David Walton - The Genius Plague

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.