The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 21

With the time I had left before we started our descent, I called Shaunessy in São Paulo to get an update on the war. She couldn’t tell me much on an open line, but she confirmed that, after what had happened at São Luis, the command staff was now taking our claims seriously. Cardiff had ordered all senior officers to undergo PET scans, and crop dusters had risen to the top of Ground Theater Air Control’s surveillance watch list. I wondered what would happen once the media realized that the bombs that took so many American lives had been dropped by American planes. It couldn’t stay secret for very long.

Airplane flights had always wreaked havoc with the pressure in my inner ear, and by the time we landed, my head was throbbing. I opened my mouth wide and pulled at my ears in an attempt to relieve the pressure but without much effect. I was reaching the end of my strength. I’d been up all of the previous night getting rattled in the C-130J like nuts in a jar. The night before I’d caught only a few hours of sleep on the couch in Shaunessy’s hotel room, and the night before that, I’d slept in the CIA agents’ car on the drive from Brasília. I was running on fumes.

I almost didn’t recognize Dr. Chu when I saw her waiting for me at the exit from my gate. She was smaller than I remembered. The top of her head reached only to my collarbone, and her slight shoulders reminded me of a bird’s wing, fragile and delicate. The look in her eyes gave no hint of weakness, however, and I could see her striking fear into a class of interns. Give her a white lab coat and clipboard and the force of knowledge and authority, and I might quail before her, too.

“Doctor Chu,” I said. I shook her outstretched hand, and mine seemed clumsy wrapped around her slim, precise fingers.

“Call me Mei-lin, please,” she said.

We walked down the corridor away from the gate. I had no luggage—it had all been lost in Brasília—so there was nothing to wait for. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.

Mei-lin gave a chuff of surprise that might have been a laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I’ve been shouting from the hills that this thing is dangerous, but nobody’s taking me seriously. Follow protocol, they say. Make your reports to the CDC and USAMRIID and let the professionals create a panic if a panic is warranted. What I saw in your brother’s cultures, though, has got me scared. Really scared.”

“Why? What did you see?”

“The filamentous morphology has some extraordinary qualities. It can hack the interfaces of other cells, feeding them chemical messages they would expect in their normal interactions with their neighbors. It’s like a con artist. It tricks the other cell into thinking it’s business as usual, snuggling up against it as if it had always been there. As far as the cell is concerned, the fungus is just another sensory transducer cell or autonomic neuron cell or any kind of cell. As far as I can tell, it’s a generalized capability. Put it with skin cells, it acts like a skin cell. Put it with thyroid gland cells, it acts like a thyroid gland cell.”

“It changes its DNA?” I asked.

“Oh, no. The mimicry is just at the interface level. On a genetic level, it’s still fungal mycelia, and it retains its essential connection to the rest of the mycelia.”

“So… does that mean you essentially have two brains functioning in your head?” I asked.

“Worse than that,” Mei-lin said, leading the way out of the main airport building. “It’s just one brain, with your original cells and the mycelial copycat cells working together seamlessly. The resulting network is even, apparently, more efficient than the original. But it comes at a cost. Some percentage of the brain is composed of fungal mycelia and thus operating for the ultimate good of the parasite, not the human host. Although those goals sometimes coincide.”

“But what does that mean, ‘for the good of the parasite’? For the good of the specific organism hanging out in your brain? Or for the whole fungal species?”

She turned a corner toward short-term parking, and I followed her. “I’m not sure ‘species’ is the right word.”

“What do you mean?”

“The cells I took from your brother and the ones from your father are genetically identical, as are the ones I’ve pulled from other patients.”

“Wait,” I said. “Other patients?”

“At least five others. The point is, there’s no genetic diversity. This isn’t so much a species as a single organism, spread out among different hosts.”

“I don’t understand. If they’re not connected, how can they be the same organism? Even if they’re genetically identical, they would be like twins, then, right? Not one individual.”

