David Walton - The Genius Plague

“More so,” I said quietly. “With this kind, you can be controlled by the fungus and humans both.”

Dr. McCarrick slipped his microphone back into his lab coat so he could gesture with both hands. “Please understand,” he said to the room. “This is not a cure. There is no road back from infection to complete wellness. Even a continuous, forcibly applied course of antifungals will merely destroy most of the mycelium, not eradicate it from the body completely. Without continued application for years, it would always come back again. There’s nothing I can do for the millions who have already succumbed. What I offer here is a way to prevent the billions of us remaining from meeting the same fate.”

General Barron turned toward Melody. “Ms. Muniz,” he said. “I understand your office has developed a mechanism to distribute misinformation to the Ligados network.”

“Is developing,” she said. “Present tense. But you don’t need anything special to get this kind of message out. Once your new-and-improved spores have made the rounds, just take out an advertisement on the evening news. Play Tyler’s fancy high-pitched tone over the air and say, ‘You all want to die.’ It’s a catchy slogan. You could even put it to an advertising jingle.”

“It’s a matter of infecting them in the first place,” the general said, frowning. “I can drop spores on a few Ligados here and there, maybe, but these people are spread over continents. I need to spread it as a drug, like they did with Neuritol, and convince them to take it.”

“We’ll let you know when we have something you can use,” Melody said. I smiled at her acerbic tone. She didn’t like this any more than I did.

Though I couldn’t entirely fault Dr. McCarrick or General Barron. What they were doing was wrong, but I understood the motivation. They were fighting a war to preserve our species. This weapon would do the same as all the guns and missiles and bombs, only much more efficiently, and possibly with fewer dead in the long run. If the Ligados got their hands on the nukes at Kirtland, it might catapult the war to a whole new level, with a lot more zeros behind the number of casualties. The fungus thrived on radiation, after all. It wouldn’t necessarily see a downside to nuclear war.

I realized I was still hoping for a solution that saved the infected instead of killing them. I thought of them as captives and slaves, not as the enemy. They were my brother and father and Mei-lin and thousands of others like them, unwilling tools of a creature using them for its own purposes. McCarrick and Barron had given up on that solution. And maybe they were right. Maybe I had to wrap my head around the idea that all those people were already lost.

“Thank you, doctor.” General Barron took a step toward the door, and the members of his entourage all stood and turned to follow him. “Begin large-scale production immediately. I want to pick up everything you can give me by this time tomorrow.” Dr. McCarrick saluted him smartly, and Barron returned the salute.

“When you use it,” McCarrick said, “don’t hold back. We’ve already seen strains of fungus in the lab developing a resistance to our updates. If this works in the field, it won’t continue to work for long. The fungus will adapt. You might get only one chance at it.”

“I understand you perfectly,” Barron said. He rolled his shoulders and gave the hem of his jacket a quick tug to straighten its lines. “Until tomorrow, then. God only grant that tomorrow is soon enough.”

I threw myself into the passenger seat of Melody’s car, torn between confusion and anger. I went with the anger.

“How can you sit there and listen to them? The people in that room are American citizens, ordinary people like you and me. A week ago, they were car salesmen and bus drivers and business executives. They have children and spouses and families who love them. And somehow we can justify making them dance like puppets.”

“I know,” Melody said. “I know, believe me.” She turned the key, and the engine rumbled to life. “But there are times when direct confrontation will get you your way, and times when it won’t. This was one of the other times.”

“You know he’s going to use it to kill them all.”

She nodded slowly, turning the car in a circle to exit the parking lot. “That does seem the most likely. He won’t risk telling them to surrender, or any kind of half-measures. There’s too much at stake.”

“Thousands of lives—possibly millions by now—killed just to make extra sure?”

“To make sure they don’t launch thousands of missiles, each of which could destroy a city of ten million people? I could see him making that choice, yes. And I’m not sure I could disagree with him.”

“We don’t even know that they’ll launch those missiles,” I said, but the argument sounded weak even to me.

“We’re all hoping for a cure,” Melody said. “There are labs all over the country trying to find one. But these things take time, and we don’t have any. Tyler is no evil villain, and neither is Craig Barron, as much as I dislike his methods. They’re making the best choices they can with the worst wartime dilemma anyone has had to face, maybe ever.”

“Does Barron have the authority to do this?”

“He’s the commander of the US forces. At this point, the only person who could tell him no is the president.”

“Can we take this to the president? Make him see what’s happening here?”

“We could try,” Melody said. “But the president wants to win this war as much as Barron does.”

“And what comes after? What if we do win? What’s to stop this ‘cure’ from being used across the world? Anybody with a few spores and the command signal could enslave anyone else with perfect control. The slavery of a few centuries ago would be nothing compared to this. Petty dictators with drone armies that do their every bidding. Girls forced to perform as sex slaves as if it were their deepest wish. Crimes committed by proxy, so that the real perpetrators can never be brought to justice. Is that the world you want to live in?”

Melody sighed but didn’t answer right away. With the energy she usually displayed and her commanding presence, it was easy to forget how old she must be. Well past usual retirement. For a moment, as she navigated the entrance ramp to the highway, she looked her age. Weighed down. Maybe even defeated.

“We don’t get to choose the world we live in,” she said, her words slow and tired. “To tell you the truth, the one I’ve been living in so far isn’t that great most of the time. The fungus has unlocked a vulnerability in the human mind. That genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. It will be used, and it will be used for evil, I have no doubt. But I can’t solve all the world’s problems. I can’t even solve my own family’s most of the time. All I can do is the best I can with my limited knowledge and the tools at hand.”

At the word family , I remembered—as I never ought to have forgotten—that Melody’s granddaughter, Emily, had been one of the earliest infected in the country. Which meant that I wasn’t the only one with loved ones among the Ligados. Melody stood to lose at least a granddaughter, if not more, if we won this war Craig Barron’s way. I wondered if General Barron himself had family among the infected, or Dr. McCarrick. There were no easy answers.

Eventually, when I didn’t respond, Melody switched on the radio. A news reporter described in detail the well-armed and coordinated Ligados force converging on Albuquerque. She gave such a slack-jawed portrayal of their size, organization, and apparent invincibility that I wondered if she were infected herself and that the news program was meant to intimidate or at least misinform. I also knew that the bulk of our forces—especially the hundreds of fighter planes and bombers—had been kept well back from the city to avoid the possibility of contamination. The Ligados force might be formidable, but we still had the full resources of the military to draw on, and every reason to protect the city at all costs. We would throw everything we had at them.