The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 29

I had the vague awareness of being shuffled into a car and then out of it and into another one. The second car had a very loud engine, persistent enough that it seemed to blot out thought. It was only after what seemed like a very long time that I realized it wasn’t a car at all but an airplane. I gradually became aware of having arms and legs, and my vision swam into focus. I was propped into a seat in a small passenger jet, probably a private one generally used by corporate executives. Out the window, I saw only ocean.

“We’ll be landing in Panama in thirty minutes,” said a female voice. “Then we’ll refuel for the final jump to Porto Velho.”

My chest burned. I tried to take a deep breath, but it caught in my throat, and I coughed violently. I felt something wet on my chin.

“He’s waking up,” said a male voice.

Mei-lin appeared next to me. She wiped my mouth and chin with a warm cloth. “Not much longer,” she said. I felt a distant pain as a needle slid into my arm. I tried to move, to push her away, but my limbs didn’t want to obey me. A few minutes later, I slipped away again.

When I came to again, the plane was on the ground and the engine had stopped. “Can you walk?” Mei-lin asked.

This time my arms and legs moved when I asked them to, though they were still strapped together with duct tape. I shifted my weight, angled my legs over the edge of the chair, and stood. My legs ached, as if I had been sleeping on them for hours, and the jabs of pins and needles crackled up and down my skin. “You’re on the tarmac in Porto Velho,” she said. “Everyone here is Ligados. There is nowhere to run, no one to hear you if you shout. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Okay. I’m going to cut the tape off of your arms and legs. You’re not going to run or fight, are you?”

I shook my head. She used a scalpel and sawed through the tape, first my legs, then my hands. I yanked the remaining bits of tape off and rubbed my wrists. I felt terrible. My head and throat and chest hurt, and I was sweating despite the cool air-conditioned cabin. I tried to take a step, but the plane spun around me, and I nearly fell.

“Okay, easy does it,” Mei-lin said. She hung on to me to keep me from falling over. I wanted to push her onto the floor and stab her with her own scalpel, but given my current strength, that didn’t seem likely. Besides, I knew the betrayal hadn’t really been Mei-lin’s fault. She was a slave now, the same as my parents and my brother. The same as I would be, too, in a few more hours.

She led me off the jet. On the tarmac, a hundred yards away, sat a tiny turboprop airplane with red stripes on its wings. Two men half-led, half-dragged me to the plane and lifted me up inside it. A gray-haired man with a grizzled beard and headphones covering his ears stalked around outside the aircraft, checking it from every angle and consulting a clipboard.

Finally, he climbed into the cockpit and pulled the door shut. “Better strap in,” he said in Portuguese. He and I were the only people in the plane.

I wrestled with the tangle of leather straps and metal clasps until I was pretty certain I wouldn’t fall out.

“You just settle back,” the pilot said. “I’ve been making this trip for decades. Nothing to worry about.”

“Decades?” I said, trying to think clearly through the haze of my sickness and fear. “Where are you taking me?”

“Johurá village, what was. Lot more to it now.”

“And you’ve been flying there for decades?” A thought struck me. “Did you fly the Wyatts?”

He laughed. “Yes, I surely did. How do you know them?”

“I met Katherine,” I said.

“No kidding. You know Kay? Now that’s one incredible lady.” He grinned, his beard parting to reveal very white teeth, and held out his hand. “Nate Carter. Missions aviator, forty-three years and counting. I’ve clocked thousands of hours in this baby, dropping folks like Kay all over the Amazon. Even more in my old Helio Courier. Now that was a plane—better than anything else in its class. Couldn’t get enough avgas, though, so we had to trade up to something that could burn jet fuel.”

He kept on talking as the engine roared to life, drowning out most of his words. I wasn’t sure the words were really meant for me, anyway. Nate seemed more like a taxi driver who had to talk to his passengers to stay sane. He leaned out the window and shouted “Abram caminho!”—the Portuguese equivalent of “Watch out!” or “Stand clear!”—and the plane kicked forward along the runway with surprising speed. The vibrations rattled my teeth and shuddered in my chest. Sooner than I expected, the ground dropped away, so fast it was like falling into the sky.

“That’s the PC-6 for you,” the pilot said, seeing my surprise. “Jumps into the air like you’re riding a rocket. Some of the places I land, you couldn’t get yourself out again with anything less.”

