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Canon Summary
Evil Genius
Cadel was a very precocious child, if you can stretch "precocious" to mean "hacks into high security networks" at the age of seven. His adoptive parents, the Piggotts, were less than enthused, and on the police's suggestion ensured that he had zero access to a computer from then on. They also brought him to be treated by the psychologist Dr. Thaddeus Roth. Instead of redirecting Cadel's skills to something more, well, legal, Thaddeus told him that he needed to remember the golden rule: don't get caught.
Thaddeus revealed in short order that he knew who Cadel's real father was: an international criminal serving a life sentence, one Dr. Phineas Darkkon. Not only did he know him, but Thaddeus was his right-hand man and had a way to contact him even while he was in prison. Since Cadel had never bonded with his adoptive parents - and for good reason, as they ignored him and disparaged of him by turns - he fastened onto this news, and worked hard to impress his new-found father with such tactics as causing gridlock-level traffic jams in downtown Sydney for hours upon hours. Cadel was meticulous and dedicated; traffic jams require a lot of field trips, which meant convincing his babysitter to drive him back and forth as he took notes, day after day. But to Cadel, bereft of computers, it was worth doing.
Shortly after this, the teachers at his school gave up on handling him and said that he was too far beyond their level of education. Faced with no other alternative, Cadel's parents enrolled him in a private high school nearby, where he proceeded to turn his attention to studying people instead of train schedules and traffic patterns. After making a blind mistake in judgement with a bully, Thaddeus told him that people were the most complicated system of all, and no equation yet existed with which to anticipate them. Challenge received, Cadel set off to make one for himself, armed with a DNA-wired cell phone that had the ability to function as a computer (which he had designed himself).
Cadel then creates a fake dating web site, called Partner Post, which in exchange for people's money promises to set them up with their perfect partner. In reality, the extensive questionnaire is just so that Cadel knows how best to fake being their partner, thereby perfectly satisfying every customer until he's obtained what he considers to be sufficient funds. But things don't go quite as planned, and Cadel finds that one of the women he's corresponding with is equally as brilliant as he is, just in a different way. Cadel is a systems thinker, an applied scientist, while Kay-Lee McDougall is a pure theoretical mathematician. He begins to look forward to e-mailing her every day, often impatiently waiting for her responses, and Thaddeus cautions him not to get too invested in the business. A sure sign of how invested he really is, Cadel makes sure to keep the existence of Kay-Lee a secret.
It's about this time that he graduates high school at age twelve (sabotaging the rest of his graduating class in their exams as a final farewell present) and starts to look for a college. Drs. Darkkon and Roth inform him that, years before, the Axis Institute was established for the sole purpose of properly educating Cadel when he came of age - though of course no one else knows that. It functions as an elite, upper class post-secondary learning facility, geared toward the sciences and with especially talented students. Secretly the classes are about topics such as extortion, lying, embezzlement, and other illegal acts required for proper villainy. After a bit of fuss Mr. and Mrs. Piggott are swayed, and though his extremely young age makes him a target for bullying, Thaddeus tells him that his status as Dr. Darkkon's son will protect him - and it does.
And then he finds out that his father and Thaddeus are monitoring his every move, which wouldn't be so surprising if the Piggotts weren't in on it. His own adoptive parents are on Darkkon's payroll and have been his entire life. Starting to question everything he's been told and his own world view, Cadel begins to retaliate. Using the skills he formed in high school, he sabotages the Axis Institute via a convoluted, multi-step interpersonal plot; this inadvertently causes the deaths of several professors and the complete closure of the school. This shocks Cadel's moral compass into realigning itself, and just as he's trying to decide how to escape the life he's being forced into, one of his professors catches on to what's happening and kidnaps him as leverage.
However, Cadel is not one to sit idly and worry when he's in danger. He starts a fire from the materials available to him and escapes while the guards are distracted, whereupon he's picked up by a waiting Thaddeus and his assistant. They retreat to Thaddeus' private home, where another revelation awaits: Phineas Darkkon is not Cadel's father; Thaddeus Roth is. His mother had indeed died when he was very young, but secretly she and Thaddeus had been lovers for ages; scared of Darkkon's wrath, they'd kept it from him. Aside from that, Thaddeus Roth isn't his real name - it's Prosper English, another notorious criminal that's evaded Interpol's pursuit for decades.