“That’s kind of a semantic distinction in this case,” she said. “There’s no centralization in a fungus like there is in a human. There’s no division of labor among its parts. I can slice a single fungus into a hundred pieces, and each piece will be just as much the original as any of the others. A fungus is kind of like the internet. It’s a network of nodes, each of which senses its environment and communicates that information along the network to the other nodes.”

I followed her between two rows of parked cars. “But, if a fungus is a network, what happens when it’s split up in different hosts? The network’s broken then, right? It’s not like it can communicate through the air. Right?”

“Well, it can’t chemically,” she said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t communicate at all.”

I thought of the Johurá tribesmen sending whistle language via cell network. “You mean through hosts talking to one another?”

Mei-lin shrugged. “When two people talk to each other, their brains pass information. There’s no reason to believe that infected brains wouldn’t incorporate that information into the larger network. A fungal network doesn’t think, but its structure is almost neuromorphic, even without a human host. It reacts in pretty sophisticated ways, coordinating all the available information and making collective decisions for its environment. Like which trees in a forest should thrive and which should die.”

“Or which nation’s leaders,” I said.

She shot me a questioning look, but I didn’t explain. That part of the story would come out soon enough.

“What I mean,” Mei-lin said, “is that a fungal organism isn’t so much the matter it’s made of as much as its genetic instruction set. Whether it’s living in the soil of the Amazon or a human parietal lobe, it’s the same set of instructions, evolved for a single purpose.”

“What purpose?” I asked. “What’s it trying to do?”

She pressed a button on her keychain, and a silver BMW chirped, its taillights flashing. “That’s easy,” she said. I walked around to the passenger side and climbed in as she did the same on the driver’s side. Before starting the car, she swiveled to look me in the eye. “Its purpose is the same as every other organism. To survive.”

I chewed on that while she pressed the ignition button, starting the engine with a healthy roar. She checked her mirrors and backed smoothly out of the parking space.

“There’s a reason fungi are so successful,” she said. “Did you know fungi outnumber plants six to one? They can survive anywhere. You can kill ninety-nine percent of one, and it’ll still survive. They don’t even need light. Fungi have been found thriving in highly radioactive places like reactor cooling tanks, the ruins of Chernobyl, and the rubber window seals of the International Space Station. They’re not just radioresistant; they actually benefit from ionizing radiation. Fungal hyphae grow toward radioactive sources the way plants grow toward sunlight. During past eras when animals and plants died out due to high radiation, fungi grew and thrived. When we finally find life on other planets, there’s a good chance it’ll be a fungus.”

“So, this particular one,” I said. “Just how intelligent is it?”

She pulled out of the parking garage and stopped. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “Which way am I driving?”

I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m following you.”

“Well, where are you staying?”

“At my dad’s house, I guess.” I told her which direction to go.

“So, intelligence,” she said. “It’s a tough question to answer. We talk about intelligence as a measure of a creature’s ability to solve problems—can it use tools, can it communicate abstractions, etc. This thing can obviously achieve some pretty complex behaviors. Its goal, however, is pretty straightforward. Reproduce. Spread out. Survive.

“Your real question, however, is whether it can think like us. Is it making plans, is it aware of us, is it aware of itself? And I can’t answer that. But there’s nothing in what it’s doing that can’t be explained by the perpetuation of a behavior that conveys a survival advantage. In fact, its behavior isn’t all that different from what thousands of species have been doing for millennia.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ants and termites are famous for how organized they are, how they have different jobs, cross rivers, build large structures. But a queen doesn’t give orders to the other ants. There’s no central leadership. Each ant follows its own evolutionary programming in a scheme that works for the survival of all. Birds flock, bees swarm, lobsters march, fish school—it’s the emergent behavior of thousands of individuals acting on their own. A colony of ants isn’t an intelligent entity, but it can make complex decisions, even solve geometric problems.”

