The Smartest Kid in the Universe Book 2: Genius Camp - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHRIS GRABENSTEIN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mr. Lemoncello and the Welcome to Wonderland series, Dog Squad, and the coauthor of many page-turners with James Patterson, including the Max Einstein series, and of Shine! cowritten with Chris's wife J.J. Grabenstein. Chris lives in New York City. Visit Chris at ChrisGrabenstein.com and on Twitter at @CGrabenstein.

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1 

Twelve-year-old Jake McQuade had never flown a military helicopter behind enemy lines, but it really wasn’t all that hard.

Sure, bad guys kept firing machine guns and mortars and Hydra rockets at him, but Jake and his chopper dodged all the incoming fire.

“Well done, son!” said the general strapped in beside him.

“Just using my math and geometry skills, sir.”

“Now we need to go rescue the hostages!”

Six pulsing green dots throbbed on the holographic display projected on the whirlybird’s windshield. They showed Jake the precise location of the hostages: trapped behind the walls of a heavily armed desert fortress the helicopter was heading to.

A nasty new fireball erupted on Jake’s right. Another near miss. He jerked the joystick to the left.

“Warning,” said the on-board computer. “Fighter jet on your tail. Prepare for missile attack.”

“Two can play at that game,” said Jake. He punched in a string of code--an algorithm he’d actually written himself--that would command his starboard Sidewinder missile to execute a complex backward, loop-the-loop, boomerang shot that no chopper pilot had ever dared attempt before.

“If the next missile hits us, son, we’re toast!” barked the general. “Toast!”

“Hold off on the marmalade, sir!”

Jake punched the launch button.

The rocket streaked away in a blistering plume of white. It arced up and over the helicopter, flipped back around, and surprised the enemy jet with a direct heat-seeking hit to its tailpipe.

BA-BOOM!

“Woo-hoo!” cried Jake, doing a quick arm-chugging, hip-swiveling chair dance.

“Well done!” shouted the general.

“Math and physics, sir. Math and physics.”

A two-note danger signal blared.

“Fish sticks!” shouted the general. “That was our final weapon!” More angry warning lights throbbed up and down the control panel. “The bad guys still have rockets, mortars, and a tank!”

“Good,” said Jake.

“What?”

“Their tank, sir. We’re gonna borrow it!”

Jake tapped another string of code into the chopper’s on-board computer. Up until a few months ago, all he could tap were one-finger text messages with lots of emojis so he didn’t have to spell so many words. But then, overnight, things changed. Jake McQuade became supersmart.

“I can hack into the enemy’s system data through heat emissions, then use the thermal sensors of my computer to transfer command and control of that tank’s weaponry to me!”

“But the enemy tank is a T-26-Z--the heaviest ever built. It’s stuck in the mud. It’s run out of fuel. It can’t move.”

“Temporary problems, sir. Which, by the way, are way more fun than math problems. Time for a mic drop.”

Jake deployed the giant superhydraulic electromagnet positioned underneath his helicopter’s belly. The thing was straight out of a scrap metal junkyard. The “Big Grabber” was standard equipment on this, the most sophisticated chopper in the military’s secret arsenal. It’s why Jake had selected it for this mission.

“It’s all tangents and vectors from here, sir. And yaw. Can’t forget the yaw. It’s in all the flight manuals.”

Jake flawlessly executed a deft series of moves. He heard the solid, metallic THUNK the instant his heavy-duty magnet snagged the ginormous tank and hoisted it up off the ground. The thing swung from the helicopter like a forty-ton yo-yo.

Jake, of course, still had to evade incoming mortar rounds. And a few more rocket shots. But avoiding those blasts was a simple matter of three-dimensional point-plotting. Finally, at precisely the right moment, and compensating for the arc of the dangling tank’s swing, he fired.

The tank’s turret gun blasted a hole in the side of the fortress wall.

Jake fired again.

The hole became a tunnel.

Jake swung the tank sideways. With the flick of a switch, he turned off the electromagnet. The T-26-Z flew away and cratered into the desert floor.

Free of the tank’s weight, Jake could easily maneuver the helicopter into position for a soft landing.

The six terrified hostages rushed out of the escape tunnel and climbed into the chopper.

“Well done, son!” said the general. “You just set a new world record for Gunship Air Battle Extreme!”

Jake heard a buzzer sound. Bells rang. A crowd cheered and chanted his name. 

He peeled off his headset and virtual reality goggles. 

Up on the giant video screen in the hotel ballroom, his name was at the top of the leaderboard!

2 

“The smartest kid in the universe has just defeated the world’s smartest computer!” announced the emcee onstage with Jake.

Triumphant whoop-whoop music blasted out of concert speakers. Jake waved at the six hundred gamers and fans crammed into the ballroom of the Imperial Marquis, the hotel where his mom was the events coordinator. In Jake’s humble opinion, this e-games competition, the first Zinkle Extreme Masters Tournament, was the best event his mom or the hotel had ever hosted.

A dozen hard-core gamers had just gone up against the Zinkle Virtuoso, the smartest, fastest, most artificially intelligent computer ever created by legendary tech whiz Zane Zinkle. That’s why there were a dozen names on the leaderboard. But jake mcquade was all the way up at the top!

“Smart thinking with that tank, Jake!” said Grace Garcia, joining Jake onstage. Grace was another seventh grader at Riverview Middle School. One of the smartest. Definitely the prettiest. At least that’s what Jake thought, even though he was too chicken to tell her. “You were amazing!”

“Um, thanks.”

Jake’s pale, freckled face went code pink. Grace had that effect on him. When she smiled and her eyes sparkled, Jake blushed.

“Who loves ya, baby?” Now his best bud, Kojo Shelton, was on the stage. Kojo was smart and funny and, for whatever reason, loved to stream TV shows from way back in the 1970s and ’80s, including one he’d stumbled across called Kojak.

“We might be soul mates,” he’d once told Jake. “He’s Ko-jak and I’m Ko-jo. Sure, he’s a bald, old Greek dude and I’m a handsome, young Black dude, but come on--we both dig Tootsie Pops.”

“Who loves ya, baby?” was Kojak’s old catchphrase. It had quickly become Kojo’s new one.

“I’ll tell you who loves him,” said Grace. “This whole crowd. Jake, you were fantástico!”

“Gracias,” he told her, because he’d recently become fluent in Spanish. The Spanish he learned the old-fashioned way. Studying. The stuff he knew to win the video game? A lot of that came from the jelly beans. The Ingestible Knowledge chewables that only Grace, Kojo, Jake, and their absentminded inventor friend, Haazim Farooqi, knew about.

“What’re you going to do with the prize money?” Grace asked.

“Donate it to charity, of course,” said Jake.

“Awesome. Pick your charity and I’ll match your donation.”

Jake might be “the smartest kid in the universe,” but Grace Garcia was on the short list for “the richest kid in the world,” on account of her family’s buried treasure, which the three friends had discovered while working together to save...