The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  “No guard?” I said. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll hurt you?”

  She pulled a small pistol out of her pocket and held it casually in her hands. “You shot me,” she said. “I’d be happy to return the favor.” The way she said it, I thought she might be looking forward to the chance.

  I pulled my legs up under me and leaned back against the wall. “Why did you follow me? If you knew I was infected, why didn’t you all just grab me right away?”

  “Melody wanted to. I convinced her to play you a little, see what you would do. The truth is, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think you could really switch sides, not after all you’d seen. Even when you walked into that hangar, I told them I could talk you down. They let me try. No one knew you were armed. Where did you get a gun?”

  “Another Ligados left it for me.”

  “Another one? There are more on the base?”

  I nodded. I tried to say, “a lot more,” but the fungus wouldn’t let me. Our fragile peace didn’t extend that far.

  Which was crazy. The fungus wasn’t thinking anything. It was my own brain deciding what was or was not in the fungus’s best interests. All the fungus did was dose me with strong emotional chemicals to prevent me from acting against it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said instead.

  She narrowed her eyes. “How can you be sorry? Isn’t the fungus controlling your mind?”

  “That’s why I wanted you to come,” I said. I explained my theory that the fungus was reacting to my own evaluations of what would benefit it, and my further reasoning that infecting humanity would ultimately lead to the fungus’s own destruction.

  “There’s no grand plan here,” I said. “It’s just humans, or connected groups of humans, acting on what they believe will help the fungus survive. That’s why so many people in South America started caring about environmentalism and protecting the rainforest. It’s why they started assassinating leaders who had policies allowing logging rights or who were in other ways threatening the Amazon. It doesn’t mean killing those people actually would benefit the fungus. Just that the infected people thought it would.”

  “So it’s not actually controlling anyone’s mind?”

  “It is. But it’s not some super-intelligent organism working thousands of people like puppets, like what General Barron wants to create. The fungus is pretty sophisticated, sure, but what it’s doing isn’t all that different from what its ancestors have been doing in forests for millions of years. It branches out into host organisms and then uses its precise control of nutrient flow to augment the functions that benefit it and diminish those that don’t. In this case, that means intelligence. It means heightening brain function and manipulating brain chemistry to reward thoughts and actions in its favor. The fungus is using our intelligence, but that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent on its own.” I thought about it. “Though it must have co-evolved with mammal brains in its environment to some extent, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between favorable intentions and unfavorable ones.”

  Shaunessy nodded, but her body language still communicated distrust, and she kept the pistol pointed in my direction. I wondered how good a shot she was.

  “Let’s say I believe you,” she said. “What does it matter? The effect is the same.”

  “The difference is that we can manipulate it. If we can convince a substantial number of the Ligados that a particular action is beneficial to the fungus, then they’ll do it. If we could go far enough to convince them that infecting humanity at all is actually detrimental to the fungus, then we might even get them to take antifungal medication. The fungus itself would compel them to.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Convince the fungus to kill itself? Sounds like a long shot.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. The fungus doesn’t need to be convinced of anything. The people do. And they’re not rewarded for protecting the little mycelium in their heads. They’re rewarded for protecting the survival of the organism as a whole. If they think extricating it from humans is the best way to improve its survival chances, they’ll go ahead and do it.”

  “It’s a nice theory . . .”

  “When ordinary South American citizens got infected, they started caring about the Amazon enough to kill for it. But when drug lords got infected, what did they do? They didn’t worry about environmental policies. They made a drug out of the spores and smuggled it into the United States through cocaine routes. Everybody does what they think would best help the fungus to survive. When it infected me, I attacked what I thought was the biggest threat to fungal survival: that B-2 and its payload of rival spores. This whole war is just a result of ordinary people thinking the best way to ensure the survival of the fungus is to spread it around the world.”

  “So, if I wanted to get the Ligados to retreat? Not to attack Albuquerque?”

  “Convince them it’s in the fungus’s best interests. You already have the means in place to do it—that worm you hid in media outlets around the world. Give them a reason to believe that turning around and heading back south would be the best thing for the survival of the fungus.”

  She started to cross her arms, then remembered the gun and pointed it at me. “Why should I believe you? You’ve been lying to us for days, smooth as a con artist. This could all be some kind of manipulation to distract us from the war, or to fall into some Ligados trap.”

  I shrugged. “That’s for you and Andrew and Melody to decide. But what do I have to gain? It’s not like you’re going to let me out of here. If you could get the enemy to turn back, that would be good. If they ignore you, you haven’t lost anything.”

  She looked at me for a long time. “I trusted you,” she said. “I knew you were arrogant and immature the day I met you. The kind of charismatic charmer who everybody likes, who can talk his way out of anything and never faces up to the consequences of his actions. I told Melody from the start that I didn’t want you on my team. But despite all that, you got me to like you, and I gave you my trust. And you manipulated me. You lied to me, and you made me look like a fool.”

  “The fungus—” I said.

  “Shut up. I know all about how it wasn’t your fault and you couldn’t help it. That doesn’t change how it feels, and it doesn’t make me like you any better. Your problem is, it’s too easy for you. You’re so smart you make everyone around you look stupid, but you don’t seem to realize it, and so they all like you anyway. And when you start lying through your teeth, nobody can tell the difference. They just swallow it down and pat you on the back. Even now, even after this, you’ll probably come out of this smelling like a rose. They’ll give you an Exceptional Service medal and call you a hero. You just watch.”

  I was floored. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I didn’t think I was any of those things. I’d done nothing but screw up since I joined the agency, and this was the worst failure of all. I’d nearly gotten arrested on my first day. I’d been the one to let Paul into Fort Meade, where he planted the spores and spread the fungus into the server network. It was my poor handling of my family’s infections that had led to my own capture and infection. And now I had betrayed my country and shot one of my colleagues. How could she think I led a charmed life?

  She shook her head. “Forget it. I just wanted to see you. To look in your eyes and see if I could tell that you weren’t in control.”

  “And can you?”

  She stared at me, her lips pursed. “I don’t know. You seem perfectly rational, not like a puppet at all.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said.

  “I know. I see what all these other people do, and I know it’s the same. You were under compulsion. But I still . . . never mind.” She stood up. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “You’ll tell Melody, though? About what I said?”

  “Of course I will.”

  She took a step toward the door, but before she could knock on it to be let out, an earsplitting siren wailed. It came from outside the corre
ctional facility, and, from the sound of it, the noise could be heard across the entire base.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Her eyes met mine, and I saw the fear in them. “We’re under attack.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Paul Johns heard the trucks long before he saw them. They carried loudspeakers blaring a high-pitched whine, like the tone you heard when your ears were ringing. They also broadcast a man’s voice repeating the same message, over and over, at a volume that traveled for miles across the flat landscape:

  You want to protect the city at any cost. You want to kill anyone coming from the south. Block the roads and arm yourselves. You want to protect the city at any cost.

  Paul traveled in a convoy of cars, vans, trucks, and military vehicles strung out all along Route 25 for miles, all of them heading north. Route 25 roughly followed the Rio Grande, a narrow corridor of populated communities hugging the river, surrounded by desert on both sides. In front of them, still an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, Route 25 was blocked by hundreds of cars turned sideways and parked across the road. Behind that, a large crowd of people waited, most of them armed with little more than baseball bats or the occasional hunting rifle. Beyond them, the loudspeaker on a military truck repeated its message: “You want to protect the city . . .”

  Paul and the other Ligados around him carried M4 assault rifles liberated from White Sands, not to mention the M2 Browning machine gun mounted on the M113 armored vehicle he was driving. Eleven other well-armed men and women of various ages traveled in the M113 with him—probably enough to take out the opposing civilians by themselves. The main problem would be the cars. By the time they could clear them, their convoy would be jammed up on the highway, sitting ducks for the spore drop Paul knew was coming. Better to spread out as best they could, taking older routes and roads through the desert, than to try to blast their way through here.

  Paul used his phone to message the sections behind them, warning of the problem. They had been expecting something like this. But before he could finish the phone conversation, the truck at the front of the convoy exploded. Heat washed over his vehicle, and smoke obscured his view. He stood up, sticking his head out the top of the hatch, and when the smoke cleared he saw that the road in front of him was gone, replaced by a crater with the remains of the lead truck. The front of the convoy tried to turn, but another explosion tore up the next section of road and caught two more vehicles in its blast.

  Demolition explosives, Paul realized, likely from crews that cut roads through mountain passes. As he watched, three more blasts turned the road into rubble. Paul’s ears rang and his heart pounded. His phone flashed a message. Two miles south, the message said, a raised section of highway had also been destroyed, dropped with a dozen cars into a dry river bed. Hills of loose sand lined the highway on either side, too high for most vehicles to cross, which meant most of the convoy was trapped like fish in a barrel.

  He never saw the B-2. He heard a string of sharp pops from above, like fireworks, and looked up to see a growing cloud of dust falling from the sky. It dropped onto the highway and enveloped it. Spores. Millions of them.

  “Masks!” Paul shouted. The soldiers in his vehicle all pulled gas masks over their faces, protecting them from the spores. The cloud billowed down and around them, obscuring the road. “Time to go,” Paul said. He sat and turned the M113 toward the sandy hill to the left and pushed the accelerator to the floor, churning sand up behind its treads. He topped the rise and drove down over the other side of the hill and into the desert, the screen in front of him showing nothing but sand and scrub brush stretching to distant blue mountains.

  A brisk wind blew from the west, pushing the cloud of spores away from them and toward the inhabited areas of the Rio Grande valley. The droning message continued, louder than the growl of the M113: “Protect the city at any cost . . .”

  They hadn’t been able to find nearly enough gas masks to protect everyone. Many of the Ligados, driving ordinary cars and trucks and unprotected by masks, would breathe in the spores, but they had taken that into account in their plans. They wouldn’t succumb immediately, and in the meantime, they would continue to fight the minor battle of Route 25, while the rest of them—mostly trained soldiers in military vehicles—continued on toward Albuquerque. The real battle would be fought at Kirtland.

