Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

In our absence we had accumulated approx 24000 emails in our inbox unchecked or we are assuming unchecked and we went about responding to each one. Unfortunately we will not be able to make the bart mitzvot of the son and daughter twins of the chief compliance or compilance officer of tendR that anyway was held weeks ago, months ago. Unfortunately we must also decline your invitation to audition Menumancer or MassTransicle. Because apparently in our absence we already bought it.

We replied to all, and shut the account. We never had another.

Though for a while if there was an email we had to send we would just open a new account and send it and the footer would disclaim no one responded to this account. Then opening new accounts got to be a hassle so we created an app, but this was later, that just let us send msgs, clancular, from any idle pda. But then we stopped. Entirely.

Backtracking. While we were gone Qui and Cull had become our Acting CoCEOs, but though Qui offered to relinquish the position and Cull offered to share it, we let them have it, we put a stop to their acting. They were our CoCEOs fullstop, and we were The Shuffler of Titles, trying Chairman, Deskman, Founder Person, but rejecting them all, realizing none was required. Everyone had equal vote but so did Kor.

Backtracking. He, Kor, went pressuring us to do press, and rehab our rep, which at this point had become as like Howard Hughes with a Unabomber haircut. But instead of replying to any interview requests we interviewed for hire. Assistants.

We asked them to imagine the mythological web or net of Indra, woven of precisely 600 monkeypubes warped horizontally and 600 monkeypubes wefted vertically. Now calculate the number of nodes, meaning how many times the pubes intersect, along with the number of voids, meaning how many openings dehisce between intersections. Next we asked what is in the middle of China. The answers were 360K, 359.4K, and in the middle of China is “i.”

The only candidate who got that was Korean, Myung. So we gave her the vitamin test. No math was involved. We just had her grade our vitamins. Then we had her script the commencement addresses we gave for our honorary degrees at Stanford Business and Caltech Engineering. Myung responded with material about how our religious search was enriching our online search. How finding ourselves was finding our users. We surveyed Asia, waggled at American overregulation and undereducation, but closed with, “We are ecstatic to be home.”

[No — you were ecstatic for your IPO.]

08/01/04, we were public. Do you know what we initially traded at per share?

[I’ve had enough of trick questions.]

We ask because we do not know what we initially traded at per share.

[2004, my friend, Cal, invested in you and was after me to put money in too.]

Did you?

[No, unfortunately — my conflicts of interest have never been that lucrative.]

But they were for everyone else. M-Unit, Aunt Nance. Deans, profs. The no perchloroethylene drycleaner. The cleftpalate waitress at Au Natchl. Recs never met or octalfortied. All invested. Tetration split, divided, dividended, it was as like a cell before sex and better than sex, or a god whose potency only increased with each embodiment. Parents of Cull who were already flush got a fourth pied à terre in Copley Square, parents of Qui got a Rittenhouse manse with a dumbwaiter. They had never been so excited.

Our CoFos, their homes were our offices, and our offices were their homes. They were our family, and we, for in . If we had a juicer emergency and Myung was off they would dispatch a young woman replacement to take us for produce in an ethanol Corvette C5 metallic pearl with baseballglove seats tan as like her, and later after she had returned us to Sierra Vista or Pacifica they would call to yell at us for having sat in the back and not recognized Natalie Portman. Cull or Qui was fucking her and the other was fucking Rogue from X-Men, Anna Paquin, and they both were doing the same recurring characters on Stargate SG-1, but not at the same time.

There were a lot of opportunities around then. All of them small with ombré hair atop heads shaped as like Reuleaux or Meissner tetrahedra, spheres squeezed to the smallest volume while still retaining a constant width.

The percentage of their bodies that was fat was the percentage of corporate income we paid in taxes, approx 10 %, until we got that down to approx 2.6 % by transferpricing through Tetration Ireland Limited, a subsidiary of Tetration Ireland Holdings, Bermuda.

We purchased a lot, hired and fired starchitects, designed La Trovita Lando ourselves, exterior, interior, domotics. Started, finished. Got involved in litigation over unfair use of plans, settled, decided it was unfinished, started again. We lived on the property in a trailer throughout.

10 figures we had, and a portapotty without a permit. La Domo, what existed, became warehouse, storage.

Guitars and drumsets once owned by the Keiths, Richards, Moon. A prototype Moog, KRS-One turntable. Some plaster cast suitcase, sculpture. Some goat embalmed and varnished clear with glitter, sculpture or installation unclear. Who the artists were we had not been apprised prior to bidding. We resisted independent appraisals. A Rothko, another Rothko basically identical, anything modern but as like the old modern. We managed and still manage our money ourselves, liaisoning with M-Unit and Aunt Nance who retired. They run our interference, run blitzes, scrimmaging against the memorabilists, antiquarians. 50 % of a T206 Honus Wagner baseball card but under the terms of our custody split Kor has his turn to hold onto it.

We have a first folio Shakespeare, the Schlechter Schneider Stradivarius, a Bruegel. Did we show you?

[Nope, disconfirmative.]

2005, the last we transacted with the Arabian Peninsula. We had keynoted a cyberterror exchange at UCLA, and a visiting Dhofari Omani general approached to sell us straight from the tomb in Salalah a toe of the prophet Job. Though there are at least four other tombs asserting sole possession of the prophet, who anyway never existed. But it was definitely a toe, a middle, which we later had carbondated to approx four centuries after the Book of Job was composed.

Why did you not get us to show you?

[Because you never offered.]

Malibu surfshack, Aspen cabin, duplex coop in Manhattan, 740 Park, close by the museums but still far from getting zoning approval for a rooftop livestock enclosure.

We purchased a defunct volcanic island at the edge of the Revillagigedos, approx 170 nautical miles S/SW off Isla Clarión, as like a tax shelter. Though we refused to decide on a name until the Mexican government retracted its claim.

[This was the scandal?]

We would have been better off owning a planet instead, even with the extraterrestrial banking laws so undefined.

[I hope you’re not expecting me to interrupt?]

You have to realize how stealth we were, especially in comptrast with our CoFos. Cull and Qui were more out, more liable, giving the commentariat interactive tours of their spreads, for serious prime acreage. Kor appeared less but made his appearances count. Plying Congress with the next quarter tech haruspexus, and writing opeds on our stewardship of the Fourth Amendment.

2006, he flew us to New York. Our new offices were opening up, in his mind it was time we opened up too. Intimately. To reporters.

You remember our sitdown. Debacular, catalaminous. We wore clothing appropriate but approved. We prepped, Myung had prepped us, but then we withheld, which is as like writing up a profile but never publishing it.