PART 2: THE CRASH AND THE CALCULUS
The Probability of Failure
The average human heart beats about 60 to 100 times per minute. Right now, inside the black government SUV speeding down Sepulveda Boulevard, I calculated my pulse was hovering around 120. It wasn’t fear. Fear is a biological response to the unknown. This was stress—the physiological reaction to knowing exactly what was about to happen and knowing the margin for error was less than 0.01%.
“We’re not going to make it to the control tower in time,” I said, staring at the gridlock outside the tinted windows. Los Angeles traffic is a chaotic system, modeled by fluid dynamics but ruined by human stupidity. “The traffic density is too high. ETA is forty-five minutes. The planes run out of fuel in ninety.”
Agent Cabe Gallo gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. “We have sirens, Walter. We’ll make it.”
“Sirens are sound waves,” I countered, checking the time on my watch. “They don’t make cars disappear. We need a static location with a secure, high-speed connection to the LAX server mainframe. We need to turn around.”
“Turn around? To where?” Cabe barked.
“The diner,” I said.
Cabe looked at me like I had lost my mind. “We just left the diner, Walter! You want to fight a national security crisis from a booth where they serve meatloaf?”
“The diner has a localized router I just optimized. It’s hardwired into the city’s fiber backbone. It’s cleaner than the encrypted mess you have at the federal building, and it’s closer. Turn the car around, or 20,000 people die.”
I didn’t wait for his permission. I looked at my team in the back seat. Sylvester Dodd, my human calculator, was hyperventilating into a paper bag. Happy Quinn, the mechanical prodigy, was looking for something to punch. Toby Curtis, the behaviorist, was analyzing Cabe’s neck veins.
“Happy,” I said. “I need you to prep a hard line as soon as we get there. Sylvester, I need landing vectors for every flight currently in the holding pattern. Toby, keep Sylvester from passing out.”
Cabe slammed the brakes and whipped the SUV around, tires screeching against the asphalt. We were going back to the diner.
The War Room
When we burst back into the diner, the bell above the door chimed—a cheerful, mundane sound that contrasted sharply with the apocalypse we were trying to prevent.
Paige, the waitress, was still there. She had her arm around her son, Ralph. The boy was looking at his chessboard of condiments.
“Everyone out!” Cabe shouted, flashing his badge. “This is a matter of national security!”
The few patrons scattered, leaving half-eaten burgers and unpaid bills. Paige stood her ground. “What is going on? You can’t just storm in here.”
“We need the space,” I said, sliding into the booth I had occupied twenty minutes ago. I ripped the tablecloth off. “Happy, strip the router. I need direct access.”
“On it,” Happy said, pulling a screwdriver from her boot. She always kept tools in her boots. It was efficient.
I opened my laptop. The screen glowed, a portal into the chaos happening invisible miles above our heads. “Okay, here is the situation,” I announced, my fingers flying across the keyboard. “The LAX control tower uploaded a software update forty-five minutes ago. It had a bug. A corrupted handshake protocol. The tower can’t talk to the planes, and the planes can’t talk to the tower. They are flying blind in one of the busiest airspaces in the world.”
“Why don’t they just use the radio?” Paige asked. She was hovering, looking between us and the screen.
I didn’t look up. “Because modern aviation is digital, Paige. The flight computers hand off data packets. When the handshake fails, the system locks out everything to prevent hacking. It’s a security feature that is currently acting as a death sentence. The pilots are shouting into a void. And the radar screens at the tower are black.”
“56 planes,” Sylvester muttered, his eyes squeezed shut. “Assuming an average capacity of 200 passengers… that’s 11,200 lives. Plus the collateral damage on the ground if they crash into the city. The statistical probability of a mid-air collision increases by 4% every minute we sit here.”
“Sylvester, stop doing the math on the death toll,” I ordered. “Focus on the fuel loads.”
“I can’t help it! The numbers just happen!” Sylvester wailed.
I typed in a command string. Access Denied.
“The tower is locking me out,” I said. “I need someone on the inside to open a port.”
Cabe was on his phone. “I can get the Director of the FAA on the line…”
“Too slow,” I cut him off. “I need the guy in the chair right now.” I pulled up the internal directory for the LAX tower. “General line. Let’s go.”
I patched the call through the diner’s landline. A frantic voice answered. “Tower Control, we are in an emergency blackout, clear the line—”
“This is Walter O’Brien,” I said, my voice steady. “I have been contracted by Homeland Security to fix your system. You have a firewall blocking remote access. I need you to disable port 8080.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I’m not disabling anything,” the controller shouted. “We are blind here! I have planes dropping off the scope!”
“Look at the security camera behind you,” I said.
“What?”
“The camera. Look at it.” I hit enter.
On my screen, I had hacked the internal CCTV of the control tower. I saw the man turn around. I waved at my laptop camera.
On the monitor inside the control tower, my face appeared on every single screen, replacing the static.
“I’m the guy inside your computer,” I said. “Now, salute the camera and open the port, or you’re going to be explaining to the President why you let those planes crash.”
The man on the screen hesitated, then slowly raised his hand in a salute. A second later, my screen flooded with green code.
“We’re in,” I said.
The Hardware Problem
“Okay, the software is corrupted at the kernel level,” I diagnosed, scanning the code. “I can’t patch it. It’s too deep. We need to reload the previous version of the software. The version from yesterday.”
“So do it,” Cabe said.
“I can’t. The update overwrote the backup on the server. That’s standard protocol to save space. Stupid, but standard.” I slammed my hand on the table. “We need a physical copy of the old software.”
“The backup facility,” Happy said, looking up from the router wires. “LAX has a hard copy storage facility in El Segundo. It’s twenty minutes away.”
“If we send a car, it’s twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” I calculated. “That leaves us with… eighteen minutes before the first plane, Flight 224 from London, drops out of the sky.”
“I’ll go,” Toby said, jumping up. “I drive fast. Happy, come with me. You know what the hardware looks like.”
“Go,” I shouted. “And don’t stop for red lights.”
As they ran out the door, silence fell over the diner. It was just me, Sylvester, Cabe, Paige, and her son, Ralph.
I looked at Ralph. He was staring at my laptop screen. He wasn’t scared. He was fascinated. He reached out a small hand and pointed to a line of code.
“Syntax error,” the boy whispered.
I froze. I looked where he pointed. He was right. In the scrolling matrix of thousands of lines of code, he had spotted a missing semicolon in less than three seconds.
I looked at Paige. “He just debugged a kernel panic in three seconds. Do you have any idea what his processor speed is?”
Paige looked defensive. “He likes patterns, Walter. That’s all.”
“No, that is not all. He’s…” I stopped. I didn’t have time to explain the rarity of what stood before me. A mind like mine. Maybe even faster. “Never mind. Sylvester, monitor the fuel levels. I need a countdown.”
“Flight 224 is at 8% fuel,” Sylvester recited, shaking. “Flight 712 is at 11%. Flight 88 is… oh god, Flight 88 is reporting an engine sputter.”
“Relax,” I said, though I wasn’t relaxed. “Toby and Happy are on their way back.”
The Magnet
Ten minutes later, Toby and Happy burst through the doors. They looked winded. Happy was clutching a silver hard drive like it was the Holy Grail.
“Got it!” Happy yelled. “Version 4.0. The stable build.”
“Plug it in,” I ordered, sliding the connector cable across the table.
Happy slammed the drive onto the table and connected it. I initiated the upload sequence.
Reading Disk… Error. Data Corrupted. Reading Disk… Error. No Files Found.
