Genius

by Leopoldo Gout

  The truth of the moth suddenly clicked for me as well.

  “Gather in. She is right. It fits,” I whispered to the team as they surrounded me. “The wings responded to light, to the laser. That is how the code was revealed. But it does not work with the eyes. To find what is hiding behind the eyes, we must use a different sort of light. We must use a dazzler.”

  “What’s a dazzler?” Norbert interjected.

  “It is an infrared emitter. They are not uncommon and are often used in industrial processes that require heat, like laminating and embossing. I myself have used one in the creation of a germ eradicator. That project was not as successful as I had hoped, but an emitter should not be too difficult for us to create here. We can make one to operate in the red spectrum, perhaps even using what we already have on stage.”

  “How confident are you about this?” Kenny asked.

  “I cannot give a percentage, but it makes sense,” I replied.

  “I know it will work,” Anj said. “One hundred percent.”

  Kenny turned to Norbert and Rex. Rex nodded.

  Painted Wolf said, “Time to build, Tunde.”

  14.1

  We worked in secret as best we could.

  There were prying eyes all around as many more contestants entered the auditorium. I do not know how many had actually discovered that the original moth was key to decoding the riddle and how many had simply followed their compatriots, but the room was soon filled.

  All of these people were fighting for the same twelve spots. Time was no longer our only concern. Now we were going head to head with the other contestants. As if I needed more stress, see me see quanta!

  Pulling myself together and finding my core focus, I carefully drew the blueprints for a pair of laser diode dazzlers on a cafeteria napkin that Norbert had in his back pocket.

  He apologized for the pizza grease stains, but it e don do.

  I am not much of an artist, but I am proud of this design:

  Red Spectrum Dazzler by Tunde Oni

  If our rather radical plan failed we would have only a few hours to create something else before the deadline. I will tell you, we were all so anxious we could not sit still. The laser I was building was rather simple, but finding the parts was not.

  I had to scavenge from all the materials at hand.

  I felt bad about stripping the laser diode and collimating lenses from a projector at the back of the auditorium and worried about ripping wires and drivers from the PA system, but Painted Wolf assured me that if the cost was not covered by OndScan, she and Rex would figure out how to pay the university back. I assured myself I could worry about my unlawful vandalizing later.

  I found a quiet place on the stage to assemble my device. Norbert assisted me, and I asked Rex, Painted Wolf, Kenny, and Anj to stand in a tight circle around us, effectively blocking the view for those eager-eyed contestants curious as to what we were doing.

  As I did not have a soldering iron, Norbert offered me the use of a lighter he kept in case of emergencies. His backpack was jammed full of things, including a small package. It was oblong and about the size of a toaster. “For when I’m ready to celebrate,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He smiled. “A confetti bomb.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Not really. You’ll see when I win.”

  “But what if you lose?” I asked.

  “I’ll be bummed. Regardless, fifteen seconds after the final bell rings, this baby is going off and it’s confetti time. Woo-hoo!”

  I stripped the wires and insulation with my teeth and then used the lighter to heat a length of metal. Norbert watched the assembly of the laser dazzler very carefully. “Tell me again how this is going to work,” he said several times.

  “I assume it will disrupt the projection in much the same way as the traditional laser light does,” I said. “Perhaps it will reveal something underneath.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not just another dead end. Or worse, another puzzle.”

  Norbert held up his cell phone to show me the clock ticking down.

  06:32:15

  As in eh, we all fail anyhow!

  I finished the laser at three in the morning. It was not until that very moment, finally lifting my head to observe the change in the room around me, that I noticed several other groups of contestants assembling machines that looked ominously like dazzler lasers. We were not alone in figuring out the puzzle!

  I counted three teams who were manufacturing emitters. Additionally, there were two teams, each with four members, examining the moth very closely. Too closely for my comfort. If they had not discovered the hidden code already, they would accomplish it within only a few minutes.

  Our situation was not good and Painted Wolf realized it, too.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to me with a wink, “I’ll take care of this.”

  Speaking loudly so the other contestants might hear her but not at a volume that was too obvious, Painted Wolf walked over to Rex and Norbert and said, “I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t found that painting in the library basement. That thing was key to cracking—”

  She stopped short and then lowered her voice as though she had just realized that everyone in the room was listening. “I mean,” she continued, practically whispering, “we really caught a lucky break there.”

  What an excellent actress Painted Wolf is!

  Her performance was so believable that within only a few minutes, the rest of the contestants jostled for the exit as they raced to the library to find the painting.

  Kenny, despite himself, was impressed. “Dang,” he said, “you’re cold!”

  “We’re here to win,” Painted Wolf replied. Then she glanced at me knowingly. “I’m sure it won’t take them long to figure out they’ve been tricked. How are we doing, Tunde?”

  “The Knockout is done.”

  This is what I had dubbed my creation. Knockout, in Naija, is what we call fireworks. Painted Wolf led the group in collecting their breath as I positioned the Knockout on a chair across the stage from the digital moth.

  Biting into my knuckles, I turned the Knockout on and it buzzed to life.

