The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  Before that, I had seen Mei-lin face the certainty of her own infection with bravery and self-sacrifice and narrowly escaped the same fate myself. I had watched from a distance as thousands of soldiers died from the guns and bombs of their own countrymen. I usually managed to keep my emotions tucked away where I couldn’t see them, and most of the time I didn’t even know they were there. Apparently that wasn’t something I could keep on doing forever.

  I felt a gentle hand on my arm. I jerked my head up, startled, and saw the beautiful woman with the long braid, now sitting across from me. She wore black jeans and a green cotton shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves that revealed slim wrists. She had green eyes and a light dusting of freckles on her nose. She looked at me with a frank expression of sympathy.

  “Who?” she said.

  I sat up straight and wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “My dad.”

  She nodded. “I lost my mom last year. Pancreatic cancer.”

  I told her about my father’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, though I referred to his current condition simply as a bad reaction to a medication. Which was true, if not quite the whole story.

  As someone willing to come up to a crying stranger in a cafeteria, I expected a bleeding heart, the kind of girl who loved to save puppies and take homeless beggars for a meal at McDonalds. Instead, she was crisp and intellectual, distracting me from my troubles by talking about the hair salon she had inherited from her mother and how little her business degree had prepared her for the day-to-day of operating a retail store. She asked what my father’s work had been and was impressed when I told her he’d worked for the NSA.

  Her name was Zoe.

  Before I knew it, I was telling her stories about my childhood in Brazil, particularly ones that involved my father, and she countered with a funny anecdote about a trip to Argentina she’d taken with her mom in the sixth grade. I felt layers of stress and worry slipping away as the muscles in my shoulders and back unclenched.

  Finally, I yawned and glanced at the clock on the cafeteria wall, and was startled to discover we had sat there talking for an hour. The elderly couple and teenage boy with his mom were gone, and we were alone in the room. I decided there was no point in trying to get back to Fort Meade at this hour. Better to get a good night’s sleep and go to work in the morning.

  I stood. “I should get home and get some sleep,” I said. “Thank you for cheering me up. It was really very pleasant.”

  “Is there anyone else at home?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Just me.”

  She stood as well, close enough that I could smell a light scent of shampoo from her hair. She was almost exactly my height. “Do you need some company?” She asked it matter-of-factly, but I could feel the force of the question.

  I considered, tempted to say yes. But I knew I didn’t have anything to offer her right now. I was barely taking care of my own basic needs, much less finding any energy to invest in a relationship. “I can’t,” I said.

  She took a step back, clearly embarrassed. “I understand.”

  “It’s been really nice,” I said. “Seriously, thanks for talking.”

  She gave a tiny nod. I turned away to leave, but then I turned back again. “Listen, Zoe,” I said. “When all this is over, if you want, I’d love to show you a Peruvian restaurant I know in Rockville.” I scribbled my phone number on a napkin and handed it to her. “Best tacu tacu outside of Peru. Believe me, it’s worth the drive.”

  She took the napkin, but she looked confused. “When all what is over?”

  I glanced at my feet, then back up at her green eyes. “What I didn’t tell you, is that I work for the NSA too, just like my dad did. Things are going to get really bad pretty soon. Like what’s been happening in Brazil.”

  She took another step back, and I could see it was too much. The small magic of our conversation was gone, and I was freaking her out.

  “Hopefully I’m wrong,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll turn it back, and most people won’t know how bad it could have been. But I don’t think so. I think we’re in trouble. Not just as a country but as a human race.”

  She smiled awkwardly. “I should go.”

  I should have let it drop there, but I couldn’t leave her without at least a warning. “Stay away from Neuritol,” I said.

  “What? You mean the smart drug, like in the commercials?”

  I stared at her. “They’re advertising it now?”

  “Not exactly. They don’t use the name, but they’re all about people improving themselves and getting smarter and stuff. And the name’s all over the news, so everybody knows what they’re talking about.”

  I had no idea it was moving that fast. “Don’t touch the stuff,” I said. “Don’t go within a mile of it.”

  She picked up her purse, a small green leather affair that matched her eyes. I felt the pang of an opportunity lost. “Well, bye,” she said.

  I let her go while I collected the trash from my meal and placed the tray back in the small stack near the register. After counting to ten to make sure I didn’t end up waiting at the elevator with her, I made my way back through the hospital and caught a cab back home.

  CHAPTER 25

  I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. I needed sleep, but I also needed to get into work as early as possible. I knew if I waited I’d get trapped in the Monday morning traffic, and I wouldn’t get in until late. Not wanting to repeat my emotional crash of the day before, I stopped at a 7-Eleven convenience store and bought two breakfast sandwiches, a bottle of chocolate milk, and three granola bars. Not exactly the most nutritious of breakfasts, but at least it would give me some calories for the morning.

  I arrived at Fort Meade and pushed through security. I wondered how much, given the nature of the current threat, all of the armed guards and dogs and razor wire fences would actually be able to protect the people and the information inside.

