Book of Numbers: A Novel (53 page)

Balk not. Virtue is a patience.

[What?]

That was a joke, laugh. Balk, Thor Ang. You might be familiar. Tetrate him if not.

[I’m familiar with him, with b-Leaks, which relates to all this how?]

You will know. We will scroll away into just a squircle parcel for the dirt, but you will know. You must, you will, understand that. That is your privilege. Do not concess the process. All time in its time.

Moe had liquidated through the mesh. He had vaped himself. The balance of his direct deposit Chase Bank checking account had been transferred and all future payments to it had been set to autotransfer to a savings account registered to the Goa Orphanage of Achievement Trust, Oriental Bank of Commerce, funds that had remained untapped until their seizure by the India Reserve, whose inquiry determined that no such orphanage existed. No images were provided to us and since the Americans refused to take the body from Canada because it was not clear that Vishnu Fernandes was a citizen and India refused to take it from Canada because it was not clear that Vishnu Fernandes ever existed, or was Vishnu Vaidya, or was a citizen, he, Mohlone, whoever, was cremated in Montreal. All this according to Kor who brought us the cremation report along with the files of the Vishnus obtained from various Bay Area hospitals pertaining to treatment for dissociative identity, formerly multiple personality disorder, and depression. Brought them to us in Berkeley, audience denied.

[That’s all the investigation you did?]

The Soviets scootered out together to the addy. The Lesstel.

They reported just a pukka blacksite all condemned boarded up. Not even a vendingmachine.

On Kor edict Tetration bought the house of Moe from Chase Bank, which gave access to the garage, from which we were sent just tranches of scrawled papers and matchbooks and coasters, random arbitrary disintegrated µCs, disassembled shields, linear regulators, crystals, interferometers, junctions and loops we had such limited bandwidth for that we did nothing to stop M-Unit from trashing them out. Kor had picked them all over beforehand infallible.

And then just a year ago, approaching a decade after the demise of Moe, Kor organized our quantum computing syndicate with Stanford, with its tech all pilfered from the garage, with its elementary particle inspired by Moe having tried, for our sake, to give practical form to his reversible computing theories.

Moe had been inventing the tetbit, as like Kor calls it now, a bit capable of two expressions, superposited, subatomic.

In the way computing works today, a bit can represent EITHER 1 OR 0. But in future computing based on the work of Moe, each tetbit would represent BOTH 1 AND 0. This would speed everything up by a factor of confounding while redimensionalizing all storage. But still this system would always be entropic, which is to say it would use electricity, which is to say it would use electricity without ever regenerating it.

It takes a lot of electricity to keep an elementary particle stable. The kind of electricity whose unsustainable generation might even destroy the planet.

All because of a collapse of significance. As like everything collapsed.

And so it was a compromise. Moe had been compromised, by having normalized his natural madness. He put aside his Tabernacle for quantum pragmatics. And he did it for us.

Moe was a computing genius who is not even remembered for his only realized genius contribution. To advertising.

Tetration donated his house for asylum, some quasigovernmental initiative providing transitional accommodation for political refugees as
like hijra fleeing the Pakistani Taliban and last we checked in it was apportioned to some Lhotshampa activist from Bhutan.

We have no clue what became of the billboard.

[So you just closed the books on him? Put Moe behind you?]

If we ourselves did not press to your specs it was grief, bandhu. We were physically pressed worse than ever before now.

Our friend, our partner. Our Injuneer bloodbrother. Had deleted himself. Was erased from our life. We craved contact to such a degree that with every hack aggressed against us subsequently our initial instinct was to hope it was Moe. Schizoid Moe. That his jiva has returned to defeat the Pakis. Jiva is the soul.

[You’re feeling what now? Guilty?]

What we feel now was what we felt then but now it has become even worse. We were turned into a child. Unappreciated, depreciated, not fledged. Dwelling still with M-Unit.

We pretended we had never seen or even heard of a computer.