  14.2

  Norbert cheered.

  I did not.

  Already I could see the Knockout was having problems. It shook ferociously as though it would come apart. I blamed my lack of time and materials, but really, it was a shoddy job.

  One of the tricks with a machine emitting infrared beams is that they are impossible to see with the human eye. Unlike laser light, infrared is invisible. So focusing the beam on the eyes on the moth was not easy. I had to guess as best I could the angle. Without the correct angle, it appeared as though nothing was happening.

  “I am adjusting it.” I said, mostly to myself. “Just wait.”

  Anj knelt down beside me and said, “Try this.”

  I did not know what she could possibly want. Did she not see that I was engaged in a very complicated procedure? That I was keenly focused?

  I stopped what I was doing and was going to angrily snap at her when I saw that she was holding out her cell phone.

  “I adjusted the lenses, removed the filters,” she said. “Just a tweak.”

  But what a tweak it was! Using the camera on her cell phone, I was able to see the infrared beams emitted from the Knockout! There, on the screen, was a weak red line emerging from my device and hitting the digital moth on the chin. If, that is, a moth had a chin.

  I turned to Anj. “Many thanks, omo. You are a lifesaver!”

  I adjusted the beam so it would hit the eyes of the moth and …

  Nothing happened.

  This sent Kenny into a total panic. “What the hell, Tunde?”

  “Do not worry,” I said, trying to keep my hands from shaking. “I just need to adjust the strength of the beam. I think it is too weak at this point.”

  With the countdown drumming away in my head, I made my adju
stments as quickly as I could. All the while, the moth never flickered, even momentarily.

  “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go,” Kenny chanted beside me.

  “Maybe something’s wrong,” Norbert worried aloud.

  “No,” Rex said. “Tunde’s got this.”

  I glanced over at Rex and he gave me a thumbs-up.

  Believe, omo. Believe.

  Seconds later, something amazing happened.

  The eyes of the moth flickered and suddenly digital parts fell off like petals from a flower. The wings fell, then the legs, and then the antennae.

  As soon as the final part of the moth, the thorax, came tumbling down, the pieces began to reorganize themselves into a new pattern.

  It was a digital, top-down architectural floor plan for a single floor of a building. Done in neon red, the lines and symbols were rather ordinary, but what drew our attention most was an X placed in the center of a large room. It was certainly the location of the safe. Now we had to discover what building this floor belonged to. We had succeeded. Phase One was complete!

  We all cheered and clapped and hollered.

  Only seconds after the architectural drawing appeared, however, the Knockout exploded in a cloud of smoke and dust that quickly filled the auditorium! Anj and Kenny screamed as scraps of metal and screws flew across the room and I had to duck to avoid a bolt that shot by like a comet and embedded itself in the wall behind me.

  The image was gone, the Knockout destroyed.

  It was surely the most embarrassing event of my life!

  What sort of engineer was I?

  I dey nearly kpafuka on the spot!

  15. CAI

  02 DAYS, 06 HOURS, 07 MINUTES UNTIL ZERO HOUR

  The sun was up.

  As the smoke cleared and the last few bits of the Knockout clanked to the floor, we all stood staring at where the map had been a few seconds earlier. It appeared Tunde’s laser dazzler system was perfectly named.

  “Did everyone see that?” Norbert asked.

  We all nodded silently in unison.

  “I apologize for my poor design,” Tunde said, sitting, head hung low, on the edge of the stage. “If not for my stress, I believe I would have succeeded in making a better system. Certainly one that would not have exploded.”

  “I barely saw it,” Kenny said. “Anyone have a photographic memory?”

  Norbert said, “It was there maybe five seconds.”

  “I remember it,” Tunde said.

  Rex pulled a pen from his pocket and began drawing what he remembered of the map on the stage floor. “There was a large room here. A series of doors and a spiral staircase … It was … No, it was on the other side … Further to the left…”

  “Rex.” I knelt down beside him. “It’s okay.”

  “How?” He looked up at me, panicked.

  I held up my cell phone. “I have the image.”

  The screen grab I captured wasn’t ideal.

  Screen grab of the image

  It was fuzzy in the lower left corner and the very top of the image was cut off by a few millimeters, but we could see what we needed to see. While everyone was watching Rex sketch, I downloaded it from my earring camera to my cell, where it was crunched and archived. It was only a matter of scanning the resulting images for the one we needed.

  Seeing the image, the room instantly decompressed.

  “Did I tell you how amazing you are?” Rex jumped to his feet, hugged me, and spun me around so fast my wig almost flew off. He was joined by Tunde and Norbert, all of them hugging me and spinning around.

  It didn’t last long. Our feet got entangled and we all fell, laughing, to the stage in a heap. My sunglasses tumbled off and as Rex fell down beside me, he noticed my eyes. He stopped laughing immediately.

  I was wearing bright blue contact lenses, but he stared into my eyes intensely. It was almost like he could see my real eyes hidden beneath. We sat like that, staring, as my heart beat even faster and a weird, good-feeling anxiety welled up in my chest.

