The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 27

We were taken into custody, hosed down, sterilized, and subjected to PET scans. They wanted to give the server room the same essential treatment, but Shaunessy convinced them not to. That is, she explained to Melody the advantage we might get from being able to manipulate the fungus under the floor, and Melody bullied and cajoled enough high-ranking people until she got her way. As far as we could tell, no one had been infected.

The Army established a perimeter around the building, allowing access only to select individuals and then in full HAZMAT suits. The thousands of people who had worked in the building, although not infected, were robbed of offices, computers, and working space, or, for most of them, access to any of their ongoing work. The fungus had effectively brought the largest intelligence agency in the world to its knees.

The servers remained on. Connected to the world, they continued to collate and automatically process much of the intelligence collected around the world by satellite, drone, land- and ship-based sensor suites, and human operatives. It was a dangerous game, now that we knew the information was accessible to both us and the fungus, but Melody felt that Shaunessy was right. The digital realm belonged to humanity: we were its creators and kings. It was the best avenue we had to try to wrest dominance of our world back from Kingdom Fungi to Kingdom Animalia.

“But not the only one,” Melody told me in our new “office,” one of dozens of overcrowded military tents in a parking lot on the base. Other fields and open spaces at Fort Meade had also been converted into these office shantytowns. It was pure chaos, with not enough computing equipment or phones, and no one knowing where to find anyone else. The security rules confining the discussion of classified topics to approved areas were so ingrained in the habits of the NSA workforce that many agents found it difficult to talk about anything at all.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re not the only people working on this problem,” she said. “Far from it.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Because we’re not exactly making headway here.” I was still smarting from Paul’s betrayal and how he had manipulated me into bringing him into Fort Meade. I knew it wasn’t productive to blame myself, but that didn’t stop me from feeling deeply embarrassed and foolish. It was my brother, after all, who had caused this catastrophe. And I had helped him do it. “My track record is pretty dismal at the moment,” I said. “So please tell me that someone else out there is actually finding a way to beat this thing.”

“That’s what I’m heading to find out,” Melody said. “I want you to come along.”

“You’re sure you want me? I seem to leave disaster in my wake.”

“I’m not asking you; I’m telling you,” Melody said. “So stand up and snap out of it. Because we have a bit of a drive ahead of us, and I don’t want to spend it listening to you wallowing in self-pity.”

I stood, smiling wryly, and snapped her a salute. “Self-pity gone,” I said. “I’m ready to work.” It wasn’t exactly true, but I knew she was right. I knew, too, that the guilty feelings were a bit of a smokescreen, hiding a lurking sense of despair. Guilt was a safer emotion. If what had happened so far had been my fault in some way, then if I worked hard and cleverly enough, I could do better next time. If it hadn’t been my fault—if everything that had happened had been beyond my power to stop—then there was no reason to believe I could succeed in the future, no matter what I did.

And, despite everything we tried, the fungus had advanced unchecked. News arrived that morning that the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico—the largest military installation in the country—had fallen to Ligados forces. Fighting had pushed north, toward Albuquerque, and enemy forces elsewhere seemed to be converging on the city. The reason seemed frighteningly obvious: Albuquerque was home to Kirtland Air Force Base and the more than two thousand nuclear warheads in its underground munitions storage complex. There was no way to move them safely in any reasonable amount of time. The only option was to defend the city with everything we had.

The president had declared martial law, and military forces were even now converging on Albuquerque. General Craig Barron—an Army four-star whom Melody knew personally, and disliked immensely—had been named commander of US forces on the home front. He had been granted huge latitude to defeat the Ligados no matter what the cost. Which made him, for all practical purposes, as powerful as the president, if not more so. The war was coming into our own borders, and no infringement on the liberties of civilians was more important than keeping those nukes out of Ligados control.

Melody drove a white Impala with a faded “Proud Navy Mom” bumper sticker on the back. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Melody dropped the accelerator to the floor, leaping out of the parking space as if driving a Ferrari. She took the turns fast enough that I gripped the door handle for balance, and in moments we were heading west on Route 32.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

“Fort Detrick, Maryland,” she said. “Specifically, USAMRIID.”

“Biomedical research?” I asked.

She nodded. “Infectious disease research, psychological research, neuroscience research. Anything that keeps our soldiers alive, improves their ability to fight, or does the opposite to our enemies, they study it there. It’s the national center of our biological weapons program.”

“I thought Nixon shut down our bioweapons program fifty years ago.”

