The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 25

I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. I needed sleep, but I also needed to get into work as early as possible. I knew if I waited I’d get trapped in the Monday morning traffic, and I wouldn’t get in until late. Not wanting to repeat my emotional crash of the day before, I stopped at a 7-Eleven convenience store and bought two breakfast sandwiches, a bottle of chocolate milk, and three granola bars. Not exactly the most nutritious of breakfasts, but at least it would give me some calories for the morning.

I arrived at Fort Meade and pushed through security. I wondered how much, given the nature of the current threat, all of the armed guards and dogs and razor wire fences would actually be able to protect the people and the information inside.

I walked down to our basement office and found Andrew deep in conversation with Melody Muniz. “Melody!” I shouted. I ran to her and wrapped my arms around her. “You’re safe!”

She stiffened, and I quickly backed off. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just good to see you alive. We’ve all been pretty worried.” I wondered if it was the first bear hug she’d received in her career at the NSA.

She relaxed and smiled at me. “I’m pretty glad to be home as well.”

Shaunessy appeared around the corner, and I hugged her, too.

“What’s happening down there?” I asked.

“It’s a disaster,” Melody said. “Thousands dead on both sides, but the real problem is not knowing what the sides are. We can’t scan people fast enough to know who’s affected, and the need to double- and triple-verify all commands with higher-ups cripples the effectiveness of the chain of command. I have five minutes with the president at eleven o’clock, and I’m going to beg him to pull our troops out of South America. The Ligados control most of the country now, and all we’re doing by staying there is risking becoming part of them.”

“Besides,” Andrew said, “the war is at home now. If we don’t find a way to control this thing, it’s going to be just like Brazil right here.”

“The president,” I said to Andrew. “He’s safe?”

“In a manner of speaking. He’s alive, and as safe as we can make him. There were five attempts on his life last night.” I must have shown my surprise on my face, because he said, “That is not common knowledge. We don’t want the media getting ahold of that, if we can help it. Four of the attempts were pretty ill-conceived and never had much of a real chance. One, however, was carried out by an aide in the West Wing and very nearly succeeded.

“You were right, by the way, about your brother’s interview. He didn’t whistle, though. He just outright spoke the words when showing off his fluency in different languages.”

“How are things with your father?” Shaunessy asked.

I pursed my lips. “Not great.” I caught Shaunessy and Melody up on my father’s condition, his attempt to kill Mei-lin Chu, and his split-personality coded communication, seemingly without the knowledge of the other part of his mind. I also told them about my brother’s lab, the computers and samples we’d retrieved, and the booby-trapped door that had infected Mei-lin.”

“We have plenty of samples of the spores at this point,” Melody said. “Where are the computers?”

“I have them in my car.”

“Get them in here, right away. We have people who can take them apart down to their constituent atoms. Any information he had there, even if he deleted it, we’ll get it back.”

“The best information on those computers is probably biological,” I said. “We need to get it to the people who are trying to understand how this organism works and how to beat it.”

“I’m on that,” Melody said. “Including the docs at USAMRIID, the CDC, and several medical universities, we probably have two hundred doctors and mycologists working on one or more avenues, either trying to develop an easy test to know who’s infected or trying to come up with a reliable cure. Anything we find, I’ll make sure it gets into the right hands.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what can I do?”

“After you bring that stuff from your car? Do your normal work. Pore through all the South American traffic that Andrew has been ignoring while trying to do my job.” She flashed him a quick smile. “Very effectively, I might add. Good to know there’s someone waiting in the wings in case I turn into a fungus zombie.”

“Something to look forward to,” Andrew said.

When I headed out to my car, Shaunessy caught up to me. “Need some help?”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s more than I can carry in one trip.”

I showed the guard at the entrance the paperwork Melody had filled out giving me permission to bring the equipment inside. He entered the information into his computer, logging it as an equipment delivery, and told me he would have to record the details about make and model and serial number before we could bring them inside.

On the way out to the parking garage, I said, “How bad was it down there?”

Shaunessy turned somber. “Really bad,” she said. “Melody talks about bringing the troops home, but I don’t know how realistic that is. There’s no way to tell how many of them are compromised. There’s been so much sabotage, no one knows what equipment can be trusted. Some soldiers have outright defected to the Ligados, or turned on each other, but there have to be more who are keeping quiet. It would take weeks to scan that many, and cost a fortune, even if every PET scan machine in the country wasn’t already running twenty-four hours a day.”

“How did you get out?”

She shrugged. “Melody, of course. Director Ronstadt listed her as a critical recall, and she said she wasn’t coming home without me.”

We reached my car and hauled the equipment out of the trunk. The machines were small enough that I could have managed by myself, but I was glad for the company.

“What do you think our chances are?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Of survival. Of preventing the United States from becoming the next Brazil and the same thing sweeping across Europe and Africa and Asia until half the population is dead and the other half has fungus in their brains telling them how to think.”

She was quiet for a time. “I think we can win,” she said.

I was surprised. “How?”

“It’s like a disease, right? We’ve had some pretty bad diseases before. Bubonic plague. Influenza. Does a lot of damage while it spreads, but we always beat it in the end. Ultimately, we’ve got a lot more going for us than a fungus. Reason. Creativity. Invention.”

