The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 30

Paul showed me to a tangle of woven vines that I was meant to sleep in, like a backyard hammock. I quailed at first, the image of the tendrils of fungus from the rotting tree still fresh in my mind. I saw no evidence of such strands, however, and the vines stretched around me in a surprisingly comfortable embrace.

It felt so good to give in. I felt like a child, raging against his father’s tight embrace before finally surrendering and resting in his warmth and protection. Now that it was here, I could see that the fungus wasn’t an invader. It fit into my mind like the last piece to a puzzle. All my angst and ambition and self-centered desires flooded away, and with their absence I felt a sense of well-being so strong it would admit no feelings of doubt or indecision. I knew who I was, and I needed nothing more.

But no! That wasn’t right. I pressed my knuckles into my eyelids, trying to clear my mind. I hated what the fungus had done to my brother, and hated what it was doing to the world. My loyalties were to my family and my country and to the NSA, and I wanted to go home. I had to resist it. The thought of leaving, however, made me feel nauseated. Images of Fort Meade and the work I did there made me feel stressed and anxious and fearful. When I thought about staying here, however, and joining with the Ligados, a sense of euphoria flooded through me like a warm fire on a cold winter’s night. Here I was safe. Here I belonged.

And Paul had been right. When I finally saw it clearly, there was no denying the rightness of what the fungus was creating. All the waste and violence of humanity had always come from our independence, from the pitting of individuals and tribes against each other. When we could strip away our differences and work together as one, how much more would we be able to accomplish? Instead of destroying each other, we would only build on each other. It wasn’t until I was willing to admit this that I could finally appreciate the extent of what this rainforest city was becoming.

I had thought they were reverting, returning to a way of life without technology, without industry, without any of the advances that had made humanity the most successful species on the planet. But that wasn’t it at all. Technology was everywhere. I just hadn’t seen it, because it wasn’t in a form I recognized.

Everything around me, every trunk and branch and vine and handful of soil, was a conduit for information. The mycelial network infused it all. That the network was organic and chemical made it no less powerful, any more than a brain was less powerful than a computer. And the people were part of it, woven into its whole. I suddenly seemed a less important part of my vocabulary than we.

No! I clambered out of the hammock, fighting the vines that tangled around my arms and legs until I fell awkwardly to the moist ground. I stood, shaking myself. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the soft glow of bioluminescent fungi suffused everything. I had no trouble finding my way back to the clearing, creeping past dozens of other sleepers in their own hammocks, some of them dangling several meters above the ground.

In the clearing, I found the rotting tree where Paul had communed with the fungus. I wasn’t so far gone that sitting there appealed to me, but I knew it was only a matter of time. If I could find out what the Ligados plans were before I succumbed entirely, maybe I could find a way to get word out to my team back in Maryland. Paul had called me at the NSA from here, after all—he must have a satellite phone somewhere. Cringing, I sat on the fungal shelf protruding from the tree, and leaned back against its decaying wood.

Immediately, the questing tendrils of the fungus emerged, probing my scalp. I had no hyphae in my hair, so there was nothing for it to latch on to. Instead, the filaments pressed up against my skin. I felt my blood pulsing in my temples. I was just starting to think this was a terrible idea when it connected. I couldn’t tell how: Magnetic fields? Patterns of blood flow? A direct connection somewhere on my scalp that I couldn’t feel? Somehow, the mycelium in my mind had connected with the mycelium of the forest, and I knew things I hadn’t known before.

I knew, for instance, the locations of the people in the hundreds of acres of forest around me. I knew where Paul was sleeping. I knew how many Ligados were in New Mexico, and where they were headed. Most importantly, I knew the plan. The analysts at home were right: they were headed for the nuclear arsenal at Albuquerque. As soon as they gained control, they would drop the nukes on the world’s major national capitals, seeding chaos and preventing any kind of organized resistance to the spread of the fungus throughout the world.

I needed to get this information out. Not just the fungus’s end goal, but the Ligados assault plans on Albuquerque and Kirtland Air Force Base. But it was too late. I didn’t want to anymore. Why should I try to prevent a plan that was so good for the planet’s ecosystem, and ultimately for humanity? Left to themselves, humans would probably drive themselves to extinction in a century or so. We couldn’t even manage to get along when our skin was a slightly different hue. We needed the fungus to help us reach our true potential.

A part of me railed against it, still yearned for the self-centered hedonism of independence, but I pushed it down. We pushed it down. There was no need for me anymore. By myself, what could I accomplish? Nothing. There was no me. There was only us.

Paul had a laboratory. Right there in the depths of the rainforest, he had a fully equipped laboratory, enabling him to study the profusion of life living around him. Only there were no spectrometers, no test tubes, no Bunsen burners, no computers. It was entirely organic.

He showed me how the mycelium could taste a single drop of a substance he tipped into the soil, how the information passed through neural pathways, tearing apart its molecular structure until, seconds later, its full chemical makeup was completely known.

“The natural world has always been better at this than we are,” Paul said. “Its eyes are better than our cameras, its molecular identifiers better than our spectrometers, its brains better than our computers. And its solutions run on food and sunlight for a fraction of the energy.”

He was still a scientist, one of many working here in this organic metropolis. I had imagined hungry and ragged people foraging for food, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a city, with specialized professions and infrastructures to manage the distribution of energy and food and waste. Only, compared to this, a modern city seemed like a monstrosity, trucking in thousands of tons of food each day and trucking out just as much trash and waste every night. The cities I was used to required megawatts of power to keep them running, but this place didn’t even show up on infrared satellite images.