Scared and unwilling to trust or go along with Prosper's plans, Cadel is returned to his home, where his "parents" - really people hired to watch over him for Prosper, not Darkkon - are to help him get out of the country. While there, his fake mother is arrested by the police, and he is rescued. Even this isn't the end: fearing that Prosper can get at him even there (and for good reason), Cadel makes the excuse of going to the bathroom, disguises himself as a girl, and exits just as the police start to look for him. He hails a taxi from the curb but finds himself, ironically, in a car with Prosper's assistant. Despite several more desperate escape attempts, he's returned to Prosper's house. Once the police arrive after him, it's clear who leaked the information that allowed the police to find Prosper: Cadel. Prosper takes his own son hostage at gunpoint in order to get away.
Cadel calls his bluff, terrified but sincerely believing that Prosper wouldn't shoot him, and walks out to surrender himself to the police even with Prosper's gun leveled at him. He was right. Prosper refrains from shooting and gets away, while Cadel is taken into police custody.
It should be said that somewhere in the midst of all this, Cadel tracked down Kay-Lee McDougall and discovered that she was actually a young girl named Sonja, wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy. They're each shocked by the other's betrayal, but the bond they'd formed over time rings true and they remain loyal to each other. This relationship deepens in the succeeding novel.
Genius Squad
Cadel gains a well-meaning social worker named Fiona who tries to protect him in his new foster home. Unable to go anywhere without police protection - as authorities are aware that Prosper once tried to kill him - he finds himself desperately bored, taken care of by a condescending, if kind, foster mother. Cadel is also now the key witness to the evils that went on at the Axis Institute and to Prosper’s many illegal activities. Although Prosper is finally now behind bars, Cadel knows that that barrier is nothing to someone like his father, since he's seen the lengths to which Prosper will go to retain control over his son. But Cadel still feels that he’s safe: Prosper didn't kill him when he had the chance before.
Prosper nonetheless now denies publicly that he’s Cadel’s father. This means that Cadel has no father on record, and with a dead mother, no citizenship in any country. So he cannot leave Australia, and Australia itself is unwilling to recognize him as a citizen. He is consequently not allowed to take classes of any kind and is subjected to the aforementioned foster care, where he is also housed with a couple of other children, including the bully Mace. While Cadel tries hard to stay on the path of good, Mace pushes his buttons too far, and he develops a strategy to hurt him while still looking innocent. Mace promises revenge.
In the meantime, the very smart and stubborn Detective Saul Greeniaus has been assigned to Cadel’s case and stops by frequently to give him updates on Prosper’s situation and how it may affect him. When visiting Sonja one day, Cadel is approached by some adults who run the new 'Clearview House', a cover for Genius Squad, a group of gifted teens who will work to bring down GenoME. GenoME was originally founded by Phineas Darkkon as a scam to rake in money by mapping people's genes and showing them how to maximize their potential. The adults from Clearview House offer Sonja and Cadel $50,000 each and a home while they work to bring down GenoME. The money and offer of living with Sonja are too good to pass up; the cash would buy Sonja good care well into the future. The problem is that they cannot tell Fiona or the detective about the undercover operations. So Cadel begins a secret life again, but this time he seems to be working for good.
As the team works in extreme secret to uncover information on GenoME, Prosper gets more active, even from prison. Cadel has to stay on his guard and trust his new allies to keep himself and Sonja safe, but in the end it's to no avail: taken hostage by an escaped Prosper with the threat of harming Sonja, who is essentially defenseless due to her medical condition, Cadel feels torn between his old and new allegiances. He still demonstrably wants the kind of parental affection and guidance that Prosper offers; but, in the end, his bond with Sonja and his burgeoning trust with Fiona and Saul lead him to make continual escape attempts.
Eventually Cadel manages to get information out to the police, and Saul comes to his rescue, thus cementing their relationship. Sonja is traumatized and injured but safe, and Prosper escapes once again. It's revealed in the end that even Prosper English isn't Cadel's father; through police investigation it's been uncovered that the person who performed the paternity test at Cadel's birth, associate of Phineas Darkkon and long time business tycoon Chester Cramp, is actually his father and has genetically been confirmed to be so. But Cramp has no interest whatsoever in claiming paternity, so while Cadel gains Australian citizenship he is now even more of an orphan than before.
