The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 35

I opened my eyes. Which shouldn’t have been possible. If Paul had succeeded, even with only one warhead, I shouldn’t be thinking at all.

They explained to me later what had happened. Nuclear weapons work by using conventional explosives to crush a hollow plutonium core, smashing the atoms together and causing a chain reaction. However, if the compression force is not equal in all directions, the core will deform, and the plutonium won’t reach a critical density.

Safety measures generally act on this principle. A liquid is inserted in the core to inhibit symmetrical compression, or else the explosives are electronically wired to prevent simultaneous detonation without a prior signal. The nuclear engineer had programmed the signal to turn off the safety measures into his remote. Paul, however, had simply connected the leads to set off the conventional explosives.

The explosives in two thousand one hundred and eighty-three nuclear warheads packed quite a punch, enough to destroy the elevator shafts, collapse the underground cavern, and injure fifty-seven people on the surface. Cracked plutonium cores were now leaking radiation deep underground where nobody could get to them. It would be the worst radiation disaster in the history of the nation, but the city of Albuquerque—and the world—would survive.

At the time, however, I only knew that I was inexplicably alive, and that every part of my body hurt. My arm was on fire. My head throbbed, and my muscles felt battered and bruised. I wasn’t sure if I could move.

A voice came over the loudspeakers, but this time it was female. Melody’s voice. “The enemy has been defeated,” she said. “General Barron is no longer in command. You want to put your weapons down. You want to return to the medical facility in Kirtland Base where you will await your allocation of antifungal medications. Your greatest desire will be to take these medications, in the prescribed dose, for the next three years.”

The smoke and dust cleared a little, and Shaunessy stepped into view, now without her pistol. She looked up into the sky for a few minutes, squinting against the bright sun. Finally, she looked at me. “Sorry about that,” she said.

I could hardly breathe from the pain, but I gave her what I thought was a smile. “I deserved it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and her smile was brilliant. “Yes, you surely did.”

Melody visited me at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. I still felt groggy from surgery, where they had removed bullet fragments from my shoulder. Shaunessy’s bullet had hurt me more seriously than mine had hurt her, fracturing my humerus right at the joint and damaging ligaments and cartilage. It would be a while before I could fly back to Maryland, and my whole arm would stay in a cast for weeks.

“And you’re taking your antifungals, right?” Melody said. She sat on the edge of the visitor’s chair by my bed, somehow making it look elegant.

I grinned. “Do I have any choice?”

“Not really.”

“Everybody within twenty miles is taking them like vitamins,” I said. “Where did you ever get such a supply?”

The wrinkles around her eyes crinkled, though she didn’t exactly smile. “While McCarrick was putting every infectious disease research facility to work growing more of his spores, I set every pharmaceutical lab with government contracts to mass-producing antifungal meds. I thought they might come in handy.”

“Smart,” I said. “But how on earth did you get the better of General Barron? Did you convince the president to revoke his command, or what?”

“Oh no, it was much easier than that,” she said. “I put some spores into his coffee.”

“You what?”

“They can withstand high temperatures with no loss of viability,” she said. “I confirmed that ahead of time.”

“You drugged the commander of the American forces?”

She shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. After that, it was a matter of getting my hands on that command signal, which was easy enough. They were piping it through loudspeakers by that point. I recorded it, played it for the general, and told him to pass his command over to me.”

I shook my head. “You’re a scary woman. How did you avoid breathing the spores in the base yourself?”

“I’ve carried an oxygen mask in my purse ever since you and Shaunessy came out of the server farm, and a larger, filter-based gas mask in my luggage. A mask that I did not surrender to the general’s little safety recall.”

I shook my head, impressed. She had thought of everything, been prepared. Much more than I had been. I hadn’t even managed to anticipate my own family.

“Look,” I said. “I know I’ve screwed up. A lot. I completely understand if you don’t want me working in your group anymore, and I’m sure Shaunessy won’t want me there. But—”

“Neil.”