Melody shrugged. “Potato, potato. Yes, it’s all called biodefense now. But how can you defend against what the enemy might do without figuring out what weapons they might throw at you? It’s two sides of the same coin. And you can bet they’ve been all over this fungal organism with everything they’ve got.”

“I’m guessing, since we’re driving there, that they’ve had some success.”

“That’s what we’re going there to find out.”

It took us an hour to get there, but we finally turned off the highway and made our way onto the Fort Detrick complex, where we followed signs to Building 1625, a six-story new construction with an imposing brick-and-glass facade. Inside, an army lieutenant led us down winding corridors and through doorways marked with biohazard warning signs. I glimpsed a sign on a lab door that read “Warning: Trespassers Will Be Used as Science Experiments.”

Finally, he brought us to a room that resembled a cross between a medical lab and box seats at a basketball game. One whole wall looked out through plate glass onto a gymnasium-sized room where perhaps two hundred people of different ages, genders, and modes of dress milled with no obvious purpose. Some sat at tables, some walked around the room, some picked at the remains of a breakfast spread. Many talked together in groups of two or three. Most looked bored.

Melody and I chose seats from several rows of folding chairs that had been set in front of the glass, looking out at the people like visitors at the zoo.

“Don’t worry; it’s one-way,” said a tall man in a long lab coat with thinning red hair. “They can’t see you. Make yourself comfortable. The others will be here shortly.”

“Tyler, I’d like you to meet Neil Johns,” Melody said. “Neil, this is Dr. Tyler McCarrick, chief of neuroscience research here.”

“You must be the Major’s newest protégé, then,” McCarrick said. “I sat in your shoes once, not so long ago.”

“Don’t flatter us,” Melody said. “It was a very long time ago.”

“You worked for Melody?” I said.

McCarrick nodded. “I was assigned to the agency for a little over a year, before I went back for my doctorate. Best education of my life.”

I wanted to ask him if he’d known my father, but it didn’t seem the time. Other people, mostly in military uniforms, filtered into the room, and Dr. McCarrick was forced to play host.

I shifted in my seat. “Who are all these people?” I whispered to Melody.

“Mostly staff members of different agency directors or high-ranking military types,” she said. “Sent by their bosses to make sure nobody else benefits from Dr. McCarrick’s research before they do.”

“I meant, who are all those people.” I pointed to the crowd of people in the room beyond the glass.

Melody shrugged. “I have no idea.”

A tall, broad-chested man in a well-decorated Army uniform entered at the front of a small entourage. The small conversations going on throughout the room stopped.

“And everyone here has just been outranked,” Melody said, her voice pitched so only I could hear her.

“Who is that?”

“General Craig Barron,” she said. “Our new commander. The fact that he’s here himself instead of sending a subordinate means he knows something we don’t know.” She nodded at Barron, who nodded back at her.

“I should have known I’d find the Major at an event like this,” Barron said.

“I can’t say the same for you, General,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“To see the show, of course.” He and his entourage took a block of folding chairs on the other side of the group.

“How come you always know the highest-ranking person in any room?” I asked Melody.

She grinned. “It’s probably from a career spent going over other people’s heads to get the job done.”

Dr. McCarrick cleared his throat. “I think we can get started,” he said. He positioned himself on one side of the window wall, in our line of sight, but not blocking our view of the people on the other side. “Aspergillus ligados is an amazing creature. Unique among invasive pathogens, it compromises its host by imitating the appearance and function of the host cells and presenting the same interface to surrounding cells. This includes showing a ‘self’ marker to immune cells, which can’t tell the difference between the fungus and the host’s body. It hacks the body so effectively that the body doesn’t even know it’s there. Makes it very difficult to design a treatment that will kill the fungus without also killing the host.

“What we’ve managed to do here is hack the fungus right back. Instead of trying to defeat it, we’ve redesigned our own version of it, one that will interface with the original version already in situ.”

“No surprises yet,” Melody said, keeping her voice low. “That’s what they do here.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Genetic tweaking. Take a deadly sheep disease and modify it to affect humans, for instance. Or shorten its incubation period. Or aerosolize it. Anything to make it more deadly on a battlefield or in the hands of a terrorist.”

“Doctor?” a woman in a Navy uniform asked. “Does this mean you’re planning to infect people with a second version of the fungus?”

“Exactly right, Captain. The first one we can’t do very much about. With our modifications, however, the second one we can very much control.” He beckoned to the glass. “Let me draw your attention to the patients in the far room. Each of them presented with an established infection of Aspergillus ligados. They were captured by military or law enforcement and brought here for study and treatment.

