In the opening of CBS's new drama "Scorpion," federal agents storm a house in the Irish countryside looking for the hacker who infiltrated NASA's computer system — only to discover their culprit is a teenage boy.
It's a dramatic scene. It's also a true story.
"Scorpion," which premieres Monday at 9 p.m., follows an eccentric genius named Walter O'Brien (Elyes Gabel) and his team of brilliant misfits — an expert behaviorist, a mechanical prodigy and a human calculator — who are contracted by Homeland Security to solve high-tech threats.
The drama is based on the life of the real O'Brien, who has an IQ of 197, the fourth-highest ever recorded (even greater than Einstein). At 13, he hacked NASA and started his own company, Scorpion Computer Services. Now, O'Brien's 39 years old and his company employs 2,600 geniuses in 20 countries, helping the military and high-net-worth clients with issues of international security. And he's serving as an executive producer on "Scorpion" the TV show.
Despite the liberties often taken by "based on a true story" tales, this is no loose adaptation.
"The pilot is 70 to 80 percent accurate," O'Brien tells The Post, noting that the show's characters all have real-life counterparts.
O'Brien grew up on a farm in rural Ireland and was bullied in school for being a teacher's pet and socially awkward — until one day when he snapped, unleashing five years of karate training.
"From then on they called me Scorpion, because apparently it's a very docile creature until it's pushed too far," he says.
At 12, he became a self-taught computer expert and started hacking into government sites under the code name Scorpion, driven by a curiosity about tanks, weapons and the space program. In 1988, he started Scorpion, the company, to provide basic tech support for the early desktop computer industry in Ireland.
"There was no big business strategy," O'Brien says. "People kept calling me asking me to help them out with computers and I made more money than my pocket money at the time."
He hired his friends to help with the growing workload, much of it focused on building computer security systems. By the time he left high school, O'Brien counted Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as clients.
After earning degrees in computer science and artificial intelligence from the University of Sussex, he moved to the US in 1997 to help Silicon Valley companies globalize their software. It's around that time that "Scorpion" the show picks up, following O'Brien and his team solving crises — like a software glitch that threatens LAX air traffic control — while helping each other learn how to fit in.
O'Brien, who lives in LA, approached producers about bringing his story to TV — not as a vanity project, but a recruitment tool to attract geniuses for his company, which he describes as "a team of oddballs [out] to save the world."
A childhood fan of "The A-Team," he thought, "What if I put something on TV that captures the imagination of the next generation?"
He pitched the idea to Hollywood talent manager Scooter Braun (best known for working with Justin Bieber), who gathered a team — including film producers Justin Lin (of the "Fast and Furious" franchise) and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (both of "Transformers") — and sold it to CBS.
"From their point of view, it's a great story and great entertainment and from my point of view, it's a great awareness campaign," O'Brien says.
He visits the LA set regularly to help the actors with the technical dialogue and mannerisms of how socially awkward geniuses relate to the normal world. O'Brien also meets with the show's writers every two weeks to pitch fodder for story lines — like when Scorpion was called in to advise a blood bank where a computer bug caused clean reserves to get mixed up with those infected by HIV.
"Those are the kind of choices we get called with," he says, "and it's like 'Ghostbusters' — who are you gonna call with that?"
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