The words flashed on the screen in mocking red letters.
“What?” I stared at the screen. “It’s empty. The drive is empty.”
“That’s impossible,” Happy said, shoving me aside to look. “We just picked it up from the archive. It was in a sealed box.”
“How did you transport it?” I asked, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.
“In the car,” Toby said, panting. “We took the shortcut through the industrial park. We were flying.”
“Where in the car?” I asked.
“In the side pocket. The door pocket,” Toby said. “Why?”
I closed my eyes. I felt a physical pain in my temples. “The door pocket?”
“Yeah, it was safe. It was wrapped in a towel.”
“Toby,” I said, opening my eyes. “The door pocket is located directly next to the car’s mid-range speaker. A speaker works by using a massive electromagnet to vibrate a cone. You put a magnetic hard drive next to a high-powered magnet for a twenty-minute car ride.”
Toby’s face went pale. “I…”
“You wiped it,” I said. “You degaussed the drive. It’s a brick. The software is gone.”
Silence. Absolute, suffocating silence.
“So that’s it?” Cabe asked, his voice low. “We’re done?”
“We have no software,” I said, leaning back. My brain was racing, looking for an exit, a loophole, a variable I had missed. “The tower has the corrupted version. The backup is destroyed. The only copy of the working software…”
I stopped. I looked at Ralph.
The boy was holding a toy plane. He was moving it through the air, making a low whoosh sound. He wasn’t looking at us. He was looking up, through the skylight of the diner.
I followed his gaze. High above, a contrail cut across the blue sky.
“The planes,” I whispered.
“What?” Paige asked.
“The planes!” I stood up. “The planes that are circling! They haven’t updated yet! They were in the air when the update was pushed. They are still running the old version—the working version—of the software.”
“So?” Cabe asked.
“So, we don’t need to find the software on the ground,” I said, the adrenaline kicking back in. “We need to download it from one of the planes.”
“You want to hack a Boeing 737 from a diner?” Happy asked, skeptical.
“No,” I said. “The signal strength isn’t strong enough. We need to be close. We need to get the software off the plane’s internal server, transfer it to my laptop, and then upload it to the control tower.”
“How do we do that?” Cabe asked. “They’re 30,000 feet in the air.”
“We tell them to come down,” I said. “Sylvester, which flight has the most fuel?”
“Southwest Flight 209,” Sylvester said instantly. “They have enough for maybe forty minutes of low-altitude maneuvering.”
“Get me a passenger manifest,” I ordered. “Toby, profile the passengers. Find me someone who won’t turn off their phone.”
The Phone Call
Toby scanned the list. “Okay… here. Row 14C. Milton P. Sterling. Vintage watch collector, runs a blog about conspiracy theories. Guy like that? He never turns his phone off. He probably thinks the ‘turn off electronics’ rule is a government plot to control his mind.”
“Call him,” I said.
We dialed the number. It rang once. Twice.
“Hello?” A confused voice. “Who is this? I don’t have signal up here usually.”
“Mr. Sterling,” Toby said, putting on his best authoritative voice. “This is the Department of Defense. Do not panic. Look out your window.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. If you hang up, we will assume you are a hostile combatant.”
“Okay, okay! I’m looking!”
“You are currently in a holding pattern because of a critical system failure. We need you to hand your phone to a flight attendant immediately. Tell them it is Code Red.”
Thirty seconds later, we were talking to the pilot. Captain Roberts.
“Who is this?” the pilot demanded. “I’ve got low fuel and zero comms with the tower. I don’t have time for pranks.”
“Captain, this is Walter O’Brien. I’m working with Homeland. We know you’re running Version 3.0 of the navigation software. We need it. We need you to transmit it to us.”
“Transmit it? How? My Wi-Fi is down.”
“We’re going to hardwire it,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” the Captain said. “I’m at 20,000 feet.”
“Not for long,” I said. “I need you to drop to an altitude of eight feet.”
“Eight feet?! Are you insane? That’s barely off the runway!”
“Actually, it’s roughly the height of a standard basketball hoop,” Sylvester interjected unhelpfully.
“Captain, listen to me,” I said, my voice cutting through the static. “If you stay up there, you crash. If you come down, we have a chance. I need you to do a low pass over Runway 25L. Fly as slow as you can without stalling. Keep your landing gear up.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to be driving underneath you.”
The Green Wave
We abandoned the diner. We needed to get to LAX, and we had twelve minutes before Captain Roberts aligned for his approach.
“Happy,” I shouted as we piled back into the SUV. “The traffic lights. I need a Green Wave.”
“Already on it,” Happy said, typing furiously on her tablet. “I’m hacking the LA Department of Transportation grid. Rerouting the signal phasing…”
Ahead of us, a red light turned green. Then the next one. And the next one.
“Go!” I yelled at Cabe.
We tore through Los Angeles like a bullet. Cross traffic stopped as Happy manipulated the city’s infrastructure to clear our path. It was a symphony of logic applied to chaos.
“We need a car,” I said. “This SUV is too slow. The Boeing 737 has a stall speed of roughly 140 knots. That’s about 160 miles per hour. This government tank tops out at 110.”
“Where are we going to get a car that does 160?” Cabe asked, swerving around a bus.
“The impound lot at the airport,” I said. “They seize drug dealers’ cars. There’s always something fast.”
The Ferrari
We breached the airport perimeter fence. Cabe flashed his badge, but we didn’t stop for the guards. We skidded into the impound lot.
And there it was. A Ferrari 458 Italia. Red. Aerodynamic. Capable of 200 miles per hour.
“Happy, break into it,” I said.
Happy didn’t use a lockpick. She smashed the window with her elbow and ripped the panel off the dashboard. “Hotwiring… done.” The engine roared to life. A beautiful, guttural Italian scream.
“I need a co-pilot,” I said. “Someone to handle the connection.”
“I’ll go,” Cabe said.
“No,” I shook my head. “You’re too heavy. Power-to-weight ratio matters here. Every pound counts. I need someone light.”
I looked at Happy. She was busy setting up the receiver tower on the ground. Toby was too uncoordinated; he’d drop the cable. Sylvester would vomit on the dashboard.
I looked at Paige.
She was standing by the SUV, holding Ralph’s hand. She was terrified, but her eyes were fierce. She was a mother protecting her child. That was a variable I could use. Survival instinct.
“Paige,” I said.
“What?” She looked at me.
“Get in the car.”
“Are you kidding? I’m a waitress!”
“You are the only one small enough to fit in the passenger seat with the equipment who doesn’t have a history of panic attacks or motion sickness. Get in the car, or the planes crash.”
She looked at Ralph. Then she kissed his forehead, took a deep breath, and climbed into the Ferrari.
“Walter,” Happy shouted. “The Ethernet cable! You have to plug it directly into the plane’s avionics bay. It’s in the wheel well. The pilot will lower the gear halfway.”
“Got it.”
“And Walter?” Happy pointed to the Ferrari. “The cable is short. You need to be directly under the nose gear. And you can’t have a roof in the way.”
I looked at the Ferrari’s sleek roof. “Right.”
I found a crowbar in the impound shed. I walked over to the quarter-million-dollar car and jammed the metal bar into the roof seam.
“What are you doing?” Paige screamed.
“Making it a convertible,” I grunted, prying the metal back. With Cabe’s help, we ripped the roof off the car. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional.
I jumped into the driver’s seat. “Put on your seatbelt, Paige. This is going to be loud.”
The Runway
We sat at the end of Runway 25L. The engine of the Ferrari idled, a nervous hum vibrating through the chassis.