That is, until Saul announces his engagement to Fiona and shocks Cadel with an offer of adoption. Taken aback by kindness as always, Cadel accepts, and looks forward to attending real college at last.
Genius Wars
Nine months later, Cadel is attending college with Sonja and a former member of Genius Squad. He's dedicated to laying low and doing nothing to attract Prosper's attention; Cadel has no idea whether Prosper knows he isn't his real father or not, and is scared of what his reaction would be if he did know. While trying to live his life as normally and uneventfully as possible, he takes on a secret project to give Sonja electronic access to the doors, elevators and crosswalk signals on campus, so that they can open for her and her wheelchair automatically. She's unable to press buttons on her own, and Cadel knows that what he's doing is technically illegal since it involves hacking the school's databases, so he keeps it secret from his foster parents.
Then Saul interrupts one of his lectures one day and pulls him out to tell him that Prosper has been seen on CCTV cameras in Sydney. Cadel is sent away under protests to a safe house yet again. While there, Saul gives him the CCTV footage of the three sightings of Prosper, and upon examination Cadel realizes that they're all electronically inserted images, done with highly advanced, cutting edge special effects techniques. Prosper hasn't been in Sydney at all, but someone had planted his image there.
Cadel is released from the safe house and Gazo is assigned to bodyguard him. The very first day back to classes, however, Sonja's wheelchair moves under its own power, straight at Cadel. He manages to duck, but Sonja goes down the stairs and lands in the hospital. Cadel, guilt-stricken and horrified, determines that his hacking to increase her accessibility had opened a weakness in her chair's wi fi reception, and some hacker had exploited Cadel's own cell phone to send a signal to it. Cadel immediately suspects that Vee, his old hacking teacher at Axis, has been hired by Prosper and is behind it.
They discover that Cadel's phone had been tampered with, perhaps as long ago as at Clearview House. The most likely culprit is Dot, sister of Com, an old classmate of Cadel's at Axis. Realizing that the hack must have taken place at a private, secure location, Cadel enlists his classmates to wardrive, something that consists of driving around with laptops and searching for active, matching pings to the one that had accessed Cadel's phone. In the meanwhile, Cadel goes to visit a special effects expert and ask who could have made the inserted images of Prosper; he's given a name, Raimo Zapp the Third, an American living in California. The name was one he'd taken himself, which as their contact put it, tells you everything you need to know about him.
While wardriving, Cadel sees Com-- revealed to be the culprit-- escaping by car, an unknown accomplice changing all the traffic signals to favor him on his way out through more hacking. Gazo and Cadel find that in the process, he's changed their friends' traffic signals to all read green, and they've gotten into a car accident. More of Cadel's friends, however peripheral, are rushed to the hospital, and Com has escaped. Due to a lucky break, they track down his base of operations, and after some clever detective work Cadel recovers his computer hard drive. Saul forces him to turn it over to the police to examine, and places him under house arrest with Fiona and Gazo and an array of police officers, also forbidding him from having any online presence (still).
Cadel convinces Gazo to sneak him a laptop and to sneak a coded message to Sonja, updating her in the hospital. He spends all day holed up in his room with the laptop, tracking down Com's partner's hacks into the traffic signals. Saul finds him there, they have a terse non-argument about Cadel's involvement in the situation (too dangerous for Saul's liking, not enough for Cadel's), and Saul manages to persuade him not to hack into any government databases looking for answers.
Then, the next morning, a bus drives itself straight into Cadel's house. The cause was another hack via the bus's wi fi connection. Once at the hospital and having regained his bearings, Cadel well and truly panics for the safety of those around him. Saul has a serious head injury and is in intensive care. With Gazo's help (again) he orchestrates an elaborate scheme to sneak himself out of the hospital while under police surveillance. Along the way, he alters the computer's database to say that he's dead, hoping to throw Vee off his trail for a while. He sends note to Sonja that he's safe and leaving voluntarily, and holes himself up in the basement of the old Clearview House, since abandoned.
