The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  As we approached São Paulo, the traffic on the other side of the road turned ugly. It seemed everyone but us was trying to get out of the city. I didn’t know if there had been some kind of attack here already, or if everyone just assumed that this was where the fight was coming, since this was where Gonzaga had set up his provisional government. I spotted several Comanche helicopters in the distance, and once an F-22 roared overhead.

  One thing about the United States military: they didn’t do anything small. By the time we reached the command center, it was clear this was a major operation. The first wave, still in the process of arriving from the United States, consisted of a battalion of Marines, a recon platoon, light armored units, combat engineers, a Marine aircraft squadron, air defense battery, an anti-terrorism team, a logistical task force, and what seemed like an army’s worth of diplomats and intelligence agents. That was just the São Paulo contingent. A larger group was headed for São Luis in the north, as a staging area to attack Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, which was apparently in the hands of the Ligados. The second wave, which would begin arriving in several days, included two carrier battle groups, led by aircraft carriers USS Harry S. Truman and USS Abraham Lincoln, each of which could project enough power all by itself to conquer most countries. There was no question of the United States winning this fight. It was just a question of how much of Brazil would be flattened in the process.

  The diplomats and agents and military staff swarmed the Palácio do Anhangabaú—São Paulo’s city hall—communicating an air of frantic busyness and importance. I wondered how many of them actually knew what was going on. To my surprise, Shaunessy Brennan was there too, waiting in the lobby to claim me. Her long braids were held back in a functional clip, and she wore jeans and a khaki shirt.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Melody has a thing about being on site. She says intelligence is crap if you don’t have the right context for it.”

  She started walking, and I followed. “What actually happened?” I asked. “Do we know?”

  “Complete chaos. Rumors on the street have the bombs placed by the Venezuelans, by the FARC, even by the United States. Nobody in the Brazilian government seems to know any better. We have eighty-five Americans trapped in the embassy in Brasília, at least five reports of American tourists under threat in the Amazonian states, a shifting political balance of power, and a major friendly government under threat of collapse. New crises are popping up faster than we can mobilize teams to address them.”

  “What about Director Kilpatrick?”

  She made a sour face. “Confirmed dead. It’s pretty certain. An agent actually saw the body herself. The bomb at the Agência seems to have been timed to take him out along with several of their high-ranking people. That or it was a coincidence, but given the precise coordination of all of these attacks, I have to assume it was intentional.”

  “But why? Terrorist attacks on major leaders in three different countries? What’s the ideology? I don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish.”

  “If they’re going for destabilization, they’re succeeding,” Shaunessy said. “Every group with a grudge is coming out of the woodwork and shaking their assault rifles. Central authority is eroding. We have some military bases, mostly in the south, declaring for Gonzaga, and others in the north declaring for Nazif and the Ligados. It’s looking like a civil war.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Nazif and the Ligados? Since when are they connected?”

  “Nazif declared the Ligados national heroes. He said they’ve been fighting for the independent sovereignty of a supreme Brazil and protecting their national treasure—meaning the Amazon—from ‘foreign despoilment.’ So there’s your ideology, if there is one—whenever one of these guys talks, it’s always about control over the Amazon.”

  “‘Despoilment?’ That’s Nazif’s word?”

  “I certainly didn’t make it up.”

  We entered a grand room with granite floors and an arched ceiling, filled with desks and computers and phones, that had been given over to serve as coalition headquarters. Sunlight slanted in through windows on two sides.

  “It’s a complete intelligence failure,” Shaunessy said. “A guerrilla group gaining that kind of influence and power, and we barely knew about them more than six months ago. Thanks to you, we’re starting to crack their communications, but only just. We have no idea how they’re organized or who’s in charge. Their motivating ideal seems to be an environmental one, which is pretty unique as far as large terrorist organizations go. Not that we even know how many members they have. And now that Colombia and Venezuela are invading, we won’t have enough time to—”

  “Wait. You’re kidding me. Invading?”

  “I forgot. You’ve been out of contact.”

  “Not that long. Less than forty-eight hours.”

  “The way this is going, you could step out to use the bathroom and be behind the intelligence curve by the time you got back. But yes, Colombia and Venezuela have declared war and are sending troops into the Amazon—including the Brazilian states—to clear out foreign contamination. We’ve already had unconfirmed reports of massacres, both of foreigners and natives, though our intelligence is spotty.”

  “But, Colombia and Venezuela?” I said. It didn’t make any sense at all. “They’ve been at each other’s throats for years. Venezuela supports Colombia’s rebel factions. Their governments are totally, philosophically opposed to each other.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. Nothing we think we know is holding true anymore. But this is what’s happening.”

  We turned a corner and saw Melody facing down a Marine colonel who stood a head taller and out-massed her by probably sixty pounds. “We’re done here,” Melody said. “Don’t talk to me about ‘interface challenges,’ as if that means anything. Either get me the information I need, or tell me you don’t have the balls to cross agency lines to get it.”

