The project showcase took over the whole east hall, and by nine in the morning you could barely walk through it.Twelve hundred colleges had been let into the Summit. Most of them came for the challenges and were happy with that. About a hundred had brought a real project and applied to show it, and every one of those got a table, a banner, a power strip, and ten minutes with the judges when they came around.Nathan walked the aisles with Nina and tried to look at everything. A school from Ohio had built a wind turbine out of old bicycle wheels, and the girl running the booth kept spinning it by hand so people could hear it hum. A college in Texas had a robot that sorted trash faster than the human team racing it, and their banner said GARBAGE IN, GLORY OUT. A boy from Vermont showed off a prosthetic hand that could play the piano."It plays better than I do," he told Nina. "Which isn't hard. I'm terrible.""Does it play anything besides chopsticks?""It's learning."There were more s

Alder Point was the surprise.They were a small agricultural school nobody had heard of, and the crate they carried onto the stage turned out to hold dirt. Actual dirt, dark and wet, in a long glass tray. Their leader, a gruff, sunburnt kid named Calvin Reeves, set it down like it weighed a hundred pounds and wiped his hands on his jeans."This was a dead field in Nebraska six months ago," he said. "Nothing grew there for ten years. We put a sensor system in it, nothing fancy, and a microbe mix we cooked up in the school barn. This is what the soil looks like now."He pulled a cloth off a second tray, and a dense green strip of wheat stood up out of the dirt like a fist.The room laughed, partly from surprise, partly because it was hard not to. General Reyes leaned forward and asked, "Can it be scaled?""It's cheap," Calvin said. "That's the whole point. If a farmer can't afford it, it doesn't count.""Is it patented?""We're thinking about it." He wiped his hands again. "We're also t

"The panel is ready with its decision," Blake said, and the murmur dropped away.Nathan was still on one knee beside the unit. He heard the first words of the announcement as if from far off, and his hand tightened around the glass cylinder."It was an incredible afternoon," Blake went on. "A hundred projects, five finalists, and every single one of them a credit to this Summit. The panel wants me to say it was one of the hardest decisions they've ever had to make."Leo was whispering something at his shoulder. Nathan wasn't hearing it."The college moving on to the final round of the White House Innovation Summit is..." Blake looked down at the card, and the room held still. "Ridgemont Technical University!"The east wall of the hall exploded in applause. Ridgemont's team jumped up, hugging, and Trent Hollis was on his feet in the front row with both fists raised. Somebody threw a program in the air. Mark was clapping so hard his hands must have hurt, and the woman beside him sat ver

Everybody was looking at the curtain, which turned out to be the wrong direction.The hum was not coming from behind the stage at all. It was coming up through the floor, through the legs of the folding chairs and the soles of a few thousand shoes, and it was coming from the back of the east hall, where the double doors had just been pulled open from the outside by two men in dark suits who did not look at anybody.Then the first row of the procession came through, and the booing, which had been starting up again out of habit, died in people's throats.Eight men walked in two lines of four, matching suits, matching pace, every one of them wearing white gloves like museum handlers. Between them, on a flat steel carriage that ran so smoothly it made no noise at all, they were rolling something the size of a small car, wrapped in a black cover that hid everything but its shape. A single pale blue light pulsed under the fabric at a slow, steady rhythm, like something asleep that had decid

For about three seconds nobody in the east hall made a sound, and then everybody did."That's artificial intelligence," a man shouted from the investors' section. "He built an AI into the machine!""It talks!""That is not a student project! That is a weapon!"Trent Hollis was already on his feet, and so was the entire Ridgemont delegation, and this time his smile had gone somewhere and not come back."This is a joke," he said. His voice cracked on the second word, and he cleared his throat and tried again, louder. "Esteemed panel, this has to be a joke. We came here as students. We built our project with a team, in a lab, on a budget, and now he wants to compete against a machine that talks to him? That is not a competition. That is a magic trick.""Hear, hear!" somebody called.A tall woman in a gray suit rose from the faculty section beside him, and Nathan recognized her from the program: Dr. Constance Ames, president of Ridgemont Technical University, a woman who had run a respecte