“Wait, hear me out. I love my job. I’m not as good with computers as Shaunessy—or well, anybody, really—and I don’t know the mission details as well as Andrew, and everything I touch seems to just fall apart, but if there’s some place for me, I don’t know, some data entry position, or a math tutor for language experts, or something, I want to do it. I don’t want to leave the NSA.”

Shaking her head and suppressing a smile, Melody set a slim box on my lap. I looked at her, then back at the box, which was cream colored, with no writing or label on it. I used my good hand to grasp the top, shaking it slightly until it eased away from the bottom. Then I looked inside.

On the left, behind a plastic panel, was a medal. The ribbon was green, with a thick vertical red stripe bounded by thinner yellow stripes. On the ribbon hung a gold disc embossed with a stylized eagle and the words National Security Agency around the circumference. To the right of the ribbon, a gold card bordered in red proclaimed it as the NSA Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

I don’t know how long I gaped at it before speaking.

“You can’t keep it yet,” Melody said. “There will have to be a ceremony with an official presentation, handshakes with whoever ends up keeping the director’s job, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t deserve this,” I said. She raised an eyebrow. “I admitted the guy who planted spores in the NSA server room,” I said. “I lied to all of you, gave sensitive information to an enemy of the United States, and shot an NSA agent. I very nearly detonated two thousand nuclear weapons on American soil.”

“You were the first to connect the Ligados to the fungal infection,” she said. “You found the link to Neuritol. You cracked the whistle language, allowing us to read their communications and track the advance of the movement through South America. You endured danger and hardship in Brazil and in Albuquerque in the line of duty, and when it came down to it, you resisted the urge to push that button for just long enough—something not many people have been able to do.”

“Long enough for Shaunessy to shoot me, you mean.”

She put a hand on my arm. “Whatever you did while infected, it wasn’t you,” she said. “Our legal system will probably wrangle for years about people’s liability for what they did while infected, but I know the truth. Nobody has ever resisted it, not for long. The fact that you did it at all is a testament to your strength of conscience.”

“I don’t see it that way.” I remembered Shaunessy’s prediction that they would give me a medal, and it made me feel sick.

“You can’t decline it,” Melody said.

“Why not?”

“Because I already declined when they wanted to give it to me. I told them to give it you.” She grinned. “Could get embarrassing if everybody keeps declining their prestigious award.”

Eventually they discharged me from the hospital, and I caught a flight back to BWI. I could barely fit my full-arm cast into the tiny seats in coach, and my shoulder ached from the uncomfortable angle, bent across my body to avoid the other passengers. The plane thundered along the runway and then lifted into the air.

Paul was dead. I didn’t know yet entirely how I felt about that. Paul had betrayed me, infected me, hurt our family and tried to kill millions. On the other hand, under the influence of the fungus, I had tried to do much of the same. And quite apart from anything that had happened or whose fault it had been, he was my brother. I would miss him, and I would grieve his death.

I watched the Great Plains roll past beneath us and wondered how far Neuritol had spread through the country. Each infected person would have to be treated with McCarrick’s spores, and then told that they wanted to take antifungal medication. It was the only way to get them to take it and thus eradicate the fungus—both strains of it—from their system.

I could already feel the fungus’s hold on my own mind weakening. I still wanted what was best for the fungus, at some level, but it didn’t dominate my thinking. The desire to take my antifungals was still strong, heightened by my belief that disconnecting it from humanity would ultimately be better for both species. I wondered what would happen six months or a year down the road, when the compulsion to take them dissipated. Would people stop taking them? If they did, would the fungus inside them return?

We flew into a bank of clouds, obscuring my view of the ground. Wisps curled past my window, insubstantial. I was flying home, but I didn’t know what home really meant anymore. The world had changed, and it would take us a long time to understand what the new world would look like.

I had joined the NSA with ideas of adventure and heroism, of saving the day through mathematics and cryptography. When it came down to it, though, I hadn’t been much of a hero. I hadn’t saved the world—in fact, I had nearly destroyed it. I had done a lot I wasn’t proud of and made mistakes along the way. Yet somehow, despite it all, we had won, and I had been part of it.