  I walked down to our basement office and found Andrew deep in conversation with Melody Muniz. “Melody!” I shouted. I ran to her and wrapped my arms around her. “You’re safe!”

  She stiffened, and I quickly backed off. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just good to see you alive. We’ve all been pretty worried.” I wondered if it was the first bear hug she’d received in her career at the NSA.

  She relaxed and smiled at me. “I’m pretty glad to be home as well.”

  Shaunessy appeared around the corner, and I hugged her, too.

  “What’s happening down there?” I asked.

  “It’s a disaster,” Melody said. “Thousands dead on both sides, but the real problem is not knowing what the sides are. We can’t scan people fast enough to know who’s affected, and the need to double- and triple-verify all commands with higher-ups cripples the effectiveness of the chain of command. I have five minutes with the president at eleven o’clock, and I’m going to beg him to pull our troops out of South America. The Ligados control most of the country now, and all we’re doing by staying there is risking becoming part of them.”

  “Besides,” Andrew said, “the war is at home now. If we don’t find a way to control this thing, it’s going to be just like Brazil right here.”

  “The president,” I said to Andrew. “He’s safe?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He’s alive, and as safe as we can make him. There were five attempts on his life last night.” I must have shown my surprise on my face, because he said, “That is not common knowledge. We don’t want the media getting ahold of that, if we can help it. Four of the attempts were pretty ill-conceived and never had much of a real chance. One, however, was carried out by an aide in the West Wing and very nearly succeeded.

  “You were right, by the way, about your brother’s interview. He didn’t whistle, though. He just outright spoke the words when showing off his fluency in different languages.”

  “How are things with your father?” Shaunessy asked.

  I pursed my lips. “Not great.” I caught Shaunessy and Melody up on my fathe
r’s condition, his attempt to kill Mei-lin Chu, and his split-personality coded communication, seemingly without the knowledge of the other part of his mind. I also told them about my brother’s lab, the computers and samples we’d retrieved, and the booby-trapped door that had infected Mei-lin.”

  “We have plenty of samples of the spores at this point,” Melody said. “Where are the computers?”

  “I have them in my car.”

  “Get them in here, right away. We have people who can take them apart down to their constituent atoms. Any information he had there, even if he deleted it, we’ll get it back.”

  “The best information on those computers is probably biological,” I said. “We need to get it to the people who are trying to understand how this organism works and how to beat it.”

  “I’m on that,” Melody said. “Including the docs at USAMRIID, the CDC, and several medical universities, we probably have two hundred doctors and mycologists working on one or more avenues, either trying to develop an easy test to know who’s infected or trying to come up with a reliable cure. Anything we find, I’ll make sure it gets into the right hands.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what can I do?”

  “After you bring that stuff from your car? Do your normal work. Pore through all the South American traffic that Andrew has been ignoring while trying to do my job.” She flashed him a quick smile. “Very effectively, I might add. Good to know there’s someone waiting in the wings in case I turn into a fungus zombie.”

  “Something to look forward to,” Andrew said.

  When I headed out to my car, Shaunessy caught up to me. “Need some help?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s more than I can carry in one trip.”

  I showed the guard at the entrance the paperwork Melody had filled out giving me permission to bring the equipment inside. He entered the information into his computer, logging it as an equipment delivery, and told me he would have to record the details about make and model and serial number before we could bring them inside.

  On the way out to the parking garage, I said, “How bad was it down there?”

  Shaunessy turned somber. “Really bad,” she said. “Melody talks about bringing the troops home, but I don’t know how realistic that is. There’s no way to tell how many of them are compromised. There’s been so much sabotage, no one knows what equipment can be trusted. Some soldiers have outright defected to the Ligados, or turned on each other, but there have to be more who are keeping quiet. It would take weeks to scan that many, and cost a fortune, even if every PET scan machine in the country wasn’t already running twenty-four hours a day.”

  “How did you get out?”

  She shrugged. “Melody, of course. Director Ronstadt listed her as a critical recall, and she said she wasn’t coming home without me.”

  We reached my car and hauled the equipment out of the trunk. The machines were small enough that I could have managed by myself, but I was glad for the company.

  “What do you think our chances are?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of survival. Of preventing the United States from becoming the next Brazil and the same thing sweeping across Europe and Africa and Asia until half the population is dead and the other half has fungus in their brains telling them how to think.”

  She was quiet for a time. “I think we can win,” she said.

  I was surprised. “How?”

  “It’s like a disease, right? We’ve had some pretty bad diseases before. Bubonic plague. Influenza. Does a lot of damage while it spreads, but we always beat it in the end. Ultimately, we’ve got a lot more going for us than a fungus. Reason. Creativity. Invention.”

  “But it’s using our reason against us,” I objected. “Making it better, even.”

  “No. It’s using our intelligence against us. Memories, analytical skills. That’s just network efficiency. This thing might be good at cognitive streamlining, but that doesn’t make it anything like human.”

