Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

%d after returning alone with Myung from DC we consulted with Dr. Majer Gupta, Stanford Oncology, who examined. A scan of 10/01/10 noted a tumorous growth, basically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, localization ectopic/head, 2cm. That was resected 11/02, in a Whipple or pancreatoduodenectomy performed by Gupta. A scan of 12/04 demoed metastasis, pancreas removed in its entirety by Dr. Nikhil Mehta, Stanford Oncology, 12/10. A scan of 01/28/11 demoed multiple metastases to the peritoneum, carcinomatosis. If this was the future, chemo might have worked. If this was the future, radiation might not both cause and cure cancer. Pancrealipase for enzyme replacement, AKA Zenpep®, a drug derived from pig pancreas, just the type of trivia our readers will enjoy, and metoclopramide for gastroparesis, AKA Reglan®, which is responsible for the tremors, why we cannot type, why our handwriting is even worse than the crushed arachnid egg shit it was, why we were unable to write this ourselves, why you are writing this instead.

We intend to discontinue both medications, both ineffective, effective immediately. Also the alternative treatments, cow colostrum, sheep placenta, enemas/bowel cleanses. Doc Huxtable provided them. His specialty was to keep us just energetic enough to mention him, while fasting. Call him Dr. Zaius, evil orangutan, Planet of the Apes . Call him the ineffable name of Dr. Who . All we know is we do not know his name, only that José Canseco called after our Whipple to get us to participate in a charity teeball event but we declined and said we were injured. Canseco recounted his own chronic pain, we responded by pretending to similar ailments, and then this guy with a syringe briefcase just showed up at our house.

Recommendations for next stage care include the retrial of an experimental macrophage protein vaccine that has failed us once already and is still a year or two away from being adapted to fail better. Prayer, estate planning. Remission rate w/ treatment, 26 %. Remission rate w/out treatment, 0 %. Median survival, 8.2 months from diagnosis. Time elapsed since diagnosis, going on 12 months.

Neither Aunt Nance nor M-Unit are or can be privy.

://

It was while we recovered at La Trovita Lando after the utter removal of our pancreas that b-Leaks was back in touch. An encrypted torchat from Anders Maleksen to Myung. The salutation was just SORRY FOR YOUR CANCER, which we had not spoken to Myung about, and now we had a chat to answer, other things to answer for too. Of course she knew, but now she knew and left in tears. The chat proceeded to outline 12 new domestic and international arrests based on Tetmail and Tetset monitoring that, because the intel was obtained illegally, were made to appear as like accidental arrests, fortuitous. Drug and weapons busts. Two new cases of Autotet entrapment. The feature actually recruiting, actually aiding and abetting, by autosuggesting the user from browsing into action, with the sense that only then was a human involved, an agent cracking knuckles to type probable cause. The affidavits were sealed. But our site was already a search warrant. All this was January. February.

Balk threatened to post, and he would have, except nothing was conclusive. He had all of the onus, none of the gun. No evidence, no proof. He threatened to disclose our disease unless we provided that. But never once were we forced into this. Or we were but under terms we set ourselves. Balk never anticipated anything not online, and that is why this is a book. Everyone will get their chance to post and post about our documents.

Refusing to dwell we collapsed again, but now in the room at La Domo reserved for the possessions of D-Unit, reserved for his books, which had been intermixed with ours, and from the floor we noticed our name, and concentrated on it until Myung found us, and that is why this is a book, will be, because it was as like D-Unit who had read everything about Jews had read your first book too and neither of us were privy.

Myung contacted our agent and publisher.

We could keep going on forever, until. We could relate the joint hurt and weakness, the swelling, the lounger and dustbunnied powerstrip tangling with the IV drip, Family Feud on mute. But time. The time on the TV topleft and the Tetbook topright, diverging by a minute, two minutes, drifting. We would not drift. We would not be left behind. But we had not programmed solo in a rec decade, tech century. Programming now had become too reliant on tools, plugnplay in a blackbox. The work now was just puzzlefitting, snapping into place sharpnesses of mirror, curation. Making your own app required only a rectardedness of will that was virtually the will to enrich us, because we had already coded all the templates. All you had to do was pop in the snippets, insert the peon widgets. We owned the platforms, we owned the portals. We ruled. We were the inventors of language and would not be criticized by, or in, subsequent fluencies.

We had not played with the sourcecode since diapers, which we were wearing once again. But we sat down in it. Into the shit and piss and swivel sweat. We are trying to avoid a scatological snark about backdoors. We were a child again. A romper kid among the algyshells, Python, C++, Java, and Simping, that language we came up with in 2004–05, to improve metadata granularity and named, given that Java was the largest of the not yet sunken islands of Indonesia, after the smallest of them, Simping. Beachy granularity. If we would have been able to keep that exalted boulder just off Baja, not Mexico, that was what we would have named it, once the original submerged.

It was there that we searched and found the inexistent. b-Leaks had already defined the terms. It was an easy autoreporting function, clumsily glocal, obvious. At least obvious to the person who had written all the rest of the code and had his days free, weeks free, and months to live, to go through by the line. What it did was autoreport all tetraffic to what had to be a DCent, not ours. To two of them, neither ours. The same or similar functions obtained for Tetmail and Tetset. The reporting was realtime, but really. With the mass of data being shuttled proxying was pointless. The IPs were bareassed with just a mask instead, but that mask elasticated away from Utah and Texas and Alaska and Hawaii locations to uncover straight intranet, the Intelinks, the systems that prop up the intrawebs of the CIA, through the Operations Center Analysis Group, the NSA, through the National Computer Security Center, and USCYBERCOM of US Strategic Command. And so we figgered, stop there, cease, desist, better not to trace any further, better not to hack or even, what else, report it. We had been surrendering our users directly to the government, but the way we were doing it was consistent with our principles, at least. Automatically.

Kor did not code this snippet. Or not by himself.

Even the simplest program must accomplish two things. It has to make something happen, and then it has to store the making of that something happen to memory. The event, and then its memorial. Its marks, signs, indicia. But this function ensured that the reporting was not stored. That it was forgotten, by us, as like it had never transpired. All of our amnesia had been ordered by a single conciliable command/statement, which though it could negate everything, could not negate itself. That command was .

The motor inn lived on but totally DCentered, its buzzy neon dimmed and its rooms cleared out to separate coasts, underground, in caves, and becoming listening stations, watching stations, wiretap archives, no vacancy spy quarters greenlit in mass SIGINT.