Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Out in the hall, the Keinerites kept crying about an “asshole Sikh,” which at least the Carbonites refuted. Moe was an asshole, but never a Sikh.

We squatted by the bathroom door attempting to mediate. We suggested to Kor and the VCs that Moe would only have to supervise the STrapp, not dev it himself. We suggested that if the future solvency of Tetration required Moe to temporarily transform his role, it was only fair to define a time commitment and profitshare fraction. But there was no response from the other side of the door and from this side there was just Keiner who clicked his dentures, “Every now and then, boy, you have to STrapp one on.”

It took until noon, and the exchange of hammer and screwdriver for fire extinguisher, for Kor to bust the door.

But Moe was gone. The bathroom was voided. There was no window to slip through, there were no tiles or insulation panels pried, staff had been present around the clock and yet. He must have gone for the ducts again and shimmied.

It was so hot that summer that even the flies were in heat. Anyone in building 2 who had to piss just went outside in or around a contractor bucket but for shitting they had to go to building 1 until Super Sal had reinstated the door.

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[The way Moe reacted, wasn’t he just protecting his pride?]

Moe was only four below us on the corporate totempole. He barely tolerated working with others on his own designs, and now he was being bullied to work on theirs. The DCent was his maya project and not the STrapp. But more to the point, more salient.

He must also have been disappointed, as like his reaction to this treatment had set him back transmigrationally, rather set in front of his atman soul further benchmarks of deaths and undeaths he had to meet before ever again being admitted to a meeting with VCs. We are saying this for serious, positing that if the situation had been less spiritual he would have contacted us or returned our contact, he would not have gone off the rez.

[But didn’t you intercede with Kor — I mean, aren’t you the boss?]

But Moe was also our friend.

And he reminded us of D-Unit. In that they both were engineers who put metal to metal welding the devices on which we just used and were used and typed, and if that idolization had always insecured us, what insecured us now was how that idolization was causing our lenience. We were accused of being lenient. By our two other cofounding partners, whom we pinged preliminary to Kor, though Kor must have pinged them both already.

This was a test, Cull and Qui argued, a popquiz even a rectard would have anticipated. Moe was being sent to discipline school, a postgrad class in detention. The subjects were teamwork, reciprocal priorities. How respect for authority can confer authority itself.

Qui had never wanted to deal with phrasal identification and relation through bit vectors, Cull had never wanted to waste himself on interteam/intrateam Tetmail. They pointed out that our own ambitions had not always pertained to Adverks algys.

Moe was a genius, we said, but they said that in business a genius was replaceable. Moe would have to prove himself as like a prerequisite to being turned loose on his own server Taj Mahal.

Today Tetration has 12 resident beekeepers, four affineurs, two ongoing emoji valency experiments, and a lab dedicated solely to honing a 3D printer that itself can be 3D printed. Today we are able to afford a Moe, but at the time we had no budget for integrity.

We returned to our office, the office of Posek and Syskin, or Roland and Toole, to mull alone for a jag until we were found, within that standard deviation between Thursday and Friday.

We were the only ones around, but then a nose poked as like a talkingpoint just above our felt divider. Kor entered, squeezing, and while he pondered what of nothing but us and our terminal to sit down on, we told him we agreed, but told ourselves we regretted it.

[Why?]

Because he was not coming to persuade us, he said. Which is überindicative Kor, the confidence that his own conviction is enough to convince anyone of virtually anything.

We have that in common, us and Kor, and perhaps you too.

[So what was he trying to wrangle out of you?]

After the weekend. Hindu month of Shravana, late August. It was a mandir sessh but we forget which. A holiday. A major. A biggie. Putrada Ekadashi, when you pray to Vishnu if you are single for a wife, if you are a couple for a son. Or Janmashtami, when you celebrate the natality of Krishna as like the eighth avatar of Vishnu. Fasting. Insomnia.

Kor wanted to make an offering, to Moe, and of all things, he wanted the billboard.

The billboard Moe had passed every day or even twice a day for two years now to avoid traffic and tolls between home and the Tetplex.

The billboard that had inspired Adverks.

On our previous and only visit, on our way back from remotely controlling LA, the billboard that had inspired Adverks had advertised some local petting zoo or playland, then we recall Moe mentioning fashion, an ad featuring the model Lena Söderberg or someone resembling the model Lena Söderberg, and though we would just be inventing its next iteration it was comptrastingly bland as like for a mayoral campaign, or just for itself, Imagine Your Ad Here. This iteration had been especially enraging, to Moe, who must have taken the detour past this billboard only to feed that rage, or else to provide fodder for his interstitial work banter, because he would always be delivering us updates about it, verging into diatribes about the lazy wasteful Americanness he had taken it to represent.

But then just earlier that spring, toward the end of the fiscal year and the start of all our trouble, a new ad had finally gone up.

As like it was a sign.

It was a billboard, which now promoted a languageschool.

Kor had sent us out with the Schloger nephew who was interning for us that summer and was president of the mountain climbing club at Cornell, and Ronnie G who had a catering business, but a landscaping truck, and we drove all the lanes of tar that become Calaveras Boulevard as like they cross the 880 in Milpitas.

To recap: Ronnie Giudice, husband of Salvatrice Trapezzi. Randy Schloger, husband of Heather Trapezzi, uncle of the intern.

We drove along the chains of Verizons and AT&Ts and the Wells Fargos and the odd weird indie Thai restaurants that buffered the parkinglots that buffered the stacks of big box stores that would never be properly malled. We passed Best Buy and Walmart and an intersection of Mexican laborers, as like the access road wandered toward the freeway again, in that stunned and desperate way a dying coyote approaches a dumpster.

And then we stopped. At the last stoplight before the coiled ramps and cars. We were pinched between Ronnie G at the wheel and the Schloger intern nephew, and we were feeling their pressure, and feeling their doubt. Just after the light was the rear of a landfill. A planting of wan sapling evergreens and a fence at the rear of a commercial landfill. Then, attached to the fence and between the evergreens was a blue that was not the sky.

Rather, it was the Bay, billboarded up in the air in dramatic panorama, and though the Golden Gate Bridge was arching across it, the calibration or transfer was off and the result was less golden and more a silver gray as like ash, while the Bay itself was the color of all the weeds outside the frame. Bottomline, though, what was truly distinctive about the image was that in the oozing middle of the Bay, and half on one side of the bridge, half on the other, but also just erected through it, the Statue of Liberty was photoimposed in malfunctioning printer and monitorscalding electric blue screen of death.