“But it’s using our reason against us,” I objected. “Making it better, even.”

“No. It’s using our intelligence against us. Memories, analytical skills. That’s just network efficiency. This thing might be good at cognitive streamlining, but that doesn’t make it anything like human.”

“Doesn’t that make it better than human?”

“That’s what I’m saying. There’s a lot more to being human than being smart. The fungus gives people intelligence, but it robs them of some of the more important things that make us human. Our emotional connections. Our moral sense. Our devotion to country and friends and family. The kind of humanity it’s producing is a shadow of what humanity truly is.”

“True humanity is cruel,” I said. “Selfish, tribal, violent. We don’t need a fungus in our heads to kill each other by the millions.”

“I didn’t say we were good. I said we’re stronger without the fungus than we are with it. That’s why I think we’ll win.”

I thought about it, then flashed her a quick grin. “I hope you’re right.”

Back in our basement office, I logged in and flipped through the first batch of South American traffic. Some of them had been translated, many had not. From what I could tell, thousands of them hadn’t even been looked at. There were just too many, and too much else going on. I sat up in my chair and cracked my fingers. I had my work cut out for me.

The difficulty with encrypted messages is that you can’t tell if they’re interesting until after you crack them. Cracking them takes time. Not only that, but due to the way the internet had developed, all South American email traffic passed through a hub in Florida, which the NSA had tapped three ways from Sunday. That meant the NSA’s underground server farm recorded millions of messages from South America every day.

Usually, the vast majority of these could be ignored, since they had no known connection to any person or situation of political interest. Now, with any citizen a potential guerrilla warrior, any message could be important. Not only that, but the number of indecipherables—messages encrypted with no recognizable scheme—had grown by orders of magnitude in recent months.

Now that South America was a priority, hundreds of agents were working those messages, most of them with significantly better computer skills than I had. The ones in Johurá had gotten the most attention. Katherine Wyatt had, apparently, continued to work tirelessly on interpreting them and even held classes to teach agents how to understand a little of the language. Those weren’t indecipherable anymore, and so not my concern.

My job was to do what computers couldn’t do: either crack a new coding scheme, like I had with the original Johurá messages, or else recognize some pattern in the chaos that could help the army of agents focus their efforts to find the needles in the haystack. The first option would require me to choose a message, more or less at random, that after hours or days of work would probably turn out to be somebody’s illicit love letter. I decided to try the second.

Fortunately, in my months on the job I had learned how to use many of the software tools available to aid in such an analysis. I could pull the metadata from millions of messages and run a bank of statistical tools against them. I was pretty good at statistics, which in my book was still a branch of mathematics, even though I knew statisticians who would take offense at me lumping their science into my field.

What I wanted to characterize was the difference between South American message traffic before and after the appearance of the fungus. Of course, there were many differences, as there would be from any comparison of distinct sets. Some of the differences were obvious, and thus uninteresting. Some of the differences would be normal random variation, or else seasonal or population-based trends, and thus also uninteresting. I was looking for the significant differences, those that were both unintuitive and important.

For lack of a better metric, I chose the date of the attack on Paul’s riverboat as the turning point after which I would deem messages to be “fungus influenced.” My null hypothesis would be that the messages before that time and the messages after that time would be perfectly correlated, shaped by the same basic forces and trends. I set about trying to disprove that hypothesis.

Four hours later, I had a spreadsheet full of numbers and no conclusions. My head was starting to spin. I had promised myself I would remember to eat, so instead of pressing on I picked up the phone and called Mike Scaggs. Before I left for Brazil, joining up with him for lunch had turned into a habit, at least when both of us could get away from our duties.

“Scaggs,” he said, with his usual soft professional tone.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” I said. “They still let you eat over there in cyber com?”

“Neil. You’re back.”

“Been crying into your pillow every night since I left, haven’t you?”

“Something like that. You hungry?”

“That’s why I’m calling.”

“You must have quite some stories to tell.”

“I’ll regale you over lunch. See you there.”

I opted for a grilled chicken panini, and Scaggs chose a cheeseburger and fries. I dumped five sugar packets into the too-sour lemonade and stirred while I told my story. I started from the assassinations and explosions, through the cross-country drive with the CIA, to the crop dusters and the defection of soldiers at São Luis and the 11th Bomb Squadron.

“I have to hand it to you,” Scaggs said. “We send you down to Brazil for a few days, and the whole country falls apart.”

“I’m just a bad luck charm, I guess.”

“You sure you don’t want to work for our enemies?”

Technically, the cafeteria was an insecure zone, where no discussion of classified material was supposed to go on. Sometimes uncleared visitors were escorted through the facility, and you never really knew who would be eating lunch there or how much they were supposed to know. In practice, however, classified topics were often discussed, only in roundabout ways and without using specific code words or program names.

“We’ve been focusing a lot of our efforts on South America,” Scaggs said. He was USCYBERCOM, so he would be concerned both with cyberattacks on US secure facilities and with trying to breach the tightly protected information repositories of others. Such attacks could be purely for the purpose of obtaining information, or they could be used to introduce destructive viruses or worms and destroy an enemy’s infrastructure or ability to communicate.

“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 uneducated 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.”