Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

But as like everyone was still alive at a Pacific Standard hour into the first day of the year 2000 they had no way to avoid clearing dishes. They cleared and we lost them from our window. Then M-Unit was at our door. We did not want scraps. But she was offering the phone instead. We had a call from Russia, Soviet Russia. We did not want to take any calls, but Gushkov and Lebdev were insistent. M-Unit thrust the phone at us and paced hiccupping in the hall as like we were getting doomsday news from the Kremlin, and Aunt Nance waddlingly joined her and steadied her wobble against her and burped.

The Soviets had volunteered to work prowl for the Eve, to maintain site vigilance, expecting nothing, but poised. y2K itself was not the threat, it was whether or how it would rally the hackers. Denial of service attacks so broadly distributed they had to be Martian, Venusian, ping surfeit of a stratospheric bandwidth, untraceable, or fribbly to trace. But the Soviets had none of that to report, all they were wondering was the last time we ourselves had visited.

“Do you mean visited the u or checked in tetside?”

“Either,” they said. “Both.”

“A month, six weeks, way back in 99—why?”

“Get online,” they said.

We got up and grogged past M-Unit and Aunt Nance and down the hall to the Mistress Bedroom, eased down onto the physioball and powered the IBM clone. A crappy bullshitty unit, constipated processor, swollen registry, bloated drives, just fragged. Loaded every program ever at booting, a tertillion.docs on the desktop, and half of them named Test. Our patience tested as like the Soviets jittered. M-Unit drifted up and shrugged a robe around us. We had, we neglected to mention, never dressed.

The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. Aunt Nance said she was glad we were feeling better, and wondered whether we would give her a brief tutorial, did not have to be now, it was just that she had never been able to get online.

The Soviets, though, the Soviets said that if we had no access we had to come oncampus.

“Tell Kor,” we basically told them.

“With respect,” we will not try the accent but maybe the vocab and syntax, “with for your situation, respect, we come only because is crucial.”

The cruciality was this. Apparently we, meaning an entity or entities with our ID, had logged into Tetsys at quarter to midnight PST, using an IP from a Delaware eCafé called My Cup Runneth Dover the Soviets had gotten through to enough to determine that it was a proxy for an IP from a Canadian eCafé called Mountiebank Delectables, which we had to suspect was a proxy too by the first, last, yet never just only general law of conspiranoia, which everyone will always refer to, but no one will ever quote.

They, our assailants, had all our tetokens, wardwords, passhibbols, and skelkeys, which meant they had all access, which they used to mod.

“How mod?”

The only change detected, the only change detected so far, was so minor and negligible and immediately remediable as like to render its quiddity alone of major concern.

It was a redirect. All tetraffic was diverted.

“To what?”

All they would tell us was to redirect ourselves to the Tetplex.

Which did not compute, nothing computed. How recy of a hack it basically was, yet how techy the hacker had to have been to execute it.

Then they said it was Moe, which diverted.

They requested permission to take the site offline. “Be smart, this must to do.”

Permission granted.

://

[Moe’s revenge part 2—where were all the searches going?]

He who insists on having the end before the beginning will still only have the beginning. Who said that? Vagary might be requisite to life. What about that? Enough. Let us speak.

M-Unit sat lapped atop Aunt Nance, a mesosociologist sat lapped atop a social anthropologist, the shrink was at the wheel and because his spouse had staged a tantrum yelling that we would all be arrested for driving under the influence she had called for a cab and waited moping on the lawn while the car swerved out of the garage. We rode in the seat alongside.

Validate hate if deprived of love.

Breathe greedy.

[When you’re through quoting bumperstickers you’ll tell me?]

We terminaled, and because Gushkov was already logged into Tetsys but because two confirms were required for keyswap we had Lebdev log and so were able to regain our access, the only way to begin ending a compromise. We were us again, if just in that.

We set about checking the site, currently extant only tetside. The hpage loaded uncorrupted, but everything searched for detoured to this post.

Before even reading it, though, we screenshot and duped it external. Manipulables must be preserved.

