Genius--The Revolution Read online

  “We won’t let him.”

  “Teo’s clever. He’ll figure it out.”

  I leaned in and hugged Rex. Resting my head on his shoulder, I said, “Teo listens to you. Even though he disagrees with the way we’re doing things, he understands that we ultimately want the same thing.”

  A lump rose in my throat as I spoke.

  “This is our last chance to get my father out,” I said. “If anything goes wrong, my father will likely never see the outside of a prison. Worse, the world is going to pay for our mistakes. Kiran runs Shiva, Terminal uses Naya’s data to bring down the banks, we’re looking at a total system collapse, and we’re the only things standing in its way. I just hope we’re up for this.”

  “Of course we are,” Rex said, pulling back so we could look eye to eye.

  “We’re dealing with so many unpredictable factors and—”

  “And I have every ounce of faith in you. After the Game, it became clearer to me than ever that all of my actions, our actions, have consequences—even the smallest choices. I got my parents deported. I got us into trouble with WALKABOUT. But I know what we need to do, and I’m going to follow your lead in getting it done.”

  “I appreciate that. Just hope I can deliver.”

  “You’ve got this. It’s brilliant.” Then, looking away with a sigh, Rex said, “It’s Teo I’m concerned about.”

  “His intentions are good—”

  “But what we’ve learned about him, the deception, the anger, I don’t have the same faith in him that I had before. Feels like for two years I’ve deceived myself, made up this story of who Teo really was. That’s all come crumbling down. Truth is, he was probably just as unpredictable before he ran off. I was a kid, he was my big brother, I didn’t see what a jerk he was.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “Teo’s family. No matter what choices he’s made in the past, you have to believe that he’s going to do the right thing now.”

  “I want to think that’s true.”

  “You’re trusting me with the fate of the world.” I smiled. “I hope you can trust me on this as well; Teo’s going to come through. He’s complicated and he’ll put up a fight, but in the end, he’ll make the right choice.”

  “Always the optimist,” Rex said.

  “No,” I replied, “Tunde’s the optimist. I’m the realist.”

  Rex smiled and then kissed my forehead sweetly.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said.

  10.1

  We spent the next six hours figuring out the code.

  Teo came back with Dural, Naya, and the other Terminal members shortly after Rex and I had begun. Dural and everyone else went to another room to eat. Teo was determined to help us look through the flip-books. He wanted to know what Kiran was hiding.

  Rex and I had to walk a very careful tightrope.

  “Maybe you can start with this one,” Rex told his brother as he handed him one of the volumes. “Seems to me the code relates more to your interests. Thought I saw something in there about bio storage programs.”

  Teo took the book, settled into a small leather couch in the corner of the room, and started to scan through the code. He was like Rex in that when he was absorbed with what he was doing, he was largely oblivious to everything else going on around him. While Rex and I talked, Teo kept his eyes glued to the pages, his expression twisted into a concentrated scowl.

  “He’s gone deep,” Rex said, glancing over at Teo.

  “Reminds me of you,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I look better when I’m thinking.”

  Because we didn’t have the time to go through the flip-books one by one and catch every small detail, we had to come up with another way to alter the code—and do it in a manner that didn’t tip Terminal off.

  That meant rather than altering it, we would have to insert something else into the code—a sort of “trapdoor” that would be hidden from Terminal but would open when the virus was eventually run.

  After two hours of near silence, Teo eventually fell asleep on the couch.

  As he snored, Rex went into the zone to develop the sabotage code. Just like at the Game, he coded best solo. Sitting in one corner of the room, removed from other thoughts and concerns, he focused himself entirely on the job at hand. I watched as he wrote furiously, going through page after page.

  After an hour, he walked over to me with a stack of papers.

  Rex sat with an exhausted sigh.

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. This is just the first bit of code, but we can get started with it. My handwriting’s terrible; can you transfer this onto the corners of the flip-books?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s it do exactly?”

  “I’m guessing Terminal wants to steal this virus and run it after Kiran takes down the system. That way, they can swoop in right before Rama and steal whatever they can get their hands on. This code we’re adding in, it rewrites the original virus and then exposes whoever runs it. Not only does it effectively render the virus useless, though they won’t know that, but it will also reveal all of Terminal’s dirty secrets.”

  “How?”

  “Through a back door program like the one I installed in WALKABOUT 2.0. When the program’s run, it’ll open, and everything Terminal keeps hidden on their servers will be exposed to the authorities. Should be seamless, so long as they don’t find it. And that will come down to our skill at hiding it.”

  “My handwriting?” I asked.

  “In part.”

  I took the notes Rex had made on scrap paper and wrote the code by hand in the corners of the flip-book pages. It took me a long time, but I was able to closely match the font, case, and size of the print in the flip-books with a pen.

  Not perfect, but I assumed it’d be good enough for Tunde’s scanner.

  Then we numbered each of the books on the spine, one to fifteen, in a way that when scanned properly they’d assemble the code in order. The addition we added was hidden inside the corner text of book number six.

