by David Walton
“He didn’t wander away,” Sengupta said, and there was some steel in her voice now. “He left under the supervision of a family member with legal responsibility for his care.”
“How do you know? Were you there?”
“The records—”
“You mean the ones you won’t let me see?”
“I’m not saying that you can’t see them. Over the phone, however, without any identification, I can’t share anything with you. For your father’s own safety—”
“Let me tell you what you’re going to do,” I said. “My mother will come to the front desk of the hospital in one hour. You will meet her there, personally, with a complete copy of my father’s medical record, which as his spouse she is perfectly within her rights to demand.”
“Legally, the hospital has fifteen days to comply with any request for—”
“Do you have a photocopier?”
“What? Yes.”
“And you have access to my father’s patient record?”
“Yes, I do, but . . .”
“Then walk over to the machine, press the big green button, and make some copies. Say the words ‘fifteen days’ again, and my next call is to the Washington Post.”
I heard a deep sigh from the other end of the phone. “All right, Mr. Johns. If your mother can demonstrate her legal right to the information, I will give her a copy of the record in question at the front desk in one hour’s time.”
“Don’t be late,” I said, and slammed the phone into its cradle hard enough that the person sitting in the seat in front of me probably felt the jolt. To my surprise, the passengers nearby broke into light, spontaneous applause.
I collapsed back into my seat and caught my breath before calling my mother and asking her to meet Ms. Sengupta at the hospital. Then I closed my eyes and thought. Where might Paul have taken him? Why did they leave? Could they have gone to see my sister? It seemed like a longshot, but I called Julia anyway. I found that Mom had already talked to her, but Julia hadn’t seen or heard from either my father or Paul.
It seemed likely that their disappearance had to do with the influence of the fungus infiltrating their brains. But it wasn’t clear to me yet just how that influence worked. My brother had talked about it remapping his brain for greater efficiency. But whatever control it wielded, it worked so subtly that its victims seemed unaware of it. Perhaps the genius of the fungus was not in its ability to implant specific thoughts, but in steering the host into using his or her own sophisticated problem-solving ability in its favor.
Humans are driven by emotion. Much of our so-called logic is merely the rationalization of choices that make us feel good. For one person, a fast car might create feelings of power and control that drove away fears of not measuring up. For another, a sports jersey or a telescope or a scale model of the Star Trek Enterprise might evoke associations of acceptance by a group of friends. Walking into a church could prompt feelings of safety and belonging, or else it might spark painful emotions of past hurts, and thus would be avoided at all costs. Emotions were often subtle, operating under the surface of our awareness, influencing our purchases, our choice of career or spouse, our home decor and style of interaction. The logic came afterward, a scaffolding we erected to support the decisions we already wanted to make.
What if, besides streamlining our neural pathways, the fungus was hacking our emotions? It would be the perfect way for a non-intelligent creature to influence an intelligent one. Instead of controlling thoughts and decisions directly—a feat that would require the complex coevolution of an organism specifically designed to target the human brain—it could simply adjust brain chemistry and let the host do the sophisticated part on its own.
All this was just theory, though, a pattern I was trying to map on the points of data I had. When it came down to it, I was a cryptologist and mathematician, not a biologist. I needed someone who actually understood the workings of the brain and what a fungal infection might reasonably evolve to do. Someone who could tell me if my theories made any sense, and if so, what that would mean for my father and brother. And for that matter, for the world.
I picked up the phone again and called the hospital. This time, I asked to be connected to Dr. Mei-lin Chu. Chu was the fungal infection specialist who had treated Paul at the hospital and prescribed his medication and apparently had been involved with Dad’s care as well. She had, at least, seen the infection at work and would have medical and biological insights I didn’t have.
I knew how hard it was to get a doctor on the phone, so I was surprised when, after only two intermediaries, Dr. Chu herself answered the phone. “Yes?” She sounded harried, overworked.
I froze. How to broach such a subject with a stranger? “Um . . . I’m calling about a patient you treated a few months ago? Paul Johns?”
“Yes!” Her tone of voice changed in an instant from peremptory to fully engaged. “Are you from the CDC? Did you read my report?”
“Um. No. I’m Paul’s brother, Neil Johns. I think you also treated my father.”
She swore softly under her breath. “What can I do for you, Mr. Johns?”
I thought quickly. It sounded like she might respond better to me in an official capacity than as a family member. I lowered my voice to a near whisper, concerned about what my fellow passengers might overhear. “I’m also an analyst with the NSA,” I said. “I’m afraid that my brother—along with possibly thousands of people in South America—have been infected by a fungus that is compromising their ability to make their own decisions.”
Silence on the other end. This was the point at which I either connected with her or she hung up politely and told the hospital answering service to block my calls.
“Where are you?” she said. “We need to meet.”
“I’m on an airplane landing at BWI in”—I checked the time—“half an hour.” I told her my flight number.