We drove in silence for a while. I tried to think through everything she said, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t trust my brain to think clearly. Finally, I said, “So did you tell all this stuff to my brother and father?”

“You bet I did. Your brother told me he already knew, and that it was under control. That the meds I gave him before were doing the trick. I advised him to come in for a follow-up, but he declined.”

“He wasn’t taking the meds,” I said. “And he knew exactly what the fungus was doing to him. He wanted it in his mind. Welcomed it. And my father… well, of course he welcomed it. What else could he think?”

She blew out a breath that was half appreciative whistle and shook her head. “That was something amazing,” she said. “I didn’t know your father from before the change, but I read his charts. I could hardly believe I was dealing with the right patient. Alzheimer’s just doesn’t go into remission like that.”

“Remission? You think it’ll come back?”

She shrugged. “How could I predict something like that? Alzheimer’s does irreparable damage to the synapses. It’s not supposed to go away to begin with.”

“That’s what’s so hard to work out,” I said. “This thing obviously provides value to its hosts. It makes them smarter. It even cures Alzheimer’s. So is it a parasite or a symbiote? Does it survive to our harm or to our benefit?”

Her smile was fierce. “I guess that depends on what you define as a benefit.”

She pulled into the driveway of my father’s house, crunching gravel under the tires. There were no other cars there, and the house was dark. I had been hoping I might find my mom home, but now that it came down to it, I was relieved not to find her. I wanted to find my dad, but I was also reaching the edge of my ability to stay awake. If I didn’t get a good night’s sleep and get it soon, I wasn’t going to be useful to anyone.

“So,” Mei-lin said. “What should we do?”

My attention swam. “What?”

“Do. What should we do? You’re NSA. You’ve got to have contacts, people who will listen to you. We need dozens of researchers working on this, taking it apart, finding a cure. We need to take this public.”

I chuckled. “That’s not exactly where the NSA shines.”

“But you know people, right? If we come at this from two directions, maybe we can make some headway.”

I hadn’t yet told her about what was happening in Brazil or our suspicion that the fungus was redrawing the political landscape of South America and turning soldiers against their own countrymen. “Look,” I said. “I’ve barely slept in three days. Any way we can reconvene this in the morning?”

Her expression remained serious. “I’ll be here first thing tomorrow. I don’t think we have much time to waste.”

“First thing tomorrow,” I said.

I hauled myself out of the car, found the key under the mat on the back stoop, and let myself inside.

I felt my way through the dark house until I found the light switch and flicked it on. The house was just as it had been before I left, comfortably cluttered and full of memories of my father. Fishing photos and knickknacks covered the tops of bookshelves and end tables. Throw pillows lay piled on the couch, along with a ludicrous stuffed trout I had given him as a joke years before. Photos of Paul, Julia, and I as children. Scrabble and chess sets on the dining room table.

Had he really walked away and left all this behind? Was he ever planning to come back? The fact that he had left Mom no way to contact him made it seem more sinister than a simple vacation. He owned an iPhone, but I doubted he had it with him. It was probably in a drawer in the house somewhere.

The thought reminded me that I needed to buy a new phone. I had left my old one in my luggage in my hotel in Brasília, which meant that it was now in the hands of the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, and thus the property of the Ligados. I couldn’t imagine it would do them any good, but it was certainly annoying to me not to have it.

I traipsed upstairs toward my bedroom, turning lights off behind me as I went. It was creepy to walk around in an empty house at night, even one as familiar to me as this one. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder or leave the lights on, though the normal creakings and tickings of the old house sounded unnaturally loud. I wondered if I had locked the doors, though I knew I had. I had even kept the key in my pocket instead of returning it to the mat outside.

I used the bathroom, rinsing my mouth out with water and wishing I had my own toothbrush. Another gift left behind in Brasília for the Ligados. I dabbed at my mouth with a towel and flipped the bathroom light off. Not wanting to be left in total darkness, I crossed to my bedroom first and turned that light on before coming back to the hallway switch and turning it off. For a moment, as I stood in the hall with the only illumination behind me, I thought I saw a tiny light coming from my father’s room.