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted above the engine noise. “You’re a missions pilot, not a kidnapper.”

Nate looked genuinely surprised. “Kidnap? Is that what you call it? I guess I could see that, from your point of view. But trust me, once you see what’s happening there, you won’t be sorry.”

Porto Velho soon fell out of sight behind us, and cultivated fields gave way to thick rainforest. The green treetops stretched to the horizon in every direction, the details of branches and leaves blending together from this distance, giving the impression we were flying across an algae-covered sea. A wide, muddy river cut through the green, looping back on itself in serpentine curves, like a giant anaconda swimming through the algae.

I pointed. “Is that the Rio Maici?”

He looked where I was pointing, and then laughed. “Not hardly. That’s the Rio Madeira, and it’s practically an ocean compared to the Maici. Settle back, my friend. We’ve got miles to fly before we rest.”

It had been evening when we set out, and the sun hung low in the west, staining the sky with vivid orange and purple hues. If not for my spasming cough and the terror of losing control of my mind, it might have been beautiful. As it was, I barely thought about it, until the sun sank lower, and the green treetops faded to black.

“Nate?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“How can you land this thing at night? Doesn’t it get pretty dark out here?”

“Back in the day, you’d be right,” he said. “Night out here comes down on you like somebody shut the lid on a box. One minute, there’s enough light you can almost read by it. The next it’s so dark you can’t find a book that’s sitting in your lap.”

“So… what’s different now?”

He grinned at me. “You’ll see soon enough.”

We flew on. The sun dwindled to a sliver, then disappeared entirely. As Nate had predicted, the darkness fell suddenly. It took me a moment to realize that I could still see, and another moment to realize why.

The rainforest was glowing.

As far as I could see in every direction, the trees radiated a greenish light. The leafy canopy itself remained dark, but something underneath it shone brightly enough to illuminate our way. As we flew, gaps in the trees revealed glimpses of twisting lines of luminescence, like branching lightning, underneath the canopy.

I couldn’t help it. “It’s beautiful,” I said. We could now see what I assumed was the Maici, a river so serpentine the loops almost met each other in places. In places, I caught sight of the water, which glinted in the forest’s glow.

“There’s our landing strip,” Nate said.

I looked. “Where?”

“That dark spot to the north. See it? Eleven o’clock.”

I saw the spot he indicated, but it didn’t seem possible. Not a clearing so much as a gash in the tree line, barely visible except for a darker color of foliage.

“You’re going to land in that?”

He didn’t answer. He flipped a switch, and the engine changed timbre. We started to descend. As we approached, I could see the landing strip, but actually landing there didn’t seem possible. It was a short stretch of tall grass that looked barely longer than a football field, and so narrow I thought Nate would have to tip the aircraft on its side to fit the wings through.

Nate seemed unfazed, however, and I assumed he knew what he was doing. He buzzed the strip once, peering out the window at the ground, apparently checking for obstacles. On the second approach, he went for it, diving at the grass at an angle so steep I involuntarily raised my arms to protect my face. We thundered toward the ground, propeller spinning, and threaded the needle between the trees. There seemed to be only inches between the tips of the wings and the branches on either side. The wheels hit with a gentle lurch, and Nate did something to the flaps, slowing us as quickly as if he’d thrown a parachute out the back. The uneven ground threw us roughly about, but in moments the plane had stopped just short of the end of the grass.

I took a deep breath and let it out. The breath turned out to be a mistake, however, because it turned into a fit of coughing, and it was a while before I could catch my breath. I wondered how long it would take the lung infection to clear up without medical care.

“Still kicking back there?” Nate asked.

“For the moment.” Now that we were on the ground, my fear of what I would find here came roaring back. As far as I knew, I might have only hours left as the sole master of my mind. Certainly not more than a day. My only hope was to escape from the rainforest, but that didn’t seem likely. I felt so sick I could barely walk, and I didn’t know how to fly an airplane, much less take off from a landing strip the size of a playing card.

I managed to unstrap myself and climb out of the airplane on my own strength. The glow was all around me, emanating from the trees on every side. The sky above, though the stars were now visible, seemed dim by comparison.

A familiar figure strode out of the forest and crossed the grass toward me. It was my brother.

Paul walked toward me, arms open wide. He wore loose tan cotton pants and no shirt. He looked healthy, well-muscled, tanned and weathered by the outdoors. I staggered to meet him. When he came within range, I swung a punch at his head with the whole weight of my body behind it.