“He’s coming in,” Sylvester’s voice crackled over the radio. “Southwest 209. He’s on final approach. Distance: two miles.”
I looked in the rearview mirror. A black dot appeared in the sky. It grew larger, transforming into the massive silhouette of a passenger jet. It was coming in hot.
“Okay, Paige,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Here is the physics of what we are about to do. That plane is going to fly over us at about 160 miles per hour. I am going to accelerate to match its speed exactly. Once we are synchronized, you are going to stand up.”
“Stand up?!” she shrieked.
“Yes. You will stand up, reach up with the Ethernet cable, and plug it into the port that the co-pilot is going to lower from the nose gear. You have to wait for the click. Once it clicks, hold the laptop steady. The download will take roughly seven seconds.”
“Seven seconds,” she repeated. She was shaking.
“If I go too fast, we smash into the nose gear and get crushed. If I go too slow, the cable snaps. If I drift left or right, the jet wash flips the car and we die.”
“Great pep talk, Walter.”
“Just data,” I said. “Here he comes.”
The roar was deafening. The plane passed over us, blotting out the sun. It was huge. A terrified metal beast descending from the heavens.
“Go!” I shouted.
I slammed the accelerator.
The Ferrari launched. 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. My head snapped back against the headrest. The world blurred into gray streaks of asphalt and concrete.
The plane was right above us. I could see the rivets on the fuselage. I could feel the heat of the engines. The noise was physical—a wall of sound hammering against my chest.
“Faster!” Paige yelled, her voice barely audible over the turbines.
I shifted gears. The speedometer climbed. 120… 140… 150.
We were closing the gap. The massive nose wheel of the Boeing hung just feet above our windshield. A hatch opened, and a crew member dangled a port down.
“Steady!” I yelled. “Hold the wheel straight!”
The turbulence was insane. The car was buffeting, fighting to stay on the ground. The plane’s wake was trying to lift us up and toss us like a toy.
“Now, Paige! Now!”
Paige unbuckled her seatbelt. She stood up in the passenger seat, the wind whipping her hair violently across her face. She held the cable in one hand, reaching up towards the underbelly of the leviathan above us.
“I can’t reach it!” she screamed.
“I’m moving closer!” I shouted.
I inched the car forward. The nose gear was inches from my face. If the pilot sneezed, if he dipped the nose even one degree, we would be decapitated.
Paige stretched. She was crying, screaming, but she didn’t stop reaching. She grabbed the hanging port.
Click.
She slammed the cable into the laptop.
“Connected!” she screamed, dropping back into the seat and clutching the computer.
“Sylvester, are you getting it?” I yelled into the headset.
“Downloading!” Sylvester’s voice came back. “20%… 40%…”
The runway was running out. I saw the end markers approaching. Beyond that, the ocean.
“Walter, the fence!” Paige yelled.
“Almost there,” I gritted my teeth.
“60%… 80%…”
The plane’s engines whined. The pilot was struggling to keep the aircraft aloft at this speed. He was stalling.
“Pull up!” I screamed at the plane, even though he couldn’t hear me. “Pull up!”
“100%! Got it!” Sylvester shouted. “Disconnect! Disconnect!”
“Unplug it, Paige!”
She yanked the cable.
“Braking!” I slammed the brake pedal to the floor.
The Ferrari’s ceramic brakes locked. The tires smoked, screaming in protest. We fishtailed, spinning 180 degrees.
Above us, the pilot slammed the throttles forward. The engines roared, spitting jet fuel. The plane pitched up, its tail missing the Ferrari by inches. It climbed steeply, barely clearing the perimeter fence, banking hard away from the ocean.
We came to a stop in a cloud of burning rubber and dust, facing the wrong way on the runway.
I sat there, gripping the steering wheel, my chest heaving. The silence that followed was heavy.
I looked at Paige. Her hair was a disaster. She was trembling. She looked like she had just gone ten rounds with a tornado.
She looked at me. And then, she laughed. It was a hysterical, terrified, beautiful laugh.
“Did we do it?” she choked out.
My headset crackled. It was Cabe. “Walter? Tower reports systems are rebooting. Radar is back online. They’re guiding the planes in.”
I looked at Paige. “We did it.”
For a moment, in that ruined Ferrari, with the smell of burnt tires in the air, I didn’t feel like a computer. I felt… relief.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I think I need to throw up,” she said.
“That’s a normal physiological reaction,” I nodded. “Lean out the side. Try not to hit the upholstery. It’s Italian leather.”
She punched me in the arm. It hurt.
“Let’s go get your son,” I said.
The Aftermath
By the time we got back to the diner, the sun was setting. The crisis was over. The news was already calling it a “glitch” that was fixed by “routine maintenance.” They would never know that a waitress hung out of a convertible at 160 miles per hour to save them.
Cabe was waiting for us. He looked at the wrecked Ferrari, then at me.
“You owe the airport a new car,” he said, but he was smiling.
“Take it out of my paycheck,” I said.
I walked over to the booth where Ralph was sitting. He had finished his game.
“You knew,” I said to the boy. “You knew the plane had the software.”
Ralph didn’t answer. He just pushed a salt shaker forward.
“He doesn’t talk much,” Paige said, coming up behind me. She had cleaned up, but she still looked shaken.
“He speaks,” I said. “He just speaks a different language. He speaks logic.”
I looked at Paige. “You asked me earlier what it’s like to be me. To have an IQ of 197.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s lonely,” I admitted. “It’s like being the only person in the room who can hear a high-pitched frequency that never stops. But today… today, with your help, with the team… the noise stopped. Just for a second.”
Paige looked at me, really looked at me. “You guys aren’t just tech support, are you?”
“No,” I said. “We’re Scorpion.”
“Scorpion?”
“It’s what I call us. A scorpion is small, dangerous, and usually unwanted. But when you’re in trouble, nothing else packs the same punch.”
She smiled. “Well, Scorpion, you saved a lot of people today.”
“We’re not done,” Cabe interrupted. He was holding his phone. His face had gone from relieved to grim.
“What now?” I asked. “Did the check bounce?”
“No,” Cabe said. “We have a problem. A big one. The Governor of California just called. There’s a situation at the Mulholland Dam.”
“A dam?” Happy asked, walking over. “Is it structural?”
“And,” Cabe continued, “The Governor’s daughter is in the hospital. The doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with her, but someone just sent the Governor an email saying they hacked her DNA.”
“Hacked her DNA?” Toby frowned. “That’s biological warfare.”
“It’s a bio-hack,” I corrected. “Targeted genetic sequencing.”
I looked at the team. Exhausted, dirty, adrenaline crashing.
“We just saved 56 planes,” Sylvester whined. “Can’t we take a nap?”
I looked at Ralph. He was watching me. Waiting to see what the smart man would do.
I looked at Paige.
“We don’t take naps,” I said. “We solve problems.”
I grabbed my laptop.
“Let’s go.”
(End of Part 2)
PART 3: THE PHYSICS OF DISASTER AND THE CODE OF LIFE
The Inefficiency of Holidays
Christmas is, statistically speaking, the most inefficient time of the year. The entire global supply chain strains under the weight of decorative plastic and dead trees. People exchange gifts that possess zero utility value, fueled by an emotional obligation that defies logic.
Scorpion, my team, was now an official government contractor. We had an office—a garage, really—and a payroll. But instead of solving high-level encryption puzzles, we were currently tasked with fixing a municipal power outage in a small town. A pine tree had fallen on a transformer. It was a job for a lineman, not a genius with a 197 IQ.
