Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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.

Anyway, at Stanford every mathperson we hated because they were also a compsciperson was cur about how exactly to calculate that — the repetition, the pattern — so they kept writing code

}

void setBit(u_char byte, u_char bit, bool v)

{x[byte] = setBitOnByte(x[byte], bit, v);}

void setBit(u_char b, bool v)

{setBit(b/8, b%8, v);}

bool getBit(u_char byte, u_char bit) const

{return getBitOnByte(x[byte], bit);}

bool getBit(int b) const

{return getBit(b/8, b%8);}

ALInteger operator ~() const

{

writing programs whose tetrating kept overloading the computers, segmentation faults as like fatal, choking on kernels.

The lawyer did not appreciate this either.

The lawyer was Mendel Gutshteyn, who had handled the estate of D-Unit. He was an émigré who had met D-Unit at shul, the Hasidics shul. He had read a kaddish at the shiva. He had a grody plateglass office on Geary Boulevard in the Richmond.

Tetration Inc., the name, was to represent our automaticity, to symbolize our selfgeneration. The way we would equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves, by sprawling out in our search through the prolific irrational until we found recurrence, redundance. Cull signed and Qui signed and then we did too, but just before we slashed the date Gutshteyn stopped and reminded us. It was 06/10, not 06/06. We had lived in advance, we had been living ahead. We had miscalculated and missed our birthday.

It is unfortunate that you will have to transcribe this.

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Ohlone.

[How is that spelled?]

O H L O N E. Forget pixels, write it in blood.

[Ohlone.]

He was a madman, a full stack fucking madman, apologies. Make sure our voice is in the red. Boost, decompress. Ohlone, fuck, Ohlone. This is evidence, this is proof. We are not sure in what order to tell it.

[From beginning to end. Leave it to me to disentangle.]

But what we knew before or what we knew after?

[Doesn’t matter to me. You’re the one who thinks thought has an order.]

Indian. His name was Ohlone. His name was but was not Muwekma Ohlone. Mohlone. Moe. Any index of knowledge is also an index of ignorance, except that knowledge is finite and ignorance is not. The myths could fill a book, though no one would want to read it. They could be algyed. An algy for the most popular myths. For the myths mostly true. The myths mostly false. Legend and lore ranked by our or his need for their indemnity.

Goa was clear as like Portuguese to us. Goa State, Konkan Region, Western India. But we did not know the degree of poverty involved, the no electricity conditions, or that the water for shitting and pissing was downstream from the nonpotable drinkingwater for livestock, which was downstream from the bathingwater for humans, which was downstream from the also nonpotable drinkingwater for humans, which, all that, was just downstream from the water for shitting and pissing of the neighboring slum. We did not know how or even if to credit that then. The water that caused hep A and E. The insect vectors that bred fevers that blinded and deafened. It was either 1 OR 0, or 1 AND 0. True and also false.

But what we can verify is the motivation, the drive. We will never have that, not as like he did. We will never understand what exactly it took to beat that system, a system not even imaginable by an upper middleclass or upperupper middleclass Jewishish kid from middle Palo Alto. We were physics homework, papiermâché models of meiosis, mitosis, we set magnesium on fire. We were Math Masters of the Month. We blueribboned at the fairs. If we hacked it was for the thrill of it, the attention. We were overparented, underautonomized, überwestern.

Our major challenges in life were college acceptance, peer group acceptance, leveraging our abilities into a slot on the Forbes.com listicle, and incubating or at least simulating emotional intimacy. Though our life has had its positives and negatives, even a negative number has more magnitude than zero, and no one was more a zero than Ohlone.

He won India. Ohlone. He won the game of India and he did it by surviving, siblings stillborn and dead in childhood, parents survived only by him and their tapeworms. An orphan. He never mentioned his siblings or parents beyond confirming their deaths and their tapeworms. The orphanage put him to work. They had a type of half school, half factory, all slavery. This was not beachy Goa, not Arabian Sea Goa, but far inland slammed against the Ghats. He would escape to the resorts to scavenge. Holidays living off the wastes of hippie tourists.

A billion people in that country, millions more than any continent deserves, and annually sitting for the admission exam to the IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, which was this Nehru scheme, there are something as like two, three hundred thousand students all the same age, of whom something as like only two, three thousand are finally accepted and that, even a humanities grad can figger a.01 % acceptance rate. Harvard go fuck yourself, Yale go fuck yourself. Stanford, sit and spin. Factor into that equation the number of graduates that merit fully sponsored #H1B work visas for the States, no more than a few, the best few, 10 % of the.01 %, and even a humanitarian can stack up the odds.

001 % of the total.

Two people, three people, in each class.

Ohlone placed second overall the year of his exam. Or so Ohlone claimed. Do not request the year. He also claimed that his disappointment was due to his not having eaten anything that day and that the first place high score boy, Vikram somethingrajan or swami, who always had something to eat, whose cousin serviced the grading machines, had cheated.

He called all cheaters that, “fucking Vikrams, Joshua Cohen,” “fuck that Vikram in his tokenhole, Joshua Cohen,” he would always use our full name.

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But again, we did not know any of this — we knew diddly. We were still trying to master the unicycle or sneaking into matinees of The Terminator or Dune and Ohlone who was only a decade or so older was wasting no time in achieving Valhalla.

But to understand Ohlone you have to understand — what is your fluency with remotes?

[I know how to use them. What you said about the germs.]

You know how they work?

[You zap like a beam. Not a laser but like a laser, a beam.]

So, Paz, this crap company out in Santa Cruz, does not exist anymore. Paz does not. Santa Cruz still exists, unfortunately. Ohlone, this was his first job in America. First serious adult engineering job, that is. It did not make him into who he became, it broke him into who he became. It was a disaster. White slavery but for an Indian.

Paz was set on creating the universal remote control, the universal remote, the unimote, the unmote. We can relate to this concept, admittedly, but some things that work in theory do not work in practice, as like some things that work in practice, do not work, for in . Consummate control had been a dream ever since the exchange of wire for wirelessness. Ever since Torres-Quevedo lacking any military support retired his project of electromagnetically guiding missiles and bombs and applied himself instead to creating a robot to play chess with, and Tesla died alone in a cheap New York roominghouse after having lost the AC/DC battle to Edison and given up the war to deliver even current through the air.