Genius--The Revolution

by Leopoldo Gout

  “Remember my first year of college? Biochem?”

  “The class you made up a fake identity to attend?”

  “Right.”

  True story: Teo was in his first year at college and desperately wanted to be in this one advanced biochemistry class. But the school insisted that you couldn’t just skip courses, no matter how smart you were. So he made up this avatar, this fake Teo named Toro, gave himself all the requisite credits, and attended the class. The school, crazily, never caught on.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “That’s how we’re getting Ma and Papa back home and…”

  Teo stopped on a corner, and that’s when I realized we were standing across the street from where we’d been that morning—Kiran’s Mexico City black box lab. We’d come from a different direction, and I was a bit turned around.

  “… this is how we do it,” Teo finished.

  “Doesn’t look like a café,” I said.

  “The kids from Kiran’s team, the brain trust, they told me there’s a supercomputer inside the building. It’s not quantum, but most of those have been pretty much effectively locked down since Kiran got ahold of WALKABOUT. You’re the king on the specs, but they told me the machine’s fast. Very fast. One point nine petaflop performance speeds, forty thousand six-core processors.”

  Fast indeed, but …

  “Okay,” I said. “Now’s the part where you try to convince me we actually need to use a superfast supercomputer. What’re you thinking?”

  “Kiran ghosted you and your friends; we can ghost our parents.”

  “To do that we’d need the same access to WALKABOUT Kiran has.”

  Teo smiled. “You put in a back door, remember? India was just a few days ago, Rex. I’m starting to worry about you.”

  I hadn’t forgotten about the tweaks I’d pulled on WALKABOUT 2.0 in Kolkata, but I’d always intended them as a way to backstab Kiran. Leave it to my older, more devious, brother to use the back door to fool the authorities and sneak our parents back into the United States. Thing is, we were on our way to coffee, not a break-in.

  “You’re not actually thinking of doing this now.…”

  Teo nodded. “Of course, brother. When else would we do it?”

  17.1

  “Everything we’ll need is inside,” Teo said.

  “Sounds too easy.”

  “It is.”

  The way I saw it, we had maybe twenty minutes.

  Of course, I would have gladly spent every waking moment trying to get our parents home. But I knew we were on a tight schedule. A countdown to Armageddon we couldn’t ignore. It was time to push ourselves.

  Twenty minutes it is. We crossed the intersection to the front door of the black box lab. Teo paused before the biometric lock. “I’ve hacked these things before,” he said. “Can usually get into one within three, four minutes. I’m not worried about the lock on this door. But if I open it, it’s going to trigger some security measures on the network inside. The whole balloon thing established a bubble network, but the system still running inside here is all Kiran.”

  “So you’re saying the minute we step into this place it’ll set off alarms and Kiran’s going to know we’re in here.”

  Teo nodded as he began hacking the lock.

  “So,” I continued, “basically, we step into this building right now and it’ll put into jeopardy everything the LODGE and ULTRA have worked toward for the past forty-eight hours. We’ll be tipping off Kiran.”

  Teo said, “You got it. It’s also going to shorten our time inside.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we’ll maybe have ten minutes.”

  So much for twenty …

  I mentally played out our time inside the black box lab. We’d have to move fast, disable whatever cameras and alarms we found, tap into the network, take out Kiran’s security software, hit the supercomputer, get into the necessary government networks, change data, cover our tracks, and then get out of the building in as little time as possible and pray the whole run back to our aunt and uncle’s apartment.

  Easy, right? But …

  The stakes were huge. If Cai had been there, she would have had us debating the merits and mistakes of such a decision. I’d learned enough from her to better gauge risk. She took risks all the time, but they were smart risks. This, this seemed pretty damn dumb. And yet, it was my parents.

  They need to be home, Rex. This is all your fault.

  “We go in here,” I said. “And I need you to do everything I say, when I say it. We can’t mess around, brother. I need you to trust me on this.”

  Teo nodded his acknowledgment and placed his hand on the scanner.

  The door unlocked with a clank, and we were inside. The lights flickered on automatically as we walked across the main room. The black box lab felt entirely different deserted. As expected, alarms went off. Lights flashed. The whole place felt like it was going to explode in a matter of minutes. I snatched a laser pointer off a desk near an electronic whiteboard and took out the few ceiling cameras I saw.

  “There,” I said, pointing to a back staircase.

  I had to yell over the blaring alarms.

  We ran over to the stairs and barreled down them fast as possible.

  Sure enough, there was a supercomputer that filled the entire basement. It was massive, long lines of servers housed in black rectangular boxes that gave the thing a sort of ominous look. There was a logo of an angry, fanged cobra printed on the side of each server housing; above each serpent was the word Naga.

  “Naga,” Teo said. “The great snake of Hindu mythology.”

  “Doesn’t look like a nice guy.”

  “He causes earthquakes,” Teo said.

  That gave me little comfort as I settled into a rolling chair at the access terminal for Naga. It felt like I was sitting behind the wheel of a bullet train. Just a single monitor and keyboard to control this monster of a machine. Teo dragged another rolling chair over and sat beside me.

  Thankfully the scream of the alarms was quieter in the basement.

