by David Walton
“Excellent work,” General Barron said. “This is exactly what we need, and not a moment too soon. How soon can it be ready for the field?”
“It’s ready now,” McCarrick said. “It’s only a matter of quantity. We can produce millions of spores from a single agar dish in twenty-four hours, and given enough space to grow, billions more from those. We can circulate them to other major infectious disease research facilities with level 3 biosafety labs—Walter Reed in Silver Spring, for instance—and increase the production rate.”
“And what happens if you circulate these spores on the battlefield and uninfected people breathe them in?” Melody asked, her voice calm. “Our own soldiers, for instance?”
“A good question,” McCarrick said. “These spores are effectively the same species as the original, so infection means the same as always—mind control by the fungal host. The only difference is that it comes with our own markers, allowing us to hijack that control. So yes, we want to avoid exposing uninfected people to these spores, especially our own troops. They’re just as deadly as the original kind.”
“More so,” I said quietly. “With this kind, you can be controlled by the fungus and humans both.”
Dr. McCarrick slipped his microphone back into his lab coat so he could gesture with both hands. “Please understand,” he said to the room. “This is not a cure. There is no road back from infection to complete wellness. Even a continuous, forcibly applied course of antifungals will merely destroy most of the mycelium, not eradicate it from the body completely. Without continued application for years, it would always come back again. There’s nothing I can do for the millions who have already succumbed. What I offer here is a way to prevent the billions of us remaining from meeting the same fate.”
General Barron turned toward Melody. “Ms. Muniz,” he said. “I understand your office has developed a mechanism to distribute misinformation to the Ligados network.”
“Is developing,” she said. “Present tense. But you don’t need anything special to get this kind of message out. Once your new-and-improved spores have made the rounds, just take out an advertisement on the evening news. Play Tyler’s fancy high-pitched tone over the air and say, ‘You all want to die.’ It’s a catchy slogan. You could even put it to an advertising jingle.”
“It’s a matter of infecting them in the first place,” the general said, frowning. “I can drop spores on a few Ligados here and there, maybe, but these people are spread over continents. I need to spread it as a drug, like they did with Neuritol, and convince them to take it.”
“We’ll let you know when we have something you can use,” Melody said. I smiled at her acerbic tone. She didn’t like this any more than I did.
Though I couldn’t entirely fault Dr. McCarrick or General Barron. What they were doing was wrong, but I understood the motivation. They were fighting a war to preserve our species. This weapon would do the same as all the guns and missiles and bombs, only much more efficiently, and possibly with fewer dead in the long run. If the Ligados got their hands on the nukes at Kirtland, it might catapult the war to a whole new level, with a lot more zeros behind the number of casualties. The fungus thrived on radiation, after all. It wouldn’t necessarily see a downside to nuclear war.
I realized I was still hoping for a solution that saved the infected instead of killing them. I thought of them as captives and slaves, not as the enemy. They were my brother and father and Mei-lin and thousands of others like them, unwilling tools of a creature using them for its own purposes. McCarrick and Barron had given up on that solution. And maybe they were right. Maybe I had to wrap my head around the idea that all those people were already lost.
“Thank you, doctor.” General Barron took a step toward the door, and the members of his entourage all stood and turned to follow him. “Begin large-scale production immediately. I want to pick up everything you can give me by this time tomorrow.” Dr. McCarrick saluted him smartly, and Barron returned the salute.
“When you use it,” McCarrick said, “don’t hold back. We’ve already seen strains of fungus in the lab developing a resistance to our updates. If this works in the field, it won’t continue to work for long. The fungus will adapt. You might get only one chance at it.”
“I understand you perfectly,” Barron said. He rolled his shoulders and gave the hem of his jacket a quick tug to straighten its lines. “Until tomorrow, then. God only grant that tomorrow is soon enough.”
CHAPTER 28
I threw myself into the passenger seat of Melody’s car, torn between confusion and anger. I went with the anger.
“How can you sit there and listen to them? The people in that room are American citizens, ordinary people like you and me. A week ago, they were car salesmen and bus drivers and business executives. They have children and spouses and families who love them. And somehow we can justify making them dance like puppets.”
“I know,” Melody said. “I know, believe me.” She turned the key, and the engine rumbled to life. “But there are times when direct confrontation will get you your way, and times when it won’t. This was one of the other times.”
“You know he’s going to use it to kill them all.”
She nodded slowly, turning the car in a circle to exit the parking lot. “That does seem the most likely. He won’t risk telling them to surrender, or any kind of half-measures. There’s too much at stake.”
“Thousands of lives—possibly millions by now—killed just to make extra sure?”
“To make sure they don’t launch thousands of missiles, each of which could destroy a city of ten million people? I could see him making that choice, yes. And I’m not sure I could disagree with him.”
“We don’t even know that they’ll launch those missiles,” I said, but the argument sounded weak even to me.