Eventually I slept. I dreamed of flying on the back of an enormous creature, part animal and part fungus, swooping low over green, leafy factories producing technological marvels powered only by the light of the sun. A world without hunger or privation or war, where disagreements were negotiated through a shared fungal network. A world without Alzheimer’s. A world where no one was alone. I woke when the captain announced our descent, surprised to find tears on my face.

I had arranged for my mom to pick me up at the airport. As I walked out into the ground transportation area, however, a different familiar face waited for me. Shaunessy.

“I told your mom I’d bring you home,” she said.

I used my good arm to lift my luggage into the trunk of her black Infiniti, and then joined her in the front seat. She pulled out and navigated the airport parking lot back toward the highway.

I knew it wouldn’t take long to reach my father’s house, so if I was going to talk with her, I would have to get right to it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You told me when Melody hired me that I would disregard the rules and screw things up. And I guess I did. I’m sorry I shot you. And I’m sorry you had to shoot me.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry about that,” she said. “It was a pleasure.”

I grinned. “Thanks. I don’t believe you, though. I put you in a position where you had to shoot your own teammate, with seconds to spare, and you did it. You came through. You saved the world, though I doubt many people will ever know it. You should be getting that medal, not me.”

“Maybe I’ll write a book when I retire,” Shaunessy said drily. “And just so you know, they’re giving me a medal, too.”

“Oh! Good. I’m glad. I mean, of course they are. You deserve it.”

“You didn’t think I would get one, did you?”

“No! I mean, yes. Well, I hoped they would.”

“Relax, I’m just messing with you,” she said, grinning. “Besides, they’ll give me the medal, but they’ll never let me write a book. Not about the good parts, anyway.”

A good portion of that final battle had been classified, with those people who were present sworn to secrecy. Since most of them were government employees of some stripe, and many were still under the influence of McCarrick’s strain of the fungus, it wasn’t hard to enforce. The US government didn’t want to admit the degree to which it had enslaved its own people to fight that war, nor how close we had come to detonating the nuclear arsenal.

“How are things in South America?” I asked.

“It’ll be years cleaning up that mess,” she said. “But the Ligados are slowly disbanding. As soon as the US threatened to bomb major cities with McCarrick’s spores, the Ligados reached the consensus opinion that symbiosis with humanity was ultimately toxic to the fungus, and it had a better chance for survival if it left us alone. We’ve been sending antifungals to the continent as fast as we can ship them. I’m sure there will be Ligados enclaves for years, holdouts who still believe that humanity is good for it, but their numbers are shrinking.”

“It’s a pity,” I said. “The fungus is good in some ways—increasing intelligence, curing neurological disorders. It’s a shame we can’t have the benefits without the problems.”

“Isn’t there any way?”

“Well, not directly. Allowing the fungus to grow in our brains means opening our minds to its emotional manipulation. But I heard there’s going to be a research facility of mycologists formed specifically to investigate that possibility.”

We pulled into my father’s neighborhood. “So what do you think will happen to all those people who attacked Albuquerque?” Shaunessy asked.

“I don’t think much of anything. The New Mexico government decided not to prosecute any of the Ligados, so long as they returned peaceably to their homes.”

“Seriously? All that destruction and violence, and they’re not arresting anybody?”

“The official stance, at this point,” I said, “is that actions committed while under the influence of the fungus were committed by a different person—by the fungus itself—and are not prosecutable. We’ll see if the civil courts uphold that opinion when the lawsuits start rolling in, but that’s the approach the Oval Office is promoting. They want their citizens to take their antifungals and reintegrate into their old lives, not try to imprison and prosecute thousands of them for something over which they had little to no control. They want things to go back to the way they were before.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Shaunessy said.

“What do you mean?”

“McCarrick’s spores. They’re still making them. Growing them by the billions, in case the Ligados rise up again, or there’s another major outbreak somewhere in the world. They talk about them as if they’re only for defense, but that seems naive.