  I looked at my watch; five minutes had passed.

  “You can do this, Rex,” Teo said. “Just focus.”

  Getting past the log-in screen was relatively easy. Even though the password was automatically updated every three minutes, I was able to brute force hack my way past it. Once I was in the system, however, all the security software kicked into gear, hitting me at every turn. That sounds like a video game—but it’s really not. Hacking is numbers and code and zero graphics.

  The excitement, it happens in your head.

  I spent an additional two minutes getting past the security systems. I’ll admit: I should have been faster, but the system was pretty complex and it took me a while to find what I needed. Some less organized brain trust member had forgotten to update a few programs. They were minor, nothing directly related to the security system, but when I accessed and tweaked them, they caused a cascade of failures. I used those to burrow my way fully into the system. Score one for Rex.

  Now that I had control of Naga, it was only a matter of tracking down WALKABOUT 2.0 and getting it up and running. That was the most dangerous move I’d make, the one that would be sure to alert Kiran.

  Sure enough, WALKABOUT 2.0 was loaded onto the supercomputer.

  Before I opened the program, I hesitated.

  Teo noticed.

  “You have a back door,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

  “Kiran might have discovered it.”

  “Wouldn’t you know?”

  “Kiran’s smarter than the average coder,” I said. “He’d leave it open. He’d wait for me to access it and then spring whatever trap he has planned. Then again, maybe he hasn’t even discovered it. Maybe he’s been too busy protecting his interests.”

  “Odds he found it?” Teo asked.

  I thought a second, finger hovering over the enter button.

  “Sixty, sixty-five percent,” I said.r />
  Teo put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve come this far.”

  We’d already broken in, taken control of Naga; if Kiran wasn’t already aware we were in his system then he was in a coma or something. And if he knew that I was hacking Naga, he knew I’d be going for WALKABOUT 2.0. There was no other choice: I had to access the back door program and run it fast as possible.

  “Here goes everything,” I said, hitting the enter button.

  WALKABOUT 2.0 opened and nothing happened. I searched for Ma and Papa’s information, accessing their files and quickly altering them. I cleared the arrest and deportation orders, expunged the records of every note related to their expulsion from the country.

  Watching, Teo said, “Make them citizens.”

  Of course, I’d thought about that. I’d considered it the minute we entered the building, but I knew it’d be the wrong thing to do. Even what I had done, the wiping out of their records, pushed the ethical limits to near-breaking point. My parents had been deported on account of my failings, but it didn’t excuse the fact that they’d sneaked into the United States illegally. I couldn’t do it.

  “No, Teo,” I said. “We’re doing this the right way.”

  Parents effectively ghosted, I made my way out of WALKABOUT 2.0.

  But I didn’t go quietly.

  “I’m sure Kiran knows we’re here,” I said. “He’s expecting me to access WALKABOUT 2.0, but he’s not going to anticipate this.”

  What happened next was an on-the-fly decision. It came from the deepest part of my being, a powerful mix of intellect and emotion. I felt like I was in this crazy, Zen state where time seemed to slow to a crawl and I could see the outcome of my decision a dozen years off. And it was a good one; it was the right thing to do.

  I logged in to a site I’d created a few years earlier. One I hadn’t touched since the Game began. It was a zoo of sorts, a place where I collected and took apart computer viruses, Trojans, and worms; a site to cannibalize them and take the coolest bits of code to use in my other programs.

  I selected a particularly noxious worm called DrummB.

  This little monster deleted program files wherever it found them and was particularly difficult to remove. Within seconds it could disable WALKABOUT 2.0, and given a couple minutes, it would effectively destroy it.

  I downloaded DrummB and launched it.

  WALKABOUT 2.0, the “upgraded” version of a program I’d spent two years of my life perfecting to find Teo, the program I’d spilled most of my brain into, was now effectively dead. Destroyed. Erased from history. I’m not going to lie: It felt like I’d just been punched in the gut. Watching WALKABOUT be dismantled, I couldn’t help but recall the desperate hours I’d spent creating it. All those delirious coding sessions had worked—Teo was essentially home—but it still hurt to watch.

  Two years of work took forty-seven seconds to vanish.

  And then I introduced DrummB to Naga itself.

  Teo tried to stop me. “What’re you doing? We could use it!”

  “I can’t leave a weapon like this lying around,” I said. “It ends here.”

  As DrummB ate its way through Naga’s programs, Teo and I ran back upstairs, through the empty halls of the Mexico City black box lab, and then out into the streets. It was raining, and lightning cut up the sky.

  18. TUNDE

  42.5 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA

  Despite the fact that it was raining and I had been on my feet and jittery from adrenaline for nearly two days straight, I had incredible fun with the brain trust.

  While I had been skeptical about the prodigies who chose to work with Kiran, just as I had been very reticent to trust Teo initially, I came to discover that they were good people. Misguided maybe but good at heart. What was even more important, however, was that they were incredibly gifted.

  At the Game, I had met and been impressed by the young people that Kiran had chosen to surround himself with. They were ambitious and clever. However, Kiran brought out the worst in them. While they were working in the echo chambers of the black boxes, they did not worry about the possible repercussions of their work.