I’ve never been a fighter, but I took him by surprise. My knuckles connected with his mouth, and both of us went down, him on his backside and me flat on my face. I struggled to my knees, meaning to hit him again, but my body betrayed me with a violent fit of coughing. I doubled over and spat blood onto the ground.

“You bastard,” I said when I could catch my breath. “Is this who you are now? Kidnapping? Bioterrorism? You infected your own family.”

“That depends on your point of view,” he said, as calm as ever.

“Well, my point of view is apparently not very important, since the fungus in my lungs is about to climb up into my brain and destroy it.”

He stood, dusting off his pants. “Not destroy it,” he said. “Our perspectives change all the time. We learn new things, have new experiences. All you have to do is read a book to change your point of view. Sometimes in ways you didn’t expect.”

I turned to face him, still sitting on the ground. “I get to choose what books I read.”

“Sometimes. And sometimes a teacher or a parent chooses them for you, because the perspective the book gives you will be important for your life.”

I felt like the metaphor was getting away from me. “This is nonsense. You dragged me here against my will. It’s not like assigning me a book to read in class.”

He held out a hand to me. I stared at it like it was poisoned. Which, given the number of spores that had to be flying around this place, it probably was.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you around. Before the mycelium reaches your brain. So you’ll understand. This is good for us, Neil. For all of us.”

I still didn’t want to touch him, but there didn’t seem to be any point in sitting there in the dirt, either. I clasped his hand, and let him haul me to my feet. He smiled.

“Welcome to the future,” he said. “Follow me.”

He strode off toward the edge of the forest. I shuffled unsteadily after him, feeling dizzy, stopping every few steps for a fit of wracking coughs. At this point, the sickness didn’t bother me. Sickness meant my body was still fighting the infection. When I started to feel better, then I’d be in trouble.

He waited for me at the tree line. The glow was brighter now, though diffuse, so I couldn’t see any obvious source for the light. After a brief hesitation, I stepped into the trees.

The humid air pressed around me, making it harder to breathe. In the branches above us, insects hummed and birds chirped, their calls echoing strangely. The ground felt softer than I expected, like a foam mattress instead of solid ground. When I peered behind me, I saw my footprints glowing faintly, their outlines traced with bright filaments.

“It’s the fungus, registering your presence,” Paul said. “It’s exploring the warmth left by your body and the traces of DNA you leave behind.”

“It knows I’m here?” The thought gave me a chill, despite the heat in the air.

“In its own way. It would be more accurate to say that we know you’re here.”

I threw him a glance, but I didn’t ask him to explain. It sounded mystical to me, like part of some belief system grown up around the fungus to justify his actions. My brother, a cult leader. I didn’t want to know any more.

I wondered where we were going, and how Paul navigated through the thick undergrowth, until I noticed a series of luminescent spots, continuing into the distance in the direction we traveled. Paul was following them. As we passed one, I took a closer look, and saw a bumpy patch of fungal growth on the side of a tree, glowing with bioluminescent life. Was there a network of such glowing patches defining paths through the forest? Or did they change, depending on where someone wanted to go?

“This is where the energy is,” Paul said as we walked, indicating the growth all around us. “In the tropical zone. Forty percent of the energy that strikes the Earth lands right here.”

“Sounds great if you’re a plant,” I said. “Or if you have a lot of solar cells.”

“You’re not thinking big enough,” Paul said. He pushed aside an enormous leaf and ducked under it, dribbling a stream of water that I just barely avoided. “The whole Earth is solar powered. The movement of clouds and air and water, the growth of plants and animals, it’s all just a big heat engine driven by the sun. Humanity has spent so long binging on fossil fuels that we’ve forgotten where it all comes from.”

I coughed violently, then drew a ragged breath. I really didn’t feel like listening to an environmental tirade. “Pardon me if I don’t think that’s a good reason to start a war.”

“We didn’t start anything,” he said. “It was—”

“Please.” I held up a hand. “Don’t tell me again about how assassinating world leaders is a peaceful solution to your problems.”

“When history looks back on this century,” Paul said, “they will see it as an aberration. A bizarre spike on the energy graph when we suddenly realized the Earth had millions of years of the sun’s energy stored underground and used it all up in a brief blaze of glory. The worst thing that ever happened to the human race was the invention of the steam engine.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “All of modern human advancement and invention, enabling billions of people to survive, that’s all nothing? Medicine? Global communication? Modern agriculture?”

