He swayed, wary, rolledup pants, rolled shirtsleeves, suitjacket looped around neck, a sockstuffed shoe in each hand, whiteness, Finn.

“Can I get a taste?”

“Taste the empty?” I tipped the bottle to grains.

“Then a smoke?”

I passed the butt, “Why not share?”

He dragged, “You’ve been making the rounds?”

“I’ve had people to meet—putting faces to names and names to faces. The next round I’m putting bodies to bodies.”

Finn ashed, returned what was left, for me to snuff.

He said, “I’m not keeping tabs.”

“I am?”

“But Aaron just happened to mention—something about the wife? She got you down?”

“Mine or yours?”

Finn clapped his heels, “You want some advice, Josh?”

“About what—always be a friend to your friends? Never go swimming on a full stomach?”

Finn grinned, “The book: it can’t be a book—it has to be an option. Write it for the screen. The game version. Whatever.”

“That’s it?”

“I need a property,” he mooned. “I need an adaptation.”

\

I felt it the next morning. Noon, after. Nothing but hangover fog, a lukewarm front of quit throat. Giving way by evening to arrogance.

Nobody came.

I checked my new account: one email, my first. Jcohen19712@tetmail.com. An invitation to yesterday, a link to a dietary survey. Made another resolution: quit drinking and smoking, check email more or less often.

Drag. Dump Trash. An empty inbox, an empty outbox. A pure, an impeccable, soul.

I went out to get something to eat, and some head analgesia. Just when I had my hand on the handle, a voice said, “Hungry?”

I turned.

The voice said, “Aspirin or ibuprofen?”

“What?”

Voice circumambient, modulated with viperish reverb, then a panel withdrew, the monition of a monitor face. Just opposite my cot. Principal’s face. But frozen, cryogenized.

I assumed a malfunction, a fritz.

“It is just a still,” the voice said. “Official as like for a book.”

“As like what?”

“Or perhaps this one is better?” and the monitor regressed: a Founder’s shot, him next to a—I’m just going to call it a server. “Or this one?” a yearbook shot—highschool? college?—teeth agleam amid pleiades of acne. “Or maybe this?” a newborn frame, squashed and jaundiced, clawmarks at the cheeks. “Or?”

“Whichever the fuck,” and again, the first familiar image was restored.

“Come back toward the cot—hang out.”

“You can see me?”

“Confirmative.”

“You can hear me?”

“Confirmative, though on the cot is better—hang loose.”

“You’re fucking snooping on me?”

“We are doing no such thing. We are offering naproxen? Acetaminophen? Depends how your stomach is—you should not need an anti-inflammatory.”

“I’m just trying to avoid taking the hard shit.”

“The hard shit?”

I gestured around at all my stuff stowed, “You should know—you think I moved in myself?”

“Pfizer is in the dumps, trading down below 20, indicating low consumer confidence in ibuprofen. Johnson & Johnson is holding steady in the 60s, aspirin is on the up.”

“Were you even around for your own 4-0?”

“Around, yes, in attendance, no.”

“Did I jerk off?”

“Unclear.”

I wanted to wish him happy returns on his birthday, but also I wanted to keep that sentiment pounding in my head, to determine whether it registered.

“We cannot read thoughts.”

“Try.”

“Think of something.”

“Any something?”

“Any.”

“Am doing it—you got it?”

At the door was a knock and a black but white goth buff transgender person entered—an XX or an XY or a chromosomally spliced Ze bearing a metal tray. I had not been thinking about its contents. But I did not have that thought until I’d consumed its contents. The tray was divided into quadrants, and all were of composted mush.

I used one of the quadrants to ash in. I wouldn’t have minded a beeeeeeeer.

“Go to your Tetbook, the desktop, open the folder Dossier.”

The only new folder, “Dosser?”

“There is no i?”

“Guess not.”

It contained: Tetration site txt, public domain .docs, junk. But then also internal reports. Personnel intel. Official Tetration capsule bios of its prez, its vps of VP (Various Projects), Finance, Futurity/Devo.

Quarterly assessments. Performance reviews with nothing smeared out. How many files? More than scrollable—inscrollable?

Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere. Creation stuff, cosmology, a founding myth, lore of origin: light separated from darkness, the wind inseminating the aether—the earth is balanced on the back of an elephant, or held by angels standing on the shell of a turtle—but what was that turtle standing on? was it just tortoise on tortoise forever?

An apple plunging from a tree and inventing gravity, volume determined by water displaced from Antiquity’s jacuzzi, a dream about the structure of the solar system being the structure of the atom, a dream about a snake consuming its own tail being the ring structure of the molecule benzene, relativity conceived in a tram as it passed a clocktower in Bern, coordinate geometry measured by the relationship of a flitting fly and the floor, ceiling, walls of some sordid dorm in Utrecht? or Leiden? A suburban garage with Dad’s camper parked out in the driveway—make room for the racks, clear the toolbench for the switches. A grant or degree. A mentor, a mother.

I took it as my job to discern something similar—to search in the way www.searching couldn’t, to find in the way www.finding couldn’t—which is to say, to conceive, make it up.

Like say I’m talking to myself—how to substantiate the claim? how can anyone but the author authenticate? I had no way of corroborating whether it was or wasn’t Principal, talking. His feed could’ve been recorded in Myanmar, in Burma, prerecorded in Siam, postproduced in Thailand, he could’ve been coming to me live but two hours behind, eight hours ahead, on whichever side of excruciation’s meridian, 36 TbPS streaming straight from the 36th century.

From then on we met constantly, continuously. I questioned, I didn’t. Answers were dirigent, direct. This was our background, the setting of scene: the hut monitor displayed graphics resembling the Himalayas (spiky unscalable linecharts of number of urls indexed by year, number of tetrations by year, number of new/unique users by year, number of tetrations by average user by year), resembling the planets Venus and Mars (πcharts of ownership structure) and Bay Area bridges (bargraphs of ad revenue)—thermodynamical models of the tech protocol itself or just organigram tutorials in managerial flow, squiggly doodly retiaries that rendered concepts like vertical or horizontal omnidimensional, unhelpful.

I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics. Interfaces: beaming cracks in plaster.

But it was all about others. Nothing about him. None of the material was personal. An interface has no profile.

He spoke to me as a grownup to an infant. A brat pubescent to a rutting pet. Would I be allowed to interview the others? No. In person? No. In writing? No. Can I speak? Talk to the wall.

I had clearance like it was going out of business, but the cost to me was guilt. Families and financials. I knew how many dependents people had, how many savants and seniors, their salaries and dividends, bonuses and dumps. Their incentives for retirement, their splits. Class A, one vote per share. Class B, 10 votes per share. I knew everything but what all this meant to them. How they spoke. Stood and sat. How they groomed.

Were they people? Not to Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain.