The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 34

I knew staying inside wouldn’t save us. The building’s ventilation system would pump fresh air to our location and, with it, the spores that would enslave us to General Barron’s every whim.

Shaunessy paced the cell. “Why would he do this? He’s intentionally infecting his own soldiers!”

“His soldiers are defecting,” I said. “A large number of them are actually Ligados, and he doesn’t know which. This is his way of regaining control and making everyone fight for his side.”

“But at what cost? We’re fighting to avoid being infected. To be free to make our own choices.”

“General Barron is apparently fighting to stay in charge.”

She took a deep breath and let it out, making a slow, smoothing-the-air motion with her hands. “Okay,” she said. “We need to get out of here.”

We left the cell together. The complex swarmed with Ligados, both rescuers and those recently freed from incarceration. Whenever we encountered someone, a brief exchange of modified whistle language convinced them we were on the same side. Unfortunately, gas masks didn’t seem to be standard issue on prison blocks.

“We’re not going to find any,” Shaunessy said. “Barron had them recalled.”

“He had them what?”

“Some kind of story about a defect. He had all masks collected and told everyone the replacements were en route. He’s probably got them in storage somewhere, available only to his most loyal underlings.”

The truth was, we were probably breathing spores already. In small quantities, they blew through the air invisibly, too small to see. “All right,” I said. “There’s no avoiding it, then. We’ve got a few hours until we start showing symptoms. Let’s make the most of them.”

We left the building and stepped outside. Here, the spores were visible as gray dust in the air. They coated my tongue when I took a breath, and I coughed. The thought of what they were doing inside me made me sick.

“If we’re going to get to the underground storage complex, we’ll need a vehicle,” Shaunessy said.

I spoke to a Ligados man, who got on his phone, and in five minutes we were driving south across the desert in a jeep. As we left the base’s complex of streets and buildings, we left the cloud of spores behind. Dust kicked up from the jeep’s wheels, and grit peppered our faces, but it felt like breathing fresh air again. The place we were heading to was no secret, and I had seen pictures of it taken from the air. The question was what we would find when we got there. General Barron’s troops still defending the complex? A pitched battle underway? Or the Ligados already in control?

Kirtland extended for miles south into the desert. The flat landscape was scattered with training areas, laser testing facilities, solar energy stations, and various classified program facilities, in the center of which stood KUMSC, the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex, where all the nuclear warheads were stored. General Barron had also set up his field command center nearby, cluttering the desert landscape with tents and antennas and tanks and field artillery.

When we drove into visual range, we saw no sign of a battle. The chaos of the base to the north hadn’t affected this place. That meant either that Barron had been remarkably thorough in filtering secret Ligados from these soldiers, or…

“They’re infected, aren’t they?” Shaunessy said, coming to the same conclusion I had. “He’s already infected all the soldiers and staff at his command center with his own spores.”

I nodded, pressing my lips into a grim line. “In the desert like this, Barron would have complete access to their water supply. He’s seen all the leaders who have been assassinated by Ligados, so he has to know he’s a target. Sometime in the last few days, he must have decided he’d rather be safe than sorry with the troops closest to him.”

“So what hope does a team of commandos have?” she asked. “They can’t sneak in here. There’s no cover. The place is surrounded by hundreds of perfectly loyal soldiers who know they’re coming. The nukes are safe. Aren’t they?”

I didn’t answer. Our jeep had reached a checkpoint, where two soldiers carrying submachine guns held up their hands for us to stop. The checkpoint stood at a break in the first of a concentric series of sand redoubts that had been raised by military earthmoving vehicles—essentially large dunes or berms that would slow the advance of vehicles or infantry while providing some cover to the defenders. Both of the soldiers wore noise-canceling headphones.

“What’s with the headphones?” Shaunessy asked as I slowed to a stop.

“Instructions,” I said. “The chief vulnerability of Barron’s slave soldiers is that someone else might take command. If he broadcasts the command signal through base speakers, then anybody could tell the soldiers what to do, and they’d obey. He needs to make sure they obey only him.”

“So if I pulled their headphones off and told them to defend me, they would do it?”

