David Edelman - Infoquake

Towards Perfection,

Margaret Surina

Master of the Surina Perfection Memecorp Bodhisattva of Creed Surina

The letters hung on the screen before him, waiting for some gesture or flicker of the eyeballs to indicate which way Natch wanted to scroll. Finally, the fiefcorp master blinked hard and sent the missive away.

"I'm afraid I don't understand why you're so worried, Natch," said his guardian. "It looks like a perfectly normal invitation to me."

"It just doesn't feel right," said Natch. "I can't explain it. It's like

... Like a vast collection of numbers that have some hidden kabbalistic connection to one another. Like a constellation millions of light years across, and you're sitting in the middle trying to decipher what it looks like from a distance. "Let me ask you this, Vigal. Why invite me to dinner? It means that Margaret doesn't want to see me in multi-she wants me to trek halfway around the globe to talk to her in person. That seems awfully formal for a first meeting. Does she think there's some security risk? Or maybe she has a business proposition for me. You know the etiquette -

important business deals happen through personal meetings."

The neural programmer frowned. "Maybe you should just take this at face value."

"Face value," Natch scoffed. "I never take anything at face value."

Vigal rose from his chair with a creaky sigh, then walked over and clapped a virtual hand on his protege's shoulder. "Perhaps you need to get some rest, Natch." He gave the shoulder a gentle squeeze and then stepped back, looking the young programmer up and down wistfully. "Rest-that's advice I think I'm going to follow myself. Make sure you Confidential Whisper me if you need anything."

Minutes later, Natch was alone.

The fiefcorp master prived himself to all incoming communication and darkened the windows. Then he called up the invitation on the viewscreen once more and crouched on his haunches in front of it.

Could this be some trick by the Patel Brothers? A punishment for filching the lead on Primo's for those brief forty-seven minutes? He verified the message's digital signature against the one in the public directory, and the directory declared it authentic. The message had not come from the hand of some Surina flunky either, but straight from the bodhisattva herself. Signatures could be forged, of course, but it was a fiendishly difficult task. Natch knew all the standard tricks for lowlevel signature forgery, and this message used none of them.

He collapsed onto his sofa and instructed InfoGather 96a to find as much up-to-date information about Margaret Surina as possible. The program launched a volley of data agents onto the measureless ocean of information and began bouncing the results off its analysis engines, deducing connections, drawing conclusions, cooking up bite-sized summaries.

Seconds later, the viewscreen lit up with the image of a woman around Serr Vigal's age. The drudges described the heir to the Surina family mantle as a glamorous figure, but Natch could see little glamour in this nondescript woman. Margaret was neither tall nor short, neither heavy nor thin; she could have been one of those composite sketches of women compiled from a hundred different ethnicities. The plain gray pantsuit she wore belied her vaunted sense of fashion, and even her raven-black hair lay unostentatiously on her shoulders. If she did not have the prominent Surina family nose and her father's eyes, preternaturally large and shining with fierce intelligence, Natch would not have believed that this woman was the heiress to the world's largest programming fortune.

read the caption that floated next to the woman on the screen.

The bodhisattva of Creed Surina and master of the Surina Perfection Memecorp, Margaret Surina is heiress to the Surina family fortune and the vast empire left her after the untimely death of her father Marcus. She lives in Andra Pradesh at the residence constructed in honor of her ancestor, Sheldon Surina, the Father of Bio/Logics.

Natch skipped ahead to the section that detailed Margaret's business interests:

Surina has been the subject of gossip and speculation over the past twenty years since she founded the memecorp that bears her name. To date, the company has released no products and purportedly receives 100% of its funding from Creed Surina. Partisans of the Surinas believe the memecorp is at work on another technological breakthrough on par with such previous family accomplishments as bio/logics and teleportation. Surina supporters have even given this undefined new technology a name: "The Phoenix Project." Detractors, however, suspect that no such project exists and that Margaret Surina is instead using her memecorp to funnel money into libertarian and pro-Islander political causes.

Natch leaned forward and tried to cajole InfoGather into providing him more about this mysterious Phoenix Project, but no tangible details were forthcoming. Pundits on the Data Sea had been scrutinizing Margaret's every move for years now, gossiping about every new visitor to her compound in Andra Pradesh in ancient India, seeking evidence of some iibertechnology that might or might not exist. So far, they had come up empty.

The pressure on her must be enormous, Natch reflected. At Margaret's age, Sheldon Surina had already written his seminal paper, Towards the Science of BiolLogics and a New Direction for Humanity, the work that jolted the world out of its post-Revolt stupor and signaled the beginning of a new age. Sheldon's grandson Prengal Surina had already published the Universal Law of Physics at this stage of his life. Even Margaret's father, the poor doomed Marcus, had become a worldwide icon and pioneer of teleportation by the time he was fifty. The public was growing restless. What would Margaret's contribution to the world of science be?

The entrepreneur remembered his days of infamy following the Shortest Initiation and grimaced. Why does she need to make any contribution? he thought. What if she just wants to be left alone?

Natch studied the image of Margaret Surina carefully. The photog rapher appeared to have taken Margaret by surprise; she seemed frozen in the act of turning towards the camera. But there were no surprises written in those unnaturally large blue eyes. Margaret's eyes showed a woman in complete control of her surroundings, a woman capable of swallowing life's surprises whole without the least bit of discomfort. Natch finally had to admit to himself that this woman had him intrigued.

And could this Phoenix Project be that thing just beyond the horizon that he had been waiting for his entire career? Was that why the very words tugged at his soul like a magnet?

He sent a terse reply to Margaret's invitation:

I would be honored to accept your invitation and make your acquaintance.

Towards Perfection,

Natch, Master of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp

The city of Andra Pradesh had few municipal building codes. Tenement high-rises and office buildings hobnobbed with parks and shopping areas and even farmland, all jumbled together without regard to style or function. Andra Pradesh was a city that had rolled down from a mountaintop and sprouted haphazardly out of the wreckage.

On that mountaintop were the Surinas.

Natch saw the massive Surina compound as soon as he stepped off the tube. Even a kilometer away, it dominated the skyline. He could easily make out the austere buildings of the Gandhi University of Andra Pradesh where Sheldon Surina had taught and the absurd towers of the Surina family's private residence. Somewhere below his level of sight were the administrative offices of Creed Surina, the Surina Enterprise Facility, and the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation. Above them all, a lone spire jutted obscenely into the clouds from the middle of the compound. Natch had heard somewhere that this was the tallest man-made structure built since the Reawakening. Down in the city below, dozens of buildings competed for the right to claim second place.