The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  “Despite everything that’s happening, we haven’t seen any increased cyber activity. It’s still China that’s the biggest threat on that front. My guess is that Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru never had much of a cyber capability, and so even on a wartime footing, they don’t have anything to use. Though with so much chaos, there are probably capabilities that the Ligados don’t know about or haven’t been able to organize.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” I said. “My impression of the Ligados is that they’re pretty streamlined. It’s not a top-down hierarchy so much as a crowdsourced one. Since everyone has the same goals, they can coordinate to an extraordinary degree.” I told him about the timing and coordination required for the various successful assassinations.

  “On the other hand,” Scaggs said, “we’ve pretty much got the run of their systems. We’ve disrupted a lot of their military comms, and crashed the computer systems at munitions factories, defense contractors, satellite ground stations. They were pretty vulnerable in a lot of their core systems.”

  “And if this were a conventional war,” I said, “that would probably give us a big advantage. But they’re not ultimately fighting us with guns and bullets. They’re turning us against ourselves and taking over our country from within. I’m beginning to suspect, too, that the Ligados have other ways of communicating with each other that we’re not aware of.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The message statistics I’m looking at. They’re too . . . normal. I don’t exactly know what changes to expect from wartime, but what I’m seeing is a whole lot of ordinary. It makes me wonder if . . . hmmm.”

  “Uh, oh, here it comes,” Scaggs said. “Half the time when I eat lunch with you, you shout ‘Eureka’ and run off back to your lab.”

  “I don’t shout ‘Eureka,’” I said. “I only did that once, and it wasn’t in the cafeteria.”

  “Well, maybe you should try it.”

  I munched my panini, thinking. It was no Eureka moment, just a feeling that I was looking at things wrong. I was trying to find pattern differences from before and after the emergence of the fungus. But what about pattern differences that ought to exist but didn’t? What about the changes you would expect from nations at war that weren’t evident in their message traffic?

  After lunch, I returned to my spreadsheets and statistical analysis, keeping the idea in mind. After another six hours pounding away at the numbers, I thought I had something. Not an epiphany, exactly, but I thought it could be important. Melody’s office was empty, so I told Andrew instead.

  “There’s a blank space,” I said. “Most of Amazonas, a lot of Pará, and a little less than half of Roraima.” These were the Brazilian states that covered the Amazon rainforest. “There’s almost no traffic in those regions. No email, no cell phone, nothing.”

  Andrew looked confused. “But that’s the same as before any of this happened,” he said. “Those states are sparsely populated, with the exception of a few tourist cities. There just isn’t much technology there.”

  “There wasn’t. But this is the center of the Ligados movement. The highest concentration of infection per capita is in these states. We also show a population shift from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia into the rainforest areas. I checked with the CIA—they keep track of stuff like that, and it’s a significant migration, millions of people. But there’s no commensurate rise in message traffic, nor in any other technological measure—energy production, building construction, roads, telephone lines. Satellite images of the area look the same as ever, just thousands of acres of trees.”

  “What are you driving at?” Andrew asked.

  “There are millions of people living in there. What are they all doing? Hunting and fishing? Living off the land?”

  Andrew rubbed at his chin. “I’m not saying it’s not important,” he said. “It probably is. But what significance does it have to us, directly? Is this a threat to our interests in some way? Do you think they’re mass-producing Neuritol there, or devising some new delivery mechanism?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “I don’t know. There’s no message traffic coming out, so there’s no way to know.”

  “Okay,” he said. “This is good work, good analysis. But it’s not going to get much traction. If there’s some direct threat we can defend against, then great. Otherwise, migration patterns? Interesting, maybe, but not actionable. Keep at it.”

  Sighing, I returned to my desk. I called my mom to check on Dad, who said there had been little change. No more Morse code, that she could tell. Then I called Lauren to check on Mei-lin.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Lauren said. “She’s refusing treatment. She’s lucid and healthy. I could get fired over this, even lose my license.”

  “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  “Hang on.” I waited while Lauren presumably held a phone up to Mei-lin’s ear.

  “Neil,” she said clearly. “Please tell her to let me go.”

  “That’s not what you want, remember?” I said. “You’ve been infected. You’re not yourself anymore. Give the antifungals a few days to work.”

  “You don’t understand what’s it’s like,” she said. “Neil, it’s nothing like what we feared. I can think clearly for the first time in my life. I can remember everything I ever learned—all my medical textbooks and classes; it’s all in there, only now I can recall it at will. I can tell you page numbers, what day I read it, what the weather was like. I can keep three different trains of thought going in my head at the same time.

  “This isn’t a curse, Neil. It’s a gift. Please don’t take it away from me.”

  A chill slid across my skin. She was so earnest, so persuasive. “This infection changes people,” I said. “It makes them kill. It makes them people they would never want to be.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” she said. “Just because somebody with a brain tumor turns violent doesn’t mean that all cancer patients are dangerous. We were wrong. I was wrong. I didn’t know.”