“Sure,” I said. “If they didn’t shoot you the moment you reached for them. I’m sure they’ve been instructed to protect their headphones at all costs.”

The first soldier approached the car, while the other stayed back and covered us with his weapon. Beyond him, I saw an emplacement with the barrel of an intimidating heavy machine gun protruding from it. I hoped this worked. I had every expectation that the plans I had learned through the fungal network while in Brazil would have been followed successfully, but it was a very different thing to stand here and bet our lives on it.

I caught the soldier’s eye. Then I held my hands flat and vertical, one on each side of my head, and drove them sharply forward and together. The soldier blinked at me. I held my breath. The soldier glanced at his partner. Then he surreptitiously slipped his right earphone away from his ear—the ear his partner couldn’t see.

“You want to pretend to look at our documentation, then let us pass,” I said. “You don’t want to tell anyone what happened or that we are here.”

The soldier peered at my hand as if I were showing him ID, checked his tablet, then waved us through. His partner stepped out of the way to let us by.

Shaunessy gaped back at them. “What did you just do?” she said. “I thought all these soldiers worked for Barron now.”

“I gave a signal,” I said. “It’s American Sign Language for the word ‘focus,’ but that’s not important. The important part is that the Ligados, as I told you, anticipated that this might happen. McCarrick’s spores, if you recall, are just a genetically tweaked version of the original fungus. They still have most of the same characteristics as Aspergillus ligados, though the desire to act for the benefit of the fungus has been hijacked and replaced with the desires given them by their master. After they were infected with Barron’s spores, but before the new strain of fungus had completely infiltrated their brains, the Ligados among the staff here spread knowledge of the hand sign to all the other soldiers.

“It’s a pretty simple concept. The hand sign is an indicator that the person wants to say something to you, and you should listen to them. In and of itself, it’s not a command, but with the command signal playing in their ears, it serves as one. They can’t hear me, but they can see me, and so I can still tell them what to want. In this case, I’m telling them to want to listen to me, which makes them want to take their headphones off. And once they do that, they’re mine.”

Shaunessy nodded, but she looked like she might be sick. “So when the commando teams arrive, they’ll just talk their way in. They’ll make the same sign you did and then just waltz in and steal the nukes, and nobody will stop them.”

“Actually,” I said. “I think they’re already here.”

We slipped past the other checkpoints as easily as we had the first. We parked the jeep and walked toward KUMSC, inconspicuous now that we were inside the perimeter. The aboveground facility was practical and unadorned, essentially a series of freight elevators, conveyor belts, and roll-up steel doorways where warheads and other munitions hardware could be transferred to and from trucks.

“I guess we’re headed down,” Shaunessy said.

“That would be my guess,” I said. A guard stood by the nearest elevator, but I gave the hand sign and talked my way in as easily as before. The elevator required a key to operate, but the guard produced one and turned it for us. We heard the hum of machinery and the shriek of scraping metal as the mechanism spun up and started moving. The elevator car reached the top with a clunk, and the doors slid open.

I stepped inside. “You can back out now if you like,” I said.

Shaunessy shook her head and followed me through the doors. “If we don’t stop them, we’re all as good as dead,” she said. “It’s not like it’s safer to stay up here.”

“Okay,” I said. “In that case, you might as well take this.” I handed her back the pistol I had taken from her in my cell.

“What’s this for?”

“In case you need to shoot me.”

The elevator had only two buttons, labeled G and U. I pressed U, and the mechanism hummed again. The car jerked, the lights flickered, and we sank into the desert floor.

After a surprisingly long descent, the car stopped abruptly, and the doors squealed open. We stepped into a cavernous tunnel that arched fifteen feet above our heads, a concrete bunker braced with curved steel beams that hugged the ceiling from the floor on one side to the floor on the other. It looked like it was designed to withstand serious explosive force, probably as a defense against enemy bombs dropped from above.

Along each wall stood hundreds of shiny steel cones, their tips painted red, each about as high as my shoulder. Warheads. A stack of dollies rested near the elevator doors, exactly the same as a delivery man might use to transfer a stack of twenty-four-can soda boxes from his truck into a convenience store. The tunnel continued beyond the light, the neat racks of warheads dwindling from view. In the distance, we heard voices.

