The hotel room became a kind of cocoon. Days blurred into one another, marked only by meals brought up in takeout bags and the steady hum of the air conditioner. Outside, Los Angeles swelled with noise, but inside, silence ruled—broken only by the scratching of a pen, the rustle of notebook pages, or the occasional siren cutting through the glass.
I filled the silence with study.
Mechanical engineering first. Textbooks, online articles, diagrams scavenged from the library and from the hotel's sluggish internet connection. I tore through them all.
Engines fascinated me. The principle was laughably simple: burn fuel in a sealed space, let the explosion push a piece of metal, and make that push do work. That was it. Fire trapped in a box. Humanity had taken that trivial truth and built ships, trains, planes, rockets. Controlled chaos—that was engineering at its core.
I drew sketches in the margins of my notebook. Pistons, crankshafts, gears. Then I flipped the page and drew again, over and over, until the shapes became less about copying diagrams and more about testing my own variations. What if the chamber curved differently? What if heat was redirected instead of wasted?
It wasn't about power. I had more power than anyone in this city already, though they couldn't see it. This was about creation. About taking chaos and binding it into form.
After mechanical systems, I moved into software. The duality amused me—one world of grease, gears, and explosions; the other of numbers dancing invisibly across silicon. And yet, they were the same. Both were ways to command reality with patterns.
C++ guides. Tutorials in Python. Crude beginnings of assembly language. I absorbed them all. Coding wasn't hard. It was tedious, yes, but not hard. Programming was like teaching an obedient fool: tell it step by step, exactly, and it would obey with perfect precision. I already had a gift for pulling strings. This was simply another set of strings, made of logic and electricity instead of flesh and bone.
I liked the symmetry of it.
One night I wrote a simple loop in a borrowed laptop—just a piece of code that printed my name endlessly across the screen. The repetition made the machine hum, as though whispering my name back at me in obedience. A childish experiment, but it made my lips twitch in something close to satisfaction.
Humans wanted meaning. I wanted structure. Creation for its own sake. That was enough.
Time passed strangely.
Most contestants filled the waiting days with rehearsal. I watched them sometimes in the hotel lobby or in empty corners of the convention center where staff allowed them to practice. A boy with a yo-yo repeating the same trick until his fingers bled. A pair of sisters singing in shrill harmony until their voices cracked. A magician fumbling cards so often he began to shake when he saw the cameras.
They lived inside their nerves. Every mistake rattled them, every misstep threatened to collapse their illusions of competence.
I didn't rehearse. I didn't need to. My "mother" sat by the window during those hours, head tilted in imitation of watchfulness, while I filled pages of notebooks with diagrams and lines of code.
The show was just noise, a distraction from what mattered. But noise was still useful.
Eventually, the call came.
The second round was called "Vegas Week" by the staff, though in 2006 it was more like "Vegas Cuts." Contestants were flown to Nevada, gathered in a theater, and cut down in size by sharper standards. The auditions had been open gates, filled with novelty acts and hopefuls. Vegas was a sieve. Only those who could prove themselves under pressure passed through.
For many, it was the end.
We flew there with the rest of the group. Cameras followed us from the airport to the hotel, catching reaction shots, recording soundbites. Parents spoke nervously into microphones about how proud they were. Children smiled awkwardly, their fear bleeding through the edges of their smiles.
I said nothing.
When the camera turned to me in the terminal, I simply looked at it and blinked once, my violin case in my hand. My mother stood behind me with her usual smile. The crew seemed unsatisfied and moved on.
The Vegas theater was larger than the first stage, yet more claustrophobic. Rows of seats stretched upward in tight arcs, wrapping the stage in a cocoon of judgment. The lights were harsher. The crew louder. The judges sat farther away this time, elevated, as if to remind everyone of the gulf between performer and authority.
Contestants milled backstage, waiting for their names to be called. Some whispered prayers. Others went through nervous repetitions of their acts one last time.
I sat in a folding chair, calm, notebook balanced on my knee. I wasn't sketching pistons this time, but scribbling lines of pseudocode. A sorting algorithm. The crude skeleton of a machine that could organize chaos with speed.
It felt fitting.
One boy nearby stared at me, wide-eyed. He must have been eight or nine, juggling three balls badly while his mother barked corrections. He whispered, "Aren't you nervous?"
I looked at him silently and then looked away.
He swallowed, then turned back to his juggling.
The producers barked names. Acts went out one by one. Some came back pale and trembling. Others came back glowing. Most simply returned hollow, their parents' arms wrapped around them like shrouds.
Time moved forward.
Then my name was called.
"Adam."
I rose, straightened my shirt, and walked toward the stage. My mother's marionette followed a few paces behind, her smile serene, her steps measured.
Backstage lights turned into blinding white as the stage doors opened.
The murmur of the audience hit me, low and restless. They were waiting, eager for the next spectacle.
I stepped into the center. The host announced my name again, drawing out the words for effect. The judges leaned forward, expectant.
Another round. Another performance. Another flood of wish energy waiting to be pulled.
The spotlight burned hot on my shoulders.
I wrapped my fingers tighter around the microphone.
And raised my head.