In the basement he finds another old member of the Genius Squad, and not one he particularly likes. Devin allows him to share his electricity, plumbing, and internet hook up, and Cadel sets to work. Cadel recruits Devin's twin Lexi (another old Genius Squad member) to help him decrypt emails he'd obtained from Com's laptop, and the results confirm that Raimo Zapp the Third was behind the CCTV program. A plan is formulated to use his old disguise from Axis Institute as a girl, complete with passport, to fly to America and track down Raimo.
Before Cadel can leave, he and Devin are awoken at 7:30 AM to concrete pouring into the basement they're holed up in. The exits are blocked and won't budge. After many panic-stricken, desperate minutes trying and failing to break through, concrete rising higher, Gazo arrives and knocks out the construction workers and frees them. Cadel is more convinced than ever that he has to leave, for the safety of others around him. Of course, to do this, he has to electronically forge money for the plane ticket, but he tells himself he'll pay it back later.
He makes it successfully to America. Through another elaborate con, the initial part of which he'd set up weeks ago, Cadel gains access to Raimo's computer files and copies them to his laptop. Then he turns himself into the FBI. Specifically, one of the agents he'd met before who was tasked to find Prosper. After a lot of rest and a tense phone call with Fiona and Saul, Cadel learns from the FBI that they're also trying to track down Rex Austin, the man who'd funded Genius Squad. Although a paranoid recluse, he hasn't been seen in many months, and Cadel arrives at the idea that Prosper has taken over his life and has been impersonating him. Prosper had, after all, been the true impetus behind forming Genius Squad.
Cadel and the FBI leave to check out an old estate of Rex Austin's that the FBI has already been through, with the intention of Cadel looking for clues. He is the closest thing they have to an expert on Prosper English. While there, Prosper plants another image of himself in the cameras, luring all of the FBI agents outside to chase him but one, who he dispatches of quickly and then takes Cadel hostage. He was hiding in a hidden panic 'house within the house', as Rex Austin was an inveterate paranoid. Prosper has been living there for months, but when Cadel pulls a fit and says he won't go with him because he's been trying to kill him, avows that he was unknowing of the attempts on his life. He furthermore promises that Vee, Dot and Com will be dealt with.
Prosper killed Rex ages ago by shutting him in his own emergency escape tunnel, where he starved to death. He needs Cadel's help to open up access to it again, so that he can use it for its intended purpose. When Cadel threatens to run away despite Prosper's gun, Prosper reveals that he's known for a long time now that Cadel isn't his son, and he has no more incentive to leave him alive than nostalgic fondness. Sufficiently scared, Cadel follows him through the escape tunnel and onto the small motor boat Rex had left moored there. They leave in a ferocious storm, one life jacket between them.
Stressed as hell, Cadel presses him in conversation, and through an accidental slip of Prosper's learns that Prosper had orchestrated every event that had happened in the past few weeks. Prosper, however, denies that it was ever meant to kill him (not that he would care much about the collateral damage of those around Cadel) but instead to wake him up from the bland servitude he'd made of his life. It was beneath him-- it was pitiful.
The motor dies on the boat. They argue over the life jacket; Cadel manages to grab hold of the gun and threatens him with it, but they both know he'd never bring himself to fire. Prosper laughs crazily and says that if he did manage to shoot him, take the life jacket and escape, he'd die happy and proud. They hit a submerged rock suddenly, are both thrown overboard, and Cadel blacks out, only to wake up miraculously safe and unharmed on a beach. There are no footprints in the sand or pieces of the boat to explain how he came to be there.
Time skip forward to his return to Australia. As Saul, Fiona, and Sonja drive him home from the airport, Cadel breaks his silence to question if Prosper is really dead. Everyone tries to convince him that he is, but Cadel isn't persuaded. Prosper has never disappeared before; it seems surreal now. Then Cadel puts forward the theory that Prosper had saved him, just stayed below the tidemark so as not to leave footprints, but no one else believes that, either. The series ends with this:
"He didn't save you, Cadel. I mean, why on earth would he have done that?"
"Because he loved me," Cadel whispered. [...] When he saw nothing but expressions of disbelief on the faces around him, Cadel wailed, "He did! He did! I know he did! He only wanted to wreck my life because he wasn't a part of it!"
And as sympathetic hands reached out toward him from every corner of the car, Cadel began to cry like someone whose heart was breaking.