We walked toward them. Wires stretched from each cone and bundled together, leading in the same direction. Ahead, the tunnel curved. I stepped carefully around the bend, knowing the people around the corner could hear us coming as easily as we could hear them. I heard the guns before I saw them, a flurry of metallic clicks as weapons were raised and brought to bear. Raising my hands high, I whistled a staccato burst of information, letting them know who I was and that I was Ligados, too.

I grinned at the submachine gun barrels leveled at my head. “We’re all friends here,” I said.

Judging by the number of people in the tunnel, I guessed that at least two of the special forces teams had made it here, if not all three. The soldiers stepped aside, and there was Paul, twisting a wire around a contact. He straightened and frowned at me. “Neil? What are you doing here?”

“New information,” I said. “We need to talk.”

He unwrapped some more wire from a spool on the floor and beckoned for me to join him.

“Paul, you’re doing the wrong thing. This isn’t going to help the fungus.”

He stopped as quickly as if he’d been struck and whipped his head around to stare at me. He whistled a quick series of notes—a query for identification—which I answered in kind. He relaxed. “What are you talking about?”

“The plan to steal and use the nukes. Where did it come from?”

“From the fungus, of course.”

“How do you know it will work?”

He stared into my eyes, confused. “You’re one of us now. You should understand this.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “Where are the long-term studies that say this course of action will ultimately be beneficial to the fungus? How did we decide on this and not, say, staying in Brazil and protecting its habitat?”

“It needs to spread,” Paul said. “The more it spreads, the better its chance of survival.”

“The more it spreads,” I said, “the more of a threat it is to humanity, and the more likely humans are to fight fiercely against it. That doesn’t guarantee a better outcome.”

“Humans are sucking the planet dry,” Paul said, confusion still evident in his face. It was so obvious to him. “There are far too many of us. It’s not sustainable.”

“Okay. That’s true. But who thought of this strategy to address that problem? Why is mass destruction the best option? What other options were considered?”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “I have to keep working. We only have so long until the rest of the army arrives. We have to be ready.”

“My point is, there’s no all-knowing creature guiding this venture. The fungus isn’t a person. It doesn’t think. It’s just a fungus. It’s people who are coming up with these schemes, and what we come up with is more and more violence, the same as we always have. Destroy, ravage, take control. Only now we have a creature in our mind telling us it’s for the greater good and manipulating our emotions to follow what people imagine will help the fungus thrive. But will it? Will it really? Nobody knows: they just believe, and then because everyone else believes it, too, it feels like it couldn’t possibly be wrong. But consensus doesn’t mean truth. In fact, it means a lack of critical thinking, a blind following of the status quo. Humans are really good at doing that, too.”

Paul twisted another wire, pretending to ignore me, but I could see in his face that my words affected him. In fact, all the Ligados were listening. They were intelligent people, all the more so because of the fungus improving the efficiency of their minds. I had to convince all of them, not just Paul. I turned my head so they could hear me better.

“The fungus has developed a survival strategy,” I said. “That strategy involves extending its network into the brains of mammals, where it hijacks the emotional core, rewarding behavior that helps it, like spreading its spores to wider areas of the forest, defecating on nutrient-poor soil, or eating plants or animals that are a danger to the fungus or its hosts. The strategy is so effective that it keeps using it, expanding its reach into higher lifeforms and benefitting from their higher brain function and mobility. But it’s a runaway train now, with nobody at the controls.

“I can see how it happened. A handful of early Ligados believe something—say, that the Brazilian president is a danger to the fungus because she allows logging in the Amazon—and decide that the best way to help the fungus is to kill her. As more Ligados join with them, they join in the ‘consensus’ opinion, because their emotions strongly confirm it. The consensus grows stronger and larger, but not because the course of action is the best option. Just because everybody already believes that it’s the best option.”

The soldiers shifted restlessly and fingered their weapons. “He’s a plant,” one of them said. “He’s one of Barron’s slaves.”

“And what are you?” I asked. “You’re blindly following an agenda just as much as they are.