“We’re all hoping for a cure,” Melody said. “There are labs all over the country trying to find one. But these things take time, and we don’t have any. Tyler is no evil villain, and neither is Craig Barron, as much as I dislike his methods. They’re making the best choices they can with the worst wartime dilemma anyone has had to face, maybe ever.”
“Does Barron have the authority to do this?”
“He’s the commander of the US forces. At this point, the only person who could tell him no is the president.”
“Can we take this to the president? Make him see what’s happening here?”
“We could try,” Melody said. “But the president wants to win this war as much as Barron does.”
“And what comes after? What if we do win? What’s to stop this ‘cure’ from being used across the world? Anybody with a few spores and the command signal could enslave anyone else with perfect control. The slavery of a few centuries ago would be nothing compared to this. Petty dictators with drone armies that do their every bidding. Girls forced to perform as sex slaves as if it were their deepest wish. Crimes committed by proxy, so that the real perpetrators can never be brought to justice. Is that the world you want to live in?”
Melody sighed but didn’t answer right away. With the energy she usually displayed and her commanding presence, it was easy to forget how old she must be. Well past usual retirement. For a moment, as she navigated the entrance ramp to the highway, she looked her age. Weighed down. Maybe even defeated.
“We don’t get to choose the world we live in,” she said, her words slow and tired. “To tell you the truth, the one I’ve been living in so far isn’t that great most of the time. The fungus has unlocked a vulnerability in the human mind. That genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. It will be used, and it will be used for evil, I have no doubt. But I can’t solve all the world’s problems. I can’t even solve my own family’s most of the time. All I can do is the best I can with my limited knowledge and the tools at hand.”
At the word family, I remembered—as I never ought to have forgotten—that Melody’s granddaughter, Emily, had been one of the earliest infected in the
country. Which meant that I wasn’t the only one with loved ones among the Ligados. Melody stood to lose at least a granddaughter, if not more, if we won this war Craig Barron’s way. I wondered if General Barron himself had family among the infected, or Dr. McCarrick. There were no easy answers.
Eventually, when I didn’t respond, Melody switched on the radio. A news reporter described in detail the well-armed and coordinated Ligados force converging on Albuquerque. She gave such a slack-jawed portrayal of their size, organization, and apparent invincibility that I wondered if she were infected herself and that the news program was meant to intimidate or at least misinform. I also knew that the bulk of our forces—especially the hundreds of fighter planes and bombers—had been kept well back from the city to avoid the possibility of contamination. The Ligados force might be formidable, but we still had the full resources of the military to draw on, and every reason to protect the city at all costs. We would throw everything we had at them.
We drove back through the gate at Fort Meade. They had doubled security at all the entrance points, put snipers on the roof, and armed squads now patrolled the perimeter. We took Canine Road around the headquarters building, skirting its acres of parking lots, and turned onto Rockenbach, passing the arrays of satellite dishes on our right. Another block and we reached the edge of the NSA shantytown. It seemed like every field and parking lot in sight was now covered with military tents and modular trailers, trying to provide working space for the thousands of agents displaced by fungal contamination.
Melody parked on the grass, and we made our way through the maze to our own tent. “Just the people I wanted to see,” Andrew said. “Take a look at this.”
“Show Neil,” Melody said. “I’ve got to go brief the director.” She walked away without looking back.
Andrew sighed. I looked over his shoulder at his computer screen. As I did, I noticed that the frame of his computer was attached to the table with a bicycle lock.
“What’s with the lock?” I asked.
“Oh that,” Andrew said. “You wouldn’t believe how contested these machines are. Two or three times an hour, I have people coming in here telling me their project is more important than mine, and their boss says they need to requisition my machine.”
“He’s not kidding,” Shaunessy said from the corner, working on a computer of her own. “I’m afraid to leave the tent.”
“Most of the computers in the building are probably clean,” I said.
“Yeah, but they’ve got a team of guys pulling them apart and putting them back together again before they let anyone use them.”
“So what have you got?” I asked Andrew.
He tapped a key. “Traced your brother’s phone call, for one thing.”
“Really? Where is he?”
“Deep in the Amazon, my friend. Jungle central.”
“Seriously? He’s in Brazil?”
“Right about . . . here.” Andrew turned a globe on his screen and clicked, zooming down first on South America and then quickly into the heart of northern Brazil. The screen showed an unbroken expanse of green trees as seen from above. The view was similar to what I had seen previously from the top secret version of Google Earth I had worked on with Melody. But the interface and controls looked different. On the left panel, I saw a long list of terrain overlay options that I recognized as top secret code words designating specific intelligence assets.
“What is this?” I asked. “I haven’t seen this before.”
“This is Esri’s version,” he said. “Works pretty much the same way as Google’s.”
“Why are there two?”
“Actually, there are at least half a dozen,” Andrew said. “Built by different contractors at different times for different program offices. Google has one, Esri has one, General Electric has one. I think Lockheed Martin has three. They all do more or less the same thing, but they don’t all interface with the same set of sensor platforms.”