“It’s a glitch. It’s like blowing your whole trust fund in a weekend. When the fund runs out, you’ve got to live on your income.”

Sweat ran into my face and down my back. I was dressed for Maryland, in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, not for the tropics. “So which seven billion people do you think ought to die so there’s enough for the rest?” I asked.

“You misunderstand me. The sun delivers more energy to the Earth in an hour than our worldwide civilization uses in a year. There’s enough for all of us. It’s just that our technology hasn’t developed to use it.”

I leaned against a tree, breathing hard. “You’re losing me here,” I managed. “Are you telling me you’ve developed a way to power the world on solar energy?”

“Not by myself,” he said. “We have. All of us.”

He looped my arm around his shoulders and held onto my waist, helping me to walk. I felt too weak to object. As we stumbled along, I began to notice changes in the forest around me. Structures loomed out of the greenish glow. Not buildings, exactly, but shelters made for humans to live in. They had no right angles or straight lines; instead, they seemed to have grown out of the land and trees around them, their shapes organic and complex. Once I noticed them, I saw them everywhere. There were hundreds at least, some touching the ground, some high in the canopy above our heads.

And there were people. In the strange light, I hadn’t recognized them at first. They moved about us, in and out of the shelters, or else climbing the trees with unexpected ease. It was as if I had walked into a forgotten tribal village, though most people wore some amount of modern clothing. These were not indigenous Amazonians. They had to be the modern citizens of Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia whom we had tracked as they migrated into the forest by the millions.

We reached a clearing of sorts—not so much the absence of foliage as a thinning of the overhead canopy. I could see patches of stars and thought that during the day sunlight probably reached the forest floor here more than elsewhere. I wondered why. Had the people intentionally cut back the trees? Or was there a reason the trees’ constant battle to claim the sun hadn’t continued here?

A dozen of the people around us approached, and Paul greeted them in Portuguese. There were women and men, young and old, even children among them. I could see now why they had blended so well into the forest. Patches of what looked like thick paint, or in some cases, moss, covered the skin of their faces and shoulders and arms. It was mostly shades of green, though I also saw streaks of white, black, brown, or even orange.

Paul introduced me to them, rattling off a set of names that I was too distracted to try to remember. They shook my hand and welcomed me, for all the world like we were hanging out together in a bar in Brasília. I looked at Paul, who was watching me, a smile dancing on his lips.

When the people continued on their way, he said, “It’s lichen.”

“Growing on their skin? I’m not surprised; living out here, there could be all kinds of weird infections.”

“No,” he said. “It’s intentional. Lichen is a composite organism. It’s actually composed of two different creatures—fungus and algae, in this case—living together in so tightly coupled a way that we refer to it as a single species. There are thousands of known lichen species, and they’re all made that way—a symbiotic relationship grown so close that two organisms become one.”

“Very educational,” I said. “But why is it on their faces?”

“Another symbiotic relationship. Fungi, like animals, usually need to digest food from the environment to live. In combination with algae, however, it doesn’t need to. The algae’s photosynthesis captures enough energy for it and the fungus both.”

“So you’re saying…”

“Those people need to eat far less than you or I. They get a large part of their energy from the sun.”

I stared at him, incredulous. “I’m not an expert,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure we would have to change an awful lot about our metabolism for that to work.”

“It’s happening,” Paul said. “The fungus is making the changes, in our bodies, little by little. Neil, don’t you see what this means? What if we didn’t have to grow food? There would be no such thing as starvation. Instead of burning oil by the gallon to fuel our food industry and move it all over the world, every person could get it efficiently, directly from the sun.”

“If it’s so great,” I said. “Why don’t you have it?” I hadn’t coughed in a while, and I was feeling a bit stronger, which frightened me. How long would it be until I started thinking like Paul?

“Oh, I will,” he said. “I haven’t been here nearly as long yet. It takes a while to grow.”

I looked around me at the community of people living here, and suddenly I didn’t see them as a crowd of humans anymore. I saw a fungus, its tendrils reaching for miles underground, up into all the trees, and through the minds and bodies of all the people around me. It was a single organism, wearing them all like puppets. Was I really talking to my brother right now? Or was I talking to it?