“This is a misuse of resources,” I muttered, watching Happy Quinn splice a high-voltage cable. “We stopped planes from falling out of the sky. Now we’re basically the Geek Squad.”
“It’s Christmas, Walter,” Paige said. She was wearing a red scarf. It served no thermal purpose in the mild California winter, so I categorized it as ‘festive signaling.’ “People need power for their lights. It makes them happy.”
“Happiness is a chemical reaction in the brain,” I corrected. “Electricity is a flow of electrons. One is essential; the other is a variable.”
“You’re a Grinch,” Toby Curtis observed, spinning a candy cane in his mouth. “A high-functioning, low-EQ Grinch.”
Before I could deconstruct his psychoanalysis, the ground shook.
It wasn’t an earthquake. The P-waves were wrong. It was a single, concussive thud, followed by a low, grinding groan that vibrated in my teeth.
“That came from the north,” Sylvester said, looking up from his tablet. “There’s nothing north of here except…”
“The dam,” I finished.
We scrambled into the van. The holiday was over. The physics of disaster doesn’t take days off.
The Fracture
The Mulholland Dam is a gravity dam, holding back millions of gallons of water. When we arrived, the scene was eerily quiet. There were no guards. Just the massive, curved wall of concrete holding back a man-made lake.
But the sensors were screaming.
“Internal pressure is at 110%,” Happy yelled, reading the gauges in the unstaffed control room. “The water level is rising too fast. The intake valves must be stuck.”
Then we heard it. A sound like a gunshot, but deeper. Crack.
I ran to the railing. A spiderweb fracture had appeared on the face of the dam, about twenty feet down. Water was weeping through it.
“That’s a structural failure,” I assessed. “The concrete is fatigued. If that crack spreads, the integrity of the wall hits zero. The dam bursts. The town below—where everyone is currently singing carols—gets wiped off the map.”
“We need to plug it,” Cabe Gallo said, his hand on his holster as if he could shoot the water into submission.
“You can’t plug a high-pressure leak with a finger,” I said. “We need to seal it. But wet concrete won’t set fast enough against that pressure.”
I looked at the weeping crack. I needed something that expanded, hardened, and stopped the flow instantly.
“Freezing,” I said. “If we freeze the water inside the crack, the ice will act as a temporary plug. It relieves the hydraulic pressure on the concrete long enough for us to apply a quick-set patch.”
“Freeze a lake?” Toby asked. “We left our liquid nitrogen at home.”
“Endothermic reaction,” I snapped. “Happy, what do we have in the van?”
“We have the quick-set concrete for the transformer job,” she said.
“And I have a bag of ammonium nitrate in the trunk,” Toby added.
Everyone looked at him.
“What? It’s for my garden! I’m growing prize-winning squash!”
“Ammonium nitrate mixed with water creates a powerful endothermic reaction,” I calculated. “It pulls heat from the environment instantly. It’s an instant ice pack on a massive scale.”
“We have ninety seconds before that crack expands beyond repair,” I said. “Happy, mix the nitrate. Toby, get the rope.”
The Pendulum
I found myself dangling over the side of a failing dam, suspended by a winch cable that hadn’t been inspected since the Reagan administration.
“Lower me,” I commanded into the headset.
I held a canister of the nitrate mixture in one hand and a tube of quick-set concrete in the other. Below me, the water sprayed out of the crack with enough force to cut skin.
“Walter, the cable is fraying,” Sylvester’s voice panicked in my ear. “The tensile strength is compromised. If you swing more than 15 degrees, the friction coefficient will snap it.”
“Noted,” I said. “Just get me to the hole.”
I reached the fracture. I jammed the tube into the crack and triggered the nitrate. The reaction was immediate. The water turned slushy, then solid. The spray stopped. The ice was holding.
“Patching now,” I grunted, smearing the industrial concrete over the frozen wound.
“Walter, hurry!” Paige yelled from the top. “The dam is groaning again!”
“Done!” I shouted. “Pull me up!”
The winch whined. I rose a few feet. Then—snap.
The cable broke.
I fell. My stomach dropped into my shoes. I flailed, grabbing at the slick concrete wall. My fingers found a piece of rebar jutting out from the old maintenance ladder. I slammed against the wall, the wind knocked out of me.
“Walter!” Paige screamed.
I looked down. A two-hundred-foot drop to the rocks below. I looked up. I was thirty feet from the rim.
“The ladder is gone!” Happy shouted. “We can’t reach him!”
“Use the concrete!” I yelled. “The quick-set! Make steps!”
Happy didn’t hesitate. She poured the remaining concrete down the side of the wall, creating crude, lumpy handholds that hardened in seconds.
I climbed. Hand over hand, gripping the warm, chemical blobs of gray sludge. When I vaulted over the railing onto safe ground, I collapsed.
“Did we fix it?” Cabe asked.
“The crack is sealed,” I gasped. “But the water is still rising. We treated the symptom, not the disease.”
The Rectal Exam
We ran back to the control room. The water level gauge was still climbing.
“The outflow pipes are clogged,” Happy diagnosed. “Debris from the storm must have blocked the grates. If we don’t clear them, the water flows over the top of the dam, erodes the foundation, and the whole thing topples.”
“We need to unclog a pipe that is fifty feet underwater and filled with tons of pressure,” Toby summarized. “Basically, this dam needs an enema.”
“A colonoscopy,” I corrected. “We need a camera and a cutter.”
“I can build it,” Happy said, her eyes lighting up. “I need a motor, a blade, and a waterproof camera.”
We raided a nearby boat shed. Happy cannibalized a trolling motor, attached a circular saw blade, and wired a GoPro to it. It looked like a robot from a nightmare.
“We lower it in,” Happy explained. “I steer it remotely to the blockage. The saw cuts through the debris. The water flows. Simple.”
It wasn’t simple.
We lowered the device. On the monitor, the murky water swirled. We saw the blockage—a massive tangle of logs and branches choking the intake pipe.
“Engaging cutter,” Happy said.
The saw roared underwater. Chips of wood floated past the camera. It was working. The water flow started to pick up.
“It’s clearing!” Sylvester cheered. “Pressure is dropping!”
Then, the device lurched. The saw blade caught on a heavy log. The torque was too high. The cable attached to Happy’s leg—which she was using to feel the tension—snapped tight.
“Whoa!” Happy was yanked toward the edge.
“Happy!” Toby lunged for her, but missed.
She was dragged over the railing, dangling by her ankle, inches above the churning water of the intake vortex. If she fell in, the turbine would grind her into biological paste.
“The winch is jammed!” Cabe yelled, pulling at the lever.
“I’m slipping!” Happy screamed. Her boot was coming loose.
I looked at the water. I calculated the flow rate. The vortex was creating a localized gravity well. I couldn’t pull her up against that force; I had to intercept her fall.
“The net!” I shouted. “Grab the cargo net from the van!”
I grabbed one end, Cabe grabbed the other. We sprinted to the catwalk below her.
“Let go, Happy!” I yelled.
“Are you crazy?”
“Let go! We’ll catch you!”
She looked at me. Trust is a variable I usually calculate as low probability. But Happy looked at me and let go.
She fell. We pulled the net taut. She hit it with a heavy thud, bouncing once. We hauled her onto the catwalk just as her boot, which had fallen off, was sucked into the intake pipe.
A sickening crunch echoed from the depths. The turbine blades shattered.
“Well,” Happy panted, checking her foot. “There goes the turbine.”
The Tsunami Bomb
The silence that followed was heavy. The turbine was destroyed. The outflow had stopped again.