Cull and Qui inquired about what they might do to assist us and M-Unit decreed we would enjoy studying papermaking and so they dispatched who they claimed was a papermaking artisan to Berkeley who entered the study and took her breasts out.

We did not bury our face into them.

To be more open, we would not have preferred a man.

To be as like most open, at this juncture we are basically sexless.

Point being, the letter with the map keyed so uninterpretable, the bull balls chiming as like temple bells, everything Moe ever did was instruction.

Moe was instructing us in how to open, how to be open, as like a lotus getting pollinated, or the cloaca of the gharials that once dined on corpses in the Ganges, the one hole they have for pissing, shitting, fucking, laying eggs, and that might also help with respiration and mobility. A single twoway orifice. Lubed. Ironically never a totally accessible lesson.

[What users?]

There are no users, he said, just, or

No winners or losers

There are no somethings

No victims

He had some line about the first world beginning with educating everyone into accountability, but ending and becoming the last world if that were ever accomplished.

No victims, just users.

[You’re still quoting Moe?]

Strain to record everything. In America, even the smallest portions were too big for him, except with “frozey yozey.” His favorite places were always selfserve and charged flatrates for small and large cupsizes, regardless of the amount of yogurt and toppings. Moe would stagger in vast crockery to fill, and the staff was unequipped to charge in excess of the maximum. It was not as like anything was returnable, melting probiotics crammed back into dispenser, the carob chunks replaced. It was because of this that all the places switched to retailing by weight. Spring 1998. This was always our prime directive at Tetration. Our actions were the higher law, the lower law either adapted or was abolished.

Summer 98, walking in SF from what had become so suggestively called SoMa onto Ellis Street to pay a visit to his ghee guy, he was stopped by an officer for resembling an AfroMexican suspected of a burglary. In answer to questioning Moe said he lived everywhere, worked nowhere, when asked his name he asked the officer when. Hauled in, he told the
entirety of Southern District Station how he owned them, their holsters, their weapons and ammo, and that though they certainly owned them too, as like fellow taxpayers, the injustice was that while he, Moe, had no authority even proportional to his burden over how such things were used, they did, police authority was total. Moe had been picked up on a public street, in public air, under public weather, at public twilight. Nonproprietary, unlicensable, the commons. He did not require the courts, he claimed, the gods had already ruled in his favor. Still he called us and we called Gutshteyn, who met us. No charges were ever filed. As like we left, the arresting cop said, “Still not satisfied with the system, fucko, even you can run for mayor.” Moe said, “I wish just to run for mayor of your brain.”

[Are you feeling OK?]

Whatevs. Or whatever your wife would say.

[Why don’t we break?]

No, no. Here, take your Tetbook back, here. No. Keep the memcard, the stick. No. Eject it and return it.

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[Feel or Jesus tell you yet? Or Myung? Fucking Kori Dienerowitz’s flown into Dubai. He just ambushed me down on the beach.]

Rovery. Ranting. Rambling gamblers gambol in the brambles. With ferry fare fairly free travelers trip with fashionable frequency twixt two temples on the Terekhol.

[OK—but what’s Kor doing, besides fucking this up? What have you not told me?]

About what? Can you name us another multinational corporation tech or rec assetized at north of $90 billion that has not done a favor or two for the governments of every country in which it operates, just hoping not to provoke conflict with the foreign policy of the country in which it is based and the majority of its investors hold citizenship?

[It’s time that you came clean.]

What did we say? We are never without a system. We are telling according to plan. What did we leave off with?

[Moe, the hanging, you still have to finish that, hold on, “… destroy him by obtaining … the self in exchange …”]

We hate our voice. We hate the babiedness in it, the infantile spanked whine, pedolalia. A lacking something sound. An always disagreeing with something sound. To rewind, to replay, the loathing just procreates. As like to be reborn, which is also to redie.