“What happens when another country won’t do what we want? How long will diplomacy or even standard warfare last when we know we have the ultimate weapon in storage over at Fort Detrick and Walter Reed? We’ll have a way to force compliance without loss of American lives. And how long will it be before other countries or private parties start getting their hands on them? Pandora’s box has been opened, and there’s no closing it again. It’s going to change everything.”

We pulled up in front of my father’s house. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“No problem.”

“Hey, listen,” I said. “Do you want to go out and get drinks sometime? Maybe after work?”

She laughed, and then stopped when she saw that I was serious. “I forgive you for shooting me,” she said. “And I’ve gotten used to the idea of working with you. But I don’t see it becoming any more than that.”

I nodded, heat rising to my face. “See you Monday, then,” I said.

She popped the trunk, and as I lifted out my suitcase she got out of the car and came around the back to where I stood. She stuck out her hand. I shook it. “You’re a good man, Neil Johns,” she said. “I’ll see you Monday.”

“Monday,” I said.

I walked toward the house, still thinking about Shaunessy as her Infiniti backed up and pulled away. I couldn’t figure her out. I didn’t know if she liked me or hated me. But I was glad that, once again, we were on the same team.

I opened the door, and there was Mom, throwing herself at me in a fierce hug. “The arm!” I said, laughing. “Watch the arm!”

She examined the cast. “Does it hurt?”

“Nothing to speak of.”

“Well, if someone tries to mug you, you’ll have a club to take them out,” she said. “Just don’t try to put your arm around a girl in a movie theater.”

I headed back toward the den and found my dad deep in thought over a crossword puzzle. I looked over his shoulder to check his progress. All of the blank spaces in the puzzle had been filled with the letter A.

He spotted me and shouted in fright, flinching away and covering his head with his arms. “Who are you?” he shouted. “Get out of my house!”

I stepped around the chair so he could see me more clearly. “It’s me, Dad,” I said.

He peered at me, suspicious. “Paul?”

“No. I’m Neil. I just flew home from New Mexico. Don’t you remember?”

He didn’t. Mom explained how quickly his awareness had declined once he started on the antifungals. He still took them religiously, remembering them even when he couldn’t recall whether he had eaten breakfast, but without the fungus, his mind had quickly reverted to its old patterns.

“He wrote you a letter,” my mom said. “When the antifungals first started taking effect, but before dropping back into the Alzheimer’s, he was lucid for a few hours. He wanted to leave you something.”

She handed me a handwritten letter. It was short and simple.

I folded it carefully and clutched it tightly in one hand. It was possibly the most precious thing anyone had ever given me. I wrapped my arms around my mom again and held her for a long time.

We ate dinner together, a nostalgic beans-and-rice dish that my dad had cooked under my mother’s watchful eye. We spoke briefly about the events of the previous weeks. My mom could remember everything that had happened, even when she had been under the influence of the fungus. She apologized for abducting and infecting me, but I waved her apologies away. I, as well as anyone, understood how the fungus could warp your sense of what was good and right. I didn’t want her living under a burden of guilt and regret, not if I could help it.

I asked about Mei-lin, and my mom told me she was back to work at the Baltimore Washington hospital, managing fungal infection cases, especially those who had developed complications from the original infection. She had stopped by the house once to see them, and I made a mental note to pay her a visit when I could.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said. “A pretty girl called for you.”

“What?”

“A girl who works at a hair salon, said she met you in the hospital. Her name is Zoe.”

I remembered her instantly, the beautiful woman with the long braid who had spoken to me in the cafeteria. I remembered giving her my number, but I was astonished that she’d actually called. It also seemed wrong to be talking about a potential date so soon after everything.

“How do you know she’s pretty?” I said. “You can hear that over the phone?”

“I looked her up online.”

“You’re stalking my potential dates on social media? That’s creepy, Mom.”

A crafty smile crept onto her face. “I want grandchildren someday, you know.”

