Genius--The Revolution Read online

  That’s when I noticed Nicole coming down the stairs alongside a guy with spiky hair. He must have been Carson. He didn’t look too happy to have been interrupted.

  I needed to get out of there quick.

  At the same time, I noticed a bank of monitors across from me displaying an OndScan news feed of sorts. On the feed: closed-circuit-TV images of Cai, Tunde, Teo, and me in Beijing. They already had us identified.

  I saw Nicole glancing around the room, looking for me as I ducked down low and scrambled toward the front door. A few people noticed me, but they were all in such a rush that I doubted they were really paying that much attention.

  I hit the front door and got it open seconds before Nicole and Carson turned toward me. I wasn’t sure if they’d seen me duck out, but I’m sure they saw the door closing. I had to run fast.

  I scrambled out into the daylight. And tore off the goatee as I ran.

  14.4

  As I raced across the plaza, I practically yelled into my earpiece.

  “They’re onto us!”

  “Who?!” Tunde asked. “The police?!”

  “Kiran, maybe everyone!”

  I glanced up at the rooftop and could see Teo, Tunde, Stella, and Javiera grabbing their equipment, shoving it into their pockets.

  “Hurry!” I shouted into my cell.

  I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going but followed Ivan as he ran down the narrow streets bordering the plaza. We dodged traffic, car horns blaring in our wake, and I suddenly had flashbacks of New York City.

  We stopped when we came to a park.

  As we caught our breath near a playground, Tunde, Teo, Stella, and Javiera caught up with us. We were all sweating and delirious, none of us having had more than a few hours’ sleep on the flight over. The adrenaline that had been driving me ebbed, and my limbs felt as heavy as stone pillars.

  “We need to get in there,” I said, “but…”

  “But what?” Tunde asked.

  “It’s going to be a nightmare, and time is ticking down fast.”

  Tunde nodded. “I am afraid this truly is the best of the brain trust. These people are working inside a fortress; all of the hardware is excessive. Even if we could sneak inside and bring in more advanced cameras or microphones, it is very unlikely we would not be seen or even that our signal would make it out.”

  We all thought on that a moment, racking our brains.

  “So we can’t get in…,” I said, letting out a sigh of frustration.

  “And Kiran will engage the virus tomorrow,” Cai added.

  Great. Rex, if you’ve got some secret weapon, now’s the time to use it.

  We needed a place to go—a place to lie low and think.

  Truth is: This wasn’t going to be like Kolkata or Beijing.

  Then, they had no idea we were coming. The Mexico City black box lab presented a formidable challenge—maybe the biggest we’d faced yet.

  There was, in my mind, only one place to go.

  Home.

  14.5

  We took two cabs across town to an apartment building just off Plaza Carso.

  Plaza Carso

  After we’d piled out of the vehicles and tipped the drivers, we stood across the street from the building and I pointed to a window on the top floor.

  “You remember?” I asked Teo.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is going to be really tough.”

  We were standing across the street from my aunt and uncle’s apartment. This was my father’s brother, Ernesto. He was older than Papa by three years and worked as a pharmacist in a drugstore downtown. Ernesto was married to Josefa, a nurse. They’d raised two kids, both now off to college, and had an apartment filled with potted plants and fish tanks.

  Despite my question to Teo, he and I had never been to Mexico.

  But we knew this place; we knew it from photographs that filled the albums on the bookshelf on Ma and Papa’s room. We’d studied those photos so carefully, so intently, over the years that we could practically smell the earthy scent of the apartment. Even though I’d never stepped foot in it, I knew every room by heart.

  When Teo said this was going to be tough, he wasn’t talking about climbing the four floors to my aunt and uncle’s place.

  He was talking about coming clean.

  About seeing Ma and Papa for the first time since he’d vanished.

  Teo was sweating while we climbed the apartment steps. Tunde was right behind me, eager and excited as ever. The guy’s energy never seemed to flag. Cai was at the back of the line with Ivan. As we walked, they talked game theory.

  I took a moment at the door.

  My aunt and uncle, Ma and Papa, they had no idea we were going to be stopping by. They certainly had no idea that they’d be seeing Teo. I decided it’d be better if I was the one to knock, the first face they saw.

  “You ready?” I asked Teo as he stood behind me.

  “No,” he said.

  “Sorry, man. World’s hanging in the balance here.”

  I knocked on the door three times. My uncle Ernesto answered, his cheeks red with laughter, and his eyes went instantly wide. He stepped backward, confused, not saying a word as my aunt called to him from the other room.

  “Who is at the door?” she asked in Spanish.

  “Rex…,” Ernesto said, stunned. “And a bunch of other people…”

  Within seconds, Ma, Papa, and Aunt Josefa were standing behind him. For a split second there was this monumental silence. All of us—me, Teo, the LODGE, ULTRA, my family—staring at each other, caught up in this singular instant of incredible emotion. And then the dam broke. Ma burst into tears as she took Teo in her arms. Teo cried rivers. And I cried as well.

  It felt like hours before we actually stepped inside.