  The door to the room opened twenty minutes after we’d finished. It was dusk, and Dural walked in with several cups of steaming hot green tea. Naya looked the worse for wear, with massive bags under her eyes. Teo woke up as the door clicked shut. He rubbed his eyes and glanced over at Rex and me.

  “We get it figured out?” Teo asked.

  “We figured out how we’re going to translate it,” I said.

  Dural pulled up a chair and sipped her tea.

  “So,” she said, “tell me how you’re going to take the code scattered throughout those books and put it in a form we can utilize.”

  Rex’s cell phone buzzed. It was Tunde.

  He answered the phone, spoke briefly, and then turned to Dural.

  “The answer to your question,” Rex said, “is sitting in the loading bay as we speak.”

  10.2

  Dural escorted us downstairs to the loading bay.

  We passed through small groups of actors and acrobats who had arrived early—quite early—to rehearse for that evening’s show. If it wasn’t already surreal enough walking alongside the leader of Terminal, seeing the actors in their painted guises added a whole new layer. It seemed quite fitting, actually. This whole thing—the scanner, the flip-books—was a charade.

  The scanner itself was roughly the size of a large television.

  It was a hollow cube. The frame was made of black metal. At its base was a platform with a drum on it. The book would be folded over the drum and locked down. A computer was mounted on one of the upright beams alongside several monitors, and at the top were two high-resolution cameras, aimed down at the drum. It was a simple-looking machine, but I had no doubt it was going to be insanely effective. Tunde had never failed to outengineer even the most complicated project.

  “It’s a scanner,” Rex said before Dural could ask. “To take pictures of the flip-book pages and then feed them into the computer. A program will then render the text on the monitor. From wh
at I understand, this should scan two hundred and fifty pages a minute. That means roughly half an hour to get all the flip-books done.”

  “Who built this for you?” Dural asked.

  “A friend,” I said.

  Dural called Naya over and said, “Make sure there are no tricks here.”

  Naya, wearing an oversized purse, crouched down beside the scanner and examined it closely. After she’d gone over it physically, she plugged her cell into the computer via a USB cable and ran several scans. We waited while the scans were completed and Naya turned to Dural.

  I watched Naya closely. She was the reason we were here in the first place. If she hadn’t stolen the data in Nigeria, my father might not have been in a detention center. I was eager to see her pay for what she’d done. The fact that she came across so confident, so certain Terminal would win, made me furious.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Naya said. “It’s clean.”

  We carried Tunde’s scanner up to the dressing room and placed it on the floor. Then we gathered up the flip-books and stacked them neatly beside the machine. This whole process had to look as professional as possible. We also needed the books in which we’d added handwriting code to not stand out. If Dural, or even Teo, saw the added code, they’d surely suspect something was up.

  Dural took a seat on the leather couch beside Naya.

  “Let’s do this,” Dural said, starting a stopwatch app on her cell.

  We placed the first book on the drum and turned the system on. When the cameras went live, the monitor flashed on. The pages were loaded into the clip that flipped the pages. With a click of a signal button, the process began. The machine was quiet—the pages were held for a split second before the clip released them and they drifted to the other side of the book. The only audible part of the process was a soft rustling as the pages turned.

  As the cameras captured the pages, they were displayed in real time on the monitor. Tunde had designed the system so that it instantly picked out the text on the page, removed it, and reordered it so that we saw the code running vertically down one side of the monitor. When I first noticed it, my heart jumped into my throat. If Dural was watching the monitor closely, she’d see the code flashing by and possibly make out our additions. I wasn’t certain how gifted in coding Dural was. Thankfully, as the first book began scanning, a protective measure had popped up on the screen—the code was overlapped with itself several times over. By the time the book was nearing its final pages, the code was a digital jumble on the screen.

  Dural noticed that right away.

  “What’s wrong with the monitor?”

  “A glitch in the monitor,” Rex said as he loaded the next book. “This was a pretty rushed project; not surprised there are a few little gremlins in it. But it’s just a display problem—system works fine, don’t worry.”

  “No,” Dural said. “Fix it.”

  “It might take a few—”

  “Now,” she insisted.

  So Rex did. It took him several minutes to dig into the scanner’s code. Dural and Naya watched closely as he did. The point of the overlapping had been to ensure that Dural and Naya couldn’t suss out what we’d hidden in the code, but clearly it would need to go. We had to hold our breath and hope that neither Dural nor Naya would notice the changes.

  “There,” Rex said. “It’s fixed.”

  The monitor flickered back on, revealing the code running smoothly, unjumbled. My heart was in my throat as Dural gave the signal to start again.

  Rex did an excellent job hiding any anxiety he had.

  Dural and Naya watched carefully as book after book was loaded and scanned. I sat back and waited, my eyes glued to book number six. Finally, it was time. I tried to calm my nerves as Rex loaded the flip-book into the scanner and turned it on.

  For the first few pages, everything went smoothly. The book was scanned, the code appeared on the screen. No one asked any questions or noted the additional numbers and symbols added to this particular book. I was impressed with how cleanly I’d been able to write the code—as the pages flipped by like the beat of a dragonfly’s wings, I could hardly tell we’d added anything.