“You’re not human anymore,” I said. “You can call it a ‘composite organism’ if you like, but you’re not the one in control. Can’t you see what’s happening? It’s turning you into its arms and feet and fingers, just extensions of itself.”

Paul reached a tree that looked rotted through, though it still stood tall. Conks and shelves and mushrooms riddled its bark. He sat down on one particularly large fungal shelf, which held his weight, and rested his head back into a depression in the decaying wood. To my horror, nearly invisible tendrils, which had been waving slightly in a current of air, settled onto the sides of his head and entwined themselves with his hair. But no, not his hair. Paul’s hair was brown, but mixed into it were whitish strands, no thicker than the others but curling outward. I hadn’t noticed them before now, but I had no doubt what they were. The hyphae of the fungal mycelium growing in his brain.

I should have been disgusted. I should have been running away to vomit on the forest floor. Instead, I felt a strange kind of detachment, and that scared me more than anything else. “Don’t do this, Paul,” I said. “Resist it. Dad managed to, at least for a while. If you’re still in there, fight back! You don’t have to let it tell you what to do or how to think. Leave with me, right now. We’ll go back to the States. We’ll figure this out together.”

“I’m not a slave,” he said. “You’re thinking of it all wrong. This is symbiosis, two species working together for the mutual good of both. It’s the engine of evolution.”

“I thought that was the survival of the fittest,” I said.

He clapped his hands. “And that’s where your thinking is wrong! Survival of the fittest has its place in evolution, sure, but it’s much more limited than the capitalist, competition-loving scientists of the West like to think. Our relationship with other species doesn’t have to be a battle. Symbiosis is a much more powerful agent of change, and a much more successful one. Look around you! It’s everywhere. Most of the creatures in this forest rely on other species to survive. You couldn’t survive without the thousands of bacteria dwelling inside you, helping you digest, producing vitamins, fighting off disease. This fungus isn’t a disease. It’s the next stage of human evolution. It’ll make us stronger, smarter, more efficient, better able to adapt and survive.”

“But we won’t be human. We won’t be us.”

“We’ll be something better,” he said. “And you’ll be with us. I can already see it starting to work in you.”

I put my hands on my face, afraid of what I might feel on my own skin. I did feel much stronger now, and my breath came easily.

“Did you know we’ve all but shut down cocaine production? Instead, we’ve developed more efficient growing techniques to increase the production of fruit, coffee, corn, and wheat. In a few years, we’ll have new strains of quinoa and other grains that double their nutritional value. In combination with the photosynthetic lichen, we’ll be able to support billions—all in totally renewable environments like this one.”

“What about art?” I asked. “What about music, sculpture, storytelling, gardening, etc.? Have those increased as well?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “I’m telling you, people are still people. Those things will still be done.”

“But what about now? Is creative expression on the rise? Are there new works of intense personal emotion? Or are you reducing the human experience to the most efficient spread of your fungal host?”

“It’s war time. Plenty of time later to—”

“Slaves are efficient,” I said. “Machines are efficient. Is that what you want?”

“Inefficiency is killing this planet,” Paul snapped.

I shook my head. “Inefficiency is imagination. It’s singing in the rain and vaudeville shows and sandcastles and whimsy and falling in love and yearning for our dreams to come true. Inefficiency is the best part of who we are.”

Paul closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree, offering himself up to the fungus with apparent pleasure. “You’ll understand soon enough. To be connected to everything and everyone around you, to know and be known more than you’ve ever experienced—it’s everything we dream of. What we’re accomplishing here, we’re doing together, all two million of us, and it’s glorious.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I left him there with his hair tangled in the tree and ran back into the forest the way we had come. I no longer felt unsteady or weak, and my feet pounded against the loamy soil. I would return to the plane. I would insist that the pilot take me back, or else try to fly it myself. If I crashed, then so be it. I couldn’t stay here, become this.

I followed the glowing patches of fungus back through the trees, their bright markers easily lighting my way. I leaped over logs, thrashed my way through tangled vines, pushing harder when I saw the branches thinning ahead. I burst into the clearing… and found myself only meters from the tree where Paul still sat. The fungus had led me right back around to where I started.

I fell to the ground and screamed in fear and frustration, wrapping my arms around my head to drown out the sound of Paul’s laughter. Resist, I told myself. Resist. This is not who you are.