  An hour later, Paul and the eleven Ligados with him ditched their vehicle a mile into the desert and hiked in toward the city. Ten of them were Marine Raiders, dressed in desert fatigues, with black helmets and flak jackets, and carrying M4s. The one other man was a civilian, Dr. Emilio Vasquez, and the team would protect him at all costs. Their primary mission, in fact, was to deliver Dr. Vasquez to the underground nuclear munitions storage center. He wasn’t entirely indispensable—backup teams protected men with similar skills—but they would proceed as if he were the only one left.

  Paul checked his watch. In half an hour, the base would fall into total confusion as the Ligados hidden among the troops turned on their squadmates and friends. By the time Paul and his team arrived, which uniforms they were wearing would mean nothing. No one would know whom to trust.

  So far, everything was proceeding according to plan.

  Shaunessy rapped hard on the door to be let out of my cell. We heard a streaking, whining sound, and an explosion rocked the building, tumbling us both to the floor. She scrambled up quickly, pointing the gun at me.

  “They’re firing the long-range missiles at us from White Sands,” I said. “Probably trying to take out the airstrips.”

  “I thought the bombing runs had taken those out already,” she said.

  “Apparently not all of them. It won’t be long now. You should find a way out of the city, if you can.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Head north, away from the fighting. Vegas might be far enough, but probably not. Get out of the state.”

  “Neil, the Ligados aren’t going to win this. We have ten times the firepower, thousands of planes at Vegas and Santa Fe. The general’s top strategists have been planning this battle for days. We’ll have air superiority within the hour. Now that they’re firing, those remaining missile launchers will be targeted and killed, as will all the mobile anti-aircraft systems. Even without McCarrick’s spores, you wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “Nobody gets it,” I said. “Even after Brazil, they don’t understand. Your military is riddled with defectors, just waiting for the right time to make themselves known. Half of your intelligence is already wrong. Most of the Ligados aren’t soldiers, and so you think of them as a ragtag mob storming a city with pitchforks. But every one of them is as bright as the general’s strategists. This attack has been timed and planned in exquisite detail. By the end of the day, all of the city’s defenders will either be dead or else captured and turned to our side.”

  She took a step closer, looked in my eyes. “And you want this?”

  “I’m trying not to,” I said. “If I could push a button that killed all the people in the world but helped the fungus spread and survive, I don’t think I could stop myself. The fungus would make it seem so good to me, so wonderful, that I couldn’t imagine not pushing it. What’s saving me right now is the belief that that won’t happen. The consensus opinion isn’t taking into account the ingenuity and power even of a crippled humanity to fight the fungus for dominance. The vision of a globe-spanning mycelium working in peaceful tandem with an enlightened humanity is a lie. Slavery and war is much more likely. I’m holding on to the idea that it would be better for the fungus’s long-term survival to leave us alone. And because I believe it, the fungus allows me to work toward that goal.”

  “Just a moment ago, you said we were doomed. That every counter-move had been anticipated.”

  “That’s true. As long as the Ligados continue to believe that attacking this city is the best way to promote the survival of the fungus, they’ll be no stopping them.”

  “Then how can we w
in?”

  “We have to change their minds.”

  The door to the cell still had not opened to let Shaunessy out. She knocked on it again, louder this time, and it finally swung open. The blond airman was gone. In his place, five men in fatigues stood with weapons drawn. The moment the door opened, the man in front pointed an assault rifle at Shaunessy’s head and screamed at her to drop her pistol. She did, and it clattered to the floor. The man kicked it to me, and I scooped it up.

  “Friends of yours?” Shaunessy asked.

  I had never seen them before, but I knew they were Ligados. “Don’t hurt her,” I said. “We need her help.”

  One of the men checked his watch. “We need to keep moving,” he said. “You’ve got her covered?”

  “Covered,” I said.

  When the men left, Shaunessy eyed me and the gun warily. “So what happens now?”

  I shoved the gun into my waistband, feeling awkward and hoping I didn’t shoot myself in the leg. “There are three teams of Ligados special forces operatives heading for the base along different routes,” I said. “Each team also includes a mycologist and a nuclear armament specialist. The specialist knows how to bypass the safety codes on the nuclear warheads. We need to stop them, if we can. Convince them that what they’re doing will ultimately mean the fungus’s downfall.”

  Shaunessy’s phone rang. She looked at me, and I nodded to her. “Answer it.”

  She put it to her ear. “Hello?”

  I heard a tinny voice, too quiet and distorted to make out any words.

  “Yes, I’m in his cell,” Shaunessy said.

  The tinny voice spoke for a while. It sounded agitated.

  Shaunessy’s face changed. She had been stressed before, but now the only way to describe her expression was dread. “You’re kidding,” she said. “That’s insane! Why would he do that?”

  More words from the phone. I thought I caught the phrase “out of control.”