“I’ll meet you at the airport,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
With the time I had left before we started our descent, I called Shaunessy in São Paulo to get an update on the war. She couldn’t tell me much on an open line, but she confirmed that, after what had happened at São Luis, the command staff was now taking our claims seriously. Cardiff had ordered all senior officers to undergo PET scans, and crop dusters had risen to the top of Ground Theater Air Control’s surveillance watch list. I wondered what would happen once the media realized that the bombs that took so many American lives had been dropped by American planes. It couldn’t stay secret for very long.
Airplane flights had always wreaked havoc with the pressure in my inner ear, and by the time we landed, my head was throbbing. I opened my mouth wide and pulled at my ears in an attempt to relieve the pressure but without much effect. I was reaching the end of my strength. I’d been up all of the previous night getting rattled in the C-130J like nuts in a jar. The night before I’d caught only a few hours of sleep on the couch in Shaunessy’s hotel room, and the night before that, I’d slept in the CIA agents’ car on the drive from Brasília. I was running on fumes.
I almost didn’t recognize Dr. Chu when I saw her waiting for me at the exit from my gate. She was smaller than I remembered. The top of her head reached only to my collarbone, and her slight shoulders reminded me of a bird’s wing, fragile and delicate. The look in her eyes gave no hint of weakness, however, and I could see her striking fear into a class of interns. Give her a white lab coat and clipboard and the force of knowledge and authority, and I might quail before her, too.
“Doctor Chu,” I said. I shook her outstretched hand, and mine seemed clumsy wrapped around her slim, precise fingers.
“Call me Mei-lin, please,” she said.
We walked down the corridor away from the gate. I had no luggage—it had all been lost in Brasília—so there was nothing to wait for. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.
Mei-lin gave a chuff of surprise that might have been a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I�
�ve been shouting from the hills that this thing is dangerous, but nobody’s taking me seriously. Follow protocol, they say. Make your reports to the CDC and USAMRIID and let the professionals create a panic if a panic is warranted. What I saw in your brother’s cultures, though, has got me scared. Really scared.”
“Why? What did you see?”
“The filamentous morphology has some extraordinary qualities. It can hack the interfaces of other cells, feeding them chemical messages they would expect in their normal interactions with their neighbors. It’s like a con artist. It tricks the other cell into thinking it’s business as usual, snuggling up against it as if it had always been there. As far as the cell is concerned, the fungus is just another sensory transducer cell or autonomic neuron cell or any kind of cell. As far as I can tell, it’s a generalized capability. Put it with skin cells, it acts like a skin cell. Put it with thyroid gland cells, it acts like a thyroid gland cell.”
“It changes its DNA?” I asked.
“Oh, no. The mimicry is just at the interface level. On a genetic level, it’s still fungal mycelia, and it retains its essential connection to the rest of the mycelia.”
“So . . . does that mean you essentially have two brains functioning in your head?” I asked.
“Worse than that,” Mei-lin said, leading the way out of the main airport building. “It’s just one brain, with your original cells and the mycelial copycat cells working together seamlessly. The resulting network is even, apparently, more efficient than the original. But it comes at a cost. Some percentage of the brain is composed of fungal mycelia and thus operating for the ultimate good of the parasite, not the human host. Although those goals sometimes coincide.”
“But what does that mean, ‘for the good of the parasite’? For the good of the specific organism hanging out in your brain? Or for the whole fungal species?”
She turned a corner toward short-term parking, and I followed her. “I’m not sure ‘species’ is the right word.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cells I took from your brother and the ones from your father are genetically identical, as are the ones I’ve pulled from other patients.”
“Wait,” I said. “Other patients?”
“At least five others. The point is, there’s no genetic diversity. This isn’t so much a species as a single organism, spread out among different hosts.”
“I don’t understand. If they’re not connected, how can they be the same organism? Even if they’re genetically identical, they would be like twins, then, right? Not one individual.”
“That’s kind of a semantic distinction in this case,” she said. “There’s no centralization in a fungus like there is in a human. There’s no division of labor among its parts. I can slice a single fungus into a hundred pieces, and each piece will be just as much the original as any of the others. A fungus is kind of like the internet. It’s a network of nodes, each of which senses its environment and communicates that information along the network to the other nodes.”
I followed her between two rows of parked cars. “But, if a fungus is a network, what happens when it’s split up in different hosts? The network’s broken then, right? It’s not like it can communicate through the air. Right?”
“Well, it can’t chemically,” she said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t communicate at all.”
I thought of the Johurá tribesmen sending whistle language via cell network. “You mean through hosts talking to one another?”
Mei-lin shrugged. “When two people talk to each other, their brains pass information. There’s no reason to believe that infected brains wouldn’t incorporate that information into the larger network. A fungal network doesn’t think, but its structure is almost neuromorphic, even without a human host. It reacts in pretty sophisticated ways, coordinating all the available information and making collective decisions for its environment. Like which trees in a forest should thrive and which should die.”
“Or which nation’s leaders,” I said.