  “You’ll thank me,” I said. “When it’s over, and this thing is out of you, you’ll thank me.”

  Anger crept into her tone. “Look, I’m being honest with you. I’m not trying to trick you. I’m telling you what it’s like.”

  “Put Lauren back on.”

  “I’m not going to stay here. You can’t hold me against my will. Lauren, I don’t want to hurt you, but I will. If I start screaming, and threaten to sue, you won’t be able to keep it quiet. You know you can’t win this. Untie the straps.”

  Her voice faded, and Lauren came back on the line. “What do you want me to do? I can’t keep her against her permission, no matter what she signed before.”

  I sighed. “Keep her as long as you can. But you’re right. I think we’ve lost her.”

  I hung up, feeling shaky and overwhelmed. Nothing we were doing was coming close to stopping this thing.

  I ordered Pad Thai and kept on working, hunting for useful patterns in the message metadata. It bothered me that Andrew didn’t find my discovery significant, but I couldn’t really argue with him. There was nothing we could do in response. So a lot of people were relocating into the rainforest and apparently giving up technology. So what? But it nagged at me. It felt important, like a clue toward understanding the bigger picture of how the world was changing around us.

  While I worked, I kept the internal news feed up on a side monitor. It was a service provided by the Office of the DNI to all the intelligence services that summarized news stories from the unclassified media with bearing on international politics or current intelligence crises. The media had a lot of journalists in the field around the world, and it wasn’t unusual for them to uncover something important before we did.

  The news was unremittingly bad. The president of Mexico had been found dead in his bedroom that morning, apparently poisoned. An Arizona senator declared the Neuritol crackdown a plot by whites to keep Hispanics unedu
cated and disenfranchised, and encouraged Hispanics everywhere to stockpile the drug and give it to their children. Thirteen policemen died in San Antonio in a massive shootout after a gang calling themselves the Arm of the Ligados overran the federal building and took thirty people hostage, including the mayor. And three counties along the southern edge of New Mexico announced their independence from the US government.

  At nine o’clock, I thought about leaving and stopping to check on my parents, but I knew visiting hours in the hospital would be over, and that the best way I could help them was to continue my work. The way things were going, we wouldn’t have much time before half the country sided with the Ligados and we were at war against ourselves.

  Instead of going home, I stretched out on one of the makeshift beds my coworkers had made on the floor and caught a few hours of sleep as best I could. I woke the next morning to discover that the president had announced a national state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

  “It’s like they’re just toying with us,” Shaunessy said. “There’s this appearance of riots, race-related violence, protests of injustice. All things our country has dealt with before, though never on this scale. But it’s a lot more organized and sophisticated than it seems.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Riots are timed to break out at the opposite ends of a city simultaneously, stretching police response thin. We crack a cell phone message between gang leaders calling for a protest at a certain place and time, and we warn law enforcement . . . and then the protest happens an hour earlier and across town. The worse things get, the more we concentrate emergency powers in the hands of local mayors and governors. But how do we know they aren’t infected? In a few days, it might be our own National Guard keeping us out of the states we sent them to protect. Our reactions are too predictable, and these people are smart. I’m afraid we’re playing right into their hands.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How do they know what messages we can read and which ones we can’t? Are they just staging fake communications in hope that we’ll be listening?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that they seem to be outmaneuvering us at every turn.”

  Frowning, I went back to my message analysis. One thing I had noticed the night before was that use of the Johurá whistle language, despite showing up in the United States, had been going out of favor in South America, and, on the whole, the messages delivered via that method were unimportant. It suggested that they were using a new language now, or a different scheme altogether, and the information was gradually spreading through the Ligados that Johurá was no longer a safe communication method.

  But if so, how did they know? As far as I could tell, no NSA agents had been turned, and our ability to read the Johurá messages was a secret known to only a relatively small number of people. Was one of those people secretly infected, or otherwise compelled to pass information to the enemy? It was a chilling thought.

  Instead of examining the metadata of the undeciphered messages, I decided to analyze the deciphered ones, those we had cracked and read. When I did so with Shaunessy’s comments in mind, the correlations practically fell into my lap. It was so obvious, I couldn’t believe no one had seen it before now. As soon as we cracked a code from a particular source, they either changed the code they were using, or else the information passed with that code stopped being useful. Or worse, the new information derived was misleading or false.

  In any one instance, that behavior didn’t set off any alarms. Codes changed, the usefulness of intercepted data changed, nothing was completely predictable. It happened. In aggregate, however, looking across all the messages received and how they changed in response to our knowledge of them, the conclusion was irrefutable. As soon as we cracked any one of their messages, the Ligados knew it.

  I showed Shaunessy what I’d found, hoping that she would point out a problem with my work, some kind of self-referential mathematical error that implied a conclusion that the data didn’t support. She couldn’t.

