Genius

by Leopoldo Gout

  I wondered: What would Teo have put on it?

  Even more important: Why was it beeping? USBs don’t beep.

  As soon as the plane leveled and we were allowed to use preapproved electronics, I pulled out my laptop and put Teo’s old USB in. Took ten heartbeats for the thing to load, but when it did, I opened it to find a single file folder labeled MANIFESTO.

  The file inside was password protected.

  I tried a few of Teo’s old passwords, but none of them worked. Thankfully, I had a library of assorted “brute force” password-cracking tools. Most of them I’d tweaked. It always amazes me how lazy some developers can be.

  Took sixteen seconds to crack the password.

  I should have known it would be Rex Matteo Huerta.

  Teo wanted me to see this file. Maybe he’d wanted me to find it two years ago. Maybe my parents found it first and hung on to it. Regardless, I had it now and I needed to see what it contained.

  Inside was a simple text file that was downright chilling.

  TERMINAL MANIFESTO

  1. To learn is to create. Learning—whether it is programming, mathematics, art, music, poetry, biology, or chemistry—is all about breaking down walls and freeing the one thing that keeps us alive: knowledge.

  2. All knowledge is free. Free to share, exploit, or destroy. We believe that nothing that is created can truly be possessed and those that try to possess creations are doomed to failure. We are not what we make.

  3. Knowledge expands freedom in all its forms. Knowledge breaks down walls. It liberates the oppressed. We are committed to knowledge. Knowledge as a hammer against classism, against sexism, against racism, against gender discrimination, against slavery, against bigotry, against war, against hatred. If there is darkness in the world, we will light it up.

  4. Knowledge has been enslaved. Corporations, governments, universities, and armies have knowledge under lock and key. They know that knowledge is power and they blindly believe that holding on to knowledge means holding on to power. We are here to prove them wrong. We are here to free knowledge from its captors.

  Revolution is the only evolution.

  Hermano: What we started has gotten away from us. From this moment on, you must trust no one. Every camera is an eye. Every microphone an ear. Find me and we can stop him together.

  I sat staring at it slack-jawed for way too long.

  I couldn’t get my mind around what it meant. Teo was part of Terminal? Was he responsible for what they’d done? For all that pain and destruction? I couldn’t believe he was. There was no way my brother could do those things. And yet … here it was in black and white.

  The last bullet was the one that concerned me the most. What had gotten away from him and why was he on the run? Who was this person, this “him,” that we had to stop together?

  My blood pressure had spiked so high I thought I might pass out.

  Didn’t matter what any of it meant, the real message was clear: Teo was in trouble. He needed my help. It wasn’t until the USB beeped again that I realized the situation was even more urgent than I’d thought.

  Okay, here’s where things got crazy.

  I saved the image on my laptop and pulled the USB. It looked like an average thumb drive, but when I cracked it, I found a rice-sized receiver. Next-generation spy tech like that doesn’t just drop into the hands of a teenager. Not even a brilliant one like Teo. That’s probably why I couldn’t reverse the reception on it and figure out where it was getting its signals. Worse, it broke when I tried to take it apart. This was fragile tech, the mark of something new.

  Still, I wasn’t defeated.

  Someone had been communicating with the USB. Someone had been actively adding to and editing the file on it. A quick look confirmed it was real: The manifesto text had been edited as recently as three hours before my flight.

  If it was Teo, and I knew it was, this meant he was alive.

  And he was in serious trouble.

  7.1

  The bumpy bus ride to the Boston Collective was crowded.

  I assumed at least some of the young people sitting around me were there for the Game. At least a few of them had to be my competition. Still, I didn’t have time to size them up or eavesdrop on their conversations. What I’d discovered on Teo’s USB had my mind racing.

  I sent numerous texts and e-mails to Tunde and Painted Wolf telling them I was in town and ready to roll. And that I had big news to discuss as soon as we could. Neither replied immediately. I figured they must be traveling.

  I called Ma and told her I was in safely, but tried to make the conversation as short as possible. Papa was at work, but he’d asked Ma to ask me about the present.

  “Thanks, Ma. It’s great. I’m going to make Teo proud with it.”

  What I couldn’t tell her was that Teo was mixed up in some seriously bad stuff. Worse, he might even have masterminded some of it. Until I found him, I had to keep that to myself.

  To do that, I needed what the Boston Collective had.

  Accessing the quantum computer wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t online, so there was no way for me to hack my way into it. I had to find it and access it manually. That required me to figure out exactly where it was.

  First thing I needed to do was access the Collective’s servers.

  Luckily, I found Carlos Hernandez.

  He was a Boston Collective student just a year older and also from California two rows in front of me on the bus. Even better, he was pretty lazy with his cell phone security.

  As the bus crossed over the Fort Point Channel, I used a cracked Slingshot device to pick up and condense passing Wi-Fi signals, then hacked into Carlos’s student account. I figured since I’d already dived headfirst into some seriously gray ethical areas, how bad could one more hack really be?

  I quickly skimmed through his e-mails, feeling really bad and hoping that moving quickly would somehow make my intrusion less horrible. I didn’t open anything until I found what I was looking for: Carlos, like most students, hadn’t deleted his student account activation e-mail.

