David Walton - The Genius Plague

Paul closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree, offering himself up to the fungus with apparent pleasure. “You’ll understand soon enough. To be connected to everything and everyone around you, to know and be known more than you’ve ever experienced—it’s everything we dream of. What we’re accomplishing here, we’re doing together, all two million of us, and it’s glorious.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I left him there with his hair tangled in the tree and ran back into the forest the way we had come. I no longer felt unsteady or weak, and my feet pounded against the loamy soil. I would return to the plane. I would insist that the pilot take me back, or else try to fly it myself. If I crashed, then so be it. I couldn’t stay here, become this.

I followed the glowing patches of fungus back through the trees, their bright markers easily lighting my way. I leaped over logs, thrashed my way through tangled vines, pushing harder when I saw the branches thinning ahead. I burst into the clearing… and found myself only meters from the tree where Paul still sat. The fungus had led me right back around to where I started.

I fell to the ground and screamed in fear and frustration, wrapping my arms around my head to drown out the sound of Paul’s laughter. Resist , I told myself. Resist . This is not who you are .

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.”