The alternative is to avatar, replicate the self, which

Moe used to say, whatever happens in life always remember that the worst tragedy is already behind us, the end of immortality with the beginning of sex. Once there had been singlecelled organisms capable of eternally replicating by dividing, by splitting, and the replications gradually sought protective symbiosis in colonies that civilized into multicellular organisms. But then an evolutionary drive to succeed emerged among them, and ultimately compelled them to mate with others of their kind in order to eliminate mutation and competition in the propagation of the very best of their kind. Though with each reproduction the essence of the progenitors was becoming less and less evident in their progeny, who grew into separate lifeforms entirely, conscious of their mortality and aware that their only consolation for that and for having their own offspring who would be so different and ungrateful was the fact that reproduction was sex for them, and sex for them was pleasurable.

But then to be able to enjoy the sex without receiving that propagation benefit, that might be the next phase in evolution, homosexuality, which Moe never pursued, or bisexuality, which we

Moe thought future humans would become as like the ardhanari or Hindu intergender gods, but with larger and thicker skulls that would shield their brains from being microwaved by wifi.

Another thought Moe had was that because humans were now able as like a species to digest lactose past childhood, in the future they would be able to breastfeed themselves too and survive through adulthood on that alone.

Telephone poles always made him pensive. With everything going mobile, he worried about what would happen to them.

Maybe they would become effigies. Maybe they would be worshipped.

The cardinal difference between Buddhist and Hindu incarnation doctrines is that Buddhism does not believe in a soul, but in a mind that transfuses our successors, and in a body that decomposes as like biosphere. Hinduism, however, believes in the soul, which determines

Moe related the situation of the individual Buddhist to the situation of a computer that lacked a memory. Which would not be a computer at all, but

Dire, our condition was dire. M-Unit brought in the Stanford shrink, who was cur about investing in a Tetration IPO, the Stanford shrink brought in homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, aromachologists, who were cur about our investing in their research. Pulse electromagnetic field therapy. Enerpathic and liquid mineral stimulation of adrenals. Entheogen solutions for aboulia and immunocompromise. Bhang, ayahuasca, venoms.

We fake slept through Aunt Nance, weak without her sarcasm, consulting a chelationist for advice on how to treat her joint inflammation. Then we were asleep.

We had dreams. We will not discuss them.

Mat Plokta and Trey Kerner chased us through an arcade while calling us “cholesterol.” They threatened to beat us until we turned into “testosterone.” Then we were in this stadium cafeteria that was not at Stanford, but it was, there were tons of students and every time anyone recognized and was recognized by anyone else, both of them grew taller, wider, everyone scrambled for their friends, which was awkward, as like everyone grew, they bumped one another, bumped heads. We had to dodge their shoes, we were friendless, we reached up to their shoelaces. Next we dreamt that Moe would not let us play a game that involved arranging very small cards, facedown, on the squares of a chessboard, we asked him why, he said, “Because it is unfair, you are a computer.” We asked him to at least explain the rules, he said, “You either obey me, or you obey me while pretending to understand me.” Next we had a dream about a taco, D-Unit was the vendor, it was a bull taco with guac and salsa and yellow shredded cheddar wires, and just before we bit into it D-Unit snatched off a papertowel and placed it atop our head as like a yarmulke. He said a blessing, but he said it in BASIC, or LISP.

Then there was this low rumble, and a whiny grating. The sofabed shook, the entire room shook. It was the garagedoor, below us, grinding along its track, opening, closing, remotely. M-Unit and Aunt Nance drove off.

They had their volunteering to do, counseling the families of queer minors, coaching tolerance, coaching love.

We got up, folded the sofabed, folded the robe. This was all robotic, this was the fanaticism of the robotic. We went downstairs and dredged
the drawers for the phonebook. Flipped through to Places of Worship. We skimmed the entries, recognized the addy, the number associated. We must have put on clothes, because we had our rollerblades on and were blading to the rabbis.