any of several numbers which are infinite, but which are not equal to each other. They are represented by the Hebrew letter aleph (ℵ, א) with subscripts 0, 1, etc At the beginning of Xanadu's second decade of development, Nelson was pleased with the project's caretakers. The last time he had come this close to having a working prototype was in 1972, when time ran out on his rented Nova. Now, the inventor's brainchild was more mature. Miller and Gregory created an addressing system that used transfinite numbers, an arcane area of calculus they had both studied in college. They called the new addresses tumblers; the tumbler system allowed readers to create links to any arbitrary span of bytes, whether or not the author had marked them. With tumblers, Miller and Gregory could give a similar address to every document and fragment of a document in Xanadu's sprawling domain of words, pictures, movies, and sounds. The address would not only point the reader to the correct machine, it would also indicate the author of the document, the version of the document, the correct span of bytes, and the links associated with these bytes.