Cadel was a very precocious child, if you can stretch "precocious" to mean "hacks into high security networks" at the age of seven. His adoptive parents, the Piggotts, were less than enthused, and on the police's suggestion ensured that he had zero access to a computer from then on. They also brought him to be treated by the psychologist Dr. Thaddeus Roth. Instead of redirecting Cadel's skills to something more, well, legal, Thaddeus told him that he needed to remember the golden rule: don't get caught.
Thaddeus revealed in short order that he knew who Cadel's real father was: an international criminal serving a life sentence, one Dr. Phineas Darkkon. Not only did he know him, but Thaddeus was his right-hand man and had a way to contact him even while he was in prison. Since Cadel had never bonded with his adoptive parents - and for good reason, as they ignored him and disparaged of him by turns - he fastened onto this news, and worked hard to impress his new-found father with such tactics as causing gridlock-level traffic jams in downtown Sydney for hours upon hours. Cadel was meticulous and dedicated; traffic jams require a lot of field trips, which meant convincing his babysitter to drive him back and forth as he took notes, day after day. But to Cadel, bereft of computers, it was worth doing.
Shortly after this, the teachers at his school gave up on handling him and said that he was too far beyond their level of education. Faced with no other alternative, Cadel's parents enrolled him in a private high school nearby, where he proceeded to turn his attention to studying people instead of train schedules and traffic patterns. After making a blind mistake in judgement with a bully, Thaddeus told him that people were the most complicated system of all, and no equation yet existed with which to anticipate them. Challenge received, Cadel set off to make one for himself, armed with a DNA-wired cell phone that had the ability to function as a computer (which he had designed himself).
Cadel then creates a fake dating web site, called Partner Post, which in exchange for people's money promises to set them up with their perfect partner. In reality, the extensive questionnaire is just so that Cadel knows how best to fake being their partner, thereby perfectly satisfying every customer until he's obtained what he considers to be sufficient funds. But things don't go quite as planned, and Cadel finds that one of the women he's corresponding with is equally as brilliant as he is, just in a different way. Cadel is a systems thinker, an applied scientist, while Kay-Lee McDougall is a pure theoretical mathematician. He begins to look forward to e-mailing her every day, often impatiently waiting for her responses, and Thaddeus cautions him not to get too invested in the business. A sure sign of how invested he really is, Cadel makes sure to keep the existence of Kay-Lee a secret.
It's about this time that he graduates high school at age twelve (sabotaging the rest of his graduating class in their exams as a final farewell present) and starts to look for a college. Drs. Darkkon and Roth inform him that, years before, the Axis Institute was established for the sole purpose of properly educating Cadel when he came of age - though of course no one else knows that. It functions as an elite, upper class post-secondary learning facility, geared toward the sciences and with especially talented students. Secretly the classes are about topics such as extortion, lying, embezzlement, and other illegal acts required for proper villainy. After a bit of fuss Mr. and Mrs. Piggott are swayed, and though his extremely young age makes him a target for bullying, Thaddeus tells him that his status as Dr. Darkkon's son will protect him - and it does.
And then he finds out that his father and Thaddeus are monitoring his every move, which wouldn't be so surprising if the Piggotts weren't in on it. His own adoptive parents are on Darkkon's payroll and have been his entire life. Starting to question everything he's been told and his own world view, Cadel begins to retaliate. Using the skills he formed in high school, he sabotages the Axis Institute via a convoluted, multi-step interpersonal plot; this inadvertently causes the deaths of several professors and the complete closure of the school. This shocks Cadel's moral compass into realigning itself, and just as he's trying to decide how to escape the life he's being forced into, one of his professors catches on to what's happening and kidnaps him as leverage.
However, Cadel is not one to sit idly and worry when he's in danger. He starts a fire from the materials available to him and escapes while the guards are distracted, whereupon he's picked up by a waiting Thaddeus and his assistant. They retreat to Thaddeus' private home, where another revelation awaits: Phineas Darkkon is not Cadel's father; Thaddeus Roth is. His mother had indeed died when he was very young, but secretly she and Thaddeus had been lovers for ages; scared of Darkkon's wrath, they'd kept it from him. Aside from that, Thaddeus Roth isn't his real name - it's Prosper English, another notorious criminal that's evaded Interpol's pursuit for decades.