  It gave me his password and PIN.

  Using that, I downloaded a VPN client and got ready.

  By the time the bus crossed Harvard Bridge, I was into Collective’s network. I had access to the campus servers and took a cursory look.

  The quantum computer wasn’t popping up.

  At least, I didn’t see it.

  And while I could find information about it being built, there wasn’t any info about exactly where on campus it was being housed. So I figured, enough with the screens, if I was going to find the machine I’d have to get out and get my feet wet.

  Literally.

  7.2

  The bus reached its destination and I darted out into the pouring rain.

  East Coast–style rain, not the wispy, warm stuff we get in Santa Cruz.

  Map of the Boston Collective campus

  This was cold and nasty.

  Only thing I had to protect me against the downpour was my hoodie. I pushed into the wind and rain, past students rushing for cover, and ran to the student center.

  Closest thing I could compare it to was a mall; there were lots of staircases, ramps, meeting rooms, lounges, vending machines, cozy but artfully designed furniture, and soothing colors.

  I followed several people who seemed to know where they were going, but they quickly vanished behind doors or down stairs. I really wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be and wondered if maybe my invitation had been incomplete.

  “Nice USB. I use one like that to flash firmware from DOS.”

  I turned around to find a girl, maybe fifteen, with close-cropped red hair and a tablet in her hand. She had a duffel bag over her shoulder.

  I touched the USB necklace. “Thanks. It was my brother’s.”

  “Welcome to the Game. I’m Edith. One of the supervisors.”

  “Hey, Edith. I’m … Rex.”

  Edith glanced down at her tablet and scrolled fo
r my name. I held my breath as her finger swiped across the screen. My name was on there. It had to be on there. I didn’t come this far to have my name not be—

  “Rex Huerta?”

  Whew. It worked.

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “Great to see you.” Edith reached out and shook my hand. “You’re name’s kind of familiar. Maybe I set up your account? Anyway, I’m with OndScan. Supervisor, like I said. I helped Kiran put this little shindig together and I’ll be your guide, so to speak. At least for the next fifteen minutes. Any questions, you can ask me. But there are some things I can’t tell you.”

  “Like what exactly the Game is.”

  “Yes, like that.” Edith smiled. I liked her already.

  “So, where do we start?”

  Edith began walking; I followed her.

  “This is where we’ll have morning meetings. Everyone is expected to attend at eight a.m.; I know, it’s early. You can get food here in the Morrison Food Court. They have all the regular stuff like Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s also a café with some pretty great scones.”

  We turned a corner, took some stairs up.

  “What do you do at OndScan?” I asked.

  “Cryptography. Mostly I design proprietary ciphers.”

  “Awesome. Anything I’d know?”

  “Brokendoor. It’s a symmetric key block cipher, like Twofish but a lot faster.”

  Block cipher

  “Yeah. I know it.”

  Edith paused, looked me over again.

  “You’re not Huerta like the LODGE Huerta, right?”

  “That’s me.” I smiled.

  Edith laughed. “I knew the name was familiar.”

  My first fan, I was impressed. Here less than ten minutes …

  “Actually,” Edith said as we started walking again, “I’ve had a major beef with you. Sorry. Couple months back on your blog you did this real takedown critique of a buffer overrun—”

  I cringed. I remembered writing it. “The Unsworth program. Right…”

  Edith gave me a half smile. “I worked on it with some friends, in our off hours. It was kind of a labor of love but also something we thought we could sell. Actually had a company interested until they read your criticism.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t feel bad. You pointed out some real flaws.”

  “I was way too harsh, though.”

  “Kind of. Yeah. Anyway, I’m still a fan of the LODGE. Painted Wolf just keeps doing some seriously amazing stuff. Everything she posts, it’s … wow. She’s really making a name for herself. Pretty hot, too.”

  Edith picked up the pace, legs moving like a speed walker’s.

  We exited the student center, made our way across a lawn. It was drizzling and already ten degrees colder than fifteen minutes earlier.

  Edith turned up the collar on her coat and pointed out a building gleaming in the distance. “That’s your dorm there. Hoban. A nice walk when the weather’s good.”

  She moved quickly, faster than me. But I picked up the pace and caught up with her. “Listen, Edith, can I ask you a cryptographic question? Although I’m not sure that’s even a word or if I used it right.”

  “Of course. Shoot.”

  I knew my chance when I had it. I needed to know where the quantum machine was and I was sure that Edith knew.

  “Say I was interested in post-quantum cryptography,” I started.

  “Okay,” she said with obvious interest.

  “People running quantum key distribution might be out of luck pretty soon given recent advances. Just a matter of time before Shor’s—”

  Edith chuckled. “You have access to a quantum computer? If you didn’t, and most of the world doesn’t, then I’d assume those people were pretty safe.”

  “Well, that was my second question.”

  Edith was clever; she wasn’t falling right into my trap. I had to work around her defenses, figure out a way to engineer a slipup. Make her tell me something she wasn’t planning to.

