At the same time, Rex and Javiera set about the complicated task of programming them, and Teo, Cai, and Ivan determined what information we would share with the brain trust. It had to be both convincing and straightforward; we certainly could not afford for the people inside the lab to sit around and debate the ideas they were receiving.
I am happy to say that Stella and I got along quite well. Though we were not always in sync—we had several fierce debates about the proper power supply to use—she and I came from the same mindset about recycling.
We both loved dumps!
It took us until dawn to finish the balloon transmitter array. By the time the hardware was built, programmed, and readied, we had four hundred balloons filled with helium under a tarp on the apartment rooftop. It was quite a colorful sight, like a nest of churning rainbows. Mr. and Mrs. Huerta, along with the aunt and uncle, came out with coffee and sweet rolls a few minutes after we had finished our work. They were stunned to see all the balloons.
Smart balloon
“This is…,” Mr. Huerta began but paused. “This is wild.”
“Wait until you see it in action,” I said. “We are going to make quite a scene.”
15.2
In Naija-land we have a saying, “A frog does not jump in the daytime without reason.”
You may consider this a silly proverb, but the truth of it is quite profound. A frog does not have many defenses. It must use stealth and, often, the cover of darkness to travel about and do frog-like things. So a frog moving about in the daylight is surely a risk-taking frog. The reasons for its being out must be very, very important. Or we are talking about a seriously crazy frog.
Regardless, this is the same approach that the LODGE and ULTRA took.
Rather than attempting to surreptitiously plant the balloon array around the Mexico City black box lab, we marched down the street with our giant bags of balloons. It was still early in the morning, not yet seven a.m., but we wanted to make a spectacle. It was, of course, an idea that Cai had.
“If we sneak around,” she said as we readied all our equipment, “people will become suspicious and call the police quickly. If we walk down the sidewalk like revelers headed to a party, people will assume that is exactly what we are. We can say something about this being the grand opening of the black box lab.”
We all laughed at that, though Cai insisted it was somewhat true.
Mr. and Mrs. Huerta transported us, and our equipment, in a rental van to a spot two blocks from the black box lab. The balloons themselves were under a clear tarp strapped gently to the roof of the van. It was quite a sight.
Once we arrived, we began our spectacle.
Being myself, I did worry about accidentally causing car crashes due to the fact that we might be distracting drivers. But this worry came to naught; there was quite a traffic jam along our route and, if anything, we cheered those anxious commuters!
“What are we showing them?” I asked Cai as we walked.
“It was tricky coming up with the most effective material,” she said. “These are people like us, prodigies looking for ways to use their gifts to better the world. They’ve bought into Kiran’s concepts, his whole song and dance. We realized it would be too hard to get them to completely dismiss Kiran himself—”
“Why is that?” I asked. “He does many bad things.”
“But he does them out of a twisted belief that they lead to good things.”
“Ah,” I said, “I see. So, if you cannot make him look bad…”
“Then we make what he does look bad,” Cai continued. “We need them to see the end result of his actions. If we can show them what that virus they’re about to release is going to do—if we can show them how bad Shiva will be—then we can convince them that they don’t want to be part of it. They don’t necessarily have to hate Kiran, but they need to see him as misguided.”
“That way they still feel good about themselves.”
“Right,” Cai said. “We don’t want them to feel like monsters for working on this project with OndScan. Guilt will just poison them more. We want these people to be on our side, to join us.”
Ah, Cai, always the wisest!
Once we got to the black box lab, we put our plan in motion. While Rex, Teo, and Javiera went to the roof of the neighboring building that housed all of the satellite dishes and radio antennae to begin the broadcast, Stella and I began releasing the balloons around the exterior of the lab. The trick was spacing them properly: too far apart and the signals would weaken; too close and they would overlap and, also, weaken. We tethered them all around five feet apart. By the time we had finished putting the balloons up fifty-three minutes later, it gave the Mexico City black box lab the feel of a carnival. So many colors!
With the balloons in place, I gave the signal to Rex.
Though it was silent, when he flicked on the network, Stella and I were able to view the feed through our cell phones. We sat side by side on the edge of the lab roof and watched as it all unfolded just beneath us.
Cai and Ivan had certainly outdone themselves.
The very first thing that happened was that every connected screen inside the lab flashed three times, an excellent way to get attention, before cutting to a shot of Cai done up in her finest Painted Wolf makeup and clothing. Her face filled most of the frame, and even though she was wearing her trademark sunglasses, you could feel her eyes burning straight into your cerebral cortex.
“Kiran has been lying to you,” she said in English. “The virus you are preparing will not usher in a new age of equality. Shiva will instead cause senseless and useless destruction, destruction that you will be a part of. Watch.…”
What followed was a cavalcade of imagery and documents, all from the files we had accumulated after Rex made his way into the Kolkata lab, the codes we had acquired in Beijing, the work Teo had done while in hiding, and the reams of things ULTRA had gathered up over the past few weeks. One did not need to have a degree in coding or advanced mathematics to see the overall effect. Pulling all of these disparate pieces together and revealing the overall shape of the puzzle was enough. The truth was simple: The brain trusters inside the Mexico City black box lab had never actually seen the full extent of what they were working on. They were like factory workers who only make a part of an apparatus but never see the full scope of the machine. We needed to show them what they were actually doing.