“That was the only working turbine,” Sylvester said, his voice trembling. “Without it, we can’t lower the water level. The dam fails in twenty minutes.”
I looked at the town below. I saw the lights of the Christmas tree in the square. Thousands of people.
“We have to reverse the flow,” I said.
“Reverse it?” Cabe asked. “Gravity goes down, Walter. Water flows down.”
“Not if we change the physics,” I said. My brain was entering a fugue state, accessing data from old military files I had memorized as a kid. “In World War II, they researched a ‘Tsunami Bomb.’ The idea was to detonate a charge at a specific depth to create a standing wave—a shockwave that pushes water backwards.”
“You want to blow up the dam to save the dam?” Paige asked.
“No. We detonate a charge fifty yards away from the wall. The explosion creates a massive displacement. The water rushes into the void, creating a reverse surge. It pushes the water away from the dam, back up the reservoir, and over the spillway on the far side.”
“It’s theoretically possible,” Happy said, nodding. “But we need a bomb.”
“We don’t have C4,” Cabe said.
“We have rubidium,” Happy said. “In the transformer equipment. Rubidium explodes on contact with water.”
“And we have the rock salt I used to make the ice cream,” Toby said.
“Perfect,” I said. “We encase the rubidium in a shell of rock salt. We throw it in. The salt dissolves as it sinks. When the water hits the rubidium… boom.”
We built the bomb in three minutes. It looked like a majestic, deadly snowball.
“Who throws it?” I asked.
“I was a varsity pitcher,” Toby bragged. “State champion.”
“Distance is sixty yards,” I said. “Wind is three knots north. You have to hit the exact center of the reservoir.”
Toby weighed the salt-bomb in his hand. “No pressure.”
He wound up and threw. The white sphere sailed through the air. It arced beautifully… and landed ten yards short.
“You idiot!” Happy yelled.
“It slipped!” Toby cried.
We watched the water. Bubbles rose. Then, a massive column of white water erupted into the night sky.
The shockwave hit.
The water in the reservoir didn’t flow down. It reared up, like a beast, and surged backward. It crashed over the far spillway, millions of gallons diverting away from the town.
The pressure gauge dropped. 90%… 80%… 50%.
The dam held.
We stood there, wet, freezing, and exhausted. Below us, the town lights twinkled, completely unaware that they had almost been washed away.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
The Bio-Code
We barely had time to dry off.
Two days later, we were back in the garage. I was trying to recalibrate the server cooling system when Cabe walked in. He didn’t look happy.
“Pack it up,” he said. “Governor Lane needs us.”
“The Governor?” Sylvester squeaked. “Did he see the bill for the dam?”
“It’s his daughter, Helena,” Cabe said. “She’s sick. The doctors say it’s a virus, but her organs are shutting down one by one. And this morning, the Governor got an email.”
He handed me a tablet. The email was simple: I’m sick, and it’s your fault. 48 hours.
“It’s a threat,” I said.
“It’s a bio-hack,” Cabe corrected. “The CDC is stumped. They can’t identify the pathogen. But someone is controlling it.”
We arrived at the Governor’s mansion. It was a fortress of wealth and power, but inside, the air was thick with desperation. Helena Lane, a twelve-year-old girl, lay in a bed surrounded by machines. She was pale, gasping for air.
I looked at her chart.
“These symptoms don’t make sense,” I said. “Kidney failure, respiratory distress, but no fever. It’s not a biological virus. It’s a genetic trigger.”
“What does that mean?” Paige asked, acting as the translator for the terrified Governor.
“It means someone designed a specific protein sequence to attack only her,” I explained. “It’s a smart virus. It targets her DNA markers. If we don’t find the source code, her body will delete itself.”
“Find who did this,” Governor Lane commanded. “I don’t care what it costs.”
The Mirror
“We can’t track the biological virus,” I told the team. “We have to track the digital one. The email.”
“The IP is bounced through a dozen servers,” Sylvester said, typing furiously. “Russia, China, Brazil. It’s a ghost.”
“Mirror it,” I said. “Set up a trap. Send a reply to the hacker. When he opens it, we mirror his connection. We don’t trace him; we become him.”
It took ten minutes. The signal locked onto a location in downtown LA.
“A gaming house?” Toby asked, looking at the address. “The hacker is a gamer?”
We raided the place. It was dark, smelling of energy drinks and ozone. Rows of computers hummed. A young man in a hoodie saw us and bolted.
“Runner!” Cabe shouted.
We chased him into the alley. He was fast, but physics is faster. I calculated his trajectory and kicked a trash can into his path. He tripped, stumbling into the street—right into the path of a moving sedan.
Thump.
He rolled over the hood. We surrounded him. He was groaning, clutching his ribs.
“I didn’t do it!” he screamed. “I’m just a mule! I just send the emails!”
“Who gave you the drive?” I demanded, leaning over him.
“I don’t know! He pays me in crypto! He leaves the drives in a drop box!”
“Who is on the list?” I asked. “The other emails?”
“There were four,” he gasped. “Four kids. All their parents worked at Springwind Pharmaceuticals.”
The Profit of Death
The connection was clear. Springwind Pharmaceuticals.
“I looked into their history,” Sylvester said back in the van. “Five years ago, they were developing a drug for Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). It was promising. But then they realized the compound worked better for asthma.”
“Asthma is a bigger market,” Toby said, shaking his head. “More profit.”
“Exactly,” I said. “They shelved the SMA drug to focus on the asthma inhaler. The SMA patients… the children… they were left to die.”
“So the hacker is a parent,” Paige realized. “A parent whose child died because Springwind wanted more money.”
“He’s targeting the executives,” I said. “Governor Lane used to be on the board of Springwind. This is revenge.”
“If we want to save Helena,” I said, “We need the antidote. And the only person who has it is the one who made the virus. We need the list of the original clinical trial patients. One of them is our killer.”
We went to Springwind HQ. The CEO, a man in a three-thousand-dollar suit, looked at us with disdain.
“Patient records are confidential,” he said smoothly. “I can’t give you that list without a court order.”
“A court order takes 24 hours,” I slammed my hand on his desk. “The girl has six.”
“My hands are tied,” he lied.
“We’re stealing it,” I said to the team as we walked out.
The Heist
“The records are in the basement archive,” Happy said, looking at the blueprints. “Hard copy only. No digital footprint.”
“How do we get in?” Cabe asked.
“Social engineering,” I said. “Employees are the weakest link.”
We parked a food truck outside. Toby posed as a vendor handing out ‘free lunch’ coupons. The coupon had a QR code. When an employee scanned it, it cloned their ID badge signal.
“Got one,” Toby whispered into the comms. “Access code captured.”
Sylvester was the only one who could memorize the list fast enough. He had an eidetic memory.
“I can’t go in there,” Sylvester panicked. “There are germs. Corporate germs.”
“Sylvester,” I said. “You are a superhero. Your power is your brain. Go.”
He went in. He found the file room. He started flipping through the pages, his eyes scanning like a high-speed scanner.
“Hurry, Sly,” Happy warned. “Security is doing a sweep.”
“I need more time!”
“You don’t have time!”
He burst out of the back door just as the guards rounded the corner. He was sweating, shaking, and hyperventilating.
“Did you get it?” I asked.
He tapped his temple. “It’s all up here. Every name. Every address.”
The Showdown
We screened the list. One name stood out. Robert Vane. A brilliant geneticist whose son had been in the trial. His son had died six months ago.
“He has the skills,” I said. “And the motive.”
