Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Reversibility, an Eastern conceit.

Imagine two bows that share a single string that can shoot a single arrow headed and fletched at both ends in two opposite directions at equal speed simultaneously. Imagine an archer who thrives entirely off his aim, and who can sustain himself physically by aiming forever, but who with the gradual release of his grip will gradually die.

To be clear, all this is possible only on paper or modeled on a computer charged or socked into an outlet. But in life, this might only be possible in Vegas. Moe was proposing a new paradigm of DCent, a facility not as like the one we were renting but open, as like to balance with access the way all other systems were, are still, autarkically closed. It would be a place full of fully reversible processors, routers, a local server, drives, operating all by themselves. A business of, by, and for computing, and the most anyone would have to do would be to make a contribution. This was conservation, this was ecology, more. This was a second nature requiring a god and not a man. The hope itself was selfsufficient.

He would call this facility the Tabernacle of Isentropic Synergy, or the Dedicated Hub Tabernacle of Collaborative Coopteration. Which, no doubt, is guano, batshit crazy, but also as like Stockholm or Oslo material, the ambition level that gets a man inducted into Boulder, Colorado, the ultimate frisbee hall of fame.

The presentation that Moe had taped to the floor around his poncho explained that some California Indian archive, but Indian as like Native American and not Indian Indian, some repository of historical manuscripts concerning indigenous life in California, did not have the funds to digitize itself, and the state would not help, the state was going broke too. His plan was to raise enough capital to pay the elderly or handicapped along with any cur volunteers to digitize its documents, its reams of scholarly paleography, notes on diet, trapping practices, fornication customs, birth and death folkways, and tralatitions of oral religious lore, for input into the computers of his Tabernacle, which would proceed to sort and kind them, to analyze them and other tribal and municipal records to enable any future research, though the research was not the point, the point was that all of this processing would generate not just enough electricity to power the Tabernacle but also to output heat and light, which would be distributed at no cost to the descendants of the archived on local reservations, and then to illegal Mexicans and the Afromerican poors, ultimately to everyone, globally.

Moe already had a location scouted out in San Mateo, as like an offisite scanning office, while for the inaugural Tabernacle itself he was set on one of the populous ancestral counties, either Sonoma or Mendocino, so as like to maintain maximum proximity and so transmission fidelity between the natives, who would upload their cultures themselves, and the downloadable power their cultures would generate. We will conclude only by noting that with classic Moe counterintuity the cardboard model of the Tabernacle that held down the hem of his poncho was not in any indigenous reed and grass wikiup style but was apparently an adobe or pueblo, and beyond that the little tiny people on the cardboard sidewalk whose purpose it was to humanistically scale the rendering were just green plastic soldiers as like toys.

It was Qui who told us none of this then, in his call to Unit 26 not from the room he had with Cull at the Desert Inn but from the Bellagio. We had been waiting for a report on their summit with AOL, waiting to be told we were being procured, and so it was serling that the first figure out of his mouth was not the $12 million we expected.

Serling. Rod. Twilight Zone . Strange.

Instead, Qui explained, first they had met a guy, his name was Ohlone, then they had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, then AOL was not offering because it was deving its own search, Microsoft was doing this, Netscape was doing that, and Yahoo. Then they had dinner, which was grilled cheese again and soupflavored soup.

After which this Ohlone guy just happened to bump into Cull again in the sportsbook at the Bellagio. Cull had just gotten on line, not online, but in a cloggy human queue. He was waiting to put his name down for a nonsmoking table, but this Ohlone kept a seat by the VIP screens, Qui said, Cull said, and was just headed over to lay down a bet. A major race was slated next. Moe had handicapped all the relative weight calculations by jockey, means of speed at distance weighted by recency on turf and dirt. There was some tendonitis afflicting the favorite being covered up, and then he mentioned something about an unfamiliar strain of alfalfa in the paddocks. He had reduced the semiofficial odds from 37.9:1 to 16.2:1. Cull basically figgered he had to trust an Indian about a horse, and so inquired what stakes the guy was in for and then doubled them, handed over all his cash to be wagered for him, parimutuel.

All that after just a chance meeting and one lunch Guinness and two bottles of Zinfandel with dinner.

Qui explained that while Cull had been gambling he had been in the toilet. Not doing number one. Number two. He had not been fast, but he was at least faster than Filly Up, who finished sixth. Of 10. Qui found Cull tangling with the rope dividers between the smoking and non sections. The Indian had never come back. Cull would not tell Qui how much he lost. But then Qui insisted, and Cull obliged him, though he would not tell us how much. But then we insisted. It was more than gas money. More as like horse or used Humvee money.

“But only $2468 of it was from the common account,” Qui said.

“We told you not to gamble with money from common,” we said. “And the rest was from what?”

“Cull and I took in $220 in stud.”

“Which you also lost?”

“This Ohlone dude is doing fascinating shit with circuit adiabatics.”

“And with adiabatic prostitutes he is paying with our money, certainly.”

“The phone just told me to insert another quarter,” a pause for him to pat himself down. “No more quarters.”

“No more drinking,” we said.

Just before the call was severed he said, “All beverages are complimentary.”

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The Vegas news had interrupted us while crunching solitary in Unit 26 in front of a terminal in front of an algyshell, which is a programming interface, just window and cursor. Lines of language lined, a Cullion lines of code, a Quinnion lines of code, which we had been purging of breakless switches, ampersandless arguments, (is) instead of (==), (_dict_) instead of (_slots_). But now all our code that had been right was suddenly wrong. Which left only our code that had been wrong as like right, though what there was of it was just dropped colons and closed bracketing omissions, unfindable. The conditionals that operated, and the conditionals we had implemented to obscure the operations, seemed interchangeable to us, and then even the spaces that gaped between the characters and the characters themselves seemed interchangeable, because no space is ever blank, so everything is flawed.

We had to sit down though we were already sitting and so we just got up and moved to the next terminal. Its comp was hibernating, suspended. The glass of it was motey. Then the glass had our face, as like we were touchlessly communing with it, and then calming to its mode. Outwardly neutral. But inwardly still volatile and cycling.

find (Indian)

find ($$$$)

if (amount of $$$$ Indian has left < amount of $$$$ that was ours)