Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

It was as like there was a redwood tree always just in front of our fender and though we were speeding we would not have hit it otherwise. Inexplicable. No one would have even grazed the thing but leave it to Moe when we told him this, weeks later, when we told him we were algying a version, months later, and went with him to Gutshteyn to patent the thing just the two of us and partner him to Tetration, to downplay his involvement. Summer 97.

[Adverks?]

Confirmative. Everyone was still thinking about onvertising, online advertising, as like a phonebook. As like the Diatessaron. Whitepages in the middle, yellowpages all around based on whatever, on whoever, would pay. But then to take the terms a user searched for and respond to them with ads, to respond to them individually and with only the ads that pertinated alongside our free results, which would inadvertently demonstrate the supremacy of our free results, that was total Moe. Wasted nothing. Perpetual motion. Reversible.

Leave it to Moe, captain machine, general mechanics, to deliver such sagacity from just a billboard.

[Adverks — this was what lured Carbon Capital?]

Dusty. For serious, Dusty.

He was hayseed localish, with a family just a generation or two off the thistle farm, tightwad inspectors for the USDA, Dustbowl grim.

But Dusty did well.

His address, but his treemail address, growing up, had been the splitlevel of a nulliparous uncle and aunt in Fresno, the last on the culdesac that still zoned him into the charter school district, which then scholarshipped him to Berkeley, which then shipped him out east to intern the P/E desk at Credit Suisse, but basically his significant other at the time left an email out on his computer and Dusty read it and uncovered an auxiliary relationship the SO tried to rationalize as like research for an NYU cosplay or furry fetish social science study, immaterial.

Dustin now that we are remembering. Something stupey as like Smith. Point is, he moved back to the Bay, started grappling at a dojo, started a grainsifting shift at a coop, landed a desk at Carbon. The lowest desk all the exes would land on, with all the prospectuses that Carbon was about to pass up but still was cur about only because a rival might be stupey enough to go for them, and so the public might be too, if the businesses went public. He was not allowed to make decisions, but had to take responsibility for misdecisions and chances missed. The worst job a VC can have, to be the CV, meaning that if someone else ever makes bank on a prospect snubbed, get ready to update the résumé.

So Tetration settles on his pile, meaning the partners had already passed and after this last review Tetration was reduce reuse recycled.

But Dustin was a gamer. Dustin understood. It is not just math and science that are relational. We are sure the same must hold in its way for the humanities in which something in one context means something else in another. In gaming, in the fantasy realms especially, each avatar has a quest and improves his or her chances of success in that quest by alliances. Trolls are short but smorgs are tall, so a troll can squeeze undetected into a tubehive but cannot reach the tubehive and so must be boosted by a smorg. Once inside the central lair it takes a human male to slay the ouroboros. The human male wants to save the human female, the smorg wants the scepter, the troll wants only an ouroboros tooth whose magic powers can save the shire. Elves can also help, with archery. Also wizards.

Each quest is different. And though each quester might not want to participate in the relative subquest of the other, participation is necessary for the ultimate quest of each to attain completion. Each roam from the goal must also be an incentive. Do not aid the smorg just to be aided by the smorg. Rather, trust destiny, trust fate. Help the human male rescue the human female because it is she the prophecy refers to, Princess Wyvern, whose power is her ring, which before her capture she had entrusted to the Norns, who had entrusted it to a Teut, who is currently imprisoned by a Hun who, immaterial.

That is how Dustin talked about it with us, with his superiors. Each search would find its own result, but along the way the terms of the search would be generating other results and each would have its price. The main search would never be lost, and the subsidiary searches would always be strictly demarcated. They would be intersections, byways.

Diligence was due, and so we were called in to demo the algy.

Way back then Carbon was still used to prospectives hauling in their own gear to show and tell, that is the deep history we are talking, the buggy whip era.

But we just had a memorystick.

Carbon founding CEO was John Bates, JBates, most famous for having basically invented silicon, which comprises as like a quarter of the earth and so he basically invented the earth. There was a massive hunk of that element in the middle of his desk and clear crucibles lined along the mantel in which crystals were being grown out of hubris, unwaferable ingots and boules. He was as like a semiconductor himself and though a digital oracle to the media not many know of his analog activities administering the shipping enterprises that allowed the political and business elites of Greece to float approx 80 times the GDP of their country through Cypriot accounts. He wore gray slacks and a white dress shirt with a gray number 14 ironed on the back, the atomic number of his tetravalent metalloid.

We loaded Tetration.com onto his Gopal N-Ovum, a machine that without his investment would not exist. We searched for the Carbonites and found their site, in the version just updated. Then we let the Carbonites try it themselves, and all the searches they called for were for “marathon training” and “knife collecting,” “arbitrage” and “the euro,” and other topics they knew preoccupied their boss. Sites were found and we were raptured, because this was the first time, the first presentation, in which nothing had crashed.

Then JBates searched himself and found a distinguished benefactors page for the Claremonts mentioning his donation of auditoria, and a page for the Hellenic League of America mentioning him as like the recipient of the Ribbon of Daedalus. There were profiles in Wired and The Wall Street Journal, and a flash animation of him as like the devil with horns pitchforking Gopals and gulping them whole, which he played for us twice.

Apparently, he was also the volunteer tech for the Sacramento County Historical Society, and had even designed his own GeoCities page—“The contents of this page do not reflect, refract, diffract, or diffuse the opinions of the Sacramento County Historical Society”—which documented his genealogy with particular emphasis on the life and career of one Ioannis Baetylus, who came to America in the early to mid 18somethings, came west in the mid to late 18somethings, and pioneered cyanide leaching at the gold rush around Coloma and the silver boom of the Comstock Lode, which left him rich, then paralytic, then dead.

And it was the corresponding ad that sealed the deal for us, as like tetrating “Baetylus” solicited a banner for a deal on Mediterranean cruises from the newly launched triparian.com, just contracted with by The Friends of the Trapezzi Sisters, which in turn derived thirdparty sidebars for Kodak.

JBates signed the check that day.

This was still the age of signing checks so we had to take it to the Wells Fargo and wait in line as like everyone else to fill out a slip and deposit it.

But then also he handed us two caveats.

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