care.'
Merri brightened and gave one of her typical placating smiles. For a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she fakes her emotions pretty well, Natch thought. 'Would it be all right if I ... thought about it for a few days?' asked the blonde channel manager.
The entrepreneur shrugged. 'Fine.'
'Okay, then ...' And with that, Merri cut the multi connection and returned her mind to a red square tile several hundred thousand kilometers away on Luna.
Natch gazed out into the gloom of the Shenandoah dusk. Dark clouds were assembling on the westward horizon and rattling their sabers, threatening a violent thundershower. In all probability, the Shenandoah L-PRACGs had already petitioned the Environmental Control Board to steer the worst of the storm clear of downtown using its geosynchron bots. But still, the clouds felt like a heavy-handed omen to Natch. Something was hiding in those clouds, some cruel and brutal creature with Natch's name roiling in its murky consciousness.
He shifted his attention to Serr Vigal. 'We've had this discussion before,' he said.
The neural programmer had sunk back into the shadows, invisible but for the occasional beard hairs glinting like flecks of silver. 'It's common sense, Natch,' he replied. 'Now that you're constantly neckand-neck with the Patels, there's a real danger of overworking your apprentices. I think you need to bring more people onboard.'
'I hired Merri.'
'But she's not taking any of the workload off Horvil and Jara.'
Natch knew his old mentor was correct, that eventually the two apprentices would snap under the strain of eighteen-hour days in the trenches fighting the Patel Brothers. They would get tired of the sorties in the middle of the night, the maneuvering for field position. The endless exchange of small-arms fire.
But as soon as business started pouring in, Horvil and Jara had forgotten all about their bewilderment and indignation surrounding the black code incident. Natch's interviews with Sen Sivv Sor and John Ridglee had spawned a drudge feeding frenzy, which in turn produced a tidal wave of sales. Suddenly, important engineers were contacting Horvil for advice and dissecting his recursive functions as if they were ancient Sanskrit texts. And Jara, who was used to shuffling money between fiefcorp accounts to placate some creditors and put off others, was now trying to find places to invest the overflow.
'Horvil and Jara will be fine,' mumbled Natch. 'Oh, I know you're right, Vigal. I'll need to bring more people aboard at some point. It's just that I don't trust anyone else.'
'Maybe you need to give those two a holiday,' said Serr Vigal. 'The fiefcorp is running pretty smoothly. There's no reason you can't slow down for a week or two.'
Natch, his arms folded over his chest, turned to glare at the neural programmer. NiteFocus 50c allowed him to peer through the veil of shadow and see the concerned look on his mentor's face. 'No,' he said, 'there is a reason.'
'Ah, the message.'
'Something's coming up, Vigal. I can feel something out there, coming up fast. A tidal wave. Something.'
Natch nodded towards the viewscreen that was still displaying Merri's apprenticeship contract. He called up a message in its place and enlarged the type so it was readable from across the room.
Natch,
I would like to personally congratulate you on achieving number one in the Primo's bio/logic investment guide. Several members of my administrative staff are devoted users of your programs. Your sleep deprivation utilities, I'm afraid, are particularly popular around here.
As you may have heard, Creed Surina will be holding a cultural festival next week to celebrate what would have been Sheldon Surina's 400th birthday. We are looking for able bio/logic programmers such as yourself to contribute to a presentation on my ancestors' legacy to the world. I would be honored to have you as my guest for dinner at Andra Pradesh this Wednesday, November 23, to discuss the details.
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
