Genius--The Revolution Read online

  I’d only just found him.

  After so many years of wondering, so many sleepless nights spent formulating plans of how to find him, designing WALKABOUT, now I was faced with the awful reality—to save Cai’s parents, to stop Kiran, I’d have to bring down Terminal and Teo with it.

  The thought gave me chills.

  What would my parents think? Selling out my brother?

  I knew I had to find a way to bring him to our side, to convince him to give up Terminal and make the right decision. The LODGE was family. I had to show him that Terminal’s plan meant disaster and that he could change the world with me.

  Thing is, I had to do it before the scanner completed its work.

  And somehow keep the truth of what we were doing from Dural.

  “Did the plans work?” Dural asked, leaning back to look at me.

  “No,” I said. “They didn’t.”

  “Not at all?”

  Cai said, “I think you misjudged your sources, Dural. The building had been completely remodeled. It was nothing like the plans. There were no employees inside and a lot of traps. You sent us in there with nothing.”

  “I knew you could handle it,” Dural replied.

  Cai looked at me, then said, “And that’s why you’re going to need us to handle the next step, too.”

  Dural slowed the car at a light and cracked her neck, irritated.

  “What next step?”

  “The books are filled with code,” I said. “It won’t be easy to extract. But we have a way to do it. Give us some time, seven, maybe six hours; we’ll extract the code and hand it to you.”

  Dural laughed. “How nice of you. And for nothing in return?”

  “We’ll make a deal,” Cai said.

  Dural started the car again, eased it onto a highway entrance ramp.

  “We will get you the code in return for getting my associate out of the detention center. But to crack this thing, we’ll need all the files Naya stole from Nigeria. It’s the only way to do it.”

  “That’s a big ask,” Dural said. “Those are quite valuable.”

  “So are we,” I said.

  Dural smiled.

  9. TUNDE

  5 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA

  My friends, it was time to build again!

  Even though Rex had provided me with very little information regarding the books I was to build a scanner for, I knew the basic properties of how a scanner worked. It was a relatively simple device, one that dated back much earlier than I believe most people assume. There were machines that performed a similar function in the late 1950s, walahi!

  While I very much would have enjoyed building a scanner that improved upon the existing technology—the few scanners I have taken apart displayed a ridiculous number of engineering faults—there would not be enough time.

  I hung up my phone and walked into the kitchen. Rodger Dodger was there, snacking on bites of chocolate cake she had taken from the fridge. She gave me a wave and offered me a piece of the chocolate cake.

  “Thank you,” I told her, “but something has come up.”

  “With Painted Wolf?” Rodger Dodger asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I need to build something to help her.”

  Rodger Dodger nodded. “Excellent, what?”

  I will tell you, my friends, I was a little hesitant to answer. It was not that I believed Rodger Dodger would not be capable of helping me but more of my concern about involving her. I knew that I was a young man, but this girl was merely twelve! Clearly, these thoughts were being telegraphed via my expressions because Rodger Dodger jumped up on the kitchen counter and said:

  “I know I’m not an engineer or anything. I can’t do what you do or what Rex or Wolf does, but I’m not afraid to try anything. I never back down from a challenge, and I’ve been punching above my weight my entire life. I can help you, Tunde. Just tell me what to do and I’ll give it my best shot. What are we building?”

  I dey bow na dis girl!

  I described the situation to Rodger Dodger. She listened intently. Then I told her some of the materials that I would need to make the scanner. As I saw it, we could easily scavenge materials from various computers and other scanning equipment. But to effectively scan fifteen books that had hundreds of pages each would involve some very powerful machinery. It would need to be industrial.

  “I can try to get you whatever you need,” Rodger Dodger said, “but most of the stores won’t be open right now. We’re going to have to scavenge stuff.”

  “I love to scavenge stuff,” I replied. “Scavenged stuff is the best stuff.”

  Rodger Dodger found some paper and several pencils in the bedroom, and we spread out multiple sheets across the table. I proceeded to sketch some ideas out. My first thought was to use a “drum” at the center of the machine. It would be, essentially, a wide wheel over which the book was placed. The biggest trouble in scanning through so many books is that they are bound. Traditionally that means scanning a page, picking up the book, turning the page, and then scanning again. A laborious process! But with a drum, the pages turn as the drum turns.

  Considering the materials we would have available to us, I came up with quite an ingenious idea (if I do say so myself). First was the scanning mechanism. We chose to go with high-speed, high-definition digital cameras placed above and at an angle over the book. The book itself would be laid across the drum, with the covers held fast. Then a specialized “page flipper” (that is what we dubbed it) would flip the pages as fast as possible. Turning the drum seemed a bit clumsy, so this little device resembled fingers and would flick the pages properly.

  Hence, it was an automatic flick-book flicker!

  Tunde’s scanner

  Once the pages were photographed, the images would be fed to a computer to be processed. The program on the computer would coordinate real-time 3-D recognition and high-accuracy restoration of a flat document image. Whatever program Rex designed, it would do the rest.

  On paper, it looked very simple. All we needed was the parts.

  I asked Rodger Dodger how she felt about the scanner.