“Sounds inconvenient,” I said. “Why don’t they consolidate them into one? Or better yet, why didn’t we just buy one of them to begin with?”
Shaunessy laughed. “Welcome to big government spending.”
“I didn’t show you this to discuss our software acquisition policy, though,” Andrew said. “Take a look.” I looked at his screen again. Nothing but trees.
“Right?” Andrew said. “No cleared land, no villages, no roads, no airstrips, no nothing. Not even an illegal logging camp. It’s deep in the Maici River valley, but it’s not even close to the river. Your brother is giving new meaning to the phrase ‘out in the middle of nowhere.’”
“How accurate was your trace?”
“Are you kidding me?” Andrew said. “Who do you think you’re working for, the state police? I could drop a bomb within a meter of where he was standing when he picked up the sat phone.”
“Sat phone? That’s how he made the call?”
“Well, they’re not exactly running fiber optics out to where he’s at. There’s more, though. Here’s what it looks like in infrared.”
Andrew switched to a different overlay, and the screen showed a nearly monochrome green, stippled with patterns of a slightly darker green. “Looks like nothing to me,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. No hidden factories, nothing that produces any kind of heat signature above the normal forest level. Even if there was something deep underground, we’d pick it up. There’s nothing.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why are you expecting to see anything? My brother’s lived out in the rainforest before. It doesn’t mean there’s some secret Ligados base out there, does it? If it looks like miles of trees, it’s probably just miles of trees.”
“I would agree with you,” Andrew said. “Except for this.”
He minimized the globe program and brought up a video. I recognized it as drone footage, taken by the camera of a Reaper or similar UAV while in flight. It flew low over an ocean of treetops. A text readout on the top left portion of the video gave the drone’s latitude, longitude, and altitude. It was only a few tenths of a degree from the location where Andrew had tracked my brother, meaning it was within a few miles of his location.
It was flying north. On the left edge of the video, I could just see an orange glint of light from the setting sun. The sky was darkening, and much of the forest below was in shadow. We watched but nothing happened. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” I asked.
“Wait for it,” Andrew said.
I waited. The drone shifted slightly toward the northeast, putting the sun out of its direct view. The picture darkened further. And then I saw it. Right on the horizon, a glow, as if a town lay just out of sight and its electric lights illuminated the sky. But there was no town. There was nothing, not for hundreds of miles.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” he said. “But this was the last ten minutes of video this drone produced before it went dark. We never saw or heard from it again.”
“The moon?” I suggested. “Was the moon about to rise over the horizon and that’s the glow we see?”
Andrew shook his head. “Already checked. The moon was nowhere near that position.”
“Then what could be making it? You already told me there’s no heat signature there. Nothing industrial that could produce that kind of light.”
“That,” Andrew said, “is the million-dollar question.”
Eventually Melody returned, grumbling about the unreasonableness of directors in general and Ronstadt in particular.
“You’ve got two hours,” she told Shaunessy. “Then Ronstadt’s going to shut down all the servers and get in there with a cleaning crew. He can’t stand the idea of the fungus being in there, even if we can get some advantage from it.”
Shaunessy slammed a fist down on the folding table her computer sat on. It was the most violent outburst I’d ever seen from her. “This is our one connection to the fungus! The best opportunity we’ve ever had to influenc
e it or feed it misinformation. How can he shut it down?”
“He’s afraid those spores will get out and his whole workforce will be infected.”
“If we don’t do something soon, the whole world will be infected.”
“It’s not like when Kilpatrick was in charge. Ronstadt doesn’t listen to me.” Melody looked at me. “Also, I tried to get an audience with the president, to communicate our concerns with using a version of the fungus to fight the fungus. My request was denied. Ronstadt assured me that my objections would be passed on. But I know what that means.”
“It means they’re keeping the president in the dark?” Shaunessy asked.
“Possibly,” Melody said. “But more likely it means the president knows exactly what General Barron plans to do with McCarrick’s discovery, and he approves.”
“So we’ve got nothing,” I said.
Melody raised her hands in an expressive shrug. “We’re not beaten yet,” she said. “Don’t give up. We’ll keep doing whatever we can to find ways to stop this thing.”
The others kept talking, but I stopped listening. It was out of our hands now. Barring a miracle, by the time the week was out we’d all either be nuked into our constituent atoms to make way for the fungus to dominate the Earth, or else we’d be the zombie slaves of whatever human was pulling our strings. Mind control would be part of humanity’s future, whether from the fungus or from ourselves. It made me feel very tired.
I kept thinking about the phone call from my brother. He had known, somehow, that I was there in the server room, despite the fact that he had called from Brazil. It implied that the fungal network was more connected than we had surmised. Where Paul was, he had no electronic infrastructure, and yet input from the server room—possibly even a security camera feed—had somehow reached him.
