“Some insider info,” Painted Wolf said as she held her cell phone up so I could see it. On the screen was displayed a freeze-frame of the floor plan that had been buried in the ones and zeros of the digital moth. “This is the OndScan building. Safe’s on the floor below the quantum computer.”
Turning to Rex, she added, “How about a recon mission later today?”
Rex nodded. “Most definitely.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Thank you. You two will not mind if I do not join you, right? I need to have the jammer finished before we dive into the safecracking machine.”
Rex said, “We’ll keep you in the loop.”
Painted Wolf added, “Do you need any help?”
“Not yet, thank you. Now, I just need to build what I have designed.”
Rex smiled. “Then you do your thing. We’re here if you need us.”
My thing. What an excellent phrase, I thought.
That was exactly what I planned to do.
17.2
The engineering lab was not as I expected.
It was large, almost too large.
It had every engineering tool you could ever want. Luckily, there was an inventory list on a bench at the front of the lab. I flipped through it and saw many tools I was not familiar with. Glancing around, I found that all of them were filed away neatly in drawers with small printed labels.
I have never seen a ratchet set so perfectly organized.
My teammates began working on the safecracking machine.
“I’m thinking robotics,” Norbert said as he scanned the room.
“Robotics are always a good idea,” I replied.
“Treads,” Halil added. “We’ve got to consider counterattacks.”
“Counterattacks?” Anj scoffed. “Seriously? Who would—”
“Uh, Kenny?” Norbert said. “That guy’s definitely an offense kind of person.”
“Treads and armor plating, then,” Halil clarified.
Norbert shook his head. “That’ll take too long. We need to go light.”
“Then maybe we go small?” Anj suggested.
“Naw, naw.” Norbert grinned. “We go big. Huge. Biggest in the room.”
Halil nodded. “I like the way this guy thinks.”
“I do as well,” I said. “If we could balance those two directions and build something powerful but not overly heavy, we can surely have a machine to be reckoned with.”
While all the materials and equipment immediately inspired Norbert, Halil, and Anj, I found myself surprisingly blocked. They drew plans on the whiteboards, but nothing truly clicked for me. You can tell an idea works when it is simple, when everyone assembled can see it without saying a word. All the ideas my teammates came up with in that perfect lab were very good; Norbert in particular had several ingenious approaches to the actual safecracking. Still, the ideas did not click.
They required too much explanation.
As the others discussed tactics, I realized why I was having trouble. Every direction I looked in, I could see the tools I would need, and yet I could not see myself being able to build the machine that was required in that room. It needed to be a masterpiece. It had to be the finest machine I had ever created. And yet to build something at that level, I needed to be among tools that I understood. Tools that spoke to me. I needed tools and materials that were proven.
“My friends,” I called out, and stood. Everyone turned to me. “I do not feel as though I can accomplish what I need to in this space. It is too antiseptic. All of the adventure and grit has been cleared away. I need repurposed materials. I understand that this is all top of the line, but for my creativity to work, I need to be surrounded by used materials and tools. I am sorry.”
Norbert looked to Anj, and Anj shrugged.
“I have everything I need right here,” Norbert said.
Halil spoke up. “I feel you, Tunde,” he said. “Don’t forget, I live just a few miles away; I know of a place you’re going to love.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Can you tell us where it is?”
“Off campus a few miles,” Halil replied. “I’ll go with you.”
Norbert said, “I’ll stay here. Maybe Anj and I can work on the programming end of things. Get some platforms schematized.”
“Thank you, I will not be long,” I said.
Then I turned to Halil. “Is the walk difficult?”
“No,” Halil replied. “Mostly because my cousin has a bus.”
17.3
Halil had quite the impressive cousin!
He was taller and older than Halil and built like a steam locomotive. His name was Walid and he was a self-taught mechanic much like myself. Only instead of working with modern technology, he had focused his mechanical attentions on things of yesteryear. This was what we would call analog. He was a true maker.
Walid had a recent project that was of great interest: an ancient bus.
“I rebuilt the engine myself,” he proclaimed very proudly in an accent that was heavily Bostonized. When he pulled the enormous vehicle around to the front of the student center, it belched great clouds of black and tarry smoke like a primordial dragon. I instinctively knew that his neighbors did not like this tinkerer.
“I’ve rebuilt fifteen of these buses. All in my own driveway,” he said as we walked around the vehicle. It was quite impressive. “Ripped out most of the seats, so you’ll just have to hang on in your own way. But I could tow a yacht in the back of this beast.”
Halil and I hopped aboard the bus and Walid drove us across the city to what he and Halil referred to as “the dump.” We rolled back and forth inside the rusted belly of the bus. I found it quite entertaining. I regaled them with stories of the buses in Nigeria. If Walid was ever in search of a job and was willing to travel, he would have quite a future in Naija building a next-generation danfo.
I cannot tell you how wonderful it felt to see the dump. It was like the junkyard near Akika Village but twenty-seven times the size.