  After the tears, we sat in the living room, Teo on a couch with Ma and Papa; Tunde and Stella in chairs alongside my aunt and uncle; and Cai, Ivan, Javiera, and me on pillows on the floor. Teo opened up—I don’t know if it was the weight lifted from his shoulders after the Terminal takedown or that, finally, he was home—and told us everything he’d been up to. He didn’t get into the specifics of his research, but he told us about the places he’d visited, the adventures he’d had.

  The night he vanished, he caught a ride with a Terminal associate—someone like him, eager to make a difference but not fully convinced the hacktivist group really could accomplish what they’d set out to do. First stop was Houston. Then they traveled to Europe—Zurich for a few months, living in a loft, then to Cyprus.

  The first problems began there—Teo had become aware of Kiran’s work as OndScan grew bigger and bigger. He knew, even back then, two years ago, that Kiran was a threat. He couldn’t convince Terminal, so he broke ranks.

  Still, he didn’t quit completely.

  Just kept finding himself drawn to their radical way of doing things. He reached out to Terminal from the shadows—well, really just the encrypted dark Web—and ran innocuous side missions. One-offs that made him feel as though he was making a difference while he toiled away in secret. Wasn’t exactly the life he’d run away from home for, but he settled into it.

  He moved to New York.

  Got his apartment.

  Teo did what he could on his own. Working on the bio-computer, attempting to come up with a secure method of storing and moving data organically. The idea was to come up with something neither Kiran nor Terminal could access.

  His was a life of leftovers, biochemistry, and loneliness.

  This went on for a long time.

  And then the Game happened, I reappeared, WALKABOUT went online, and Kiran came after me. With the LODGE on the run, Teo decided it was time to reach out. He left clues where he could, led us to the lab, and followed Kiran to India. My joining Kiran there, though not intended, was like a puzzle coming together.

  Crazily enough, he actually thought he might be able to convince me to join Terminal, that the two of us could utilize their techniques and make their
mission a success without all the chaos and negativity. Obviously, that didn’t work out.

  After getting it all off his chest, Teo settled back into the couch.

  He put his arms around Ma and Papa.

  As he’d told his story, I’d watched their faces as they moved through shock and then worry to acceptance and happiness. It was an emotional roller coaster that they wore on their faces. Seeing them all sitting together was an image I’d longed to see for years. Finally witnessing it, I almost had no words to describe my joy.

  Papa said, “It is wonderful to have you home again, son.”

  To which Ma added: “But never, never again can you put us through that.”

  Teo nodded, understanding. “I promise, I won’t.”

  Life was suddenly good again.

  Only it wasn’t.

  The LODGE and ULTRA had some serious work to do. While Ma and Papa went up to the roof to get some evening air and talk more, we talked shop.

  “So we know we can’t do what we’ve done before,” I said.

  “Well,” Tunde began, “Stella and I could build a machine that could get inside. With the two of us, it would go much faster—”

  “No time,” Cai said. “Besides, they’ll be looking for us to try to get in.”

  “Don’t have time to hack our way in, either,” Javiera said.

  We sat in silence for a few moments, stuck.

  Ivan suggested something with projections, Javiera came up with an idea to hack into their systems further up the “digital line,” and I threw out an admittedly wacky idea involving mirrors. But none of them got us anywhere.

  We’d hit a dead end.

  Suddenly, Tunde stood up. “We need tacos,” he said.

  “Hang on,” Stella spoke for all of us, “what?”

  “Tacos.” Tunde beamed.

  15. TUNDE

  3 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA

  My friends, the best way to break through a logjam of thought is to eat!

  I am not kidding in the least. Oftentimes, when I am stuck with a problem that cannot be solved by any normal means, I find that distracting my poor, overloaded brain with food is essential. I do not know the chemistry of how nutrients impact the brain cells, but I am certain that the right combination of minerals is crucial to improved mental flow.

  I knew that tacos could only help.

  Na today I dey realized dis truth.

  We were in Mexico City after all!

  It was, however, quite late in the evening. Though some of them put up more of a fuss than others, everyone agreed with me that getting out into the night air would be ideal. Mrs. Huerta, the aunt, suggested we try a taco stand on the corner just a block from the apartment. She insisted it was the finest taco stand in the whole of the country. This, of course, made me only the hungrier!

  We all piled out into the street.

  Ah, omos, the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of tropical flowers and the earthy scent of recent rain. The streets were wet and reflected the dizzying lights that flickered and flashed above us. I was in love with this city already.

  We found the taco stand, and, thrillingly, it was still serving tacos. My friends, these little bites of heaven were incredible! I had heard about tacos before, likely from a television program or on the Internet, but those were in hard shells and looked a little too … organized. These tacos were gently laid out on little pancakes of flour. The ones that I ate contained braised pork, beans, cheese, avocado leaves, and a strange mushroom-like thing that Rex told me was corn fungus. My friends, I devoured five of the delicious things before the idea struck me.

  It was not so much a bolt out of the blue as it was a sudden realization that the answer to our dilemma was right in front of my face. The taco was what inspired me. As I ate it, the shell worked quite hard to keep its contents contained but eventually failed. All of the wonderful filling poured out into my hands. Rather than the mess annoying me, it gave me an incredible idea.