  “I think it’s going to be killer,” she said. “Let’s start right now.”

  That, my friends, was exactly when there was a knock at the apartment door.

  9.1

  I turned immediately to Rodger Dodger.

  She shrugged and shook her head, indicating to me that she was not sure who was at the door. This was a dramatic moment. I did not know if the knock was merely a mistake or perhaps it signaled the arrival of the police. Regardless, I wanted to stay mute—we needed to pretend the apartment was empty.

  And yet, still more knocks came.

  “This is a problem,” I whispered to Rodger Dodger, both of us frozen.

  Rodger Dodger nodded.

  “What do we do?” I whispered.

  “Wait till they go away,” Rodger Dodger suggested.

  “We’re not going away.”

  The voice came from the other side of the front door. It was the voice of a young woman, and it was not familiar to me. She had an accent that sounded, to my relatively untrained ears, to be South American.

  The voice continued: “We know you’re in there, Tunde Oni. Come on and open the door. This is important.”

  “This is crazy,” I whispered to Rodger Dodger.

  I did not know what to do. Rex, Cai, and I had experienced so many different attempted traps over the past few weeks that I was not sure I could trust my own shadow! And yet, the voice on the other side of the door did not seem threatening.

  “Please, Tunde,” the voice said. “There isn’t much time. We need your help.”

  My friends, this was getting even more confusing.

  I stood and approached the front door cautiously. As I did so, Rodger Dodger opened one of the kitchen windows. She signaled to a patio outside, one that we might utilize if we needed to make a hasty escape.

  I stopped a foot from the front door.

  “H
ow can I help you?” I asked the voice on the other side.

  “We have the same goal.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “Stopping Kiran Biswas.”

  I do not know why I trusted that voice, but there was such sincerity in the way she spoke those words, such determination, that I could not ignore her. As I opened the door, Rodger Dodger made an expression I imagine someone makes when they are about to be run down by a danfo. I nodded to her in an attempt to calm her concerns, but I will admit that I still had many of my own.

  I unlocked the door and opened it to find something very unexpected.

  The three young people that had been following us in Beijing were now standing in the apartment hallway. My friends, my instincts had been right!

  They were trailing us, but not for the reasons I had assumed.

  “My name is Javiera,” the girl I had been speaking with said. “I am from Peru.”

  She was around my age, with long, dark, braided hair. Javiera had on high-top sneakers and wore a lot of those multicolored rubber bracelets. I noticed that one of them said: . Rex would have been proud.

  “Can we come inside?” Javiera asked.

  I looked over at the other two young people. An Asian girl of a similar age to Rodger Dodger and a tall, rail-thin, and very pale teenaged boy who wore a beanie.

  The younger girl said, “I’m Stella. From Detroit.”

  “And I am Ivan. From Noril’sk,” the boy said in a thick Russian accent.

  “Javiera, Stella, Ivan,” I said. “Welcome.”

  9.2

  “We’re called ULTRA,” Javiera said.

  She, Stella, and Ivan settled into the apartment, taking seats on the couch across from me. Rodger Dodger walked in from the kitchen and stood behind me. She was quite anxious still; years of hiding will do that to a person.

  Looking at the members of ULTRA, I tried to approach the situation as Cai might have. What would she have done? How could I determine that these young people were truly who they said they were? I cogitated on that for a few moments before I turned to Rodger Dodger and said, “They say they are here to help us.”

  “We are,” Javiera said. “We’re like you. Like the LODGE.”

  “I apologize if I appear quite suspicious,” I said, “but if you truly know us and know what it is we do, you will understand.”

  “We have proof,” Javiera said. “Here.”

  She pulled a tablet computer from her bag and handed it to me. On the screen was the forum on our LODGE site. It was open to a user account page. There was a photo of Javiera beside her username and join date. The date was twelve months ago. She had posted 210 times in the forums.

  “I joined just before Ivan and a couple months after Stella,” Javiera said.

  She reached over and flicked through several tabs showing me each of their LODGE site user account pages, each with a photo and their join date. It was clear that they were frequent users of the site long before the GAME.

  Javiera continued: “You’ve probably never heard of us, but we’ve been fans of the LODGE for a long time. We like to think of ourselves as being on your team. I’m a coder, like Rex. Stella is an engineer like you, and Ivan is a crypto-linguist. We saw what happened to Rex after the Game. After what happened during Zero Hero, I knew Rex must have been framed. We did some research, followed the clues, and formed our own little group. We’re actually here ’cause we need your help.”

  “To do what?” I asked. “Things are a bit complicated right now.”

  Stella said, “While you’ve been following Kiran’s business interests in Nigeria, India, and now China, we’ve tracked them through Germany and Greece. And we’ve found that there is a lab in Mexico City, one that we believe holds the keys to a virus Kiran is building.”

  “But we have already found this virus,” I said. “It is here in China.”

  Stella looked to Javiera.

  Javiera asked me, “What’s this virus do?”

  “I have not studied it myself,” I said. “But Rex says it impacts the banking systems; it is designed to bring down economies. We suspect this is what Kiran has called Shiva, his plan to reorder the world.”