I remembered the stories I had read in my youth of sentient planets, vast networks of life that guided evolution and stored the memories of generations. That dream would become a reality, right here on Earth. In just a few years, Aspergillus ligados would blanket the globe, and humanity would be united for the first time in history.

I knew this wasn’t actually what I wanted. The real me, Neil Johns, didn’t want the fungus to dominate the planet. But it didn’t matter. Anticipation of such a future filled me with feelings of joy and excitement that I couldn’t shake. The part of me that disagreed was being drowned, and the more I tried to hold onto that part, the more it slipped away. The fungus was winning the battle for my mind.

Thanks to me, the Ligados network now knew much more about the US forces that opposed us at Albuquerque. Most important of all, we knew about Dr. McCarrick and his USAMRIID zombies, their actions controlled by McCarrick’s mutation of the fungus. Once his spores were out in the world, the future we were building with the fungus would be in real jeopardy. I had a role to play, a crucially important one, in making sure that didn’t happen.

Nate flew me back to Porto Velho in his PC-6, and from there I took a commercial jet back to DC by way of Miami. No one went with me. No one tied my hands or forced me at gunpoint, but I went anyway. I tried to miss my flight, or to get on a different one, or even to attack a security guard and get myself arrested, but it was no use. I could hardly bear to think about such attempts, never mind to actually accomplish them.

I was headed to deceive and betray my friends, and I knew it was wrong. Worse, it felt like the idea to do so came out of my own head. I had to keep reminding myself over and over again that it wasn’t me, that this wasn’t what I wanted, but it didn’t matter. When we landed in Miami, I tried to walk the opposite direction from my connecting flight, but all I managed to do was trip over my own feet and go sprawling. When I got up again, I walked twice as fast in the direction the fungus wanted me to go.

My mind surged with energy and alertness. There was no question of sleep. To distract myself on the flight, I bought a New York Times crossword puzzle omnibus from a book vendor, and by the time we landed at BWI I had all two hundred puzzles finished. I had never felt so capable, so in tune with the powers of my own intelligence.

The plane and the airport and the city—all the technology around me—no longer seemed like the edifices of human achievement but like cathedrals built on sand, impressive but ultimately doomed. Someday, I thought, even transcontinental flight would be accomplished without fossil fuels. I imagined giant winged composite creatures, a symbiotic mix of animal and plant and fungus, powered by photosynthesis, impelled by animal musculature, and controlled by a network of fungal hyphae. The humans of the future—or the post-humans who would be our descendants—would travel the globe on such phantasms.

I called Melody and told her I was coming back to work. I had called earlier and let her know I had found my dad. He hadn’t been kidnapped by McCarrick’s lab after all, he had just been lost and wandering and unable to remember how to get home. I did a pretty convincing job, I thought, of playing the worried and frantic son who had finally located his father. I returned to Fort Meade and greeted my team, hoping nobody would suspect the true reason for my absence.

“How’s your father?” Shaunessy asked.

“Sick,” I said. “I found him at the Arundel Mills Mall—that’s like seven miles from home. I’m lucky I didn’t find him in a ditch or hit by a car. The Alzheimer’s is finally tearing him apart. He doesn’t recognize anyone. I don’t think he even remembers he was lost, now that he’s back.” The lies flowed easily from my mouth, almost without thinking about them. In fact, I found myself picking up on cues from my teammates, subtle indicators of tone of voice and body language I never would have noticed before, which made it easy to manipulate them.

“I thought the fungus had reversed his Alzheimer’s,” Melody said.

I shrugged. “It’s a degenerative illness. My guess is the fungus forged new pathways for him to reach parts of his brain he’d lost connection to, which temporarily gave him back some memories and mental function. Ultimately, though, his neurons and synapses are being destroyed. They don’t come back again.”

Shaunessy squeezed my arm. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

I gave her a grateful smile. “Yeah, well. It’s been a long time in coming.”

I tried to tell them the truth. I opened my mouth to tell them I was infected, that they couldn’t trust me, that everything they said would be communicated directly to their enemy. But I couldn’t make the words come out. Just the attempt produced waves of terror and disgust that threatened to overwhelm me.

“Things have been happening fast here,” Melody said. She gave me a brief overview of the advance of the Ligados forces north from White Sands through Valencia County and the communities that hugged the Rio Grande. They moved slowly, not for lack of organization, but because they consisted mostly of foot soldiers—citizens of New Mexico who had succumbed to infection. US forces controlled all the major roadways into Albuquerque, with significant air support massed at the Santa Fe and Las Vegas airports, ready to rain fire down on the Albuquerque valley at the first sign of a Ligados offensive.

“Most of the nukes are at Kirtland,” Melody said, “but there are some at Los Alamos and at a few facilities in the desert around Sandia. We can’t afford for any of these to fall under Ligados control.”

I knew more than she did—knew, for instance, how many people in Albuquerque and even on the Kirtland base itself were already Ligados, and how quickly life as we knew it would fall apart if the Ligados took control, but I kept that knowledge to myself. The thought of a Ligados victory alternately made me feel ill and elated, but no matter what I thought, I couldn’t change my actions.

“So, are you free now?” Melody asked me. “Or are you still taking care of your father?”

“He’s with my sister in Ithaca now,” I said. “I’m here and ready to work.”

“Glad to hear it. Pack your bags, all of you. We’re going to Albuquerque.”