Genius--The Revolution

by Leopoldo Gout

  “I do not understand the trouble with that…,” I said.

  “I could have used it to stop Shiva,” Rex said, eyeing the floor.

  “Should have,” Cai said. “It could have easily been accessed.”

  “I wouldn’t say easily,” Rex countered. “Besides, I don’t know if that would have worked. Teo and I didn’t exactly have a ton of time in there.”

  “Well,” she said, “now WALKABOUT is gone. Our chance to use it to stop Kiran has evaporated. We’re stuck with our original plan, and the clock is ticking. We have to find Kiran in time.”

  I did not know what to say. To think we may have just lost an opportunity to stop Kiran remotely was almost too much to bear.

  By the look of it, Cai was even more furious than me.

  “Rex,” Cai said, “let’s have a talk.”

  “Fine,” he replied. “Just give me a minute.”

  Rex ushered his parents into the room and told them that he had cleared their records. They were free to return to the United States again. They were shocked and delighted. At the same time, they were deeply concerned that Rex had broken the law.

  “But, son,” his father said, “what you’ve done is surely illegal.…”

  Rex nodded, knowing it was true. “I’ve broken so many laws during the past few days that it’s impossible to even make a list of them. And you and Mama broke the law when you came into the U.S. illegally. But you’re good people. You’ve worked hard to raise Teo and me. Worked hard to make a life for us. I took that away from you, and I wanted to make sure you had it back.”

  Rex embraced his parents, and, I tell you, my friends, the look upon his face was one of immense contentment. It was truly a joy to see. After all the chaos and worry, Rex had managed to right the wrong he had committed. Though I was still quite angry that he had chosen not to disable Shiva when he had the chance, I will admit that he had made an excellent choice regardless.

  “Here’s the thing,” Rex told his parents. “You don’t have much time to pack.”

  “How much is not much?” Mr. Huerta asked.

  “Well,” Rex said, “maybe an hour … possibly two…”

  PART THREE

  FALL LIKE ROME

  19. CAI

  38 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA

  Rex and I stepped out onto the patio of his aunt and uncle’s apartment.

  The rain had stopped and the city was gleaming. Though Rex probably thought I was going to yell at him, I wasn’t angry so much as disappointed.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked Rex.

  “I saw an opportunity and I took it.”

  “And now we have to deal with the fallout,” I said. “What if Kiran changes up his plans? What if he launches Shiva right now while we’re talking? You put everything we’d planned in jeopardy.”

  “I needed to get my parents home, Cai. The fact that they’re here in Mexico City is because of me. I had to fix it.”

  “You could have done that later. After we’d gotten Kiran.”

  Rex leaned forward on the railing and sighed.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have been. I was just so … I wanted to get back at him, for stealing my program, for using it to frame the LODGE and me. Since I couldn’t hit him in the face, I figured it would feel really good to hit him where it hurt most, his empire.”

  “And did it?”

  “For a little bit, yeah,” Rex said. “But then reason got hold again.”

  I stepped over beside him and put a hand on his back.

  “So what can we do now?” he asked.

  “Keep moving. We can’t change our plans. He’s likely expecting us to do something completely different now. You changed the board. But I say we stay the course, just exactly as we’d outlined it, and that might trick him. It’s like running into a fire. Who would ever do that, right?”

  Rex turned from the railing and faced me with a grin.

  “You’d run into a fire?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “If you were in it, hell yes.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” I said. “I’m talking about game theory here, about how to outwit your opponent. I’m saying that maybe we can play this as an opportunity to mix things up. We salvage it by keeping Kiran on his toes.”

  “So maybe what I did was kind of clever, actually,” Rex said.

  “Don’t you dare…”

  “Dare what?” Rex feigned shock.

  “Turn this around to make it look like you didn’t just majorly screw up.”

  Rex said, “Cai, I admit that I completely and utterly failed. I wasn’t thinking; I was just reacting purely on an emotional level. I’m not going to argue it.”

  Well, that was certainly unexpected.

  “Come on,” I said. “We need to get to Arizona.”

  “But we don’t even know where Kiran is.”

  “We’re going to have to cross our fingers that the brain trust has located him by the time we touch down. If they haven’t, we’ll have to do it there. Rex, he’s going to take down the entire Internet in a day and a half unless we stop him.”

  I needed him to understand the urgency.

  “I get it,” he said. “Give me two minutes and I’ll have a flight for us.”

  19.1

  36 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA

  The flight to Arizona departed two hours later.

  We arrived at Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez with just enough time to scramble through security, get onto the plane, and settle into our seats minutes before the jet took off. Tunde and I sat with the ULTRA team in the middle rows of the plane while Rex, Teo, and their parents sat directly behind me.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect in Arizona, but I planned to use the flight to prepare for our next encounter with Kiran.

  As the plane leveled off and the stewards made their way down the aisles with various drinks and snacks for sale, I leaned my seat back, closed my eyes, and walked myself through the various directions our trip could take.

  Behind me I could overhear Rex telling his parents about our time in Nigeria. He was describing the feast General Iyabo had prepared for us. As he talked through the tension of that moment, I remembered just how close to being uncovered we were. Recalling just how crazy it all was, I couldn’t help but laugh to myself.