  “There are no quantum machines online now.”

  “There’s one on this campus,” I countered.

  “It’s not online.”

  “Of course, it’s just for research purposes. True quantum machines are still five or ten years out. But this one, I’m guessing it’s something special. Next-generation-level computing,” I said, feeling my way carefully into my next question. “OndScan wouldn’t put the Game here just for grins, though, right? How cool would it be to get over to the computer science lab, boot that bad boy up, and run some cryptographic schemes against it?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a bit to get a peek at the machine.” Edith smiled as we reached the door to the dorm. “The OndScan building is locked down until Zero Hour.”

  “Of course.”

  Mission accomplished: The quantum machine was in the OndScan building. Now I just had to figure out where that was.

  “I’m sure I’ll see you around,” Edith said as she opened the door.

  “Definitely,” I said. “Oh, and sorry again about the mean critique of Unsworth. It’s still a cool program. With a few tweaks I’m sure it’ll be great.”

  Edith gave me a sour glance before she ushered me inside.

  7.3

  Contestants.

  Here they were, Kiran’s hand-selected prodigies: dozens of young men and women, all of them my age or younger, sitting on couches and chairs and talking. The nervous energy was palpable. It was like walking into a room of people five minutes before they took the SAT.

  Edith cleared her throat. Then, when she had the attention of everyone in the room, she said, “Hey, everyone. This is Rex Huerta.”

  A round of limited applause followed.

  I smiled to the crowd and waved awkwardly.

  No one waved back, but who cares.

  Scanning the faces, I didn’t see Tunde or Painted Wolf.

  Where were they?

  Edith patted me on the shoulder. “I’ve got to run back to the student center, someone here will show you to your room. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to try to track me or one of the other supervisors down. See you soon.”

  As soon as the door closed behind Edith, the rest of the contestants went right back to their previous conversations.

  I made my way through the lobby and sized up the competition.

  I passed: A girl, possibly fifteen, chatting about natural language processing with an obese young man with a beard; a tall girl mulling over terascale data sets with a Mohawked dude; and a guy in sunglasses testing out a detailed model of the Curiosity rover built from matchsticks and powered by a lemon.

  Most said hello or nodded as I walked past them.

  The Mohawked dude high-fived me.

  Wasn’t until I’d nearly crossed the room that I realized how comfortable I suddenly felt. Listening to them, I felt the same deep-down, joyous tremor that ran like soda up my spine when I was online with Tunde and Painted Wolf. It was the feeling of being home, the feeling of being among my people.

  As Papa says, “Pájaros de un mismo plumaje vuelan juntos.”

  Birds of a feather, indeed …

  “Are you Rex Huerta?”

  I turned around to see a young girl standing at my side. She smiled wide. The fact that she was missing her two front teeth brought up warm memories of that addictive Christmas song. I instantly recognized her from a forum post: a Spanish girl, almost supernaturally skilled in chemistry. She didn’t wait for confirmation of my identity.

  “I just wanted to tell you that the structural formula program you wrote was incredible. I use it all the time.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I wrote that for my brother. He was big into chem.”

  “In Córdoba I don’t get to talk to many others kids like me. There are a few but they’re younger. I really love the LODGE. You guys are supercool. Please tell me Painted Wolf is going to be here.”

  Her accent was thick, her lisp ev
en thicker.

  “Yeah, she is. Tunde, too,” I said.

  “No way.”

  “Yes. By the way, I recognize you. What’s your name?”

  She beamed. “Rosa.”

  “Hey, Rosa. Yeah, read about you online.”

  “On the Prodigy Planet site?”

  “That’s right. That is where I read it. I was really impressed.”

  Rosa grinned.

  “I hope we’re on the same team together,” she said. “It’d be a movida. A party.”

  “You excited?”

  “Of course!” Rosa squealed. “This is going to be insane. You can’t have so many smart people in one place and not have them looking around. Some people have been talking and I overheard a rumor that the Game is all about insects. How crazy is that?”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I also heard that if you win, the real prize—not the money or the fame or whatever—is a key to a machine that will change the world.”

  “You believe that one?”

  She laughed. “Can’t change the world, silly.”

  Sounds like we have a similar outlook.

  “So, you know where you’re going?” Rosa asked.

  “Not really. Can you show me?”

  Rosa led me across the room to a sheet posted on the wall. It was a printout of all the contestants’ names. I saw Painted Wolf’s name before Rosa drew my attention to my own. “You’re in 402,” she said. “I’ll walk you up.”

  We took the stairs to the fourth floor. On the way, Rosa asked me everything she could about the LODGE. How we met. How we get along. Was it true I had a crush on Painted Wolf? She said there was a rumor online that I might.

  After walking me to my door, she said, “I’m on the second floor. Rooming with a girl from Norway. She’s sweet but a little loud. I hope I see you guys at dinner, if not earlier. Please tell me I can take a picture of you all together! Oh, and watch out for this kid named Kenny. We were in a competition last year and he totally ripped off my design for a dehydrator. I hate that guy.”

  “Sure,” I said, totally confused, as she raced off.

  I opened the door to 402 and stepped inside.