I sighed, my hand still resting on the switch. It was probably nothing. An LED alarm clock, or else the reflection of a streetlight through the window. If I didn’t look, however, I’d end up lying in my bed, wondering. I walked to the other end of the hall and reached my arm around the doorframe to find the switch for his room. I flipped the switch, flooding the room with light.

A figure lay slumped on the end of the bed, his back to me, wearing a hospital gown. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew that head of curly gray hair better than I knew my own face in a mirror. It was my father.

I couldn’t move at first. Adrenaline flooded my system, sending my heart into a gallop, and my skin flushed with a heat that felt like fear. An eternity passed in seconds. Was he dead? But no, he held something bright in his hand. What was he doing here? Was he hurt? Where was Paul?

Eventually, my fight-or-flight reaction subsided, and I took a deep breath. My father hadn’t yet moved or acknowledged my presence, or even reacted to the light. I took a step closer and saw that the object he held was his iPhone. The glowing rectangle, perhaps reflected in the window, must have been what I’d seen from the hallway.

“Dad?”

I stepped closer and peered at the screen. He was paging through the photographs of Julia and her daughter, Ash, his thumb sweeping across the device every few seconds to bring up the next. Finally, he shifted his head a fraction to regard me. There were tears in his eyes.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he flipped to the next photo, this one of Julia’s husband holding the baby, and stared at it with an expression of intense despair.

“That’s Hisao,” I said. “He’s married to your daughter, Julia. The baby is Ash, your granddaughter.” I slipped easily into the soft, calming tone of voice I had grown accustomed to using with him in recent years.

“I know who it is,” he said. “Don’t patronize me.”

I sat down on the bed across from him, just an arm’s reach away. “Dad? What’s going on? How did you get here? Are you… ?”

“Am I of sound mind?” he said bitterly. “Who knows? I certainly can’t be trusted to have an opinion on the matter.”

“Dad—”

“Do you know those dreams, where nothing makes any sense, but you know there’s somewhere you were supposed to be, or something you were supposed to do? You wake up with that feeling of urgency and panic still lingering, but you can shake it off because, hey, it’s just a dream. Only it wasn’t for me, was it? I woke up to find that the dream was actually the last two years of my life.”

He seemed lucid enough. On the other hand, he still wore the same flimsy gown he’d been wearing when he left the hospital, smelling like a sick room and with a few days growth of beard darkening his face. He wasn’t exactly back to normal.

“Do you remember how you got here?” There had been no car in the driveway when I arrived. Mom would surely have checked the house, and although he might have hidden up here in the dark, she would have noticed if his car had been here.

“Paul dropped me off. I haven’t seen him since.”

“He just left you here?”

“He was called away.”

“Called away? By whom? Have you been here all this time?” I assumed my mom had checked the house, but maybe with all the lights out, she hadn’t realized he was home.

“I slept a lot,” he said. “I think.”

“Have you eaten anything?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice rippled with anger and frustration.

“Are you having memory lapses?”

“Yes? Maybe?” He groaned and sat up, holding his head. “I don’t know whether to thank Paul or curse him. It’s like torture, this glimpse of what I should be, what I’ve missed.” He held out the phone with a close-up of Ash’s pudgy face. “I’ll never really know her, will I?”

I met his eyes. “I don’t know, Dad. You might. We never expected you to regain any mental ability, but here you are.”

He gave me an acid smile. “Here I am.” He sucked in a breath and let it loose in a great sigh. “Don’t you think losing your mind once is as much as anyone should have to endure? I’m afraid to go outside now, in case I can’t remember how to get back to the house. Earlier today, I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was. In my own home.”

“You’ll need someone to stay with you, at least until we figure out what you can and can’t do now. Does Mom know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so. When she came, I hid in the closet until she left.”

