David Walton - The Genius Plague

“Actually,” I said. “I think they’re already here.”

We slipped past the other checkpoints as easily as we had the first. We parked the jeep and walked toward KUMSC, inconspicuous now that we were inside the perimeter. The aboveground facility was practical and unadorned, essentially a series of freight elevators, conveyor belts, and roll-up steel doorways where warheads and other munitions hardware could be transferred to and from trucks.

“I guess we’re headed down,” Shaunessy said.

“That would be my guess,” I said. A guard stood by the nearest elevator, but I gave the hand sign and talked my way in as easily as before. The elevator required a key to operate, but the guard produced one and turned it for us. We heard the hum of machinery and the shriek of scraping metal as the mechanism spun up and started moving. The elevator car reached the top with a clunk, and the doors slid open.

I stepped inside. “You can back out now if you like,” I said.

Shaunessy shook her head and followed me through the doors. “If we don’t stop them, we’re all as good as dead,” she said. “It’s not like it’s safer to stay up here.”

“Okay,” I said. “In that case, you might as well take this.” I handed her back the pistol I had taken from her in my cell.

“What’s this for?”

“In case you need to shoot me.”

The elevator had only two buttons, labeled G and U. I pressed U, and the mechanism hummed again. The car jerked, the lights flickered, and we sank into the desert floor.

After a surprisingly long descent, the car stopped abruptly, and the doors squealed open. We stepped into a cavernous tunnel that arched fifteen feet above our heads, a concrete bunker braced with curved steel beams that hugged the ceiling from the floor on one side to the floor on the other. It looked like it was designed to withstand serious explosive force, probably as a defense against enemy bombs dropped from above.

Along each wall stood hundreds of shiny steel cones, their tips painted red, each about as high as my shoulder. Warheads. A stack of dollies rested near the elevator doors, exactly the same as a delivery man might use to transfer a stack of twenty-four-can soda boxes from his truck into a convenience store. The tunnel continued beyond the light, the neat racks of warheads dwindling from view. In the distance, we heard voices.

We walked toward them. Wires stretched from each cone and bundled together, leading in the same direction. Ahead, the tunnel curved. I stepped carefully around the bend, knowing the people around the corner could hear us coming as easily as we could hear them. I heard the guns before I saw them, a flurry of metallic clicks as weapons were raised and brought to bear. Raising my hands high, I whistled a staccato burst of information, letting them know who I was and that I was Ligados, too.

I grinned at the submachine gun barrels leveled at my head. “We’re all friends here,” I said.

Judging by the number of people in the tunnel, I guessed that at least two of the special forces teams had made it here, if not all three. The soldiers stepped aside, and there was Paul, twisting a wire around a contact. He straightened and frowned at me. “Neil? What are you doing here?”

“New information,” I said. “We need to talk.”

He unwrapped some more wire from a spool on the floor and beckoned for me to join him.

“Paul, you’re doing the wrong thing. This isn’t going to help the fungus.”

He stopped as quickly as if he’d been struck and whipped his head around to stare at me. He whistled a quick series of notes—a query for identification—which I answered in kind. He relaxed. “What are you talking about?”

“The plan to steal and use the nukes. Where did it come from?”

“From the fungus, of course.”

“How do you know it will work?”

He stared into my eyes, confused. “You’re one of us now. You should understand this.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “Where are the long-term studies that say this course of action will ultimately be beneficial to the fungus? How did we decide on this and not, say, staying in Brazil and protecting its habitat?”

“It needs to spread,” Paul said. “The more it spreads, the better its chance of survival.”

“The more it spreads,” I said, “the more of a threat it is to humanity, and the more likely humans are to fight fiercely against it. That doesn’t guarantee a better outcome.”

“Humans are sucking the planet dry,” Paul said, confusion still evident in his face. It was so obvious to him. “There are far too many of us. It’s not sustainable.”

“Okay. That’s true. But who thought of this strategy to address that problem? Why is mass destruction the best option? What other options were considered?”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “I have to keep working. We only have so long until the rest of the army arrives. We have to be ready.”

“My point is, there’s no all-knowing creature guiding this venture. The fungus isn’t a person. It doesn’t think. It’s just a fungus. It’s people who are coming up with these schemes, and what we come up with is more and more violence, the same as we always have. Destroy, ravage, take control. Only now we have a creature in our mind telling us it’s for the greater good and manipulating our emotions to follow what people imagine will help the fungus thrive. But will it? Will it really? Nobody knows: they just believe, and then because everyone else believes it, too, it feels like it couldn’t possibly be wrong. But consensus doesn’t mean truth. In fact, it means a lack of critical thinking, a blind following of the status quo. Humans are really good at doing that, too.”

Paul twisted another wire, pretending to ignore me, but I could see in his face that my words affected him. In fact, all the Ligados were listening. They were intelligent people, all the more so because of the fungus improving the efficiency of their minds. I had to convince all of them, not just Paul. I turned my head so they could hear me better.

“The fungus has developed a survival strategy,” I said. “That strategy involves extending its network into the brains of mammals, where it hijacks the emotional core, rewarding behavior that helps it, like spreading its spores to wider areas of the forest, defecating on nutrient-poor soil, or eating plants or animals that are a danger to the fungus or its hosts. The strategy is so effective that it keeps using it, expanding its reach into higher lifeforms and benefitting from their higher brain function and mobility. But it’s a runaway train now, with nobody at the controls.

“I can see how it happened. A handful of early Ligados believe something—say, that the Brazilian president is a danger to the fungus because she allows logging in the Amazon—and decide that the best way to help the fungus is to kill her. As more Ligados join with them, they join in the ‘consensus’ opinion, because their emotions strongly confirm it. The consensus grows stronger and larger, but not because the course of action is the best option. Just because everybody already believes that it’s the best option.”

The soldiers shifted restlessly and fingered their weapons. “He’s a plant,” one of them said. “He’s one of Barron’s slaves.”

“And what are you?” I asked. “You’re blindly following an agenda just as much as they are.

“We’re all driven by this defining idea, to protect and promote the survival of the fungus. But are we really helping it? It’s not the fungus that’s the parasite here. It’s us. I think its chances of survival would be better if we left it alone.”