4
Isaac’s hands hovered motionless above the keys. Destroying something was easy, if you knew for sure what actually was to be destroyed. Isaac had come into possession of a database, but what was the right way to deal with this knowledge from out of the blue?
“What if I search the table for names I know?” thought Isaac, in earnest excitement.
He opened the file named Human Imagination Tone. First, he decided to try his own name, typed it in and launched the search. “I’m not in the top hundred, but I made the top thousand, marked with 996 that is,” he grinned to himself. His next search was for “Jeremy Link”. There was a lot of empty chatter available on the internet about the professor, but there was no serious open information.
The search engine found Jeremy Link. Wow! The name was in a separate table with the striking title “Top 50 geniuses”. The genius top list, no less! And these were people who have not donated their energy!
Isaac ran through the list eagerly: Europeans, Australians, Americans, Asians – talents could be born anywhere. The first two were unfamiliar to him; number three was a well-known Russian mathematician, who worked at MIT. He and Pascal were taught on his books. He cracked complicated theorems like nuts and was famous for always refusing money prizes for his achievements. What had jogged him into filling in a form to sell his creativity? Isaac found the answer to that question in the “Remarks” section, where it said that the mathematician needed to raise money for medical treatment for his child who had a rare brain disease.
Isaac gritted his teeth at this coincidence. Vicky, dear little sister. Isaac’s fury with Collective Mind overwhelmed him. It would never release him now.
Vicky was Isaac’s stepsister, but she was the nearest and dearest person he had. No matter how hard Isaac tried, he couldn’t clearly recall the moment when he first met her. He remembered being introduced to a frightened little girl in a blue dress. And that it was a good day, because he was given a radio- controlled car. And a bit later Vicky’s dad – his mum’s friend, as he was introduced at the time – bought Isaac a really great bike. Then he started coming round more and more often, together with Vicky. Playing with someone, even with a girl, was better than playing on your own. On the weekends Vicky’s dad drove them to the amusement park and bought them big ice creams, and there was no reason to be afraid of someone like him. Isaac quickly got used to him and was glad when he came, always with a present, even if only a little one. Isaac was delighted when he and his mum moved into his apartment, where Isaac and Vicky had their own room.
They grew up like that together, went summer camps and the amusement parks together. Then to school, to the parties at school, and then to the discotheques. He told her about his inventions and the problems he had making progress with them, and she listened closely and encouraged her brother, and wouldn’t let him give up. And Vicky used to laugh and say that he was her very best girlfriend, who wouldn’t even look at the same boy as she.
Isaac drove away his memories and went back to the data base.
Isaac saw another famous name, the inventor of the unique search engine “Piquet”. Johnson Pike lived in Beverly Hills and was a very successful man. He got rich after launching his search engine, with a totally new approach to the analysis of results.
The usual search engines were focused on the amount of site traffic, and a lot of traffic automatically made a site important and ranked it high in the ratings. In the first lines of the located data, users saw the most popular sites, not the reference that they needed. The information they were looking for was either hidden away somewhere in the last pages, or was never even located at all.
Piquet was better and faster at finding results for given search parameters. The algorithm for the results of analysis was complicated and, of course, wasn’t made public. Specialists assumed that the search engine analyzed all the words on each site found. If there were too many words that meant it wasn’t a professional site. Piquet assigned credibility to sites on the basis of the frequency of the search words relative to the total number and the presence of specific, strictly professional terms and phrases. At least, that was what the manual claimed. Paranoiacs claimed that the search engine also analyzed the files on the computer of the user who launched a search, in order to figure out what he did and rank the results more accurately.
Apart from everything else, Pike was a superb PR man. In his numerous interviews about the search engine and his company, the inventor frequently toyed with the journalists,