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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, only talking about what he wanted and cracking jokes, including dirty ones. At one press conference he put eight penguins in the front row, and he arrived to another wearing an astronaut’s suit. In the first case he announced that he wanted to see a decently dressed audience at the conference, and in the second case that he had been searching for an answer to a very difficult question out in space – and found it. The journalists loved and hated him at the same time. On the one hand, he was rude, but Pike only attacked people in response to an attack, never overstepping a thin boundary line, plus he threw fantastic parties, at which he was always very hospitable and generous. In any case, he was a newsmaker, and no one quarreled with him openly. After all, tomorrow he might block your name in his search engine, and you would instantly be consigned to journalistic oblivion.
    Late last year the extravagant Pike had put on yet another show, in which he jumped off the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles—into the sunset—on a yellow hang-glider with “Search in Piquet” written on it. The journalists outdid each other in inventing catchy headlines. A superb banquet was laid out for them on the roof. The next day the wings of the bright-yellow hang-glider appeared on the front pages of all the major newspapers and news sites.
    Everybody was really surprised when Pike announced he had decided to download his
    creativity. At the test session, to which he invited the press, he said that his creativity level was off the scale and declared emotionally that from now on his imagination would serve the good of society.
    However, before offloading his energy, he was required to hand over the Piquet algorithm to the company’s board of directors and wind up all activities that required intellectual energy. In the table it said that the downloading of Pike’s creativity had been postponed once again.
    Probably it had just been another of his PR moves, so he could announce to the press how high his level was.
    Isaac clicked the mouse on other tables in the data base. He went into the top 100 of those who had already downloaded their creativity. Among them he recognized the name of a
    celebrated artist, Andrei Sharov. He was a Veggie now, he didn’t make art any more, but the pictures he had created became world-famous.
    Isaac recalled the story that had been all over the media. The artist, solitary and
    unsociable, never left his studio, scraping by on occasional sales of his