She shot me a questioning look, but I didn’t explain. That part of the story would come out soon enough.
“What I mean,” Mei-lin said, “is that a fungal organism isn’t so much the matter it’s made of as much as its genetic instruction set. Whether it’s living in the soil of the Amazon or a human parietal lobe, it’s the same set of instructions, evolved for a single purpose.”
“What purpose?” I asked. “What’s it trying to do?”
She pressed a button on her keychain, and a silver BMW chirped, its taillights flashing. “That’s easy,” she said. I walked around to the passenger side and climbed in as she did the same on the driver’s side. Before starting the car, she swiveled to look me in the eye. “Its purpose is the same as every other organism. To survive.”
I chewed on that while she pressed the ignition button, starting the engine with a healthy roar. She checked her mirrors and backed smoothly out of the parking space.
“There’s a reason fungi are so successful,” she said. “Did you know fungi outnumber plants six to one? They can survive anywhere. You can kill ninety-nine percent of one, and it’ll still survive. They don’t even need light. Fungi have been found thriving in highly radioactive places like reactor cooling tanks, the ruins of Chernobyl, and the rubber window seals of the International Space Station. They’re not just radioresistant; they actually benefit from ionizing radiation. Fungal hyphae grow toward radioactive sources the way plants grow toward sunlight. During past eras when animals and plants died out due to high radiation, fungi grew and thrived. When we finally find life on other planets, there’s a good chance it’ll be a fungus.”
“So, this particular one,” I said. “Just how intelligent is it?”
She pulled out of the parking garage and stopped. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “Which way am I driving?”
I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m following you.”
“Well, where are you staying?”
“At my dad’s house, I guess.” I told her which direction to go.
“So, intelligence,” she said. “It’s a tough question to answer. We talk about intelligence as a measure of a creature’s ability to solve problems—can it use tools, can it communicate abstractions, etc. This thing can obviously achieve some pretty complex behaviors. Its goal, however, is pretty straightforward. Reproduce. Spread out. Survive.
“Your real question, however, is whether it can think like us. Is it making plans, is it aware of us, is it aware of itself? And I can’t answer that. But there’s nothing in what it’s doing that can’t be explained by the perpetuation of a behavior that conveys a survival advantage. In fact, its behavior isn’t all that different from what thousands of species have been doing for millennia.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ants and termites are famous for how organized they are, how they have different jobs, cross rivers, build large structures. But a queen doesn’t give orders to the other ants. There’s no central leadership. Each ant follows its own evolutionary programming in a scheme that works for the survival of all. Birds flock, bees swarm, lobsters march, fish school—it’s the emergent behavior of thousands of individuals acting on their own. A colony of ants isn’t an intelligent entity, but it can make complex decisions, even solve geometric problems.”
We drove in silence for a while. I tried to think through everything she said, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t trust my brain to think clearly. Finally, I said, “So did you tell all this stuff to my brother and father?”
“You bet I did. Your brother told me he already knew, and that it was under control. That the meds I gave him before were doing the trick. I advised him to come in for a follow-up, but he declined.”
“He wasn’t taking the meds,” I said. “And he knew exactly what the fungus was doing to him. He wanted it in his mind. Welcomed it. And my father . . . well, of course he welcomed it. What else could he think?”
She blew out a
breath that was half appreciative whistle and shook her head. “That was something amazing,” she said. “I didn’t know your father from before the change, but I read his charts. I could hardly believe I was dealing with the right patient. Alzheimer’s just doesn’t go into remission like that.”
“Remission? You think it’ll come back?”
She shrugged. “How could I predict something like that? Alzheimer’s does irreparable damage to the synapses. It’s not supposed to go away to begin with.”
“That’s what’s so hard to work out,” I said. “This thing obviously provides value to its hosts. It makes them smarter. It even cures Alzheimer’s. So is it a parasite or a symbiote? Does it survive to our harm or to our benefit?”
Her smile was fierce. “I guess that depends on what you define as a benefit.”
She pulled into the driveway of my father’s house, crunching gravel under the tires. There were no other cars there, and the house was dark. I had been hoping I might find my mom home, but now that it came down to it, I was relieved not to find her. I wanted to find my dad, but I was also reaching the edge of my ability to stay awake. If I didn’t get a good night’s sleep and get it soon, I wasn’t going to be useful to anyone.
“So,” Mei-lin said. “What should we do?”
My attention swam. “What?”
“Do. What should we do? You’re NSA. You’ve got to have contacts, people who will listen to you. We need dozens of researchers working on this, taking it apart, finding a cure. We need to take this public.”
I chuckled. “That’s not exactly where the NSA shines.”
“But you know people, right? If we come at this from two directions, maybe we can make some headway.”
I hadn’t yet told her about what was happening in Brazil or our suspicion that the fungus was redrawing the political landscape of South America and turning soldiers against their own countrymen. “Look,” I said. “I’ve barely slept in three days. Any way we can reconvene this in the morning?”