  “We’ve been infiltrated,” she said. “There must be infected people who are working here, staying quiet, but passing the information out to a Ligados network of some kind.”

  I shook my head. “It could be. But it seems too fast, too thorough. It’s more like . . .” I stopped, considering. An image flashed into my mind of Paul, visiting the NSA, standing in this very room, before we had any idea of what his infection could mean. Of me showing him the server room. Of Paul, dropping to the floor and gazing through the grates at the bundles of cables connecting the thousands of server racks to each other and to the rest of the world. “Oh, no,” I said.

  “What?”

  I jumped to my feet and strode toward the server room, my heart thundering and heat flooding my face. I stabbed my numeric code into the keypad at the door, but the light flashed red. I tried again, but my shaking fingers stumbled, and I hit the wrong sequence again. The lock beeped, warning me, and flashed red again.

  “Let me,” Shaunessy said. She entered her own numbers in rapid succession and the light flicked to green. The door made a clunking sound as the electromagnetic bolts released, and Shaunessy pushed it open. A blast of cool, pressurized air ruffled our hair. I slipped past her and ran down the short flight of steps to the ground level of the vast room. I tried to picture where Paul and I had been standing. It couldn’t have been far.

  Most of the squares that made up the flooring were a dingy white, opaque, but spaced at regular intervals were grates that allowed a dim view of the hundreds of cables snaking their way underneath the floor. I ran to one of these grates—the same one, I was pretty sure, that Paul had peered into on his visit, and yanked it up. The sections of floor were made to come away easily, allowing technicians access to the wires underneath when necessary.

  I tossed it aside, where it clanged against the floor. The hole was unlit, giving me little clear view of what was down there. When Paul was here, he had dropped to the floor so quickly I thought he had fallen down. He could easily have used the motion to drop something—or many tiny somethings—into the hole.

  I put my hand into the hole and used the leverage to pull away one of the white squares next to the grating, then another and another, widening the hole. Now the bright LEDs on the ceiling illuminated the space, and I could clearly see what I had feared. I didn’t stop. I pulled away section after section, hurling them to the side, exposing the depths of my folly and the degree to which my brother had manipulated me from the very beginning.

  Thousands of tiny white mushrooms quilted the crawlspace like a dusting of sugar, stretching out under the floor as far as I could see. The crisscrossing cables were tightly spiraled with thin, translucent filaments, wrapping around the wires like vines around a tree. They were hopelessly tangled together, and in some cases it was difficult to distinguish the mycelium from the wires.

  Shaunessy stopped at the edge of the hole I had made in the floor, her eyes wide. “What does this mean?”

  I rocked back on my heels, breathing hard from the effort of tearing away the floor. “I think it means we’re in trouble.”

  An alarm pierced the cavernous space. Shaunessy held her hands over her ears. “I think you’re right!” she shouted over the din.

  The lights went out, leaving us momentarily in pitch darkness until the emergency lights switched on, bathing the room in an eerie, cave-like glow. “Time to go,” I said.

  We ran for the door, careful not to fall in the hole I had opened in the floor. The distance wasn’t far, and the emergency lights, though dim, gave us enough illumination to see where we were going. On our way to the exit, I remembered the steel cage that Melody had told me was hidden in the wall above the doorway, designed to fall in the unlikely event of an assault on the building by external forces, protecting the information inside. No sooner had the thought entered my mind than a light bar over the door glared red.

  “
No!” I ran full out, but I had only reached the first step when the massive portcullis smashed into place with an impact that shook the floor. The sound repeated around the giant room as similar steel barriers fell, blocking all the entrances to the server room and its precious cache of data. And trapping us inside.

  I took the stairs two at a time and yanked stupidly on the steel bars, but they didn’t budge. Melody and Andrew appeared on the other side, faces grim with concern. Melody started to speak, but I cut her off.

  “Get out of here,” I said. “Don’t wait for us. Get everyone out while you still can.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Shaunessy said. “A fungus may resemble a computer network, but it’s organic. It communicates through nutrients and enzymes and chemical neurotransmitters. It can’t interface with an Ethernet cable or make sense of network protocol.”

  “It doesn’t need to,” I said. “This cable is unshielded. That means the hyphae wrapped around it are bathed in the electromagnetic radiation coming from those wires. It’s what we sometimes do to tap enemy networks.”

  “But we know the protocols. We know how raw signal is converted into useful information. The fungus doesn’t.”

  “Again, I don’t think it needs to. It’s a giant neural network. Data goes in, the network responds, and then it gets feedback. The feedback enables it to strengthen neural paths that give favorable results. It doesn’t need to understand the data in order to learn from it. It’s the same behavior it uses in a forest, only with a different kind of data. Paul talks about it ‘learning’ and making ‘coordinated responses’ and ‘collective decisions,’ but it’s not really deciding anything, not like we do. It’s just strengthening pathways that give it the best feedback and culling those that don’t.”