  “It’s not that simple,” the man said. “The exploitation goes through two different stovepipe systems, built by two different contractors for two different agencies. They just don’t talk to each other.”

  “All I’m hearing is ‘I can’t’ when I needed that data yesterday. Go bore someone else with your excuses.”

  The colonel stormed out, while Shaunessy and I watched in awe. Melody was not technically in his chain of command, and so couldn’t give him orders, much less dress him down for failing to fulfill them. But everyone knew she had the ear and trust of those who did give the orders, which amounted to almost the same thing.

  Melody smiled at me. “I hate it when one of my own has to be rescued by the CIA. They never let you live it down. Welcome to São Paulo.”

  “Having trouble with the help?” I asked.

  “Trying to weed out those who kiss other asses to cover their own,” she said. “There are people who get things done, and people who just get in the way.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “All our connection models are falling to pieces,” she said. “Half of how we do business is by building up these huge graphs of known connections. X is a known associate of Y who is part of organization A who hired company B, which funds the sale of arms to country Q, like that. We use them to track terrorist networks, shifting alliances, potential defectors, all sorts of things. Only we’re finding that our connection models here in South America are completely wrong. People who previously had no known connection are suddenly bosom friends. Organizations with opposing goals are suddenly working together. Old alliances are crumbling and new ones are taking their place, as if someone ran them through a random number generator. I’m trying to verify our models against data from other agencies, but it’s apparently impossible for the CIA and NRO and NSA to, you know, share critical information with each other.”

  “So, about that,” I said.

  “About what? The intelligence community’s cripplingly dysfunctional bureaucracy?”


  “No. The failing connection models. I might have an idea why.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re arrogant and headstrong and you have no sense of self-restraint, but you’re not crazy. If you have an idea, spit it out.”

  “Nobody’s acting like they should, right? We have sworn enemies becoming allies, security agents killing the people they protect, indigenous tribesmen working with high-tech encryption. And suddenly everyone wants to protect the Amazon so bad they’re willing to kill for it.”

  “I thought you were going to tell me something I don’t know.”

  “What if it’s the fungus?”

  The statement hung in the air, stark and ridiculous, and I waited for her to laugh or fire me or throw me out of the room. When she did none of those things, I said, “What if all the people acting out of character are hosts for the fungus—the same one that infected Paul and your granddaughter and, presumably, all of those uneducated people suddenly doing mental gymnastics for reporters? What if, instead of just making them smarter, it was influencing them? Making them care about things they otherwise wouldn’t, like protecting the Amazon? Which, by the way, is where the fungus lives.” She was still looking at me without expression, so I rolled on, hoping to convince her. “Apparently fungi do this kind of thing all the time. They influence other species, manipulating them in whatever way improves their own survival. Paul’s told me about single organisms stretching for acres underground, infecting trees and controlling where and how they grow, manipulating whole ecosystems to be perfect for fungal habitation.”

  “Controlling trees is a long way from influencing world politics.”

  “They control animals, too. Sometimes just subtly, pushing them to prefer certain food or habitat choices that improve the survival opportunities for the host. There’s a fungus that can completely take control of the brains of ants, forcing them to climb up high and hang onto a leaf, until the fruiting bodies grow out of their heads and burst, dispersing spores over the rainforest. During the time it’s taking root inside the ant, however, it benefits it, fighting off diseases or other infections that might threaten it.”

  “So you think this fungus is intelligent. That it’s intentionally controlling thousands of humans to improve its own survival.” I had to give her credit; she said it with a straight face.

  “It wouldn’t have to be aware of what it’s doing,” I said. “It could just be following its evolutionary programming. Say it alters serotonin levels in response to intentions that could help or harm it, which makes people feel good about one option and not about another. It could influence people that way without any higher-level brain function of its own. But I’m just guessing here.”

  I realized I hadn’t told Melody about my father’s miraculous reversal. There had been no chance to do so, since my plane had left just after I found out myself. It reminded me, too, that I hadn’t yet called home. My parents had to be worried sick about me. Not just my mom, but my dad, too.

  Had I been too hard on Paul? Dad’s healing was something extraordinary. If Dad had known such a thing was possible a few years earlier, he would have paid any price for it, taken any risk. Maybe I should have congratulated Paul instead of scolding him. On the other hand, what if the fungus really was the key to all this? Was my father’s mind now infected by a creature that could bend whole nations to its purposes?

  “I need to call home,” I said. “No one there knows I’m safe, and I’m worried about my father.”

  Melody let out a long breath, and I realized she was tired. “By all means,” she said. “And keep thinking about your idea. Think how we could verify it, one way or another. Ask your brother, too—it would be nice to have a mycologist’s opinion on whether such a thing is possible.”

  I remembered my brother in his lab, giddy about the mycelia entwined through his neural pathways, saying, “There are certain portions of my brain they’ve remapped . . .”