  “I have it!” I shouted to my friends in the LODGE and ULTRA.

  “Have what?” Rex asked, nearly choking on his food.

  “How we are going to get into that black box lab!”

  I gathered everyone around. “We cannot get into this facility,” I said. “We cannot break in physically or digitally. We also do not have the time to plot or build. So, the only answer is to not get inside.”

  “That’s really deep, Tunde,” my best friend said.

  “We are not going in,” I repeated. “They are coming out.”

  “The brain trust?” Ivan asked, flabbergasted.

  “Yes,” I said. “And they will bring their data with them.”

  Rex looked at me as though I was crazy.

  But I dey not craise, oh!

  “My friend,” I said, “we all came outside into the night to get these delicious tacos because we knew that we needed them. We are going to convince the brain trust prodigies in that lab to come outside because they need to as well.”

  “So we scare them out?” Stella asked. “Start a fire or—”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, nothing so crude. Sorry.”

  “Okay…,” Javiera said, looking at me quizzically. “Then how?”

  “That is the most beautiful part,” I continued. “We are going to show them the error of their ways. We will show them what we know, give them our information. Reveal to them the truth of what Kiran is doing and what those programs they are working on will do to the world. Once they see the truth of it, they will stop.”

  “Seems awfully optimistic,” Ivan said.

  I took my final bites of taco and said, “There are very few truly evil people, Ivan. I believe that the brain trust members are like those friends of Terminal who thought they were changing the world and just did not see the destructive side of what they were doing. Perhaps there are some bad brain trusters, though again I do not like that word. My guess is that even so, they are few in number. If we can convince the majority to rebel, they will.”

  “Don’t you think they already know what Kiran’s doing?” Javiera asked. “I mean they’re working on these projects twenty-four-seven.”

  “I think they see what they want to see. We will change the want.”

  “Now you’re getting philosophical,” Rex said.

  Cai jumped in next. “Say we can convince them, and say we’ve got the information that will do that. How do you suggest we get this data to them? We’ve already decided that hacking our way in won’t work.”

  “We will not hack,” I said. “We will share.”

  This response got me even more confused looks, but I had a plan—a very clever, very crazy plan.

  15.1

  48 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA

  “We are going to use crowds,” I said.

  I explained my idea to Cai and Ivan and was enthused that they agreed it was a good idea. We could not hack directly into the Mexico City black box lab, this much was clear from Rex and Javiera, but we could influence the influencers inside. I left how that would happen to Cai.

  “If we can crowdsource the messaging,” Cai said, “we can get people, all of our followers, ULTRA’s followers, to communicate privately with the brain trust people inside the lab. Once we get their attention, we can direct them to some sort of data feed. Something independent of Kiran’s closed system.”

  “Independent how?” Rex asked.

  “What we need,” Ivan said, “is a way to envelop the entire building and all of its communication systems in a single, wireless network. Basically, we need to make a digital bubble around them and control what goes into that bubble.”

  “Leave that to Stella and me,” I said, looking to Stella.

  With our brains already racing, we rushed back to the apartment and caught Teo up on the details of our plan. Though many of those details were still left undecided, Teo seemed quite eager to begin immediately. And that is how, my friends, the apartment quickly transformed into a working station.

  The parents o
f my best friend were delighted to find their sons working in tandem again. I myself was cheered to see it. For the first time since I had known him, Rex appeared to be confidently optimistic. I do not know if my own mental outlook had now fully rubbed off on him, but it was excellent to see. It made all of us that much more motivated!

  Even though I am not a midnight candle burner, I was delighted to find that Mexico City never slept. Using money loaned to us by the Huertas, we were able to acquire the majority of the things we would need to put our plan in action. By dawn, Stella and I had not only designed one of the most striking and original wireless network systems ever invented but we had most of the parts assembled.

  Though it sounds silly, we needed a lot of helium.

  Here is the crazy plan we concocted: The only way to create a wireless network that would envelop the Mexico City black box lab was to literally blanket the building with a signal. This signal would both act as a transmission, sending information inside, while at the same time blocking external data from entering. This was the bubble that Ivan envisioned. But how could we create such a thing? Well, we certainly could not rewire the building. We needed a fast and cheap alternative. This meant suspending thousands of tiny transmitters around and over the Mexico City black box lab. My friends, the idea I had was as playful as it was expeditious: We would float hundreds of helium-filled balloons over the site!

  The trick, of course, would be to ensure that the balloons did not drift over the city and then up into the sky. Not only would we need to tether them, but we would have to calibrate the precise weight for each to hover properly over the rooftop building and keep the dome shape we would need. When all the transmitters held aloft were activated, they would create a bubble network around the Mexico City black box lab and we would be in total control of it!

  Stella and I worked out the details of the transmitters. Luckily, these would not be items we had to fabricate, since creating thousands of them by hand within the allotted time would be impossible. We would use existing pieces, tiny single-chip transmitters that were a quarter the size of a penny coin, that were easily found in cast-off computer parts. We could harvest most of them from older cell phones.