Scared and unwilling to trust or go along with Prosper's plans, Cadel is returned to his home, where his "parents" - really people hired to watch over him for Prosper, not Darkkon - are to help him get out of the country. While there, his fake mother is arrested by the police, and he is rescued. Even this isn't the end: fearing that Prosper can get at him even there (and for good reason), Cadel makes the excuse of going to the bathroom, disguises himself as a girl, and exits just as the police start to look for him. He hails a taxi from the curb but finds himself, ironically, in a car with Prosper's assistant. Despite several more desperate escape attempts, he's returned to Prosper's house. Once the police arrive after him, it's clear who leaked the information that allowed the police to find Prosper: Cadel. Prosper takes his own son hostage at gunpoint in order to get away.
Cadel calls his bluff, terrified but sincerely believing that Prosper wouldn't shoot him, and walks out to surrender himself to the police even with Prosper's gun leveled at him. He was right. Prosper refrains from shooting and gets away, while Cadel is taken into police custody.
It should be said that somewhere in the midst of all this, Cadel tracked down Kay-Lee McDougall and discovered that she was actually a young girl named Sonja, wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy. They're each shocked by the other's betrayal, but the bond they'd formed over time rings true and they remain loyal to each other. This relationship deepens in the succeeding novel.
Genius Squad
Cadel gains a well-meaning social worker named Fiona who tries to protect him in his new foster home. Unable to go anywhere without police protection - as authorities are aware that Prosper once tried to kill him - he finds himself desperately bored, taken care of by a condescending, if kind, foster mother. Cadel is also now the key witness to the evils that went on at the Axis Institute and to Prosper’s many illegal activities. Although Prosper is finally now behind bars, Cadel knows that that barrier is nothing to someone like his father, since he's seen the lengths to which Prosper will go to retain control over his son. But Cadel still feels that he’s safe: Prosper didn't kill him when he had the chance before.
Prosper nonetheless now denies publicly that he’s Cadel’s father. This means that Cadel has no father on record, and with a dead mother, no citizenship in any country. So he cannot leave Australia, and Australia itself is unwilling to recognize him as a citizen. He is consequently not allowed to take classes of any kind and is subjected to the aforementioned foster care, where he is also housed with a couple of other children, including the bully Mace. While Cadel tries hard to stay on the path of good, Mace pushes his buttons too far, and he develops a strategy to hurt him while still looking innocent. Mace promises revenge.
In the meantime, the very smart and stubborn Detective Saul Greeniaus has been assigned to Cadel’s case and stops by frequently to give him updates on Prosper’s situation and how it may affect him. When visiting Sonja one day, Cadel is approached by some adults who run the new 'Clearview House', a cover for Genius Squad, a group of gifted teens who will work to bring down GenoME. GenoME was originally founded by Phineas Darkkon as a scam to rake in money by mapping people's genes and showing them how to maximize their potential. The adults from Clearview House offer Sonja and Cadel $50,000 each and a home while they work to bring down GenoME. The money and offer of living with Sonja are too good to pass up; the cash would buy Sonja good care well into the future. The problem is that they cannot tell Fiona or the detective about the undercover operations. So Cadel begins a secret life again, but this time he seems to be working for good.
As the team works in extreme secret to uncover information on GenoME, Prosper gets more active, even from prison. Cadel has to stay on his guard and trust his new allies to keep himself and Sonja safe, but in the end it's to no avail: taken hostage by an escaped Prosper with the threat of harming Sonja, who is essentially defenseless due to her medical condition, Cadel feels torn between his old and new allegiances. He still demonstrably wants the kind of parental affection and guidance that Prosper offers; but, in the end, his bond with Sonja and his burgeoning trust with Fiona and Saul lead him to make continual escape attempts.
Eventually Cadel manages to get information out to the police, and Saul comes to his rescue, thus cementing their relationship. Sonja is traumatized and injured but safe, and Prosper escapes once again. It's revealed in the end that even Prosper English isn't Cadel's father; through police investigation it's been uncovered that the person who performed the paternity test at Cadel's birth, associate of Phineas Darkkon and long time business tycoon Chester Cramp, is actually his father and has genetically been confirmed to be so. But Cramp has no interest whatsoever in claiming paternity, so while Cadel gains Australian citizenship he is now even more of an orphan than before.
