Content Warning: This section features depictions of racist, white supremacist ideology.

It is April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, and famed physicist Albert Einstein is dying. Despite objections from Einstein’s housekeeper, a doctor gives Einstein morphine for his pain. Disoriented from the medication, Einstein speaks in German, saying: “Pandorabuchse! [...] Sie ist im Holmes” (3). Finally, Einstein dies.

Then, Einstein’s friend Ernst Klein appears. He asks the doctor what Einstein said and then tells him to hide the news of Einstein’s death until the next day. Per Einstein’s last wishes, Klein burns Einstein’s books, papers, and notes. However, before he can finish, men with guns burst into the room and stop him. He hopes any mention of Pandorabuchse is among the parts he managed to destroy.

An epigraph attributed to Einstein reads, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” (11).

At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the present day, Agent Dante Garcia speaks with Jamilla Carter, the Director of the CIA. He wants to bring in a 12-year-old girl named Charlie Thorne to help with a CIA case. Carter examines the file on Charlie Thorne, a genius with an IQ nearly as high as Einstein’s, who speaks 12 languages and studies theoretical physics in college.