After the images and papers, the codes and secret e-mails, flickered across the screen, Cai reappeared. I am not ashamed to tell you that much to the bemusement of Stella, I clapped and cheered.
Painted Wolf said, “Now that you’ve seen what you’ve spent the past few weeks creating, you have a choice: You can attempt to help Kiran bring destruction to the world or you can join us and create real change. Brain trust, step outside of your lab, walk out into the street. We are waiting. Join us.”
The screen flashed again and then went to black.
I turned to Stella. She was grinning ear to ear.
16. CAI
45 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA
It took two minutes for the first of the brain trust members to emerge.
The metal door to the black box lab slid open, and a teenaged boy stepped out, blinking in the early morning light. He was lanky like Rex and had his hair in an Afro. I was standing there, alongside Ivan, with a simple paper sign that read:
WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION.
The teenaged boy walked over to me and said, “My name is Alfonso.”
“Hi, Alfonso. I’m Painted Wolf.”
“I, uh, I designed a lot of the infection mechanism the virus uses,” Alfonso said, a bit nervous. “I want to help you. I want to make things right.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Thank you. What stage is Shiva at now?”
Alfonso looked a bit surprised that I’d mentioned Kiran’s program by name, but he didn’t let it stop him for long. He said, “The program is up and running.”
“Do you have any way to a
ccess it?”
“No,” he said. “The way the program’s designed, once it’s finalized, Kiran takes full control of it. He’s the one who pulls the trigger, so to speak.”
“And there are no back channels? No remnant access codes?” Rex asked.
Alfonso shook his head. “Kiran wanted it bulletproof.”
“He knew we would be trying,” Tunde said, walking over to the conversation. “Kiran is no dummy. He and General Iyabo share the same trait for ultimate control. My worry is that the only way to truly stop the Shiva program is to take it from Kiran ourselves.”
“Can you tell us what Shiva will do?” Rex asked Alfonso. “I think we have a cursory idea of how it will hit banking accounts, businesses, and governments, but is there more beyond that?”
Alfonso sighed, long and loud.
“It’ll delete everything on the Internet,” he said.
We all looked at each other. As Rex had said, we all had a general idea of what exactly Shiva might accomplish, but I don’t think we truly realized the extent. To hear it so plainly made it sound that much worse.
Alfonso could read our worry. He said, “But while we don’t have the key to stop Shiva, there is something we do have.”
He turned and signaled to a girl with a metal briefcase.
“This is what you’re looking for,” the girl told me.
“What is this?” I asked as she handed me a briefcase.
“This is Rama,” Alfonso said. “Take a look.”
He opened the briefcase and revealed its contents. Inside was a single sheet of shiny metal the size of a standard index card, roughly three by five inches. The “metal paper” was as thin as regular paper but marked by various engraved dots and swirls, almost like the perforations on a sheet of stamps.
Rex stepped up alongside me and examined the paper.
“This what I think it is?”
Alfonso nodded. “Shiva was a virus, a program designed to wipe the slate clean,” he said. “And Rama is supposed to be the next step, a new Internet, a new world of data. Sizewise, Rama is twenty times bigger than Shiva. The trick was storing all that data in a way that could be easily transported. We chose to store it on state-of-the-art, nonvolatile, solid-state memory sheets. These involve memristors and allow us to make the storage devices quite small. This card, in fact, holds nearly a quarter of the Rama program.”
“Incredible,” I said. “And how do we extract the data?”
The brain trust girl said, “These.”
She pulled a scanner from her back pocket. The size of a cell phone, it resembled a magnifying glass, only the glass part was not clear but dark. She said, “This is positioned above the sheet—there is a stand inside each briefcase—and when it’s switched on, it will scan the data and transcribe it to whatever device you have linked up. Probably best to set it up with a laptop or a tablet computer.”
“And how long does that take?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes a sheet, give or take,” she said.
“How many sheets?” Rex asked.
“Ten,” Alfonso said.
I turned to see an additional nine brain trusters emerging with briefcases. We had the Rama code, the second part of Kiran’s grand plan.
Within the next fifteen minutes, all of the brain trusters walked out of the lab and into the street. There were forty of them all together. They stood around, talking to each of us, telling us what their area of expertise was and how they wanted to help. Even better, a good number of them came out of the black box lab holding flash drives, binders, and even laptops.
Our plan had worked.
And just in time, too. As we stood there conversing, several of the helium balloons holding network transmitters popped overhead. The balloons sank, their contents falling to the street. The network was disabled and our signal lost.
Watching Tunde and Rex talk to the brain trusters was incredibly inspiring. I’d never considered the brain trust people to be enemies, just deluded kids who wanted to do the best thing for the world but found the wrong route. We’d taken down Terminal, and now we’d liberated the brain trust. Two threats were disabled, but we weren’t close to done.
