David Walton - The Genius Plague

Shaunessy nodded, but her body language still communicated distrust, and she kept the pistol pointed in my direction. I wondered how good a shot she was.

“Let’s say I believe you,” she said. “What does it matter? The effect is the same.”

“The difference is that we can manipulate it. If we can convince a substantial number of the Ligados that a particular action is beneficial to the fungus, then they’ll do it. If we could go far enough to convince them that infecting humanity at all is actually detrimental to the fungus, then we might even get them to take antifungal medication. The fungus itself would compel them to.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Convince the fungus to kill itself? Sounds like a long shot.”

“That’s the beauty of it. The fungus doesn’t need to be convinced of anything. The people do. And they’re not rewarded for protecting the little mycelium in their heads. They’re rewarded for protecting the survival of the organism as a whole. If they think extricating it from humans is the best way to improve its survival chances, they’ll go ahead and do it.”

“It’s a nice theory…”

“When ordinary South American citizens got infected, they started caring about the Amazon enough to kill for it. But when drug lords got infected, what did they do? They didn’t worry about environmental policies. They made a drug out of the spores and smuggled it into the United States through cocaine routes. Everybody does what they think would best help the fungus to survive. When it infected me, I attacked what I thought was the biggest threat to fungal survival: that B-2 and its payload of rival spores. This whole war is just a result of ordinary people thinking the best way to ensure the survival of the fungus is to spread it around the world.”

“So, if I wanted to get the Ligados to retreat? Not to attack Albuquerque?”

“Convince them it’s in the fungus’s best interests. You already have the means in place to do it—that worm you hid in media outlets around the world. Give them a reason to believe that turning around and heading back south would be the best thing for the survival of the fungus.”

She started to cross her arms, then remembered the gun and pointed it at me. “Why should I believe you? You’ve been lying to us for days, smooth as a con artist. This could all be some kind of manipulation to distract us from the war, or to fall into some Ligados trap.”

I shrugged. “That’s for you and Andrew and Melody to decide. But what do I have to gain? It’s not like you’re going to let me out of here. If you could get the enemy to turn back, that would be good. If they ignore you, you haven’t lost anything.”

She looked at me for a long time. “I trusted you,” she said. “I knew you were arrogant and immature the day I met you. The kind of charismatic charmer who everybody likes, who can talk his way out of anything and never faces up to the consequences of his actions. I told Melody from the start that I didn’t want you on my team. But despite all that, you got me to like you, and I gave you my trust. And you manipulated me. You lied to me, and you made me look like a fool.”

“The fungus—” I said.

“Shut up. I know all about how it wasn’t your fault and you couldn’t help it. That doesn’t change how it feels, and it doesn’t make me like you any better. Your problem is, it’s too easy for you. You’re so smart you make everyone around you look stupid, but you don’t seem to realize it, and so they all like you anyway. And when you start lying through your teeth, nobody can tell the difference. They just swallow it down and pat you on the back. Even now, even after this, you’ll probably come out of this smelling like a rose. They’ll give you an Exceptional Service medal and call you a hero. You just watch.”

I was floored. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I didn’t think I was any of those things. I’d done nothing but screw up since I joined the agency, and this was the worst failure of all. I’d nearly gotten arrested on my first day. I’d been the one to let Paul into Fort Meade, where he planted the spores and spread the fungus into the server network. It was my poor handling of my family’s infections that had led to my own capture and infection. And now I had betrayed my country and shot one of my colleagues. How could she think I led a charmed life?

She shook her head. “Forget it. I just wanted to see you. To look in your eyes and see if I could tell that you weren’t in control.”

“And can you?”

She stared at me, her lips pursed. “I don’t know. You seem perfectly rational, not like a puppet at all.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said.

“I know. I see what all these other people do, and I know it’s the same. You were under compulsion. But I still… never mind.” She stood up. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“You’ll tell Melody, though? About what I said?”

“Of course I will.”

She took a step toward the door, but before she could knock on it to be let out, an earsplitting siren wailed. It came from outside the correctional facility, and, from the sound of it, the noise could be heard across the entire base.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Her eyes met mine, and I saw the fear in them. “We’re under attack.”

Paul Johns heard the trucks long before he saw them. They carried loudspeakers blaring a high-pitched whine, like the tone you heard when your ears were ringing. They also broadcast a man’s voice repeating the same message, over and over, at a volume that traveled for miles across the flat landscape:

You want to protect the city at any cost. You want to kill anyone coming from the south. Block the roads and arm yourselves. You want to protect the city at any cost.

Paul traveled in a convoy of cars, vans, trucks, and military vehicles strung out all along Route 25 for miles, all of them heading north. Route 25 roughly followed the Rio Grande, a narrow corridor of populated communities hugging the river, surrounded by desert on both sides. In front of them, still an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, Route 25 was blocked by hundreds of cars turned sideways and parked across the road. Behind that, a large crowd of people waited, most of them armed with little more than baseball bats or the occasional hunting rifle. Beyond them, the loudspeaker on a military truck repeated its message: “ You want to protect the city… ”

Paul and the other Ligados around him carried M4 assault rifles liberated from White Sands, not to mention the M2 Browning machine gun mounted on the M113 armored vehicle he was driving. Eleven other well-armed men and women of various ages traveled in the M113 with him—probably enough to take out the opposing civilians by themselves. The main problem would be the cars. By the time they could clear them, their convoy would be jammed up on the highway, sitting ducks for the spore drop Paul knew was coming. Better to spread out as best they could, taking older routes and roads through the desert, than to try to blast their way through here.

Paul used his phone to message the sections behind them, warning of the problem. They had been expecting something like this. But before he could finish the phone conversation, the truck at the front of the convoy exploded. Heat washed over his vehicle, and smoke obscured his view. He stood up, sticking his head out the top of the hatch, and when the smoke cleared he saw that the road in front of him was gone, replaced by a crater with the remains of the lead truck. The front of the convoy tried to turn, but another explosion tore up the next section of road and caught two more vehicles in its blast.

Demolition explosives, Paul realized, likely from crews that cut roads through mountain passes. As he watched, three more blasts turned the road into rubble. Paul’s ears rang and his heart pounded. His phone flashed a message. Two miles south, the message said, a raised section of highway had also been destroyed, dropped with a dozen cars into a dry river bed. Hills of loose sand lined the highway on either side, too high for most vehicles to cross, which meant most of the convoy was trapped like fish in a barrel.