could this description
and/or prescription instead be
linguistically proximal,
to a most perfect
result? Which is to say is the name transliterated scifi style, as like
“vYshnOO,” or are we dealing with a typo, as like “caBRon
capitOl,” “n gineer,” or “fin anceus”? Finally, and
this is arduous, could the searchterms be in any way
conceptually proximal,
to
a most perfect result? “Not Krishna but other god but Indian human,”
“person whose job it is to build things,” “entity whose job it is
to roll bank/bankroll,” and so on into subquestions pertaining to whose concept
of “god” or “job” are we using? What is the sample size by
which, and what is the scale by which, proximity is being defined? Our ideas of
“job/god,” and/or your ideas of “god/job”—how to make
them, how to make anything, mergeable?

We searched among the numbers for a name. Not among the numerals but the
integers, which name the distances between.

A quadratic is a square or pertaining to squares, to both the object to be
squared and the subject of squaring. Quadratic algys output in a duration proportional
to the square of the size of their input. Applicable to
algys
simple, not complex. Used for kinding and sorting. The relationship of any 2D curve to
any curved 3D form, whether spheroid, ellipsoid, cylinder, or cone, is quadric. The same
as like the relationship between the value fluctuations of our respective portfolios.
The Babylonians squared all shapes with quadratic equations, the Hindus and Buddhists
with cubic equations, because they understood the worth of negatives. Angling with
quartics had to wait for Europe, polynomials.

The deadline we had set for a name decision was our birthday, 1996. The
day approached and we still had no storms in the brain, only in the algy, and Qui and
Cull would not even respond to their own names let alone to suggestions.

The names Cubic, Cubics, Cubix, Cubiks, Cubicks, and even Q-bics were all
already taken, both as like company names and dotcoms. All registered to a military
contractor who bounced our emails.

The name Quartical did not test well with father and stepstepmother de
Groeve who kept dangling a watchmaking future in front of Cull as like a hypnotizing
pendulum and neither did Quadration impress the parents O’Quinn who kept
reminding Qui he could always get back in touch with Microsoft while his brothers
insisted that brogrammers genius as like he was should be getting paid by the codeline
or even by the character.

Salvatrice Trapezzi would read the news, each new incorporation filing,
for Affine, for Infdex, but if they had $10 million in capital we had 120 million
documents identified. The narrative plot of online is that as like the number of sites
that made the web increased, the number of hosts or domains that made the net did not,
and it was just at this point in time that their stasis or even decrease was being felt,
with capitalism and so democracy too in thrall to just a handful of corporations. We had
to be one of that handful. The forefinger, which starts words, the pinky, which ends
them. The ringfinger, which is bound to shift and second functions, as like in
programming to code parentheses and brackets. The middle finger, we would be the middles
if lucky. Not the first, not the last, but the strongest.

Raffaella proposed Etude, and Perspective.

We were partial to E-tude, with a hyphen, or Perspektiv, with a k. Also,
Indagator.

Salvatrice: 2gether, GathR.

Heather: FrisB, Boomerang, Poprank, Rankpop, Demogz, Dmogz, Yoyo, JoCo,
Juggle, Buggle.

Cull was suggesting CoCull (which is Latin or Greek for a cowl), or CullCo
(bastard Latin or Greek, “to inculcate”). Qui went for CoQui (which is a
frog or toad native to Puerto Rico), and QuiCo (bastard Spanish, “to
glut”).

Nobody could spell Diatessaron. But even if they could and we used that
there was still the fear, but an unsubstantiated fear, of Stanford suing us.

But by trying to think words all we were thinking were numbers. As like
language was a problem and we were solving for name. We were always returning to math.
Operations. All the ways two numbers can be manipulated are essentially the same. They
are just depths, or nests, recursions. Addition, a quantity that has been followed, or
succeeded, by another, is contained within multiplication, a quantity that has been
added to itself × number of times, while multiplication is contained in
exponentiation, a quantity that has been multiplied by itself × number of times.
Practically, all computers can do is just add and comptrast, though theoretically, the
number of potential operations is illimitable, and the sums generated grow too large for
a human to compute, even too long for a human to write.

The operation after exponentiation is called tetration, the fourth order
of magnitude, a quantity exponentiated by itself. Also called iterated exponentiation,
hyper-4. By the time we got to Stanford this question of what to call the operation had
been answered, not so the question of how to calculate and notate its results. The
mathpeople were all cur about Cs, or complex numbers, which are numbers represented by
× + iy, where × and y are real numbers and i the imaginary unit
equal to the square root of negative one. Essentially this number does not exist. But
its speciousness enables the modeling of chaos. The systematizing of chaos and the
differencing of that from the random and arbitrary, which given even an infinite or
eternal timescale or space might never evince determination or design. Applies to
morphogenesis, phyllotaxis, biochirality, and fractalization, how leaves and shells are
proportioned, how the human face is proportioned, econometrics, oscillating chemical
reactions, dynamics of liquids and gas. This is a ridiculous
explanation but. Encryption techniques. Quantum mechanics. Ridiculous but.

Because it is only in the tetration of complex numbers that results become
so large and long as like to allow for the identification of repetition, of pattern. Of
deepest nested recursion. Once every C would be tetrated all the disciplines would be
united in singularity and day would be night and night would be day and no inbox would
ever again give evidence of anything but an integrated self. We have read through your
email, sorry.