Read Book of Numbers: A Novel for Free Online

before Cohen had even toured it, apparently.
     This would be a first for us both.
    The meet & greeter’s badge wasn’t brass but a
     brasscolored sticker on his vneck, below which were black slacker jeans, holstered
     taser. He smirked at my license, summoned an elongated attenuated marfanoid flunky to
     take me up, but instead of elevators or escalators or stairs, we took the ladders, rope
     ladders, rigging. An obstacle course of rainbowbanded enmeshments. We scuttled past
     androids fumbling to hook up their workstations, arraying plushtoys, wire/string
     disentanglement puzzles, tangrams, rubikses, möbiuses, slinkies.
    The conference room was massive and vacant and carpet interrupted by
     tapemarks. The flunky left and rolled back with a chair and positioned its casters over
     the tapemarks and to keep the chair from rolling away chocked the casters with
     lunchboxsized laptops, left finally.
    The ceiling panels were black and white, a chessboard defying gravity with
     magnetized pieces in an opening gambit off3 d5, g3g4,
     b3d7,b2 e6. The
     wallpaper, a cohelixing of the DNA of Tetration’s founders, a physical model of
     their alliance—or, just design.
    Portals, portholes, had a vista over a plaza whose rubberized T tiles were
     proof of the four color map theorem, and stacked cargo containers and bollards being
     retrofit for a children’s playground. The pier of my bookparty was just beyond,
     but which it was, I wasn’t sure, as all the piers were becoming trussed in steel
     or repurposed into monocoques of electrochromic smartglass, available for weddings, and
     bar and bat mitzvot.
    Our fleshtime: Principal entered, and the one chair was for him because he
     sat in it and I was still standing but all was otherwise similar between us.
    “How’s it treating you, NY?” I said.
    “Banging, slamming,” yawning.
    “Not tubular?”
    “Whatever the thing to say is, write it.”
    “I take it you don’t have a great opinion of the
     press?”
    “The same questions are always asked: Power color? HTML White,#FFFFFF. Favorite food? Antioxidants. Favorite drink? Yuen yeung,
     kefir, feni lassi, kombucha. Preferred way to relax? Going around NY lying to
     journalists about ever having time to relax. They have become unavoidable. The
     questions, the answers, the journalists. But it is not the lying we hate. We hate
     anything unavoidable.”
    “We? Meaning you or Tetration itself?”
    “No difference. We are the business and the business is us.
     Selfsame. Our mission is our mission.”
    “Which is?”
    “The end of search—”
    “—the beginning of find: yes, I got the memo. Change the
     world. Be the change. Tetrate the world in your image.”
    “If the moguls of the old generation talked that way, it was only
     to the media. But the moguls of the new generation talk that way to themselves. We,
     though, are from the middle. Unable to deceive or be deceived.”
    In the script of this, a pause would have to be indicated.
    “I want to get serious for a moment,” I said.
     “It’s 2004, four years after everything burst, and I want to know what
     you’re thinking. Is this reinvestment we’re getting back in NY just
     another bubble rising? Why does Silicon Valley even need a Silicon
     Alley—isn’t bicoastalism or whatever just the analog economy?”
    Principal blinked, openshut mouth, nosebreathed.
    “You—what attracted us to NY was you, was access. Also the
     tax breaks, utility incentives. Multiple offices are the analog economy, but the office
     itself is a dead economy. Its only function might be social, though whatever benefits
     result when employees compete in person are doubled in costs when employees fuck, get
     pregnant, infect everyone with viruses, sending everyone home on leave and fucking with
     the deliverables.”
    “Do the people who work for you know your feelings on this? If not,
     how do you think they’d react?”
    “Do not ask us—ask NY. This office will be tasked