We tracked his phone. He wasn’t running. He was at a nearby office building. The same building where the Governor was currently holding a press conference about the ‘mystery illness.’
“He’s not just killing the daughter,” I realized. “He’s coming for the Governor.”
We raced to the building. The lobby was crowded. I spotted Robert near the elevators. He was holding a briefcase.
“Robert!” I shouted.
He turned. He looked tired. Broken. A man who had nothing left to lose.
“Don’t come closer,” he warned, holding up a remote. “This briefcase contains an aerosol version of the virus. If I trigger it, everyone in this lobby dies. Including the Governor.”
The Governor froze. He recognized Robert.
“Robert,” the Governor said. “I’m sorry about your son.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring him back!” Robert screamed. “You chose profit over his life! You let him suffocate!”
“He’s going to release it,” Toby whispered. “His body language is terminal. He wants to end it.”
I looked at the sprinkler system on the ceiling. I looked at the chemical composition of the virus in my head.
“The virus is protein-based,” I whispered to Happy. “It’s unstable in high humidity. Water breaks down the casing.”
“So?” Happy asked.
“So we need rain.”
I grabbed a lighter from a bystander. I grabbed a can of hairspray from a woman’s purse.
“Walter, what are you doing?” Cabe yelled.
“Science,” I said.
I ignited the spray. A massive tongue of fire shot up toward the smoke detector.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The fire alarm blared. The sprinklers exploded.
Water rained down on the lobby. Robert triggered the briefcase. A cloud of green gas hissed out, but the moment it hit the wall of water falling from the ceiling, it dissolved. The chemical bonds shattered. The virus was neutralized.
Cabe tackled Robert. It was over.
The Variable of Humanity
Later, at the hospital, Helena was recovering. We had found the antidote notes in Robert’s lab.
I stood in the hallway, watching the Governor hold his daughter’s hand. He was crying.
“You saved her,” Paige said, standing next to me.
“We solved the problem,” I corrected. “It was an equation. We balanced it.”
“Is that all it is to you?” she asked.
I looked at her. I thought about the fear I felt when Happy fell from the dam. I thought about the anger I felt when I learned about the dead children. I thought about the 8-move checkmate Ralph had played.
“No,” I said softly. “It’s not just an equation.”
I looked at my hand. It was still shaking slightly from the adrenaline.
“I have an IQ of 197,” I said. “I can calculate the velocity of a falling object or the code of a virus. But I can’t understand why a father would let children die for money. And I can’t understand the depth of grief that drives a man to become a murderer.”
Paige touched my arm. “That’s why you have us, Walter. That’s why you have me. To help you understand the parts that aren’t math.”
I looked at the team. Happy and Toby were arguing about who saved who. Sylvester was sanitizing his hands for the tenth time. Cabe was debriefing the agents.
They were a mess. They were inefficient, emotional, and chaotic.
They were perfect.
“We’re not just a team,” I said, testing the words. “We’re a system. A complex, adaptive system.”
“You mean a family?” Paige smiled.
I paused. Family. A biological grouping usually defined by genetics. But in this case…
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s call it that.”
“Come on, genius,” Paige said. “Let’s go home. Ralph is waiting.”
We walked out of the hospital into the cool Los Angeles night. The city was quiet. The planes were landing safely. The dam was holding. The girl was breathing.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the need to calculate the odds of what came next. I just knew we could handle it.
(End of Part 3)
PART 4: THE ALGORITHM OF REDEMPTION
The Failure of Simulation
Success is a metric. In my world, it is binary: 1 for success, 0 for failure. There is no spectrum. You either save the girl, or you don’t. You either catch the plane, or it crashes.
But the government operates in the gray areas.
Three weeks after the Governor’s daughter incident, Scorpion was placed on a probationary “war game” exercise. The Department of Homeland Security wanted to test our field readiness. They put us in a simulated combat scenario: infiltrate a secure compound, retrieve a hostage (a sandbag with a face drawn on it), and extract.
We failed.
Not because we weren’t smart. We failed because we were too smart. I spent seven minutes hacking the electronic lock on the back door because it was the most efficient entry point. Meanwhile, Happy was disassembling the perimeter sensors to use as spare parts. Toby was psychoanalyzing the “hostage” sandbag. Sylvester was hiding in the van because the simulated gunfire was too loud.
By the time we breached the room, the “hostage” had been “executed” by the opposing force. We were three seconds late.
“You are a liability,” the Director told us, tossing the file onto his desk. “You solve problems on a whiteboard, O’Brien. But in the field? You’re a disaster. Funding is pulled. Scorpion is deactivated.”
Just like that, the variable changed. We went from saving the city to being unemployed. Again.
We retreated to our garage. The atmosphere was heavy with the static of failure. We were back to being misfits. No badges. No purpose. Just high IQs and low bank accounts.
“We need a case,” I said, pacing the room. “We need to prove utility.”
“We don’t have clearance anymore, Walter,” Cabe Gallo said, leaning against the wall. He looked tired. He had stuck his neck out for us, and we had chopped it off. “It’s over.”
Then, the ground shook.
The Lawyer and the Router
It wasn’t a metaphor. The ground literally shook. A shockwave rattled the windows of the garage.
“Explosion,” Happy said instantly, checking the seismic monitors we had illegally tapped into. “Downtown. Three miles away.”
We turned on the news. A lawyer’s office on Wilshire Boulevard had been blown open. Smoke was billowing from the second floor. The news anchors were calling it a “gas leak” or a “civil dispute.”
“A civil dispute?” I scoffed at the screen. “That’s statistically improbable. People who are angry about a lawsuit throw bricks or key cars. They don’t detonate high-yield explosives.”
I zoomed in on the footage. The blast pattern was wrong.
“Look at the debris field,” I pointed out. “The glass blew inward before it blew outward. That’s a shaping charge. And look at the location. It’s a low-rent law firm. Why bomb a lawyer who handles divorces?”
“Maybe a really bad divorce?” Toby suggested.
“No,” I said. “Look at what’s under the building.”
I pulled up the city infrastructure schematics. My fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing the subterranean maps of Los Angeles.
“There,” I pointed. “That building sits directly on top of the main fiber-optic trunk line for the Southwest region. That isn’t a law office bombing. That is an attack on the internet.”
“If they cut that line,” Sylvester stammered, his face paling, “internet speeds in Los Angeles will drop by 60%. Banking, traffic lights, hospitals… everything will lag.”
“It’s a bottleneck,” I realized. “Someone is trying to slow down the flow of information. But why?”
“We’re not on the clock, Walter,” Cabe warned. “We are civilians.”
“I don’t care about the clock,” I said, grabbing my jacket. “I care about the data. We’re going.”
The Turtle in the Reflection
We arrived at the scene. It was chaos. Police tape, fire trucks, and confusion. We ducked under the tape.
“Hey!” A uniformed officer shouted. “Get back!”
“It’s okay,” Cabe said, flashing a badge he probably shouldn’t have been using anymore. “Consultants.”
We walked through the rubble. The smell of cordite and burnt drywall was overpowering. I scanned the blast zone.
“It was a pipe bomb,” Happy analyzed, picking up a shard of metal. “Low tech, but effective. Placed right over the conduit.”
“Wait,” Toby said. He was looking at the crowd of onlookers. “Behavioral baseline. Look at the people. Everyone is shocked, scared, recording on their phones. Except him.”
He pointed to a man in a hoodie, standing near the back. He wasn’t filming. He was watching the police. He was tapping his foot.
“Flight response,” Toby whispered. “He wants to run.”
“That’s our guy,” I said.
