David Walton - The Genius Plague

At the time, however, I only knew that I was inexplicably alive, and that every part of my body hurt. My arm was on fire. My head throbbed, and my muscles felt battered and bruised. I wasn’t sure if I could move.

A voice came over the loudspeakers, but this time it was female. Melody’s voice. “The enemy has been defeated,” she said. “General Barron is no longer in command. You want to put your weapons down. You want to return to the medical facility in Kirtland Base where you will await your allocation of antifungal medications. Your greatest desire will be to take these medications, in the prescribed dose, for the next three years.”

The smoke and dust cleared a little, and Shaunessy stepped into view, now without her pistol. She looked up into the sky for a few minutes, squinting against the bright sun. Finally, she looked at me. “Sorry about that,” she said.

I could hardly breathe from the pain, but I gave her what I thought was a smile. “I deserved it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and her smile was brilliant. “Yes, you surely did.”

Melody visited me at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque. I still felt groggy from surgery, where they had removed bullet fragments from my shoulder. Shaunessy’s bullet had hurt me more seriously than mine had hurt her, fracturing my humerus right at the joint and damaging ligaments and cartilage. It would be a while before I could fly back to Maryland, and my whole arm would stay in a cast for weeks.

“And you’re taking your antifungals, right?” Melody said. She sat on the edge of the visitor’s chair by my bed, somehow making it look elegant.

I grinned. “Do I have any choice?”

“Not really.”

“Everybody within twenty miles is taking them like vitamins,” I said. “Where did you ever get such a supply?”

The wrinkles around her eyes crinkled, though she didn’t exactly smile. “While McCarrick was putting every infectious disease research facility to work growing more of his spores, I set every pharmaceutical lab with government contracts to mass-producing antifungal meds. I thought they might come in handy.”

“Smart,” I said. “But how on earth did you get the better of General Barron? Did you convince the president to revoke his command, or what?”

“Oh no, it was much easier than that,” she said. “I put some spores into his coffee.”

“You what ?”

“They can withstand high temperatures with no loss of viability,” she said. “I confirmed that ahead of time.”

“You drugged the commander of the American forces?”

She shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. After that, it was a matter of getting my hands on that command signal, which was easy enough. They were piping it through loudspeakers by that point. I recorded it, played it for the general, and told him to pass his command over to me.”

I shook my head. “You’re a scary woman. How did you avoid breathing the spores in the base yourself?”

“I’ve carried an oxygen mask in my purse ever since you and Shaunessy came out of the server farm, and a larger, filter-based gas mask in my luggage. A mask that I did not surrender to the general’s little safety recall.”

I shook my head, impressed. She had thought of everything, been prepared. Much more than I had been. I hadn’t even managed to anticipate my own family.

“Look,” I said. “I know I’ve screwed up. A lot. I completely understand if you don’t want me working in your group anymore, and I’m sure Shaunessy won’t want me there. But—”

“Neil.”

“Wait, hear me out. I love my job. I’m not as good with computers as Shaunessy—or well, anybody, really—and I don’t know the mission details as well as Andrew, and everything I touch seems to just fall apart, but if there’s some place for me, I don’t know, some data entry position, or a math tutor for language experts, or something, I want to do it. I don’t want to leave the NSA.”

Shaking her head and suppressing a smile, Melody set a slim box on my lap. I looked at her, then back at the box, which was cream colored, with no writing or label on it. I used my good hand to grasp the top, shaking it slightly until it eased away from the bottom. Then I looked inside.

On the left, behind a plastic panel, was a medal. The ribbon was green, with a thick vertical red stripe bounded by thinner yellow stripes. On the ribbon hung a gold disc embossed with a stylized eagle and the words National Security Agency around the circumference. To the right of the ribbon, a gold card bordered in red proclaimed it as the NSA Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

I don’t know how long I gaped at it before speaking.

“You can’t keep it yet,” Melody said. “There will have to be a ceremony with an official presentation, handshakes with whoever ends up keeping the director’s job, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t deserve this,” I said. She raised an eyebrow. “I admitted the guy who planted spores in the NSA server room,” I said. “I lied to all of you, gave sensitive information to an enemy of the United States, and shot an NSA agent. I very nearly detonated two thousand nuclear weapons on American soil.”

“You were the first to connect the Ligados to the fungal infection,” she said. “You found the link to Neuritol. You cracked the whistle language, allowing us to read their communications and track the advance of the movement through South America. You endured danger and hardship in Brazil and in Albuquerque in the line of duty, and when it came down to it, you resisted the urge to push that button for just long enough—something not many people have been able to do.”

“Long enough for Shaunessy to shoot me, you mean.”

She put a hand on my arm. “Whatever you did while infected, it wasn’t you,” she said. “Our legal system will probably wrangle for years about people’s liability for what they did while infected, but I know the truth. Nobody has ever resisted it, not for long. The fact that you did it at all is a testament to your strength of conscience.”

“I don’t see it that way.” I remembered Shaunessy’s prediction that they would give me a medal, and it made me feel sick.

“You can’t decline it,” Melody said.

“Why not?”

“Because I already declined when they wanted to give it to me. I told them to give it you.” She grinned. “Could get embarrassing if everybody keeps declining their prestigious award.”

Eventually they discharged me from the hospital, and I caught a flight back to BWI. I could barely fit my full-arm cast into the tiny seats in coach, and my shoulder ached from the uncomfortable angle, bent across my body to avoid the other passengers. The plane thundered along the runway and then lifted into the air.

Paul was dead. I didn’t know yet entirely how I felt about that. Paul had betrayed me, infected me, hurt our family and tried to kill millions. On the other hand, under the influence of the fungus, I had tried to do much of the same. And quite apart from anything that had happened or whose fault it had been, he was my brother. I would miss him, and I would grieve his death.

I watched the Great Plains roll past beneath us and wondered how far Neuritol had spread through the country. Each infected person would have to be treated with McCarrick’s spores, and then told that they wanted to take antifungal medication. It was the only way to get them to take it and thus eradicate the fungus—both strains of it—from their system.

I could already feel the fungus’s hold on my own mind weakening. I still wanted what was best for the fungus, at some level, but it didn’t dominate my thinking. The desire to take my antifungals was still strong, heightened by my belief that disconnecting it from humanity would ultimately be better for both species. I wondered what would happen six months or a year down the road, when the compulsion to take them dissipated. Would people stop taking them? If they did, would the fungus inside them return?