Then, as like Aunt Nance cut us a slice of napoleon leftover from the Eve feast of the Soviets, we read.

[A post Moe wrote?]

Though in a sense we wrote it too.

[How?]

Give us your Tetbook.

[It’s yours.]

You will read it.

[No problem.]

Krishna.tet. Save it, read it into record. This memcard is ours, but after this it will not be ours, or yours, because truth belongs equally to all and none. Go.

[Now?]

Better. We will hold it for you, the Tetbook. That is better for us both. We will scroll along and try not to shake.

[Why don’t you read and we’ll do the scrolling?]

Go on. We do not have the breath.

[Om! Krishna Gonzalez, son of a bitch and a workers hero engineer, was an engineer born himself and so in this caste that is the greatest in the world he was rised! That it was the greatest caste in the world he was rised to believe! Equal to a Brahmin he believed! At the time of his life the four castes were everything and at the top was hard engineer, below that soft engineer, below that the users, and beyond that at the very bottom the untouchable. The hard engineers the bodies made, which allowed the soft engineers to put their minds into them and the users to operate them and the untouchables had no electricity and were pariah. “Harijan.” “Dalit.” This was the world at the time of the life of Krishna until the age his parents died. He was so deprised he wandered. He was all alone in the age of the world and so to a new country he wandered, Cali. But Krishna Gonzalez found that though the jobmarket was good, the market for making friends with his fellow jobbers was bad especially with the Pakistanis who all had friends from schooling and athletic associations and even this one Pakistani who asked hello how are you doing at the bank and Krishna answered we are doing fantastic when after the transaction Krishna got a sourdough prune danish and beer and they met in the parkinglot where the Pakistani was on smokebreak Krishna greeted him this time but the Pakistani did not recognize him. Also the fellow Indians who had Cali flagged were demissive and cared only about property mortgages and voted the Democrat until they owned and then voted the Republican but just to prevent other Krishnas from downgrading neighborhood economies. They were in favor of quotas. No one to have the opportunities they had. He went on a date with one who was not born in Delhi but in Cali for which he had to beg, the date, and she who worked the cashier at a carwash spent the full time at the dinner theater whingeing about a psychiatric disorder that caused her to go into a druggist and buy a product no matter what and come out again and just in the closest trash toss it immediately, and that was her syndrome that shamed her but also made her feel chosen and proud, she bought things and then not out of shame or chosen proudness but just automatically threw them out, profligia or prodigia was the official psychological diagnosis. Her family who was from Delhi did not comprend either. They wanted her to marry not just any Indian but a certain salary fitness type and she said this was wrong and everyone said this but in personal practice was racist and she would not visit him at his home because at the time it was black Oakland. Krishna should have trashed her on the corner! Krishna should have bought her from her family and tossed! It was not that she or anyone else in Cali had no caste and were premissive but what they had was backward. Role inversal. Krishna went to the movies but not with her and what Calis worshipped were the actors and actresses and not the innovators of celluloid or even of charged couple devices and complementary symmetry metal oxide semiconductors. Famous for praise were the demons who sang and played or the devils who just pretended but not the craftspeople who made the sarod and shehnai, who without microphonics or camera crews went out to the trees to split the wood and the special keywood and mined the metal for the strings and pedals to make a piano, not to mention the inventors of ragas and talas. Famous for praise the painters and sculptors and the architects of museums in the images of banks but not the crushers of berries for the paint or the weavers of leaves for the paper or the collectors of the rodent manes for the brush, not to mention the technicians of quarrying equipment or surveyors. They in Cali celebrated the users of sites above the programmers of code for the sites and them celebrated even above the engineers who designed and erected the machines that do everything and on which everything is done. Krishna dispaired of this but not enough and so was himself tempted to tend his checking account at the very expense of the puranas. It was while in this dispair that a cloud visited Krishna and this cloud was blacker than Oakland and out of it emerged with the tongue out not the female but male gaysexual Kali. The Lord God Kali.]