  But before either of us could say anything, the door to the lecture hall blew open. We scrambled to our feet.

  I grabbed my sunglasses and looked up to see Kiran and Edith.

  They waved the smoke out of their faces as they walked down to the stage.

  “Good job. You’re in,” Kiran said. “Not that I’m surprised. I should tell you, I personally chose every contestant here from a list of thousands.” Kiran glanced at Rex, who seemed to be trying to avoid his gaze. “Each and every one of you was meant to be here. But only a few were meant to win. How are you enjoying the competition thus far?”

  “Terrible,” Kenny said. “And I should tell you, I’m not convinced your selection of contestants has been as rigorous as it could have been.”

  Kiran smiled, turned to Tunde. “And you?”

  “Excellent.” Tunde forced a smile.

  Rex had moved to the back of the stage, but Kiran noticed him and called him out. “Mr. Huerta,” he said, “how have you found the challenge of Phase One?”

  “It’s been an experience.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s enough, right?”

  The pause that lingered between them told me something more was going on. Rex’s hiding went completely against his character. There was no way they could have known each other before this. No, it must be something else.

  Kiran turned back to me. “Can I see the phone?”

  I handed him my cell phone and he looked at the image of the map on it.

  “Very impressive,” he said.

  With a smile, he gave me back the phone.

  “Congratulations on reaching Phase Two. You should be very proud of yourselves. You’ve done amazing work here this morning. In an hour, we’ll know who the remaining two teams are. Now, if you all will clear out, that’ll give the remaining contestants time to make the cut.”

  “Please, tell us what we must do next,” Tunde said.

  Kiran seemed pleased.

  “You’re eager, that’s excellent. There will be a meeting this afternoon, I’ll fill you in on everything then. For now”—Kiran smiled—“rest.”

  15.1

  Kenny was outside before Kiran had even finished speaking.

  Anj followed Norbert to the exit, both of them shuffling their feet and yawning exhaustedly, eager to get to bed and catch a few hours of sleep before the next leg of the competition began.

  Rex walked over to me. “You ready?”

  I turned to leave with him and Tunde when Kiran spoke up.

  “Actually,” he said, “I have something I’d like to show you, Painted Wolf. Privately.”

  Rex raised an eyebrow and then looked to me for an explanation.

  I could only shrug and mouth: I. Don’t. Know.

  “Okay,” Rex said. “Um, well, we’ll meet back up with you later.”

  I watched as Rex took the stairs two at a time. I was exhausted, both from the competition and the long flight before it. I wanted to find my room, and take this costume off. I wanted to sleep. Rex paused at the door, turned back to face me, and waved. I moved to wave back, but he was gone before I could.

  Kiran cleared his throat. “I want to offer you a private tour.”

  “Of what? The campus?”

  “No,” Kiran said as he motioned for me to follow him backstage. “If you’re okay with it, I want to show you OndScan’s labs here. I want you to see the heart of the machine.”

  I thought it over. I was confident Rex and Tunde had things under control in terms of building the jammer. Maybe there was something I could get out of Kiran about why he was in China and why he was pressuring me to join his prodigy team.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We made our way through the auditorium’s back hallways, through numerous doors, and then down a flight of metal stairs. Kiran made small talk as we walked. “I realize the competition is rather silly. You’re used to doing things that have profound, real-world effects. You�
�re used to being out there, in the thick of it, chasing after the truth. I assume this probably bores you.”

  I thought that over. Maybe a few days ago, I would have said yes. The idea of the Game seemed unimportant when compared with everything else I was trying to do, but now, having been through Phase One, I found myself appreciating it.

  “No,” I said. “It’s been challenging. I’m glad I’m here.”

  We came to a steel door and Kiran paused.

  “You know, the only way my plan will truly succeed is if I have an intellectual counterpart at my side.”

  “Naturally,” I half joked. “So who’s that?”

  “You of course.”

  I could feel my skin tightening before he had uttered the final syllable.

  15.2

  Kiran’s modified Tesla Model S was waiting outside.

  I felt tiny in the passenger seat.

  He drove like a madman. But the drive was, thankfully, quite short. Eight minutes after we’d left the auditorium, we arrived at a large brick building, where Kiran took up two parking spots.

  As we walked into the building, I wondered at his intentions.

  Was he just flirting with me?

  Was there an awkward skin beneath that mask of brainy confidence?

  No. I was certain neither of those were true. He was being honest with me. He wanted me to join his team and he was going to do anything he could to convince me. That’s what had me most worried. What could I possibly offer him that he couldn’t find in any of the other contestants?

  We took two elevators, one of them accessible only with an ID card Kiran pulled from his wallet, to the fourth floor. After exiting, we walked through several doors protected by retinal scanners and biometrics.

  “This is our lab,” Kiran said as we entered a long white room filled with engineering equipment and computers. “We’ve got a partnership with the Collective. We pay for the equipment and their students are allowed to run research here. It’s a nice setup, and it’s in this very room that I came up with the first stage of the Game.”