  “We know of Shiva,” Stella said. “But that is not the virus we’re after.”

  Now it was my turn to be surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Javiera pulled her cell phone from her purse. She did a quick search and then held up her cell so I could see the screen. On it was an image of the Indian god Shiva, the destroyer and transformer. He was seated in the lotus position, legs crossed, on a tiger pelt. His arms were raised and he held various objects.

  “Do you see?” Javiera asked. “He has four arms.”

  This was true; the depiction of Shiva had four arms.

  “Each one is a virus,” Ivan said. “We have identified two of them. One was in Kiran’s Greek lab. It was designed to affect communications. The virus we discovered in Germany was built to attack security systems. You say the one here in China is for banking. Those are three of Lord Shiva’s arms. The fourth, the final one, is in Mexico City. We believe it targets the root servers that connect the Internet.”

  “Root servers?” I asked.

  “The Internet isn’t a big, whole system,” Javiera said. “It is a whole bunch of tiny systems linked up together. There are hundreds of thousands of tiny Internets that are linked. They communicate with each other via the root servers. If someone takes those offline, it will effectively cut off all the tiny Internets. That sort of thing can be fixed, of course, but not before Kiran has introduced his next move.”

  “Rama,” I said, recalling the program.

  “Yes,” Javiera said. “That is why we need to stop him now.”

  “You seem to have figured all of this out,” I said. “I applaud you for that. We certainly need as much help as possible in thwarting Kiran. But what is it that you need from me? Why come all the way from Mexico to China?”

  “We can’t get into the Mexico City lab,” Stella said. “We’ve been running surveillance on it, and it’s crazy well protected. We came to you ’cause we need ideas, and we thought that joining forces, the LODGE and ULTRA together, we’d be more effective. We can arrange a flight as soon as tomorrow morning, if you’ll join us.”

  I stood up, feeling the need to stretch my limbs. Rodger Dodger and I were in the middle of a project that I could not abandon. I glanced into the kitchen and saw the plans for the scanner on the table. Even though ULTRA had come to me, had followed us halfway around the globe, their mission would need to wait. I had to build the scanner, bring down Terminal, and clear Mr. Zhang first.

  Using my cell, I snapped photos of the LODGE site user account pages Javiera had shown me and I sent them to Cai and Rex. I wanted them to weigh in on this situation before I made a decision. In my text, I wrote, I have found some friends. They want to join forces.

  I received a response from Cai first.

  What is your reading on them, Tunde? she asked.

  I believe they are honest, I texted. And I think they will be helpful.

  Hell, yes ☺, Rex texted. Original fans!

  Cai was more tempered. We can give them a shot, she said. But, Tunde, please be cautious in what you share with them. You are able to read people, trust your gut on this. We will see you soon.

  Bolstered by the compliment and confidence, I turned back to ULTRA.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can work together.”

  Ivan clapped; Stella high-fived Javiera.

  “But,” I continued as their expressions shifted to worry, “I would appreciate some extra hands to complete my work here in China. ULTRA and the LODGE will team up, but our work starts here. Now.”

  10. CAI

  5 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA

  Rex, Teo, and I spent the rest of the day at the opera house.

  When we arrived back, we unloaded the flip-books, and Dural and the other Terminal members began to look through them. I worried
momentarily that they’d start piecing the code together right away, but that didn’t happen. They grew bored and restless and decided to go out for a noodle run. Teo offered to go with them to bring us some food. Rex seemed upset by the thought, but he agreed.

  Though they had guards placed outside the dressing room door, Rex and I had a moment to talk about our plan and unpack everything that had happened. I found an old boom box on a shelf in the corner and turned it up. We had to hope the Chinese hip-hop was loud enough to drown out our conversation from the guards’ prying ears and any microphones Terminal had planted in the room.

  “So what do you think of this ULTRA thing?” Rex asked.

  “Even though I’m cautious, I think it could be good,” I said.

  “I dig it,” Rex said. “More hands to help.”

  Then, switching gears, he said, “So Tunde will have the scanner in the next couple hours. We’ll have to find a way for him to bring it by surreptitiously. In the meantime, we should dig into the data Naya stole. See what we’ve got.”

  I said, “Another long day ahead.”

  Rex rubbed his forehead, eyes clenched tight.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and just the weight of it made him sigh. “Yeah,” he said, turning to me, those dark eyes filled with exhaustion. “Just stressed out. This whole thing with Teo … I just need him to come around.”

  “He will.”

  I was confident that we would convince him. Rex had spent so long looking for his brother and it had paid off. But not the way he’d figured. WALKABOUT didn’t find Teo; Teo effectively revealed himself. I knew it could have been Terminal related—given what we knew, there was no doubt that Teo had ulterior motives. If he wasn’t trying to help Terminal, his emergence was related to his quest to stop Kiran. And yet, watching Teo with Rex, it was clear that Teo had a deep love for his brother. Teo was in a tough spot, but I had no doubt he’d make the right choice.

  “Teo can be stubborn,” Rex said. “He thinks only of the end goal. I’m worried that when he figures out what we’re doing, how we’re changing the code, he’s going to tip Terminal off. He’ll reveal our hand.”