Leaving The Genius’s World Chapter 10

Leaving The Genius’s World Chapter 10

“Audrey. Come back with me,” Theo said. “It’s too hard here. The wind is strong, the conditions are rough.

Your stomach was never good. Come back to Los Angeles with me, okay?”

“I swear, I’ll never make a decision for you again. You want to write? Write. You want to do cultural projects?

Do them.”

“Whatever you do, I’ll support it.”

I turned around.

In the distance, the Theban Mountains deepened in the evening light.

“Hard?” I asked softly. “Theo, the wind here never lets up. Summers are brutal-you can barely breathe. And

I’ve always got sand in my hair. But I love this work.”

Theo looked like he was about to break down.

I stayed calm.

“I used to think you guys were geniuses, so you had to be closer to the right answers than I was. Then I

figured it out. Al hallucinates. People do too. When a machine doesn’t have enough information, it spits out

something that sounds reasonable. That’s exactly what you did back then.”

“You saw me learning slowly and generated a conclusion-Audrey isn’t suited for a good college, isn’t suited

for research, isn’t suited for important things, is only suited to being taken care of.”

“Then you believed the answer you generated.”

Theo closed his eyes. Tears fell.

“I’m sorry.”

I looked at him.

“I don’t hate you. I really don’t. I don’t need to look up to you to know my worth. You’ve got your world. I’ve got

mine.”

I didn’t look at him again. I turned and walked toward Noah.

Noah opened the car door for me without inserting himself into my past. That was the kind of relationship I wanted these days.

That day, the desert sun set slowly, its afterglow staining the whole ridge gold-red.

I suddenly felt I had finally walked out of that chase.

Later, I only heard bits and pieces about Theo and the others.

Theo paused his research work for a long time. When he later returned to the project, he actively added

humanities researchers, psychologists, and an ethics team to model evaluation.

Owen and Wyatt also left the original core lab for a while and moved into other fields, but they never produced much.

Sadie faced a university investigation over authorship and citation issues in research data, and her reputation suffered.

None of it moved me anymore.

That spring, Noah and I went back to Luxor.

In the evening, we passed the West Bank.

Noah led me to an open space where we could see the ridge, then knelt on one knee.

“Audrey. There’s no such thing as geniuses and fools. Some people have high IQs and still can’t see what’s right in front of them. I should thank them, actually-for being too blind to see you. Because it led me to you.”

He took out a ring. “Will you marry me?”

I looked at him and nodded, smiling.

“Yes.”

Yes. People who think they’re geniuses are always trying to shortcut their way through the world.

But they don’t know the desert can only be crossed one footprint at a time.

The stars I once thought I could never reach? Just cold, dead rock.

Being my own sun-that’s the work of a lifetime.

I’d been acting so off that my family called in an exorcist.

It wasn’t a demon. It was the Al chip My sister Angelica Bennett had implanted in my head.

“All we needed was for you to take the SAT for Angelica. One test so she could get into her dream school.

Why do you always have to make everything so hard?” my childhood friend Adrian Kessler snapped.

“You’ve always outshone her in everything. She spent her whole life in your shadow, and it pushed her into a

deep depression. What were we supposed to do?” my parents said with a sigh.

Angelica blinked back tears. “Rafa, don’t blame them. They only did it because they love me and didn’t want

you bullying me anymore.”

My head was spinning.

Half of me wanted to scream. The other half was gone, severed from every sensation by the chip.

I didn’t answer. Tears spilled down Angelica’s cheeks almost instantly. “Rafa, are you still mad at me?”

Adrian didn’t hesitate. “Kneel, Raphaela. Apologize to Angelica.”

The command cut straight through the fog in my head.

The numb half took over.

My knees cracked against the floor. I bent forward and pressed my lips to Angelica’s shoes.

[Command received. Kneeling. Repeating apology one hundred times.]

My knees scraped raw against the floor. A buckle on Angelica’s shoe split my lip open. That was when my mom finally screamed and rushed over to drag me away.

“Rafa! What are you doing?”

Adrian’s shock hardened into a scowl. “Seriously? You’re pulling the victim card now? All I said was

apologize to Angie.”

I couldn’t speak. Every ounce of fight I threw at the chip bounced off. The unfinished command was all my

mind could hold.

My mom couldn’t pull me free. My body kept repeating the same motion, and the force of it dragged her to

the floor.

My dad lost it. He kicked me in the shoulder, then the back. “What the hell is wrong with you? You just

knocked your own mother down!”

I went down sideways from the kick. But my body crawled right back, dropped to its knees, and kept kissing