That is, until Saul announces his engagement to Fiona and shocks Cadel with an offer of adoption. Taken aback by kindness as always, Cadel accepts, and looks forward to attending real college at last.
Genius Wars
Nine months later, Cadel is attending college with Sonja and a former member of Genius Squad. He's dedicated to laying low and doing nothing to attract Prosper's attention; Cadel has no idea whether Prosper knows he isn't his real father or not, and is scared of what his reaction would be if he did know. While trying to live his life as normally and uneventfully as possible, he takes on a secret project to give Sonja electronic access to the doors, elevators and crosswalk signals on campus, so that they can open for her and her wheelchair automatically. She's unable to press buttons on her own, and Cadel knows that what he's doing is technically illegal since it involves hacking the school's databases, so he keeps it secret from his foster parents.
Then Saul interrupts one of his lectures one day and pulls him out to tell him that Prosper has been seen on CCTV cameras in Sydney. Cadel is sent away under protests to a safe house yet again. While there, Saul gives him the CCTV footage of the three sightings of Prosper, and upon examination Cadel realizes that they're all electronically inserted images, done with highly advanced, cutting edge special effects techniques. Prosper hasn't been in Sydney at all, but someone had planted his image there.
Cadel is released from the safe house and Gazo is assigned to bodyguard him. The very first day back to classes, however, Sonja's wheelchair moves under its own power, straight at Cadel. He manages to duck, but Sonja goes down the stairs and lands in the hospital. Cadel, guilt-stricken and horrified, determines that his hacking to increase her accessibility had opened a weakness in her chair's wi fi reception, and some hacker had exploited Cadel's own cell phone to send a signal to it. Cadel immediately suspects that Vee, his old hacking teacher at Axis, has been hired by Prosper and is behind it.
They discover that Cadel's phone had been tampered with, perhaps as long ago as at Clearview House. The most likely culprit is Dot, sister of Com, an old classmate of Cadel's at Axis. Realizing that the hack must have taken place at a private, secure location, Cadel enlists his classmates to wardrive, something that consists of driving around with laptops and searching for active, matching pings to the one that had accessed Cadel's phone. In the meanwhile, Cadel goes to visit a special effects expert and ask who could have made the inserted images of Prosper; he's given a name, Raimo Zapp the Third, an American living in California. The name was one he'd taken himself, which as their contact put it, tells you everything you need to know about him.
While wardriving, Cadel sees Com-- revealed to be the culprit-- escaping by car, an unknown accomplice changing all the traffic signals to favor him on his way out through more hacking. Gazo and Cadel find that in the process, he's changed their friends' traffic signals to all read green, and they've gotten into a car accident. More of Cadel's friends, however peripheral, are rushed to the hospital, and Com has escaped. Due to a lucky break, they track down his base of operations, and after some clever detective work Cadel recovers his computer hard drive. Saul forces him to turn it over to the police to examine, and places him under house arrest with Fiona and Gazo and an array of police officers, also forbidding him from having any online presence (still).
Cadel convinces Gazo to sneak him a laptop and to sneak a coded message to Sonja, updating her in the hospital. He spends all day holed up in his room with the laptop, tracking down Com's partner's hacks into the traffic signals. Saul finds him there, they have a terse non-argument about Cadel's involvement in the situation (too dangerous for Saul's liking, not enough for Cadel's), and Saul manages to persuade him not to hack into any government databases looking for answers.
Then, the next morning, a bus drives itself straight into Cadel's house. The cause was another hack via the bus's wi fi connection. Once at the hospital and having regained his bearings, Cadel well and truly panics for the safety of those around him. Saul has a serious head injury and is in intensive care. With Gazo's help (again) he orchestrates an elaborate scheme to sneak himself out of the hospital while under police surveillance. Along the way, he alters the computer's database to say that he's dead, hoping to throw Vee off his trail for a while. He sends note to Sonja that he's safe and leaving voluntarily, and holes himself up in the basement of the old Clearview House, since abandoned.