“Julia just gave you one. You’re not getting greedy in your old age, are you?”

“She sounded very nice on the phone.” Her voice broke, and her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “We need some good news around here, don’t you think?”

“I get it, I get it.” I pulled her into another embrace and kissed her forehead. “Why don’t you ask her out, if you like her so much?”

A wavering smile broke through her tears. “I’m not the one she called.”

I thought about it. Maybe it was just what I needed. A new beginning.

On Monday, I pulled into the parking lot at Fort Meade and made my way through the building to the basement. Outside, the shantytown was being dismantled, tents folded up and carted away in trucks. I made my way inside and through the building to the basement, where I stopped at Melody’s office.

“Good to have you back again,” she said. “Though I’m afraid I won’t be here much longer. You’ll have a new boss soon.”

“You’re retiring?” It had to happen eventually, I supposed—she must have been due for retirement for years. It was probably as good a time as any for her to make the switch.

“No,” she said wryly. “Not voluntarily, anyway. I’m going to be charged with treason and conspiracy and who knows what else. I might be going to prison.”

“What? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It hasn’t happened yet. There’s still a chance to fight it. But it’s in the works. Part of the political war that’s brewing to see who will end up with control of the spores and the command signal. I’m just a bit piece, I’m afraid. A pawn. But putting me away undermines the claims of the intelligence community.”

“I thought they wanted to give you an award.”

“That was the NSA. This goes higher than that.”

“It’s Barron’s doing, isn’t it? He wants to punish you for what you did to him.”

“Well, I did kind of poison his coffee.”

I swung my fist in the air, frustrated. “It’s ridiculous. You saved everyone. If not for you, New Mexico would be drifting through the stratosphere.”

“Not true,” she said. “If not for me, Barron would have kept control, and the result would have been nearly the same, only with a lot more Ligados dead.”

“It’s not right. This isn’t justice. They’re just destroying you to advance their own agenda.”

“The real question you should be asking yourself,” she said, “is what’s going to happen to you—to everyone—when the dust settles and someone emerges as the victor. Someone is going to have the power to control thousands or even millions of people as slaves. For the moment, everyone agrees that the best thing to do with that power is get people to take antifungals. But how long do you think that will last?”

Melody left me to think about that while she met with Terry Ronstadt, still the acting director of the agency, in an attempt to gain his support. I returned to my desk, feeling as low as I had for a long time. We had won, hadn’t we? Why did it feel as though everything was falling apart?

Shaunessy and Andrew and the rest of the team were all in their usual places. I thought things might be awkward with Shaunessy, but she smiled warmly and welcomed me back without a hint of embarrassment.

“So what have we got?” I asked.

“A large number of indecipherables out of Myanmar,” Andrew said. “Projecting down the coast into Thailand and as far as Malaysia. Particularly in regions where rainforests are the dominant biome.”

“You think it’s the fungus again,” I said. “That it’s spread there, and is causing the same effect.”

“That or a government got ahold of the genetic map for McCarrick’s version of it and is using it to enslave its people.”

“Or someone else’s people,” I said.

“Only one way to find out,” Shaunessy said.

I gave her a mock salute. “I’m on the job.”

I sat at my desk and logged in to my account. In many ways, the situation was even worse now than when we had first discovered the Ligados passing messages in South America. McCarrick’s spores presented a greater potential danger than the original fungus, one that would affect world politics for decades. Mind control was now part of the political landscape, even in the United States, and there was no guarantee the people at the top would use that power for good. Pockets of Neuritol users still held out throughout the country, choosing mind control of a different kind, their numbers and location unknown.

It wouldn’t be hard for anyone, given a few of the spores, to grow more of the fungus in their own backyard. They wouldn’t need a new supply from South America. And once the command signal became publicly known—which it would, eventually—mind control would affect not only politics and war, but start creeping into corporations and religious cults and crime as well. The world had become a dangerous place.

I brought up the latest batch of indecipherables on my computer and selected one at random. It was time to get back to work.