“We’re all driven by this defining idea, to protect and promote the survival of the fungus. But are we really helping it? It’s not the fungus that’s the parasite here. It’s us. I think its chances of survival would be better if we left it alone.”

The soldier who had spoken raised his weapon. “Should I shoot him?”

I raised my hands, trying to look nonthreatening. “I’m not one of his slaves, at least not yet,” I said. “But Barron is dropping spores on the base, and we were caught in it. A few hours from now, we’ll do whatever he tells us.”

“And you want us to abort the mission?” Paul asked. “You want to be a slave? If we leave now, Barron wins. It won’t stop with this battle. He’ll keep on making spores, and keep on using them to control people. He’ll destroy the Ligados wherever he finds us. Ultimately, his strain of the fungus will be the one that survives.”

“It will anyway,” I said. “Do you think dropping nukes on major cities will make people give up? They’ll just make more of McCarrick’s spores. They’ll keep on throwing slave armies against you, and they’ll use nukes right back at you. There are still a lot more people in the world than there are Ligados, and if you do this they’ll be desperate. The whole world will be against us.”

Paul laughed. He actually threw back his head and laughed loud enough for the sound to echo along the tunnel walls. Then he looked back at me incredulously and shook his head. “I forgot that you haven’t been connected,” he said. “You actually don’t know the plan, do you?”

I felt a hard knot in my stomach. “What do you mean?”

“The latest plan isn’t to drop nukes on major cities. That was discarded before I ever left Brazil.”

“Then what?”

“We’re going to detonate right here.”

I stared at him, finding it hard to process his words. “It… what? What good does it do to detonate a nuke in Albuquerque? Why conquer a city and then destroy it?”

“Not one nuke,” he said. “All of them. We’re going to detonate all two thousand one hundred and eighty-three nuclear warheads stored in this underground complex, all at the same time.”

I looked around, the meaning of all of the wires finally registering in my brain. This branch of the tunnel was just as full of warheads as the first one had been, and at the end of it I could see yet another turn. A thick bundle of wires already stretched around the corner from that direction.

“But… that’s…” My mouth moved without forming words, my mind racing faster than my words could keep up. “That’s crazy,” I finally said. “That’s enough firepower to… to…”

“It’s over a billion kilotons,” Paul said matter-of-factly. “It’s enough to blow a crater in the New Mexico desert the size of New Hampshire.”

I understood at once. There had been past ages on Earth when fungi had been the dominant kingdom on the planet. The Ligados were trying to recreate such an age. An explosion like the one Paul described would blow enough radioactive debris into orbit to circle the globe and block sunlight for years. Plants would die. Animals would die. The human species would probably survive, but billions would die, and our technological infrastructure would be all but destroyed. We would become dependent on the fungus for everything.

“But… the Ligados have been converging here,” I objected weakly. “They’ll all die, too, along with us.”

“It’s never been about the people,” Paul said. “The people are disposable. In one move, we’ll eliminate human overpopulation and create a climate where we can never grow so numerous again. By the time the sun finally peeks through the dust clouds, it’ll be a new world. A world where Kingdom Fungi dominates the planet.”

I wanted to be horrified, but I wasn’t. The fungus in my mind prevented that. I could see the power of this plan, the reshaping of the world to the perfect environment for the fungus, at the same time taking out its major competitors for the use of the Earth’s resources.

“What about our glorious future as symbiotes with the fungus?” I asked. “The future you showed me in Brazil?”

“That will still come,” he said, a little sadly. “For some humans; the ones who survive. Just not for us.” He shrugged. “There are just too many of us. It was always only meant for a few.”

“But won’t this destroy the Amazon?” I asked. “All the trees, the animals, the whole ecology the fungus controls and grows in. They’ll die, too.”

“It was never about them either. They’re a means to an end, just like we are. This will turn the clock back, to a time when fungus ruled the Earth. Any species that can survive in that world will serve the fungus.”

A man in civilian dress, presumably the nuclear engineer, came up to Paul. He held a tablet in his hands, which he poked at with his thumbs, typing as he walked.