Kiran still had Shiva in hand.
16.1
Though Kiran had lost most, if not all, of his brain trust, I knew he was still dangerous.
One of the established concepts in game theory is unpredictability. Though it sounds like a contradiction, being unpredictable is a rational strategy. When you and your opponent have clashing ideologies, game theory says that you should behave in a way that leaves your opponent figuring out your intentions. If you move randomly, it’s difficult for them to outguess you.
We’d been outguessing Kiran for a few moves, but I knew he always retained the upper hand. Even with Rama, we still didn’t know what Kiran’s next move would be. My guess was that he’d launch Shiva. Even without Rama as the backup, he’d still get what he wanted: an overturn of the status quo.
Our next step had to be tracking him down.
Working with ULTRA and the brain trust, we moved all of the records, documents, and digital drives to Rex’s aunt and uncle’s apartment. I felt really bad knocking on their door that afternoon. Rex’s uncle Ernesto’s eyes bugged out when he saw we had a dozen more people with us than the day before. Luckily, the weather was good and the roof was large. We spread everything we could out on the hard-top, put up deck umbrellas, and settled in to go over what we’d acquired.
As the sun set, I decided I needed a break. I walked over to the water tower on the roof and sat on one of the steps that led up to it. The tower was squat like a gourd, and someone had painted it bright blue with a giant smiley face. It stared out over Mexico City with an eternal grin, no matter the weather or what took place below. I sat there a few moments, collecting my thoughts and noticing a scratch I’d somehow gotten on the back of my left hand, before Rex sat down beside me with a glass of water and a snack.
“So what brings you to Mexico?” he joked.
Then he took my hand and ran his fingers over it, noticing the cut.
“You need a bandage or something?”
It was a silly question; the cut was small.
“It’s nothing.”
“Looks like it hurt.”
“It’s a scratch,” I said. “I can handle a scratch.”
“I’m sure you can. You look pretty tough.”
“You flirting with me, Mr. Huerta?”
Rex winked.
For a second, I imagined us out on an actual, real-life date, but I couldn’t really see what that would look like. Definitely not us.
We both started laughing.
Then, as our chuckles ebbed, Rex got serious.
“The Rama program is something,” Rex said, “that I haven’t really dug into as deeply as I want to, but it’s impressive. If Kiran didn’t have the whole Shiva destruction thing, I could see Rama actually being a real gift to the world.”
“Think we can reprogram it?”
Rex nodded. “It’ll take time, but even if we strip it down to its parts, those are going to be some seriously helpful bits of code.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Enjoying each other’s company and looking out as the sun’s last few orange rays painted the horizon.
“Kiran’s going to fight with everything he’s got,” I said.
“And we’re stronger now than we’ve ever been.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so,” Rex said.
Tunde shouted from across the rooftop, “Here!”
Rex and I hopped down from the water tank’s steps and raced over to where Tunde was sitting. He was on a blanket under an umbrella going over several laptop computers with Stella, Javiera, and a couple of the brain trusters.
“What’d you find?” I asked Tunde as I sat down beside him.
“A location,” Tunde said.
He turned a laptop around and handed it to me. On the screen was a map of the Unit
ed States, but it didn’t look like the sort of map I was familiar with. This one was blue with a lot of rings radiating from a million little points. Tunde pointed to one of the points in the south of the country.
“There,” he said. “That is Kiran.”
“That’s where he is?” I asked, feeling my adrenaline surge again.
“No,” Tunde said. “It is actually just one ping on a cellular tower. He is somewhere near there, and if we can find additional pings, we can triangulate his location from them. My ULTRA and brain trust friends here have performed some amazing feats of digital wizardry, and I have no doubt they will be able to locate Kiran in the next few hours. But it will not be faster than that.”
“That’s excellent, Tunde,” I said, smiling to everyone.
17. Rex
43.5 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA
Stopping Kiran was obviously priority number one, but Teo and I had another problem we had to solve.
I was pretty much confident that with the combined brain power of the LODGE, ULTRA, and the kids from the brain trust, we’d be able to pinpoint Kiran’s location. Heck, we’d already done several impossible things before dinner.
Getting my parents back to the States, however, was a more personal challenge.
While everyone worked on the stuff we’d snagged from the black box lab, I pulled my brother aside for a conversation. This new version of my brother, the guy who seemed adept at sneaking around borders and trotting the globe untracked, needed to show me how we were going to get our family back to Santa Cruz.
We decided to make a coffee run.
“There’s a great café three blocks from here,” Teo said.
After we’d collected everyone’s orders (Tunde insisted on tea instead of coffee, of course), we walked downstairs and out into the city. The place was full of music and life: people in bright colors having incredibly animated conversations and the sound of percussion drifting out of every storefront.
“It’s not going to be as hard as you think,” Teo said.
Like I’d believe that.
“Go on,” I replied.
Genius--The Revolution Page 13