  Rex’s story segued into how he’d found Teo in India. That led to Teo talking about some of his solitary journeys. I couldn’t imagine how difficult the past two years had been for Rex’s family. It was amazing sitting there, hearing the reunion continue, as they dove deeper into the emotional toll Teo’s running away took on the family. His mother cried again. In fact, they all cried again.

  But it was a beautiful thing to hear. There was so much love.

  I replayed images of Tunde’s village on our departure and saw again how happy his parents and people were to see the general taken away. I recalled our visit to my parents’ apartment. How Rex, Teo, and Tunde talked to my father and how I cooked and talked with my mother. Now Rex and Teo were united and their family was again whole for the first time in a very long time.

  I only realized I’d fallen asleep when the plane hit turbulence on its descent into Phoenix, Arizona. When I sat up, I noticed that Tunde was fast asleep beside me, his head resting on Stella’s shoulder. She was asleep as well.

  I took out my cell phone and used an app to hitchhike onto a carrier’s signal, allowing me service. There were dozens of messages and texts from Rodger Dodger. She’d heard about our breaking up the brain trust in Mexico City and sent a series of happy face and surprise face emoji. There was also an alert from the brain trust: Kiran was at a house in Phoenix. They sent an aerial map.

  Tunde noticed my expression. “You look very pleased,” he said.

  “We found him,” I said.

  “What’s the plan?” Rex asked.

  “We confront him,” I said. “Keep him occupied while we bring in the police and do what we can to dismantle Shiva before he launches it
.”

  19.2

  We said our good-byes to Rex’s parents at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

  They had a plane to Santa Cruz to catch, and we had a car ready to take us to the location the brain trust had sent us. Teo set it up through a friend he trusted. Rex and Teo hugged and kissed their parents, but I could tell they were eager to get back into the chase. Rex in particular, buoyed by the fact that his parents would be home safe soon, seemed especially impatient to get going.

  As we exited the airport and made our way to the car, I ran through some of the strategies I’d come up with on the flight before I’d fallen asleep. Adapting my plan, considering word that Kiran was on the move, I told everyone the situation.

  “This is going to be a house,” I said. “In a nice neighborhood.”

  “So not a black box lab?” Tunde asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  We stepped outside into the bright, dry Arizona air.

  Our ride, a van, was waiting on a nearby corner.

  As we crossed the street, I continued, “Knowing Kiran, there’s a good chance he saw this coming. He’s lying low now because even with the superstructure of his grand scheme falling apart, he’s still got the trigger for Shiva in his hands. We’ve turned the brain trust, taken down all his labs, and raided his data, but he’s still got the upper hand.”

  “How is that?” Javiera asked. “Seems we’re in control now.”

  “This is a zero-sum game,” I replied. “There is no half winning or half losing. We need to take down all his systems and then crush him as well. I don’t like talking in those terms, but it’s the truth. As long as Kiran is free, this doesn’t end.”

  “But we already know he’s here,” Teo said. “I’m confused.”

  “Kiran has a message for us,” I said, “I’m convinced of it. That’s been his modus operandi the whole way through. At the Game, he brought me over to his OndScan hangout to see how impressive all his gear was. In India, he showed Rex the inside track with the brain trust and his larger vision. He’s doing it again here. Kiran wants us on his team. Wants to show us something that might convince us that he’s after the same thing we are.”

  “And that is…?” Ivan asked.

  “A true revolution.”

  19.3

  During the drive to the location, I explained what I meant.

  “After everything that’s happened, Kiran knows he can’t convince us his actions aren’t destructive. That cat’s pretty much out of the bag now. It’s going to be something more along the lines of the puppet master routine he loves to pull. He’s probably going to try to convince us he planned all this out, that he already knew what moves we’d make, and that he wanted us to discover his plans so we could prove ourselves.”

  “He already tried with me,” Rex said. “It’s flattering.”

  “Which is exactly what he wants. Whatever we find at this house, don’t take it at face value. He knows we’re coming for him; whatever we find is going to have been put there on purpose. Hopefully, we can find whatever tiny truths he’s scattered through his gilded lies. Sorry, that sounded less poetic in my head.”

  We arrived in the neighborhood ten minutes later.

  As it appeared on the aerial shots, it was a nice place with large, expensive homes. Each one had an outdoor pool and perfect landscaping. Many of the houses were hypermodern, looking like odd geometric structures. When we pulled up to the building we’d triangulated, it was massive—a black stone, metal, and glass behemoth with wild, swooping curves. The house honestly looked more like an art museum than a home.

  Modernist house

  We pulled up to a corner a block away to observe.

  There were lights on inside. Within a few seconds of watching the home, we saw movement in an upstairs window. The blinds weren’t drawn and the windows were quite large, so it was easy to see inside. Kiran stood at a window and looked out into the darkness as he sipped from a coffee mug.

  Teo said, “He’s home.”

  “Think he sees us?” Ivan asked.

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t be sure, but he wasn’t looking in our direction. Then again, it was Kiran, so it was hard to say.

