Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

then# beat him down

else (he can bring us our $$$$ within start=datetime end=datetime with interest compounded daily for range at rate_float)

else (we would derive > satisfaction from having him beaten to death). Let The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters bury his corpse under some soddy landscaping job outside some McMansion in Montara.

We decided, this Indian would be the victim of the first nonsimulated living breathing execution of our algy.

But all we had to go on was the name. Not even its spelling, just phonetically.

We took the comp out of hibernation and tetrated variations: “A Loan,” “Aloan,” “A Lone,” “Alone.”

Just imagine what results were returned to us. But then add “Indian.”

Qui and Cull returned from Vegas. But we had no use for their apologies or tears or promises of payback or all the swag souvenirs they brought us of Engadge tshirts and Isruptious hats and Acer tshirts and hats and drinkcozies and Compaq tshirts and hats and drinkcozies and flyswatters and the Continental Airlines plastic wings pin designating us as like Captain.

All we had use for were the data.

We wanted to know whether anyone had found any email or phone for this Elone or Ilone before we had. We wanted to know whether the Vegas cops had outstripped our algy.

But Qui and Cull had never even called the cops, and so our algy was spared.

Then we called CESS, the electronics show organizers. But they would not relay exhibitor info over the phone and suggested we consult the official commemorative catalog. But we already had. We had an unlisted Indian situation.

We clenched, we had been waiting to clench. Everything Cull and Qui were telling us was a repetition. Either the Indian was this master who absently mixed up his horses, or grifted, or both. He made interactive creditcards. He made crappy dongles. But he was also working on a vanguard type of total computing in which what went in and what went out were sustainably equilibrated. Reversibility in computing was as like letting a bet ride through every race without ever winning or losing but also without paying a vig. As like a sex act between two bodies that never aged and whose minds were equipped with the Undo/Redo functions.

Cull and Qui hit the showers. We went back to getting aggro about the inprogress site of the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose only unbroken link on its linkpage was to a url broker trying to sell virtual reservations to every tribe, apache to zuni.com. We decamped for the unmoderated engineer hunting grounds, WbStrZ.org, Netikit.org, @omic@araxy, 73h.wh157l3bl0w3r. We read about nodes and electrodes, capacitive coupling, bistability.

We posted msgs with handles as like ISOLone and VegaSageV with offers to hire an engineer for a reversible experiment that made a weeny affirmative action claim about especially welcoming applications from Native Americans. Just by reading and msging we were feeling proximal already, if not linguistically or conceptually proximal, then mystically, religiously, as like in searching for him we were feeling that tingle of being searched for ourselves.

Super Sal woke us up at the terminal by saying, “The Chief is on Line 2.”

We took the call, assuming we had been preemptively found, but then Line 2 introduced itself as like, “This is only the acting chief of the council of business elders.” He was just returning the voicemail we had left after tetrating “Indian+O’Lune” had brought us to the tribal site of the Ohlone, or to be politically PC the Muwekma Ohlone, descendants of the original inhabitants of the Bay, since dispossessed, halfassedly genocided.

But none of the members of the Ohlone tribe were called Ohlone, the chief said. Or they all were called Ohlone. They were the Costeños, “coastal people,” to the Spanish. The Ohlone, “people of the west,” to the Miwok. The Muwekma, “people of the Miwok,” to themselves. People of the Miwok, people of the west. Western Miwok. Überwesterners.

The chief told us we were eligible for a lowprice genetic test that might establish our membership in up to 18 federally recognized tribes. Or our money back. And our money back. Reparations might be attainable.

Finally, a TendR VC cur about our having applied for and received US Patent 5835905B, “Method for relevance prediction,” rang back with two asks:

Firstly, would we explain the parallelism formulas governing Fig. 4D? And secondly, would we explain why we were getting so publicly inquisitive about this character Ohlone?

We answered that our partners had met him in Vegas and got cur about him but never got his contact, and the VC said, “Next time write an algy that can, with all respect, call bullshit. Anyway, Muwekma Ohlone. That is an alias. Legally his name is Vishnu Vaidya.”

Our terms, then, became clarified.

“He tried to get us involved in a scheme for invertible computing,” the VC said and we said, “Reversible.”

The VC then reminisced about a snazzy anorak he used to own, lined on one side in cotton, for the theater, the other in water repellent Tyvek, for hiking home.

“He is Indian?” we said.

“With a dot,” the VC said. “Not a feather.”

“Vaidya?” we said.

“But he came to us with that bullshit inversible scheme calling himself Vishnu Fernandes.”

“With a z?”

“Fernandes with an s,” the VC said. “But then how the fuck would a dot Indian get that name?”

“From Portugal.”

“You can say that again.”

“From Portugal.”

Then the VC told us all that montage about the remotes and the mafia, backtracking, and how the Vishnu identity had been disclosed during diligence on his reversible papers, backtracking. “The suspicion,” the VC said, “was that he stopped being Vishnu because of all that cablebox fraud and being foreign especially was trying to not get arrested.”

We thanked him and he said, “No prob, just keep our name out of it.”

But we told him we did not understand why and he said, “If you hire him, you can forget about our support.”

We hung up.

The VC. His name was Bretton Cleaver.

We tetrated again using “Vishnu Vaidya,” and appended “the Bay,” because back then to trim by coordinate consilience or zipcode was a Vedic fantasy.

The results stack came back paltry.

One result was a gambling site, one comment below many and most of them gibber, “nice turnout last time. chuck u left yr asthma inhaler will bring,” left by the uname Vishuponafern at the bottom of a thread called “Poker In The Rear.”

The READ THIS FIRST post advised that getting in on a game was contingent on responding correctly to a riddle: “Four men sit around playing blackjack. The first man gets up, leaves, and lives. The second man gets up, leaves, and lives. The third man gets up, leaves, and lives. The fourth man gets up, leaves, and expires. Explain without accusing anyone of homicide.”

The last line of the riddle was hyperlinked to a moderator/admin email, and we clicked it and replied: “They were playing on an airplane to determine who got the last three parachutes, or on a boat to determine who got the last three lifejackets, or else the guy with the lowest or busted hand had a brain aneurysm,” and the moderator responded immediately with an invitation.

At the Wells Fargo we withdrew the sub $6K still in the account without telling Cull or Qui, went out searching the way our ancestors searched, with the only other cards we ever had, with our name on them and the title embossed, Founder, Tetration.