  “Doesn’t that make it better than human?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. There’s a lot more to being human than being smart. The fungus gives people intelligence, but it robs them of some of the more important things that make us human. Our emotional connections. Our moral sense. Our devotion to country and friends and family. The kind of humanity it’s producing is a shadow of what humanity truly is.”

  “True humanity is cruel,” I said. “Selfish, tribal, violent. We don’t need a fungus in our heads to kill each other by the millions.”

  “I didn’t say we were good. I said we’re stronger without the fungus than we are with it. That’s why I think we’ll win.”

  I thought about it, then flashed her a quick grin. “I hope you’re right.”

  Back in our basement office, I logged in and flipped through the first batch of South American traffic. Some of them had been translated, many had not. From what I could tell, thousands of them hadn’t even been looked at. There were just too many, and too much else going on. I sat up in my chair and cracked my fingers. I had my work cut out for me.

  The difficulty with encrypted messages is that you can’t tell if they’re interesting until after you crack them. Cracking them takes time. Not only that, but due to the way the internet had developed, all South American email traffic passed through a hub in Florida, which the NSA had tapped three ways from Sunday. That meant the NSA’s underground server farm recorded millions of messages from South America every day.

  Usually, the vast majority of these could be ignored, since they had no known connection to any person or situation of political interest. Now, with any citizen a potential guerrilla warrior, any message could be important. Not only that, but the number of indecipherables—messages encrypted with no recognizable scheme—had grown by orders of magnitude in recent months.

  Now that South America was a priority, hundreds of agents were working those messages, most of them with significantly better computer skills than I had. The ones in Johurá had gotten the most attention. Katherine Wyatt had, apparently, continued to work tirelessly on interpreting them and even held classes to teach agents how to understand a little of the language. Those weren’t indecipherable anymore, and so not my concern.

  My job was to do what computers couldn’t do: either crack a new coding scheme, like I had with the original Johurá messages, or else recognize some pattern in the chaos that could help the army of agents focus their efforts to find the needles in the haystack. The first option would require me to choose a message, more or less at random, that after hours or days of work would probably turn out to be somebody’s illicit love letter. I decided to try the second.

  Fortunately, in my months on the job I had learned how to use many of the software tools available to aid in such an analysis. I could pull the metadata from millions of messages and run a bank of statistical tools against them. I was pretty good at statistics, which in my book was still a branch of mathematics, even though I knew statisticians who would take offense at me lumping their science into my field.

  What I wanted to characterize was the difference between South American message traffic before and after the appearance of the fungus. Of course, there were many differences, as there would be from any comparison of distinct sets. Some of the differences were obvious, and thus uninteresting. Some of the differences would be normal random variation, or else seasonal or population-based trends, and thus also uninteresting. I was looking for the significant differences, those that were both unintuitive and important.

  For lack of a better metric, I chose the date of the attack on Paul’s riverboat as the turning point after which I would deem messages to be “fungus influenced.” My null hypothesis would be that the messages before that time and the messages after that time would be perfectly correlated, shaped by the same basic forces and trends. I set about trying to disprove that hypothesis.

  Four hours later, I had a spreadsheet full of numbers and no conclusions. My head was st
arting to spin. I had promised myself I would remember to eat, so instead of pressing on I picked up the phone and called Mike Scaggs. Before I left for Brazil, joining up with him for lunch had turned into a habit, at least when both of us could get away from our duties.

  “Scaggs,” he said, with his usual soft professional tone.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” I said. “They still let you eat over there in cyber com?”

  “Neil. You’re back.”

  “Been crying into your pillow every night since I left, haven’t you?”

  “Something like that. You hungry?”

  “That’s why I’m calling.”

  “You must have quite some stories to tell.”

  “I’ll regale you over lunch. See you there.”

  I opted for a grilled chicken panini, and Scaggs chose a cheeseburger and fries. I dumped five sugar packets into the too-sour lemonade and stirred while I told my story. I started from the assassinations and explosions, through the cross-country drive with the CIA, to the crop dusters and the defection of soldiers at São Luis and the 11th Bomb Squadron.

  “I have to hand it to you,” Scaggs said. “We send you down to Brazil for a few days, and the whole country falls apart.”

  “I’m just a bad luck charm, I guess.”

  “You sure you don’t want to work for our enemies?”

  Technically, the cafeteria was an insecure zone, where no discussion of classified material was supposed to go on. Sometimes uncleared visitors were escorted through the facility, and you never really knew who would be eating lunch there or how much they were supposed to know. In practice, however, classified topics were often discussed, only in roundabout ways and without using specific code words or program names.

  “We’ve been focusing a lot of our efforts on South America,” Scaggs said. He was USCYBERCOM, so he would be concerned both with cyberattacks on US secure facilities and with trying to breach the tightly protected information repositories of others. Such attacks could be purely for the purpose of obtaining information, or they could be used to introduce destructive viruses or worms and destroy an enemy’s infrastructure or ability to communicate.