We moved toward him. The man saw us. His eyes widened. He turned and bolted.
“Runner!” I shouted.
And then, the most embarrassing chase scene in the history of law enforcement began.
We are geniuses. We are not athletes.
I sprinted, but my gait was inefficient. Happy was fast, but she was carrying a tool belt. Sylvester ran like he was afraid the air was trying to attack him. Toby… well, Toby tripped over a curb.
The suspect was getting away. He vaulted a fence. We stopped, panting, hands on our knees.
“We need… cardio…” Sylvester wheezed.
“He’s gone,” Happy spit out. “We lost him.”
“No,” I said, looking at a nearby street camera. “We didn’t lose him. We just need a different angle.”
We went back to the garage and hacked the street feed. The footage was grainy. We couldn’t see his face. But we saw something else.
“Enhance reflection,” I ordered.
Happy pulled up the image. In the reflection of a parked car’s side mirror, we saw the suspect running. Hanging from his belt was a keychain.
“Zoom in,” I said.
It was a cartoon turtle wearing a racing helmet.
“A turtle?” Cabe asked. “That’s our lead?”
“It’s not just a turtle,” Toby said, leaning in. “That’s the mascot for ‘Speedy’s,’ a turtle racing bar in Reseda. Illegal gambling. Very niche.”
“How do you know that?” Paige asked.
“I have a… diverse portfolio of hobbies,” Toby admitted.
“We find the turtle, we find the bomber,” I said.
The Vegetable and the Laptop
We tracked the suspect to an apartment complex near the bar. We staked it out. When he came out, we were ready.
Or so we thought.
We tried to corner him. “Federal Agents!” Cabe shouted (a lie).
The suspect panicked. He ran into the street, looking back at us. He didn’t see the city bus.
CRACK.
The sound of impact was sickening. The bomber flew twenty feet and landed in a heap.
“Well,” Toby said, checking the man’s pulse as the sirens approached. “He’s alive. But he’s in a coma. Glasgow Coma Scale of 3. He’s not talking anytime soon.”
“Great,” I said, frustrated. “Our only lead is a vegetable.”
“Walter!” Paige scolded.
“It’s a medical term,” I defended. “Functionally, his brain stem is intact, but higher cortical function is zero.”
“Check his backpack,” Happy said.
Inside, we found a laptop. And a detonator.
“This isn’t a detonator for the bomb that already went off,” Happy said, examining the wiring. ” The frequency is different. This is for a second bomb.”
“Where?” Cabe asked.
I opened the laptop. It was encrypted. 256-bit AES. Standard for cybercriminals.
“Give me two minutes,” I said.
I bypassed the kernel, brute-forced the password using a dictionary attack based on the guy’s social media profile (people are predictably terrible at passwords; his was turtle123), and opened his files.
“He was emailing someone,” I said. “Someone named ‘K’.”
“Who is K?”
“I don’t know. But look at this map.”
A map of Los Angeles popped up. There were three targets circled.
-
The Lawyer’s Office (Destroyed).
-
A Radio Tower in Burbank.
-
A building in the industrial district labelled “Gray Tech.”
“Gray Tech,” I read. “They are a server farm. They host physical storage for massive amounts of data. Low-speed, long-term storage.”
“Why bomb a storage unit?” Paige asked.
“The lawyer’s office slowed down the internet,” I reasoned. “The radio tower would cut off backup communications. And Gray Tech… that’s where the data lives.”
“He’s not a terrorist,” I realized. “He’s a cleaner. Someone hired him to erase something. Something that exists on the internet.”
“You can’t delete something from the internet,” Sylvester said. “Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
“Unless you destroy the physical servers and the caching routers that hold the temporary files,” I explained. “When you upload a file, it sits on a router before it hits the server. If you slow down the network (the lawyer’s office), the file sits on the router longer. Then, if you blow up the server (Gray Tech), the only copy left is on the router.”
“And then you blow up the router,” Happy finished.
“We have to get to Gray Tech,” I said. “Whatever is in there, someone is willing to kill to destroy it.”
The Corrupt Element
We arrived at Gray Tech. It was a fortress of concrete and cooling fans. We broke in (breaking and entering was becoming a habit).
We found the server rack listed in the bomber’s laptop.
“This is it,” I said, plugging in. “Let’s see what K wanted to hide.”
I pulled the file. It was an audio recording.
I hit play.
Voice 1: “The transfer is complete. The money is in your account.” Voice 2: “And the evidence?” Voice 1: “Buried. No one will know we sold the guidance chips to the cartel.”
The room went cold.
“I know that voice,” Cabe said. His voice was a whisper, filled with betrayal.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Merrick,” Cabe said. “Director Merrick. My boss. The head of the LA field office.”
“Your boss is selling military tech to drug cartels?” Toby asked. “That’s bold.”
“And he hired the bomber to destroy the evidence of the transaction,” I deduced. “The bomber was cleaning up Merrick’s mess.”
Suddenly, the heavy steel doors of the server room slammed shut. The electronic lock beeped red.
“We’re locked in,” Happy said, banging on the door.
A voice came over the intercom. It wasn’t Merrick. It was worse. It was the man we had seen at the crime scene earlier—the “Consultant” working with the police. Agent Calloway. The man Cabe called “Killer” because of his ruthless efficiency.
“Smart kid,” Calloway’s voice sneered. “You figured it out. Merrick is messy. I’m the one who cleans it up.”
“Calloway!” Cabe shouted at the intercom. “Open this door!”
“Can’t do that, Cabe,” Calloway said. “You see, there’s a third bomb. And you’re standing on it.”
The Viscosity Solution
“Search the room!” I yelled.
Happy scrambled up a ladder to the ventilation shafts. “I hear it! It’s in the ductwork!”
She ripped open a grate. Inside, strapped to the main HVAC unit, was a bundle of C4 with a digital timer.
“05:00,” she read. “Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds.”
“Disarm it,” Cabe ordered.
“I can’t!” Happy shouted down. “It’s got a mercury tilt switch and a collapsing circuit. If I cut a wire, it blows. If I move it, it blows. If the timer hits zero, it blows.”
“We’re trapped in a steel box with a bomb,” Sylvester hyperventilated. “I’m going to die in a server room. That’s statistically the most likely place for me to die, but I hate it!”
I looked at the bomb. I looked at the room.
“We can’t disarm it,” I said. “And we can’t escape. The blast radius of that much C4 in a confined space will turn this room into a pressure cooker. We will be liquefied.”
“Thanks for the visual, Walter,” Toby snapped.
“Think,” I told myself. “Think.”
Explosions are just rapidly expanding gas. Pressure. If you can contain the pressure, you can contain the blast. But we didn’t have a blast shield.
I looked at the corner of the room. There were barrels of industrial sealant—fire retardant gel used for the server cables.
“The sealant,” I said. “It’s a non-Newtonian fluid base. If we mix it with a thickening agent, we can create a high-viscosity barrier.”
“We don’t have a thickening agent!” Happy yelled. “3 minutes!”
“Salt,” I said. “Sodium chloride increases the viscosity of certain gels. We need salt.”
“We don’t have salt!”
“The cafeteria,” Paige said. “We passed a vending machine in the hallway. Pretzels.”
“The door is locked!”
“Happy, the vent!” I pointed. “Can you crawl to the hallway?”
“I fit,” she said.
“Go! Get every bag of pretzels, chips, anything salty. And hurry.”
Happy disappeared into the vent.
“What are we doing?” Cabe asked.