In the basement he finds another old member of the Genius Squad, and not one he particularly likes. Devin allows him to share his electricity, plumbing, and internet hook up, and Cadel sets to work. Cadel recruits Devin's twin Lexi (another old Genius Squad member) to help him decrypt emails he'd obtained from Com's laptop, and the results confirm that Raimo Zapp the Third was behind the CCTV program. A plan is formulated to use his old disguise from Axis Institute as a girl, complete with passport, to fly to America and track down Raimo.
Before Cadel can leave, he and Devin are awoken at 7:30 AM to concrete pouring into the basement they're holed up in. The exits are blocked and won't budge. After many panic-stricken, desperate minutes trying and failing to break through, concrete rising higher, Gazo arrives and knocks out the construction workers and frees them. Cadel is more convinced than ever that he has to leave, for the safety of others around him. Of course, to do this, he has to electronically forge money for the plane ticket, but he tells himself he'll pay it back later.
He makes it successfully to America. Through another elaborate con, the initial part of which he'd set up weeks ago, Cadel gains access to Raimo's computer files and copies them to his laptop. Then he turns himself into the FBI. Specifically, one of the agents he'd met before who was tasked to find Prosper. After a lot of rest and a tense phone call with Fiona and Saul, Cadel learns from the FBI that they're also trying to track down Rex Austin, the man who'd funded Genius Squad. Although a paranoid recluse, he hasn't been seen in many months, and Cadel arrives at the idea that Prosper has taken over his life and has been impersonating him. Prosper had, after all, been the true impetus behind forming Genius Squad.
Cadel and the FBI leave to check out an old estate of Rex Austin's that the FBI has already been through, with the intention of Cadel looking for clues. He is the closest thing they have to an expert on Prosper English. While there, Prosper plants another image of himself in the cameras, luring all of the FBI agents outside to chase him but one, who he dispatches of quickly and then takes Cadel hostage. He was hiding in a hidden panic 'house within the house', as Rex Austin was an inveterate paranoid. Prosper has been living there for months, but when Cadel pulls a fit and says he won't go with him because he's been trying to kill him, avows that he was unknowing of the attempts on his life. He furthermore promises that Vee, Dot and Com will be dealt with.
Prosper killed Rex ages ago by shutting him in his own emergency escape tunnel, where he starved to death. He needs Cadel's help to open up access to it again, so that he can use it for its intended purpose. When Cadel threatens to run away despite Prosper's gun, Prosper reveals that he's known for a long time now that Cadel isn't his son, and he has no more incentive to leave him alive than nostalgic fondness. Sufficiently scared, Cadel follows him through the escape tunnel and onto the small motor boat Rex had left moored there. They leave in a ferocious storm, one life jacket between them.
Stressed as hell, Cadel presses him in conversation, and through an accidental slip of Prosper's learns that Prosper had orchestrated every event that had happened in the past few weeks. Prosper, however, denies that it was ever meant to kill him (not that he would care much about the collateral damage of those around Cadel) but instead to wake him up from the bland servitude he'd made of his life. It was beneath him-- it was pitiful.
The motor dies on the boat. They argue over the life jacket; Cadel manages to grab hold of the gun and threatens him with it, but they both know he'd never bring himself to fire. Prosper laughs crazily and says that if he did manage to shoot him, take the life jacket and escape, he'd die happy and proud. They hit a submerged rock suddenly, are both thrown overboard, and Cadel blacks out, only to wake up miraculously safe and unharmed on a beach. There are no footprints in the sand or pieces of the boat to explain how he came to be there.
Time skip forward to his return to Australia. As Saul, Fiona, and Sonja drive him home from the airport, Cadel breaks his silence to question if Prosper is really dead. Everyone tries to convince him that he is, but Cadel isn't persuaded. Prosper has never disappeared before; it seems surreal now. Then Cadel puts forward the theory that Prosper had saved him, just stayed below the tidemark so as not to leave footprints, but no one else believes that, either. The series ends with this:
"He didn't save you, Cadel. I mean, why on earth would he have done that?"
"Because he loved me," Cadel whispered. [...] When he saw nothing but expressions of disbelief on the faces around him, Cadel wailed, "He did! He did! I know he did! He only wanted to wreck my life because he wasn't a part of it!"
And as sympathetic hands reached out toward him from every corner of the car, Cadel began to cry like someone whose heart was breaking.