“We’re all set for remote detonation,” he said. “Everything is wired and status is green.”

“Remote?” Paul frowned. “Why remote? We’ll be just as dead upstairs as here. If it’s all wired, push the button.”

The engineer shook his head. “We have to control the timing precisely,” he said. “We want to create a rolling chain reaction so that each of the detonations increases the overall strength of the blast. The whole thing takes less than a millisecond, but if the controller is destroyed too soon, the timing will be off, and we won’t get nearly the megatonnage we expect. We might barely destroy the city.”

“Okay. But you’re ready?”

The engineer held up the tablet, which showed a simple status display along with a rectangular green button. “That’s all it takes.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is a high-risk plan. If the blast isn’t large enough, there will be a backlash. The rest of the world will unite to destroy us. Barron and others like him will have full rein. And if it’s too big—surely there’s a point at which not even the fungus can survive. Where the entire planet is sterilized of life. Is it really worth that risk?”

“We’ve modeled it,” Paul said. “Checked and rechecked the numbers. The range of error is pretty wide.”

“But…” I said, not knowing how I was going to finish the sentence. I could feel my resistance to the idea dissolving. Paul was a mycologist; he would know how much radiation the fungus could handle. I knew it was just the infection in my brain that made the death of billions seem like a good idea, but I had a hard time thinking of why it would be bad.

I wondered what Shaunessy thought about all of this, and realized that I hadn’t seen her since I’d turned the corner of the tunnel. Maybe she’d changed her mind about being down here after all and had gone back up the elevator. It was probably for the best. She might have resisted, and then the soldiers would have shot her. Better that she die cleanly and instantaneously, like all the rest.

“Back to the elevators,” Paul said to the group. “We need to go back up.”

I went with them dumbly, my resistance gone. I could only fight the idea if I had a better one, one that benefitted the fungus just as much, and I didn’t. I didn’t even feel sad. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more elated I felt. We were going to do it. As soon as we reached the top, the engineer would press the button on his tablet, and it would all be over in a moment. All of the rapacious greed of humanity swept away to make room for a saner, more balanced approach to life. I was only sorry I wouldn’t be there to see it.

The freight elevators were large, but not large enough to hold everyone. I rode with Paul and the engineer and about a dozen soldiers, while the other soldiers and civilians took another elevator. We rode up in silence, until I said, “Goodbye, Paul.” He turned, surprised, and regarded me. Then he nodded and ruffled my hair. “Goodbye, little brother.”

I thought of Shaunessy, and Melody, and Andrew, and the thousands of people in the city to our north. We would all die in an instant, like turning off a light. No pain, no fear, no prolonged anticipation. It was a good way to go. The push of a button, and a new chapter in the history of the Earth would begin.

We hadn’t reached the top yet when Paul turned to the engineer. “Is this far enough?”

“Should be,” the engineer said.

“Then don’t wait for the doors to open,” Paul said. “Hit it now.”

The engineer lifted the tablet and turned the screen on. “Shouldn’t we count to three or something?”

The elevator squealed and jerked to a stop. “Nope,” Paul said. “Just push it.”

Automatic gunfire tore through the elevator doors. The engineer jerked and danced and then fell, joined by two of the soldiers. The doors started to open automatically, but stuck halfway. Two more soldiers forced them open under a hail of bullets, while the rest returned fire. I cowered on the floor, covering my head with my arms. One of the soldiers hurled a grenade, and at the sound of its blast they ran out of the elevator toward the cover of a concrete wall. Holding my breath, I snatched the tablet from the engineer’s hand and ran after them, cringing as a bullet sang past my ear and sparked against the elevator door frame.

The soldiers zigzagged as they ran, and I imitated them. The man in front of me went down with a bullet in his back, and I tripped over him, sprawling flat. The tablet flew out of my hand and went skidding along the pavement. More bullets whined overhead, and I hugged the ground, shielding myself with the soldier’s dead body as best as I could.

Barron’s soldiers surrounded the facility, taking cover behind armored trucks. As I watched, the last of the Ligados soldiers fell. I couldn’t see Paul anywhere.

