Humans have a love-hate relationship with their numbers. They use them to count their wealth and count their woes. They test themselves and time themselves and even number themselves with them. But numbers have such a definitive relationship with the universe that it is probably naive to suppose that they do not have an agenda of their own: what do numbers do with their humans? Numbers are the parasites of the modern mind; you carry them in your head just as you carry bacteria in your gut.

But these numbers are out in the open — nine common numbers, arranged in a common order, not tangled around sums or measurements. So there can be little more to them than that. The problem seems to be that if you are so used to seeing numbers which have a good reason for being where they are, when you see them spread out idly and without purpose like this, you become suspicious. Perhaps you should; perhaps the Devil finds work for idle numbers.