Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

“I’m just trying to avoid taking the hard shit.”

“The hard shit?”

I gestured around at all my stuff stowed, “You should know — you think I moved in myself?”

“Pfizer is in the dumps, trading down below 20, indicating low consumer confidence in ibuprofen. Johnson & Johnson is holding steady in the 60s, aspirin is on the up.”

“Were you even around for your own 4–0?”

“Around, yes, in attendance, no.”

“Did I jerk off?”

“Unclear.”

I wanted to wish him happy returns on his birthday, but also I wanted to keep that sentiment pounding in my head, to determine whether it registered.

“We cannot read thoughts.”

“Try.”

“Think of something.”

“Any something?”

“Any.”

“Am doing it — you got it?”

At the door was a knock and a black but white goth buff transgender person entered — an XX or an XY or a chromosomally spliced Ze bearing a metal tray. I had not been thinking about its contents. But I did not have that thought until I’d consumed its contents. The tray was divided into quadrants, and all were of composted mush.

I used one of the quadrants to ash in. I wouldn’t have minded a beeeeeeeer.

“Go to your Tetbook, the desktop, open the folder Dossier.”

The only new folder, “Dosser?”

“There is no i ?”

“Guess not.”

It contained: Tetration site txt, public domain.docs, junk. But then also internal reports. Personnel intel. Official Tetration capsule bios of its prez, its vps of VP (Various Projects), Finance, Futurity/Devo.

Quarterly assessments. Performance reviews with nothing smeared out. How many files? More than scrollable — inscrollable?

Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified — located elsewhere. Creation stuff, cosmology, a founding myth, lore of origin: light separated from darkness, the wind inseminating the aether — the earth is balanced on the back of an elephant, or held by angels standing on the shell of a turtle — but what was that turtle standing on? was it just tortoise on tortoise forever?

An apple plunging from a tree and inventing gravity, volume determined by water displaced from Antiquity’s jacuzzi, a dream about the structure of the solar system being the structure of the atom, a dream about a snake consuming its own tail being the ring structure of the molecule benzene, relativity conceived in a tram as it passed a clocktower in Bern, coordinate geometry measured by the relationship of a flitting fly and the floor, ceiling, walls of some sordid dorm in Utrecht? or Leiden? A suburban garage with Dad’s camper parked out in the driveway — make room for the racks, clear the toolbench for the switches. A grant or degree. A mentor, a mother.

I took it as my job to discern something similar — to search in the way www.searching couldn’t, to find in the way www.finding couldn’t — which is to say, to conceive, make it up.

Like say I’m talking to myself — how to substantiate the claim? how can anyone but the author authenticate? I had no way of corroborating whether it was or wasn’t Principal, talking. His feed could’ve been recorded in Myanmar, in Burma, prerecorded in Siam, postproduced in Thailand, he could’ve been coming to me live but two hours behind, eight hours ahead, on whichever side of excruciation’s meridian, 36 TbPS streaming straight from the 36th century.

From then on we met constantly, continuously. I questioned, I didn’t. Answers were dirigent, direct. This was our background, the setting of scene: the hut monitor displayed graphics resembling the Himalayas (spiky unscalable linecharts of number of urls indexed by year, number of tetrations by year, number of new/unique users by year, number of tetrations by average user by year), resembling the planets Venus and Mars (πcharts of ownership structure) and Bay Area bridges (bargraphs of ad revenue) — thermodynamical models of the tech protocol itself or just organigram tutorials in managerial flow, squiggly doodly retiaries that rendered concepts like vertical or horizontal omnidimensional, unhelpful.

I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me — cameras, mics. Interfaces: beaming cracks in plaster.

But it was all about others. Nothing about him. None of the material was personal. An interface has no profile.

He spoke to me as a grownup to an infant. A brat pubescent to a rutting pet. Would I be allowed to interview the others? No. In person? No. In writing? No. Can I speak? Talk to the wall.

I had clearance like it was going out of business, but the cost to me was guilt. Families and financials. I knew how many dependents people had, how many savants and seniors, their salaries and dividends, bonuses and dumps. Their incentives for retirement, their splits. Class A, one vote per share. Class B, 10 votes per share. I knew everything but what all this meant to them. How they spoke. Stood and sat. How they groomed.

Were they people? Not to Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain.

He guarded his privacy but flung open the doors to the lives of others. His underlings. Their underthings. What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.

All this factuality grated, was a grate, a veil, a screen — a firewall. There was a firewall between us.

Tetrate “firewall.” Though how to decide which site to hold with? the most popular or most reputable? and if reputation shouldn’t be popularly decided, then how? and couldn’t this question be better asked of politics (management), or religion (ownership)?

Class A knowledge is not as powerful as Class B knowledge, and all the managers be fools and the owners, doctrinaire.

Tetrationary.com, a userdriven site, defines: “Firewalls can either be software-based, or hardware-based, and are used to help keep a network secure,” then digresses into types: packets, filters, layers, proxies. Entry last updated by “Myndmatryxxx.”

Correction — last updated by myself, as I rejoined the verbal phrase: “Firewalls can be either.”

Whereas a more authoritative site, which I’ll define as one that employs professionals, at minimumwage, but still — pride counts more than maternity leave or sickdays — states: “1. A fireproof wall used as a barrier to prevent the spread of fire. 2. Any of a number of security schemes that prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to a computer network or that monitor transfers of information to and from the network.”

Correction — the site, lexility.com, just freeloaded the work of old print dictionaries and encyclopedias whose compilers are dead and whose compiled kin don’t receive any residuals.

Another site says “firewall,” in its architectural usage, dates to ca. 1840, in its computing sense, to ca. 1980. Yet another site gets strangely specific, 1848, 1982, on the dots.

Austro-Hungary, apparently, designed the firewall. The Austro-Hungarian theater. Where it was armor dropped from a proscenium to prevent a conflagration onstage from spreading to the audience. No mention on the site as to what might’ve started the fire onstage — the effects, like the fake cannon that ignited Shakespeare’s Globe, likelier than anything textual.

In German, this barrier was called der Eiserner Vorhang . “The Iron Curtain.” Which another site attributes to Churchill. Whose own source is cited by yet another site as having been the Muslim belief in “the Gates of Iron,” “erected by Cyrus the Great to keep Gog and Magog out of Persia.” Still others assert that Cyrus is actually Alexander the Great and Gog and Magog are really the Scythians. “Not even a wall of iron can separate Israel from its God,” Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, 20 °CE. “Iron and steel were called the same in ancient Hebrew and Arabic, and both cultures believed the element fell from the heavens.”