  “Hang on,” Teo said. “Stop the scan for a minute.”

  Rex stopped the machine and I held my breath.

  Dural leaned forward on the couch and looked at Teo.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Teo looked over at Rex. “I think it scanned that last page wrong.”

  “Okay,” Rex said. “We’ll just rescan it. Easy.”

  Teo glanced at me, then turned back to Rex as Rex stopped the scanner, flipped the page back, and got ready to turn it on again. “I’m sorry,” Teo said, “I think it’s a problem with the camera on the right. Can we just take a moment to grab something from out in the hall? This can be fixed easy.”

  Dural looked concerned. “How long’s this going to take?”

  “Just a minute, two maybe,” Teo said.

  “Fine.” Dural waved Teo and Rex from the room.

  I watched them step outside, the door closed, and I tried to stop the blood from draining from my face. If Teo had discovered we’d hidden the altered code inside the sixth book, everything we’d planned for would be ruined.

  Without those files my father would move from the detention center to prison and I would most likely never see him again. The thought made my stomach churn. But not only was my father’s fate at stake: If Teo betrayed us, we would be handing Terminal a weapon that would allow them to wreck the international banking system and topple countries with abandon.

  11. Rex

  5 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  As soon as the door clicked closed behind us, Teo pushed me against the wall.

  He was in my face, eyes locked on mine like laser beams.

  “I need you to make the right decision here, brother,” I said.

  Teo shook his head. “What did you do?”

  “I’m bringing Terminal down.”

  Teo let me go and backed up. He was quiet for a moment, chewing over his words. I could tell he wanted to rage at me, to get back in my face and yell.

  But he knew that wouldn’t work.

  I stepped toward him.

  “Teo,” I said, “Kiran hid a virus in those books. That code we’re scanning right now? If it gets out, if Terminal uses it, it will lay waste to the global economy. People will lose everything; they’ll suffer. Is that really what you want?”

  “They’re already suffering, Rex.”

  “But not like this. This is on a whole other level.”

  Teo sighed. “What did you do to the code? I saw something in there, a line relating to my bio-computer, only you’d tweaked it. You turned what was a data collecting tool into something that propagated data, a signal.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the signal, Rex?”

  “It uses my program WALKABOUT,” I said, “the one I built and designed to find you, to mine Terminal’s own files and hidden data caches. Instead of attacking the economy, it effectively reroutes Terminal’s data to Interpol, the FBI, et cetera, et cetera. If Terminal runs that virus, it will ruin them.”

  Teo stumbled back hearing that.

  He acted like I’d actually punched him in the chest.

  “Rex … please think about what you’re doing.…”

  “Brother,” I said, “you ran out on our family. You abandoned us. And we never gave up looking for you. I devoted the last few years of my life to finding you. I put aside school, a social life, anything a normal teenager does just to find a shred of your existence. I didn’t do it ’cause I needed you. I did it because I never stopped believing in you. People said you were part of Terminal, there were rumors you’d gone rogue, but I always trusted that when I found you, you’d be the Teo I remembered.”

  Teo looked down at his feet, emotion making him blink.

  Finally, getting something here …

  “I knew,” I
continued, “that when I found you, you’d help me fix this world. You might be angry at how messed up this world is, how screwy and unfair things have gotten, but, in the end, you’ll do the right thing.”

  Teo was silent for a moment before he looked up at me.

  “What’s the right thing, Rex?”

  “Stopping Terminal, clearing Painted Wolf’s father, and finding Kiran.”

  Teo nodded. “How does this help us find Kiran?”

  “Tunde has an in with another group,” I said. “They’ve discovered that Kiran has created four viruses. And this one isn’t the worst that’s out there. If we team up, if we all work together, we can stop Kiran, and, in the process, we can change the world. Please, brother, let’s do this the right way. I need you to come in from the cold. Come, be a part of the LODGE.”

  It was a huge moment.

  Here I was, on the other side of the globe from home, asking my brother to join my team. I’d dreamed of this moment for a long time. Seeing him at my side, changing the world together the way we’d talked about as kids. At the same time, this wasn’t the Teo I’d grown up with. It hurt me that I couldn’t trust him. And I needed to trust him more than anything at that moment.

  The door to the dressing room opened. Naya peeked out at us.

  “You guys get what you need? Clock’s ticking.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We found it.”

  “Good,” Naya said. “Get your butts back in here.”

  I walked toward the door and glanced at Teo as I passed him.

  He nodded to me and mouthed: Okay.

  11.1

  When we walked back into the room, I could see Cai was struggling to maintain her cool. I walked past her toward the scanner and took her hand and squeezed it. I hoped it was a reassuring squeeze.

  Then Teo and I pretended to manipulate one of the cameras.

  Teo used a small key-chain screwdriver.

  We put on a pretty good show, though I wasn’t entirely convinced Dural and Naya would find it persuasive. They had to believe it enough to run the program—once Dural hit that enter button, Terminal would be over.