  Ah, but this had changed. Now they were out.

  As I walked around, stretching my legs, I listened to their conversations.

  “I can’t believe you were working on that,” one young woman with a nose ring exclaimed to a short boy in a flannel shirt. “I thought I was the only one.”

  “Insane!” shouted a Thai hydrologist to a Peruvian coder as they transcribed information.

  I will not lie to you. I loved to hear these words. It was crazy to know that so many brilliant people worked in the very same rooms and did not understand what their neighbors were truly working on. This, surely, was the worst crime Kiran had perpetrated! To keep all these minds from each other was like separating neurons from one another. Thank goodness we had come along to change it.

  But they would have time to do all of this later. Now we needed them to focus on stopping Kiran. On reversing the work that they had already done. Key to succeeding was tracking down Kiran.

  E dey hard for us, oh!

  Our first order of business was to pull back the curtain.

  While each of the brain trust members were busily explaining to the ULTRA team what they had been working on, Cai climbed onto the top of a rather unstable card table we had placed on the rooftop. She called as loudly as she could for each and every person on the roof to listen.

  They all turned to her immediately.

  “Everyone,” she began, “we need to find Kiran.”

  I saw a lot of heads nodding in understanding.

  Cai said, “Working with several of your colleagues, we’ve identified a rather broad area in Arizona where we think Kiran is currently. To narrow that area down, I need for you to work together. We have to triangulate his location to stop him from proceeding with Shiva.”

  It did not take long for the brain trust to kick into high gear. Rather than diving into their individual data and work, they began to collaborate, sharing what they knew to try to figure out how we could pinpoint Kiran.

  As Cai climbed down from the table, Javiera walked over to us.

  “They’re empowered now,” she said. “They’re going to be very helpful.”

  “That is my sincere hope,” I said. “There are some amazing people here.”

  “Only the best for our friend Kiran.”

  “Yes, but this is extraordinary,” I said. “I have not felt this inspired and impassioned since I was at the Game. Imagine if we could find a way to keep all these beautiful minds together? Find them a home…”

  “They’re not lost puppies, Tunde,” Cai said.

  “I know this! But just think of the neural power we have congregated on this rooftop. There are about forty-five people up here, and they probably constitute a fifth of the entire prodigy population on the globe. Do you not find it inspiring?”

  Javiera looked out over the brain trust members as they talked, typed, and scribbled notes out on scraps of paper. She nodded.

  “We should know something by later tonight,” Cai said, pleased with their work. “Now, where do you think Rex and Teo have gotten off to?”

  “Perhaps they went back to the apartment,” I replied. “Let us go there and wait for them. I need to put my feet up, even if it is only for five or six minutes. As they say in my village, my dogs are barking.”

  “Your dogs?” Cai looked at me sidelong.

  “My feet, of course!”

  18.1

  Rex and Teo came back to the apartment ten minutes after we arrived.

  They did not have coffee, or my tea.

  Normally, of course, this would not be an incident that would upset me that greatly. I am often quite capable of accomplishing numerous things without the benefit of caffeine. But, my friends, this was simply not one of those times! I expressed my displeasure to Rex.

  “Omo, what happened?”

  “Sorry, Tunde. Something came up,” Re
x said.

  “Something?”

  “I will explain in a second. How’re we looking up here?”

  I proudly gestured back toward the rooftop.

  “We have every single member of the brain trust working to triangulate the location in Arizona where Kiran is currently. We will not see the results immediately, of course. But I do believe the tides of war have shifted to our favor.”

  Rex grabbed my shoulder and gave it a healthy squeeze.

  “Excellent, Tunde.”

  “You said something had come up. What is this something you speak of?”

  Rex ignored my question.

  “Good, good,” Rex said as he placed his arm around my shoulder and began to walk with me toward another part of the rooftop. “Listen, I’m sorry about the tea. Really. I want you to be with me for something important, okay?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. I was still a bit confused.

  When we reached a quieter corner of the roof, Rex motioned for Cai to join us. She walked over as well, though I could see that Stella and Ivan were a bit perplexed as to why we were having a private discussion without them.

  “I kind of did something,” Rex said.

  Cai immediately sensed this “something” was not good.

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  “Teo and I went into the Mexico City black box lab,” Rex said. “They had a supercomputer in the basement. Not a quantum machine like at the Game but a powerful thing nonetheless. Kiran had WALKABOUT 2.0 loaded on it. I used the program to change my parents’ records, to get them back into the States.”

  I gave my best friend a very serious glance.

  “I know,” Rex said. “I was desperate. We had to do something. I also destroyed WALKABOUT 2.0. The whole program, every bit of it, is wiped out. Kiran can’t use it anymore.”

  “I do not see why this is so terrible,” I said. “You have destroyed a tool that Kiran has used against us in the past. I realize you built it and took great pride in it, but he had corrupted your vision. I am sorry to say this, brother, but I think it is probably a very good thing that the program is destroyed.”

  “That’s not the problem, Tunde,” Cai said with her eyes locked on Rex.

  “Right,” Rex said. “I used the WALKABOUT back door.”