“Cease fire,” a booming voice said, amplified to be heard above the gunfire and accompanied by a brief, piercing tone. I felt the command deep in my gut, and wished desperately that I had a gun, so I could cease firing it. McCarrick’s fungus had apparently reached my brain.

The shooting stopped, leaving an eerie quiet that seemed to echo across the desert. I sat up carefully, my heart still thudding with adrenaline. My ears rang. I looked around. Where was Paul? Then I saw that the elevator doors—the ones with the bullet holes—had closed again. Paul was on his way back down.

Others saw it, too. Soldiers ran for the elevators and jabbed the buttons, then clambered aboard and headed down. They would stop him, I was certain of it. Without the tablet, what could he do? Perhaps there was another way to signal the nukes from below, but I doubted it. The only way to detonate them…

I stood, scanning the ground for the tablet, and spotted it about twenty feet away, black against the black pavement. “Neil!” Shaunessy ran up to me. “Are you okay? Were you hit?”

I told her I was fine. Once she had heard the plan to detonate the nukes underground, she had sneaked back to the top and called Melody. Melody had called General Barron and warned him, and the rest I knew.

“Good,” I said. “You did it. You saved everyone.”

“I don’t think they were going to change their minds,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

She lowered her voice. “Melody knows we’ve been infected with McCarrick’s spores,” she said. “Most of the base is. She said to tell you she’s working the problem.”

“Working it how?”

Shaunessy shrugged. “I don’t know.” She lifted her phone. “I’d better give her a call and tell her you’re all right.”

She put the phone to her ear and turned away from me, using her finger to plug the other ear. I sidled away from her, toward the fallen tablet. There was still a chance. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. I bent and picked it up.

The screen was scratched, but otherwise it seemed undamaged. I felt around the outside for the on button and pressed it. The screen came to life, and I swiped once across the front to dismiss the opening display. The tablet showed me the same green button I had seen before. I remembered what I had said to Shaunessy earlier: If I could push a button that killed all the people in the world but helped the fungus spread and survive, I don’t think I could stop myself.

“Put it down, Neil.”

It was Shaunessy’s voice. I didn’t look up. I stretched my finger out to touch the green button. A part of myself, deep inside, screamed at me to stop, but I couldn’t. The desire to push it was just too strong.

But no. I had been here before. It was just like pointing the gun on Shaunessy and trying to keep from pulling the trigger. Then, I had failed. This time, I wouldn’t give in. Pushing that button felt like the best thing in the world, but I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, not the real me. If I pushed it, I would die quickly, but billions around the world would die slowly, in horror and starvation. I thought of my parents. Of Julia, and her baby girl, Ash.

My hand stopped in midair, my finger still outstretched toward the button. I strained against it, the muscles in my arm and neck clenching painfully. A wave of nausea washed over me. Not pushing that button was like not reaching for a glass of water after drinking nothing for days. Or not holding out a hand when a child was drowning. That button, that beautiful green button, encompassed all that was good and right and lovely. It called to me. I had to push it. I just had to.

And then it was gone. I felt the impact before I heard the shot, like a sledgehammer to my shoulder. I hit the ground before I knew I was falling, the tablet tumbling out of my grasp. I screamed in pain and surprise and in sorrow for the loss of the green button.

Shaunessy stalked into my vision, the pistol I had given her still smoking in her hand. She stood over the tablet and fired a bullet down into it, shattering it into pieces. She lifted her phone and said, “I just shot him. We need a medic here, right away.”

Pain arced through my arm and upper body. My vision narrowed. I couldn’t see Shaunessy anymore, just a circle of desert sky. The green button still called to me, and I felt tears running down my face at the opportunity lost.

The only chance left was Paul. Maybe he couldn’t detonate all the nukes without the remote, but if he could just detonate one, that would kill the general and the core of his slave army. It might be enough for the main Ligados forces to the south to regroup and retreat, possibly to make a play for another nuclear facility in the coming weeks.

I imagined him running through the underground tunnel to the place where wires from each of the warheads converged. He would tear away the antenna, find the leads that completed the circuit, and…

The ground buckled under me, an enormous force tossing me into the air… and then nothing.