Medical Center. MRI Room.
Darren was in there getting his MRI scans done.
"Boss!"
With a nurse eagerly leading the way, Peggy and Lisa strolled in. Lisa was the first to call out a greeting.
"You guys made it!"
Adam lit up, grabbing Peggy's hand and pulling her over to the screen. He pointed at it excitedly. "This part right here? That's the tumor…"
Tumors aren't exactly neat and tidy.
With a structure this messy, the calculations involved were way beyond Adam's wheelhouse.
Good thing they had Peggy—the number-one genius teenage mathematician—to save the day!
Peggy stared at the scans from every angle on the screen, effortlessly building a mental model of the tumor in her head.
Then Adam jumped in, explaining the other structures of the human brain on the spot, helping Peggy flesh out her model even more.
How the virus would get injected into the tumor, spread through it, and wipe it out.
What kind of damage the surrounding tissues might take from the virus.
How the body's immune system kicks into gear.
Every variable that could possibly matter—Adam laid it all out, modeling it in his own brain at the same time.
He and Peggy had teamed up like this plenty of times before. No need for whiteboards—their minds synced up automatically, like they were sharing the same cosmic starry backdrop.
The models they built? Pretty much identical, just viewed from different angles—like watching the same object from two perspectives.
If this were a movie with special effects, you might get a glimpse of how it works.
Picture this: a starry void.
Adam and Peggy floating mid-air, a lumpy gray blob forming between them.
That's the tumor!
As Adam talked, layers of colorful glowing orbs popped up, wrapping around the gray blob from every angle until it morphed into a full-on brain.
Blood flowing, nerves firing, the virus taking out tumor cells, immune cells spawning to chase the virus, the tumor shrinking, surrounding tissues getting hit—it all played out, clear as day and totally vivid.
Adam and Peggy circled the glowing brain, checking it out from all sides. Sometimes they bumped into each other, passing right through like ghosts, no delay at all.
To outsiders, it just looked like Adam and Peggy were sitting there—Adam talking, Peggy tossing out a question here and there, both of them barely moving.
"She's the genius mathematician?"
Old Mr. Covington stared, his face a mix of confusion and disbelief.
"Yup!"
Lexi watched the two of them sitting so close, her expression a little complicated.
"How old is she?"
Mr. Covington couldn't wrap his head around it. "Eighteen yet?"
"Math's the real genius game—you either get it or you don't!" the short guy chimed in. "Age doesn't matter. Tons of math prodigies show off skills way beyond everyone else when they're still kids.
They see through problems in a flash—stuff other top mathematicians might never figure out in a lifetime.
Take this guy from the Three Kingdoms era—Ramanujan. Born dirt-poor, no formal math education ever.
He just grabbed a book with 5,000 theorems and formulas, proved them all his own way, and then casually jotted down some new ones.
Boom—conquered the math world.
The formulas he left behind? Generations of mathematicians still can't crack them all.
Dr. Adler might not be quite Ramanujan-level, but she's in that same league of super-genius."
"…"
Mr. Covington's jaw dropped.
He was just a soldier—muscle and guns were his thing. These legends? Totally over his head.
Even if he couldn't grasp how insane it all was, the sheer "whoa, that's wild" vibe hit him hard.
"You should feel damn lucky," Lisa snapped, glaring at Mr. Covington for daring to doubt Peggy. "You're a soldier—do you have any idea how many groups have tried recruiting Peggy these past few years?
NSA, CIA, FBI—they all want her working for them, using that genius brain of hers on superstring theory, chaos math, advanced algorithms…
Plain and simple? They want her cracking codes no human or computer can touch.
Like pinpointing some secret foreign base.
You get how valuable that kind of intel is, right?
With all those big shots begging her to join, you still doubting her skills?
Getting Peggy to help with your son's case?
You've pulled off something even your boss's boss's boss couldn't dream of!" 😤
"…She didn't say yes? Why not?"
Mr. Covington was floored again.
Now he got it—Peggy was some next-level being.
But why turn them all down? In his soldier brain, those were patriots!
"Why?" Lisa scoffed. "Peggy's smarts are for pushing humanity forward—not for helping you crack codes so you can bomb secret bases and kill countless innocents!"
"Those are rebels and terrorists!" Mr. Covington shot back. "Killing them keeps the world peaceful!"
"You really buy that?" Lisa smirked. "After the bombs drop, you're sent in to 'keep order.' How many buddies do you lose in the process?
Then you survivors come home, scarred up with PTSD, only to find the jobs you need got shipped off to the same warzones you fought in.
The locals you battled? They take your livelihoods.
Why? War turned their rich lives into nothing, so they'll work for pennies a day.
And you? You realize your big 'dream' was just cheap oil for some company to jack up prices back home and rake in billions.
Even if gas gets cheap later, so what? Unemployed, you can't afford it!
In the end, tons of you end up on the streets, drowning in trauma and pain.
Those 'patriot' types who hyped you up? They won't even glance your way.
To them, you're just disposable, mass-produced 'patriots.'
You don't matter, you don't bring peace—you're nothing!" 😒
"…"
Mr. Covington couldn't handle this heresy. He wanted to argue, but where do you even start?
His family came from a long line of soldiers, so he'd done alright.
But he knew plenty of buddies who'd ended up just like Lisa said—broken mentally and physically, homeless on the streets.
"Alright, Lisa!"
Adam saw her getting way too blunt and had to cut off his deep modeling sesh with Peggy to step in. "We're here to deal with Darren's tumor and save his life. None of that other stuff matters right now."
"Oh, right!"
Lisa quickly nodded.
(End of Chapter)