Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

“Search is a conduit,” he later said, “all notions are related through it, somehow, but some notions are only related through it.”

“That is also one definition of intelligence,” he said. Kor would later give us other definitions of intelligence.

We took the check from him and from out of our pocket, we have never had a wallet, the Diners Club card Carbon had given us, for interviewing purposes only.

“Please,” he said. “My treat.”

“Carbon pays.”

The waiter came, took the card.

“But you know who is responsible for paying Deepcast?” Kor asked.

“We do,” we said. “We are.”

Kor went into his fannypack for a napkin and asked, “But you know who owns Deepcast?”

“We do not.”

“James Bates, second cousin of John.”

We nodded but not at this. That a VC firm required one of its investments to retain the services of another of its investments did not shock us as like what weighted the middle of the napkin or rather paper Kor held, apparently a tax filing for Deepcast. It was a rod, and Kor was confirmative, it was platinum. He told us it was exactly 14.8 ounces and that with platinum now trading at $1515 per ounce, the price of this rod was precisely equal to the fee owed to Deepcast.

“Hire me, let me take care of it,” he said. “Consider it this way, you get a President who pays for himself.”

We shook on it, and our signature on the receipt felt as like gratuity.

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After the backgammon board has been set up, before anyone has moved or even rolled the die yet. After everything has been problematized toward the left of an equal sign, before anything has been solved on the right. Moments of tantric potency. Potentiality held in reserve. This was our situation. We were funded and had a new den mother. Who was about to move us into a new office den with enough capacity to hibernate everything online 100x over. Beyond, Moe was already poised to scale toward 100 2, toward 2100.

[What year are we in again?]

Worst. Year. Ev. Er.

[Which?]

97 through 98. But also not. Rather it was Beta. It was perpetual Beta.

[You’re at the Tetplex, the office?]

The core of it. A bay tract by the sloughs. Sedge, rush. Muck. City land. Palo Alto. The building we were in then, former garaging for the Department of Public Works, has since been cleared for parking. We bought the rest of the acreage from NASA Ames, adjacent marsh. Expansion in 2001 through 02, fitness center, kindercare center, yurt. Major renovations in 08 and 10.

[All the servers at the time were onsite?]

They were. Kor would not put Moe in his own barn or silo unsupervised. That was the issue. At first.

[What?]

But we are not sure what was first. It was hiring Kor, then the Tetplex core, The Lesstel. But they all overlapped, they lapped. Even a few things we had not been apprised of.

[Namely?]

Sometimes secrecy is secrecy but other times it is just that we have octalfortied the fact that other people as like you do not have access to everything we know and think. Many people have this problem, most of them not trying to hide anything. They just assume everyone can read their minds as like a book. We presume you understand this.

Point is, we found ourselves up to the waist in wetwork. Blackops, glomars, skunks. We moved to the marsh and suddenly stunk. This was what it meant to be managed. To compromise, and to be compromised, to dwell amid decay. Amid the pervasive waft of methane as like everyone in the office were locked in a continuous fit of farting.

As like we expanded Kor would take us to inspect the perimeter, out to the point that our clogs would just sink. “Freedom is water,” he used to say. He meant that it has the behavior of water. How it takes any shape, because it cannot make its own.

We have to be the shapers of freedom, Kor would tell us, as like our concrete shored up the basin. On the rain days. The fog days. “Tetration is the air.”

We planted public land with capital and harvested it private. We bought from the city, bought from the county, took credits and abatements both state and Fed for setting aside a nook for a rookery. We sheltered the least tern and brown pelican. Eggs of smelt and tidewater goby.

We took a disused building and renovated it, built a building nextdoor, each to its use, different floors in the different buildings, different sectors on the different floors, each to its use, quintessential Kor. Multitasking, polypronged productivity initiatives throughquarter. The lefthand ignorant of the right, as like in typing tutorials to develop finger independence. Compartments, compartmentalization. Cubicles. Tetricles.

Businesses predicated on unicity had to function by secernment. Employees now had to swipe in and out. They had security clearances. Even we had to swipe, but we always lost our card, and anyway later the Tetplex switched to facial/vocal recogs, connating cepstra and isometries. Even we had a clearance level and though it was the highest we were not assuaged. It was still a level, it was measurable.

Previously we had all been not just on the same page but the same page itself. We were inured to our proximities. The engineer who started a project, finished it. Delegation was for rectards, and the techs were treated as like they treated themselves, if only they were the boss, everything would be splenda. But now we had been severed, dissevered, cleaved apart. Disarticulated, boxed. This and not any speculation was the worst bubble of the Valley. Specialization, which made a speciality of nothing but boredom, the integrative duty descriptions, which institutionalized that boredom, the windy command catenations, the recirculated air of assessment, filling the corridors of every office and the cavities of every engineer until the only way to remain sane was to pop.

Previously we had all been down in the niggly bits. Qui and Cull and the original Tetrateers #s 26 through 33. We will go through them alphabetically, rather in hiring order. Gushkov, Lebdev, émigrés who never appreciated us mixing up which one was from Kiev and which from Akademgorodok. Posek the Jaw, Japanese Jew. Syskin the Chew, Chinese Jew. Roland who was Roland. Toole, the youngest living person with an Erdős number of 2. Tiiliskivi, who had epilepsy and was allergic to wood. Yazyjy, who at 18 was our youngest hire and was still wearing his varsity badminton sweatband from the U of Jordan, Amman.

Now what we had to do was relevate. Move up the foodchain, evolve. Qui was responsible for supervising the writing of external code, userside, what you get when you use us. Cull was responsible for supervising the writing of external code, tetside, what we get when you use us, and how we use you and ourselves, backend. We were above and between them. And Mondays and Fridays we were at lunch with our Chief Engineer.

We met Moe at The Jaggery, Kokum If U Got Um, Daal Central, and the Seed Factory. We talked Tetration. Mnemosystems, mnemotechnics, sperance. How to not just bring users to sites or sites to users but how to store all of online ourselves.

How to store online, not how to shop it.

We would begin with the concept of existing space vs. new space, proceed into talking through the entailments of each w/r/t data and electricity, racked mountables per cabinet, and cabinets per corridor, seismal dampering, algidities, praxeological redundancies. W/r/t electricity and data.

Then Moe would end at least the work component of our powwow by reviewing.