It was a veritable paradise.
Ah, dat place chassis oh!
As Halil and I walked among the towering mounds of metal, my mind raced at every mechanical beauty that we passed. A broken air-conditioning unit became a portable refrigerator; a Honda Civic engine became a pulley system to bring supplies across gorges; and a shattered fax machine held the parts to construct a book-scanning device. There was simply so much. Sheh kpe!
I did not hesitate to grab an old shopping cart when we came across it.
The cart quickly filled, though I knew I could not take everything.
Watching me, Halil smiled. “You love this place, don’t you?”
“More than anywhere. It is a library of invention.”
To start, I needed antennae from old cell phones, mixer ports, clock oscillators, and anything I could salvage from radio-controlled flying toys. I found all of these and many more. I was certain, given the material I had acquired in just an hour at the dump, that I could make a machine that would have Kiran jumping out of his luxury footwear!
Yet it was only as we prepared to exit the junkyard that I noticed something shoved beneath a pile of broken computer monitors. I pushed the monitors aside to reveal a gorgeous piece of hardware.
“This,” I told Halil, “is to be our machine.”
What I had revealed had treads and a stout base that appeared to have been smashed into and burned. I did not have the slightest idea what it could have originally been. Perhaps some munitions disposal robot?
Emblazoned on the side of the small tanklike machine was a single word written in bold lettering: RAVAGER.
Ravager blueprint
I dragged it from the trash.
“I think it was a fighting machine,” Halil said. “Like in the competitions.”
“What competitions?”
“Robot battles. Engineering students build machines like this and then fight them inside a cage to see which is the best built, the most dangerous. Sometimes it’s broadcast
on TV. It’s kind of a popular thing.”
I could not believe my ears. “Are you telling me that they build sophisticated machines for the sole purpose of destroying them?”
Halil nodded.
“How barbaric!” I shouted. “Well, we will rehabilitate this sorry machine. We will transform Ravager into Efiko and it will become a robot of success and intelligence, not a war machine.”
“Efiko?” Halil asked.
“Ah, I apologize,” I said. “It means ‘very studious.’ We will turn this robot of destruction into a student, a thinker. All we need now is to find an arm.”
18. CAI
01 DAY, 19 HOURS, 12 MINUTES UNTIL ZERO HOUR
After Tunde and his team left, I pulled Rex aside.
“How about we put my superhero skills to work?”
“What are you talking about?” Rex asked.
“Now’s the perfect time to break into Kiran’s secret room, just you and me. We’ll get to the quantum computer and load WALKABOUT and I can do some additional investigatory work. Find out what Stage One is all about.”
Rex grinned. “I love it.”
We told the rest of our team that we had to get some CPU schematics for Rex’s program, that it would take only an hour, an hour and a half at most, and then we’d meet up with them. Rosa and Ambrose told us to meet them on the roof of their dorm, just across from the one Tunde and Rex were in. That sounded weird, but Ambrose explained it was a safe place.
We agreed and then peeled off from the group.
“Where do we start?” Rex asked.
“Kiran’s got cameras all over the place,” I said. “Even if we can get through the doors and bypass the alarms—”
“I got the alarms. No worry there. Cameras are your deal.”
“Depends if they’re live feed or videotapes. We can’t shut down the power, that’ll set off the alarms,” I said, thinking aloud. “If the camera feeds are live and someone’s watching, we will need a miracle. If they’re not, we can scramble the recorded feeds or erase the data. Regardless, we need to get in unnoticed.…”
“Might be hard.”
That’s when I remembered an impressive stunt a blogger in Tibet had pulled off a year earlier. “I’ve got it,” I said. “All we’ll need are baseball caps, some LEDs, wiring, two nine-volt batteries, and a green laser. We could grab a laser from one of the labs, but that might raise some red flags. Any idea where we can find this stuff?”
“Shouldn’t be too hard.”
There are essentially three ways to avoid being picked up by video cameras and facial-recognition software. First, actively disable the cameras, either by cutting power or smashing their lenses or otherwise physically damaging them, which is messy and would get us caught. Second, wear a disguise. We needed to do that regardless, but I had another plan in mind. Option three was the most complicated but also the most fun.
After Rex had stopped by his room to grab the WALKABOUT hard drives, we found everything we needed to construct our anti-security systems at a hardware store across the street from campus. Rex picked a Boston Red Sox ball cap. My cap had the Liberty Bell on it. That seemed quite fitting.
I punched small holes around the front and sides of the cap and threaded the LEDs through, arranging them in a zigzag pattern. Ten LEDs did the trick. I wired them to the nine volts, which I had stuffed into the back of the cap. Not terribly comfortable, but it worked.
Rex was impressed. “Nice. So what’s next?”
“We need costumes.”
We made our way to the Wheatley Sports and Fitness Center and found it unlocked. Tucked away near the main office was a bin of clothing labeled LOST AND FOUND. Rex grabbed an oversized hoodie and fit the hard drives in its pockets. I picked up a sweater and jeans. Not a perfect fit but good enough.