“Dad! She’s been worried sick.”

“Please don’t call her. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”

“She loves you.”

“That’s exactly why I don’t want her here. She’s already been through this once. I know it hasn’t been easy, dealing with someone who doesn’t remember how much you’ve done for them. She shouldn’t have to go through that again.”

I put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone to Brazil. I should have been here with you. But this is a gift. Maybe not a perfect one, but we’ll figure it out. Mom will want to be here.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow and stared at me. For a moment, I thought he didn’t know who I was. “Neil,” he said. “I want you to admit me to a psych hospital. Somewhere they’ll watch me. Where they won’t let me leave.”

“I don’t think we need to resort to that yet.”

He grabbed my sleeve. “Listen to me. You don’t know how hard this is to say.” He tried to continue, but it turned into a hacking cough that he couldn’t control. I patted him ineffectually on the back until he waved me away. “I almost killed her,” he said urgently.

“Who?” I said. “Mom?”

“That young doctor. Chen or Chu. I wanted to kill her.” He ran the fingers of both hands roughly through his hair. “I wanted to so badly.”

I pulled away. “Dad, what are you talking about?”

He propped his feet up on the bed and hugged his knees. His arms stuck out of the short sleeves of the hospital gown, and I noticed how thin he’d become. “It came on all of a sudden,” he said. “The doctor came in to take a blood sample. She didn’t have a nurse do it; she came in with a syringe herself, looking around like she didn’t want anyone to see her. And suddenly, I had this tremendous urge to take her throat in my hands and squeeze until she died. It seemed natural and obvious, like something I might do every day. Just something that needed to be done.

“Instead, I told her to leave. I told her they’d already taken samples, but she said I had very special blood, and she was trying to understand what made it so special. She told me I’d been infected by a fungus, and that other people had been, too. I shouted at her and called her names and told her to get out before I called security.

“She said she would let me rest and come back in an hour. While she was gone, I searched through the cabinets in the room until I found a scalpel. I hid the scalpel under the sheet and waited for her. All the while, I imagined slashing it across her carotid.”

“Why?” I said. “Why would you do such a thing?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know. It was like she was evil. She had to be stopped before she did irreparable harm. It wasn’t rational; it was just this powerful feeling. The idea of killing her felt so right, so clear. Like if it were the last thing I did before I died, it would make my whole life worthwhile. I knew that if she came back, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from cutting her throat. So I left.”

The temperature had dropped since the sun set. I pulled a knitted blanket off of the bed and wrapped it around my dad’s shoulders while I tried to process what he had said. I thought of Mariana de Andrade and her attempted assassination of the Brazilian vice president. She had shown no regret, no sense that the decision hadn’t been hers. And yet it went against everything she had apparently dedicated her life to up until that moment. I had no doubt that it was the influence of the fungus in her brain that had prompted her actions.

My father, however, had apparently been able to resist the urge to kill. More to the point, he’d been aware of the compulsion as something outside of himself. What was different? Was it his Alzheimer’s that altered the equation? Or did he just have a particularly strong will? Obviously, the fungus had been able to create the connections that Alzheimer’s had previously robbed from him. But now he was losing those connections again, presumably because the fungus was receding. Was it my father’s resistance of the fungus that caused its integration with his brain to reverse? Could the physical growth of mycelia in the brain really be affected by a frame of mind?

I tried to think, but my exhausted brain just traveled in circles without getting anywhere. I needed to sleep.

“We can’t do anything until the morning,” I said. I pulled a pair of pajamas out of a drawer. “Put these on,” I said. “Sleep. We’ll figure it all out in the morning.” I headed for the hallway.

“I’ll try,” my dad said. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Too many dreams. And Neil?” I stopped in the entranceway and turned to face him. The anguished expression on his pale face combined with the hospital gown to give him a spectral appearance. “Lock your door.”