  “So what do we do now?” Javiera asked.

  “We get out of this car, march over there, and confront him,” Tunde said.

  “And we kick his butt,” Stella added.

  “That doesn’t sound like a very good plan,” I said.

  Teo said, “Cai’s right.”

  “We need to keep him there, distract him with something. Then, while he’s talking like he loves to do, we can surreptitiously alert the authorities. There are enough of us, with enough skills that if he’s got Shiva in there with him, we should be able to find it. If we can find it, we can dismantle it.”

  “Before he presses the launch button,” Rex said.

  “Hang on,” I said, raising my hand to focus everyone.

  The lights in Kiran’s modernist house went off one by one before, minutes later, the garage door opened and a silver Tesla sports car emerged. Its headlights flickered on, and the car pulled out into the street before quickly racing away.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting to see if Kiran was coming back. He did not. Five minutes after Kiran left, we exited the van and walked down the street to the front door of his Arizona mansion.

  As we walked up the steps to the mansion, I warned everyone.

  “Kiran knows we’re coming,” I said. “Whatever we find in this place, it’ll likely be another lie or sales pitch to try to convince us that he’s doing the right thing or to make us feel like we’re so far behind we’ll never have a chance of stopping him.”

  “But we do, right?” Teo asked.

  “Of course we do,” I said.

  19.4

  Getting in was easy.

  There was no special alarm system (at least nothing out of the ordinary) and no craftily designed keys. I picked the lock while Rex and Ivan took out the surveillance cameras and motion detectors. It took us three minutes flat to get through the front door and drop ten cameras and fifteen sensors.

  It certainly helped that there were seven of us. All the same, the house was not that well protected. Perhaps it was because it was a home and not a lab. Or, perhaps, we were expected.

  “This feels off,” I told everyone as we made our way through the massive front room of the house to the living room. The walls were essentially bare, with the exception of a handful of postmodern paintings and an odd sculpture that resembled an impressionist take on the OndScan logo.

  “You think it is a trap?” Tunde asked me.

  “I think it’s too easy.”

  “Regardless,” Rex said, “we’re in here, we need to take a look. Dig up whatever we can, regardless of whether Kiran planted it or not.”

  “Where do we start?” Teo asked.

  The house was three stories and at least three thousand square feet. I guessed we’d be dealing with four or five bedrooms. There would be a lot of cabinets to go through, drawers to loot, and undoubtedly computers. That was assuming Kiran kept important things at this location.

  “We need to load up what we can carry, take photos of what we can’t. I say we split up,” I said, “ULTRA upstairs, the LODGE down.”

  “That’s exactly how horror movies start,” Rex said.

  Despite Rex’s joke, we all darted in separate directions. Rex and Teo headed to the living room and kitchen. Tunde took the front rooms. While I heard the ULTRA team members scrambling upstairs to the bedrooms, I walked toward the back of the house. There was a staircase leading down to the basement. As I approached it, the lights flickered on above me.

  The stairs led to a wide hallway. It was lined with framed photographs. All of them highlighted Kiran with various well-known politicians and tech innovators. In each and every picture, Kiran was smiling, dressed in his finest clothes. I wasn’t sure if the photographs were arranged chronologically, but at the end of the ha
llway there was a picture from the Game. It was of Kiran standing in the midst of the falling confetti during the Zero Hour finale. Those final minutes before everything exploded. I saw myself standing in the background of the picture. Well, Painted Wolf was standing there.

  The hallway led to a large room. I walked inside, and, as on the stairs, the overhead lights flickered on one by one. It was an office. The walls were lined with shelves, and on the shelves were identical-looking binders, each with the OndScan logo on its side. There were computers and a bank of servers that hummed quietly on one wall. But it was the wall opposite the door to the office that had me entranced.

  There was a laser display on the wall: a 3-D hologram, projected by a ceiling-mounted laser light. It was a tree and it shimmered, turning clockwise in a slow circle. I walked up to it and examined it closely, passing my fingers through its digital green branches. It was beautiful. That was when I noticed the leaves. Each had a name hovering over them. I saw General Iyabo’s and Naya’s names. I saw the names of the brain trusters and Game participants. I also saw the names of the ULTRA team, Terminal, and our own names: Rex, Tunde, and Painted Wolf.

  Tree

  “It’s all there.”

  The voice came from behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. By now, his voice was familiar. I did turn around and saw that Kiran was standing by the door, wearing slacks and a black turtleneck shirt. He walked over to me and we shook hands, all very cordially. He didn’t seem to notice that I slipped an audio bug, a tiny, sticky microphone the size of a grain of rice, onto his right sleeve.

  “All the connections,” Kiran said. “Each branch represents the flow of information. Each one connects the various people and projects together. I thought the image of a tree made sense, and it’s got a wonderful aesthetic, don’t you agree?”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I said.

  “The tree or the plan?”

  “The tree.”

  Kiran chuckled. “You know,” he said, “I made you an offer at the Game. It still stands. If anything, I feel even more strongly now than I did before. You would make an incredible addition to my army, Painted Wolf.”