We changed in the bathrooms.
Rex was quiet when I walked out.
“I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing videos in this or anything.”
“No,” he said. “You look good.… You look relaxed.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, but his eyes told me he was fascinated seeing me dressed down. I didn’t want him to linger on me so I elbowed him in the ribs. “You look like a middle school student.”
As we ran across campus, I explained how the baseball caps would protect us. “Even though the LEDs aren’t particularly bright, video cameras pick up any available light sources. In the cameras, the LEDs will flare crazily. It’ll look like we’ve got exploding suns for heads.”
“Beautiful,” Rex said. “And then?”
“Then we hit them with the green laser. Boom. Overwhelms their CMOS sensors and the camera goes down.”
“Wow, you’re totally a spy.”
I lowered my sunglasses and gave Rex a wink.
When we reached the OndScan building, we scrambled around to the loading bay at the rear. Rex paused at the back door, his fingers hovering over the security keypad. “You ready to do a little breaking and entering?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
18.1
Rex wasn’t lying about his skills.
He was able to unlock the door in eleven seconds.
Rex studied the keypad and narrated his thinking. “This is a Tartan system. It’s high-end and trickier than you might imagine. Cracking the passcode the traditional way, looking for wear and tear on buttons or even fingerprints, won’t get us anywhere. The code changes every day. But there’s a good chance we won’t even need it.…”
With that, Rex entered a long series of numbers and symbols on the keypad. A metallic click reverberated through the door and it softly swung open.
“Voilà,” Rex said.
“How did you do that?”
“Even the most intelligent people in the world get sloppy. Whoever installed this door probably sold OndScan on its state-of-the-art security but forgot to delete the factory-default passwords. Oops.”
With that, Rex ushered me inside.
I led the way, pausing to glance around every corner like a spy.
Every camera we passed, I hit it with the green laser. All it took was shining the laser straight into the lens for about three seconds and then listening for a subtle whirring sound as the camera crashed.
I took out ten cameras in the lobby alone.
Rex ate it up. He clearly loved playing the covert angle and soon he was “scouting ahead” to make sure the “perimeters were clear.”
I laughed as he somersaulted down a hallway, crept on his belly under a table, and sprinted diagonally across an empty lobby. He was being silly. Still, I was impressed by how carefully he moved. He might have been playing it for laughs but he knew what he was doing.
“This isn’t your first time, is it?” I asked quietly as we ducked behind a half wall to survey the elevator banks.
“Teo taught me a few tricks.”
“I can’t wait to meet him.”
Rex grabbed my hand and we ran across the lobby and hit every elevator button as we passed. We both laughed when he dived behind a potted fern and knocked it over.
I helped him up and dusted him off.
As I did, I could feel his eyes. He was watching me, staring at my face.
I could not help but blush.
“We need to hurry,” I said, turning away.
“Of course,” Rex said. He was suddenly serious, his mood changed from playful to focused. I instantly regretted it, but I wasn’t ready to let him get too close. He only knew Painted Wolf. He did not know me.
Rex had to hack his way through two additional sets of doors before we reached the staircase and made it to the floor with the quantum computer. I was careful to get all the cameras in the room. I counted fifteen.
When Rex saw the computer, he nearly fell to his knees in awe.
“You know how long I’ve dreamed of this moment?”
“Too long,” I said.
“Way too long.”
Rex walked acros
s the glass floor, eyes glued to the quantum computer. When he reached it, he ran his fingers along its bulky metal surface. “It’s cold,” he said. “Which is crazy because the thing’s generating enough heat to melt a fridge. They did some spectacular work insulating it.”
Rex took his time.
He found a rack with an input computer and a USB port, but then he hesitated. He looked over and gave me a sheepish smile.
“Is it strange that I’m nervous about this?” he asked.
“Are you worried it won’t work?”
“No,” he said. “I’m worried it will.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve spent the last few years looking for Teo. What if I find him? What if he isn’t the same as I remember? What if he won’t talk to me?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “He’s your brother.”
Rex nodded, grabbed his hard drives, plugged them in, and got to work. He had to hack his way through a dozen security and administrative screens. Then he paused, facing down a series of complicated passwords. “I have to get through all these and then figure out how to get this thing online. Kiran’s running his shadow Internet in here. It’s complicated code, a lot of it dark. I’m going to have to set up a proxy, smoke screen my getting in, then set up another pipeline.”
“But you can do it, right?” I asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Don’t really have a choice. This might take a few minutes.”
“You can do it. I know you can.”
Rex flashed me a smile and then dived back in. While he worked, I walked over to Kiran’s Quartermaster room and picked the lock.
Stepping inside, I flicked on the light, lowered my sunglasses, and made my way around the office, making sure to scan the room slowly and let the camera in my sunglasses capture the images as cleanly as it could.
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