  “If such a thing is possible,” I said, “I’m not sure we could rely on my brother to tell us the truth about it.”

  I finally found a phone in a municipal office that someone said I could use. I dialed and reached my mother’s cell phone number. “Hello?” she said. She sounded anxious and breathless, as if she had run for the phone.

  “It’s me, Mom,” I said.

  “Sorry, I was just parking the car.” I heard an engine turn off in the background, then the sound of a door opening.

  “It’s Neil,” I said. “I’m okay. I’m safe.”

  “Safe? Were you in danger?”

  “I was in Brasília, Mom. Haven’t you seen the news? The bombs and riots?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to watch the news. Neil, your father . . . he . . .”

  I felt a flood of worry. “What is it? Is he forgetting again?”

  “No, but he’s. . . . I don’t know how to describe it. He’s not the way I remember him.”

  “In what way?” Her comment sparked some old hurts for me. The man my father had been was the man she’d left behind. Now that he was back, did she already find him unsatisfactory? Did she like him better sick and needy? It probably wasn’t fair, but I had never entirely come to terms with my mom’s on-again, off-again involvement with our family.

  “He’s more aggressive, more direct. He flirts with the nursing staff. He’s, I don’t know, just not the person I remember. Rougher. He scares me a little.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed natural to me that he would have changed somewhat. You don’t just pop back into your right mind after years of dementia without it affecting you. The lost years, the dependence on family, maybe even remembering doing or saying things that made sense at the time but were completely inappropriate. I could see how getting a second chance at life would make you want to live a little larger, take charge of situations, even flirt a little. It had to be a traumatic experience, a little like Rip Van Winkle, waking up from a dream to see how the world had changed around you.

  I heard her car door slam, the sound of her footsteps on pavement, other traffic in the distance. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’m just heading into the hospital.” As she said it, I heard the squeak and buffeting air as she passed through the hospital’s large revolving door.

  “Is Dad still there?” I asked.

  “Yes. They’re still keeping him for observation. Dr. Chu is concerned with the numbers she’s seeing and doesn’t think it’s safe for him to be on his own yet.”

  “Dr. Chu? Isn’t that the same doctor who treated Paul?”

  “The same one. She’s a little paranoid, if you ask me. She always wears a surgery mask when she checks on him, and she was pushing to get him moved to an isolation ward. I mean, I’m worried for him, too, but that seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

  “Did she say why?”

  “He still has traces of the infection in his body, and she’s concerned about it. Paul still does, too, of course, and he says he feels fine. In fact, it was Dr. Chu who originally told Paul it could stick around for years, wasn’t it? She seemed to think it was no big deal then.”

  “It was. And if she’s concerned, I would be, too,” I said. “Mom, I’m afraid this fungus Paul picked up might be more serious than just a respiratory illness.”

  “Oh, I know it’s serious. That poor girl Paul traveled with. But look at what it’s done for your father—he might stress me out, but I can’t deny the Alzheimer’s has taken a serious step back. Pretty much disappeared, from what I can see.”

  “So he’s still pretty lucid? How much does he remember?”

  “He’s here,” she said. “You can ask him yourself.”

  I heard the sound of distant conversation and my mom saying, “It’s Neil.” Then my dad’s voice came on, clear and strong. “Neil! Son! Where are you?”

  A warmth spread through me, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was h
olding. It was real. My father, remembering me. It was almost like he had come back from the dead. “I’m in São Paulo, Dad.”

  “You disappeared so quickly, I hardly got to talk to you. What’s happening down there? They had a coup? It’s all over the news here. Fortunately, they left my TV on a news channel. If it was daytime soaps, the Alzheimer’s might have been better.” He laughed, an easy, happy sound, and I was back in our home in Brasília, telling my father some dumb knock-knock joke I heard at school or delighting him with a Portuguese/English pun.

  “Looks like a coup, yeah.” I didn’t know what was public knowledge, so I didn’t say anything more about the political situation or mention Venezuela and Colombia. “Looks like I might be down here a little while yet. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to get a flight home. I miss you.”

  “I wish they would let me leave this stupid hospital,” he said. “I’m healthy. My mind is working again, as well as it ever did, if not better. There’s no reason for me to be here anymore.”

  “Listen to your doctor,” I said. “And be careful how much you listen to Paul. Despite what a mycologist might think, it’s not a good thing to have fungal mycelia growing through your body. If Dr. Chu tells you to take medication, take it.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Look, you get home as soon as you can, you hear? We have a few years of catching up to do.”

  My next order of business was to submit to a debriefing by the CIA, a grueling five-hour session that felt more like an interrogation than an interview. I told them everything I knew, including my theories about Paul’s fungus. They were, to put it mildly, skeptical. I didn’t press the point. I would have doubted me, too.

  When they finally let me go, I was ready for bed. Command staff and agency personnel had requisitioned nearby hotels, but before I could find out whether they had a room for me, Melody found me. “I have someone I want you to talk to,” she said.