“Earlier this morning, they were further infected with our new strain of the fungus. Before and after treatment, each patient was lucid, able to give his or her name, remember salient indicators of time and place, and answer questions involving simple mathematics or memory. Before treatment, however, most patients were surly, largely uncooperative, and on several occasions attempted to harm or kill research staff. Now, as you will see, they are significantly more accommodating.”

McCarrick pulled a small, wireless microphone out of the pocket of his lab coat like a magician producing a wand. He pressed a button, and a high-pitched whine began, just at the edge of our hearing.

“That high tone you hear is what we call our ‘command signal,’” McCarrick explained. “It’s the control we use to distinguish our instructions from anyone else’s. It’s a complex set of frequencies that induces a vibration pattern in the new molecules we’ve introduced into the system. You can think of it kind of like a key.”

“A key to what?” the man sitting next to Melody asked.

McCarrick smiled. “To their minds.” He raised the microphone to his lips. “You want to raise your right hand,” he said.

All two hundred ‘patients,’ as McCarrick had called them, raised their right hands.

It was creepy enough that I tensed and leaned back against my chair. I noticed I wasn’t the only one.

The patients didn’t stop their conversations or anything they were doing. Three young men, who had been bouncing a stone against the wall in a kind of game, continued the game, only now with their right hands raised. None of them seemed to think it was odd.

“You want to raise your left hand,” McCarrick said into the microphone.

The patients obeyed, for all the world like the wish was their own. The three men playing with the stone switched to kicking it instead, altering their game to accommodate the fact that both of their hands were now held over their heads.

“I want to stress that these people have not been conditioned in any way,” McCarrick said. “No reward has been offered nor punishment given for disobedience. We are simply demonstrating, in dramatic fashion, the access to their wills that the fungal network has created.”

He spoke into the microphone: “It is no longer of great importance to you what you do with your hands.” The patients all lowered their hands and continued to use them as they had before.

The viewing room erupted into noise as the visitors threw out questions. I might have thought McCarrick had compelled us the same way, considering all the hands that shot into the air. I kept quiet, still shocked by what I had just seen. People not only forced to act but compelled without their knowledge, under the delusion that the act was their own wish. It was the same thing the fungus did, but this was different. This was humans doing it to each other.

“Doctor McCarrick,” General Barron said, and the other voices in the room fell silent. “This is amazing work. Compelling people to raise their hands, however, is a far cry from what may be necessary.”

McCarrick raised a finger. “Ah,” he said. “My demonstration isn’t quite finished.”

“Well, then, let’s see it,” Barron said.

“You want to lie down on the ground,” McCarrick said into the microphone.

The patients complied, including one old woman who pushed herself out of her wheelchair to fall onto the ground.

“You want to stand up.”

Again, the patients obeyed, jumping to their feet. The old woman, obviously unable to stand, tried anyway, crying out in pain when her legs wouldn’t hold her weight.

“Stop this,” I said. “You’ve made your point.”

“You want to kill each other,” McCarrick said.

I sprang to my feet. “No!”

The response was immediate and violent. Patients assaulted one another with punches and kicks, wrapped arms around each other’s necks, grabbed hair to bash heads against the floor.

“You have no wish to harm anyone,” McCarrick said, and the violence stopped. Only seconds had passed. The patients helped each other up, brushed off dirt, dabbed at wounds.

“This is wrong,” I said. “Unethical, cruel, however you want to say it. Those are people in there. Human beings, who had the bad luck to catch an infection any one of us could have gotten. They’re not our experimental playthings, no matter how much insight they give us.” I felt something on my arm, and looked down to see Melody tugging at my sleeve, trying to get me to sit down. “Not now,” she mouthed. I thought of my father, under similar compulsion, tapping out Morse code on the rails of his hospital bed, and felt sick. “If this is how we win,” I said, “then I’m not sure I want to.”

I sat. “There are ways to push that argument,” Melody said softly. “This isn’t it. If you make a point of it now, you’ll just get thrown out of the room.”

Dr. McCarrick pasted a broad smile on his face and addressed the room as a whole. “We’re not doing anything the fungus hasn’t already done,” he said. “These people are already infected. They’re already being compelled to kill their friends and fellow citizens, to assassinate their leaders. The fungus can make them want to do anything, and they’ll pursue it single-mindedly, as if it were their dearest wish. As if their only child’s life depended on it. No matter what it is: kill the person next to them, chew through their own arm, anything. What we’re doing isn’t creating that compulsion but taking control of it. We’re controlling the thing that’s controlling them.”

“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.”