The more obvious choice of just portraying people as having extremely high intelligence, is unfortunately a bit of a trap. Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.
The only room seems to be in emergence from incredible amounts of processing power and data or perhaps many brains working together can overcome the limitations of one brain.
Because they understand the forces, and set them into motion with tiny efforts to build mechanisms that eventually unleash and reform large amounts of energy, creating the force.
And what if intelligence is another kind of force that can be created by taking tiny, human efforts, building a machine, then pumping huge amounts of energy into it, outputting the intelligent force?
Or let's consider evolution. How could it create intelligent brains from single celled organisms? Incrementally, as the organisms randomly accumulated mechanisms of adaptability and eventually sensing and cognition.
In the first view we see ourselves as engineers, building a vast engine that, through its sheer size and energy, and our basic understanding of fundamental laws of intelligence , produces an intelligent force greater than a human mind.
In the second view, we see ourselves as blind watchmakers, jamming AI components together at random, until, by accident, we get something smarter.
Hah, I've noticed that for years. Anderson's "Brain Wave", however, is a decent attempt at what more intelligent people would be like.