“We are going to bury the bomb,” I said. “We are going to make a cocoon of putty that will absorb the kinetic energy of the blast. It won’t stop the explosion, but it might dampen it enough so we don’t die.”
Happy returned two minutes later, dragging a bag full of snacks.
“Crush them!” I ordered.
We spent the next sixty seconds stomping on bags of pretzels and mixing them into the barrels of sealant. It was ridiculous. It was desperate. It was science.
We poured the thick, salty sludge over the bomb in the vent. It oozed over the C4, burying the timer.
“It’s not enough,” I said, looking at the volume. “The layer is too thin.”
“00:30,” Happy said. “Thirty seconds.”
“Get behind the server racks!” I shouted. “Everyone, down! Cover your ears! Open your mouths to equalize the pressure!”
“Walter, come on!” Paige yelled.
“I have to hold the seal!” I shouted. “If I don’t pack it down, the gas will escape!”
“No!” Paige screamed. Cabe grabbed her and pulled her behind a heavy steel bank of servers.
I stood there, my hands deep in the grey goo, pressing down on the bomb that was about to end my life.
I closed my eyes. I thought about the Ferrari. I thought about the dam. I thought about Ralph.
I calculated the odds of survival. 4%.
“Walter!”
00:01.
BOOM.
The Baghdad Truth
The world turned white.
Then, it turned into pain.
I was thrown backward. I hit the wall. My ears rang with a high-pitched whine that drowned out the universe. Dust filled my lungs.
I coughed. I was alive.
I looked at the vent. The sealant had held—mostly. The blast had blown the vent cover off and scorched the ceiling, but the force had been directed upward into the shaft, not outward into the room.
“Walter!”
Paige was there. She was covered in dust, coughing. She grabbed my face. “Are you okay? You idiot! Are you okay?”
“I… I recalculated,” I wheezed. “The salt content… was sufficient.”
The door to the server room hissed open. The electronic lock had been shorted by the EMP of the blast.
Calloway stood there, gun drawn. He looked surprised to see us alive.
“Persistent cockroaches,” he muttered. He raised the gun, aiming at me.
“Goodbye, genius.”
BANG.
I flinched. But I didn’t feel a bullet.
Calloway dropped. Behind him stood Cabe Gallo, his service weapon smoking.
Cabe stepped over Calloway’s body. He walked over to me. He offered me a hand.
“You okay, son?” he asked.
I looked at his hand. The last time Cabe offered me a hand, I was sixteen. I had built a software program for humanitarian aid—to drop food packages in Baghdad with precision accuracy. Cabe had taken that software. Two days later, I watched on the news as my software was used to guide laser-guided missiles into a bunker. 2,000 people died. Civilians.
I had never forgiven him. I had trusted him, and he had turned my genius into a weapon.
But now, looking at the smoking gun in his hand, looking at the man who had just saved my life… the data set had changed.
I took his hand. He pulled me up.
“We need to talk,” Cabe said, his voice gruff. “About Baghdad.”
“Not now,” I said.
“Yes, now,” Cabe insisted. “While we’re still alive.”
He looked me in the eye. “I didn’t know, Walter. When I took your software, I thought it was for aid. Merrick… Merrick swapped the payload data. I didn’t know they were going to bomb that bunker until I saw it on CNN, just like you.”
“You were the handler,” I said, the old anger rising. “You were responsible.”
“I was,” Cabe admitted. “And I have carried that every day for fifteen years. I couldn’t tell you the truth because it was classified. I would have gone to prison, and you would have been recruited by someone even worse than Merrick. So I let you hate me. Because it kept you safe. It kept you away from the government.”
I processed this. The logic held. Cabe had sacrificed his relationship with me to protect me from the machine. He had taken the blame for a war crime he didn’t commit.
“Why tell me now?” I asked.
“Because today,” Cabe said, looking at the team, “you proved that you can handle the truth. You aren’t a kid anymore, Walter. You’re a soldier. In your own way.”
I looked at him. The resentment, a heavy variable I had carried for half my life, evaporated.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re good.”
The Emotional Quotient
We walked out of the Gray Tech building into the morning sun. The police were swarming. Merrick was being arrested in his office—the audio file from the server had been automatically uploaded to the FBI database the moment I accessed it (I set up a dead man’s switch).
Scorpion was reinstated. Fully funded.
We went back to the garage. We were bruised, battered, and covered in pretzel-dust-infused industrial sealant.
“I need a shower,” Happy announced. “And a beer. In that order.”
“I need to sanitize my entire existence,” Sylvester whimpered.
“I need to go win some money to pay for that car window I broke,” Toby said.
They dispersed, leaving me alone with Paige.
She was wiping soot off her face with a wet wipe. She looked beautiful. Not in a symmetrical, aesthetic way, but in a chaotic, human way.
“You stayed behind,” she said quietly. “With the bomb.”
“It was the only logical choice,” I said. “I knew the mixture ratio. If I let Happy do it, the probability of error was 12% higher.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop hiding behind the math. You didn’t stay because of the mixture ratio. You stayed because you wanted to protect us.”
I looked at her. She was decoding me. She was hacking my firewall without even typing a command.
“The team,” I started, struggling to find the words. “They… they are necessary for the mission.”
“They are your family, Walter,” she said. “And you love them.”
Love. An elevated level of dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin. A biological bribe to ensure species propagation and tribal cohesion.
“I suppose,” I said, “that I have formed a significant attachment to them.”
Paige smiled. She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. It was a brief contact of epidermis, lasting 0.8 seconds. But the physiological response was… significant.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For giving Ralph a place where he doesn’t have to be alone. And for giving me a job where I feel like I matter.”
“You are essential to the team’s efficiency,” I said. “Without you, the friction coefficient between me and humanity is too high. You are the lubricant.”
She laughed. “That is the most romantic and terrible thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m working on my EQ,” I admitted.
“It’s a work in progress,” she agreed.
The Conclusion: The New Variable
I sat at my desk. The sun was rising over Los Angeles. The city was waking up. Millions of people, going to jobs they hated, sitting in traffic, worrying about money, falling in love, getting their hearts broken.
They were inefficient. They were irrational. They were messy.
For a long time, I thought I was better than them. I thought my brain made me superior. I thought that because I could see the code of the universe, I was above the people living in it.
I was wrong.
I looked at the garage. Sylvester was asleep on his keyboard, drooling slightly. Happy was dismantling a toaster, looking peaceful. Toby was throwing playing cards into a hat, muttering about probability. Paige was sitting with Ralph, reading a comic book.
Ralph looked up. He saw me watching. He smiled. A genuine, unguarded smile.
I realized then that intelligence is not just processing speed. It is not just memory capacity.
True intelligence is the ability to adapt. To connect. To survive not just as an individual, but as a collective.
I am Walter O’Brien. I have an IQ of 197. I can stop planes from crashing, dams from bursting, and bombs from detonating.
But I cannot do it alone.
My team is a chaotic system of variables. They are unpredictable. They are annoying. They are my greatest liability.
And they are my greatest asset.
I opened my laptop. A new email popped up. Homeland Security. Subject: URGENT – NUCLEAR SILO MALFUNCTION IN NEVADA.
I smiled.
“Hey guys,” I called out. “Wake up.”
The team groaned.
“Coffee!” Toby yelled.
“Is it safe?” Sylvester asked.
“Do I get to blow something up?” Happy asked.
“Let’s go save the world,” Paige said, grabbing her coat.
“We have a case,” I said.
I typed a reply: SCORPION IS EN ROUTE.
The logic was sound. The variables were set. The solution was us.
(End of Story)
